November Night

Listen
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.

Adelaide Crapsey
1878–1914
 She also makes reference to the afterlife, invoking the mythological river Styx. In her poems the season is perpetually autumn or winter, and the reader visits bleak (though also beautiful) natural scenes and elegant cemeteries. 

Today and Tomorrow and Today

  November 1, 2011  Greetings fellow         pioneers.. .I learn and experience   something new everyday as you know through my past blogs...  Some have been quirky, some fun, and for me always educational in the process.  That's what I love about being a Pioneer.....just open your eyes and explore. Maybe because it's a dreary November day and I'm feeling very melancholy that today's post will be very different than my past blogs, but no matter, today it is today until tomorrow when it will be today again..


I stumbled upon a beautiful clip on YouTube which made me contemplate the our rich past and the American way of life and the vast landscape in which we live.  As we stumble through our journey in our moment of life, we learn also of the beauty of the past, the struggles which are different from our own, still show the human spirit of survival.  This clip of Americana set to the brilliant Aaron Copland's music from his opera A Tender Life has me in awe today of this wonderful piece of work ... life and love is beautiful. Love frees us and gives us light, shining like a star—breaking the fearful darkness of this world, and guiding us on our long and winding journey home one day at a time.  And so...life so fleeting is at times difficult but also sweet...


...This is the Promise of Living..    Please enjoy the video, I promise you will be touched.  Any comments anyone may share would be very much appreciated.  


Your Philosophical P.G....xoxo

Thriller Nights and Bumper Cars

October 30, 2011
Good morning, fellow travelers and pioneer spirits...Although yours truly has not herself traveled to any local haunts on this Halloween, there's a lot of spookiness out there.  Freaking me out was SNOW, yes snow on Halloween...hoping that it is not a portent of the winter ahead.


Halloween has morphed from the old Irish festival of SAMHEIN, which was the night when the world of the dead intersected with that of the living...  To keep the spirits from roaming the earth and to keep from wandering into the OTHERWORLD themselves, farmers would gather around a bonfire, dressed in masks and costumes believing they could get through the night with the ancestors by hook or crook. There's creepy and there's scary in the otherworld and even today...


Not to be a damper on the fun of Halloween dress-up, candy, puking pumpkins....but I always like to find a different take on everything I explore, even if I'm exploring from my home base. Know what else is spooky to this Pioneer Girl....Nuclear plant accidents..radiation..remember this one, 

Chernobyl Amusement Park (Pripyat, Ukraine)
This amusement park, built for the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant workers and their families, was scheduled to open May 1, 1986. But five days earlier at 01:23 local time a fourth reactor explodes and causes a nuclear meltdown, blanketing nearby towns with a lethal dose of radiation.  The world's worst nuclear accident caused the evacuation of the town of 49,000 residents in four hours.  


No one ever returned. Instead of children's
laughter there's an eerie silence, a bizarre emptiness in the amusement park and surrounding buildings, now abandoned for 25 years. The corroding Ferris wheel and bumper cars are forever frozen in 1986. and   it didn't stop there really.. the plume of fallout drifted throughout western Russia and Europe, reaching its dark eerie hands as far as the UK and even to North America. .who knows what the effects have really been over the past decades to human health, the air we breathe and to our beautiful world....  downright...


SPOOKY, HUH...    Yours truly, P.G..... save travels in this world and the otherworld... cause it's a thriller night.  xoxo

(In Just-)

Good morning, fellow pioneers... what did I discover today, but that it is my favorite poet's birthday, e.e.cummings.  GPS coordinates find me re-reading some of my favorites, so in honor.I've always loved this poem...to me it reminds me of the innocent and wonderful world of childhood, playing and jumping and dancing and splashing.    xoxo--PG 


[in Just-]
BY E. E. CUMMINGS

in Just-

spring          when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles          far          and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it's

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer

old balloonman whistles

far          and             wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's

spring

and

         the

                  goat-footed

balloonMan          whistles

far

and

wee

Powdered Wives and Frank Zappa

PG on The Susan Constant

October 1, 2011...Good morning, friends…today GPS coordinates find me in Jamestown, Virginia.  Along with BOG (minus Camper) and trusty Scout, we wound our way in the Ford Pickup south through rainy Somerset and south to Cumberland and Berkeley Springs, through some of the most beautiful Appalachian forests on a very complicated two-lane route.  Thanks to Scout, many arguments and road side stops for map study were averted.

We ended up in Williamsburg VA in just enough time to eat at a local pub and chat with some locals and walk through the chilly streets before some well deserved rest. Early to rise, we ate breakfast at a local joint and I had my fill of southern grits.

Onward to Jamestown and the preserved settlement.   I climbed aboard one of the three replica ships, The Susan Constant, that brought the settlers to the Chesapeake Bay area and had some fun doing my Titanic impression.  Okay didn’t quite work…the gentleman demonstrating the canon and telling tales of pirates informed me that I was at the stern of the boat and not the bow.  Well, so picky.

Food Pyramid

I always learn something, or relearn something new on my journeys.  Although the early settlers were eventually successful, and a tour of the working settlement was great, it was the early 1600’s settlement that I found most interesting and a bit gory, the period known as The Starving Time.  The settlers mistrusted the Powhatans so much and expected savagery that they rejected their welcome and offers, and during the brutal winter, disease and starvation killed over 80% of the colony.  The colonists were desperate and ate all sorts of bizarre things (boiled leather shoes, toadstools, rats of course), and eventually began digging up the corpses and well… Just how is human flesh prepared:    "boiled and stewed with roots and herbs," "powdered," (salted) "carbonadoed” (barbequed).   This is not a healthy diet...roots, toadstools, and wives are not on the Food Pyramid.   It was Captain John Smith who wrote of the turn of events across the pond in his General History of Virginia who wrote:   I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of.

