HJCotton.net

Last Saturday, Alison and I headed to see the “abandoned” portion of the PA turnpike, which is now an 8.5 mile trail. There’s all sorts of video and photos online about it, and it surprised me that I hadn’t even known about it prior to stumbling upon PikeToBike.org while looking up some Appalachian Trail info. Perhaps the biggest reason it’s worth going to see is that this section of the turnpike has been abandoned since 1968 and contains both the longest (and shortest) tunnels on the PA turnpike. The whole stretch has kind of a “Centralia, Highway 61″ feel to it because of the cracked roadway, illegal dumping and ample graffitti, but it is nonetheless quite a cool place to visit.

PikeToBike has a lot of information about the trail. It’s not officially open, but is apparently well traveled. We didn’t encounter anyone the entire time we were there. The Sidling Hill tunnel is supposedly 1.3 miles long (I didn’t measure) and… far darker than I expected. The damp tunnels eat light! If darkness weren’t pressing in from outside, too, I’d have liked to explore the ends of the tunnels a bit more. There are some huge fans sitting on top of the entrance of the Sidling Hill tunnel that I’ll have to explore next time. There’s also an air space in the upper part of the tunnel that can be accessed, which would be pretty cool to get into had I been armed with a more powerful flashlight. It was kind of an eery feeling just walking/riding through this tunnel with such a limited amount of light. For some reason I expected to be crashing into abandoned vehicles, old mattresses and the homeless, but both tunnels are barren throughout. However, the effects of vandalism and time are apparant in the entire length of the tunnels and particularly on the tunnel entrances.

PikeToBike lists some of the projects that would be worthwhile on the property; including paving one of the four lanes (in order to make it accessible via road bike) and adding some minimal lighting the the tunnels. This is on top of tunnel maintenance and repair, which is also pretty badly needed. The roadway is pretty rough but is fine for mountain biking. If you’re going through the tunnels, bring a real flashlight!

Go check it out for yourself!

This past weekend I ventured to Philadelphia to check out the Liberty bell, Independence Hall, and take in the sights of historic downtown Philly along with 6 million other people, Katie and Meghan included. Philly has quite an impressive network of trains that can seemingly take you anywhere you want to go. You actually pay for passage upon boarding the train, and the experience is far more personable than riding in an NYC subway car. I’m accustomed to the train operator mumbling incoherently about what the next station is over the speaker-system, but on these trains the ‘ticket master’ would open the car door and announce, incoherently, our arrival at each station.

While the historic Philly sites were interesting, what I really enjoyed was walking around on the WWII diesel-electric submarine “Becuna” and the 1898-built iron cruiser “Olympia” at the Philadelphia Seaport Museum. Though this one is over 300 feet long, submarines are just plain cramped, and I was only on it for 20 minutes. I couldn’t imagine being trapped in one on a lengthy voyage… especially with four 16 cylinder diesel engines running! The Olympia, on the other hand, was powered by some monstrous steam engines. At full speed it used 600 pounds of coal per minute! Nearby there is a monument dedicated to Christopher Columbus, which sufficiently enraged us and is an opportune time for me to share a quote from the author Kurt Vonnegut:

“1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.”

Sunday we spent the day near Doylestown PA checking out the Henry Mercer museum and Fonthill. What’s interesting about the places designed and built by this guy are that they’re all ENTIRELY made from concrete. Even the roofs are reinforced concrete. Though a millionaire, he made bookshelves from his era’s milk-crates and recycled things he got for low or no cost nearby. After discovering that a recently acquired couch would not fit in the room he wanted to, Mercer hacked the back corner off and then proceeded to file a chunk of concrete out from the wall in order to get it to fit. Ingenious!

Apparently, springtime is a very dangerous time of the year for wildfires. With the lack of shade from trees that don’t yet have leaves, the sun bakes last fall’s fallen leaves to a crisp. All it takes is a carelessly tossed cigarette, or a campfire that isn’t properly put out… We’ve all seen “Smokey the Bear” announcements. I never paid much attention to such propaganda; until today that is. I was burning cardboard boxes in the burning pit at my father’s house today. I was careful to rake up all the leaves within 10 feet or so of the pit and went at it. There was barely a breeze when I started the fire.

