Wednesday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Wednesday

I don’t want to overstate it, but …

Slept in. Thought about taking a nap after that. Tomorrow I’m going to do some stuff, if for no other reason than the buzzards will be circling overhead, patiently waiting to see if there are any signs of life. Sitting still has been a good strategy, but it hasn’t restored my energy. I still don’t feel terrible. I just don’t feel … good? Normal? Right? Not ready for a rest at the slightest exertion? Last night I nodded off watching the Tour. This evening I had to work to stay awake during another stage.

So it’s been a lost week. Maybe two. Perhaps three. It’s a bit disappointing. Frustrating. Maybe that’s what this pseudo-sinusitis has been. It has been frustrating. Frustrating and persistent. Persistent in its frustration. Persistently frustrating. I’m just running out of patience in slogging my way through it.

At least I’m telling myself that it feels like tomorrow will be back to normal. I will manufacture, if necessary, some light at the other end of this tunnel.

It’s time once more for We Learn Wednesdays, where we discover the county’s historical markers via bike rides. This is the 39th installment, and the 71st marker in the We Learn Wednesdays series. We return once more to Fort Mott, which protected the river, and Philadelphia upstream, from invaders. We’ve been here for some time, as you might recall, but our time here is nearing an end.

In the last few weeks we checked out the old gun batteries and had a quick look at the observation towers that helped them in their work of defending the river and Philadelphia, beyond. Lately, we’ve looked at the parados and the moat that served as the fort’s rearguard. We saw the signs for the generator, plotting and switchboard rooms and we saw the battery commander’s station and, most recently, the peace magazine.

The park has a map to orient you to the fort’s layout.

The river is on the left side of this drawing. You can see the pier jutting out into the water. That’s the area we’re briefly visiting today. And we’ll see it from atop the earthworks that protected the battery placements

The construction of a fortification the size of Fort Mott required the delivery of a large amount of materials and equipment. The river provided an excellent “highway” and the government constructed a wharf to receive the construction materials. Equipment, materials, and supplies were unloaded at the wharf onto a rail line which was built from the wharf to the fortification site. Once the fort was completed, the rail line additionally served to transport ammunition and supplies to the various magazines. Eventually the rail line was extended through the parados to access the newly constructed Peace Magazine. The Army used teams of mules to pull large service carts along the rail line.

The bottom of the marker features a National Archives photo from February 1898, when the troops were unloading the 12-inch gun carriage that helped command the river.

The wharf juts out from a small river beach. On the other side is the walking trail. In between us and the wharf is a field full of mosquitos and other insects ready to take a bite out of you.

The fort’s job was to defend the waterway, and the Delaware River was also key to keeping Fort Mott supplied during its years of service. Most of the building materials, guns, and ammunition were delivered from here. The wharf also provided access to travel between Fort DuPont and Fort Delaware, the other two links in the river defense system. Fort Mott, and the others, were rendered obsolete when Fort Saulsbury, was ready for business downriver after World War I. Mott housed soldiers from 1897 to 1922. It became a state park in 1951.

If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.

adventures / photo / SCUBA / Wednesday — Comments Off
19
Jun 24

Diving in the Cenotes

We had booked four dives a day in Playa del Carmen. Two in the morning, two in the afternoon. This allows for the necessary surface intervals — a safety consideration — and other important considerations like lunch. You could get in a few more dives each day if you pressed, but there are things like timing, fatigue and money to afford them all.

But because of the weather — a tropical storm formed up around here and moved off, and is still impacting the local conditions — our dive card is thinning out. We didn’t get any of our tanks yesterday. We moved to Plans B and C. Plan B was today.

We met a couple, who showed up late, and waited for a shuttle driver. That guy showed up, later, and someone loaded up our gear and put it on the van. The van drove and drove, we made small talk with our new friends from northern California and the driver steered in silence. He steered us to … another resort. We picked up another diver, a Canadian. And then we road on a good deal more, in the gray and in the rain.

Finally we came to a gravel road with a chain across it. Carved out of the woods, with old rusting cars and the leavings of other projects scattered here and there. A barefoot woman under an umbrella came out and moved the chain. We drove on. Finally, we came to a little clearing with three buildings. One made of stone, los banos, another of commercial lumber, the kitchen, and another painted up hut. That was the changing room.

People were clumped loosely together and we found two guys around a pickup truck who were in charge of the five of us. Gear, briefings about the dives and so on commenced.

