Excursions Aboard The U.S.S. Pediddleville...Kayak Bucket List...Funeral Procession For A Dead Swan...

Editor's Note:  I've just about given up on the author of this blog, avalonjeff.  He goes months at a time between even logging on to this blog, and usually does very little except start new entries that he never works on (for instance the long-anticipated one about Race, one about "deli etiquette", one about a cure for Athlete's Foot, and no doubt a few more bouncing off the skull in some kind of consciousness limbo), does not answer the phone (maybe he dropped his phone in The Water?), and if I drive by his house in Pediddleville there is no sign of him, just the sound of bagpipes and roosters.  So it was with some surprise that I found this entry in a forwarded email from some shady record producer's invalid email address, with the heading, "Hey Dipshit".  Somehow it bounced back to me and I figured I'd publish it.

 
The U.S.S. Pediddleville is my Old Town Heron model kayak, a gift from my family, Christmas 2013.  I had been wanting to explore many of the waterways in the Pediddleville area for some time, and had compiled a bucket list of them.  Summer of 2014 turned out not to be very active on that front because of my extended trips to Michigan and Ohio that season, and I kicked myself for not finding a way to bring it with me and go out on Lake Huron, or even the Muskingum River, but I did hit a few targets that year.  The 2015 season, now probably over, saw many of the targets hit.  I would sometimes go out twice in a weekend, or after work on the long days till Sunset.  I got many great pictures--though some of the best have been lost to The Water, and had a lot of life-affirming Solitude.

   
In 2014 I only got to the upper and lower Moodus Reservoirs, Babcock Pond, and the lower portion of Salmon Cove from the boat launch in view of the East Haddam swing bridge over the Connecticut River.  Went up the Blackhall River in Old Lyme with X-Ray Man.  I brought the kayak on vacation to Maine and hit the First and Second West Branch Ponds. I've been to Babcock Pond several times because it's close by and easy to get to if I just want to go out for the exercise or the sunset.  Same with the reservoirs, which are much less clogged with lily pads.  I think that was about it, just enough to get The Bug and compile the bucket list.

Early in the season of 2015 I got going on the quest.  I had gotten a four day work week with Fridays off, and it made it easy to find the time to go out kayaking.  One Friday I went out twice in one day.  I got going early in the morning.  I wanted to find a pond near me that I had seen on Google Earth.  It was off a road near Babcock Pond.  The road became gravel as it entered the deep woods, and I kept looking to my left for some way to get to my destination, Pine Meadows Park Pond, but wasn't  seeing it.  I was driving a Nissan Altima, not exactly a four-wheeler, and after a while started to wonder if this was a good idea.  The road got "less-travelled" the further I went until it came to a T intersection.  I tried a left, but the road soon got dicey, and with no way to turn around, I backed it up back to the intersection.  Well, I had come this far, so it was worth at least trying the other direction, and I could see a watery area to the left as I went in.  It looked very swampy rather than pond, but worth checking out.  Soon I found a sign on the right that said "Standish Pond". Well, here we go!  This pond was identified as state property on a sign I saw as I portaged the Pediddleville down to the pond.  It had a little observation hut and a wooden footbridge (in disrepair) over a narrow part of the pond, and a big open field on the other side of the bridge.  Clearly this pond is not visited often these days, and it was just what I was looking for!  There was no boat access to speak of, but I found a way near a fallen tree.  The pond had an abundance of lily pads and millfoil. There were really only a few open water areas, probably kept clear by the beavers, so the paddling was slow-going.  There were several herons around the pond and a beaver lodge.  The beavers were not used to any boat traffic, and made several loud splashes to send me the message that I was not welcome.  But I WAS welcome in my own way!  There was nobody to be seen this whole excursion--I've come to regard not seeing any human beings as a bonus on each trip.  I realized when I was away out in Michigan by myself that Solitude is my Friend.  Solitude feels most natural to me.  Connecticut is densely populated, even out in the East, and finding seclusion like this near my home is a blessing.  No sign of people, and The Silence!

I went out again that day, to Great Hill Pond, where I used to swim a lot when I was younger.  The pond is loomed over by the small mountain my friends and I used to hike up, and party and camp out on the rocks, and bearing a resemblance to Glastonbury Tor in England, became part of our band mythology--another story for another time, except to say that when I was in Glastonbury I was overtaken by that Mystical feeling I have been getting  lately from The Silence. Other trips this season were to Pickerel Lake right near me in Pediddleville, Mono Pond in Columbia, Williams Lake in Lebanon,  Beseck Lake in Middlefield,  Salmon River upstream from the cove to the Route 151 overpass, Salmon River above Leesville Dam as far as I could go (not very far), and Moodus River from the cove as far upstream as I could go.

