• Category Archives looking back

  • As in “looking back in time,” things which have a historical connection.

  • Jasper And Blue Jingles

    Posted on by Don

    This was a short bike tour we took, a loop south along the Delaware, then west and back home by way of Vera Cruz. We took some liberties, but it was at least nominally meant to follow some of the old native paths in the area south of us.

    Day One

    We left Bethlehem, heading cross-country over to Riegelsville, brunched at the Riegelsville Inn (we got there just as it opened), then we continued downriver on the New Jersey side, crossed back into Pennsylvania at Milford, and rode down the towpath to Tinicum Park, our stop for the night.

    Riegelsville Bridge
    Riegelsville Inn
    The Delaware At Riegelsville
    Riegelsville Bridge
    Riegelsville Bridge
    Anne On The Milford Bridge
    Delaware River
    Tinicum: Delaware River
    Tinicum: Delaware River
    Tinicum Park
    Tinicum: Polo Players
    Tinicum: Morning Deer

    Tinicum was fairly primitive as far as campgrounds go, but it was very pleasant, and we got to watch some local equestrians play polo for a while before we crashed for the night.

    Day Two

    This was another beautiful day. We got up and out early, got breakfast at a diner not far from the campsite (again arriving just as it opened), then rode down the towpath and Rt 32 to Point Pleasant.

    Point Pleasant is where Tohicon Creek meets the Delaware, and just above that is where Geddes Run enters Tohicon Creek. This area had a substantial native population once, and the mouth of Geddes Run was once a place where Native Americans worked a local stone called argillite (aka “mudstone,” or “blue jingles” as the local quarries later called it). The actual native quarry site is now on private land, but we could get a view of the general area from the road.

    Tohicon Creek
    Tohicon Creek
    Geddes Run
    Wismer Road At The Bridge
    Anne At The Covered Bridge
    Anne In The Covered Bridge
    In The Covered Bridge

    Our route from there took us west on the Point Pleasant Pike, generally following an old native path to Schwenksville, through scenic little roads, and into more built-up and heavily trafficked areas, until we finally made it to Green Lane Park, our second night’s lodgings.

    Day Three

    From Green Lane we went north, again following the general outline of a native path — this was the path from the Phoenixville area to the jasper quarries at Vera Cruz. The route was a bit of a surprise; I expected it to be fairly flat (something I’d heard was a hallmark of native paths) but it was actually fairly hilly and rolling.

    We got into Vera Cruz, stopped to explore Jasper Park (sorry, no pictures this time), and then we went into Emmaus to get lunch. We came home on our usual route from Emmaus, which was once also a native path. And that was our little holiday!


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  • A Tale of Two Paths

    Posted on by Don

    I sometimes get myself into Native-Path-adjacent GIS enthusiasms (other than my original projects), two of them in particular being the original path of the Walking Purchase, and the Mason-Dixon Line.

    There was very little information I could find about the actual path of the Walking Purchase “walk” — certainly no publicly available GIS data, just a few scanned maps here and there, along with many depressing accounts of the whole sordid incident and its aftermath. This shouldn’t be too surprising; it seems that the perpetrators took steps after the fact to obscure what exactly happened. This information is probably not lost to history, but it is probably well buried, and it seems that not many people like to dig for and play with shameful data from the past.

    By contrast, the Mason-Dixon Line is pretty well established online, but then the line itself has been a part of state (and colonial) legal boundaries for more than 250 years, and a cultural boundary (and touchstone) for almost as long. It was a large and highly scientific project for its time, and well marked at the time with massive milestones and a great deal of documentation, and it has had multiple restorations over the centuries. In other words: not shameful, but a point of historic pride. It has received a great deal of attention in recent years, as surveyors and others have been documenting the GPS locations of the original (and replacement) milestones. More info from the Mason & Dixon Line Preservation Partnership can be found here.

    Anyway, just some things I’ve been thinking about.


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  • I Feel The Earth Move

    Posted on by Don

    We had an earthquake today. Anne and I were watching Iris, and hanging out in the living room when there was a sort of whump! against the house, and a low rumble. Anne thought it was a really crazy wind gust, while I thought it might have been a truck rolling by outside. I started suspecting something else when I looked out the window: no wind, no trucks, and the rumble continued for a few seconds longer…

    I looked it up on the USGS site (no mean feat when Iris is around, and really into our electronic gadgets — we usually keep them hidden), and sure enough there was an earthquake, 4.8 on the Richter scale, out near Whitehouse Station NJ. Meanwhile, our phones lit up with messages: neighbors, friends, and Anne’s siblings too, from nearby and from as far away as Connecticut. (Her brother lives near the epicenter, and they had pictures fall off the walls.) We were listening to WXPN out of Philadelphia when it happened, and they played “Whole Lotta Shaking Going On” (and other songs like that), so I guess they felt it down there too.