The cenotes are natural pits, sinkholes. Limestone erodes and collapses, exposing deep reserviours of groundwater. The Yucatán Peninsula has thousands of them, most privately owned, and some open to diving, so here we are. You can find features like this in various places around the world, some of the more popular ones are large open-water pools, but most are sheltered sites, like the ones we dove today. Descend down some slippery stairs, it rained the entire time we were there, and then slip into the water.

This is cavern diving, rather than cave diving. It’s a distinction, our guide explained for those that didn’t know, that has to do with distance between access points. Cave diving requires a more special training. Cavern diving is accessible to open water divers. Open water, no ceilings. Cavern diving, some ceilings. Cave dives, no ceilings.

Around here, the aquifer system is such that the caverns provide deep enough access that the fresh water and salt water meet, a halocline, around 25 or 30 feet deep. It changes two things, the temperature of the water, and the visibility. Right in the halocline you get a blurry, swirling effect. It’s as if, for a few minutes, there are hundreds of floaters in your eyes. As if someone moved the antenna and the signal is going fuzzy. It’s like watching a video online in 1997. It’s the change in the salt in the water. But, otherwise, the key feature of cenotes are clear freshwater. Rain water filters slowly through the ground. There’s not a lot of silt and such in the water.

There’s just less to see. We saw rocks! And a few small fish. Somehow some trees had slid into place. The defining feature were stalagmites, which you could see right up close. These fragile limestone formations tell us the caves weren’t always filled with water. They’re drippings, after all.

We weren’t allowed to take our cameras. But the local guy has a photographer and he took this photo and the dive master grabbed it for us.

I’m looking down in the photo. Incidentally, that’s the first time I’ve worn a wetsuit for a dive since 2006, I think.

The Yucatán has few rivers or lakes, so the cenotes make up the drinking water and so, for the history of man, these have been places where settlements were formed. A few decades ago, in fact, researchers diving in some of these cenotes found the oldest evidence of human habitation. The best thing we found was my dive buddy’s mask. She dropped it getting ready for the second dive. The Maya apparently thought cenotes were portals to the next realm. (Some are protected by the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage.) That moment when you dip below the surface, you could see how the imagination would go that way. On our second dive, the water was brown-gravy murky at the entrance point. It only lasted about four feet or so — there’s no current, so if you stir up silt it just … hangs there — but those were a few interesting seconds of a dive.

For different reasons, we came up with the same idea about cenotes diving.

Glad I could do it; don’t need to do it again.

Back at our resort after our two dives, we decided to try the ocean. You’ve never seen a happier girl.

She’s a beach girl.

I like the floating part.

She loves the waves. And they were present and vigorous today.

To be sure, they make photo composition a bit of a challenge.

It is a permanent smile when she’s at the beach.

Here, she seems to be waving at Cozumel, which is just 10 miles over that way. You can see it, when the skies are clear. We could almost see it today. We’ll go over tomorrow.

We spent a long time, and 114 photos, trying to do this right, but it was somehow tricky. The angles, the waves, the sea spray, the timing, and so on and so forth. This one of the better ones.

This is, I think, my favorite one.

That was the 106th photo in the series.

Tomorrow we’ll dive in saltwater, if the weather finally cooperates.

cycling / history / markers / New Jersey / photo / We Learn Wednesdays / Wednesday — Comments Off
12
Jun 24

Got a wrench? I’m going to need a wrench.

We were just heading out to the hardware store for an early evening errand — I needed a wrench larger than any wrench I own. I own many wrenches, a lifetime of accumulation will do that for you, but I do not own anything that will open 10-and-a-half inches wide. And, today, we had a reason to need one. So I resigned myself to spending a fortune for a tool I needed to use exactly twice, to take off a piece and, moments later, reinstall it. Then of course, I wouldn’t need to use the wrench again for a good quarter of a century or so.

We were at the end of our driveway and had to yield because our neighbors were returning home. So I walked over to see Joe the Elder as he got out of his truck. He’s got a great big smile, an across-the-street “How ya doing!?” and a positively enthusiastic handshake. Lovely people. He gave me two wrenches to try, and so we did not have to go to the store.

Both worked! And we needed both. And it took the both of us to complete the job. But we did! And, this part is important, it seems we got it right the first time. Nothing was broken, no utterances were uttered, and our cost, after the replacement part, were two stiff backs and a bit of sweat. Standard DIY invoicing.

