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.

Crazy Man’s Hollow

Old Foundations

My friend Joe Jesensky introduced me to Crazy Man’s Hollow back in 1999. Joe grew up down in the valley sketching and recording years of history. He was near 90 when I first met him. He remembered looking out his bedroom window down in The Flats as a boy and seeing canal boats pulled along by mules. He shared so many stories with me over his remaining years. He liked the way I recorded history in the form of songs and that my background in Canal History brought an air of authenticity to an area he loved.

Crazy Man’s Hollow lies down in an area south of Cleveland along the Ohio Canal. The foundations are still visible of the old building the unemployed fellow holed up and died in. It has a haunting feel to it when you know the story. I’ll give you the bare minimum here. A company shut down very quickly overnight and the night watchmen never got relieved. He decided to make the place his own and stayed rarely being seen. When he hadn’t been seen at all in a very long time, some folks went to investigate and found he had died. Once inside they found that he had spent countless hours painting and writing all over the very large walls of the place, most of it unintelligible gibberish. From here I’ll let the words of the song written in ¾ time tell the rest:

This is the story of Crazy Man’s Hollow

It’s one that I have heard a few times before

Not far off the old path where the mules wandered

Ain’t hardly nobody goes round there no more

 

Ain’t nothing much left there, don’t many remember

Though old-timers sometimes recognize the name

Foundations remain of the walls he scrawled over

Sputtering gibberish he went insane

 

Smack dab in the midst of the Pinery Narrows

He’d sit up all night with his eyes open wide

Why they left behind this solitary fellow

A question he pondered alone every night

 

Was he writin’ love poems or solvin’ equations?

Nobody, not even he really knew

No one was there for his last punctuation

I bet it was a question mark or two

 

This is the story of Crazy Man’s Hollow

It’s one that I have heard a few times before

Not far off the old path where the mules wandered

Lie the facts and the fiction of local folklore

Unemployment Benefit

Six inches of fresh and heavy snow awaited me and my snow shovel. Luckily my son’s school was called off, so they awaited him as well.

We have great neighbors we share fence stories with all summer long. We hand out candy together at Halloween. We communicate with those same neighbors during the winter with a Christmas card and occasionally over the handle of a snow shovel. This was one of those snow-shovel-catch-up-days. It was closer to freezing than zero and the winter wind was taking a well deserved rest. I got caught up on his wife’s job after her company was sold. She managed to hang on and even move a bit up the new ladder. She’ll be working out of the house quite often in her new position. He’s been pulling about 30 hours since he found something to replace his previous job he’d been laid off from. He’s thinking an extra 10 hours at work could be pretty beneficial about now.

I told him I’m still looking every week and that hopefully come spring time we’ll get some action on selling our house. I shared with him our crazy week in which my son turned 13, my wife lost her job and six days later had her company offer her job back to her. I would have shown him my new shoes, (See earlier post, If Shoes Could Talk) but they hadn’t gotten here yet. Could be still in Latham. We hadn’t checked.

Earlier, after my son had been helping shovel for a while I told him when we were done I’d run him up to the library to look for a movie he’d been wanting to see. He reminded me that as I’d been catching up with our neighbor I’d been falling behind on my shoveling. And so my neighbor and I bid farewell until summer.

Even earlier, back when the snow was waiting for me and my shovel, I was taking in a deep breath and trying to button up my snow-pants. That’s when I realized another unfortunate benefit of my unemployment.

Laptop?

My Laptop

As my wife was on our lone computer, crafting her response about an issue with her unemployment claim, I started thinking who I might know who had a laptop I could borrow. I just recently started writing a new stage production and frequent ideas come fast and furious, but fleetingly. Like lightning bugs you’ve got to catch them while they’re out there flickering about. Otherwise you have a sad and empty mason jar. And who wants to stare at a sad empty mason jar?

The past few days I’ve been getting my exercise between bouts of frantic keyboard punching and alternately trying to find a comfortable spot to read. Seems I no sooner get comfortable when I suddenly become inspired and dart back to the straight-back wooden chair at the computer. Our couch is horrible! It is so sad and worn out. We warn people who visit about sitting there. When I think about moving I smile. I can’t wait to leave that couch sitting on the tree lawn to be picked up with the trash. My son and I bought that couch together. I love that couch.

