Chorizo Flambado

No sun, more rain, still cold. I gotta do something about this! I am seriously starting to think there may be something to Seasonal Affective Disorder. Throwing Fall down on top of our Spring is cruel. A pair of Mallards is swimming in my neighbors newly acquired pond. I’m flipping through photos on my phone to help me remember what a blue sky looks like. Here I sit, my hair slowly turning the same color as the Cleveland sky.

Hope is on the horizon. I have accepted a new job. We’ll soon be moving west of the Mississippi. I’ve put the new job’s location on my weather app. It is in a place of abundant sunshine and amazingly starlit nights. But I’m in limbo. My start date is not until June. I am tense, anxious, excited and moody.

I got out of here for a few weeks back in March and early April. I volunteered for the National Park Service. I spent a week at New River Gorge with Bearded Dave. I helped them put together some videos for their website and trained their staff on the editing software. They have some great videos up now. On my way further south I spent a weekend in Charleston,South Carolina with my friend Roy. Afterwards I volunteered for two weeks down in Florida at Big Cypress. I assisted their Public Affairs office with updating a contacts database. On weekends I hung out at my friend Bob’s and on the beach in Naples. It rained twice while I was there, briefly, in the evenings. On my way north I stopped off at Cumberland Gap and played music with my friend Scott who often performed with me at CanalWay CoffeeHouse.

When I lived in Boston, on days when I was feeling like I am today, I would head out with friends for lunch to a Tex-Mex place north on US 1. They served gigantic glasses of unsweetened iced tea and an appetizer we loved called Chorizo Flambado. This morning for breakfast I did my best to recreate this dish in the form of an omelet. It was familiar, hot and good. It reminded me of friends and other places. It’s amazing how great memories can help you remember the sun and great friends can help you endure until you see it again. Wow, there it is!

New River Strand Continued

Strange was the sensation you got from these two at first glance. As you actually took them in it became something else altogether. I know, the good book says don’t judge a book by looking at the cover. Or was that Huey Lewis? I think children’s authors might disagree with that notion. Dr. Griggs swore that his bright pink jumpsuit, cut off at the knees, made him invisible to the Skunk Ape. Dr. Thompson wore a homemade version of Crocs he had created by cutting off galoshes at the ankles and using a couple of hole punchers. On his head was what appeared to be an old leather football helmet. He claimed it allowed him to focus even in close proximity to all the cell towers that had popped up around the Big Cypress Swamp.

I recounted all the details of my earlier journey to New River Gorge, where Bearded Dave had informed me of the Bigfoot Research going on. As I recalled my tale, describing my close encounter with the Skunk Ape on the Tamiami Trail, I was struck by déjà vu.

“Expedition or voyage?” the man in pink asked. “What’s the difference?” I between sips of beer inquired. “Well, the first is a noun the second a verb” Dr. Griggs bellowed. “Sorry, pet peeve” he said breathing deeply, extending elbows, and placing palms together. “Trying to get over it. Therapy. Medication. No more Electric Company. Christmas in Skowhegan. It’s getting better.” “It is,” Thompson interjected.

Thompson persisted, “Voracity and velocity are every similar and yet quite different. Would you agree?” “I don’t guess I know for sure. Can I have a P for Pterodactyl?” I countered. “Just as Bigfoot and the Skunk Ape are very similar and quite different,” he positioned. Now I was getting the gist.

“Sometimes it’s our similarities that make us different,” I injected. Thompson smiled, “And often it’s our differences” Griggs nodded, “That make us similar.” “Put one foot in front of the other?” I sang. “Yes” they grinned. They finished their beers, rose in unison, waved and nodded goodbye, turned and walked right out the door.

Not real sure if my goal there was consummated. I have a numb sensation that theirs was, as I got stuck with the bar tab. I’ll probably never know what that thing was I encountered crossing the highway near the New River Strand in the Big Cypress Swamp. I do know one thing though. I have a pretty good feeling that a bartender in Chokoloskee is chuckling.

New River Strand

An Underground Connection?

