It’s been a while since I’ve put keyboard to MS Word and written and I hope there are still some people out there who care about me. So here goes. You’ll have to wade through about 2200 words. Sorry I had to “broadcast” this.
As most of you know, I spent last summer in the Dakota Badlands at a tourist trap called Wall Drug. In one way or another the family who own it account for the income of more than half of the town of 800’s population. They hire lots of summer help – about two hundred people – mostly foreign students whom they house in dorms or RVers like myself. Local motels and nearby stores also hire seasonal help. I will be heading back there for the summer en route to Oregon in the autumn.
After a freak blizzard that dumped about four feet on the town on Oct. 4th, and closed Interstate 90 for five days, I managed to pull out of my RV spot and begin a journey back east. I did leave some water hoses and a sprinkler under a snowdrift and I hope it will still be there when I return in a few weeks. I do have a bit of anxiety as the store’s general manager, a wonderful gentleman, passed away after he hired me for this summer.
In October, I spent several weeks in New Jersey visiting friends but things did not go according to plan as I had hoped to make a relationship with a former girlfriend something permanent. I did get to spend some time with Matthew. I continue to be impressed by how he has grown and matured and became self-supporting. I also renewed friendships with some high school classmates, Larry, Pete, Lois and Emily, and friends from the Port Jervis region, Donna and Barbara, where I lived for a couple of years after my marriage to Rosemary ended. And I managed to once again visit my friends Jim and Carol in Western Virginia. I had hoped to go to Maryland to see my cousins and Bill, my boyhood friend. But to do so would add nearly 800 miles and I just couldn’t afford it.
And so I drifted to Campbellsville, Kentucky to work for Amazon for November and December. It was very tough work, packing merchandise for ten hours a day and six days a week. But the trip east cost more than I anticipated and I needed the money.
I then wandered into Georgia for the winter. Now the last time I wintered in Georgia, the temperatures rarely dropped below 50 degrees and the highs were usually in the 70s and sometimes 80s. Hah! That was along the Atlantic Coast about a mile from the Florida border. I wound up volunteering at a state park campground in the Blue Ridge Mountains in a year when North Georgia had a record cold winter. One night it was 3 degrees above zero, but the winds gusted to 30 mph. It was cold, frequently wet and generally miserable. I talked to many local old timers who told me that it was the worst winter since around 1980. Because the water would freeze in the hose connecting the water from the pump to the trailer, I had to shut it off and was without water for about 10 days in one stretch. I had hoarded some bottled water and got by, boiling my dishwater.
My arrival was one filled with problems. First I slipped into deep Georgia red mud while trying to park the trailer and had to be towed out. I was so rattled that I then hit the utility box and the resulting loss of electric and overflow of water lasted a couple of days. There was about $3,000 in damage to the trailer, but it was mostly labor and I only had to spend about $150 for parts and did the repairs myself. The insurance company was instructed to pay the bank, so the loan on the trailer was cut in half and I expect to pay it off nearly three years ahead of schedule.
But I survived, though I spent about three times more than I budgeted for propane, as my electric heater couldn’t keep up with the cold. Atlanta, which is about 90 miles southeast of us, had two major ice storms (we had some ice, but mostly a few inches of snow) that shut down the city. But I had a near miss as many snow laden trees came down, including one that landed a few feet from the back of my trailer. What is minor to a damn Yankee is a catastrophe to a Redneck. A fellow volunteer, Cindy, a woman from the Pittsburgh area who also spent three months here, and I would laugh at people slipping and sliding.
We would occasionally share dinner and we went over to the park’s lodge and watched the Super Bowl, but it was so lopsided that we both went back to our trailers by the end of the third quarter. Cindy also had a dog, a very lively young border collie, and we sometimes walked the two together. But after a mile or so, Pup would become wiped out and “Muffin” (as in ragamuffin) was just warming up.
I did spend time with my friends, Frank and Gina, during Christmas and later in March. They live in North Carolina and getting off the road for a few days was wonderful. You don’t know how much you miss a tub bath until you haven’t had one in nearly two years. But you learn to live without. It’s been an exciting time for Frank and Gina. Their son Marc proposed to his girlfriend Christmas Day and they have spent much of the past few months setting up a thrift store to benefit autistic adults. The store not only raises money, but its real mission is to train their client base in retail functions. The store is the dream of their daughter, Nicole, who teaches autistic children in a local public school. She won the state’s “autistic teacher of the year” and it was a major factor in getting seed money for the project.
