Horrors! I'm a Horror Writer. (Not Horrible -- Horror, Horror!)

The grouping on the left was sold on eBay a few years back for $1,800, meaning each issue was $100. That is a pretty good markup for magazines that had a newsstand price of $.75 when originally published in the 1970s. It was listed as "The Stephen King Collection", because it contained some of Stephen King's earlier stories. Mr. King had exactly twice as many stories within these volumes as yours truly. I wonder if it would have added value as the "Stephen King and Larry Eugene Meredith Collection"?

Probably not.

I seem to be garnering fame on the coattails of more famous authors, Stephen King, Agatha Christie, Robert Block, Nero Wolfe and Clark Ashton Smith. My name has more recently been popping up on its own. For instance the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, where I am an entry along with 70,966 other writers of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror. Plus my short story "Conjured" ("Startling Mystery Stories", March 1971) was mentioned in a book examining the horror comics and pulps of the 1960s and 1970s, World of Eerie Publications (2010, Feral House) by Mike Howlett.


I got a complete two-page synopsis review of my short story, "The Last letter of Norman Underwood" in Brien J. Frost's, Essential Guide to

Werewolf Literature (2004, University of Wisconsin Press). It is nice to be elevated to the level of "Literature".

This variation on the werewolf tale of mine originally appeared in "Magazine of Horror" in January 1969, nearly 11 years after I had written it at age 16 and it was the first horror story I sold, unless one considers my anti-Vietnam War "Poem to the Boys on the Flat" a horror story as well, which was published in "Psychedelphia Period" in 1968. "The Last letter of Norman Underwood" was also published in a Spanish anthology in 1968, La Chica de Marte y Otros Relatos (The Mars Girl and Other Stories, Gemini, 1968) with the title "La ultimo carta de Norman underwood".

A story I sold to "Magazine of Horror" in 1969 (published January 1970), "The Writings of Elwin Adams", also showed up in an European anthology a few years after publication in the United States. In this case the book was published in France, 13 Histoires  D'Objets Malefique (Marabout, 1975, Andre Gerard - Editor).

Now as a matter of fact, horror stories make up a small portion of all my writing, both published or unpublished. Even among my fiction they are less than a quarter. So how did I get branded as a horror writer?

Well, duh, for bringing it up so much myself, like in the first half of this essay. Honestly as a teenager it was all I aspired to. Yes, my highest ambition was to be a hack pulp writer, which I suppose I accomplished. It is easy to step over a bar set low enough, but the real challenge in life is to set a bar you have to reach up for and pull yourself over.

I didn't write strictly terror tales then either, but most were and the others tended to be about juvenile delinquents or guys with hot rods. But still, how did this innocent, Christian lad get hooked on this darker fiction in the first place?

Partly it was a story we read in our fourth grade class at East Ward Elementary School. It was Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart". That is the first story I can remember really gripping and intriguing me. It drove me to the library looking for more Poe, but I failed in my effort for I was restricted to the Children's Room and Poe was considered too adult, too upsetting for a nine-year-old.

Somewhere about that same time I saw a dramatized version of Poe's "The Gold Bug" on TV and this

whet my appetite even more, although "The Gold Bug" isn't a horror story per se. I did manage to get a paperback of some of Poe's stories and when I got a bit older I badgered my family for more. My grandmother found me a ten volume set, The Richmond Edition, The Woks of Edgar Allen Poe, published in 1904. Volume six was missing. I still have them, so they are now 110 years old. It appears volume eight has also went missing. Volume Ten's cover has really faded and that was a favored volume. It contained all of Poe's verse, which turned me on to poetry.

My friend, Stuart Meisel gave me a paperback that he assured would scare me. It was The Lurking Fear, a collection of short stories by H. P. Lovecraft, and it did scare me, but it also inspired me.

But I think there was more to my choice of content then just Poe and Lovecraft, plus the Universal monster movies recycling through our local theater at the time. I think much had to do with the monsters lurking in my own life, the bullying and abuse I faced most days at school, the fear of my father and the times of loneliness. I suffered from nightmares nightly.

Creating supernatural menace put me in charge of the demons and allowed me a world I controlled. Perhaps the demons within, those desiring vengeance on my tormentors, had an outlet not in some violence against anyone real, but in a bizarre world where vampire and werewolves and other outer-worldly creatures recked havoc on fictitious surrogates for my enemies.