Monday, March 28, 2011 – I lock up the brakes and skid right to avoid hitting a large furry brownish gray figure scampering across the Tamiami Trail. It turns and our eyes catch. It gestures and half growls, half mutters something, that I’m sure in its vernacular probably wasn’t very nice. It disappears with a splash. I look up, and nearly creasing my front bumper is a guard rail near a sign that reads “New River Strand.” My jaw drops…

Monday, March 21, 2011 – I arrive with Bearded Dave at the Sandstone Visitor Center near Hinton, West Virginia, high up on a ridge above New River Gorge. He tells me about recent activity where people involved in tracking the elusive Sasquatch have tracked and reported sightings of the creature right in that vicinity. I blow it off as Tabloid hunters and hardly give it a second thought… until it’s a week later and I’m about a thousand miles away.

Holy Chewbacca! Could it be? I decide to head over to Ochopee to the Skunk Ape Research Laboratory. The creature goes by many names. On my way there I am flagged down by one called Two Fronds. Not a Bigfoot, a Miccosukee Indian. Two Fronds tells me he has had a vision that he was going to meet me today and that I was destined to take him to Miami. Two Fronds also smells of rum and cigarettes. I tell him he has double vision and should flag down the next car behind me. He gestures and mutters in a manner very similar to the Skunk Ape as I quickly drive away.

Somehow I miss the giant panther at the Skunk Ape Rescue League and end up at a bar on Chokoloskee. After a couple of cold ones I ask the bartender if he knows of anyone who has encountered the Skunk Ape. A look of terror fills his eyes and he shakes as his upper body stiffens up and he slowly walks over to me. He hands me another beer and laughs. “Nope, but I know a few who claim to have on their way home from here.” I tell him of my near collision on the way to there. He stares suspiciously at me and suddenly opens up. He asked me to keep his name out of this, but it is his information that leads me to the rest of this story.

A couple of phone calls that afternoon and the next morning I’m in the parking lot of Joanie’s Blue Crab. A few minutes later a dusty old green van looking contraption pulls up and out step the very strange duo of Doctors Geraldo Griggs and Roberto Thompson.  The evening before over the phone I had shared with them my close encounter with whatever that thing was. It wasn’t until I questioned a possible underground connection between the New River in West Virginia and the New River Strand in Big Cypress Swamp that they agreed to meet me. We shook hands and as we sat down for a cold beer in unison they said, “You first.”

To be continued…

Florida Rain Ramble

Boardwalk to the Gator Hole

I sat in my car to escape the Florida rain. Drops so big they stung. I remember this kind of rain from when I was just a kid down here. I began the first four lines of a new song but really needed my guitar to get any further. Faith alone let me know that those rain drops were not big enough to break through the windshield. I sat there surrounded by water and gators and wondered what the resting panthers were wondering about. Surely dreaming about what tasty morsels they would pounce upon as they roamed their swamp this evening.

I’m living in a compound within the Big Cypress Swamp. In the evenings when I’m walking I look around and am reminded of the Branch Davidian in Waco. Here the fences are designed to keep me from becoming panther and/or gator bait and I’ve been allowed a key to the gate. Of course when I worked at the mental hospital up in Boston I had a key and look where that has led me. I’m not a big fan of enclosures. I understand and respect their necessity but I still don’t like them. Guess that’s partly why I love the road and the outdoors.

I like songs about rain. Loved BJ Thomas’ version of Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head when I was a kid. Of course I also loved Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini. Nostalgically, I still like that song but these days my mind gets cluttered thinking about it.

It is now Saturday morning, the sun is shining. I’m at a friend’s in Naples for the weekend. Judging by the flatness of the pond out back there is very little wind. Up at home there is news of more snow. I’ve been volunteering the past few weeks for the National Park Service. Most of what I’ve been doing has kept me tied down to a computer. My plan is to escape to the beach today to burn my skin a bit as I inhale the salty gulf coastal breeze and stick my feet deep into the warmth of the Florida sand. That’s the kind of thing that gets my toes smiling. Knowing Florida though, at some point I’ll end up sitting in my car to escape the pouring rain. Maybe I’ll get another four lines for that song…

Brain Hydration

Being a musician and enjoyer of life, I have many good friends who tend to over enjoy themselves on occasion. I myself may have even done so a time or two. Many of us have experienced how all the fun of a Friday night can be painfully relived on a Saturday morning/afternoon.

