Hillbilly Highway: The Road Out Of Appalachia

 Susan and I lived near Highway 23 in Eastern Kentucky for several years, and witnessed the cars with Ohio and Michigan plates coming to visit every summer.

Touring With Tristan, America's Best Drive?

What Can Instagram Do For You?

 We have been traveling vicariously with Tristan and his bride all over the West. They are good at taking us to remote, lonely places with incredible views. In this video, he shows us how social media has changed the dynamics in popular places. Follow SUV Rving on YouTube for some real wilderness thrills.

Wayback Machine: CRP Recon Joys

CRP signups made for intense workdays.  The county Farm Service Agency offices would often have dozens of new cases or renewals, and every field had to be inspected. I would map out the whole county to reduce backtracking, make a soil map of each case, and look up  the history of renewals so I would know what had been planted.  After seeing each case, the landowners had to be interviewed, and then the new plans could be written.  Conservation Reserve pretty much controlled my work for all of my years working for Illinois Department of Natural Resources.  It wasn't what I expected when I hired in, but it was good work that actually changed the landscape of the counties I worked in.  All that driving and walking meant that I saw lots of interesting sights.  Here are a couple of good ones from the spring of 2012 in Hamilton County.  The tractor is an Allis-Chalmers WC; the barn is probably melted down to the tin roof by now.

The throttle shows some honest wear. I guess the reason I focused on the throttle is because it is very familiar to me.  A kid working that little lever while driving a tractor feels like the king of the world.

R.I.P., Chimney

June 25, 2015. Nighttime T-storms.

Dowsing: Either You Have It, Or You Don't

I found out about fifty years ago that I could dowse for water and sewer lines, and my dad could do it, too.  He worked for the municipal water system, and all of the water and sewer department trucks had dowsing rods for locating buried utilities. The first time I tried it was at McMillan Park in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa. They were getting ready to stake down some equipment before Old Threshers, and they needed the location of a water main before putting anything into the ground. I was amazed then, and I still am every time I see it work.  In this brief video you will see the rods cross on a burial from 1850.

The Suspense Is Killing Me

Disappearing Act

You Pick!

A) Ramshackle
B) Shabby
C) Dilapidated
D) Help Me, I'm Melting!

Too Many Tacos?

Taco Tierra in Fairfield, Illinois has been a regular stop for lunches for more than twenty-five years; they have lunch specials Monday through Friday, and that determines what I order when I stop.  Whether you stop at ten in the morning or eight o'clock at night, the line is out to the street, and you don't order over a speaker.  One of the workers comes to your window, takes your order, (Mild, Medium, or Hot?) and your food is ready when you get to the window.  Recently I pulled up to the window, the lady opened the little door and said "$3.63."  I handed her the money, she handed me a bag of tacos, and I drove a couple miles down the road and parked to eat my lunch.  Halfway through the first taco I realized that I hadn't placed an order, but the bag had what I wanted.  Try that at your local burger outlet.

Barn

What Barn?

Nothing to see here, folks; just move along.

Sometimes You Get Lucky

Walking an old road into a creek bottom to look at land on the other side of the creek, after a night of heavy rain, you wonder if you can find a way to the other side.  Sometimes you can find a logjam to cross, sometimes you have a long drive and walk in from the other side.  Last week I got lucky!

Dry Fork, northern Wayne County.  A bit deep for wading after a night of thunderstorms.

Going, Going...

 The dozer cleared trees that had grown up in the old barnyard, and the last time I drove by there was a track-hoe sitting next to the dozer.

It's probably all over by now.  Barns like this were outdated technology fifty years ago, and the families who used them are long-gone.  The Mrs. and I have been patching on our barn for more than thirty years, and we will never be done, although we are gaining little by little.  We have big plans for 2013; ripping out old wood, fitting new pieces, bolting and nailing.  Dilapidated old buildings like this old dairy barn give me a sense of urgency to get back to work on our ongoing project.

Have Pity, O Lord, In Misery I Languish...

...in other words...Back To The Old Grind! 

Photo Credit:  Page 463, Samson Et Dalila, Metropolitian Opera, New York, 1915, with Caruso, Matzenauer and Amato.   The Victor Book of the Opera, Victor Talking Machine Company,1929; RCA Manufacturing Company, 1936.  Photo by White

I See Dead Cars

 I run into old cars and trucks on a regular basis; it's one of the benefits of being asked to look at timber.  This old touring car body has just about returned to dust, and I am guessing that it has been sitting here for well over fifty years. 