Either become a writer or a serial killer; I think I made the right choice.

...To the Dark of the Dungeon

As I entered the waiting room and looked around I saw the sign on a mantle.

"I guess my wife's out of luck," I said to another man sitting nearby.

"Uh?" he said and I jerked my thumb to the old notice.

My wife is Irish; well, part Irish anyway. She had an Irish maiden name. Her other main parts are German and Native American (one-quarter Creek).

T'is, me Lads, the irony that Mauch Chunk should end up named Jim Thorpe. It is also an example of how this country can and does change usually in the right ways. You see, Jim Thorpe had a part-Irish, part-Sac and Fox father, one Hiram Thorpe. Jim's mother, Charlotte Vieux had a French dad and Potawatomi mom. Hiram and Charlotte named their son Wa-Tho-Huk ("path lighted by great flash of lightning") and raised him as a Sac and Fox. He was also Roman Catholic, which was probably another strike against him in some places in those times.

Jim Thorpe was born in 1888. Eleven years earlier there was an incident in Mauch Chuck that shows he probably wouldn't have been welcome there in 1877, even possibly the decade-plus later when he was born in Oklahoma. He probably would have been shunned or worse for being  (1.) Irish, (2.) an "Injun" and (3.) a papist.

To illustrate some of the mind-set of those times I will take us back to those mansions on top of the hill, specifically the home of Asa Packer.  I mentioned therein that the Packers, rich as they were, but people of hard-working humble beginnings, existed in wealth a long while without the prerequisite servants, until Sarah Packer reached a point when doing it all herself was difficult. They hired a Butler and a Maid, who each had separate quarters in the house. The Packers, faithful to their Protestant morals wanted to be sure there was no hanky-panky between this single man and single woman. Thus they hired an Irish Catholic Butler and a German Lutheran Maid, knowing one would never have anything to do with the other. (This is another story with ties to The Little Woman, with her Irish father and German mother, and being raised a Lutheran.)

If that is an amusing story, there are many darker tales to tell of the prejudices of those times, especially against the Irish.

The Irish lot on their native sod was not a particularly happy one in the 19th Century. They were viewed as less than vermin by England, to which they were subject much against their will. Many lived in abject poverty; in fact, it was rare if an Irish family was able to serve one piece of meat a year in their meals. Beginning in the 1840s many Irish began to immigrate to the United States and this flow continued well into the 1880s. The English took a "good riddance to rubbish" attitude and encouraged this.

The United States also encouraged this influx of Irish, at least the industrialist of the day did. They saw these people as an underclass, a supply of cheap labor and a desperate people they could exploit. They were not welcome in every place of business, as the sign at the beginning of this post shows, but they were welcomed into the black holes of Pennsylvania and West Virginia where coal could be harvested.

Mauch Chunk was a coal town.

Working as a coal miner was far from paradise, not only might you be digging down toward Hell, your life was the Devil's own as well, barely a notch about slavery. You worked a long day on a dangerous job for very little pay. Worse yet, you owed everything to the company. You lived in homes provided by the company, so leaving your job was forfeiting the roof over your head. You had to buy your own work tools and supplies from the company, which you could get at the company store, where you also bought the other necessities of your life. You got credit on your purchases, so to speak, but then your bill was deducted from your wages on payday. It wasn't unusual for a miner to find he owed more than his pay and so go home with nothing in this pocket.

During the time of this miserable situation grew a secret organization known as The Molly Maguires. How secret were they? So much so historians really know very little about them. Were they the terrorist one owner painted them to be in their day, killing brutally and often? Were they a discredited and maligned group of fighters for labor reformation? Truth is they were probably somewhere in between, but they had enough influence that owners of the coal industry saw them as a threat to the status quo and of course blamed every dirty deed that came down the pike on them.

One such industrialist was Franklin B. Gowen (pictured left). Like Asa Packer, Gowen was a wealthy, powerful man in Pennsylvania. He was the president of the Philadelphia Coal and Iron Company and the director of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. He was also a former Attorney General.

