Beltane Full Dyan Moon
Pre-raphaelite training today. I”m looking forward to it. One of my favorite group of artists.
Kate and I leave tomorrow morning for Indiana. The Empire Builder arrives in St. Paul at 7:50 a.m, picking us up on its way to Chicago. In Chicago we board the Cardinal bound for Indianapolis. An all day affair. We will see how Kate responds to train travel.
Beltane Waxing Dyan Moon
This southern gentleman showed up on my tour of Okefeenokee Swamp. He hissed and opened his mouth wide. (Does that mean he’s related to Jesse Helms?) After we moved past him, he moved to another patch of grass and rolled over on his side, happy at having driven away the intruders.
The gator is the moose and the wolf of the south. It shows up on license plates, as school mascots and in tourist ware like mugs and hot pads.
Chip, the crocodilian biologist who gave me the tour, said that the crocodilian’s basic survival strategy got put into place 30-40 million years ago and has not changed since. They hunt the shoreline and low water edges, relying on stealth and speed to catch birds, deer, fish.
The females (you cannot tell a female from a male without opening them up) lay a large number of eggs, guard their brood and hope for the best. It seems to work. Think of all that time.
Beltane Waxing Dyan Moon
South Bend, Indiana Room 5, car 2901 at the junction of Eastern and Central Time
Outside the train with his family is a young boy I encountered about 4:00 a.m. with his head down in the toilet. He looks better now, smiling and happy to be on friendly ground.
The train carried me through western Pennsylvania and northern Ohio, brushing Lake Erie, as I slept. The sound of a train’s horn becomes a machine age lullaby, the slight rocking of the train a metal nanny rocking you to sleep. I realized on the way down that this has an older association for me. Our home on Canal Street in Alexandria, Indiana sat only a couple of blocks from the Nickel Plate Railroad’s tracks. Each night at midnight the nation’s lasting functioning steam engine came through town and sounded its horn where the tracks crossed nearby Monroe Street.
It feels good to be headed north where 70 is a more normal high during the day, not at night. The heat and traveling alone began to wear on me on the last day in Savannah. I chose a refueling option with the rental car that made it optimal to bring the car back empty. Near the time I decided to go the airport to drop off the car I began looking for a seafood place for a last lunch. None appeared. Even with the air conditioning on the heat beat against the car. Wanting to shed the responsibility I drove to the airport and by the time I got there I was hot, hungry and bit nervous about my nearly empty gas tank.
In part this was a reflection of my desire to be quit of this place and, like the young boy, to be back on friendly ground. Back now in the Midwest, riding through Indiana on the way to Chicago, I have gotten there. The train makes travel simple, so I can focus on enjoying the ride.
Beltane Waxing Dyan Moon May 30th, toward evening
Capitol Limited, traveling through the Cumberland Gap
We passed Cumberland, West Virgina 15 minutes ago. The train stopped near the Union Rescue Mission. Nearby a man with a sleeveless t-shirt, a gut and a gray beard shrugged. Beside him a four year old boy with no shirt mimicked his shrug. Exactly.
The Cumberland Gap is a true piece of Americana, the first straightforward path through the Appalachia’s. Until its discovery the west was difficult to reach for all but the most determined. We went through a long stretch of no phone service, maybe 100 miles in western Maryland.
At supper I met a guy who works for the Bosch company. He says the company has a charitable foundation. No big news there. If it works the way he said it does, though, the reality amazes. He says each year the foundation divides up the profits. The company is wholly owned by the Bosch family. They get 2-3% of the profit. The board which helps them manage gets the same. The rest, 94% or so each year, goes to the foundation for charitable work. Last year the profit was $67,000,000,000. That’s one hell of a lot of money. Or, at least it was before the bank bail-outs.
A weird thing on the way to the metro to the Smithsonian. I saw a guy that looked a lot like my Dad. He a Red Skins hat on and a Hawai’ian style shirt, but he had the Spitler nose and Dad’s distinctive cheek bones and squarish face. He looked enough like him to make me look twice.
