FREE AT LAST

     Twelve miles up the Ohio R. from Paducah (where the Tennesee flows into the Ohio)  we take a right turn onto the Cumberland R., a pleasant, winding stream, which has negligible current although we are still going up river and encounter fairly large tows on the tight bends.  This is a 30 mile detour which takes us to Barkley dam and lock and thence into the lakes region.  Barkley Lake is a 134 mile long lake with over 1000 miles of shoreline and Kentucky Lake, just to the west, is one of the largest man-made (no chicks were involved in its birth) lakes in the world…um universe.  It covers 160,000 acres and has 2,380 miles of shoreline.  “Quiet anchorages and modern marinas abound”  This is one of the prettiest places we’ve seen- it rivals the North Channel for beauty and cruising opportunities.  The water is a little muddy, but it’s warm.  Sailing, skiing, hiking, hunting, fishing, boating, and just farting around are all primo.  Check out the Land Between The Lakes , a 170,000 acre scenic playground with historic little towns and many campgrounds.  Great place for the whole fam damily. 

Just inside Kentucky L. we stayed at a “clean, well-lighted place” –Lighthouse Landing, a primarily sailboat marina.  RULE 21:  NO liveaboards.  Nice cottages and RV spots and many sailboats to 40’. Met a very cool guy who was a cross between Jim Harrison and Jimmy Buffet who gave me a 20 mile ride to get propane, and wanted to know if I needed to go into Paducah for some rum as this was a dry county.  Regrettably, I demurred.  We considered erecting our masts here, but, since we wanted to give them another coat of paint, we decided to wait until Mobile.  Of course the next 2 days we had winds on our six of 20 knots (and waves of 2+feet);  this gave us a nice push south.  Had two of the coolest anchorages anywhere in secluded coves, perfect weather, caught a mess of small striped bass on a little Cleo and two sizeable blue catfish on crawlers.  Chilly nights, warm days, morning fog, no bugs, colors just starting to change. 

In this area, the birds became much more plentiful:  kingfishers, swallows, finches, osprey, bald eagles, vultures, ravens, Great White  egrets (black legs), and especially the Great Blue Heron  distinguishable by its size and yellow beak.  Its numbers were only matched by the rod-pumping bass bashers in their sleek go-fast metal-flake machines.  Every quarter klic down the banks would be a svelte, stilted sentinel with its long curvaceous neck out-stretched, or with its head withdrawn and shoulders hunched like some gray-blue somber medieval bishop waiting its turn to move against the stilted castles of the humans perched on the steep, wooded bluffs in the ancient chess game of nature vs. man.  Whoa, easy, Dave.  We passed “many mansions” with incredible stone walls and stairways on the shores of the lakes that put the cottages of Lake Mich to shame.  Most seem to have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain in the last 10-15 years.  Too bad half of them are for sale. 

Working our way up The Tennessee R., we chugged languidly along in the late summer sunshine through the history of the 19^th century.  Tours of antebellum mansions, plantations, towns with a dozen buildings on the Historic Places Register were accessible.  A woman at a small marina where we did a lunch stop  talked on the radio as if she had a mouthful of pralines and honey.  We stopped to shop in the ville of Clifton where our bikes took us along a country road to Main Street where all that was open were two newish banks, a brace of churches, a brick school, and an IGA.  A 60 year-old pharmacy, the barber shop, the restaurant, an old hotel, and various other small businesses were recently closed down.  A sweet palpable peace hung in the air like the leaf smoke in the autumn of my childhood.  We floated on the river past the Nathan Bedford Forrest forest, past the “Trail of Tears” where the Seminole and the Cherokee were marched to the barrens of Oklahoma in a “relocation” scheme, passed under the Natchez Trace,  and with Steve Earle on the stereo singing about Mc Cullough (sp.), :  “Don’t know what I’m fightin’ for/ I never owned a slave”- we swept past Shiloh.  Here, in April of 1862, 24,000 soldiers were either dead, wounded, or missing in an epic battle of the Un-Civil war.  I guess the blood of the fighters was the Roundup needed for the trees that “bore a strange fruit” (Lady Day Holliday). To paraphrase Hemingway,  Words like honor, valor, patriotism, courage didn’t have meaning anymore. It was only the names of places:  Antietum, Shiloh, Bull Run, Gettysburg, and Zutphen which carried any weight.  Now some of you folks might be getting’ a mite upset with talk like this from a no good non-veteran, carpet baggin’ pleasure boatin’, earringed, tattooed,  damnYankee comin down here flyin' his planet flag..  But please, we come in peace and sadness with hope for a little understanding.  And if that don’t get it, we kicked you’re a$$ once and we’ll do it again.  Come on, I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Please don’t hurt me.

