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.

The Most Unique Resort In Pediddleville...The Last Installment Of The Michigan Adventures...Liquor Chicken...

When I was a teenager, lots of kids from Pediddleville, East Pediddleville, and Moodus had Summer jobs at Frank Davis Resort.  Most jobs were kitchen help, waitstaff, and some grounds work.  My friend Rick and I had also worked there, but our experience was different since we were night security guards--a whole different story to be told at a later time, and it now can be told since the place no longer exists.  In fact, there is the go-ahead for the story I am really here to relate.  Anyway, the resort had a sign out front on the lawn which claimed that Frank Davis Resort was "The Most Unique Resort In America".  The claim probably came from the fact that Moodus once was called "the Catskills of Connecticut", and lots of people from NYC and Boston came to the numerous resorts there.  In old movies if you see some character talking about summering in Connecticut, that's what they were talking about.  By the time I came around, this heyday was long gone, and there were only three resorts left, Frank Davis Resort being the most popular.  Mr. Long, our High School English teacher, pointed out that the claim was ridiculous, not simply because there was nothing special about the place, but because it is impossible to be the most unique anything.  "Unique" is defined as being the only one of its kind; unlike anything else."  So there is unique, and not unique, without any kind of graded scale.

...and it's the same kind of Logic that makes the Big Corporate Slogan of the company I work for the stupidest thing I've ever heard.  Some executive at some high level, or maybe at a public relations/advertising firm made big bucks for coming up with that one, and it makes no sense.  It even functions as a double-negative. "Rethink Possible" Mr Long would say that "Possible" means "It CAN be done."  There is only one way to rethink that--that it CAN'T be done! They have used the slogan for years, so apparently it just goes over most people's heads unless you think about it.  And who gives much thought to a stupid Corporate slogan?  I bring it up because lately there has been some movement in the company that truly corroborates the double-negative.  That's all I'll say about it now because I'm really here today to talk about the last two weeks of my last trip to the Detroit area...

I told the story in my last post about how I had been assigned  (it seemed) to work in the nice rural and waterside areas north of Metro Detroit that I had become so enchanted with during my time there back in March.  Reynard, Ryan, BigDave and I were assigned there, while the rest of the guys were in other areas, which meant that they were mostly right there in Detroit, below Eight Mile, every day. We all agreed that it would be fair and Humane for it to be mixed up some, so that we could all have some good, some bad.  But we knew also that seeing as we were all Mercenaries, any complaints or suggestions about our assignments would be given little consideration. That Sunday of the first week I bumped into Reynard up in Croswell and we talked about how great it was to be where we were, and about feeling for the guys stuck in Detroit every day. Monday afternoon I bumped into Reynard again-- he was parked under a shade tree next to two scuzzed-out empty houses  and across from an old industrial building with no doors and covered with grafitti.  "We've gotta stop meeting like this!"  I said when I went over to his van.  "Yeah, I was wondering about this. " he said. "Dave and Ryan are in Detroit today too."  So here we were thinking maybe they switched us and that we'd be working in Detroit, maybe for the rest of the time.  Of course I was always fully aware it could happen, and was prepared for it, but my high hopes for more ecstatic experiences out in the Thumb seemed to be going up in flames like a squatter house...

That day in Detroit was pretty interesting, and I never felt in harm's way.  I did a job at a city community center installing a line for a job referral service.  It was cool because I felt like I was contributing to the City, doing my part for Motor City on it's way up again.  I was totally safe there, parked in the lot with five or six police cruisers.  That day in Detroit was also the only really hot day for the entire Summer.  I was sitting in the lot cranking the air conditioner when I got the email saying one of the local techs had been held up at gunpoint not far from where I was. Here we go. Next was a daycare center out of service in semi-industrial area that wasn't anything worse than I've seen in Bridgeport, then an Islamic auto parts salvage garage to the South near Dearborn.  I went into Dearborn, which seems almost to be bi-lingual, for a falafel sandwich, then went to a pretty wrecked residential neighborhood, still not feeling unsafe, just cautious.  After that was when I saw Reynard-- we were both planning on heading in relatively early, regrouping for what was going to be coming down the pike. That, and not wanting to end up in the Hood after nightfall.

Here I suppose is a good spot to tell a story about my brother-in-law, Welby, who came out to Michigan other times when I did not.  He was working in a bad neighborhood and a local power company truck pulled up to him.  The driver was black and said "What are you doing here?"  " We'll I have this repair job..." Welby answered.  " No, I mean what are YOU doing here?  You're white.  You should not be here." the lineman said.  "You're in danger here.  I'm in danger!  I hope you have a gun, do you?"  "Well no, I'm not allowed to have one."  "Man, all of us down here are packin'.  You better get yourself one if you're gonna be here." He hung out for a while to back Welby up, then gave him a list of really bad areas that he should never go to alone.  Tribal kindredship transcends Race among Utility workers. The guys started questioning the assignment locations and doubling up for safety though they were not really directed to by Management.  You gotta do what you gotta do, and no job is worth losing your life over.  Like I said, I really had no reason to complain or fret, just accept...