To say he was anti-union is an understatement and he did everything in his power to destroy any progress by labor that might effect his business. He made this statement about the words of the Declaration of Independence, "All men are created equal":

“Men were not created equal, the distinction between mind and matter, between the men who labored with their heads and those who labored with their hands. There [are] two great classes of people in this world, men of genius, or intellectual men, and those who [are] not so, the men of labor."

 Anyway, to make a long and fascinating story short, Gowen came to blame the Molly Maguires for all things Union and hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to bring the group down. Eventually several men were arrested and charged with murder on the word of one detective, James McParlan, who went undercover and acted as an informant. He began accusing Molly Maguires after a murder where he had a hand in and may have been responsible for.

Four men were brought to trial at the Old Jail of Carbon County in the town of Mauch Chunk upon the lone testimony of McParlan. This was not a criminal trial, but a private one in which the county simply supplies the facilities. The Judges were men connected to Gowen and there is the possibilities he rigged the jury. In 1877 four men, accused of being  Molly Maguires and murderers were hung inside the Old Jail on gallows brought in for the occasion. They were John Donahue, Edward Kelly, Michael Doyle and Alexander Campbell.

Campbell left an impression behind. Declaring his innocence, he rubbed his hand on the floor and pressed his handprint into the wall of his cell. This was 137 years ago, but the handprint is still there for all to see (I saw it myself). Attempts were made to remove the print, but all failed. Here is the history of the handprint as described at Paranormal@101:

Over the years, county sheriffs have tried to remove the handprint to no avail.

In 1930, Sheriff Biegler had the wall torn down and replaced. The next day, the handprint reappeared.

Around thirty years later, Sheriff Charles Neast covered the handprint with latex paint, but it reappeared. His son, Tom, in the 1960s, loved to tell friends about the ghostly phenomenon. Word spread and people visited the Carbon County Jail to see the print.

Attempts to wash the image away failed.

In recent years, James Starrs, George Washington University forensic scientist, and Jeff Kercheval, Hagerstown MD police chemist, analyzed the handprint using high tech equipment. They found no logical scientific explanation for the handprint’s existence. They finally measured the exact location of the image in the event it there were attempts to remove it and it reappeared, they would know if the phenomenon returned to the same location or a different one.

The jail’s last sheriff, Bill Juracka, said he wouldn’t try to remove the handprint.

Now a days you can tour the Old Jail in Jim Thorpe. It is fascinating and a bit spooky. You enter and get your tickets and then go to the waiting room to await your guide. This area was actually the home of the Warden and his family, so in a sense the Warden was in jail with his prisoners.  In fact, when you go upstairs you are brought through the Warden's family bathroom and into a side wing of the jail where women offenders were housed.  

From there you wend your way back down into the main cell block where the men were. Here you see the infamous gallows that hung the Molly Maguires and Cell #17, where Campbell's handprint can be viewed upon the wall. (Sorry, they would not allow photographs of the handprint. Now, to tell the truth, it would have been very easy to sneak a picture, especially with my Flip, but I chose not to do that. The photograph seen above is from Weird Pennsylvania.)

To say the interior of the jail is bleak is an understatement. It would not be a place I would ever wish to find myself. That in itself should encourage one to behave. More depressing were the dungeons in the basement. Visiting these isolation cells certainly gave more meaning to the old coal miner's song:

It's dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew 
Where the danger is double and pleasures are few
Where the rain never falls the sun never shines
It's a dark as a dungeon way down in the mine.

I don't want to tell some of the stories I heard there because if possible I think you should go and enjoy the tour. One of the amazing things to me is this jail was in service until 1995. I will leave you with a few more photos of the place, including our charming young guide holding up the narrow window through which a prisoner once escapes.

Although this prisoner was only sentenced to about a third of a year, he determined to break out. His method was probably worse than his punishment. First he starved himself until he felt he had lost enough weight to squeeze through the window frame the guide is holding up. meanwhile he stole the soap from the shower room until he had a supply hidden away. On the day of his escapade, he striped naked and lathered up his whole body. With help from his cell mates he pushed this window frame out on its pivot. He tossed his clothes down in a pillow case and flung tied together sheets out to climb down upon. Believe it or not, he got through that window and probably would have been far away, except he attempted his escape at 12 noon. Some women eating lunch on their porch were surprised seeing a foamed up naked man shimmying down the jail wall and...well, he was soon caught.