    So that makes five earthquakes I’ve experienced, all on the East coast:

    • In high school, probably junior year, we had one during school hours. No one knew it at the time, I was in class and I remember glancing at the door — it sounded like one of those wheeled carts they used in school, rolling down the hall just outside.
    • Not long after high school, my brothers and I were hanging out in the front yard, and there came a weird groaning from the cement porch. I looked at the porch, and I must have looked like I thought I was losing my mind, because my brother said “yeah I heard it too.” It turned out to be another earthquake.
    • Early Eighties, I was living in Boston and I was awakened in the middle of the night by what I thought was a passing subway (Boston has subways, but I didn’t live anywhere near one). The next day it was all over the newspapers — we’d had an earthquake.
    • We had one while I was at work maybe twenty years ago, the first of the bunch that was recognizable as an earthquake while it was happening. It was small and pretty close to my office, which was close to the epicenter of today’s.

    Anyway, we just finished a pizza dinner with Emmi & Kyle (and Iris). Tomorrow is a ride to the farmer’s market in Easton.

    UPDATE: WE had an aftershock about 6:00 last night, but I didn’t notice it. Also, there was another earthquake here, maybe 2010, strong enough to require repairs to the Fahy Bridge (which TBH may have already needed repairs).


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  • Hilly History Ride

    Posted on by Don

    …hi I’m back. And here’s my story:

    Jasper is a type of stone, sort of like an agglomeration of quartz-like minerals. It’s very pretty when polished and has been used for millennia for ornamentation, and it’s also very good for high quality stone tools like axe heads, arrowheads, and stone knives. There is a seam of jasper going through Lehigh and Berks Counties, and there are small sites all along the seam where natives once dug it up, but the biggest and most important site was an actual jasper quarry just south of Emmaus, at a place now called Jasper Park in Vera Cruz.

    This quarry was worked for thousands of years, making it one of the oldest industrial sites in North America, and it really only shut down with the coming of European traders and their more competitive iron wares in the 1600’s. The site was studied by Henry Mercer in the late 1800’s, and was included as the destination for one of the native paths in Wallace’s Indian Paths of Pennsylvania; Wallace also noted that several other paths came together nearby, which was likely how the jasper made its way into the native trade networks — the jasper from here has been found as far away as New England.

    As part of my native paths project, I’d put together a bunch of bike rides that more or less follow the old paths, and I have two — one a short ride, and one a multi-day trip — which visit Jasper Park. I have been meaning to go out on the shorter ride for a while now…

    The Canal Museum is currently putting together an exhibit about Pennsylvania’s native paths, and just posted something on Facebook about Jasper Park. That, along with the recent nice weather, was enough inspiration to get me off my duff and out on my ride.

    I started with some climbing, crossing the Lehigh and cutting across the college campus over South Mountain, then I picked up a few sections of the now-fragmented Old Philadelphia Pike/Old Bethlehem Pike (which name depends on where you are and where you’re heading), which I suspect followed the “Delaware River Path.” From there I headed southwest, skirting the southern flank of South Mountain out to Vera Cruz, and picked up the “Perkiomen-Lehigh Path” which led to Jasper Park, were I stopped to explore on foot.

    Jasper Park is a Little League baseball field, some pavillions, and a small fitness trail; the quarries are off the fitness trail, in the woods behind the ball field, and tucked up against the Turnpike Northeast Extension right-of-way.

    Jasper Historic Marker
    Old Quarry Pit
    Old Quarry Pit
    Old Quarry Pit
    Pieces Of Jasper

    There wasn’t really much to see, no spooky vibes or anything, though it was cool that the ground still showed the indentations after almost 400 years. The top stone in the pile might have been what’s called a “turtleback:” these were once considered a very primitive form of stone tool, but are now thought to be stones that were partially dressed for trade, which would be shaped to their final form (arrowheads etc) by their end users.

