Today we left Connecticut, leaving behind Shelton, which is a nice old town, a bedroom community of New York, and Irene’s nice family, now mine. The Sullivans have been there forever and will remain there forever, no doubt. Steve can’t go anywhere in town without knowing somebody, where I can’t go anywhere where I DO know somebody, so we’re even although different.

When Irene asked Steve what he would do if he suddenly had a couple of million tax-free, he said he would give a lot of it to his kids, and with the rest he would tear his house down and rebuild it right there, because he likes it there, and who can blame him? He’s Steve Sullivan, uncrowned King of Sullivan Avenue, and there are only three houses on the Street, and his daughter is in another of the other two, and probably if we wait long enough one of them will buy the third and there he’ll be again, King of Sullivan Avenue where I, on the other hand, am not even King of the Road, although I’m trying.

I have to say the extended Sullivan family (including Jack and Karen and Stevie and Danielle and Matthew and Jim and Jean and….did I forget anyone? Probably….) are a wonderful group of folks. What they have they share with us…food, time, love…and want to wait on us, which is rare for us as usually we only have each other to wait on or to be waited on by. The waiting on us part is largely unnecessary, but they don’t know that, and I won’t disallusion them, because, who knows, they might stop if I did.

Once we left we headed roughly West across 84, through New York and into Pennsylvania, then on 81 and at last on the big boy, Interstate 80, into Bloomington. Because we almost never reserve places in advance we of course had no park in mind when we started, and stopping where we could dump our black- and grey-water tanks, after dry-camping in Steve’s driveway for a week, wasn’t an option, it was a necessity. Eventually, Irene, on the air-card and cell as we traveled, found a place outside Bloomington, right off 80, and so about 5 PM we arrived at Indian Head campground, on the banks of the Susquahana River, and we immediately ran into Pauline, who had a spinning rod in the back of her golf cart, and she shared with us that earlier this year she had caught a 39″ Carp that weighed nearly 25 pounds, which is a lot of Carp. She said her picture was up in the office with the Carp. She said that her husband, who is disabled, hooked one that may have been bigger than hers but it broke off when they were trying to land it, but he’s still ahead of her in terms of total fish caught this year.

I went inside the office later, after we were set up and the dogs had been walked, because I wanted to see what a 25-lb Carp looks like. The answer is, it looks like a very big fish. Some people don’t consider the German Carp to be a game fish, categorizing it instead as a “rough fish”, and I can guarantee that when you supersize them like that they do look rough, and Pauline said it treated her rough, running all the way across the large river into the brush at the edge of the far side before she coud turn it around and eventually walk it up the bank, measure and photograph it, and release it. She said he’s still there, now bigger, no doubt, but alive and kicking. She seemed very pleased with herself and who can blame her? She’s getting an award from the State and is ahead of her husband for biggest fish of the year, a contest they always run between themselves, although he is still ahead by five fish in the “most fish” category.

What do Carp tell us about the meaning of life? I don’t know, not exactly. I do know that they were a very desireable food fish in Germany at the turn of the 20th century when someone imported them here. They found they liked it but somewhere along the way captured this “rough fish” designation and were subsequently disdained by “purists” who wanted the cleaner-looking, albeit much smaller, trout, bass, pike, pickeral, muscelunge, salmon and so on. The poor Carp…brought here to be something special and then ignored…at least until now.

I noticed in a fly fishing magazine that Carp are now a target fish for fly fisherman. I have never caught one on a fly but I could see it…they are a smart, opportunistic and talented fish quite capable of tearing a fly-rod in half and, along the way, scaring the wholy heck out of any poor and largely unsuspecting trout they may pass. The Carp is Back.

Their relationship to the meaning of life, again? Oh, I could make something up easily enough. I could talk about how everything comes full-circle. How we should throw nothing away as it will be back in fashion. About how perception colors reality….and how, when Carp were well-regarded, Pauline’s catch would have been considered the prize of all time, where now it’s marginal if, ten years ago, if anybody would have even admitted to catching one, and now we are here in times where it’s not fashionable to be exclusive, and ol’ Mr. Carp can certainly put a bend in any fly rod, and, now that I think about it, I wonder where she caught that one? I mean, I know it’s here in the river, but which hole, and what did she use? We may have an hour or two to spare in the morning, after all.