We went to Maine again on vacation, and I went to Jordan Pond and Long Pond in the Acadia National Park area, and also went on my first salt-water venture out into Seal Cove and Mt. Desert narrows and explored Moose Island.  Again I was alone for most of this.  I was perturbed because the Pediddleville was at home in Connecticut, and I was using my sister-in-law's Pelican kayak, which was very tippy compared to mine.  I'm surprised I risked it on my first excursion into the freezing cold Atlantic in this kayak, but I was determined.  It was a very overcast, misty day and I got across the narrows to the island without incident.  I had to constantly use my legs as a counter to the tipping in the rough water, living and learning.   The island was beautiful.  The spruce forest was thick, except for a storm-damaged swampy grove I walked through on the path that circuited the island.  Sphagnum moss everywhere.  The path went into the woods and emerged on the coast, then continued along it, looping back to where I had parked the kayak on a spit of sea stones at the narrows.   I was looking for blueberries, which were not near ready yet, when I looked down at my feet and saw, smack-dab in the middle of the path, a tiny blueberry bush with one ripe blueberry at its top. How unlikely!  It was a gift, and I ate it right there.  As I walked along I suddenly panicked that maybe the tide had come in and that I had not pulled the kayak far enough away from shore.  I started running, imagining seeing the kayak floating away and stranding me there.  It was still safely there when I got to it, and it was time to go.  It rained heavily as I got near where my car was parked--getting drenched was another first.

The upper part of Salmon Cove became a go-to spot for me this past season.  This is a wide open area of water at the base of Mt. Tom, Machimoodus State Park, the supposed source of the famed "Moodus Noises", where the Salmon and Moodus rivers merge.  There is a road off Johnsonville Road that leads down to a small parking area near the water access.  At this point the Connecticut River and these tributaries are tidal.  At low tide water access is sometimes iffy, and not wanting to drag the kayak through thirty feet of muck, I would go somewhere else if need be.  At high tide it's no problem.  My first, much anticipated trip up Salmon River from here took place after a couple of tide-thwarted attempts.  I went in the late afternoon one day, got into the water, and headed upstream.  Soon I found that there is no cell signal there, which I find thrilling, though potentially disastrous.  I get into losing myself and not being found.  There were multiple small islands on the river, which at some point I will explore on foot.  The water is deep enough here to warrant a rope swing and jump-off spot off a big rock face soon after rounding a bend out of the cove.  The trick here is finding a landing spot, and I'll jump sometime next season.  As I went upstream I began to see the houses of the river-dwellers and wondered what it must be like living along the waterway.  Do people travel by boat to each other's houses for parties?  Or are these people the type that keep to themselves by their river Shangri-Las?  Probably a mixture of both.  I continued on past the old resort I used to work at, now torn down and made into a state park.   Maybe some of those stories will pop up on this blog at some point.  On the opposite side of the river the dwellings were up on a steep incline with steps down to the river, and were tucked into the trees almost invisible from the foliage.  I got a creepy feeling that with a private road access, these were really private dwellings where I imagined the possibility that very secret things could occur...When I got to the overpass of Route 151 I stopped and enjoyed seeing the area from the new angle I was getting, and turned around to head back.

The cove is also the mouth of the Moodus River, a smaller river that flows out of the Johnsonville millpond.  As far as you can go up this river there are no houses, few signs of human activity but for one observation hut and a few bird nesting houses.  The water is calm and very reflective and surrounded by wilderness at the base of Mt. Tom and further in.  Some fallen trees have been cut to allow passage, though one big one that is not cut makes passage under it difficult at high tide.  This is a magical excursion, winding its way through woods with no sign of people.  Kingfishers, herons, and interesting water-side plants everywhere, and there is a little side gulley leading to a beaver pond near the river.  My first trip up Moodus River made a great impression on me, that this existed so near my home, and my second was accompanied by experiencing the tide coming in, which pushed my kayak effortlessly upstream for a time before rounding a bend.  Here's another spot I will return to many times when the bucket list is less important than easy access and guaranteed splendor.