The replacement part is a device that holds filters. Looks like a cup holder. We can hold four drinks in the thing. The previous one was broken, somehow, which is a mystery because the thing lives in a case that requires a metric wrench, a mallet and then some deliberate intentions to even get to it. We replaced it with a similar piece, but supposedly more sturdy, which is good, because if we have to go through the whole process again — after all of that to open it, we had to remove a threaded piece that was not installed in such a way as to grant easy access, then mallet hammer and pry one piece from the other and so on — I think we just might start over.

I took the wrenches back over and as ever, I am wondering what I can offer these nice people as a gesture of thanks. It’s one of those small-to-you, big-to-me things. This wrench was sitting in their garage, and that one was in his truck, and he wasn’t using them, but it saved me a small fortune, and a trip to one or more stores and the frustration that could go along with it. And they say, don’t ever go buy something, just come over here and get it. They really are quite sweet. We’re very lucky with the neighbors we picked.

When I woke up this morning I wondered if I should go for a swim, or a ride, today. I did both yesterday. And that was easy enough. Doing both two days in a row seems like a tiny challenge. And then I got up, and wondered if I would do either. I felt weary. But that’s no reason to stop, it’s just an excuse to slow down.

This afternoon my lovely bride was heading out for a ride and I invited myself to tag along, get dropped, and see her back at home. I predicted she would leave me behind in one of two places, both of which can best be described as “early in the ride.” And she did, in both places.

Somehow, I caught up to her again, which was great because that allowed me to ride in front of her in the one little tricky part of this route, a three-tenths of a mile stretch with a fork and an awkward merge. I sprinted through there with the only bit of energy I had and she stayed right behind me and that made the next turn easy.

This look right here?

This is the look The Yankee gives you before she rides you right off her wheel.

While I’d done the little lead out and made it off the relatively busier road onto some empty county roads, I could not keep up from here.

I lost sight of her a third of the way into the ride, and slowly diminished for the next hour or so. But this was too be expected. I don’t have a lot of miles in my legs right now, but somehow it feels like I do. Anyway, pleasant ride, even if I got in two seconds later than I’d anticipated from half-an-hour away. My riding buddy had no such problem. She pronounced it a strong ride, and, having spent the whole of the thing watching her disappear into the distance, I’d say she was being gracefully humble.

It’s time once more for We Learn Wednesdays, where we discover the county’s historical markers via bike rides. This is the 38th installment, and the 69th and 70th markers in the We Learn Wednesdays series. These are grouped together because they’re directly related anyway as we continue our exploration of Fort Mott.

In the last few weeks we checked out the old gun batteries and had a quick look at the observation towers that helped them in their work of defending the river and Philadelphia, beyond. Most recently, we took a quick glimpse at the parados and the moat that served as the fort’s rearguard. We also saw the signs for the generator, plotting and switchboard rooms. (The signs are good, the rooms were empty.) Last week, we saw another empty room, the battery commander’s station.

The park has a map to orient you to the fort’s layout.

The river is on the left side of this drawing. You can see the pier jutting out into the water. Next to that you’ll see the long row of gun placements. You can see the moat, in blue, behind them.

Today, though, we’re starting off between the moat and the gun batteries, up near the top on the map, at Peace Magazine.

There’s no way to photograph the whole sign without the railing, which is, no doubt, period authentic. If you’ll allow me, then, the generous use of the blockquote …

A Special emphasis was placed on keeping the interiors of the defensive magazines under the various batteries dry. According to an excerpt from, “Reports on 5-inch Guns, Fort Dupont and Fort Mott, December, 1900, Operations” which references Battery Gregg …

“…ceilings of the magazines consist of flat arches of 6-inch hollow tile and the vertical walls are covered with 2-inch hollow tile furring and both ceilings and side walls are plastered with a thin layer of Portland mortar 1 – 3. Two hundred thirty-two linear feet of 3-inch vitrified tile were laid underground from emplacement number 6 to a manhole at the entrance of the west emplacement for carrying cables for electric light and power. Outside walls of the battery were roughly plastered and then waterproofed with paraffin paint #3 and coal tar. A 2-inch porous tile drain was placed around the foundations of each emplacement and covered with a layer of broken stone.”

Despite many efforts, condensation of moisture in the emplacements and magazines continued to be a problem that was never adequately solved. On June 11, 1903, the Chief of Engineers authorized an allotment for the construction of a new storage magazine to be detached from the main installation and located behind the parados. Money was also provided for the creation of a tunnel through the parados, and for extending the railroad tracks through the tunnel to the new magazine. The brick building, called the Peace Magazine, was finished in 1904. The structure was slightly more than eighteen feet by fifty-two feet on the inside, with a copper ventilating roof.