A word about Franklin Gowen, the head of the Philadelphia and Reading railroad. Said Mr. Gowen was found dead in a Washington DC hotel room on December 19, 1889, a small caliber pistol by him and powder burns on his face. His hotel room was locked and his death at age 53 was ruled a suicide. Stories and speculation arose that he had been murdered, and it was claimed this was done by a Molly Maguire who actually looked like Gowen. It was said this assassin had stalked him for years, had even purchased the pistol using Gowen's name and had hid in the hotel room, did the deed and escaped out the window.

People questioned his taking his own life because he was still relatively young, had wealth, reputation and a family. They saw no reason to think he would do such a thing, so it had to be murder and who better to blame than the Molly Maguires. However, I lean toward it being suicide. Gowen was no longer the head of the railroad. In fact, he was seeing a number of bonds he was involved with declining in value at this time and it might have been more a financial concern that led to his self-elimination.

All photos inside and out of the Old Jail by the author except:

The portrait of Franklin Gowen
The Jim Thorpe Wheaties Box
The Campbell Handprint in Cell 17 is from Weird Pennsylvania.

Photographs of Dads and Sons and Pickup Trucks

My friend at Retired in Delaware wrote a post today called "Pop". It was about his relationship, or lack thereof, with his father. Ron and I became buddies in 1950 while in third grade. I met his father on occasion when I visited Ron at his homes 9he moved three times in that period)  and I admit, his father always scared me. He was a big man and always seemed to glare at me.

As to my friend visiting me, I am sure at times my dad might have been there, but my dad wasn't often at home. He was a long-haul trucker and usually on the road. However, this was fine with me. I always worried what my dad would do to embarrass me or upset my friends if he was home.

Ron and I had many things in common as children and certainly the wall between ourselves and our dads was one.  His dad would call him "Beak," a jibe about his nose that did nothing for his self-image; my father would call me, "Gertrude" or make other belittling remarks in front of others.

Our dads were contemporaries. Ron's father died in the year 2000 at the age of 80, and so would have been 91 this year. My dad is still living and is age 92. The men even knew each other at one time, back around when Ron and I were born, both men worked in a steel mill in Coatesville. Both had sons who I guess they couldn't quite understand. Both smoked pipes, although Ron's dad continued smoking all his life and mine quit at some point in middle age. In my youth my dad always seemed to have that pipe between his lips and that is how I sketched him in 1966.

I was also drawn to the photographs Ron included of himself with his dad. I don't know how many he has altogether. He had five on his Blog that ranged from when Ron was a baby until he was in his early forties, and I have pictures Ron sent me of he and his dad as late as 1999. It made me wonder how many photos I had of me and dad together.

Not many.

I was 25 when the one on the right was taken. It was our June Celebration dinner. My grandmother, mother and I were all born in June. My mother and father were married in June and of course, these dates all fell near Father's Day. I think this restaurant was called The Warehouse and was located outside of Philadelphia, perhaps in Conshohocken or Manayunk. Clockwise from the left sit yours truly, my grandmother, my dad, my mom and my wife.

There is another picture much later than this taken as we entered to a surprise 25th Wedding Anniversary in 1986, but in this my dad is half hidden in the background.

Perhaps that says a lot about our relationship right there.

In this photo, left to right, is our oldest daughter, Laurel, my wife (no longer a blond), me again, our middle child, Noelle (who looks thrilled to be there) , our son, Darryl, my mom (snapping a picture) and my dad talking to someone elsewhere.

Most the other photos are when I was very young.







This was the first, when I was a little bitty babe of three months, he standing out in the yard at Whitford holding me on a September day.

Here we sit on the porch after moving into Downingtown that December. Both the country house and the city house were rentals and the homes of my maternal grandparents. My mom and pop didn't have a place of their own at this point and when this last picture was taken, World War II had just begun and my dad would soon be sailing away for several years.

A couple years later and I am two and my dad is home on leave. He dressed me up in a look-a-like uniform and they had this family portrait taken.

And then not long after he was off again and gone for a few more years.

One wonders if we would have bonded and been closer if the war had not separated us in those years.