Nearing the end of the season, I felt a need to go up Salmon River again, this time the goal being as far up as possible below Leesville Dam.  It was a really nice day, and I figured I had better not miss perhaps the last opportunity of the season.  I got into the cove and noticed a number of swans floating around.  They were ahead of my course upstream, and a few took off in flight as I approached.  After a short while I noticed something floating on the water.  Nearing it, I saw that it was a dead swan, its arrestingly long neck sticking straight out from its body floating on the surface.  Part of its torso along the spine was torn open.  It is rare to be able to see a swan up this close, and really perceive the great size of the bird.  I got the vague sense that I might be attacked by the other swans if I lingered too long, so I moved on upstream.  Change of plans as I noticed a small tributary river to my left and decided to explore the waterway-less-travelled.  This stream wound its way through tall reeds and  into the woods.  I saw only one house along the way up a steep bank tucked into the forest and from there it was wilderness.  I don't know the name of this river, may find it out later, but it turned out to be a key trip that may be my last for the season, and though there may be a few more days left before it gets too cold, it may be fitting to stop for the season.  I got to the end of the line for this river as a deposit of small stones across the flow made it impassable.  I got out of the kayak here to pee and look around.  It was a nice setting for an end-of-the-line, end-of-the-season picture of the U.S.S. Pediddleville.  I had my phone in a plastic zip-lock bag and had stupidly placed it on top of the kayak as I took the photo with my camera--I usually snap redundant photos with the camera and with the phone.  When I went to get back in the kayak I moved it toward the water and then saw the bag with the phone in the water.  I grabbed it quickly and shook the water out of it as best as I could, but the bag had not been sealed, and the phone was swamped.  This phone was a trooper--it had fallen into a toilet at a Starbuck's in Michigan, and also the Lower Moodus Reservoir, and though it was still working at this point, it soon would not take a charge and I found out that charging it was the worst thing I could do, and I lost all of my photos on that phone!

So with consternation about the phone I headed back down stream, and back into Salmon River.  The tide was coming in and I had to paddle against the waves of the flood tide coming up from the cove.  I looked for the dead swan and didn't see it at first.  There were still lots of swans around, a bit further down stream exiting the cove.  I would guess there were about thirty of them, and I noticed that they seemed to be lined up, just drifting down stream in a line that I followed to my right, and then I found the dead swan, maybe an eighth of a mile downstream from where I saw it last, still floating and bringing up the rear of this swan flotilla.  Were these swans in mourning for the dead one?  Swans are known to mate for life, maybe they also grieve their dead. Was this a funeral procession?  I wondered how far down the river they would accompany the dead one--till it sinks, or gets snagged in a tree limb or washes ashore?  Would they go all the way down to Long Island Sound?

I sat for a while and pondered all of this.  Yes, it was a good thing I didn't miss this opportunity to go kayaking one last time, and had the chance to see this most rarified of scenes, a near Mystical experience.  I looked up the symbolism of seeing a dead swan--I could only find the meaning of seeing a dead swan in a dream--and since I enter a dream-like state on these excursions, took that as the true template.  A dead swan signifies frustration towards a person or situation, and it just so happens that that was another reason I went out that day!  It's good for me to get out into the Solitude, the Silence, yes even the head music stops sometimes when I'm out there.

Silence tells a real good story
Perfect Silence-never boring
It's like Music-all around
Silence is my favorite sound---Sylvia Platypus

Ghost Towns And Dead Zones...Truncated And Dispersed In Ohio...Rolling Coal And The One-Hundered-And-Thirty Year Fire...

EDITOR'S NOTE:  Little did I know that not only do I edit this blog, but I also have to be the author's babysitter.  The post now finally published here dates back to events that happened in August of 2014 when the author, avalonjeff, seems to have gone AWOL.  It was known he had gone to Ohio, but there was no evidence of his return.  Finally he was found under a pile of boxes, vinyl records, and musical instruments in his house in Pediddleville, quite unaware how long it had been since his last post.  A bit of not-so gentle persuasion had to be employed...

I volunteered, once again, to go away from Pediddleville for yet another three week stint to work as a relief/ mercenary field technician, this time in rural Southeastern Ohio.  The fucked-up Corporate politics that soured my last trip to Michigan popped right up at the outset of this trip.  First, it was scheduled for three weeks, and I was told that I had made the cut and would be going.  Next thing I heard was that the trip was shortened to only a week, and was asked if I still wanted to go.  At first I thought I wouldn't, that it would be a waste of time--I was still not caught up with myself from my first trip back in March-- but then I thought better of it.  Any reason to have an adventure, I thought, was good. I admit I am bored out of my fucking mind in this job and just being somewhere else makes it more bearable, I have found.  Plus I still haven't clambered completely out of the Hole of Pediddleville, so the opportunity to make more money working tons of Overtime, eased by the Novelty of being away, made my decision for me.  But then my boss told me that I now was NOT going to be able to go, since they changed the time frame and re-canvassed everybody.  The last email I had gotten had said that it was the FINAL LIST, arrived at by seniority, and there I was the last candidate on the list, confirmed.  I sent off an email to the administrator who was coordinating the trip.  In it, I demanded an explanation as to why I had been on the finalized list, and then was not, and I added that I wanted an HONEST explanation. I think the word "honest" gave them the Heebie-Jeebies, and soon my phone rang with a call from my boss saying I had been given premature information, and that I was going. It was Adventure Time again...