THIS IS NO FUN

THIS IS FUN!

LIGHTHOUSE LANDING

CALIBAN'S CAVE

STRIPER

Also, we’d like to thank those of you who hold us in your thoughts and prayers for a safe journey.         Salaam alaikum.  Dave and Jan (who is not to blame)   

Lock Nest Monster

Standing wave at Lock 53

Wahl ah shore wooud laak to, but ah cain't

Dave gets a ride

Yep, shore was a baad flare joint.

sheer dredgery

Tips for flaring copper tubing:  1- The nut must be put on the line before making the flare!  If possible use a long-nosed fitting.  2:  The end of the tube must be cut square and cleaned of all burrs inside and out.  3:  Warming the tube before screwing down the spinner will help prevent cracking (ideally the tube should be annealed).  4:  The tube may need to protrude above the face of the clamp by 1/3 or ½ the depth of the bevel to permit an adequate flare.  When made, the flare should just fit into- but not hang up on- the sides of the flare nut.  5:  The spinner should be oiled when making the flare.  6:  The spinner should not be screwed down too tightly- it will weaken the flare.  When the joint is done up, the flare nut will pull the flare snugly onto the flared fitting.  7:  If the flare looks uneven or in any other way unsatisfactory, it must be cut off and remade.  Doing so right away will be a lot easier than doing so later.   Page 530.  “Boat Owner’s Mechanical and Electrical Manual”, Nigel Calder  2005

We got an early start the next morning and were excited to get off the Mississippi and head upstream on the Ohio at the confluence at Cairo.  As we made the left turn to the East, we soon realized that the Ohio is no punk%%% river itself.  We were working upstream against a 2 to 3 mph current and there was plenty of barge traffic to deal with.  The banks were gentler though, with some grassy  areas, and the bird life seemed more plentiful.  We found a nice anchorage on the Kentucky side about halfway up the 60 miles we had to go before meeting the Cumberland R. turn off.  We anchored along side the bank with an anchor fore and aft to keep us aligned with the current, and we were just around a corner which protected us from a stiff westerly breeze which kicked up a 2’ chop against the current.  The next day, as I was steering upstream, a tow headed out from the left bank to our port and angled out into the river on a converging vector with our course.  I couldn’t move too far to the right because of a giant dredge working there.  I had been trying to minimize our radio traffic so as not to interfere with the pros and I thought our speed would take us in front of the barges, but we heard          earzztvbmd,kriuutuhjjfkjfkspiniriut69ifkjaroundmmdkk4k5k.  Suddenly, the bow of the tow turned directly at us and we were just able to take evasive action.  Another close call.  I think the Captain must have had a black cat bone and put the juju on us because listen to this:

Just as we were relaxing again into our routine we came up on Lock and Dam 53.  Because of the high water from the recent rains, the pickets of the dam were down which allows boats to pass over the dam without locking through.  We contacted the dam on CHNL 13 and received permission to pass through.  We noticed some standing waves and quite a bit of current as we were passing over the dam, but were busy checking out and waving to another boat which was passing us.  When we looked abeam at the lock wall it soon became apparent that, although our speedo said 6.5, we were actually standing still and then were inching backward.  I signaled the engine room for full speed ahead but Scotty said “I’m givin’ ‘er all she’s got Captain Kirk!”  The speedo soon read above seven but it felt as if a giant hand had taken ahold of us from below (perhaps it was the Lock Nest monster). My next impulse was that we had fouled a large line or were hung up on the pickets.  Thump, thump, went our hearts.  After working the boat back and forth across the current (which resulted in some alarming forward ferries (canoe lingo)  we finally broke free of Satan’s grasp and inched our way up river.  Phfeeewww.  Soon, Jan said, “Do you smell paint thinner?”   I replied in the affirmative and scrambled below to check the paint locker.  No dice.  On deck again we kept sniffing and I wondered, “Maybe it’s diesel fuel.  I’ll bet Cindy has stowed away in the aft cabin.”  When I opened the engine room I was met with a fountain of diesel fuel squirting from a fuel line.  I was about to tighten it with my trusty left-handed crescent wrench when I decided that I might break it off and really cook our goose.  So I wrapped a rag around it and we limped upriver a few miles to Paducah, KY where by a stroke of serendipity there was a tie up open at the floating town dock.  Bad luck couldn’t have transpired in a better place.