When the cardboard boxes caught, suddenly a stiff breeze picked up and blew flaming chunks of ash onto the hill in the backyard. Within seconds, a wildfire was well established. It genuinely surprised me how quickly the leaves and grass burned up the slope of the hill. My leaf rake wasn’t doing me much good, and the garden house didn’t reach past the fire pit, so I started filling up 5 gallon buckets of water and running up the hill to douse the flames; all the while insisting to my father that the pressure washer would not be a good firefighting apparatus. This wasn’t working quickly enough, so I picked up a rock rake and started removing the dead leaves and grass to create a break at the top of the hill. I was very glad to have watched that smoke jumper documentary on the Discovery channel some time back.

By now, my father had procured additional garden hose from the neighbors house and attached it to ours, lengthening it’s reach by 50 feet or so. Surely, this would put the fire out. A garden hose seems to disperse a lot of water; but in the face of such an inferno, it seems the equivalent of attacking the flames with a child’s squirt gun. Between the fire break and the garden hose, we managed to stop the advance of the flames up the hill and work back down the hill to extinguish the north and south fronts of the blaze. After dousing the hot-spots, we regrouped on the back porch to assess the situation.

It reminded me a lot of California; a 60′ by 60′ charred landscape has replaced the plant life that once thrived there. I figure it’s all good; until heavy spring rains fall and cause a mudslide.

After a boating incident like the one I had last year, most people would give up trying to navigate the Hudson River; but not me! This year we were much better prepared – with a fully rebuilt out-drive and newly acquired river-navigation-information. It took Chris and I about 2 hours to get to Newburgh. We found the public launch information online and drove through the slums of Newburgh with boat in tow. We launched there and headed south towards the Statue of Liberty. All was going well until Haverstraw bay, where the wind picked up and waves started crashing over the bow and into the boat. The beating also knocked out the fish/depth finder, a very important piece of gear on this year’s trip. We took shelter in a cove for 15 minutes or so to straighten out the wiring job under the dash and get the depth finder working again.

The wind died down so I picked up the pace a little…. and within a few minutes we collided with a submerged log and destroyed the propeller. We idled down the river with the steering wheel a-shimmying until we found “Westerly Marina” where I was able to buy a new prop ($177) and talk to the store owner about my adventures navigating the Hudson with a road map (which I made sure to bring along this year!). Here, I also forked out $20 for a real marine map of the Hudson, complete with depth soundings. The rest of the trip downriver was rough but uneventful. Huge tugboats, barges, yachts and ferry’s were everywhere as we got closer to the Statue of Liberty. At this point I felt really out of place – being the smallest vessel around… hell; we were the only fiberglass vessel around – everything else was made of iron!

I have never seen waves so big (at least from the helm of an 18′ bow-rider). A few times I thought we were sinking because the waves coming at us from all directions seemed higher than the boat: It was at this point that I decided we should don the flotation gear in the event of a capsizing. There was all kinds of trash to navigate around and we were doing well until we hit an aerosol can, which knocked the transducer out of alignment enough as to render it useless for the trip back. We circled around the harbor for awhile and started back; but not before we hit a monster wave and knocked the rub-rail off of the starboard side of the boat. The gas gauge then came under demonic possession and it’s rapidly moving needle failed to indicate the current fuel level. Halfway back up the river we stopped to fuel-up and paid just $2.55/gallon!

All in all, it was an excellent trip. Everything (but the damaged prop) went according to plan but now that I look back on it, I wish we had ventured further out and gone under the Verrazanno Bridge. Perhaps then I might have had a more interesting story to tell about this adventure… There’s always next year I suppose.

Adventures – Centralia, PA (July 2005)

In an issue of Smithsonian magazine, I discovered the wonderfully exciting world of underground coal-mine fires. Centralia (near Frackville off of I-81) is only an hour and a half away from me and the article in the magazine made it seem so intriguing that I just had to pay it a visit. Somehow I managed to con Sherri into going with me… something about “If I fall into a crack in the abandoned portion of Route 61 and die, you’re not getting my half of the rent for next month!” So we loaded up the bikes and followed Mapquest directions to Centralia.

