Saturday, November 01, 2003
Roger's diary entry:
Little did we realize, as we entered the small, two pump gas station in Quareyville, Pennsylvania, that we would leave it by following Walter to three Amish homes.
Walter was a seventy-two year old electrician who drove a beat-up old pickup truck. He pulled up next to us as we filled our gas tank.
"Sure would like to get me somethin' like that someday.", he said, looking at our camper.
And that's how it started. We started talking about how the van was nice and compact, yet offered everything we needed. Well, mostly he talked, and I listened. He wasn't much for hearing what I had to say.
I managed to get in a couple words how we were on vacation and he suddenly switched gears.
"If you want to see some real, live Amish folk, just follow me. I know some Amish, and I was just headin' over there. It's a real different experience, and I think you'll get somethin' outta seein 'em up close.
Well, we couldn't pass up an opportunity like this, weird as it was. Did this guy pick up tourists and drag them to Amish homes all the time? Did his Amish friends mind? We didn't want to treat them like tigers in the zoo, oohing and ahhing over their lifestyle. This wasn't armchair viewing of some show on the Discovery channel, but regular people like us who chose a slightly different lifestyle.
We followed Walter four miles out of town, and pulled in behind him as he entered the driveway of a modestly sized ranch home. There was a horse attached to a post next to the nearby barn. Recently picked corn fields and hilly green pastures surrounded the home. Walter dashed out of his truck and disappeared inside the home, apparently to warn the occupents of our arrival. Walter popped out in a few seconds and came over to us.
"There are a few inside, but seein as how I don't know your names, we won't bother with introductions. I'll just show ya around. Should be real interestin' for you folk."
Turns out Walter didn't know their names, either. After we followed Walter inside and sheepishly said hello to the woman and two girls, Walter discovered the woman was Sarah's sister. Sarah and Melvin - who Walter got to know because Sarah used to clean his home for extra cash - recently bought the place and hadn't even moved in yet. One girl was eating a Dannon yogurt; the other was eating a sandwich as a miniature poodle studied me from her lap.
Walter quickly ended the conversation with them and asked us to follow him around the house. It was nearly empty, as no authentic Amish goods had yet been brought over. Turns out it wasn't a very good example of Amish living, as the previous owners were quite ordinary in the typical American way - electric lights in every room and receptacles everywhere. Walter talked about how they borrowed his vacuum cleaner to clean the house, apparently breaking the Amish rule against modern appliances. "Sometimes they cheat a little, and I like to give them a hard time about it," he chuckled.
Walter then instructed us to follow him as he drove to yet another Amish home. We followed obediently to another farm a mile down the road. The house was a simple, but large two story farmhouse. A huge barn held numerous horses (Belgian mules, we later learned from Walter) and Holsteins confined to their stalls. After briefly running inside, Walter invited us into the home. The front door opened into a single large room that served as kitchen, eating area, and living room. Old sheets covered the stuffed chairs. A stove burning either wood or coal radiated heat from the side. A kerosene lamp hung over the simple wooden kitchen table. A woman in a plain colored dress and black scarf over her head was hand washing dishes. She looked to be in her mid twenties. A toddler in a dress just as plain stood motionless and silent across the room. A boy about four years old clung to the woman's dress. He had on dark pants, an off-white long sleeve button shirt, and suspenders. We exchanged hellos, and then there was silence. Trying desperately to think of something to say, I remarked on the tiny kitten I saw outside. "They're coming out of their nest now," was all she said, without missing a beat on the dishes.
Walter, Margaret, and I left the home and briefly looked inside the barn.
"I heard some kind of engine running when we first pulled in. What was that?" I asked Walter.
"That was the generator. The Amish don't like to buy electricity, but they don't mind makin' their own. They need it cause the state makes them keep the milk cold. Plus, they need the power for the milking machines."