 I don't know the brand of this one, so I took photos from a few different angles to help the experts, and see if anyone knows what this old car is.

 There is a ventilator up front, and in the lower photo you can see the cutout for the instrument cluster.  Is two gauges a cluster?  If you have a good guess, please leave a comment.

Jenga, Anyone?

Weekend Steam: Light 'er Up!

Uploaded by leadingtruck on Sep 15, 2009

Going through the raising steam process on Ja1271 at Steam Inc, Paekakariki a day before an excursion.

When I watch something like this, I think, "Why did I go into forestry?" I was born 100 years too late; that's why.

Weekend Steam

The Big Barn

 The Big Barn is one of the more obscure cultural oddities you have never heard about before.  The barn is in southeast White County, Illinois, a short distance from the Wabash River.

The Wabash River floods regularly, making agriculture difficult, even in our modern era with sophisticated machines.  The farmer who built this barn on stilts went to great lengths to build it above the floods.  Cement pillars hold it about fifteen feet in the air, and there was a ramp at both ends.  Give a thought to how it would have been built.  The holes for the pillars had to be dug by hand, and dug deep.  The cement would have been mixed on-site, and the process of mixing and pouring had to have gone on for days on end.

 I last saw this barn about nine years ago, and it was a solid structure yet at that time.  I didn't have a camera with me then, but I did last week when I was on a property next door.  Storms of recent years have really taken a toll on the old building.

 The runway through the center had double floor joists.  The lumber used for construction was not planed, and was probably sawed in the neighborhood from bottomland hardwoods.

 This aerial photo from 2005 shows that the roof was intact at that time.

The barn sits just south of the curve in the trail at the top of the photo.  This peninsula is an odd feature on the map.  It is lengthening to the south as the river deposits sediment.  Timber is growing on the undocumented land, and there are several acres that don't belong to anyone, although they are landlocked by the owner of this timber.  The river bank above and below this peninsula is collapsing a bit every year, making land disappear.  There isn't much you can do about it; rivers like to move around.  There are several landowners adjacent to the river who are planting trees, and that will eventually curb major changes during flood events.

UPDATE BONUS! A commenter sent me looking for more barns like this one, and I found two barns on Wabash Island (at the confluence of the Wabash River and the Ohio). These images from Google Earth are USDA photos shot in 2011. Note that the Ohio was flooding, and much of the island has water running over it.

Have You Been Watching The Moonshiners?

 We've been enjoying the show about moonshining on the Discovery Channel, and we have fun spotting bogosity in the well produced depiction of the way moonshiners might work.  One of the sad truths about real moonshining is that much of it is made primarily with sugar.  The corn in the mix does little more than provide a little flavor, and that type of whiskey isn't what moonshining used to be.  Not so many year ago, moonshiners would soak their corn, let it sprout, dry it, then take the malted corn to a mill and have it cracked before they mixed their mash.  The enzymes produced in the sprouted corn converted the corn starch to sugar, and that produced the alcohol, instead of cane sugar in poorly crafted illegal whiskey.  I bought this burr mill many years ago from the miller who ran it near Martin, Kentucky, and I asked him whether his mill had ground malted corn; and YES it did!  (The red Sears engine in the background ran this mill.)

 Just about every major creek in Appalachia had a place to have corn ground, so folks could have their daily bread.  Most folks didn't have much money, so the miller would take a toll, typically about 1/10 of the corn to pay for milling.  Malted corn couldn't be sold to corn-less customers, so millers simply remembered how much was ground for moonshining, and took the toll later, of unmalted corn from the same customer.  This engine was on a remote creek in Pike County, and it's mill, barely visible in the background of the last photo, undoubtedly ground malted corn, too.

 D.T. Bohon is a pretty rare label on gas engines, and we tried to purchase this engine on several occasions.

We drove up to look at it one day, and it was gone.  I hope it went to a collector, and not a scrapper.

Tucker's Corner

Here's Johny Tucker behind his little store at Tucker's Corner, several miles west of Dale, Illinois in the late 50's or early 60's.  Tucker's Corner was a common stop for oil field workers in southern Hamilton County for about forty years.  Mr. Tucker sold gas, had an air compressor out front, and made a lot of baloney sandwiches for roughnecks and well servicing crews.  You got good value with your lunch at Tucker's Corner; Johny was a whistling virtuoso, and a fiddler, and if you weren't in a hurry to hit the road, a floor show came with lunch.

(The little shed holds fire fighting tools.)