The first thing I noticed about Centralia is that it’s very easy to miss. I saw a warning sign about an underground mine fire and the next thing I know we’re headed to Mount Carmel on a 4 lane divided highway. We turned around and discovered the closed portion of Highway 61 hidden behind a man-made embankment. What we discovered when we biked down there was not as scary as I had hoped it would be. There are bigger cracks in Jefferson Avenue. Granted, they don’t belch smoke and steam, but I also didn’t see any knife-toting crack heads either. From that standpoint: I’d have to say that I felt safer in a burning, abandoned ghost town than I do in my own. Anyway; on to the photos! The first 9 photos are of the closed portion of Route 61. The picture taken from my car is the mayor’s house, I believe. On the other side of the non-closed portion of Route 61 we found some old vent pipes (and lots and lots of trash). Back on the other side you can see the damage the fire has done. You can also see some more trash (the place has become a dumping ground).

All in all it was an interesting trip. I have to hand it to the photographer from Smithsonian Magazine; he/she probably had quite the time trying to take those photos without getting any of the numerous tires and piles of trash into the pictures. It’s a shame that the government bought up all the land and tore down most all of the buildings. I think Centralia is a delightful place to live. I saw no more than a few wisps of smoke from various crevasses – as far as I’m concerned, the fire is out and everyone can move back!

The Adventures of HJCotton are becoming more like Mis-Adventures of HJCotton. This Hudson river trip was to include a 2 day trip up and down the river in our 18 foot Celebrity. We were well prepared and I made sure that the boat was in tip-top shape before we departed; spending over $150 on ropes, zincs and tune-up parts and another $50 in gas. We launched at “North Anchorage” marina near Newburgh, NY on July 7th, 2004.

12:30PM: The launch fee and an overnight slip cost $50. We started up the river at full throttle to escape the sweltering heat… Cost so far: $250

2:00PM: Things were going well and I was teaching my father how to safely operate the boat; the throttle, the trim, where to stay between the channel-marker buoys. I decided that it would be safe to take a nap while we were heading upstream…

2:26PM: I felt a surge in the boat and I opened my eyes. The outdrive popped out of the water and the boat instantly turned black under a deluge of PCB contaminated river mud. We had beached…. a few hundred yards to the right of the red buoy that we should have stayed left of. I raised the outdrive and powered us off the sandbar and I looked for damage. Little blue globules of blue gear lube bubbled to the surface. A call to a helpful mechanic at work was placed and it was decided that I would not try to limp back 50 miles downstream at idle speed. BoatUS was the next call made…

4:00PM: SeaTow showed up in a fly towing rig and we got a ride 1.5 miles past the Saugerties lighthouse to the Saugerties marina where we were laughing stocks. We made arrangements to leave the boat docked there temporarily and I had to fork out $190 for a fair-weather tow. It cost us $20 to leave the boat at the dock for a few hours. Cost so far: $460

6:00PM: Now we found ourselves in a predicament; 50 miles from our tow vehicle at a run down marina with a broken-ass boat. An employee was kind enough to give us a ride back to North Anchorage Marina in Newburgh for $50. 2 hours later we were back to pick up the boat. Cost so far: $510

8:30PM: With the boat on the trailer and out of the water, the damage to the lower unit was evident – a hole directly in front of the drain screw. It was time to get back on the road and go the hell home.

11:00PM: After an uneventful dinner, I dropped the boat off at work. Upon leaving, I released the parking brake and the dashboard brake-warning lights stayed on… As if the day could get much worse. The truck made it home, and the installation of a new rear brake-cylinder the next day cost another $100.

In reflection:

I learned a lot of things on this trip. The most important is to never, ever navigate a body of water with an interstate road map. Things like this are bound to happen if you are cheap. Also, considering the damage my father had done to the boat, and the predicament we were put in… I found the situation at times to be nothing short of hilarious. It was just another adventure; what else can I say?