Nineteen of us from different parts of Connecticut left, a day later than the original start date, for the Southeastern part of Ohio known as " Outstate". It was a long drive to be making in one day, a long time to muse on the screwy situation and anticipate the next week's adventure.  Somewhere in Southwest Pennsylvania, near dusk, when the final fingers of gravitational pull from Home let go, I saw an inspiring sight that brought me back to my first trip to the Thumb of Michigan:  up on the tops of twin flat-topped mountains, dozens of wind turbines, spinning serenely. They stood there on the mountaintops like two armies of giants, two armies of Hope for the Future, resolute, yet breezy...

What I found in Ohio was a land that Time forgot, a shadow of what it once was back in the black old coal mining days.  It had been a depressed area for quite some time.  You rarely see a house or building that has even been painted in decades.  Abandoned houses and buildings are not torn down, they're just left there to collapse and get grown over with vines.  Often a mobile home is moved onto the property and placed next to the old house while it stands decaying. There are many small oil rigs seen on properties where the people have sold the mineral rights to their land.

Driving from my hotel in Zanesville, through Crooksville and Roseville, every day nearly an hour South to Nelsonville, New Straitsville, and others, the cell signal vanished.  I use an iPad for dispatching my jobs, testing lines, chatting with support people, all things needing cell signal.  It was very difficult working like this.  Sometimes I'd have to drive ten miles out to get signal, do everything I could possibly need to do on the iPad, then drive all the way back to do the physical part of the job.  There were few places to get lunch in some of the towns I was in.  I kept noticing all the decay, the vacant buildings left to collapse, often covered with thick mats of vines.  It wasn't fun like being in Michigan.  It was pretty in the rural parts, very hilly, and most of the people I met were all very nice, but a weird thing I noticed that was a little disconcerting, like getting used to the grid over in Michigan had been for me, was that the area was so hilly, just gentle rolling hills and valleys, that you could never really see any kind of horizon. Pretty and rural, but claustrophobic.

Claustrophobic, yeah, maybe the kind of locale that could foster a scene like the Redneck Conference I witnessed with my own two eyes.  I was up a telephone pole looking at a property with a big flat lawn and a mobile home at the back end.  There were at least ten young men, what I would call Rednecks, and a few young women, all hanging out in this yard, blasting Country Radio, whooping it up, drinking Bud Light (exclusively).  They were loud and boisterous and they yelled up to me on the pole asking if I'd like a beer.  I declined because I was working, and because it was Bud Light.  "It's too late to be working on a Friday." one of them said to me.  They didn't know I would probably end up working until at least ten PM that night. At some point I heard one guy say "Hey, lets get a picture of us and our babies for Facebook!" It didn't register with me, but I would have expected to see some of the guys and their girlfriends line up for the photo, but what actually happened next I could not have predicted.  They all got into their pickup trucks and revved them up.  Black smoke suddenly filled the yard and drifted my way.  One-by-one they lined the trucks up next to each other, all ten of them across the left side of the yard facing the girl with the cell phone.  Then all ten guys sat on the hoods of their "babies", held aloft their Bud Lights, and posed for the picture!

It gets even better.  I continued working, soon moving my ladder across the street to the side of the house I was servicing.  I don't know if maybe they noticed the Connecticut license plate on my truck, and wanted to put on a show for the Yankee, or for whatever reason they had, but the scene I witnessed will stand with the short list of most awesome experiences of my life. I may have subconsciously noted the hubbub as I climbed my ladder to attach the wire to the house, but soon enough there were multiple blasts of loud truck engines, and that thick black death smog erupted all over the yard across the street.  Revving the trucks and hooting, the rednecks filed out the driveway, took a right onto the street, then a left onto the street where I was set up near the corner, almost all of them blowing their horns, hooting, and blasting thick clouds of that evil black smoke in a convoy right next to me and up the steep hill that was there.  I could hear them nearing the top of the hill, then driving the loop that was up there, then they all came back down the hill, still making a big commotion.  Satisfied probably that they had put on a heck of a show for the stranger from Liberal Connecticut, they went by me, turned right, and continued past the mobile home out to the main road and drove off towards New Straitsville.  Normally I would not condone such brazen destructive attitudes, but this was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen in Real Life, and I suppose not something most people would ever see.  Fucking hilarious! Adventure Time...