I don’t know any serious book collector who could ever mistake the stock in an antique shop for that in an antiquarian bookstore. Based on having been in perhaps thousands of the former and hundreds of the latter, I know I never could. Hey, antique shops for the most part don’t even sell antiques these days, (much less true antiquarian books) unless you realistically consider Carnival Glass to be an antique. Of course the various definitions of “antique” vary, but in the past the old standby of “over 100 years old” was at least instructive. Now “antique” is synonymous with “collectable” and in today’s economy that’s probably overly enthusiastic and it’s probably more like “anything that somebody might buy for some unknown reason.” For instance, yesterday Irene, her sister Jeanne and I spent a couple of hours trolling through the “antique district” in downtown Seymour, a small bedroom community of New York nearby Shelton, where Jeanne and Steve, her husband, have always lived. Granted Seymour isn’t yet as upscale as Shelton is getting to be but the antique shops, while cute, have truly awful books…the most useless trash imaginable….but by far the worst, because they were ALMOST something of interest, were three small books that were each bound in leather and were about 50 years old. Fine bindings by themselves are a catagory of book collecting and as such were of some small interest to me as a dealer/collector, but they weren’t very fine at all, being badly rubbed and stained and with otherwise obvious damage on a lot of people, but worse than that they were written in what I believe was Lithuanian or at best Polish and appeared to be reprints of sermons of some obscure Protestant minister. Not that this makes them bad by itself, as I suppose that somebody, someplace wants marginal-quality leather-bound books written in a foreign language and featuring people nobody has heard of lecturing about something nobody cares about but hey, who am I to judge, and if I was, I would also be judging the nearly $200 price-tage each one of the three volumes carried. So let’s see…no earthly purpose for anybody wanting these things but because they are somewhat cute let’s charge a million dollars for them just in case. Real value, as determined by me, because I do have some expertise in this subject? More like $10-15, with their only purpose being to fill a shelf of other, better-bound volumes for some decorator who needs to plug a hole of maybe five inches.

Let’s compare that with three volumes that a true Antiquarian bookseller has just offered me. Granted, Ron operates a bookstore that, for monetary purposes has to double as a collector’s book store and a used bookstore, two other things that are not being an antiquarian shop, but in addition to that he’s a true antiquarian dealer. He and I got off to a rocky start as I made the mistake of talking about a relatively rare book I own (a first edition, first state of The Emerald City, a follow-on book writtin in the early 1900s by L. Frank Baum, who in 1899 made history by writing the first definitivly classic American children’s book, the Wizard of Oz) out loud to a collector in Ron’s store who was looking for L. Frank Baum. Ron was right to bring me up short…dealers should always go THROUGH the dealer in his own shop, not around him…and after he graciously accepted my apology (and I promised to send him a better description of the book so HE could contact the L. Frank collector aforementioned) he and I turned to other matters and it in turn turned out that he owns three leather-bound and VERY early books on fly-fishing, either my first- or sometimes (after early poker books) second-love in the book-collecting world. Now these are in his own personal collection and weren’t in the store, but the next day he brought them in, called me and I trotted right down. These three books are spectacular, treasures, works of art. They are all about fly-fishing, one of the most desireable subjects among serious book collectors, although there are literally thousands of works in the field. They are all VERY Early….two of them very early 1800s and one of them, amazing, early 1700s, putting it right around the time of some of the Compleate Angler stuff, this one written by Grey, who was a contemporary of Isaak Walton who of course wrote the C.A. along with Cotton. These three books are all rebound in the most high-quality leather, beautifully done indeed, which protects that very paper of the earlier pieces. They absolutely shine in the half-light of Ron’s shop and after I buy them, which I intend to do, they will shine in the coach as well. Something like this will not leave my personal collection until Irene and I someday need the money, but they are as guaranteed to increase in value as anything could be, especially since Ron has them priced at…wait for it….about the same prices as the three scruffy books in the junk…I mean antique…shop mentioned before.