I forgot about him. Then,while I ate lunch at the Smithsonian Castle Cafe, he came through the hallway beside the table where I sat. This second encounter caused my imagination to leap into high gear. What if it was Dad? Why now? What would we say to each other?
There was a moment where I pushed myself all the way into that scenario. I allowed myself to imagine actually encountering my Dad father, after all these years. What would our conversation have been like? A frisson of fear shot through me. Dead Dad, after all. I realized the conversation we’d had would have been much like the one’s in life. Interesting, but somehow disengaged, distant.
It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I would have asked a question or two about the afterlife.
The train just went around a curve, still here in the Cumberland Gap. I could see our engines and the other cars ahead of us. The sleeping cars come last in the train. I imagine that cuts down on traffic in the hallways.
I’ll sign off now as the sun sinks down below the Appalachian mount just ahead of us.
Beltane Waxing Dyan Moon
Savannah Amtrak Station, waiting on the Silver Meteor which the stationmaster said will be 20 minutes late.
After leaving the rental car to the tender mercies of the Alamo cleaners, I took a taxi from the airport to the Amtrak station. In the process I rode on early 20th century technology to get to 19th century technology, displaced by the mid 20th century phenomenon of the commercial jet.
When I first arrived at 6:00 p.m., I had the station all to myself. The stationmaster asked how far I wanted to check “this big boy.” All the way to Minneapolis.
He gave me a new ticket folder because the trip down had crumpled the old one.
The first additional travelers to arrive were a short, squat man with brill cream slicked back hair, an Asian boy in sandals whom he treated as a son and two short pinch fenced red heads headed back to some school or the other. They were family and had, apparently long ago, mastered the art of conversations in which each of them talked at the same time. It was a peculiar experience. Like watching unfamiliar animals in their habitat.
Now there are many people in the station, that movement of people in and out of public places that finds them alternately empty and crowded, as tides of passengers or audiences or students come and go. The change is from dead to alive, a space with no buzz to a space filled with the agendas of strangers mixed together for a brief period.
It may be the relative novelty of train travel, but all this seems more human, certainly less desparate than the airport, even the small one I left earlier today.
Now there are two Amtrak employees here.
Every one stays in their small spaces, talking to those whom they know. One thing travelers do is find small spaces they can claim as their own. This space, no matter if its only a plastic seat in a crowded room, provides a refuge from the chaos of others and their unknown purposes. This is one of the chief advantages of train travel, it allows a space with real boundaries, a place you can fall asleep while traveling.
Yes, it takes longer, but the process has a definite scale to it that seems to match me. Rather than flung in the air by great jet engines, we will glide over the rails, pulled forward by hulking engines with humans at the controls, in fact riding on the engine itself.
Beltane Waxing Dyan Moon
Acela Lounge, Washington, D.C.
Leg two of the trip begins in about two hours, the Capitol Limited to Chicago. This is, again, a sleeper. The first few hours in daylight will take us through Maryland, West Virginia and into Pennsylvania. As night comes, we’ll travel through western Pennsylvania and Ohio, reaching Chicago at 8:40 a.m. on Sunday, June 1st.
This morning I saw the Phillips collection again. It’s strange the way memory shapes expectations. Two falls ago I went to New York and revisited the Cloisters, once one of my favorite places. This time it seemed smaller, less magical. Why? I can’t say.
The Phillips collection was the same. Though there were a couple of Bonnards and Cezannes that drew me in, the Morris Louis paintings, especially his blue column and the Rothko room, the rest left me flat.
The D.C. metro though was as good as I recalled. It’s clean, easy to use and reasonably priced.
I took it to the Freer where the piece that jumped out at me was Whistler’s Peacock Room. So overdone, but at the same so cohesive and beautiful.