I’d like to think that Peace was named after someone who worked on the fort, or in honor of a soldier who served and died elsewhere, like so many of the parts of Fort Mott, but I don’t see any mention of it anywhere.

Here’s another angle of the magazine.

And one more quick view today from Fort Mott. This marker actually addresses what’s across the way.

At this section of the Delaware estuary, the waterway narrows from a broad bay into a river. Considered a strategic location early in the nineteenth century, military officials selected this area for a coastal defense fortification. Fort Delaware was built on Pea Patch Island during the first half of the nineteenth century. However, the advent of steam-powered naval vessels necessitated a more elaborate defensive scheme to adequately protect the upstream ports. Fort DuPont on the Delaware shore and Fort Mott on the New Jersey side were designed and built during the last half of the nineteenth century to reinforce Fort Delaware. The three fort system remained in force until after World War I.

Fort Delaware is visible on Pea Patch Island. Finished in 1859, it also served as a prison for Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. Many of the prisoners who died there are buried at Finn’s Point National Cemetery, located adjacent to the north side of Fort Mott.

(The state really should get around to updating some of these markers.)

The three photographs show Fort Delaware on Pea Patch Island, the view of Pea Patch Island from Fort Mott, and the last is an aerial view of the three forts that protected this section of the river. (All three were closed down when a more powerful and modern installation opened down river.)

And if you’re looking off into the distance, you can see a bit of Pea Patch island, and the fort that stands there.

You have to take a ferry to get over there. And maybe one day I’ll visit. There’s a lot of history over there, as well. When it was built in 1859, that hazy looking fort over there was a state-of-the-art example of American fixed fortifications. It also served as a POW camp during the Civil War. Almost 13,000 Confederate prisoners could be held there at once.

Back on this side of the river, Fort Mott became a state park in 1951, but it was a self-contained military installation in its day. At it’s busiest, Fort Mott had over 30 buildings, including two barracks that each housed 115 soldiers, commissioned and non-commissioned officer housing, a hospital, post exchange, library, a YMCA, a school for the soldier’s children and more. Most of those buildings were constructed between 1897 and 1905. It closed in 1922, when another, more modern, installation opened downstream.

We have just one or two more markers to visit at Fort Mott, and we’ll do that in our next installment. Until then, if you’ve missed any of those historical marker posts, you can see them all right here.

adventures / history / markers / New Jersey / We Learn Wednesdays / Wednesday — Comments Off
5
Jun 24

The long pause Wednesday

Warm today, and cloudy. I watched it all slide away. When I was prepared to go for a bike ride I stepped outside and was impressed by the humidity and that, Nahhh. Could I have made a better use of the time? Sure. Do I feel ambivalent about that? Probably — whatever.

At any rate, I had to return to the closet project. Yesterday I resized six clothes hangar bars. Today I had to resize four more of them again.

That’s what happens when you eyeball things, comfortable with the knowledge that, these things are so adjustable precision doesn’t matter and, they are going to be in a closet, so perfection doesn’t matter and, they’re going to be in the guest bedroom closet, so this will only come to mind a few times per year. So I eyeballed it all yesterday, and I ended up doing a bit more of it again today.

I did not refine my technique. Happily, I did not have to purchase any new equipment. And now the custom-sized closet system is completed.

And, somehow, it may yield us a bit more room for stuff and things.

And, after dinner, it started raining. After a time it started raining hard. And now it is raining so hard it just sounds different.

I’d never heard water roar down a drainage pipe, and now that’s happening just outside the window next to where I am typing. It is, to be sure, a sensation.

It’s time once more for We Learn Wednesdays, where we discover the county’s historical markers via bike rides. This is the 37th installment, and the 67rd and 68th markers in the We Learn Wednesdays series. These are grouped together because they’re directly related anyway as we continue our exploration of Fort Mott.

In the last few weeks we checked out the old gun batteries and had a quick look at the observation towers that helped them in their work of defending the river and Philadelphia, beyond. Most recently, we took a quick glimpse at the parados and the moat that served as the fort’s rearguard. Last time we saw the signs for the generator, plotting and switchboard rooms at. (The signs are good, the rooms were empty.)

As a park, Fort Mott has a map on a sign that will orient you to the space.