Given all this I was bracing myself, thinking about how much less money I would be making since I would not be working late every day, thinking of the process of calling other guys for back-up, thinking of setting up a dummy wallet to give a thief if need be, but that day was the only day I ever worked in Detroit.  Monday I found myself in the suburbs again, though this time they were northwest of Detroit.  Royal Oak, West Bloomfield, Pontiac and Farmington Hills.  This area was kind of like Connecticut.  There were some lakes that made for curvy roads rather than that grid I drove to the East.  There were some hills, too, so that a town named Farmington Hills actually had some real hills, unlike Sterling Heights.

And that was where I stayed for the rest of my time in Michigan.  Every day I would dispatch and head out to West Bloomfield.  It seemed a bit more upscale than the Eastern suburbs.  There were even some affluent neighborhoods that I saw.  This was a relief, I guess, not having to deal with Detroit, but it took the adventure factor down a couple of notches.  Every day up and down the same roads past strip malls and professional office buildings--a dreamland for American Consumerism, but a drag for me.  It got very boring, just like back home.  Out that way the ninety degree grid was much less apparent, so the GPS driving directions always had me hopping on the highway to get from town to town.  Right there, that cuts down on the level of Novelty.  It was just easier to follow along than to try to outsmart the GPS with roads less travelled.  I saw very little of interest to take pictures of.

 
The other big difference with this trip compared to my Winter trip was the amount of drinking.  It was nice weather, and the hotel had a roofed patio area that had picnic tables and chairs and two gas grills. This became the party spot.  Any given night if you didn't go across Van Dyke to Malone's, there was a group of guys from Connecticut hanging out, cooking Polish Sausage from Hamtramck or burgers, and drinking.  There was lots of beer, and some Bourbon, and some Tequila, and some maple-flavored Moonshine.  I was of course on a beer Quest, trying as many Michigan-made India Pale Ales as I could.  Working late, and the draw of the party made me less productive than I like to try to be when I'm away with no distractions, but it was fun.  The telephone worker Tribe loves to tell stories about jobs they've done, and I heard many personal stories about that city that was all over the National news all the time.  It could get loud.  The politics of who was and wasn't working in Detroit came up from time to time.  It was apparent that any of the people at our company that we wanted to give a shit, did not.  It would have been easy, and smart, for them to mix up our work locations, but it never happened.  I would sit there and say little.  How could I complain about being bored when other guys complained about getting stiff necks from always looking over their shoulders?  Strip malls?  Much less devastating than burned-out neighborhoods and giant holes in the road and the danger of electrocution because of people stealing power by hooking up jumper cables up the poles.

When in Connecticut, our dispatchers are located in Michigan, right in the area I was working in, and it had become customary each trip for some of them to meet up with us at Malone's.   When I got there that night I was a little earlier than most.  There were only a few people of both groups there yet, and it was awkward.  I didn't feel well--I think it was the grocery store Sushi I had for lunch--and the people there were ones I didn't know well.  Two Connecticut guys who had been keeping to themselves started asking me if I was working in the nice areas.  They were really pissed about being stuck in Detroit.  As the crew started showing up and the drinks started going down, the topic was broached several times.  A weird scene--comradery laced with contentiousness.  Our dispatchers, of course, were peons just like us, and had no control over where they turfed us.  TJ got a bit hot under the collar.  People were getting drunk, laughing, complaining, rationalizing.  I couldn't say much.  I sat there feeling kind of disconnected and left early to a bad night's sleep,  getting up a few times overnight with diarrhea.  Nothing changed of course, and we all kept on keeping on where we were.

Four days before our slated departure date I was working in Bloomfield Hills, went to dispatch, and nothing came up.  Weird, if they were so swamped with work here that they needed help from Connecticut mercenaries, why this was happening.  I looked at the dispatch chat site and found nobody available.  Even weirder.  I called Ryan to see if he knew anything about it.  "Oh, you didn't hear?  They're sending us home.  Tomorrow."  I was looking through emails, texts, and there was nothing about it.  "I don't have any word about that.  Did you get an email?"  "No, I head it from Dave."  "So is it just a rumor or what?  They should let us know.  Somebody pranking us?"  The rest of that afternoon and evening turned into a bizarre event.  This was pretty big news for us, but there was very little word, officially, from anybody at the company in either state.  I was able to pick up one more job that day, and since I was now in a vengeful mood, the job I got was perfect--an hour away up North, and the GPS was stumped by road construction and could not find my job location for a long while.  It is a rare thing in the work world where the peon has the power to enact (at least financially) revenge against the Company.