Amazing as it seems, we have to jump ahead 18 years to find my father and I together in another photo. I was just turned 20 by a month when this photo was taken after a fishing trip for tuna out of Indian River Inlet off Bethany Beach, Delaware.

This was one of two such trips.

The other fishing trip.

Someone snapped these photos of us with the catch of the day. Here is my bride-to-be and I, then my dad and the captain of the boat.

My fiancee and soon-to-be wife looks well enough here and she was the first of the crew to catch a Tuna, one of the largest; however, thereafter she was seasick the rest of the day.





And that's all, folks. Just those few photos, almost all before I turned 21, which I guess speaks much about my dad and my closeness.

One other thing, though, in Retired in Delaware's Post is the pickup truck. Funny now, but this is something we saw quite differently.

On the right is my dad's pickup truck (and my teenage shadow taking the photo). My friend, Ron, was humiliated by having to ride in the back of his dad's pickup. I loved riding in the back of this one. That was where I wanted to ride, me and my friend Richard.

We thought it was cool.

There are some stories about that pickup, but for another time.

Cauffiel

There once upon a time was a quarry. The Bellevue Quarry and they use to haul the rock down this way to barges on the Delaware River.

As old as I am, that was before my time.

Now where that use to be is the Bellevue State Park and down the track where the hauling went is a continuation of the Delaware Northern Greenway.

This skinny stretch attempts to connect the Bellevue State park with Fox Point State Park, but it doesn't quite complete the link...yet.

Sitting over from the trail, across the Bellevue Boulevard up on a hill is the Cauffiel House.

That is it mostly hidden by the trees. I guess if this was August or any summer month the house would be completely hidden from where I stand snapping this photo. With the leaves blown away in this early December morn you can just see the building.

There is a driveway further up the Boulevard that winds its way up to a parking lot by the house. You can drive up and visit, take a tour or perhaps attend some function it is being lent out to from time to time.

I had already went past the entrance of that drive, so I wandered up through a stretch of ground between crop fields to look it over.

Straight ahead is a gazebo. All these old estates around about here would be incomplete without a gazebo or two, or three in the case of Rockwood.

I like gazebos myself and would have liked one in the yard, but there were always more pressing needs for my money than buying one of these things, so I remain gazebo-less.

Still, I visit enough of them in my walks and wanderings to feel some odd ownership in the gazebo world.

As usual, I like to take a shot thought them.

I'm looking through this one at the main house, The Cauffiel House atop the hill. The style is called Colonial Revival.

The house was build by or for a Mister Daniel Cauffiel back in the early 1920s. He lived there with his family of wife and seven children during the summer. He lived in Wilmington the rest of the year.

Mr. Cauffiel was an advisor to the duPonts. I don't know what he advised them about, just that he did.

There is little in this neck of a land piece other that the Cauffiel Estate, the road and the trail. You can look out across the stretch of empty fields down to the Delaware River, watch the oil tankers go by or count the clouds in the sky.

Of course, the Cauffiels are no longer here. The duPonts must get along without Daniel and the house belongs to the County. The County picked it up in 1993 and now it is a tourist site and used for things like corporate meetings, weddings and varied types of social events. I imagine there is a fee involved somewhere for the privilege, although technically the house belongs to the public now, meaning you and me.

You might wonder about that odd shaped little building. From a distance it looks almost like a chapel or perhaps a bell tower. It is neither. It is a small structure housing a cream separator in the lower portion. Milk would go in one end and cream would come out the other. I have no idea what the upper part was for.

I didn't go over and look inside, maybe another time.

It felt a bit eerie wandering about here. There wasn't another sign of life, no one about but me. The parking lot was empty. I felt like an invader creeping about in the yard.

Actually, I am often the lone intruder at places. Is it because I come so early or does no one else care?

It is always nice that someone cares enough to preserve and keep-up some of these past properties, remnants of the long ago so we can see how life was. There are many pockets of history for visit around the country and we've been to many.

Of course it can get out of hand. Every time some dilapidated or unsafe eyesore is on the verge of demolition there seems to be some group that appears with pitchfork and torches and the claim we are destroying history.

Well, you can't keep everything and if these people feel so strongly why don't they take up the restoring and preservation.

Each of us carry fond memories of places from our past, usually ones remembered through the distorting mists of childhood.