One thing I have lived without is television. I’m up in the mountains and I don’t get any reception. Of course, there is no cable either. But if you have Dish Network, which I can’t afford, they have a receiver for you. The lodge has Internet. So about once a week, I go over to watch the latest NCIS. I finally broke down and got a Smartphone so I could hook into the Internet with my computers and try to keep current with e-mail and Facebook. I like the weather app and use it daily. But I am not at all happy doubling my phone service fees. Meanwhile, I bought a lot of $5 DVDs at Wal-Mart.
I’m on fairly high ground, which is a good thing as springtime flooding has been a problem. We had about three inches of rain over a 30-hour period a few days ago. But high ground also means low water pressure, especially when the campground is full as it has been since mid-March. I generally use the public showers (low ground) since there is rarely enough pressure to have more than a trickle. I know they are clean because I spend five days a week cleaning and disinfecting them. That’s how my blue jeans became filled with bleach stains and I’ll toss them when I reach my next stop. The hippie look doesn’t quite work when you’ve reached you mid-60s and are bald.
This state park is different from the other state parks in Georgia. It has a 100-room lodge plus 60 cabins as well as the 100 or so campsites. The lodge is the key. It was losing tons of money so the state contracted out the management to a company that specializes in resorts. But the deal was for the entire park. This happened about a year ago and as word gets around that the only thing volunteers do is clean bathrooms, they are cancelling. In mid-February, a couple visited the park to scout it out and cancelled. Another couple never showed up so after Cindy and Muffin left, I was left to do 15 bathrooms a day. In one way, this is to my advantage. I’ll stay until around the 25th and get to my next assignment in the Badlands with a couple of days left to relax. I won’t be spending nearly what I expected to in camping fees. My route passes through St. Louis, so I will get to see the Gateway Arch, something I am anxious to do. Otherwise, it’s just a lot of Midwest interstate highways. My route will take me through a little bit of Kansas, leaving Arkansas and Oklahoma as the only continental states I’ve never visited.
What makes up for it is the wonderful scenery. Nearby is Anna Ruby Falls. It is where two fairly large springs merge near the top of a mountain and provide a spectacular view. As spring is finally here, the leaves are starting to come out as are flowering trees.
The nearest town is Helen. Several decades ago, the town was an outstanding example of rural Appalachian poverty. But the town fathers turned it into a German-Bavarian-Alpine themed town and it has become quite a tourist trap. A few weeks ago on a sunny Saturday, a car broke down on a bridge on the town’s main drag. It took me nearly an hour to get through the eight or so blocks that comprise the many souvenir and antique stores, not to mention lots of German restaurants. Even the one that features Mexican food has an alpine design. Like any tourist mecca, prices are high. Gas is often 40 cents per gallon higher than over in the next town, Cleveland. The autumn foliage is glorious here and weekend traffic jams along the 90 miles from Atlanta are legendary.
I was a pretty sick puppy for almost a month as my blood sugars went out of control. I could barely get up and function. Gradually they went down, but it was a scare. I had symptoms similar to the series of strokes I had in 2006. There was a lot of trembling and inability to form words. The real “cure” was simply to get up and move. But it was so hard at times. I guess it bred some depression, which often accompanies me in the winter months when there is so little sunlight and I am generally isolated. It was a little better this year because of working for Amazon.
I continue to photograph what I find. And I have begun exhibiting my photos. The park gave me an “artist-in-residence” show at the lodge over the Valentine’s/Presidents’ Day weekend. I also exhibited at a Dogwood festival arts and crafts fair a few hundred miles away at the end of March. While I didn’t make much money, I managed to basically break even and learned a great deal about what sells. Much to my surprise, my best sellers are not the spectacular scenes, but photographs of country barns. I’ve shot a number in upstate New York and rural Kentucky and there are several here in Georgia that I am now working on. Alas, I passed through some of the best examples of aging barns in West Virginia on my trip to Kentucky. But the roads were so narrow and mountainous, and the weather so foggy, that I didn’t dare stop to take any photos. I lose a lot of great shots while travelling because it is such a problem to pull over when hauling a trailer. My next exhibit will be at the annual buffalo roundup at Custer State Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota. More than 50,000 people attend this event and much of my work is of the region as it will be my third time there.
So anyhow, that’s what is going on with me and I hope you will take the time to share something of what is going on in your life.