When I got back to the hotel there was an inevitable group hanging out at the patio.  Drinks were going down as we tried to figure out if this situation was real or not.  All we knew was that one of the guys had gotten a call from a local manager, who up until then had had no contact with us, saying that we were being sent home the next day.  Nobody had heard any news from their organizations back home.  Some guys had called their bosses and they had not heard anything either.  This was now not just a party, but a business meeting with booze.  We decided that in the morning we would all show up to the patio, but not dispatch until we heard what we were doing.  Like other times we were expected to work half a day, then drive to a mid-way hotel in Ohio, but we figured if we didn't dispatch, it would raise some flags and maybe we would get some confirmation.  Also we would use this company time to pack up our belongings rather than our own time this night.  There was drinking to be done, grill food to be gotten rid of.  The edginess caused by the lack of information made for some wild conversations and behavior.  The guy we called Tipsy McStaggers drove in by the patio, already cocked.  Ryan came in from one of the bars and told us that BigDave had met up with three women and was bringing them back to the hotel to party with us.  A little later I could see BigDave staggering across the parking lot toward us, by himself, and I figured that he had struck out in his endeavor, but soon after, three cars drove in and parked near us, and these three young women got out and came on over.  What followed was a pretty comical scene of drinking, twerking, and a big sandwich lap dance kind of thing that one of the guys somehow got in the middle of.  You had to be there.  These women were like something you'd see in a movie, like you wouldn't expect to see in real Life.  They were drinking anything that was there, whooping it up, and you could sense that this was nothing out or the ordinary for them.  Most of us by this time had gotten through the business aspect of this meeting and were starting to think about the long drive the next day, and at about One A.M.  we all bailed on the scene, leaving Dave with the women.  I don't think he ended up working the next day, but he did make it to the hotel in Ohio.

It came out that there had been declared a Nation-wide capping of Overtime in the Company.  This was due to the end of the Fiscal that was coming up and they wanted to make the Bottom Line look spiffy for it.  Somebody must have realized that "Holy Shit, we've got twenty techs out there in Michigan raking in the hours--and look at this--they're scheduled to be driving home on a Saturday, which would be all Double-Time!!  Holy Shit, we've got to pull them back early!"  So this was the reason for the cluster-fuck we had going on.  Typical Corporate Dickishness.  There is nothing sweeter in this work than to do nothing but drive a vehicle for double what you normally earn,  all day long for twelve hours, and they took that sweet Mercenary opportunity away from us to save Face for themselves.  The upper level executive, a special breed of lizard-like businessman whose concerns are laser-focused on cheapening the whole experience for the peons.  It's hard to blame them too much, though.  They grew up in a sick Money culture, idolizing fathers who were probably the biggest Swine you could imagine--if only they had seen it and learned from the bad example.  But you don't see these things when you get to go to Vail every Winter, maybe study abroad in Europe, or Thailand...You don't see the Death Toll that come with those Christmas bonuses.

Sometime in the mid-morning the next day I received an email with the address of my hotel in Ohio.  This was the ONLY official communication I got from the company about returning home.  That's it.  I finished work and headed out, outsmarting GPS routes that would require tolls, and taking my time getting back homeward.  Yup.  Rethink Possible...

From Sterling Heights To Bath City...The Elusive Wolverine...Black Squirrels, Blue Water, Green Pastures...

Editor's Note:  This piece was posted nearly one month after the events described occurred.  The author,  avalonjeff, is admittedly a world class Procrastinator, however this post was delayed mostly by the fact that the Blog format cannot accommodate long length posts attempted on the iPad.  He was unable to scroll without losing parts of the text, got frustrated, and gave up until arriving back home in Pediddleville, whereupon "other" stumbling blocks occurred.  Yeah, that's it...


Here I am back in Michigan for another three week stint.  It feels different this time.  Even though all the roads and everything are all flat and in straight lines, it feels more rounded- off because all the trees have leafed out and the ambient background is Green rather than White, Dead Brown and Gray. On my first trip out I found it disconcerting to not be able to identify some of the trees.  Now I can say they were probably Elms, Cottonwoods, Butternuts or Willows I was seeing, none of which are plentiful in Pediddleville.  Today the air was full of the Cottonwood's downy seeds flying around like snow.

I know the first time I came out here it was a very spur of the moment thing and just about everything was unexpected--I certainly appreciated my trips up to the Thumb and along Lakes Huron and St. Clair, seeing the wind turbines and the vast openness out there, plus it made it easier and more interesting working the long hours.  So far on this trip I have been stuck in the boring suburbs, even though I am supposedly assigned to the Mount Clemens (Bath City) area covering Port Huron.  I know maybe I should be patient, that the great bonus I seek will come, but right about now, sitting in my truck on hold with a call center for forty-five minutes listening to drivel hold music as cars zoom by at a busy intersection, I feel the urge in a dire way.  I did get in to Detroit for one job this past Sunday.  It was at a house that sat, along with three others, right next to a giant abandoned factory complex that took up an entire three block area.  Two garage doors were gone from the side of the building, and I could see daylight all the way through to the other side.  Just inside the doors was a pit which contained the burned-out hull of a twenty foot speed boat.  It must have been quite a scene at one time.  This neighborhood was quiet--dead quiet.  The house I was going to had a threatening, paranoid sign on the front door saying not to knock, so I just left a note saying that the occupants needed a different utility to do the work requested, took a few pictures of the factory, and drove off taking in all the urban decay.  I didn't feel in danger because there was nobody at all around.  The bright side was that it was so different from the suburbs.

I knew right away when I got up to the Thumb back in March that I would love to see this place in the Summer, and here I am, but so far I've been cramped in the busy boring suburbs north of Detroit, only up as far as Twenty Three Mile Road.  It's like if you took the Boston Post Road in Milford, CT, straightened out about twenty three miles of it, then lined up fifteen of those all next to each other. Every National chain store and restaurant you can imagine is here, over and over again.  I am very goat-like when it comes to Consumerism, and I can't seem to wrap my mind around this place.  Just a couple of days ago I came to the realization that if you are at a four-way intersection, there will be a CVS/pharmacy at one of the corners, always.  Often there is also a Walgreens and a Rite Aid.  I'd almost guess this is a state law mandating "corner drugstores".

