We're back.
It's Sunday night and a humid 70 degrees, the calls of crickets and cicadas hop from water molecule to water molecule. We spent 3 hours on a 90 minute journey from Richmond, VA...lightning, thunder, and sporadic deluges made for bumper-to-bumper on I-95.
Urbanna, VA was a quaint delight. Urbanna ("the city of Anne") was settled by the English in the 1680 and named after Anne, the Queen of England, when she took the throne in 1704. Before that the Nimcock Indians lived there. Tried to imagine that as I jogged across the mist-touched Urbanna Creek bridge (biggest creek I've ever seen at about 800 ft. wide) at 6:30 in the morning with the sun hanging low on my left over the Chesapeake Bay like a huge, ripe persimmon.
Anne and the settlers and the Nimcocks are no more. Just the creek and the Chesapeake and the rising sun....350 years later. How does James say it? "What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while then vanishes."
Well, for being a misty blip on the radar screen of the universe, I'm a grateful blip. Ruth and I were commenting in the car---somewhere between an antique store and a fresh vegetable stand---that we are most blessed with 4 great kids and spouses and 10 terrific grandchildren. Who deserves that kind of thing? Not us, but we're lovin' every minute.
Late morning we pulled over on a country road to check out a vegetable stand run by a couple of good ol' boy's missing a few teeth, but not missing any congeniality. They were delightful!...and good salesmen. We walked away with a bunch of fresh tomatoes, potatoes and string beans for $7....then on the way out they suggested that the cantaloupe (just-right ripe) might be a good buy....so we bought....4 for $2.
After we stopped a couple of more times...like for dinner? Those cantaloupe in the hot car were talkin' to us. Tomatoes and taters don't let you know where they are, but ripe cantaloupe are ever-present. At this writing, the vegetables are in the refrigerator, as are 3 of the cantaloupe.
But one is in the Foths. Didn't last 20 minutes after we got home.
Our two days away are bracketed by Queen Anne and a warm cantaloupe. There's gotta be a country song in there somewhere.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Milepost 44........
Forty four years ago tonight I was sleeping outside in the central valley of California with several of my best friends. Oh, not in the woods. The smell of peaches was heavy on the warm summernight air and we were stretched out on sleeping bags on the lawn of a country frame house a few miles north of Modesto. The friends were my groomsmen and the house belonged to Roy and Opal Blakeley, who within 24 hours would be my in-laws. At 8 PM the next evening with the temperature about 105 degrees, I would exchange vows with their eldest daughter, Ruth. That began the second greatest adventure of my life.
On our wedding night, the traditional "chase" ensued, as we embarked on a week-long honeymoon. Most folks faded back after a few miles,when we pulled onto Highway 99 toward San Francisco....except, of course, for Stan on the motorcycle. If nothing else, he was focused. A gentle-but-enthusiastic soul, he followed us---as I recall--- all the way to the Dumbarton Bridge, which crosses the south end of San Francisco bay. The toll booth apparently proved his undoing.
We traveled that week from Palo Alto to Strawberry Lake in the Sierra Nevada mountains...then to Long Beach in the south to catch the ship for Catalina Island...back up the coast and to Modesto again. That journey by car was the first of tens of thousands of miles we would travel by car with maps and sandwiches and kids....up and down the West Coast, back and forth across the United States. Always an adventure, never a dull moment.
We traveled with kids well before seat belts, car seats, private videos and bottled water. No vans, just station wagons that got 12 1/2 miles to the gallon and were crammed to the hilt with suitcases and other paraphernalia. Anywhere we drove, it was "Grapes of Wrath" re-visited.
We had a thought for a family car design: sleek and fuel-efficient, self-cleaning windows from the inside, and a loop tape that played "Sit back and stay on your side of the line,"We will be there when we get there," and " If you do that again we're stopping the car!"
When we married, Ruth was tall, sandy-haired, slim and green-eyed. I was tall, brown-haired, slim and hazel eyed. She is essentially the same, with hair color varying now and again. I, on the other hand, have grown quite round and hair has flown the coop. Maybe it was all those car trips with the window rolled down. The roundness of course is explained by the fact that food loves me.
Could not imagine that 44 years after the fact, I would reflect on these matters by means of a thing called a personal computer over a system called "the internet" through a mechanism called a blog. And, it is light years from a Chevrolet Corvair to a Toyota SUV. Washington DC in 2007 is a universe away from rural California in 1963.
If I thought the ride on the Blue Mountain Express was great with lush valleys, flowered hillsides, persistent switchbacks, steep gradients, and spectacular vistas...it's nothing compared to 44 years with Ruth.
I really had no idea it would turn into such an adventure, just trying to get away from Stan on the motorcycle.