As I’ve said before, I used to work as a park ranger/cave guide down in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky. Back then we all swore that any after effects of a late evening would be accommodated by a brisk morning hike through the cool and radon riddled passages of the cave. Looking back it was probably more the exercise than any magic cave dust that made us feel better. But just talking about feeling better sometimes actually makes you start to feel better.

I met many inspiring people while I worked at Mammoth Cave. One whose inspiration has stayed with me is the Hydrologist there. Joe once shared with me what now seems a simple secret but back then was something else altogether. Joe studies how water moves through the land and affects its surroundings. One late night playing music with our friends on his expansive porch in the Kentucky woods he shared with me the secret of Brain Hydration. It does work if religiously followed. The secret he shared was that if you followed each beer or other alcoholic beverage with a small glass of water it would counter the dehydrating effects of the alcohol which were mostly responsible for ruining people’s Saturday mornings. I have found that even as I have gotten older and seldom require more than two glasses of water on a Friday night that remembering who, how, and why makes me feel better both in the present and the future.

She Sewed My New Blue Jeans

My Grandma Nolan lived in Tibbee, Mississippi but worked at the Big Yank factory in West Point. She retired once only to be called back to work. Her work ethic was strong but fair. Her yard was the first one I ever mowed. My Uncle Roy, her brother-in-law, taught me at nine how to do it with her push mower by making and following patterns around her very large and often muddy yard. Grandma would bring me glasses of sweet tea or cold ice water. Sometimes she would watch me sweltering in that muggy Mississippi sun and sneak up behind me and turn off the mower, telling me that if I needed a break so did the mower.

Out in Grandma’s front yard ran a double-lined railroad track where she would carry her trash out to burn on the rocks that made the rail bed. Until the 1980’s she ran her house solely off of a well. In the 1970’s after my grandpa had died when a large part of her house needed foundation repairs she couldn’t afford, she had it torn down. What was left standing she took care of up until Alzheimer’s started playing tricks on her.

We moved in with Grandma in the mid 1970’s. Suddenly the home she’d been enjoying living in was overflowing with 8 extra unexpected passengers on her life’s journey. I learned what a sycamore switch feels like on the back of your legs and what a bar of soap tastes like. I learned that by the third or fourth sibling the bath water was no longer warm and didn’t really make you feel clean. I also learned how to smash pennies on a railroad track, build a log cabin, repair a barbed wire fence, corral cattle, and sneak into her neighbors ponds for a little fishing and or swimming.

Grandma and I escaped the madhouse on most Saturdays. We’d go to the Laundromat in West Point where she taught me to ring clothes out without pinching my fingers in the rollers before putting them in the dryer. I loved the smell, warmth and tumbling sounds of the dryers. Sometimes we’d combine the laundry with getting her hair done. That smell I’d just as soon forget. It looked and smelled like they were mixing fish oil with vinegar and then toasting it on their heads with space helmets.

My favorite part of those Saturdays was that we were gone so long that we had to get lunch in town. Grandma loved burgers! We’d stop by Stafford’s Big Burger or the A & W Drive-In or sometimes get these 10 cent burgers at a place over by the grocery. Before we’d continue on with our chores for the day we’d take a little break and she’d drive me over by some place that meant something to her. Sometimes it was a building that used to be something else or the first paved road in Mississippi. Sometimes we’d just drive by her church, Calvary Baptist, or often we’d stop by the Big Yank Factory. She said she liked seeing it on Saturday, the parking lot empty and the building quiet. She said she liked that it got a break too.

After I had grown up a bit and my family had moved out of her house I’d go to visit her and go to church on Sunday. Afterward on the way home to Tibbee we’d still drive by Big Yank occasionally. She never really said she missed it, but I could tell she did. She was proud of the work she’d done there in that factory. I was too; it was there she sewed my new blue jeans.

Gone Is My Favorite Place To Be!

