Posted on

Epic Road Trip ~ Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois

Welcome to Kentucky 

 

Across the Big Sandy, Kentucky greets us with an oil refinery. It’s a Dante-esque scene, with flames blazing from pipes that pierce the skyline, steam and smoke everywhere. An orange backdrop of the setting sun compounds the effect. Storage tanks up on the hill are blithely painted with a big “Welcome to” sign, which is bracketed with corporate logos of the refinery. But the human engineered landscape dissipates quickly. Kentucky assumes a fine bucolic appearance of gently rolling hills and forests for what’s left of the rest of the day.

Continue reading “Epic Road Trip ~ Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois”

Posted on

Epic Road Trip ~ Virginia & West Virginia

Packed 

 

We’re running out of room.

Right.

You can only take one small bag.

Right.

No, really.

I’ve got a small carry on. And a backpack. It can sit under my feet.

Cool. My kayak paddle will be by your head.

Yup, got it.

 

With the car packed (really packed) idling and pointed west, and we strapped in, the driveway suddenly feels like a runway. We pause a moment to contemplate it. Mentally go through a preflight checklist. Contemplate the leaving part.

The road starts out uphill and twisty. First, wending out of our rural hill country, up the Southwest Mountains and Poe’s Ragged Mountains. Beyond that up the Blue Ridge, across the Appalachian Trail and Skyline Drive, down the Shenandoah Valley, then up into the Alleghenies, which encompass almost the entire state of West Virginia. From there it’s a rolling downhill slide to the belly of the country, and then days of flatlands.

 

 

Continue reading “Epic Road Trip ~ Virginia & West Virginia”

Posted on

Epic Road Trip ~ Mile 3082 : Hood River, Oregon

Postcard from the Road:

20140114-222322.jpg

Portland, 9:51pm

Left Emily in Hood River this morning. Not an easy thing,

But she has a bunch of friends already, and a job, and a place to live, and a vigorous sense of adventure. She’ll be better than fine.

Back in Portland, met up with Doryman, who was on his way to Port Townsend to deliver a boat. We spent hours talking philosophies: Eastern, Western, Personal, purely conjecture. It was good to see him. He’s thinning the Doryman fleet, paring down, preparing for a new phase of adventures of his own. So much suddenly becomes possible when you cut all the lines that keep you moored.

Leaving at 5am to catch a flight back East. In the coming days I’ll start backfilling details and photos. There’s an awful lot of story left out — so much you just can’t get your head around when you’re moving so fast, let alone get down in any coherent fashion. Epic indeed.

For now, this is tonight, my last night in Oregon, in Portland, in a group house hostel in the arts district with a bunch of twenty-something’s, in the fog:

20140114-222356.jpg

20140114-222435.jpg

20140114-222517.jpg

Posted on

Foxing

 

video link 

 

Arrived home at dusk one evening to find a young Gray Fox mousing in the yard. Beautiful animal.

A few years ago we gave up the pretense of a suburban lawn. Waaay too much work, and never cared for it anyway. Replanted with a no-mow grass and let it grow, then let the rest go back to wild. Almost immediately the wildlife returned.

Continue reading “Foxing”

Posted on

Chickahominy River Revisited

Amanda happy on the Chickahominy 

 

More snow, sleet and freezing rain today. A good day to sit by the fire and look at pictures of summer.

One of the trips that didn’t get posted was a quick one to the Chickahominy late in the season. Amanda called one evening as I was driving home from work, and said “Let’s go sailing this weekend.” Powerful arm-twisting words, those are.

Continue reading “Chickahominy River Revisited”

Posted on

Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

As someone inured and enamored with words, I have followed John Koenig’s blog Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows since it’s early days.

He just posted his first video “definition” and it’s really, really well done.

If you’re a word person, enjoy:

 

Sonder | The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows from John Koenig on Vimeo.

 

 

Posted on

Yankee Point

Almost exactly one year ago, to the day.

 

The Corrotoman juts off the north shore of the Rappahannock, a mile or so upriver from the White Stone Bridge.

When I was a boy the bridge scared me. Even my dog was afraid of the bridge, and would cower in the floor of the back seat when she saw the big steel trusses approaching.

Not just because it is very high for a bridge – when it was built post Pearl Harbor, the Navy wanted to use the deep Rappahannock as a hurricane hole and disperse the fleet from Norfolk quickly, and be able to get upriver and back even if a storm (or Japanese planes) knocked out the power, so a low, drawbridge type wouldn’t do – but, more significantly, because it was so high a few people had gone over the edge to their deaths. Driving across you could see scars in the guardrails where they swerved and bounced over. Grandfather never failed to point them out. I could imagine too clearly the bumping crunch, the long silence of the drop, and the explosive splash at the end.

Continue reading “Yankee Point”