Author: Paul

Three-fourths of America’s cobblestone buildings are within a 75-mile radius of Rochester. This Culver Road garage may be field stone and not cobblestone but it still looks pretty cool. I spent the day with dentists and and I was thinking that their practice is more like a craft than a science. And I don’t mean any insult to them.

I had a tooth that needed a root canal but the roots were too squirrelly to do one properly so they patched it up and let me keep the tooth until it acted up again. Two years later it acted up and so I went to my dentist this morning thinking I needed it pulled. I was bracing myself for a bone crunching experience but when I got there my dentist thought that it was the tooth next door that was giving me the pain so he sent me back over to the root canal specialist.

The specialist was wearing microscopes on each eye and a white surgical mask and I had a dental dam over my mouth while I was laying down a few degrees beyond horizontal. They were playing soft rock and I noticed how silly Rod Stewart’s rough and tumble voice sounds with a string section. The dentist worked furiously filing out the nerve endings and asking the receptionist for tools like “ND 20.5″. He noted that my canals take crazy curves and when he left the room the receptionist said, ” Take a look at the curve on this puppy” as she put one of the files away. The dentist came back in and the new Whitney Houston song came on. The receptionist said, “She has lost her voice completely”.

6 Comments

I kept thinking these were little pies laid out on the seats of Steve’s party boat. Click photo for enlargement.

Dale Hollow Lake was created by the Tennessee Valley Authority when they bought up land and dammed two rivers that had cut through the hills so they could harness the water to generate electricity. The state owns the shotgun shell littered shoreline and the giant lake they created when they flooded the valley. I remember learning about this project in Geography class and now here we were floating on the lake in a party boat. As you can see from the map the lake is huge with hundreds of miles of shoreline and countless coves. On Labor Day weekend most coves were filled with rented party boats but we did manage to find a few to hang out in. We must have seen over a thousand boats here and not one was a sail boat. Four wheel pickup trucks, big power boats, party boats, jet skis and ATVs continue the TVA style assault on the landscape. The Shell station where we first called Steve from is a hub for refilling their toys and it’s the busiest place in town.

We bought some pasta at one of the marinas and had it with Peggi’s homemade tomato sauce for dinner. Steve cleaned up and asked if we wanted to go to a local honky tonk called “Bear’s Place”. It has been about ten years since we were in a smoke filled bar and this place was surly the smokiest of them all. Bear runs it from a seat at the bar. His two sons tend bar and keep the patrons in line. The age group was 20 to 70 and it seemed their relationships were all in play. It was like going to a teen dance. Steve had only been here six times but he knew quite a few of the women. Couples were hooking up and heading out the door as we drank one Bud Light after another. Our eyes hurt from the smoke but feasted on it all.

This county and the surrounding ones prohibit the sale of alcohol. The bar serves only wine and beer and it closes at midnight. It can’t even open on Sunday by law. Bear’s Place is one big open space with a pool table to the left and a DJ and dance floor to the right. The music is loud as hell and it sounded great. The lady DJ played cuts from cds, one at a time. No segues. And the music ranged from shitkicking country to Joan Jett with hip hop in-between. She always had a crowd on the floor but the urban tracks worked best for her. A guy standing nearby wore a motorcycle t-shirt with a picture of a woman with large breasts, a souvenir from an event called “Choppers ‘n Floppers.” Not everyone had a full set of teeth but people were genuinely nice and we closed the place.

We were hoping to get some down home breakfast food at the Dixie Cafe on Sunday morning but they don’t even open until ten because everyone was at church. We got there near noon and watched the place fill up with church goers. We overheard one woman say’ “We went to two services today. We let the spirit in twice!” We tried ordering breakfast and waitress said they don’t do breakfast on Sunday. She recommended a BLT as the closest thing to breakfast.

I love the homemade billboards you see down south. Most of them are put up by religious fanatics. We saw a few with the ten commandments on them and one that read, “Warning! Jesus Is Coming. Are You Ready?” My favorite read, “Hell Is Real”.

More photos from Tennessee

5 Comments

I came back from Tennessee looking like I had been hit with buckshot. We drove down there over Labor Day to visit our friend Steve and camp on the land he bought in the hills. I scratched the head off my chigger bites on the way home but they still itch like crazy.

We plotted a Google map from our house to Steve’s property and we knew we wanted to go towards Buffalo but we may have gotten up too early for this trip. We found ourselves on Rochester’s eastern expressway heading toward Syracuse before it dawned on us that we wanted to go west.

Our friend, Monica, let us borrow her Woodstock book, the one with forward by Martin Scorsese, and Peggi was reading it aloud as I drove. We were making good time and were slightly ahead of the Google’s estimated times when we got stuck in a rush hour traffic jam in downtown Cincinnati, right where interstates 75 and 71 merge. And things didn’t get much better in Kentucky where the roads switched from four lane to two lane and kept jamming up for no apparent reason.