    After my expedition I got back on the bike and came home via Emmaus. I was essentially following the “Perkiomen-Lehigh Path” to the “Oley Path,” and it was pretty obvious that I was following the native paths more closely on the way home: the route was much flatter, and traffic was heavier — native and modern routes both preferred to avoid the hills.

    In the end, the hilly parts were not historical, and the historical parts weren’t hilly…


    looking back the sporting life 📎and tagged

  • COVID Memories III

    Posted on by Don

    I wrote two previous posts (here and here) about looking back on the weirdness of the early pandemic . I remember reading about the influenza pandemic of 1918, as pretty much everyone probably did, and it struck me how so much of that (admittedly very dramatic) time became a part our collective memory, except the pandemic. Now I look back on our own pandemic experience from the vantage of — what? three years? — and it’s like a veil has come between that time and now, it was so different from what came before and “the new normal” that came after. We were all just on ice, waiting for what would come next.

    Anyway:

    • Everybody took walks. We would all be walking through the neighborhood, especially after dinner, and if you encountered another person or couple, which happened multiple times every block, you’d cross the street to avoid them. (Six feet was the suggested minimum distance, but we’d usually go for 30 feet or or more.) We didn’t want it to look like we were being surly or antisocial though, so we’d be extra friendly to whoever we met, only from a distance.
    • Zoom became a thing. It was like the perfect moment: Zoom worked well on all systems — the only one that did so at that exact time, it seems — when we suddenly all needed something like that. Group zooms with family and friends were a regular thing for about two years.
    • My cello lessons continued, but as Zoom lessons. I did that for more than a year, despite the limitations of music over Zoom.
    • We used to hang out with John & Donna (and sometimes others like Scott & Kellyn), at Brew Works every pre-COVID Sunday night, but when we couldn’t hang out in person we had “virtual drinking nights,” again using Zoom. That was weird but fun to do, and it helped preserve our sanity. Strange, I think we engaged more, in a communicative sense, in our zoom meetups than in real life, but there was a flatness to it, something missing… it was way more satisfying to sit next to each other at the bar, like bumps on a log with nothing to say.
    • We eventually started doing “porch visits” as a way to hang out in person, getting together over drinks, outside, at someone’s house. We busted out some Danish-style coziness by using blankets as the weather got colder, and switched to warmer drinks like hot toddies. These times seemed to go on forever, and now they’re further behind us each day.

    looking back

  • Memoria Mortuorum

    Posted on by Don
    Mike, Before a Ride in Jim Thorpe, 1993

    I just realized this, so I thought I’d note the day: today is the twentieth anniversary of my friend Mike Kucher’s death. This is what I wrote about about it not long after, and this is a little photo collage I put together for his fiancee. It seems like a thousand years ago.

    Rest in peace, brother.


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  • Looking Back At Looking Back

    Posted on by Don

    I’m currently battling a cold/sinus thing, no COVID according to the test (and from what I see I’d guess it’s a bacterial infection anyway), but I still feel pretty shitty: stuffy nose, sore throat, headache and stomach ache, and just feeling really tired. I’ve been hanging indoors for the past two days, sleeping and working on my Native Paths project, which is now almost halfway through the foot segments. (The canal museum is doing their next project on native paths in the Corridor, so it’ll be interesting to see their take.)

    Meantime, here is what I wrote, ten years ago, about my first bike race. Enjoy!


    day by day looking back

  • Rest In Peace, Uncle Jake

    Posted on by Don

    My uncle Jake passed away last Tuesday. Here is his obituary; he was only a week or so away from turning 90 when he died. My dad was pretty devastated, and especially now that his last surviving sibling was gone (Dad was the youngest of five). Here are some pictures of my dad and his siblings over the years:

    The Kelly Kids, 1939
    Uncle Jake, Suzanne, Grandma Kathryn, and Don (my Dad) holding Wayne.
    The Kelly Kids, mid-1980’s?

    Because of the holiday weekend, his funeral (in Brooklyn) was last Friday and the viewing was Thursday night; my parents needed a ride so I drove down and took them Thursday night, then stayed over and we went to the funeral together. It was a long two days…


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  • CADOP5

    Posted on by Don

    Happy Ides of March! Watch your backs, and remember: the day ain’t over ’til it’s over…

    I took a graduate-level computer-aided design course in college — way back when CAD/CAM/CAE was really not a consumer-grade product — and a good part of the course was about optimization. I happened to think about that the other day when I was idly browsing through various Python modules (the way one does), and I ran across a genetic algorithm package.