What are we doing to celebrate our 44 years together? We leave in the morning for a bed and breakfast in the Tidewater area of Virginia.
We'll be driving.
On our wedding night, the traditional "chase" ensued, as we embarked on a week-long honeymoon. Most folks faded back after a few miles,when we pulled onto Highway 99 toward San Francisco....except, of course, for Stan on the motorcycle. If nothing else, he was focused. A gentle-but-enthusiastic soul, he followed us---as I recall--- all the way to the Dumbarton Bridge, which crosses the south end of San Francisco bay. The toll booth apparently proved his undoing.
We traveled that week from Palo Alto to Strawberry Lake in the Sierra Nevada mountains...then to Long Beach in the south to catch the ship for Catalina Island...back up the coast and to Modesto again. That journey by car was the first of tens of thousands of miles we would travel by car with maps and sandwiches and kids....up and down the West Coast, back and forth across the United States. Always an adventure, never a dull moment.
We traveled with kids well before seat belts, car seats, private videos and bottled water. No vans, just station wagons that got 12 1/2 miles to the gallon and were crammed to the hilt with suitcases and other paraphernalia. Anywhere we drove, it was "Grapes of Wrath" re-visited.
We had a thought for a family car design: sleek and fuel-efficient, self-cleaning windows from the inside, and a loop tape that played "Sit back and stay on your side of the line,"We will be there when we get there," and " If you do that again we're stopping the car!"
When we married, Ruth was tall, sandy-haired, slim and green-eyed. I was tall, brown-haired, slim and hazel eyed. She is essentially the same, with hair color varying now and again. I, on the other hand, have grown quite round and hair has flown the coop. Maybe it was all those car trips with the window rolled down. The roundness of course is explained by the fact that food loves me.
Could not imagine that 44 years after the fact, I would reflect on these matters by means of a thing called a personal computer over a system called "the internet" through a mechanism called a blog. And, it is light years from a Chevrolet Corvair to a Toyota SUV. Washington DC in 2007 is a universe away from rural California in 1963.
If I thought the ride on the Blue Mountain Express was great with lush valleys, flowered hillsides, persistent switchbacks, steep gradients, and spectacular vistas...it's nothing compared to 44 years with Ruth.
I really had no idea it would turn into such an adventure, just trying to get away from Stan on the motorcycle.
What are we doing to celebrate our 44 years together? We leave in the morning for a bed and breakfast in the Tidewater area of Virginia.
We'll be driving.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Once Upon A Time......
Never thought I'd be a blogger...but have been persuaded to give it a go.
When reflecting on a page title, the first thing that popped into my mind was something to do with the Blue Mountain Express. No, it's not a quick-effect premium Jamaican coffee. It is a place and time from another world that shaped how I see the world and people and life.
World War II was won by the summer of 1945 and by fall the Foths--Oliver, Gwendolyn, Louanne, and Dick (that's me)---sailed out of New York harbor on the S.S. Gripsholm (a Swedish liner on its last troop-ferrying activity) for Alexandria, Egypt. From there, we embarked for India and the most formative 4 years of my life. I was three and a half.
We ultimately settled in the scorching plains of far South India in the city of Madurai, a bustling city of 500,000 then and millions now. Schools for Europeans were many miles to the northwest in the Nilgiri Hills (the Blue Mountains). To be more precise, about 300 miles. It was there that Louanne and I went, she first and then both of us. Coonoor was one of several beautiful and cool "hill stations" created after 1799 when the area was acquired by the East India Company in a treaty. It was--and is--the home of Hebron School.
Hebron was British and female to the core. So, my education began in an English girls boarding school, which--true to such traditions--accepted little boys until they reached 10 and became more fully aware of their surroundings. At that point, they were shipped out to Breeks, a boys school in Ooticumund, the "queen of the hill stations," 18 kilometers further up the mountain.
Hebron was my home from 1947 to 1949, except for a 3 month vacation each year with my family in the plains during the cooler season.
That education was an experience unto itself. That is for another time. It was the "how we got there" part that captured me. We went by train...steam train....engines made in Switzerland....open-windowed wooden railway carriages. It was, literally, the little train that could. The Blue Mountain Express.
The rail trip from Mettapalayum to Coonoor is 29 kilometers (about 19 miles). The train climbs to about 6,000 ft in that distance so it takes 3 hours. The gradients are steep, switchbacks many, and views breathtaking.