What they were doing with the black smoke out their exhaust pipes is called "Rolling Coal".  It happens because of a deliberate modification that is done to the diesel engine to produce the smoke, and it's done as a middle finger to Liberals and Environmentalists generally, and to President Obama specifically.  Rolling Coal has nothing to do with actual coal, but I will relate to you the story of real coal burning that turned some of these towns into ghost towns.  Really a little bit of misplaced anger round these parts...

New Straitsville was established as a coal mining company town, complete with all the misery that goes along with such a place, which in the 1880's saw the forming of the first coal miner's Union in the country.  Inevitably a strike took place, and getting frustrated with how things were going, some of the striking miners loaded up a bunch of logs on a cart, doused them with kerosene and lit them on fire, then pushed the cart down the mineshaft.  The coal in the mine caught fire and it still burns today after one hundred and thirty years!  The fire has traveled along the coal veins all these years and sometimes smoke will rise from the ground in Wayne National Forest.  Presumably this will continue indefinitely and nothing can be done about it.  It certainly ended the strike,  with the unintended results of the mine being closed down, the miners all losing their jobs, and the local economy collapsing.

I met some nice people in New Straitsville, the Thompsons, when I went to their house to do a job for them.  They sat me down at the kitchen table while I was on hold for a long while for company support people, gave me a glass of iced tea, and chatted with me about my job and why I was there from Connecticut.  They gave me a bag of excellent ripe tomatoes from their garden, which I kept in my truck and ate along with some almonds and apples when I couldn't find somewhere to have lunch.   The Thompson's issue could not be resolved that day because they hadn't received shipment of a modem, so I moved on, but I dispatched on it again the next day.  Doubting the modem would be there, I went anyway, and found Mr. Thompson in the front yard.  We sat down on the front porch for another chat.  Soon Mrs. Thompson appeared with a glass of iced tea for me.  Nice people.  Mr. Thompson was on the town council and I asked about the town being "the Mooshine capital of the world".  He didn't mention the coal fire--I found out about that later on the internet--but he told me about a local beverage recipe made with Moonshine and apples called "Apple Pie" that he enjoyed.  There is a legal Moonshine distillery/ museum in the town right on Main Street, but there remain many illegal bootleggers all over the place here.  The town puts on an annual Moonshine Festival, but I didn't ask how the bootleggers participate in a sanctioned function such as that.  Dipshit that I am, I never sampled anything from the area because I really do prefer IPA's to any hard liquor, but this is how New Straitsville pulled itself out, to an extent, of the economic collapse.  Other towns in the area, Shawnee and Corning, for example, did not fare as well.  Nelsonville was propped up for a long time by the Nelsonville Block Company and other brick manufacturers, and Roseville and Crooksville had the famous pottery and china companies, but the competition from foreign manufacturers did it's inevitable damage.  The whole area is pretty run-down.  The town of Shawnee, in particular, has what was once a beautiful Main Street downtown area that is now basically a ghost town.  There are big brick row buildings with store fronts and restaurant spaces and apartments upstairs all empty, boarded up and collapsing under the vines.

Somehow it seemed like more than ten days that I was away.  I was able to see a lot in those few days before they split us up and sent two thirds of our group to other locations.  Ryan and a few others got sent further west to Xenia, and Welby and others got sent further South to Marietta.  Those of us who were working South of Zanesville ended up finishing out the tour in the Zanesville area.  Zanesville is a relatively uninteresting town except for the Y Bridge over the brown water of the Muskingum River and some interesting Church and Municipal architecture.  They have a brewpub, which I never got to try.  Working in Zanesville was easier because there was cell signal, but the plant was just as beat-up as in the rural areas.  I don't know what they think we'd get accomplished in only a week in the first place, then they went and dispersed us further.  At any rate it was another adventure in a new place, I made a bit more money than I normally would, and I was spared the boredom of the home turf.  A sense of Weirdness was creeping in, though.  My room had a mildewy funk to it that I should have complained about. The Michael Brown shooting and subsequent riots and protests took place while I was in Ohio, and Robin Williams committed suicide.  There were Halliburton work crews staying at my hotel.   The Xenia crew got to leave a day early because they ended up with a two-day drive.  There was a sense of finality with this trip.  Even though there was one more trip (which I did not put in for) to Detroit after this one, we all knew there would be no more of this since the outfit we worked for was going to be sold off in a matter of months to a new company that did not have such a large range of coverage.  I know I am stuck where I am now for good.