I felt pretty disappointed about all this, but still it beats working right in Detroit, I guess, where there is always the possibility of danger.  I had become enchanted with the rural parts of Michigan I saw in the Winter, and in coming back here I wanted more.  When I got back home from Michigan at the beginning of April I was very inspired to get back working on a couple of projects I had left behind, but things didn't pan out.  Scheduling conflicts, technical difficulties, and a serious battle with the 'ol Creatism Disease all dogged me.  I was completely bored and frustrated with work back home,
motivationally challenged, and all the money I made in Michigan was quickly depleted.  About all I remember from that time between trips to Michigan was a slow, slow change to warm weather, lots of hectic running around, disinterest in work, a lot of Championship level Procrastination, and the dumb, blanket rule of Pediddleville Law.  I was watching the Fargo mini-series on TV.  The long shots of cars driving on long, flat roads in the middle of a desolate winter in Minnesota reminded me of what it was like for me back in March, up in the Thumb.

The turning point came when I tried to dispatch and could not.  I contacted my dispatcher and she said she'd have to "open me up", and Boom! I was now in the 810 area code!  I got to Allentown, a depressed-looking little village surrounded by flat, open farmlands, and to Port Huron, St. Clair, and  East China along the blue, blue St. Clair River, right across from Ontario.  Now I was happy.   Seeing these places in the summer that I had seen only in Winter was a rush.  Some roads I had travelled before, others not.  I was driving along in the farmlands one afternoon and I saw a dead animal on the roadside.  Something about it seemed strange, and I thought it was probably just a cat, but something made me turn around and take a look at it. This animal had light colored fur with orange-y stripes.   It was definitely not a cat, definitely not a raccoon.  It had vicious -looking teeth very much resembling those of a Wolverine.  Canine-looking, but snaggly and sharp, these teeth were dangerous.  I think this animal is in the same family as Weasels and Wolverines, but I can't seem to find it online to identify it.  Later that day I was talking to an old-timer while fixing his line and I mentioned it to him. He said it would be a very rare thing if it was in fact a Wolverine.  The coloring of this animal is wrong for a Wolverine also, but the shape of the face and what I could make out of the body, and those teeth!  I need to find out what it is.  I'm going with Wolverine till I know better, but since then I have seen two more of them dead by the road, so the likelihood that they are Wolverines is low.  Even still,  I'll be on the watch for a live one.

Earlier in the day I worked on a line for an old widow who had a nice little property tucked away
among the flatness, not far from the  power transmission lines that seem to run off to Infinity.  This
was obviously the highlight of her day, and she watched me as I worked and chatted, mostly asking me about what I was doing.  She wasn't really aware that she had a problem with her line- the neighbor who watches out for her had called in the trouble ticket.  As we chatted she mentioned that her husband had had a phone line out in the large garage in her back yard, and that he used it when he used to go out there to "watch TV".  I said I should check that line, since disuse and corrosion could be her problem, but I was really interested in what was in that garage.  Keep in mind this area is just outside of Metro Detroit, though it is rural.  Sure as shit, there was a Model T, an old, old Cadillac, and a red 1980 Pinto, all under covers in mint condition!  It's a good bet that her husband had worked for Ford. This is the kind of stuff you'll see here if you look!  Now I was starting to have fun.

I finished work and I had some gear to pick up out by the telephone pole.  I drove my truck out there and noticed a stalk of asparagus growing there in the long grass.  It looked good, and my plan was to harvest it and munch on it raw, but the lady walked out to the road to chat some more.  It seemed like she had read my mind and wanted to keep her asparagus, but she was probably just lonely.  I left the asparagus, waved goodbye to her several times and drove off to the crossbox to sign off.  Over at the crossbox I finally took the opportunity to blow up my  Swedish Bagpipes and play for a little bit. The pipes were the one thing I was able to accomplish when I had been home.  Their completion had been stalled due to my first trip to Michigan, and after I got home I was able to turn a functional, but not quite accurate chanter.  At least now I could play them and see what they were like.  It has been a goal of mine to play these and get acquainted with them while I'm here, but stuck mostly in the suburbs I feel inhibited.  No, it has to be out in the rural areas.

Another job I had had a surreal feel to it.  I was at an unmanned facility of some sort belonging to the Town of St. Clair replacing a temporary feed left over from the Winter.  It was in the middle of nowhere down a dirt road.  There was a locked chain across the driveway, so I had to walk in about a quarter mile just as I felt the urge to poop.  When I got in there, lo and behold, there was a Port-O-Potty! Walking in, I had noticed the odor of a dead animal.  I saw something laying in the field, thought it was a deer, but then it turned out to be a cardboard box.  As I did the work I had to pull the old wire off the ground in the field. I saw that the field had been a large puddle for some time, and it had recently dried up.  In all the last depressions at the bottom of the puddle there were the dead bodies of thousands of polliwogs- which were what I had been smelling.  Then I noticed thousands of tiny baby toads hopping on the ground as I neared. They were about the size of a pea, and there were so many of them that I had to be careful not to step on them.  These were the winners in the race against Time.