My dad wrote on January 16, 1947:
"I had promised Dick a ride in the front coach. The mountains are very steep, so the engine pushes the train up instead of pulling it....you can get a wonderful view of all the scenery as you come up. Dickie was quite thrilled by it, and it was a lovely sight. It was a clear sunshiney day and everything sparkled. There were lots of wildflowers out; wild canna lilies and morning glories, and the orange lantana are at their best now... there was a scarlet flower, about the size of a small morning glory, that trailed all over everything. The numberless waterfalls are very pretty right now, and many of them come down like ribbons dropping down hundreds of feet over the rock cliffs.
At the start of the journey on the plain, there are rice fields, sugar cane patches, banana groves (with bananas growing so close together that a person can scarcely squeeze between them). As you begin to ascend the mountains, you notice the huge growths of bamboo. Each one grows to a great height and thickness. Farther up at about 2,000 ft. their are coffee plantations everywhere, and then at about 4,500 ft. the tea plantations begin."
I didn't know about Hebron School, but the Blue Mountain Express (the slowest express in the world, no doubt!) captured my heart. Open rectangular windows...heads in, so as not to catch a cinder in the eye. It was gaggles of people in multi-colored saris and turbans; vendors hawking wares on train station platforms; the smell of curry and engine smoke. This is the train that put the wind in window. The higher the train chugged the cooler the air and the cooler the views. It was cooler than anything I had ever known.
When reflecting on a page title, the first thing that popped into my mind was something to do with the Blue Mountain Express. No, it's not a quick-effect premium Jamaican coffee. It is a place and time from another world that shaped how I see the world and people and life.
World War II was won by the summer of 1945 and by fall the Foths--Oliver, Gwendolyn, Louanne, and Dick (that's me)---sailed out of New York harbor on the S.S. Gripsholm (a Swedish liner on its last troop-ferrying activity) for Alexandria, Egypt. From there, we embarked for India and the most formative 4 years of my life. I was three and a half.
We ultimately settled in the scorching plains of far South India in the city of Madurai, a bustling city of 500,000 then and millions now. Schools for Europeans were many miles to the northwest in the Nilgiri Hills (the Blue Mountains). To be more precise, about 300 miles. It was there that Louanne and I went, she first and then both of us. Coonoor was one of several beautiful and cool "hill stations" created after 1799 when the area was acquired by the East India Company in a treaty. It was--and is--the home of Hebron School.
Hebron was British and female to the core. So, my education began in an English girls boarding school, which--true to such traditions--accepted little boys until they reached 10 and became more fully aware of their surroundings. At that point, they were shipped out to Breeks, a boys school in Ooticumund, the "queen of the hill stations," 18 kilometers further up the mountain.
Hebron was my home from 1947 to 1949, except for a 3 month vacation each year with my family in the plains during the cooler season.
That education was an experience unto itself. That is for another time. It was the "how we got there" part that captured me. We went by train...steam train....engines made in Switzerland....open-windowed wooden railway carriages. It was, literally, the little train that could. The Blue Mountain Express.
The rail trip from Mettapalayum to Coonoor is 29 kilometers (about 19 miles). The train climbs to about 6,000 ft in that distance so it takes 3 hours. The gradients are steep, switchbacks many, and views breathtaking.
My dad wrote on January 16, 1947:
"I had promised Dick a ride in the front coach. The mountains are very steep, so the engine pushes the train up instead of pulling it....you can get a wonderful view of all the scenery as you come up. Dickie was quite thrilled by it, and it was a lovely sight. It was a clear sunshiney day and everything sparkled. There were lots of wildflowers out; wild canna lilies and morning glories, and the orange lantana are at their best now... there was a scarlet flower, about the size of a small morning glory, that trailed all over everything. The numberless waterfalls are very pretty right now, and many of them come down like ribbons dropping down hundreds of feet over the rock cliffs.
At the start of the journey on the plain, there are rice fields, sugar cane patches, banana groves (with bananas growing so close together that a person can scarcely squeeze between them). As you begin to ascend the mountains, you notice the huge growths of bamboo. Each one grows to a great height and thickness. Farther up at about 2,000 ft. their are coffee plantations everywhere, and then at about 4,500 ft. the tea plantations begin."
I didn't know about Hebron School, but the Blue Mountain Express (the slowest express in the world, no doubt!) captured my heart. Open rectangular windows...heads in, so as not to catch a cinder in the eye. It was gaggles of people in multi-colored saris and turbans; vendors hawking wares on train station platforms; the smell of curry and engine smoke. This is the train that put the wind in window. The higher the train chugged the cooler the air and the cooler the views. It was cooler than anything I had ever known.
The Blue Mountain Express remains for me to this moment a metaphor for adventure and learning. It is tea at 4 o'clock, British discipline, Indian beauty and richness, a dozen dialects, a hundred smells...and it just .....moves.
The Blue Mountain Express........ color and perspective on the journey.
All abooaard!
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