Rotating rubber humming on concrete or asphalt puts Tchaikovsky to shame! There is no more soothing or energizing sound in the universe than wheels rotating at 60 plus miles an hour as my engine hums along around 2200 rpm’s for hours undisturbed. It doesn’t matter where I’m going, it only matters that I’m going.

In the early 70’s my folks and siblings and I really did all pile into a Volkswagen van. Seatbelts? Ha! Seats? I think only the driver’s and front row seats were there. The rest was all luggage and blankets arranged so that us six kids ages one to thirteen could bash each other around and nap in between matches. The epic journeys were from south Florida to northeast Mississippi to visit the grandparents. Somehow they always actually seemed happy to see us coming. I remember awful big smiles as we were leaving as well. Those journeys eventually switched over to a Town Squire wagon with those nutty pop-up seats in the storage area.

By the mid 80’s I had a license and a car of my own. My Uncle Charlie and I started out for Texas from grandma’s house in Tibbee, MS one night in 1984 in his old blue Datsun pickup. It had a cab on back where we planned to sleep if needed, four bald tires and shortly out of town, no headlights. We drove for awhile with a flashlight until we could find a safe place to stop for the night to buy new lights in the morning. We spent the next night at my other grandma’s house in Vicksburg. In his old stomping grounds of Denton, Texas a few days later we bought four new tires. That purchase made Uncle Charlie very proud as I remember. But not nearly as proud as when he bought me my first pair of cowboy boots in Fort Worth a couple of days later. I still occasionally wore those up until just last year.

As I’m writing this I am planning on my next big trek. This one will take me to stops in West Virginia, the Carolinas, South Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky. I’ve been to all those places before, lived in most of them. Still I am excited! There is a sense of adventure, but also of familiarity. Not just with the places, but the people. Every stop on the way will see me spending time with some of my favorite friends and family.

I’m posting this to publish while I’m on the road. By the time you read this I will be on my next adventure, marching to the beat of a different drummer and dancing to the hum of the highway. Gone is my favorite place to be!

Chasing Frances

Image by AlbinoFlea via Flickr

The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal is still in pseudo-operation these days. I drove mules on the C & O Canal. For the better, or maybe the worse, part of three years from 1997-1999 I helped take care of the mules and boats at Great Falls and Georgetown that were the heart of the interpretive operation there with the National Park Service. I even made it into a Hollywood Movie starring Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams. I wasn’t chasing Frances in that one, I was poling The Georgetown along with some fellow boatmen. I think we were going out of or into a lock. It is kind of like that movie in that way, neither I nor anyone else quite remembers. It was about two girls who wander away from a White House tour and meet President Nixon. Kirsten and Michelle were wearing patriotic hippie outfits for the scene we were in. The Watergate hotel was named that because it is right near one of the canal gates.

Frances was one of about seven mules we had that pulled our canal boats for historic rides along the C & O. I think she was the very mule I introduced to the Rolling Stones Keith Richards one Sunday morning down in Georgetown. There really was no chasing her when she was working. She pulled those canal boats likes she was dragging them through sorghum molasses.

Bearded Dave worked at Mammoth Cave. I worked at Mammoth Cave. We had not previously met each other. We did not work there at the same time. We were introduced to each other via the recordings of the Bacon Duke. The Bacon Duke was the owner and operator of Black Hat records. Both Bearded Dave and I had recorded with the Bacon Duke and met through these recordings and stories about each other through mutual friends.

I met Bearded Dave on the C & O Canal. He came to work there during my second year and we have been good friends ever since. We share similar tastes in beer, bourbon and music among other things. We subsequently showed up together on various later recordings. We are both excellent drivers!

I lived in Virginia with my wife and newborn son in Alexandria in one of those multi-unit contraptions that’s only saving grace was the outdoor sky lawn we had created as an escape on our balcony. Bearded Dave lived in Maryland in government housing in the park with the mules. Their housing was separate but equal as far as most of them were concerned. We shared many late evenings together. Nights at Bearded Dave’s tended to get awful late. My wife never worried about us about waking up the mules, even if a game of 4:30 Trivia spontaneously combusted like a milk-crate.