What does all this say? Nothing much. But it does point out why so many antique shops fail, and why, over time, stores like Ron’s survive. I wonder if there is a lesson here, about value and so on, that we could learn in other areas of business…for instance, in the financial industry, where they persist in producing worthless financial products that don’t bring any value to anyone? Or am I, once again, over-harping on the obvious?

When last we met I was focused on the misanthropic fools I consistently stumble over out here in RV-world, and if you are one of said fools, I’m sorry, but you know what I mean because you simply must know how awful you are, right? Luckily, some of the coolest experiences I have had recently didn’t require people at all. Well, sure, they DID in a way, if you want to be snippy…to develop the applications and invent and produce the gadgets that provide these experiences…but once they exist you don’t have to interact with the people behind the scenes, and you can just go ahead and use them shamelessly which should really work for you, shameless as you are. Let me tell you about a few of my favorite recent experiences.

1.  Cutting through carrots without carpel. We just bought a ceramic knife that cuts through raw carrots, thick broccoli stems, raw apples, whatever,  like they were sticks of warm butter. It’s so light you don’t get carpel tunnel chopping. It’s ten times harder than steel. It may never need to be sharpened, but if you think it does, you send it off to Kyocera and they sharpen it for free and send it back to you.I love this knife and as soon as I save up enough money I’m buying a second one.

2.  A Perfect, Replicable, Cup of Coffee. You would think that I, being a caffeine addict and as nit-picky about coffee as anyone you’ve met and as oriented towards trying new gadgets as I obviously am, that I long ago would have solved the problem of how to produce a perfect cup of coffee each time. But once again, ferret-breath, you would have been wrong….until lately. Last week I found a coffee-maker…well, a coffee-making PROCESS, really, that does exactly what I want….it hands me a perfect cup. It’s made by AeroPress, it works something like a French Press but doesn’t get grounds in the coffee, and a couple of the customer testimonials say it better than I…”I have achieved coffee nirvana”, says one, and “It makes the absolute best cup of coffee I’ve tasted in my entire life,” says another, and I agree with both, and it only costs $30, and I’ve paid more than that for a pound of coffee. Well, not often, but I have. Negatives? You have to be conscious, you have to follow the process, and you have to take the temperature of the water before you pour. Too difficult? Sucks to be you; I’m drinking good coffee.

3.  A lawyer-ly give-back. OK, I’m not an attorney. But recently a friend of a friend, a woman and her boyfriend who ARE attorneys, developed one of the coolest sites. www.examplemotion.com that formalizes something that lawyers have been doing informally for years…it shares documents so lawyers and others don’t have to create new wheels every time they need to produce a document in an area perhaps outside their specific area of expertise. And maybe it can work for you, too. For instance, let’s say you have an urge to file a motion to compel discovery in your latest nuisance lawsuit. You can now go to examplemotion and find how the pros do it, and do it a little better this time so you don’t get laughed out of court. O course I don’t think the examplemotion guys have you and I in mind as their target market…they’re essentially looking for other attorneys to use their work and in turn to leave some of their own, a very humanistic and thoughtful approach to cooperatively working in the law…an area not always known for its cooperation…but I bet if you’re nice they’ll let you play, too. Anyway, check it out…http://www.examplemotion.com, like I said.

I have more examples, but I’m tired and I can’t do EVERYTHING for you, can I? Do you think I’m your mother?

People, mostly misanthropics like Bob T. but occasionally more normal people as well, have asked me, from time to time, to comment on the types of people we run into on the road, and for the most part I don’t, because I really don’t like that many people and the more I see of them the less I like of them, and therefore it has always seemed to me negative or elitist or worse if I talk about what I really think about some of the folks we meet, not to mention that, emotionally, I’m usually better off not recognizing the disdain that usually lurks beneath my smiling exterior – what good does it do me to know that I’m smarter than about 99% of the people I meet out here on one hand and to recognize that I’m still out here doing exactly the same stuff they do, because apparently I’m not smart enough to change what it is that I’m doing?