The river is on the left side of this drawing. You can see the pier jutting out into the water. (That’ll figure into this in just a moment.) Just above that you’ll see the long row of gun placements. You can see the moat, in blue, behind them.

Today, though, we’re in front of the moat, in one of the most dangerous spots at the fort, the battery commander’s station.

Back then, all of the work of fighting invaders would have started here. The people in this bunker would visually ID and chart the progress of enemy vessels. They’d relay the information they collected, by a simple phone line, to the plotting room. There, soldiers following mathematical formulas created firing solutions that would allow the defenders to put 870-pound rounds downrange, six per minute.

This is in fact a former gun position. One of the batteries, Krayenbuhl, was outmoded as technology improved, and so this went in at the same physical space.

If bad guys ever sailed up the river — looking for Philadelphia beyond — and they were fired upon by Fort Mott, they’d want to target all the observation points in kind. And the guys sitting in here, would be the target.

Remember that pier, in the map above? You can see it through that narrow slat in the command bunker.

Fort Mott became a state park in 1951, but it was a self-contained military installation in its day. They had a small hospital, a PX, a library, school and more. It closed in 1922, when another, more modern, installation opened downstream. But we aren’t done with it yet. There’s still a bit more for us to explore on We Learn Wednesdays. Until then, you can catch up on all of the older posts, right here.

adventures / cycling / errands / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
29
May 24

Every item achieved — though there were only a few

I did that thing this afternoon where you leave the house in order to accomplish a series of goals. I believe this has a name, but it escapes me. Whatever it may be, I bundled up three items together, because they were more-or-less convenient to the route.

First, I drove a short distance to a place that repairs cameras, for I have one in need of repair. You fill out the form and get a standard reply: mail your camera to the address below. Serendipitously, their office was only a half hour away. Cut out the middleman, I say. So I found myself in a nondescript industrial center, you know the type. The map got me close, and a second try got me a bit closer, still. I asked some guys hanging out around their office about the address and they had no idea what I was talking about. This is an area for work, and not personal investment. And most of the work from the many companies leasing space, you imagine, is done off-site. This is a place for morning meetings, day old donuts and misapplied Tony Robbins quotes. And sales reports. You know the sort.

So I dropped off the camera, and then visited a nearby retail store, a giant place named after an object that is used to test accuracy. Granted, it was the middle of a work day, but that place looked and felt dead. Circuit City dead. Open, but unaware of it’s demise. The only thing that wasn’t there was a scent of musty despair. And some items on shelves. And employees. The last three times I’ve been in one of these stores it felt like that, but it could be a question of timing.

I found the thing I wanted, thanks website, but decide it wasn’t what I wanted, so I left.

And then I went to the grocery store. I needed to get some granola and, of course, once I’ve found one I like they seemed to have stopped carrying it. This is the height of first world problems, hilarious in its predictability. There was also a small list of other things we needed, Ketchup, aluminum foil, corn meal and the like. And this probably says as much about our house as possible, grated cheese was on the list twice.

When we consolidated our houses when we married, we had a lot of extra things. Each of us had a house full of stuff, of course, and in some respects we had more than one copy of things. Somehow, our two houses became stocked like three homes. When it came to consolidating refrigerators we had five or six different canisters of the grated cheese. (She brought most of it.) It took ages to use it all, and we still laugh about it. I’m sure that’s why it was on the shopping list at the top and bottom. I only purchased one container, because we don’t need surplus everything.

I got home in time for a bike ride. My lovely bride was off for a ride with a friend and I decided to ride over to the friend’s house with her. I just needed a recovery ride, anyway after several hours in the saddle yesterday.

The science is still up in the air, but the suggestion is that the benefit is minimal, though people do feel better after the effort, which is meant to be short and low-intensity. They are meant to be almost casual, flat. Zone 1 or Zone 2, with a reasonably high cadence. Easy. You’re not stressing yourself.

It should be so, I’ve read, that you wind up feeling almost guilty about how easy you went.

Let me tell you about trying to stay in Zone 1 or Zone 2 when you’re following someone in Zone Infinity over here.

She gets in her aero bars, puts her nose in the wind and will drop you, or me, in a hurry.

Anyway, they went off one way and I doubled back for home. It was a 15-mile recovery ride, one where I found myself sprinting through intersections because it felt good. I blame her for that, somehow.

And so here is one of the views I saw along the way.

Tomorrow, I’ll just go for a swim.