I’m not so sure that Frances believed her paddock and barn to be equal to the nice little house Bearded Dave inhabited. The reason I think she may have felt oppressed is due to the number of times she managed to open a pretty strongly secured gate and take off on a tour of discovery of the winding roads in the park. I was involved in a few of these chases. They only seemed comical for about the first three minutes if you were there. Otherwise, hearing about them later, I’m sure the tales would have been great fodder for Charlie Chaplin or Laurel & Hardy. One of my favorites was the tale of some bewildered visitors who had passed Frances up the road and seriously said “You sure have some big deer around here!” One of my last nights working on the C & O before moving to Ohio I woke up at Bearded Dave’s and was greeted by Frances grazing out in the front yard. Luckily several of our coworkers had rolled in by then helping to make my final episode of Chasing Frances short and victorious!

Hank and Amos

Hank & Amos met in the back of an old pick-up truck hauling a pair of prize-winning twin goats named Bell and Butch that they had both hitched a ride in after a bohemian music festival in Western Kentucky.  They broke out their instruments and played all the way from Louisville to Lodi! The truck was heading to Lodi with the pair of prize-winning twin goats. After the ride the two took off in different directions.  A few months later they crossed paths again one Sunday evening after church at a jam session in a big barn in Lorain County.  They played a few tunes out by a roaring fire and then took the stage together for the first time ever under the name “Two Hitchhiking Bohemian Goat Herders from Western Kentucky” but have since shortened their name to just Hank & Amos.  That’s their story and their sticking to it!

With the southern born strum of an acoustic six string guitar accompanied by the bluesy wailings of a lonesome harmonica, Hank & Amos will make you laugh, make you cry and maybe make you want to throw tomatoes.  Through a variety of cover tunes and the original songs of Hank Mallery they paint a nearly unbelievable cadre of stories that are the essence of true Americana.  The songs slosh a shot of reality into a bottleful of imagination to tell unique stories featuring a variety of characters loosely based upon real-life experiences with a few names and details changed so as to avoid things like prison, collection agencies, and former girlfriends. The people and places they introduce you to feel oddly familiar and will have you saying, “I knew a guy just like that once!” or “That near about happened to me!”  When the singing’s done, you’ll feel like you’ve gone on a great journey and met some strange new friends along the way, that’s

Hank & Amos!

Click here for more info!

Man of Influenza

Image by vidalia_11 via Flickr

I started reading again yesterday, Cervantes’ Don Quixote. My dad always loved Man of La Mancha. When I was a kid down in south Florida my mom had this big braided oval rug. I remember falling asleep on that rug and feeling entrapped by it as my dad played the soundtrack from that musical. During those naps I would have nauseating dreams about being trapped and fighting battles of my own. I could only run toward the inside of the ever swirling oval where my escape would surely be foiled and I’d meet with certain doom. Back then I didn’t know Don Quixote from Don the American Pie guy. Those dreams seemed very real. Here some 40 years later I don’t exactly remember the details but can’t escape the emotions. It was frightening, dizzying, nauseating, kind of like the flu I’ve been battling the past couple of weeks. Today I feel awake and alive enough to realize the flu was not a dream.

While I’ve been down with the flu, life has gone on. We have had floods and blizzards. A couple of nights after we had nine inches of snow, we had an all night thunderstorm that brought in torrential rains and kept Barks at Planes up half the night. The next morning it looked like Lake Erie had crept into our back yard. We had to let Barks at Planes out the front door as he is not yet SCUBA certified.

I love to read, but for the past two weeks it has been limited to the tiny blurry fonts on the side panels of medicine boxes every 4 to 6 hours. From what I could gather rest and fluids were the best things to combine with those medications. Some of the meds knocked me out cold for a couple of grateful hours at a time. For the fluids I added in OJ, water, ginger ale and sports drinks. I think it has finally worked. Cue soundtrack. Now, where are those windmills?

Note: I own and enjoy the movie and soundtrack for Man of La Mancha. I bought both about ten years ago to help overcome a childhood fear. I have also learned to enjoy spinach.