Or something like that. That said, enough is enough and I’m here to tell you that something simply must be done about the overall quality of people in general. Let me go a little further with an example or two and you tell me if I’m off-base.

So yesterday we were at a KOA campground…and you already know I hate KOAs, starting with their stupid, obviously misspelled-on-purpose name and continuing into their being the hangout of screamy-loud, drippy-nosed kids on skateboards who, at night, screech karaoke, and by extension also the hangout of their parents, who apparently are stupid enough to think the kids are funny, cute, or capable or singing remotely near on-key, none of which is even close to true. However, this particular KOA, outside Freeport, Maine, is quite beautiful in spite of the dumb bunny next door who spent fifteen minutes  trying to convince me that killing bears by baiting them, running them with a bunch of dogs and then shooting them out of a tree is a sport. Heck, it’s quite beautiful in spite of  plastic playgrounds, above-ground swimming pools, bath houses purposely designed to look like barns, all showing that humans, piss-poor custodians of the Earth that we have proven repeatedly that we are, still can’t screw everything up, and in fact whenever we do less, it works out to be more, as for instance-d by the nature trail that some numb-brained KOA work camper cut around the camp one afternoon on a bulldozer and then promptly forgot, as a result of which, just a few weeks later, the trail is half overgrown, mulched by a foot of leaves, this making it half-perfect, and, because it isn’t some pathetic plastic swing-set or, worse, a long series of blow-up Santa Clauses and Elves representing something KOAs call “Christmas in July”, because of the things it isn’t,  it is also largely ignored by everyone in  camp besides Irene and I, meaning only she and I and Jake and Spyro went on it, which took it the rest of the way to perfect, and after shopping in Freeport for several hours I c0uld go and detox on the trail with her and life was reasonably good.

Except when we went to the free Bluegrass concert our last evening, sponsored by L.L. Bean…this is the home of L.L. Bean and they have a stage and free concerts every week in season, being part of their “giving back”, the brochures they pass out telling us about their giving back being the rest of their giving back, but anyway, yesterday evening, they had the Puck Brothers, who feature probably the best bluegrass mandolin player in the world and certainly are an adventurous, different group, playing bluegrass that sounds like a strange blend of jazz fusion and classical, except with separate instrument parts for the mandolin, bass, guitar, fiddle and banjo. It’s a strange, complex, sophisticated form of music, well worth listening to, and I could even forgive Steve, my redneck buddy sitting next to me who clearly didn’t approve, because he at least has grounding for his disapproval, this being his deep understanding of the classical bluegrass form and, I think, a deeper sadness at the mandolin player’s in particular having left all that classical stuff behind in his own personal search for musical fulfillment.

No, what gripped me here was the gang of seven, totally fat, half-drunk idiots four rows behind me who simply wouldn’t shut up, no matter how many times people gave them the look, even though people nearby actually TOLD them to shut up. You have to tell me…why would anybody come to a concert featuring a sophisticated and complex form of music and then persist in talking about Iphone Applications at the top of their collective voices? Worse, why would they persist in laughing at each others’ lame stories about lack of connectivity, about the bargains they got at Best Buy, at the…oh gosh…I can’t even go on without just steaming myself. If I could have wedged my way backwards through the crowd and got to them, I probably would have made it very clear to them how rude they were….hell, how rude they are, as I doubt they’ve stopped being rude since last night, anymore than they stopped being fat.