A meal at the Smithsonian Castle Cafe and I headed back to the station. It’s the afternoon. Hot. I remembered. Besides it’s also the time when I take a nap. Which I plan to do right now.
Beltane Waxing Dyan Moon
Savannah Hilton Head Island International Airport
The rental car has returned to its stable, now a “dirty car” in the lingo of the rental car world. The KIA was ok, but seemed a bit tinny to me. Might have just been the crank windows, separately locked doors and no cruise control.
Ft. Pulawski on Cockspur Island covered the north and south shipping lanes into Savannah for the new American government, part of the Third build-out of forts to protect the east and gulf coast.
It fell into Confederate hands when the state of Georgia took it with state militia prior to its secession.
The role of Ft. Pulawski in military history is an odd one. On April 10th, 1862 Union soldiers began a bombardment. It used the usual smooth bore cannons and mortars largely to no affect. There were however a few Parrot rifled cannons. After a day of bombardment the Parrots broke down the seven foot thick masonry walls (bricks) and the next day projectiles began to strike near the powder magazine. The Fort surrendered.
This spelled the end of masonry forts in military history.
Beltane Waxing Dyan Moon
Folkston, Georgia Gateway to the Okefenokee
The Okefenokee Restaurant is the place to eat in Folkston. It has a country buffet. When I looked at the fried entrees, I asked for a menu. It said, “We encourage you to try the buffet.” This after a short menu of fried food.
There was however enough fruit and vegetables to satisfy me when I reinspected the buffet. Hah. After a week plus in the south, the sight of fried food has begun to have an aversive affect on me.
This is the area of Georgia known as the piney woods, the growth on the sandy soil here that is not swamp. Some of it is the remains of an ancient barrier island, Trail Ridge, which forms the eastern boundary of the Okefenokee. In the day of the barrier island the Okefenokee was a salt marsh protected from the Atlantic by the island.
Beltane Waning Flower Moon’
Hilton Head Island, S.C.
Imagine the little guy on Fantasy Island. If he were here on Hilton Head Island instead, he would be running around saying, “The Sun! The Sun! The Sun!”
Yes, on our last day here the sun has come out for the morning and it makes all the difference. The gloomy, chill atmosphere of the last few days falls away and the Island takes on its vacation place cast. Everything sparkles and the trees now provide shade rather than reinforcement for gray mornings.
I’m glad because it gives me a chance to see this place in all its parts, not only as it looks under the influence of a tropical depression.
It was laundry time today, so I drove over to a laundromat not far from here, washed clothes for the further journey to Panama City and the train ride home, then went to the Plantation Cafe for a true country breakfast. All the while I marveled at the transformation created by the sun. It is no wonder so many societies have worshipped that flaming presence in our sky.
Gray and gloom appeal to me in their place, such as a Minnesota early spring or late autumn, but when they defy sunny expectations their affect proves that much more intense.
Beltane Waning Flower Moon
Hilton Head Island, S.C.
Cloudy again today. Yesterday afternoon, for a couple of hours, the sun shone. I just looked at the forecasts for Panama City. Thunderstorms followed by thunderstorms.
It finally came to me yesterday why this weather looked so familiar. It looks like the pre-hurricane footage from the weather channel. And for good reason. There is a tropical depression slowly twirling off the east coast of Florida. Its northeast quadrant, around Jacksonville and the panhandle, has already dumped a lot of rain. 2 ft. in one location over two days! Remember Florida barely has a grip on the surface; a lot it will go early when the oceans rise.
As I worked out today on hard sand just above the surf racing ashore, I felt another of nature’s cycles, the tides. They pull in and out four times a day, hi and lo. These cycles remind us of the cycles in our own bodies and in our lives.
Last night at the Jazz Corner the crowd’s age showed in the gray heads dominating the room. We are the outgoing tide for this generation of living humans. We washed ashore in one of the biggest birth events in US history and we will go out as one of the biggest death events. Cycles,spirals. Change.