Between jobs I travelled along the road that goes along the St. Clair River, which is the outlet from Lake Huron.  Across the River is Ontario.  The water of the River, like the Lake, is incredibly Blue.  I believe this is because there is a light colored clay bottom, the water is clean and clear, and it's not all clogged with algae and organic debris.  Beautiful.  I had a Divinely located job at a the Culinary Institute of Michigan, right at the Nexus where Lake Huron turns into the river, and the bridge that goes from Port Huron to Canada.

The furthest up the Thumb that I've gotten so far is to the town of Peck, where I saw a buffalo farm.  I bumped into Raynard, one of my Connecticut co-workers at the tiny central office in the
town.  I was practically giddy as we talked about how much we liked it up there-- and it was beginning to seem like we would see more of this--and we were very hopeful.  I said I almost felt guilty because some of the guys work right in Detroit every day.  They are not seeing God's Country, they are seeing dilapidated houses, crack sales, prostitutes, horrendous roads, and overgrown neighborhoods on their way back to Nature.  I left Raynard and went on to my next job, at a house right on Lake Huron. It had a private beach and the people who lived there were not home.  Of course, I went down the stairway to the beach and enjoyed it for a while.  I collected some beach stones and gazed at the massive beauty of the giant Blue Lake.  Of course, I pulled out the Swedish Bagpipes and had a little jam session with the Lake.  Now I almost feel like I might have been gloating at how great time I was having doing my job.  Heading South I did one more job in Marine City,  again Divinely placed right near the River.  I completed my work, then took a stroll through the nice riverside park for a while.  People were fishing in the river, walking around with ice cream cones, and enjoying the nice early evening.  I may have realized at that point that when I was working in these rural areas I seemed to have near mystical experiences--everything in slow motion, seeing every detail, feeling free--and that that, was that.  True enough.  The whole rest of my time in Michigan had an entirely different flavor...

So...

As a radio programmer I thought I'd stick up for my fellow radio people and talk about a trend I'm sure you've noticed if you listen to Public Radio.  Doing interviews is not my forte, but I respect those that do, and it's a Tribal thing to defend them.  Defend them? Against what?  Interviewees being sarcastic?  Evasive?  Just what, exactly?

The word "So".  How so?  You've heard it, more and more, as more and more interviewees hear it, and then emulate it when they get their chance to be on the radio talking about the subject on which they are experts.  I find it very annoying, and it colors my attitude toward the person speaking, no matter what the subject matter, or my level of agreement with what is being said, so much so that I thought I'd examine this trend.

It goes something like this:

Interviewer:  "What led up to this new initiative?"
Interviewee:  " So, there was a need for blah blah blah..."

In the past, the interviewee would begin with "Well... " or "Good question..."  or " It's like this...", all of which are similar to "So...", but why has "So..." gotten so overused lately?  It really seems to be a trend in radio interviews.  Not to pick on NPR, but I believe this originated there.  I don't really notice it much on TV, so it's perplexing where this is coming from.  I think I know.  I think it comes from Scientists, Doctors, and Academics.  NPR has a higher concentration of these types of interviewees than most other mainstream media, and it goes without saying, Fox.

I won't blame the Scientists, Doctors, and Academics for this, because these people are generally highly educated, and are used to giving lectures, dissertations, and such, and using the word "So" is just a technique used to denote continuation of a thought or process to the listeners.  These people started the trend inadvertently simply due to their Natures...

No, it is the trend followers that are guilty.  After hearing it said a number of times, it starts to become protocol, spurred on by the infiltration of EGO.  See, the Scientists, Doctors, and Academics do it because they fall into what I'll call "lecture mode", where they are asked a question, and not being used to that type of interruption, then continue on with their train of thought by using the word "So".  It's the trend followers who hear this and adopt the practice.  Why?  I think it's Ego.  The person is awfully impressed with themselves for being invited to talk on the radio about their area of expertise, and use "So" as the first word of their answers--( and particularly annoying when they use it for their very FIRST answer) because of their ego.  Starting the answer with "So" negates the presence of the question, even of the interviewer.  At this point "so" translates to something like "So, I'm just going to continue on saying what I was going to say anyway, but for the interruption from this radio person".

I may be wrong on this for some, but I'm sure I'm dead on for many, and the trend self-perpetuates.  If I was an interviewer on one of these radio shows I would maybe stand up for myself, and for the sake of my listeners and stipulate, pre-interview, that the interviewee NOT begin any answers with "So", maybe even rig up a wrong answer buzzer in case they do.   I know that if I worked as a sound editor at an NPR station, I would be tempted to edit out the "So"s.  It would be easy enough since they are at the beginning of the answers, and are most often followed by an equally annoying pause...but nah!  Let 'em make asses of themselves.

The Wind Turbines Of Your Mind...Blowin' Through The Jasmine In My Mind...Cruising The Thumb On The Weekend...And A Post-Script From Pediddleville......

