Please Touch

[david and josie, washington square park, philadelphia, august 4, 2007]

Went to Philly last weekend to see my brother and his wife and my niece Josie and their new house. Philadelphia, which I hate, instinctively, from years of "Oh-you're-from-Pittsburgh? I-know-someone-in-Philadelphia" syndrome, grows on me every time I go there. Especially because David now lives in Queen Village, a neighborhood south of Center City that abutts the Delaware River and includes a lot of great parks, markets, restaurants, and an open-air Italian market. It's a bit like the Strip District in Pittsburgh, except with rowhouses and families and not so many warehouses.

On Saturday, I was charged with taking little Josie to the Please Touch! museum, some 30 blocks from David's house. She slept the whole way there in her stroller, but when she woke up, she was hot, grouchy, and had no idea where she ways or really, who I was, and the tears 'n squalling began immediately. I called Dave to come assist, but by the time he got there, Josie and I had gotten really into the boats-in-water play station, and she had calmed down.

The following are some photos of Josie from the museum. That's right just because she's cute. Not because this is really travel-related.


[art made with rice, glue, crayons]


[alternate use for rice]


[generosity]

There were lots of old SEPTA public transport vehicles parked in the museum, and Josie took the helm at driving several of them.


[septa bus]


[septa trolley]


[tractor]

Josie tried to give a play turnip to this little boy, but he refused, so she threw it at him.


[peace offering]

And these photos are from the farm room. The Please Touch! museum focuses on teaching valuable life skills, like motoring and agriculture. Here, little Pepita (which is Josie's Spanish name) is harvesting toy turnips and cabbages.


[agriculture]


[lift with your knees]


[paige, the turnip-crazed, big-headed playmate]

The day would not be complete without a hearty meal, so Josie demolished a bowl of matzoh-ball soup at Famous Fourth Street deli, which is the best Jewish deli I've been to in some time. I could barely finish half of my reuben, which is telling, given my appetite usually. I did have soup, latkes, pickles, and several Doc B's black cherries, too, though.


[hand-to-mouth coordination]


[mmmm!]

...and bedtime...


[tooth-washing]


[gum-scrubbing]


[pre-bed story: Mickey "In the Night Kitchen"]

p.s. bonus points for anyone who can tell me apart from my brother.

Pondsville Barns

Every time my family drives from Pittsburgh to Thurmont, we get off Rte. 70 at the Smithsburg-Boonsboro exit and drive east over the northern part of South Moutain and through some of the Catoctins, both of which are part of the Blue Ridge that sticks down from Pennsylvania into Maryland between Hagerstown and Thurmont. We always pass through this valley that my mom calls "My Valley" because it's so pretty -- just rolling hills and fields and old-school looking farms. So the other day we took a trip there to photograph the pretty old barns, and found out that the area is called Pondsville/Myerstown. The above barn is on a property that the owner told us dates to the late 18th century called Hewitt's Meadows.

Here's the backside of Hewitt's Meadows, with the cow barn, in the late afternoon light. Roy, who was shooting on his Dual-Reflex medium-format camera from the 1950s, told me that the following picture, which I took on his Nikon D-80 digital SLR, in fact sucks, because the sky is overexposed. You see, I'm learning, here, people, and that's what's important.



Here's another farm. Didn't get the name of this one, but the owner saw us shooting and accused us of terrorist intentions, at which point we had to explain to him the aesthetics of agricultural photography, which he didn't buy, so we had to leave Matt there as collateral. He's still working off the debt we incurred by trespassing. Whatever you're doing out there, Matt, we support you.


Happy farmer. Let's call him "Earl".



The Red Bridge farm. Right near the Pondsville Road.






Matt. Wishing you luck in your captivity as an indentured servant to the grotesque farmers of Pondsville. We'll try to break you out soon.

Thurmont: Pleasant Living

Perhaps not as much as today as in the recent past, visitors at the presidential retreat come to Thurmont to shop or to attend church. When they do, Thurmont townspeople treat them with a reserve that respects their privacy. Sometimes this has its problems as this story by Wireman tells: A man was late to church. Unknown to him, the President and his party were inside and already seated. As the tardy man pulled into the usual parking place, he was stopped by a Secret Service man who remarked, "You can't park here." - "I've got to park here," the man replied. "I'm late for church. I happen to be the minister."

- Paula M. Strain, The Blue Hills of Maryland: History Along the Appalachian Trail on South Mountain and the Catoctins

Right about now I'm living in Thurmont, Maryland, on the Whelan/McGill family property where my grandmother was born and died, where my great-grandfather Ernest McGill used to ride his horse between three Episcopal churches every Sunday morning, giving a sermon and singing mass at each. Where the food at the Cozy is almost as distasteful as the annual Klan rally on the corner of Main and Water Streets. The site of many a righteous Hopkins party, where Uncle Wake, my father's uncle, in the declining years of his reign here, demanded of my friend Paul, on the first day of their acquaintance, "Why don't you love me any more?" This and many other moments, from Wakey's senility to the hikes at Chimney Rock and the Presidential helicopter landing on the little league field on its way to Camp David in foggy weather, and many other happy, more personal memories color my love of Thurmont, a town that, without its connection to my family, may just be another vinyl-sided suburb of Washington, D.C.

I'm here because, between my 6 months in India and the real world, I have decided to have a little sojourn, do some writing, and take my time applying for jobs. In the meantime, Thurmont is very inspiring. The building in the first picture there is the Lodge, a one-room cabin that's been around since the 1890s, I think, and built by my great grandfather.