I have never been in a friendlier place.  The “dock committee” , comprised of several ancient fishermen , assorted layabouts , retired rivermen, tourists, loopers, and even Tom and Huck (see Picture) greeted us, supervised our landing and tie up, assessed the situation, offered cogent advice as to methods of repair offered us rides into town, and, believe it or not, during the two days we were there, three people offered us their cars.  Incredible.  Jan, of course, offered to take Huck and Tom with us to which Tom replied, “Ahh shore weeesh ah cooud, but ah cain’t”.  We cleaned about 2 gal. of fuel out of the bilge and gave it to a guy who needed it to burn his brush pile.  Half a bottle of Dawn and a couple rolls of paper towels, and we had a semi-livable boat again.  The next day, two different guys gave me repeated rides to NAPA and a radiator shop where we had a new flexible fuel line custom soldered and crimped and we had the old girl purring again.  I had replaced an old fuel line with copper flare fittings, neglected the finer points of flaring, so the fuel line cracked when we reved the engine up. 

If you’re ever in the area, check out Paducah.  It’s got a cool mural on the flood walls, a beautiful, peaceful, cool little tree-lined avenue where you can find a 100-year old bakery and a hip new coffee shop, and make sure you stop at Coop’s BBQ for some of the best pulled pork around.  And, if you like Museums there is the railroad museum and quilting museum. This is a quilting mecca.  Most places have some local food market goods and we were able to stock up on some fresh vegetables as well.   

THE BIG MUDDY

Dave heads for danger with a bottle of wine

Jan braves another bridge

Huh, what?

“Ole man river keeps rollin’along”. (?)   “That ol’ river keeps on rollin’ though/ no matter what gets in the way/ or which way the wind does blow”.  (Dylan)   “Can’t put the rain back in the sky/ once it falls down,  please don’t cry./ Can’t force the river upstream/ when it goes south, know what I mean./  Are you down, babe, down with that.” (Lucinda Williams- ESSENCE). 

     Now we’re on a REAL river.  If you consider the Missouri a part of it, it’s right up there with the Amazon and the Nile.  Big currents, big tows, big turns, big banks, big bridges.  “Past nun gut auf!” (Pay attention).  From the confluence we shot down the river at 10 knots (6 on our speedo, 10 on the GPS= 4 knot current.  We flew by the arch at St. Louis which city has no welcoming, safe waterfront facilities for the pleasure cruiser ?????  Why not?  We are known to the tow captains as PC’s (pleasure craft),  an apt appellation from our point of view, if, perhaps, a derogatory one from theirs.  I’m sure that we are akin to the mosquito to them, a constant if not particularly egregious irritation.  We try to blend into their traffic patterns by communicating on channel 13 with them, but to the neophyte, it’s a precipitous learning curve.  “The one whistle” means passing port to port when meeting, but port to starboard from the overtaking vessel’s weltanschauung.  The “two whistle” is of course the reciprocal.  The VHF transmissions are usually quite garbled with static and arcane references as to places and identities.  A 1500’ tow might suddenly decide to do a 180 deg. spin in the middle of the river.  They might want you on the “one” or the “two” when meeting or overtaking on a tight turn or in a congested situation.  These guys are incredible masters of their craft(s) and are unfailingly considerate, polite and calm.  The majority have a deep drawl with a predominance of Cajun influenced patois.  An amazing, and, I believe, very well paid subculture.  Thanks for your forbearance, guys.

The only choice for a stop on the first day was Hoppie’s marina, which is a barge moored along the right descending bank run by an old riverman- Hoppie- and his semi-famous partner, Fern, who holds an informational and precautionary confab with the Loopers who wash up on their bank each day.  Brilliant, piercing blue eyes, deeply lined face, and a cloud of smoke swirling in a halo. A group of boats will naturally congeal together due to lock timing, mooring opportunities, and a natural affinity of anxiety and shared adventure.  Rock Chalk, Confetti, Duddon Pilot, Oceanus, Last Dance, Last Chance, Sonata, Cap’t Sharon abd. Something Landing, et. al. all became radio personalities, happy hour raconteurs, boating stylists, sources of info, etc.  We must learn to make friends on shorter notice, because too soon the pace of travel will widen the gap.