This is what it’s like out here. People not only are stupid but they all seem amazingly loud, unaware of the impact they have on others, not really seeming to care about anything or anyone except for themselves and their own small comforts. But does this sound any different from ANYTHING else we hear about these days? Bailed-out banks just back from the brink of fiscal death are doubling their bonuses. Bernie M. has gone to jail but obviously only is remorseful at being caught and the fact that he’ll spend the rest of his life in jail, not at the lives of everyone he ruined through greed. Our president is struggling with the recession, with the price of oil, with health-care reform and his work is halted mid-stride by an artificial controversy fostered by ignorant haters about whether or not he should have called an idiotic police action “stupid” or not…and as a result he winds up inviting the perpetrator (the offending police officer) to the white house for a beer. I can’t find anything out there these days that isn’t stupid, so why am I surprised that this stupidity exists within the RV community as well?

So, if I’m this dissatisfied, what do I want out of this life I’ve chosen? Not much, really, truth be known. But I am looking forward to an intelligent conversation with somebody sometime soon, preferably somebody who cares about something besides themselves, even more preferably somebody who will listen when talked to and who will respond on-subject and, dare I say it, without disturbing anyone else around them with their opinions. In spite of everything I said above, I believe that this is possible. But I’m not positive. Anyway, I’ll keep you informed.

The end is coming.

This of course has different meanings to differing folks. For instance, to me, right now, it means that, tomorrow at oh-dark-thirty, we head for North Carolina, leaving Alabama, passing right through Georgia, departing the South in favor of the almost-South or, better, of the mid-Atlantic region. Better because we are through with the South, through with the too-slow pace, the too-high humidity, the too-much-rain, the too-fried food, the too-radical-right Catholic priests. People being people, the people here can be friendly, generous, helpful, trustworthy, professional…all that stuff. And they can be all the other stuff as well and so why comment on the people? It’s the overall that you are aware of, and (excluding the Catholic priest part) it all just seems…wait for it….too little. In this case, the end being near is a good thing.

Not that we think everything can be painted with that same brush, you understand. We just came back from our fourth visit to the Amsterdam Cafe here in Auburn…not only the best restaurant in Auburn by my lights but arguably one of the better places we’ve eaten in months; highly innovative food with an ever-changing menu good enough that we even gave away gift certificates for the place to the Senior Clinician and 4th Year Student who were responsible for Jake’s care. Tonight I had a beautiful Duck, served medium-rare with a traditional rich orange sauce, sitting on a small bed of ripe-cheese Risotto. Irene had a lovely lamb shank, rare, melt-in-your-mouth, with funky little baby brussel sprouts carmelized in a sweet onion sauce much better than it sounds. Overall, better enough to make you forget you were in Alabama, which I did, prompting me to ask a “head” question about “how long do YOU think the sun will shine?”, which in turn prompted the student/waitresss’s giving me the most vacant of looks. Later, going home, Irene and I agreed that the sun HAS shone about 4.5 billion years and by most conservative reports is good for another 4.5 billion; long enough, certainly that neither of us should worry about it much, and yet we both agreed that we used to scare ourselves sleepless wondering what eternity might be, which prompted the follow-on question between ourselves about the nature of heaven….and from there a probably-facetious inquiry from one of us about why the license plate frames here in Auburn all sport that ridiculous slogan, “The Stars Fell on Alabama”…the question being “Why is that a good thing?” I mean, think about it….if the stars fall on Alabama, no matter where WE happened to be at that moment, we are through. Not as through as quickly as we would be when the sun eventually winks out, because that will have a red-star flame-out factor that will instantly vaporize all oceans on all of the planets in the solar system, quicker-than-instantly vaporizing with it all life. But through. I mean, here’s another thing to think about…we all watch the meteor movies, right? The ones where a little piece of a meteor hits the earth, creating earthquakes, tidal waves, hurricanes, and prompting the return of George W. Bush who will come back iterating that this is all Intelligent Design, or, perhaps worse, Regan, never dead at all, just as I feared, and again stipulating that ketchup really is a vegetable….an errant Californian who never earned the name.

I seem to have wandered, but I was probably nearly through anyway, and tomorrow I really will will be through. Through with Alabama, assuredly, and, assuming a still-burning sun, looking forward to a new day, somewhere – anywhere – else.