After another week working in the Northern suburbs of Detroit, this past weekend, like the weekend before, was spent way up North in The Thumb.  My goal was to make it to Bad Axe...I knew right away when no job came up on my iPad, that I was headed North, but when I got the call I chuckled when my dispatcher said "Bad Axe". I told her that my goal that day was to go there, and she was glad to help me fulfill it.  I just liked the name of it.  It sounded like a harsh place that builds character.  Apparently some old, broken axe was found by early settlers.  The article I read about it didn't specify if it was a Viking axe or not, but there have been many findings of Viking artifacts all through Michigan.  Funny that areas that were explored by Vikings would later be settled by their descendants, without being aware of it.  Here, and even moreso in Minnesota and the Dakotas, there is a lot of Scandinavian blood. There is even some speculation that a lot of Algonquin words have been derived from Nordic words, just as in some other areas the Native American  languages seem to have been influenced by Old Gaelic. In Fourteen Hundred And Ninety Two Columbus Sailed The Ocean Blue.

Bad Axe has a cool old movie theater, a converted Knights Of Columbus Hall, a music store that was once a bowling alley, and some fascinating antique Telco plant.  Next I went back South to Ubly, which has made it to my list of my favorite places, because it's so freaking rural, because it has a drag strip, and because the wind turbines that I now believe to number in the hundreds are all over the place.  I drove East from Ubly towards Lake Huron and I kept seeing them and seeing them for miles and miles. This is a case where Mankind has actually improved the look of a place. I just couldn't stop looking at them, with their slow, neverending turning, reigning over the land like the Gods of the trees. I have noticed that when the sun is out the light is extremely bright, white light, definitely brighter than I know of the sun in Connecticut.  I wonder if this is because the penninsula is surrounded by giant bodies of water, and maybe the reflection off the water and the snow on the ground magnifies the brightness. It must be gorgeous in the Summer. I only know the upper Thumb of Michigan in the last stages of a tenacious Winter, but the wind turbines are mesmerizing to see, always turning, a great army of goodness, common sense, and beauty...

On Sunday I was on a mission to see the Petroglyphs.  My GPS guidance system showed a route to my job in Ubly, but if I stopped and reprogrammed it here and there, I could go right by the Petroglyphs.  I made it there, and it was closed, so I moved on.  It was a clear bright white and cold day driving through the wide open flat farmland. Open skies, old collapsed barns and houses sporadically placed along the long straight lines of the roads were all I could see for miles, then the wind turbines started to become visible in the distance.  I had gotten very enchanted with the solitude out there alone in the middle of nowhere, or along the shoreline of the huge Lake.  I had completely stopped watching TV in my hotel room.  Silence and stillness permeated my being, even if I had the radio on in the van eighty-five miles out Van Dyke.  Moving along toward the job I was there to do,  I had the Detroit NPR station on the radio, and just as it fuzzed out with interference from another station, I got a chill through the van around my legs, making me think the heater had died. The song that I tuned in that was reaching from the adjacent frequency was "Summer Breeze", by Seals and Crofts.  At first I thought this was some real Cozmick Dada, but it may well have been some foreshadowing.

Two weeks later, back in Pediddleville:

Tonight I finally sat down to finish this thing, this account of where I have been.  I've been drinking three Michigan-made IPAs and trying to settle down and into the old Pediddleville mentality, out of necessity...

"Said the straight man to the late man, 'Where have you been?'  'I've been here and I've been there and I've been in between.'  I talk to the Wind.  My words are all carried away.  I talk to the Wind.  The Wind does not hear.  The Wind cannot hear."*

My Life has been a rapidly changing Flux since returning from the Thumb.  I had almost felt like I could go Native over there.  It has been a tough re-acclimation.  Nothing bad specifically; it's just not quiet here.  It's just not wide open.  I did want to get home because I missed my family and friends, and two or three projects I was working on, but the motivation eludes me.  That's Pediddleville.

A recounting of the return trip home needs to be the bookend here.  The last week of work in Michigan again was mostly in the busy suburbs of Detroit, places like Sterling Heights, Macomb, Shelby Township, and a few trips late in the days as far out as Thirty Mile Road and Port Huron.  We were set to head homeward on the last Saturday, but were required to work half a day before taking off for a hotel just East of Cleveland.  Right off the bat we all dispatched on jobs back in Connecticut!  It took two and a half hours to straighten that out, and of course in keeping with the trend, the job I got was in Fort Gratiot, an hour away up North near Lake Huron.  It was truly time to get out of Dodge, and when I finally gave up on fixing the trouble I was working on, I turned away in disgust, broke through the crusty roadside snow, and fell flat on my belly in a ditch.  Now I had about a six hour drive ahead of me. With pants splattered with clay, I swung by Huron one last time for a few more photos of the now almost clear lake--small icebergs had been seen the day before floating downstream from the lake through the St. Clair River--found a diner for a quick lunch, and started driving South.  The Winter, it seems, did not want to release us.  After I rounded the bend at Toledo, I was now driving in a snowstorm.  It was extremely slippery, greasy driving.  I caught up with a small group of my fellow travellers and we all cautiously drove for hours it it.  Cars were spinning out off the highway all over the place.  The wind was whipping across the road, at times, and I had to keep both hands on the wheel at all times to not lose control.  This was not good for me, since I had developed a muscle spasm in my left shoulder.  It was agony not being able to drop the arm to rest it, not being able to stop for fear of getting stuck, and holding in a bladder full of piss.  When we got to the hotel there was talk of going to a nearby restaurant.  I thought about it, but I needed a shower to wash away the nervous stink of the day's ordeal.  I chugged two IPAs in the shower, got dressed and walked outside to see if anybody was around.  I didn't see the restaurant they were talking about, plus I was exhausted.  With sleet pelting my eyeballs I walked over to the gas station, bought two twenty four ounce Yeunglings and went back to my room.

