Anne and I just did a section hike on the Appalachian Trail, walking the New Jersey portion with several friends. More (probably much more) on this later, but one of the things that struck me was how meditative just hiking along can be — songs, other earworms, and various musings would take up a lot of the mental landscape.
I’d built a QGIS project before our trip, with info about our section of trail, and put it on my phone. It had some distances in miles and others in kilometers, and I was mentally converting back and forth when it struck me: a kilometer is about 0.6 miles, while a mile is about 1.6 kilometers. In other words, their reciprocals differ by one. Is that true, and if not, what number would it be true for? I worked out the quadratic equation:
(hmmm, seems familiar)… and I found the answer to be:
otherwise known as φ (phi), the golden ratio. Interesting, and a fine bit of mental bubblegum to chew on as I walked along…
When I got home, I broke my internet fast with some Reddit, and the first thing I see there is a photo of a tee shirt, with the golden ratio written on it — meaning, in this case, the “most irrational” number, as in “I am most irrational.” Anyway, just a coincidence, but a strange and striking one.
The other thing I carried with me in my head? “The Alley Cat,” a perfect earworm for my hiking rhythm, though I noticed that I changed the tempo as the terrain changed.
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.
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).
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.
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…
We just got back from a visit with Ben and Jenny in Los Angeles, or rather Altadena, just north of Pasadena. We stayed in an AirBnB (meh, or maybe even “meh minus,” but it was someone’s entire house to ourselves, and it was close to their place in Altadena), and we got in some biking, hiking, cooking, and even a nice dinner with Jenny’s folks at a Persian restaurant. I’ll have more to say I’m sure, but for now here are some pictures:
NASA Jet Propulsion LaboratoryBen & jenny’s front Yard and CatGiant Fig Tree At The LibraryIn The ForestLocal FlowersStream CrossingDo You See The Lizard?Lizard Close UpAngeles MountainsBerries On The TrailBerries Close UpAngeles MountainsHikingAngeles MountainsBen, Jenny and AnneAt The Diner
We were supposed to go to Connecticut today, but when we got up this morning Anne was sick, either something she ate or (more likely) some stomach bug, which she may have caught from Iris, who has been “pukey” and out-of-sorts lately.
I’m currently at the Essentials Cafe, a new place in the old Moravian Church parsonage on 3rd Avenue. This is probably run (maybe not directly) by the Moravian Church, as a “pay what you can” breakfast/lunch spot. Pretty decent, quiet, it just opened a few weeks ago. They have food, but I just got a cup of coffee; my ultimate destination is Bitty & Beau’s, the coffee place catty-corner from the Brew Works.
If Anne feels better tomorrow we’ll probably still head up — her sister’s mother-in-law passed away and the funeral is Monday. Long drives with a stomach bug are not fun, and nobody wants to be the super-spreader of anything at a funeral, so we’ll see.
We’ll be heading to LA to visit Ben & Jenny on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, I was down visiting my parents last week, and we also drove up to a bike shop in Alfred NY for Anne to buy a new recumbent bike. (Alfred is just past Corning, so on the way home we stopped at the Museum of Glass.) We finished the week with a visit to her Aunt Kay in Jim Thorpe. Lots of traveling going on!
The Sporting Life: We’ve been getting a lot of hiking practice in lately, getting ready for our New Jersey section hike on the AT with Julie. (There’s also been a lot of research, and some buying/borrowing of equipment we’ll need but don’t have, thanks to neighbors Ed & Jan and Matt & Diet.) The weather may go back to “winter mode” soon, but we’ve been enjoying the warmer weather with a bunch of bike rides. Spring is coming.
And finally, even the slowest horse crosses the finish line — Anne and I are both done with all the Slow Horses novels and novellas. We don’t know what to do with ourselves now… I’m currently reading “Great Feuds in Mathematics,” which is kind of meh but it keeps me occupied.
The humidity in the house has been really low lately, no surprise with all this cold winter weather. Anne and I have been struggling with dry skin and sinus issues, but for me the big issue has been its effect on my cello: as it dries, the wood shrinks slightly, which makes it play flat, and recently the pegs have come loose so it became really flat and un-tunable. I had to put drops of water on the pegs, then put the cello in its case with a damp-it to recuperate.
The cello is fine now, and the weather has been moderating — warmer, rainy — but we still broke out the room humidifiers upstairs.
This post’s title is part of a song in my dream last night, sung in a syncopated, Latin style, maybe a bit like Tom Waits’s “Bye Bye Baby,” by a chubby waitress, who was understood to be at least partly machine, in a diner that was understood to be in space, about a date she went on (with some guy who looked a bit like a cyborg Sam The Butcher). It’s mostly faded now of course, but I woke up with the song in my head, and I just thought I’d document what’s left of it here…
Meanwhile, Reading: I’ve been burning through the “Slow Horses” novels and novellas; I’ve probably read seven or eight by now. Great page-turners, Anne is also reading them and recommended them to me. We were out last night with John and Donna, who are watching the series on TV, and a good part of our evening conversation was about “Slow Horses.”
We just got back from a nice walk with Sarah & Marc, part of a project we’re doing with them where we walk the perimeter of the City of Bethlehem. We’re doing it in sections, and doing the easier ones right now: last Sunday was an out-and-back on the towpath heading west (maybe 4 miles), and today was (about 6 miles total) up Club Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue, plus getting to and from the city line. A really pleasant walk, both times. (We also did a hike yesterday, about 5.4 miles around Sals, also really pleasant.)
FYI: we’re getting ourselves into hiking shape, because we’ll be doing a week on the AT in April. We plan to do the New Jersey section, probably over seven days or so, with our friend Julie G (who did the Alberta ride with us in 2022). We were all joking about how much better shape we were in before that ride, and how getting ready for it lent structure to our fitness regimens at the time, and came up with this trip as our new project. We’re probably closer to physical readiness right now than not, but there’s a lot of other pieces of the puzzle we have to deal with: backpacks, food & logistics, our actual start & end points, etc. We’re working on all of it.
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.
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