Next stop was Melvin and Sarah's old house - the one they were in the process of moving out of. Walter introduced us. Sarah was twenty. Melvin was twenty one and wore an outfit that perfectly matched that of the 4 year old at the previous residence, except his was a lot bigger. Neither was very talkative but I managed to have a nice conversation with Melvin by being assertive. I learned that Melvin was one of seven children. He had three sisters, and was the third oldest of four sons. The oldest son recently got his father's farm. The second oldest son got his father's second farm. And he got nothing. Zero. Zilch. Without a farm, he had to learn a trade, and the one he chose was framing. He framed houses.
I asked Melvin how he goes on vacation if they don't own cars. He said they can ride in cars as long as they can get someone else to drive. Hiring a person to drive a rented car is quite expensive so vacations tend to not stray very far. They also arrange their travel so they can make it to church on Sunday.
We learned a few other tidbits. They had a coal furnace to heat the house. A propane water heater provided hot showers. A propane refrigerator kept the meat and vegetables cold. And it was quite common to carry around a 12-volt battery to serve as a divinely authorized alternative to 110. They have telephones, but they keep them in a small outdoor shed that looks a lot like an outhouse. Apparently the women gabbed too much when the phones were inside, so they put them outside, hooked them up to answering machines, and now they communicate by exchanging voice mail with each other.
Parts of me envied their lifestyle. The slow pace, the satisfaction of physical labor, and their closeness to nature and God are all appealing. Family and tradition are obviously important, at the expense of freedom of choice and convenience. I grew up believing I could be anything I wanted, if only I worked hard and set my mind to it. This freedom of choice brings with it the responsibility of choosing wisely, and the possibility of failure. An Amish woman has few choices to make in life, and all her family and friends support her predefined role of being a mother, wife, and possibly school teacher. She is set up to succeed as long as she follows her role. For some Americans, the expansive freedom and multitude of choices is a burden too great to bear. These are the people who would benefit from the Amish lifestyle.
Thursday, November 06, 2003
Roger's diary entry:
"Mammoth Cave has no mammoths."
That was but one of many facts we learned today at Mammoth Cave National Park in southwestern Kentucky. It gets its name from its size, which is spectacularly huge. Not that any one room is huge, because the largest is only two acres, which is just a cubby hole compared to the huge 72 acre room in Carlsbad Caverns in Arizona. But there are over 360 miles of tunnels here, making this the longest cave in the world. Even if you add the second and third largest cave systems together, you still can't beat Mammoth. And they're not done exploring yet. A few more miles are added each year as new passages are discovered and mapped.
All of them are contained within limestone rock, which has been disolved into all these tunnels by rainwater draining from above. The lowest tunnels still contain active streams, and until 1991 they operated boat tours through them. According to our tour guide, they stopped them due to the high maintenance costs associated with frequent flooding.
We picked two guided tours, both of which were about two hours and consisted of about a three quarter mile hike into and back out of different parts of the cave. The first was into the only natural entrance. I was unpleasantly surprised by the lack of stalactites, stalagmites, and other beautiful formations caused by water slowly dripping through calcium carbonate. The rock walls were jagged and rough, looking as though they were blown apart by dynamite. The floor was littered by the remains of these "explosions". No water dripped from the ceiling, as most of the cave has a leak proof sandstone cap.
But it was cool nonetheless, and I learned that the cave was first used as a saltpeter mine. Saltpeter, known as potassium nitrate among chemists, is a key ingredient in gunpowder. Margaret asked how they knew saltpeter was here. The guide picked up a handful of soil and slowly drizzled it over the flame of a bic lighter. Sparks revealed the secret.
The second tour was more interesting. We descended 256 stairs that tightly twisted back and forth down a narrow sinkhole connecting the surface to the deep interior. The guide led us along an underground trail that eventually led to the Frozen Niagara formation, which was exactly as its name implies, except on a scale of a couple dozen feet rather than a few hundred. This was a part of the cave where the roof leaked, and the stalactites and stalagmites I had been expecting were here in abundance. I took most of my pictures in this area, and it was definitely my favorite.