Somehow I woke up at 4AM.  I made some coffee and wrote the first two paragraphs of this post.   It didn't look bad outside.  The snow had stopped.  Most of the guys planned to shove off by six.  I cleaned off the van and got on the road at about six-thirty.  Just about the time I realized that my muscle spasm was coming back I also realized that it was snowing again--hard!  It was the same as the day before, slippery, nerve wracking, and many accidents.  After an hour and a half or so, the snow changed to heavy rain, but it was little comfort.  The wind kept my shoulder in agony and the road ahead was long.   Somewhere halfway through Pennsylvania I thought I'd better see if I needed gas and think about stopping for lunch.  Sure enough, the gas gauge told me I should stop.  The flashing "Service Engine Soon" light also told me I should stop.  I got off the next exit, got gas, checked the oil, added three quarts, crossed my fingers, and drove off to find lunch.  The van had been a trooper for the whole trip, and the idea of breaking down at this point was not welcome.  I had a tense lunch at a diner and started off again, figuring I really had no choice but to try to get as far as I could.  When it was idling, moving slowly, or accelerating, it was running really rough, but highway speeds were okay, which was a very lucky thing.  Damn the torpedoes!  I didn't have a problem other than the anxiety of not knowing if I'd make it until I finally hit The Metal Muncher (I-95 in Stamford, Connecticut) when I had to slow down for a traffic jam.  Please don't let it die here! Please don't let it die here!  I ended up making it all the way to Old Saybrook.   My wife picked me up in the parking lot.  I left a note in the office for X-Ray Man apologizing for killing his van, unloaded, and went home.  The next two days were hard after this two-day white knuckle ride.  I had not felt this much nervous exhaustion since the big storm clean-ups from a few years back. 

After a week, the company sent twenty more technicians back out to Michigan, including my Brother-In-Law.  I felt bad that I may have misled him and maybe others how great it would be for them, since the protections the company had had against us getting into dangerous areas of Detroit went straight out the window for these guys.  They are right in The Shit.

What did I learn on this excursion?

1.  Michigan has over one hundred and twenty craft breweries and brewpubs.  I did a fair amount of          sampling of these beers, mostly IPA's.  Most enjoyable.

2.  I like Solitude, and when I get out there by myself out in a wide open world, it beckons me.

3.  Even though everything is flat and in straight lines, there are reasons people consent to live there.

4.  People who oppose wind farms are assholes.

*Quote from King Crimson's "I Talk To The Wind" lyrics by Peter Sinfield.

The Heart Of The Thumb...Ubly Windmills And Lake Huron...Big Two-Storied Mausoleum...

On Saturday I got dispatched to a repair job.  When I looked at the job, I thought "UBLY" was an erroneous bit of telephone jargon, not a town, so I found an address in nearby Roseville and programmed my GPS Maps for that.  When I  arrived at the address I soon found out it was wrong.  This Siri-assisted driving is a Godsend in this unfamiliar locale, except in this case.  Looking again, I found out that Ubly was indeed a town seventy five miles North off Van Dyke, just south of the town of Bad Axe.  I'd already blown an hour on the wrong address, now I had nearly a two hour drive ahead of me.  Driving North it eventually became very rural.  I went through a town called Marlette that had put up a sign saying they were "The Heart Of The Thumb".  I saw many old collapsed barns, and many working farms, the land still being very flat and very wide open and smattered with remaining snow and ice.  It was a beautiful day, partly cloudy, but very bright with a big sky.  Stunningly beautiful desolation...

As I approached Ubly I saw a few swampy areas and adjoining fields that were wild, not turned into pastures or cornfields, and I got a sense of what the untouched land would be like, sort of a semi-prairie, I guess.  Then I noticed the wind turbines. At first I saw maybe five off in the distance, but as I entered Ubly I realized there was a whole wind farm there, spreading out for miles.  I was starting to be enchanted by this place.  It was not quite as flat anymore, sort of low, rolling hills here and there.  The roads and properties were all still in square grids, but I began to understand why people would live  here.  The ancient wind, and the people who understand it; a Timelessness I could feel.

And they have a drag-racing strip!  The people have to have something to do on a Saturday, and this is the ideal terrain.  I got to the prem, opened up the box, and within a minute I had the trouble fixed. I went inside and had coffee with the customer, a nice lady, retired teacher.  We talked about how bad Education is these days, and about how bad service is at my company--same stuff I hear back home.  I asked her about the wind turbines, and she told me a route to take to get some good photos of them, which would also take me by some Native American petroglyphs I had seen signs for.  The park was closed, snowed in, so I missed the petroglyphs, but I did see a couple of Amish men driving horse carriages down the road.  Here basically was a well-paid sight-seeing tour.  I didn't even need the GPS to get back to the hotel, just meet up with Van Dyke and drive seventy five miles.