  Then, in the morning, gird up your loins, screw your courage to the sticking point, and back on that horse (and don’t change it in midstream).  A quick 60+ miles down the river we pulled off into Little River Diversion Channel, a placid anchorage near Cape Girardeau with room for many boats and a chance of a barge tow entering in the night.  That night and all the next day it was buckets of rain, buckets of tears, got all them buckets comin’ out of my ears.  The ‘puter showed rain all the way up the Miss. and the Ill. Now we had to worry about a wall of water coming down the channel.  God willing or not, the creek was gonna rise.  We decided to take a lay day here anyway, so we did.  The GPS showed that town was 1.8 mi. away, so being bored in the rain and in need of certain comestibles, we set another anchor, downed dinghy, buzzed up to the RR bridge and struck out on foot in our foulies.  Well, we should have stayed on the RR tracks (There's a whole lot for a boy to think about as he walks along the tracks./  As he walks along...Greg Brown?)  because the two-track short-cut (Diek) turned out to be a morass (now that’s just grade school, Bill- there’s no need to denigrate a perfectly good word) of mud and quick(-mud)sand.  Every step Jan would take for 1/8^th of a mile she would almost lose a boot or fall over.  Oh,yeah, real funny, now. (Gonna’ do a little dance in that Mississippi mud.  Hank Wms. III) The path did take us by a couple of really cool caves  which Tom, Becky, and Huck could easily  have inhabited.  It turned out that the trek lasted 3 hours in the deluge and the thunder and lightning and nary a one Missourian to give us a ride.  Finally, we reached “town” and found a groc store, gas station, and, dripping wet , shivering, in our foul weather gear and mood we were served a fantastic authentic Mexican meal by a very bueno senorita.  Somewhere the sun was shining.  We then got our groc, talked the manager of the store into a ride back to the tracks near our boat and hiked back to the channel.  Here we were greeted by our dinghy riding 2’ higher than when we left it and a 5 knot current in the channel.  As we coasted down past the other boats anchored there, people were shouting, “What’s the name of your boat?”  Nrrrgsdtk dragging!  Oh, good, another dose of adrenaline.  Someone had come in, dropped anchor, and he quickly took the dogs ashore.  (Hi, Blucifer!) Well, she was on the boat alone when it started dragging out towards the raging river.  She started blowing the horn.  He, meanwhile threw the dogs in the dinghy, and headed toward the boat when his little outboard quit. Now he was being sucked out toward the big water in the dinghy and the big boat was dragging.  The horn blasts became more frequent and frantic.  We started out towards them but I glanced at the bow of our dinghy and we had 3” of freeboard with all our supplies and a 2 horse motor.  We about faced and inched our way back up current to the Visitor.  Some deft, brave soul in a Great Banks or possibly a Monk trawler ventured out to the edge of the current and threw the dinghy a line.  Disaster was narrowly averted. 

Jan stowed the groc., I cleaned the gluey mud off of our traveling gear, we heated some leftovers, and sank wearily into our dank, damp sleeping quarters.  Goodnight, Irene, good night Irene, I’ll see you in my dreams.

DAVE GETS OFF

Sorry to leave ya’ll  (ahm staahtin’ to tawk lock this here awreddy) hanging for a few days, but we’ve been pretty busy traveling.  It’s a job of work.  After the adrenaline of the grounding left our bloodstreams, we made it down the remainder of the Illinois in fine fettle.  There were still tows and current and locks and logs and navigation and the stress of finding a safe anchorage for the night to deal with, but we had a nice run in good weather.  We arrived at the marina in Grafton, IL, at the confluence of the Illinois  and the Mississippi rivers early in the afternoon (the red and green bouy is where the two channels meet)  and tied up with a sigh of relief and the pffft of pop tops.  What a grand view to see the limestone cliffs of the Missouri side for miles upriver.  I’ll bet it’s a grand place for the autumn colors. We hurried up and did the laundry and cleaned the boat, both of which were so dirty they should have been spanked.  Then to bed by 8 pm—what a waste of $50 for a marina, although they do have the nicest showers since Eldean's.   My internal compass (at least the geographical one) is usually quite good, but, because the rivers take some crazy loops hereabouts, I found that the sun set in the  East and rose in the West.  What a strange feeling.  No matter how I checked the compass and the charts, it was two days, when we were headed south on the Mississippi, before I could shake the anomaly.  We certainly didn’t want to end up in Minneapolis for the winter.  Grafton is also the bald eagle watching capitol of the world according to the sign.  Our avian friends seemed less plentiful the further southwest we got and were very far between and few on the Miss. R.   We wondered why--  perhaps they were hanging out more on the backwaters.  The swallows stayed with us all the way though (now that’s true love) with their flitting, swooping, darting flight patterns.  We also had repeated sightings of a Monarch butterfly on his/her way south to Mexico.  We are quite sure it was the same one that we kept seeing because he/she was always the same color and flew the same seemingly aimless  course—so we named him/her MOJO and would always say HI! when she/he joined us on our hejira (religious pilgrimage) to Mecca----I mean Mobile.  She/he kept calling to us, in pappillonese, “Come all the way down south to old Mexico, cabron!”