Here's what it looks like on the inside:




People keep coming, quite welcome, to visit me. Jake came and spent a whole day practicing Charlie Parker heads on his bass, in the Lodge...



Here's the mossy old plaque that declares the Lodge birthplace of my grandmother, Caroline Faries McGill...



These days, the Lodge is my writing workshop...



I try to write about 700-1,000 good words a day, in addition to the freelance articles I'm writing to keep my bank balance in the black. I'm basing my discipline model on Hemingway's while he was at Key West -- he used to deny himself his first drink of the day until he had written 700 words. Then he'd get smashed at Sloppy Joe's and go fishing then beat up queers in the bar all night. I'll not comment further on my own daily routine, but let your imaginations run wild, by all means. I don't like to say I'm writing a "novel" because it sounds obnoxious, so let's just say I'm working on a "long work of fiction". It's going okay. I hope to have 50,000 words by the end of the summer. You know, something to apply to grad school with.

So what else do we do at Thurmont? Here's the door to the main house, the Snuggery, where my grandma and grandpa lived their retired life-after-Baltimore...



Inside, Matty is working on a long silk-screening project. He works at the desk in my grandfather's old room, which has lots of pictures of my uncle Brent wrestling at Gilman. I'm sure Matty'll put up some photos of what he's working on, maybe on facebook or something...



We garden, like true country gentlemen...



We take art shots of glasses frames left in the algae-stained bird bath, probably left here by one of my friends, signifying the juxtaposition of the decay of an old Maryland family and its glory with the moral decay of 21st century hipster youth.



We play that old-timey music underneath the old maple tree...



I make guacamole,



Then we grill.



We admire the dusky Catoctins in the picture window of Wild Rose Lodge,a 1920's Sears-Roebuck pre-fab house filled with mildly onanist classical scultptures, where Uncle Wake used to live.



And gaze, with a snifter of rye, at the mountains themselves...

All Aboard

Come on Nancy put your best dress on
Come on Nancy ’fore the steamer’s gone
Everybody’s headed for the Chesapeake Bay
All aboard for Baltimore! If you’re late we’ll all be sore!
Come on Captain let us catch that boat
’Cause we can’t swim, no mister, we can’t float
Banjo ringin’ a good old tune, Up on deck there’s a place to spoon
Settle down folks ’neath the silvery moon
Sailing-down-the-Ches-a-peake,
All aboard for Chesapeake,
Sailing down the Chesapeake Bay!
- Red Clay Ramblers



That pretty little thing there's the Shorn Lamb, my uncle's fine, 42-foot Island Packet schooner, in her berth at the North Point Marina in Rock Hall, Maryland. Last weekend, Uncle Andrew, took his girlfriend Diane, me, my cousin Leo Fitzwilliam McPherson Whelan, the Shorn Lamb's Chief Mate, a jolly stock trader from Wilmington called Rob Sidell, for a four-and-a-half day cruise on the Chesapeake. We started from the Eastern Shore, and headed directly South on a Thursday, below the Bay Bridge and up into the Magothy River (one of 48 that drain into the Chesapeake). We didn't sail a bit our first day, because the winds were no good, but it was still a pretty sunset...



That there's the Baltimore Light, at the mouth of the Magothy, and this here's me and Will:



She's a pretty little beacon...



However, the fact that we were underway with the motor the entire first day, may have in fact been the fault of the Chief Mate, pictured below...


Because if I remember correctly, when he was asked in the morning about the state of the winds for the day, he pretended to check the forecast in the Mariner, a free magazine that touts itself as "the beacon of the Bay," but he was, in actuality, looking at this.

I arrived with unsuitable footwear for the voyage. All I brought were my new, and totally ill, lime-green Starburys, but I was told that the soles would scuff up the poop deck, so I had to buy these, admittedly also pretty ill, West Marine top-siders:



We laid chain in a faire gunkhole somewheres round Swan Cove our first night, in view of a few good-lookin' waterfront mansions. The cocktail hour was observed, with some aged Dalmore and a fairly decent pate. After rations, which I assure ye weren't no hard-tack-n-grog, we smoked cheroots with the Chief Mate on the deck. Quite pleasant.



Our harbor, a mansion...



Day two took us back across to the Eastern Shore and under the bridge at Knapp's Narrows, a route that allows a sailor to navigate southeast towards the Choptank River without having to sail all the way around Tilghman Island. The Chief Mate remarked that the Tilghman Island boys are notoriously rough on landlubbers, and that we made quite an admirable decision in limiting our congress with them. We passed through them straits in just a few minutes. Even saw a few half-naked ladies sunbathing aforedecks.



Knapps Narrows is a-brimmin' with dilapidated trawlers...



And the Bay's finest skipjacks, what whose days of dredgin' the clay for world-class arsters have passed 'em by, god bless 'em...



The red markers, where ospreys make their homes...



And one of many JFK shots of me with Diane. And yes, that's seersucker.



Here's the Captain puttering about up near the mainsail. He was preparing to hoist the foresail in this shot, if my memory serves me. The second day was when the wind picked up and we finally did some knots.



El Capitan...



The mighty mast:



But things didn't get really awesome until we unleased the Jenniker, a sail that can only be used in leisurely waters, but with a good headwind. In races, mavericks often blow these things out, which is easy to do because they're not affixed to the mast or the boom the same way the more traditional sheets are. The design on this particular sail was chosen by Uncle Andrew's kids, Clare and Christian. The jenniker:



And as evening descending, Will on the bow:



Next port of call: Oxford, MD, home of the nation's oldest continuously operating ferry!