Steve’s place is just over state line in Tennessee and I am really surprised they didn’t stop us to check our passports because this place is world away from New York. Steve left instructions for us to call him from the pay phone at the Shell station in Byrdstown and he he came down in his pickup to meet us. There was no way we could have found his place on our own. It is tucked away up some incredibly steep, winding dirt roads.

The Woodstock book is full of descriptive quotes from the organizers, performers and attendees. Because Peggi had been reading to me for so long I kept hearing a narrator’s voice as I took in Tennessee. Steve introduced us to a guy named Troy who was squatting on his property in a tent down by the creek. Troy was on the lam and helping Steve in exchange for a place to pitch his tent. He had killed a rattler while clearing some brush on the property and he was wearing a white cowboy hat that he wrapped with his snake skin band.

We were prepared to camp here but Steve had recently pulled a small trailer up there so we folded down the bed over the kitchen table in the trailer and spread our sleeping bags out there. We were exhausted and ready to crash but first Steve wanted to take us back down the hill to meet some biker friends and the biker friends of theirs that had just driven a Neil Young style Touring RV up from Ft. Meyers, Florida. One of the guys told the story of how this area got the name. “Roughshod Hollow”. A character named Billy rode a horse over here from Indiana and and stopped at the blacksmith to repair a shoe. The blacksmith was busy so Billy shoed the horse himself and then asked the blacksmith how it looked. The blacksmith said, “Pretty rough but it’ll do”. We did some heroic beer drinking and stayed up til three or four that morning.

I’ll have to continue this Tennessee story tomorrow before it all slips away.
Photos from Tennessee

Leave a comment

You know those goofy old guys who ride down your street on a bicycle that has a basket on it? And they sit up straight on the seat and wear street clothes instead of all that tight fitting bike gear. Well, I am one of those guys. I love wandering around and spacing out on my bike. But I have learned not to space out too much. Not just because I might run into a car or a sign but because someone might say, “Take a picture. It’ll last longer”. I must have been ten when someone called me out like that and I have never forgotten it.

So now I just stop and take a picture.

Leave a comment

Maureen emailed us to alert us to an event she thought we would like, the “2009 Point Pleasant Firemen’s Association Tournament in the Valley”. Volunteer firemen groups from as far away as Long Island compete in “3 Man Ladder”, “Hose Efficiency”, “Motor Pump”, and “Buckets” events. We assumed it was at the Point Pleasant firehouse where we vote and it is within walking distance so we set out on bikes. There was nothing going on over there so we rode down Culver to the Sea Breeze Fire Department but there was nothing going on there either. We rode along the lake and asked a park official if he had any idea where the event was happening. He told us it was up near the the Town Hall on Goodman. There are two Point Pleasant Fire Departments and the event was being held at No. 2. So we we got here a little late but we saw some of the last two events. We rooted for our home team, the Point Pleasant Pea Pickers, and we were happy to see that our first responders were in such good shape. We watched them run up ladders with buckets of water and fill a 55 gallon barrel in mater of seconds.

I was really taken with the logos.

2 Comments

We stopped by Clover Pool Supply to pick up some more ph to add to our street’s pool. We are the presidents this year and our duties include keeping the chemistry balanced. With all the rain the ph has been consistently low. While we were there I noticed these signs for sale. I was trying to decide which one the members would like best.

1 Comment

We drove deep into “Death Panel” country this week to attend the Wyoming County Fair in Pike, New York. New York’s gun toting junior senator was there and I grabbed a photo of her giving a balloon to a little kid. She got pretty cool reception when they introduced her. We rode down with Jeff and Mary Kaye and Jeff really knows the back roads so the scenery was “I Love NY” dreamy. We made this trip last year but our timing was off. We were there at the end of the week and the animals had already gone home. We did have fresh lemonade, ride the Ferris Wheel and see a nasty tractor pull.

This year we went on Tuesday and the fairground barns were full of prize winning livestock. We wandered around for hours and looking at goats, cows, rabbits, pigs, chickens, roosters, horses and sheep. We sat in the stands and watched the judging of cows and horses. It was hard for us to tell whether they were judging the animal or the the handler but that really didn’t matter.

There were no freak shows or creepy things in formaldehyde jars but there was a midway with the usual corn dogs and fried dough fare and farm equipment on display and booths selling t-shirts, wood stoves and ATVs. And a few buildings were devoted to trade show like booths for groups like the American Legion, the Republican Party, Right To Lifers offering tiny feet lapel pins for a dollar, a church group with free literature debunking evolution and a group that wanted to bring back “God given Jewish Law” that stated that “both persons involved in a homosexual act were to be be put to death.”

I spent a few minutes watching contestants play “I Got It”. The operator had a silky smooth voice and the contestants looked like they were in a trance. I took a short movie of one game and it turned out I caught a woman throwing two balls on one turn. Watch closely on ball number three.

More photos from the Wyoming County Fair

2 Comments