Books:  Huck Finn,  The Story of Edgar Sawtelle,  Work Shirts for Madmen, (thanks, Craig),  Arabian Sands—by Wilfred Thesiger  (thanks, John—talk about a traveler!)

Website:  Google search :  S/V Precipice   This guy took his wife and daughters on a trip from our homeport in Muskegon through the Northwest Passage to Alaska.  All I can say is “cojones".
{ JAN-  ADM is a large food products corp.}

AGROUND!

AHHOOHGAH!  AHHOOHGAH! AHHOOHGAH!  ALL HANDS ON DECK!  WE'VE RUN AGROUND!!!

Broken Dreams

Sickening Lurch

     Remember the servant on the Addams family?  Well he's getting worse.  Sickening lurch might be a cliche, but it's the most apropos phrase for when your boat stops suddenly and you keep going.  We were approaching the Florence bridge and Jan was at the wheel.  She had been there far too long while I was below trying to construct this blog.  There was a big tow (tug and barges) coming up behind us, so, Jan decided to take the right span instead of the center where the tow would come.  Unbeknownst (love that word) to us, they had recently dredged there and left a spoil bank under the bridge.  We ran up on it at full speed and went abruptly from 10' of water to 2'.  The bow was high and dry with the waterline at least a cubit above the water at the stem, and we were in 1.5 knots of current.  We named the two kids Florence and Bridger-  see previous blog.  Okay, what now?  We ran two of our largest anchors out up river and tightened up on them with the windlass and a winch.  We've never been so cranky.  Got the rodes (lines) bar tight and smoked the engine in reverse.  Nothing so much as a hint.  Then the windlass quit, so we had to transfer the port line to the winch.  Fortunately, it was only the circuit breaker.  We tightened up (Archie Bell and the Drells)  so much we pulled the port anchor into the boat.  I decided that we needed some lateral twist to wrench that wench off the bar, so we ran it back out to the side and re-cranked.  All this was done in the dinghy, in the current.  We are cranking away and just waiting for one of those big wake makers to come along and give us some rise.  Scarcer than genuine smiles at a fund raiser.  All the while we were shouting and radioing forth and back to the bridge tender as to help from other boats (thanks, Rock Chalk, for stopping)  and the Coasties.  Just as the phone rang from the St. Louis office of the Coast Guard,  I put the boat in reverse one more time and we slipped gently back toward our anchors and didn't even tangle them in our prop. That felt better, as Huck Finn would say,"than church getting out".  All told, we wasted about 4.5 hours, got a good workout,  and got a good lesson in kedging off.  No damage to the boat.  Onward and downward!

Peoria Pounder

Blog S/V Visitor 19 Sept. 2011  Pos. N 39 44.2,  W 90 37.42

Peoria Pinks

There are many forms of water  torture I’ve only read about.  The ancient Chinese version where they tie you down and let water drip, drip, drip on your forehead for days.  We’ve all heard about the new fad of water boarding where they put a wet towel over your face until you signal acquiescence.  Or, like in a John Garfield movie, they stick your head in the toilet bowl and flush after a couple minutes (swirlie?).  But, the Peoria Pounder owes them nothing.  Here’s the skinny.  Take a big ole Dutchman on a Fri. nite and give him:  1 West Coast IPA at an Irish saloon with 10 crab cake mini-balls, 1  Bass ale at a Creole ( how the H do you spell) rhythym kitchen bar/rest.,  maybe 3 or 4 Hacker-Schorr draft pints and a German sausage at the Octoberfest beer tent ,  play a bunch of Latin rhythyhym inspired ? polka/ german marches  (Frie Bier Ist Gut)  until he’s as happy as a gov’t worker on pension( thanks, Sam Clemens).  Just lay back until you see that big orange ball peek over the up river horizon.  Okay, now let loose with the ersatz steam calliope on the huge riverboat just off his bow.  Give it some intermittent foot bass notes,  don’t shy away from the dissonant archipelagos (thank you Keith),  and stomp all over the melody.  Give that bastard some Sousa!  He’ll give you up his mother, his wife,  and his daughter.