Sunday I hit another fairly rural town called Croswell, well North of Port Huron. The people were not home.  I learned from my contact person that they were at Church.  They had statuettes of Jesus and Mary in the yard, also twin black-faced lawn jockeys.  A place of stark contrasts.  Next I went to nearby Lexington, which took me to the shore of Lake Huron.  Amazingly vast.  I had seen Lake Ontario years ago during the summer, but to see giant Huron iced over was thrilling.  This lake was not placid like iced-covered Lake St. Clair.  Even with the cover I could sense the peril of Huron, a fresh water ocean.  The frozen dunes around the lake were a wind-blown composite of snow and fine beach sand like you'd see on a sea coast.  Another day of easy work, sightseeing, and getting paid good money honestly.

I hope this weekend I get sent to the outer limits again.  Back in the usual coverage area during this past week it's just a lot of commercial hustle-bustle and fairly ugly residential areas.  Every chain store you can imagine is here, over and over.  I have never seen so many Wal-Marts in my life!  Two miles South of my hotel on VanDyke there is a Wal-Mart, and a half a mile North is another one.  Two Wal-Marts within three miles of each other, on the same road!  What is refreshing is that while there are Dunkin Donuts here and there, they are not so numerous, not like in Connecticut where you  literally cannot spit without hitting one. Really the only interesting place I saw this past week was a humongous Catholic cemetery.  I've never seen anything like this in my life. In Connecticut I've seen cemeteries that may have a little office in the maintenance shed, with a phone/fax machine or a DSL hook-up, but this place actually had a big professional office building with executives and clerical staff and a receptionist.  A staff person got in a pickup truck and had me follow him to my job location, about a half mile past countless headstones still covered with Christmas Grave wreaths and snow to the Crypt,  It was a large building of polished marble  and great bronze statues of the usual cast of characters housing the cremated remains of thousands of people in marble and brass drawers.  I was there to repair the emergency telephone line-- for the elevator to the second floor!

Today my goal is to make it to Bad Axe, fingers crossed.

Michigan Seems Like A Dream To Me Now...Greetings, From The First Thumb Knuckle Of The Mitten...

Thursday, March 13th
I've always thought of Michigan as a snowy place, and yesterday's introduction to working in this place was a trial by Fire,...well, Snow.  I don't know if it happened, but some of the Locals were hoping they'd get a lot so they could break a snowfall inches record from the 1800's.  The rest of the Locals were just plain sick of this Winter.  Boy, do we have some pot-holes here.  Thankfully, I don't think X-Ray Man will be upset if I wreck his van.  The old bucket of bolts has been a trooper so far.  I've been in the Detroit suburbs of Warren and Sterling Heights, which inexplicably is very flat, and got up North a bit to Clinton Township, where I hit some roads that were unplowed.  The van was resolute and merciful to me by not getting stuck at all.

The local Weatherman just said the total yearly snowfall is now at 90.7 inches, not over that record.  If we have another snowstorm, they will have a shot at the record again, and it will truly be a freak winter.  Yesterday the only task was not having an accident or getting stuck.  Today will be clear, and COLD.  The sight-seeing day.

Friday, March 14th
Today was a pretty decent day.  I felt physically good, well rested, and it was a comfortable weather day.  The jobs I did were relatively easy. Some of my goals while here are starting to formulate.  I haven't yet seen Lake St Clair, or any lakes for that matter.  This place terrifies me in a way.  Not that I am hating it, but I am used to New England driving.  I miss driving by rivers, up hills, eating lunch at the beach.  Here in the Detroit suburbs I work a lot in a place called Sterling Heights.  I've looked and I don't see anything remotely resembling "Heights" that isn't Man-made.  This place is FLAT! and all laid out in grids based on all these roads that are exactly one mile apart running East to West parallel to each other.  So orderly a plan, it just seems wrong to continue it out into the suburbs from the city, and it continues even way out into the rural areas.  I just don't look at Life at right angles, I guess.  The story goes that New England roads were laid out by cows, and I think I prefer the good job they did.

Another goal I have is to take some pictures, and so far all I've seen is a bunch of busy roads, strip malls, industrial areas and giant factories, and a little bit of residential Suburbia and Rural.  All of the newer-constructed houses out there are wildly incongruous with the surroundings.  They look like something you'd see in Spain or Italy.  There are a few old barns and farmhouses and small one-story brick houses, often obscured by a new McMansion/Villa house, and they're all laid out in that ninety degree Expanse. I really haven't seen much of anything interesting to shoot.  Did I mention how flat it is here?  I noticed that the local Tax Return Services employ people to go out by the road and dress up like the Statue of Liberty with a sign advertising their service.  I have seen this before in Connecticut, but the two guys I have seen doing it here are goofing on it big time.  One of them wears a red ski mask, and stands out in front of the Wal-Mart on VanDyke, and the other one is further North on VanDyke..  This guy has some kind of green foam mask matching the color of the Oxidized Copper Green of the costume, making him look like some mutated Gumby.  It is my goal to get good pictures of these two.  It's hard with the traffic.  I pulled into a gas station across six lanes of Van Dyke and snuck behind  the van and tried to surreptitiously get some shots of the ski mask guy, but I think I was too far away.  I 'm  going to keep trying. It's got to be documented!  I will be on this Quest!