    Genetic algorithms had their own vogue a few decades back, but that long-ago was long after I left college. Still, playing with it got me to reminiscing about the the things we did way back in school, and about the program we used and our professor (Dr Michael Pappas, who was its author), so I Googled him and the program.

    Dr Pappas passed away in 2015 — I found his obituary. He was a major player in the computer-aided and biomedical engineering worlds, and was the co-inventor of the artificial knee, among other things. I knew he was a big deal back in the day, but I guess I never realized how big a deal he was. (He had a pronounced limp and a seriously deformed back/hip, so I suspect he had some skin in the artificial joint game.) He was fairly intense, and was one of those guys who always seemed on the edge of blowing his stack, though in fact he was always decent and patient with us students. That was one of my all-time favorite classes…

    The optimization program itself was called CADOP5; it was written in FORTRAN and it was a bear to use. (I remember him telling us, at the start of the course, that we needed to start working now on our optimization project, because it couldn’t be finished in a day, or a week, or even two weeks… I was probably the only one in the class to get an A on the project, and I wasn’t even able to find the optimum solution — though I was able to say why.) When I searched for CADOP5, I didn’t find much except this thesis at NJIT. The program given in that paper was a refinement called CADOP8; I might have met the student working on it at some point, but he had his PhD by the time I took the course with Dr Pappas.

    I really did like that class a lot, and its professor, and in fact tried to get Dr Pappas as my thesis advisor, but I got some behind-the-scenes stonewalling from one of his other students/assistants (it took naive me about a year to realize that maybe I’d been undermined), so did my thesis on linkages under Dr Sodhi, and the rest is history — or at least, water under the bridge.

    Back to the Python genetic algorithm: I downloaded it and wrote a little program to test it. It was amazingly easy to use, like all things Python, but it seemed pretty slow to me. (High computation cost? Slow convergence? No idea.) There are many other optimization critters out there in the Python ecosystem, I wonder how they would stack up against that one particular genetic algorithm module, or against those ancient CADOP programs for that matter.

    Anyway, something from the Wayback Machine: this and this are what I was writing fifteen years ago, maybe a month or so before I met Anne.


    looking back tech talk

  • The Corliss Comes Alive

    Posted on by Don

    Happy Pi Day! Here is that post about the steam engines.

    The National Museum of Industrial History has a few gigantic, spectacularly beautiful old restored steam engines, some of them even in operating order. I’ve seen the steam exhibit before, but I have been meaning to go back to the museum to see it again, because my friend Donna’s father just helped restore a new one they got. (George is a retired woodworker and very handy.)

    That new, and newly restored, addition to their collection is a Colt-Baxter “portable steam engine,” patented by a guy named Baxter and manufactured by Colt Firearms as a way to diversify after the Civil War. The Baxter was “portable” in the sense that it was only as big as a big barrel rather than building-sized; it ran at about 15 psi steam pressure and put out about 10 horsepower, was built to run a belt drive, and was ideal for powering small factories, machine shops etc — they sold maybe 300,000 of them over the years. (I learned all this at the Museum on Sunday, and on the Internet yesterday…)

    The museum had a demo day Sunday, where they would power up their Corliss engine — the biggest steam engine they have, and beautifully restored — using compressed air. I figured I’d kill three birds with one stone by riding the Iguana over for a test ride, watching the Corliss in action, and seeing the new Baxter engine on display.

    Here’s a video I made of the Corliss:

    At about 19 seconds into the video you can see what makes a Corliss engine a Corliss: the spider-web of levers running off a central rotating plate are what control the steam valves that feed the pistons. This engine was used to run a water pump; I’m pretty sure that the black part (the front) is the steam engine end, and the green part at the back is the water pump.

    And, here are a few photos I took of the Baxter:

    Colt-Baxter Steam Engine

    (Along the wall in the background, you can see some belt-driven machines on loan from the Smithsonian, drills and lathes and such, that the Baxter would have powered.) The Baxter had its own furnace/boiler built into the lower section, with the piston inside the top of the “barrel” and the bulk of the machinery on top.

    Baxter Engine Top Front
    Baxter Engine Top Rear

    The museum had a few other exhibits, including a few small model engines running, as part of the demo, and one final surprise for me: the Baxter engine was operational! They didn’t have a fire running inside it, it was all compressed air like the Corliss, but here is a video of the operator starting it up:

    In all, a banner day!


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