Friday, November 07, 2003
Margaret's diary entry:
Outside St. Louis, Missouri
From Pennsylvania we continued South and West in search of warmer weather and some of John Denver's favorite places. Fortunately, we found the former but gave up on the latter with out much of a fight.
When we got to West Virginia we decided it was time to try out our Free Campgrounds of the East book. Well, they would have had some trouble making a whole book out of free campgrounds, so they went ahead and included any campgrounds that charge $12 or less. The first one was Sleepy Creek Recreation Area, it was so remote that the town the book used as a point of reference to tell us where to find it wasn't even on our Atlas, I had to bust out the laptop and fire up Microsoft Mappoint to find it. But eventually the signs the locals had put up to direct us toward Sleepy Creek Fishing and Hunting Preserve appeared. Hmph. For those of you who may not know, Autumn tends to be hunting season. Well, we had survived public lands in Wisconsin and Massachusettes already without getting shot, and although we had ignored several suggestions that we might want to invest in flourescent orange vests before venturing into the forest in hunting season we went ahead in, with the promise of a $5 legal night in the wilderness our goal.
The further we went on that road, the more rocks ka-chinged off the underside of the van, the more anticipation I sensed from the other side of the E-brake where Roger sat. We hadn't seen a single other vehicle on our way in and he was beginning to think he would have the peace and loneliness he longed for and had become so used to from the many forest service roads in Colorado we had camped near in the past. But just as we made a left turn and popped over a hill to see a small loop of about six primitive campsites a motor home just a few years younger than me popped into view. I breathed a sigh of relief-- we wouldn't be the only ones in the forest. At least one of us was happy.
Anyway, it was a pleasant stay. Most of the leaves were gone from the trees by now, but occasionall a milk-chocolate brown oak leaf would flutter to join its temporarily abandoned former neighbors on the ground. The next day the temperatures soared into the seventies and we enjoyed a sunny afternoon with the van door wide open, Kiya frolicking free and we had our choice of sitting outside in our travel chairs or in the cozy shade inside the van. We brought out our sandals again and our toes loved us for it! I even took a sun shower!
I never thought lady bugs could be annoying but it turns out they bite! There were tons of them in that forest. By the end of a day with the van door open and the pop top up there had to be well over a hundred hanging out on the inside of our screened windows. Somebody thought they had been transplanted there to help take care of a moth problem.
We stayed two nights. The fellow with the motor home showed up later in his dusty Ford Tempo and Kiya promptly made friends with some sort of hound that he'd been feeding lately. "Would you like to take him with you?" He asked Roger when it was clear that he and Kiya had made pals. It was tempting, but Roger declined.
A few other campers showed up that night and the next day. It was the weekend after all, and the hunting was hopping. I helped an elderly couple put up their brand-new Coleman tent. "If I ever have a hard time doing something I just ask the young folk," the old man told me, "they can always do it."
We were startled by only a few loud gunshots that seemed to emit from the direction of the hound-peddler. Some squirrels must have been bothering him.
We knew we were south of the Mason-Dixon line when we pulled out of there and he yelled after us, "y'all come back and see us!"
Brad was an intelligent slacker from Mississippi I worked with in Americorps that was really my only first-hand exposure to Southern Culture. He had mentioned once that Mississipi and Alabama often traded off for poorest state in the union. I'm not particularly familiar with the economic trends of the regions of this country (Roger likes to blame it on the California public school system) but by the time we'd gotten a few miles into Kentucky I was pretty sure that poverty was a bit of a trend in the south. The towns weren't very cute anymore. Lots of Family Dollar stores, "antique" shops, yard sales in the middle of the week, trailer parks, and dirty rest rooms. The churches stood out the most though. The steeples we had become accustomed to had dissapeared a while back. Now the churches often took the shape of large ranch-style houses, pre-fab buildings and even closed-down grocery stores. Most of them had those white signs out front with changeable black letters saying something like "If God is your copilot, switch seats." And they were everywhere!