No, seriously, we had an excellent time in Peoria.  The farmers market on the waterfront was an organic “corn”ucopia.  Met a veggie guy who used to swim in Lamberton Lake next to our house in his salad days.  Another preacher’s kid who moved around.  I think he had a little Methodist in his madness.  Good soup, buddy.  Fresh eggs guaranteed to last weeks:  blue eggs.  “There’s more in this world than is dreamt of in our philosophy”, ($10 to anyone who can finish the quote).  If yer ever in the big P, check out the Peoria Bread Co.-  this is my third morning on the best cinn. roll God ever graced this little blue ball with (Yeah, Bill, I know- preposition).  Thanks to the old man tending the roses.  Sorry, we just couldn’t resist the Peoria pinks. 

There’s a great bar for sale- Cap’t Ron’s-  just up from the lock, LDB.  Classic.  After hours party ‘til 4 antemeridian.  Mighty spicy bloodys.  Rog?  River is a little bit of a ditch down here- not much fauna, but we did spot one early morn coyote with a black tipped tail.  Still some herons and swallows.  “Summertime,  and the Asian carp are jumpin,  Corn is mos’ ripen, and the river is low.  Your Daddy is poor, but your Momma’s good lookin.”  We’re leap-froggin’ down the river with mostly the same boats.  Getting to know them mostly as radio personalities.  All sorts of luck, good, bad, and indifferent.  If it wasn’t for bad luck, some wouldn’t have no luck at all.  One gets the feeling that we’re all, less or more, in the same boat, though.  “People on the river are happy to give”  Thanks, Duddon Pilot, (do you know that river, Gary?), for the Penfolds Koonunga Hill shiraz cabernet 2007.  “Uhhh, uhhh,uhhh, I can almost taste it, now.” 

We’ve done about 400 miles and both tanks are still well over half from a fill in Muskegon.  Running at approx.. 1200 RPM at 6-7 mph.  Not bad.  Paid $50 for one dock so far.  Not bad.  We’re still hugging each other.  Not bad. “It’s not bad work, if you can get it, and you can get it if you try. “  Gershwin. 

Peace, Visitor out.

BUH,BUH,BUH,BIRD,BIRD,BIRD-- BIRD IS THE WORD

Yeah, she likes me.

Pelicans in Illinois!

The yellow tipped seagull

Now that's hot!

OK, she likes her, too.

Blog S/V Visitor  N 40 41.29  W 89 35.27  16 Sept. 2011    Peoria, IL

It seems that the birds have all the riparian rights to the river bank down here.  We have seen beaucoup buzzards, beaucoup blue heron, soaring bald eagles, the great white heron or maybe egret, golden or maybe  juvenile baldies, scores of seagulls, wary wild turkeys, many mallards, some kind a big white duck, maybe a king fisher, murders of crows (ravens), schools of swarming blackbirds, a squawking parrot on a trawler, and, much to our surprise a white pelican.  In Illinois.  In Illinois.  And then we saw an islet covered with them.  Whoa.  Peterson's Field Guide (thanks Ann Decker) tells us that this is a "casual straggler".  Harold asked, "There's no good -ism, right?"  Well, I've got one for ya, or maybe just a boat name:  Casual Stragglerism.  Chuck can be the Dominie, you can be an elder, and we'll be coming late and sittin' in the back.  Check out the pic of the gulls.  Among the ring bills and glaucous gulls is a new species:  the yellow tipped gull.  What is that?  A piece of plastic or some kind of tag?
Down here in Illinois, along the river, we have found the people to have an endemic sweetness, without fail.  Plus, it's October Fest in September!  Whadda Deal!! 
Just a footnote.  Jan's getting tired.  ADM has quite a presence here along the banks of the Illinois.  How are you doing boys?  If genetic engineering works for corn, wouldn't it be fun to do homo sapiens?  Huh? Huh?  How are you treating the little guys?  The guys with cow shit on their shoes? 



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