Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   Win the War!
Wednesday, January 9 2008

setting: rural Augusta County near Staunton, Virginia

This morning Gretchen and I walked around "Muellers' Mountain," the 3/4 mile loop road around the ridge to the west of the house. Down in the valley beyond is an old Norway Spruce and an old Eastern Hemlock (38.099966 N, 79.136528 W) that I have known since I was a kid. The hemlock is now nearly dead, almost certainly from an infestation of the Woolly Adelgid, an invasive alien parasite.
Later Gretchen and I drove into town with my mother. The route I took was the usual one to downtown Staunton, Middlebrook Road (State Route 252), and along the way I saw two or three yard signs I'd never seen before. They featured white writing on a black background and read, "Win the War!" It just doesn't get any more red state than that.
Our goal in town was to get some health food provisions (particularly nutritional yeast) that we'd been unable to find in the health food ghetto (and it's very much a ghetto) at the Staunton Kroger (where we'd stopped yesterday on our way in from Maryland). First we went to Cranberry's on Central Avenue. It was a delightful little store with all the essential hippie supplies, plus a deli in the back with gourmet coffee and things like a tempeh wrap. I shit you not, you can now order tempeh in Staunton! But the nutritional yeast was badly overpriced, so we only bought things like toothpaste instead.
We ate lunch at the nearby Baja Bean (which I assume is a franchise of the restaurant with the same name in Charlottesville). We all had various alcoholic drinks mostly to take the edges off my mother's incessant repetitive banter. These were of an much more extravagant price scale than the food, leading me to conclude that they alone constituted the basis for the restaurant's profitability.
The Kronos Gallery, where Gretchen would be reading tomorrow, is down in Staunton's historic wharf area. We wandered down there and found the place closed but fortuitously Kevin, the guy who runs the place, just happened to be stopping by for some reason. So he showed us around the place. The gallery is beautiful, full of ancient brickwork and huge beams made before the Civil War from virgin timber. Most of the art was Kevin's and tended to be of the richly-textured two dimensional sort. The place and the art were much hipper than Staunton ever gets, but Kevin seemed to be doing what he could to spark a one-man renaissance here in the heart of Win the War! country. In addition to his art, he had a publication, a series of bumper stickers and post cards, and of course the poetry readings.
On the way back to Beverly Street, we ventured into the bowells of an antique store off the side of Lewis Street just below Beverly. An old man runs the place and Hoagie had warned us that he's something of a flirt. We weren't in there a minute before the guy was offering Gretchen a "girl as pretty as you" discount. We managed to get a steel woodstove poker and an old barometer (labeled in French and also having a centigrade thermometer) for a grand total of $5. (Taken from a $300 woodstove tool set, that poker alone would have cost at least $50.)
There's another antique store on Beverly in the large space that was once home to Woolworths and then Beverly Art and Office Supplies. A rack of fireplace tools there cost $140, but (perhaps inspired by the eBay clock obsession of Gretchen's parents' dog sitter) I bought a beautiful old clock gearbox for $12.
Just south of US 250 where begins to leave the heart of Stauton is a large complex of institutional brick buildings. They're from a period when institutional buildings were still grand and funding was earmarked for such things as soffit decorations and columns. The buildings lie behind several layers of fence because they used to be part of a medium-security prison (indeed, my best friend's father spent five years there). But at some point in recent history the prison was closed and looked to be falling into disrepair. Not any more. As we were driving to Pam's Natural Way (on an errand mostly to get nutritional yeast), we saw the place was undergoing a massive remodeling. All mention of its past-life as a prison had been scrubbed away and signs now proclaimed the coming of luxury condos. The terms "condo" and "Staunton" are almost never found in the same sentence, but evidently someone with deep pockets thinks he can pull it off. It's a tall order when one considers the stigma that must be overcome.

Back at Creekside, it was hard not to marvel at the sheer cheapness of the finishes in a modern double-wide trailer. Nothing seemed to be made of natural materials. At one point Gretchen and I were trying to figure out what the walls were made of and her guess seemed as good as any, "chemicals." Still, certain features in this particular trailer seemed to have been added as elements of luxury. There are two bathrooms, and though nothing is finished in tile, there are gold-fixtured his and her sinks and a huge round tub. It doesn't have massage jets, but it looks like something a redneck would love to say he had in his bathroom. Gretchen and I took a bath in it at some point late this afternoon, though it was hard to arrange the kind of privacy a married couple might want in such a situation what with my wacky brother barging in and out of the trailer repeatedly to watch snippets of junk teevee. My mother has given done his own "office" in one of the two non-master bedrooms, and to get to that office Don also has a key to the trailer's front door. Indeed, the only time Don is barred from the trailer is when my mother is taking a bath. She's always going on about how important her privacy is.

This evening my father cooked up a delicious meal of veggie burgers and stir fry over in the house I grew up in. Gretchen and I tromped over and sat around a little card table eating.

Later on I figured out that I could almost get a WiFi connection at Creekside to a wireless router in the Shaque. It would have been very exciting had I been able to get this to work reliably, but the connection just wasn't quite good enough and kept crapping out on me. I was able to download maybe two emails across a distance of 200 feet (38.100405 N, 79.12949 W to 38.100413 N, 79.13029 W) and through four panes of glass, but that was it.


The Baby (aka "Marie") on the rail of the deck behind the Creekside Manor trailer. Behind her is the ruin of Bob's Auto Body garage.



The Baby walks towards me on the rail. To the left is Eleanor with her bandaged knee.


My brother Don dispenses advice for dealing with an attacking bear.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?080109

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