We ran out of main-course meals somewhere between Mammoth Cave and Illinois so we took the exit for Elkton. The black dot on the map had a little white dot inside it, Roger thought maybe that meant we could find a Dunkin Donuts there, but it simply indicated that the city was the county seat of Todd County. We figured its grocery store wouldn't be too small. After a few blocks we found it: Save-A-Lot, the building instantly reminded me of a grocery store near the airport in Managua, Nicaragua I visited this past summer on a trip through Central America with some girlfriends. Even there we were pretty sure the taxi driver chose the dump to get back at us for bargaining a low taxi fare.
We parked toward the back of the lot as we usually do so that Kiya could be hooked to the outside of the van and roam around a bit without bothering anyone. I was struck by the plainness of a Barber Shop there:
Inside looked pretty similar to the Managua grocery store too, cinder block walls and mismatched shelving. With the exception of the produce everything was still in its cases. It looked very neat, all the cases were placed strategically so that we could see what was inside and reach in and grab it. However, there was very little we felt compelled to grab. Everything was processed, artificial. Lots of cans. It was hard to describe, really. Nothing was appetizing. No soymilk of course, no veggie burgers, ground turkey, or deli-sliced ham. Roger pointed out about 12 rows of white bread, three of wheat. We didn't even bother to see if any of it was whole wheat. We walked out of there spending the least we'd spent so far on a trip to the grocery store. We had a bag of baby-carrots, a can of Manwich (sloppy joe slop, Roger was getting creative after weeks of noodles & red sauce and burritos), ground beef, and a jar of strawberry jam.
We were grateful though, they certainly passed their savings on to us.
Sunday, November 09, 2003
Roger's diary entry:
We arrived in Boulder last night after a marathon driving day that started in St. Louis. It is so nice to be home again! I melted into our luxurious bed within minutes, while Margaret sifted through our wedding photos and planned how they will fit into an album. The house is in excellent shape, as it was taken good care of by our friend Cindy.
Something not really mentioned in our previous diary entries are the day to day mechanics of living in the van, and I thought I would summarize a few of them here.
- Where did we stay? About a third of the time we stayed in campsites. Usually we requested electric hookups to help recharge our battery. Costs varied from $5 (no hookups in a recreation area in West Virginia) to $37 (outside Washington DC where everything was included - even cable TV). Another third of the time we stayed in rest areas off of interstates. Nearly all of them allowed overnight parking and the restrooms stayed open all night. The noise didn't bother me and I never felt unsafe, perhaps due more to my own ignorance and trusting nature than reality. The rest of the time we stayed in WalMart parking lots, friend's driveways (twice), or the Helix parking lot when I was contracting for them for a week. Despite WalMart's predatory practices and monopolistic behavior, we have to reluctantly admit they are very gracious to allow us to stay there, and we never had any hassles. Their parking lots are well lit, and security cameras help us feel safe. My only complaint is they have very loud street-sweeping type machines that clean the parking lot early each morning, and they interrupted our sleeping a bit.
- Internet and email. Just before we left we purchased a new cell phone / Verizon plan with a voice package and unlimited internet access for $120 a month. I know it's a ridiculous price, but we wanted unlimited access and good coverage, and Verizon is the only game in town right now that does both. The speed is a pokey 28.8 - 56 Kbps, but we can log on almost everywhere. Notable exceptions are Nebraska, West Virginia, and Kentucky. We didn't bother trying to hijack wireless networks like we did on our honeymoon, since we were never without internet access for more than a couple days.