The play is based on the personas of three writers, two dead and one living. I’ve been researching at the library and bringing their works and works about them into our home as well as delving into interpretations of their works in film. A ticket stub/bookmark, the pause and rewind buttons on a remote control, and a computer keyboard have become my close companions.

Back to my wife. All roads may lead to Adena.  But my roads get me back to Alanna, my wife. In my life that is a comforting constant I heavily rely on. She’s doing fine. We went through all this mess back when I lost my job just about a year ago. We’re trying to be un-phased. The day after she lost her job she came into the living room where I sat drinking my morning coffee. She looked a bit lost. I sat down my coffee, gave her a smile and a big hug and serenaded her with a bit of Welcome to My World. She thanked me for the laugh and we slowly plowed on into our day. 

Back to the laptop. Shortly after wishing I had one, I remembered I had an old-fashioned remedy for that. I went back into my backpack and pulled out a nice leather-bound journal I had planned to start writing in last year as I was beginning to deal with my job loss. I took it to the dining room table, mixed some ink up with the mortar and pestle and discovered the feathered quill flying off of the pages. The biggest bonus? The journal’s space bar doesn’t stick!

If Shoes Could Talk

01/29/2011 07:43 AM  ARRIVAL SCAN LATHAM NY 

01/29/2011 03:05 AM  DEPARTURE SCAN CHELMSFORD MA 

01/28/2011 07:37 PM  LOCATION SCAN CHELMSFORD MA 

01/28/2011 04:12 PM  ARRIVAL SCAN CHELMSFORD MA 

01/28/2011 02:23 PM  DEPARTURE SCAN FREEPORT ME 

01/28/2011 11:26 AM  ORIGIN SCAN FREEPORT ME 

01/28/2011 06:13 PM  BILLING INFORMATION RECEIVED

For Christmas my wife and I gave each other $50 gift certificates from LL Bean! We had gotten them using our checking account’s awards program. Previously we had been using them to get gas cards. But hey, it was a Christmas splurge!

We both decided to get the same type of shoes called Comfort Mocs. I had used a previous gift certificate from my little sister, now in Texas but then living in Florida, to purchase the same shoe several years ago. I’ve worn them while visiting her in both places. They treated me kindly and are still my favorite yard work shoe. They go well with a pair of blue jeans and don’t look overly goofy with a pair of shorts. Not as stylish or comfy as my Birkenstocks but with much less chance for losing a toe to a mower.

After deciding what we wanted we were concerned about having to kick in extra to pay for the shipping and handling since as of this past week we are now both unemployed. After some research she discovered that we could get free shipping and handling if we ordered together. Amidst all the heartache and chaos of losing our remaining source of income it felt really good to order those shoes. My wife went with blue suede with a strap across the foot. I ordered the same brown as last time but upgraded to leather, still staying under $50.

Today, not because I really cared but just because I could, I hit the link to track our shipment of shoes. As you see above they have already traveled from Freeport, Maine to Chelmsford, MA. It’s pronounced “Chumsford.” I used to drop off my laundry in Chelmsford. The lady at the laundry reminded me of Elvis. Sometimes she’d say to me, “You know, you kind of look like Elvis.” I worked across the Merrimack River in Lowell, but lived in and was helping to restore a house in East Boston, in the yet to be established Eagle Hill Historic District. It had no washer or dryer. In fact, for a few weeks after coming home to discover the toilet which now sat in the middle of the new kitchen had been totally removed by the plumbing contractors, I moved in with my friend Roy who was house-sitting at a place with working stove and toilet in separate but equal rooms.

From Chelmsford we’ve tracked our shoes to Latham, NY. An old girlfriend from my Boston days had married and was living for a while some years back in Albany, NY. The guy she had married, his last name was something close to Latham.

Freeport, Maine. How my wife and I love that kitschy town! I’m afraid I may be drifting a bit off my point now.

Shoes, yes. At least metaphorically speaking I suppose. When I began this I was thinking about how well-travelled these shoes will be before we venture to even put them on our feet. Not much chance they were produced in Freeport so they probably had quite a tremendous journey long before we thought to order them to come to Ohio. All things considered, we’ll be highly surprised if they speak English. At this writing they still have a ways to go before they get here. We’re in Cleveland and our shoes are in Latham. God alone may be brave enough to connect those dots.