We all know tales of cannibalism throughout history, The Donner Party was a group of American pioneers who set out for California in a wagon train, the group whose plane crashed in the Andes (the movie Alive), serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, and many more…some we’re probably not aware of.

Mr. Green Genes" by Frank Zappa (from the Mothers of Invention album Uncle Meat) makes a funny reference to cannibalism: "Eat the truck & driver / And his gloves / NUTRITIOUSNESS! DELICIOUSNESS! WORTHLESSNESS!"  BTW, it was said at one time that Frank Zappa was the son of Mr. Greenjeans from Captain Kangaroo, but alas that rumor proved to be untrue.   

Well..I’ve had my “fill” of cannibals for now, time for lunch…until my next stop…

Peace on the road, keep your eyes open….XOXO PG

CONES AND STONES

   

Isaly's West View

September 24, 2011  Good morning, fellow Pioneers… wow, it’s been a while since I had my exploring shoes on.  Today I head out to see what I can see.

Along with trusted Scout, I find myself in West View, PA, a northern suburb of Pittsburgh—coordinates per Scout:  40°31′6″N 80°2′1″W / 40.51833°N,  Destination: Isaly’s Dairy Store in search of a Skyscraper Cone.  Everyone remembers those tall cones from the 1960’s, rich White House ice cream filled with maraschino cherries, 4 inches of ice cream piled atop a cone in the shape of and precariously tilted to one side…) closely resembling a Marge Simpson hairdo) all for a whopping 5 cents. 

ISALY'S PATENTED SCOOPING SPOONS

Although Isaly’s went bankrupt in the 1980, Isaly’s in West View is one of only two remaining privately owned dairy bars in the Pittsburgh area and has kept the authentic charm with booths, bright red rows of the famous Barbeque Sauce, luncheon counter with silver rimmed stools, deli case full of chipped ham and other lunch meats decorated with plastic parsley.  But, alas, no skyscraper cones--in fact no ice cream to dip and dig the Isaly’s elongated spoon into. Those spoons!!  For fun, I checked out the spoons, which were actually patented back in the 1930’s.   In fact, even the technology for chipped chopped ham was patented.  But Skyscraper Cones are now just a memory...

DANCELAND

Disappointed and hungry (although breakfast was an option), I headed down Perrysville Avenue towards one of Pittsburgh’s most remembered amusement parks, West View Park.  Sure, West View Park entertained folks young and old with the Racing Whippet, the Swings, the Dips Roller coaster and other fun rides and picnic spots from 1906 to 1977 and a lot has been documented about the amusement park; but it was DANCELAND where couples met, courted, and danced to performers like Duke Ellington and Bobby Vinton (who was a student at Duquesne University then), Bobby Vee, and many others.

But I'm a rock and roller,and and interesting tidbit I found along my research was that in 1964 Danceland featured a new rock and roll group from England on their very first U.S. tour-- and tickets could be had for $1.50: The Rolling Stones!  It's true!   Let's see in 1964 I was..well, let's just say very young. The tour in was, in Bill Wyman's words, a "disaster," as they had no hit records here and were basically nobody's at the time. But KQV booked them at Danceland--I'm curious to know what transpired to get them booked.  If only they knew then what we all know now.   It wasn't until one year later in 1965 that "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" hit the charts and remained #1 in US for 4 weeks.  Danceland had them first!

 

Sadly, Danceland burned to the ground in 1973, it’s mirrored glass ball shattering to a million crunchy pieces, smoldering for days. Although the fire did not start the demise of West View Park,it  was certainly the icing on the cake. The park closed in 1977.   I went there looking for a plaque establishing the Park as a Pennsylvania historic site, but alas there was none.  There’s lots of fast food joints and a Giant Eagle though, hardly an apt tribute. Oh the sign leading into the shopping center has a wooden carousel horse on it...     But West View Park is but a memory… 

Well, all I can say is, I got my exploring feet got dancing with this little trip.  So until the next time…  Keep on dancing, keep on rocking and a’rolling with the Gentry's:       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQT77fCq1BQ&feature=related

XOXO--P.G.  

ps this blog is not intended to be a complete historic view of West View, PA or Isaly's, I'm not from West View and never had the joy of experiencing the rides, the lake, the boats, the tunnels, or Danceland. (although Isaly's skycrapers and chipped ham, I sure have)  This is just my little side-take of my day..I call it Cones and Stones.

Friday, January 21, 2011

Good morning, Pioneer folks...  Coordinates have had PG grounded due to inclement winter weather, but soon enough I have a boatload of local spots to explore, and will be sharing my finds, observations and ideas that come to me when I'm at a new point of interest.

During this time, I have embarked upon a cleanse which has lots of organic green juices, which I juice up each morning, enough for two servings during the day.  Liquids only until noon, and after that a beautiful 80/20 selections of foods, 80 Alkaline and 20 Acidic.  No caffeine, no sugar, no moo food, no dairy, just healthy PH balanced foods.  This is an adventure of its own, however, I have always eaten pretty  healthy, but I'm feeling awesome, and sleeping like a queen.