- Laptop. We bought an emachines M5310 just before we started, and we've had mixed results. It locks up every once in a while. We rented a DVD once, and the laptop played it well. The Pinnacle Systems TV Deluxe system was buggy but most of the time we couldn't get a television signal anyway. The biggest problem we had with the laptop was supplying power to it. The battery only lasted about an hour (terrible!), so most of the time we had to keep it plugged in to the inverter. The inverter, however, would sound an alarm whenever the voltage dropped below about 12.5 volts, which was only after an hour or two after a full charge. The specs said the alarm should go off around 11 volts, but it didn't. It is our third one from CompUSA, so I figure they all do that. That means if both batteries are fully charged (front and rear), we can run the laptop about five or six hours. This is unacceptable as I want to camp in one place for a few days to work on the PC, and I can't. It's not that the batteries are run down - the engine still starts and everything else still runs - it's just that the inverter sounds the alarm way too soon. I'm trying to track down a DC cord for the laptop, but haven't found one yet.
- Eating. We had a rule that we wouldn't go to a sit-down restaurant more than once a week, and I was surprised by how easy the rule was to follow. Breakfast was usually cereal with milk, oatmeal (mostly Margaret), pancakes, and french toast (my favorite). The rest of the meals fell into three broad categories - sandwiches, burritos, and pasta. The specific contents varied, although there was almost always cheese involved. Toward the end I was getting pretty sick of the same food, and if we had been on the road longer I would have branched out into more diversity, although simplicity would still be the driving force.
- Bathrooms. If we found ourselves next to one, we would use it, because who knows when the next one would come along? This was surprisingly not much of an issue, though, since we usually had a bathroom handy. For emergencies, like in the middle of the night when WalMart was closed, we have a plastic peanut butter jar that was our chamber pot.
- Showers. We got our bodies used to going three to four days between them. It helped a lot to shave my head, since my hair gets all out of wack when I sleep on it. The need for a shower and a fresh supply of water was usually the driving force for finding a campground.
- Space. With the exception of three warm days where we were able to sit outside, we holed up in the van whenever we weren't hiking, visiting museums, or engaged in some tourist activity. We learned new habits to deal with the lack of space. Instead of getting up to retrieve what we needed, we learned to stay put and ask for it, since it was almost a certainty that the other person was sitting next to whatever we needed. Space was tight, no doubt about it. Kiya learned to stay out of the way by sitting in the driver seat, and we would sit either on the rotated passenger seat or the rear bench. And believe it or not, Margaret and I rarely parted ways to get some breathing room. If you don't count the week I spent in the Helix office, Margaret and I were never separated for more than an hour or so.
- Sleeping. We went to bed soon after dark and got up soon after dawn, and nearly always did it together. Most often we slept "downstairs" rather than the roomier "upstairs", for two reasons. The van stayed warmer with the pop top down, and the downstairs bed is easier to set up.
- Spare time. Oddly, it felt like we didn't have much, because I always had far more on my "to-do" list than I could finish. I had hoped to get a lot of reading done. I did read some, but not much. I had hoped to work on Gallery Server - my software project - but didn't put more than a couple hours into it. I had hoped to build a web site dedicated to our camper, with photos and descriptions of all our modifications. I managed to get a few links on the redesigned Marogeret web site (which I *did* get done), but the links currently are dead ends. We were constantly on the go, rarely staying in the same place more than one night. Not that I have regrets - everything we did was fun and I wouldn't trade it - but I'm at a loss to explain how six weeks can go by with so little progress to show for it. Maybe I shouldn't spend so much time writing these diary entries...
- Propane / fresh water. We refilled our propane tank twice, at a cost of about $10 each time. Pretty sweet. We used the propane heater often when whenever it dropped below about 50 degrees and we were just hanging out in the van. But when we went to bed we turned it off because the sleeping bag kept us plenty warm. The propane also kept our refrigerator nice and cold, with only one episode where I had to bang on the exterior vent to knock loose some carbon buildup on the burner element. Our twelve gallon fresh water tank would last about six or seven days.