The house I lived in the swamp when a child is gone now, so is the swamp. There is a college parking lot on that ground. I have but a couple photos of a small portion of the exterior of the place. I wish I could go and take the whole of the building from each side and traipse again through the rooms to record them, but it is too late.

I know little about the history of that house. I believe it was a summer home, like one nearby where no one seemed to come. Who built it and who began to renovate it, I don't know. Why was it left half renewed with the workmen's scaffolds still up along one side?

I know it had no real historic significance, unless by some weird twist of time I should become famous and then people will say The Old Goat once lived there.

Now, looking over at the Cauffiel barn it occurs to me I don't know the historic significance of this place either.

A man, probably well-off had it build on this hill where he could see the Delaware in the summertime. He was an advisory to the duPonts, but not a duPont. Was he anything more than that? I can't seem to find much about him. He isn't in Wikipedia, so he and I share that lack of honor. What I know is he was from Johnstown, Pennsylvania and moved to Wilmington, Delaware. He craved a summer retreat and loved the Bellevue acreage, land once occupied by the Lenni-Lenapi and then by early Swedish settlers.

Is it the architecture? It doesn't seem that unique. It certainly isn't that old having been built in the 1920s. It was a popular site from Claymont down  for the wealthy to built estates along the river. This Cauffiel place was sometimes called "The Last River House". I don't know if it was last in line or the last one build.

Perhaps it is the location.

It is a nice site with the view of the river from the back windows and what then may have been but woods when built. Even now it is fairly uncrowded by the progress and growth of the last 90 years.

Even though the morning has slipped by nothing has changed. The clock has passed the eight o'clock hour when this place is officially open, but there is no sight of life beyond me here.

No cars come up, no one opens a door, no footsteps of some caretaker with a key hurry along the path.

It stays still and silent and chill.

It is time to continue on with my purpose here today, the objective of my walk and my real reason to be in this place to take it.

The house was just a side diversion from that.

What I came for is down there.

I'm looking down from the driveway of the Cauffiel House parking lot. The road you see is Bellevue Boulevard. The pavement you see curling around just across the road is a continuation of the Delaware Northern Greenway.

I really came down here to walk this link since it is a section of the Greenway I haven't walked to date.

I already was down that curving path and on the trail. The trip up the hill to the house was my going off on a tangent. It really came after the fact, so to speak. I am thus going to treat where the path ended as the beginning and walk us back from that point.

You see the trail actually ends here, up against the side of Governor Printz Boulevard. If you consult information about the Northern Greenway you are told you can walk it from Fletcher Brown Park in Wilmington to Fox Point State Park on the Delaware. Technically this is true, but in reality the trail doesn't connect to Fox Point. You would have to hike a fair distance up along Governor Printz to Edgemore Road to get across the Boulevard, I-495 and the Amtrak rails, then walk along Lighthouse Road a bit to get into Fox Point. They hope someday to connect that park with this, but it isn't
now.

So we begin here where the trail stops.

Perhaps you are wondering about who Governor Printz was to have a highway named after him. You probably took a guess that he was a former governor of Delaware.

You'd be wrong.

He was a governor of what became a part of Delaware, but not of the state.

Johan Bjornsson Printz, son of a Lutheran Minister, was born in 1592.  In 1653 he became the governor of New Sweden, the Swedish colony on the Delaware River. The Lenni Lenape, who lived here when the Swedes arrived, called Printz, "Big Belly" since he weighted over 400 pounds. Obviously he made a big footprint because a number of things have been named in his honor.

As you can see this isn't the most used of the trails in the area. It is kind of off the beaten track, you might say. I was very much alone here. It isn't the wider paved paths of most of the parks. It is fairly narrow and basically a dirt footpath through a narrow stretch of woods.

Except for the Cauffiel House and the Bellevue Boulevard it is pretty barren to the one side. On the other is a line of houses just beyond a small creek.

Where the trail ends there are also the businesses that line Governor Printz Boulevard, things like auto wrecking yards and truck rentals.

This is where the creek comes up against some piping under the Boulevard.

The creek zig-zags through here and under a series of small bridges, which adds some interest to it all.

Otherwise, it is pretty bleak and lonely wandering down this trail.

The sun is to my back here throwing my shadow on the ground before me. Since it is early morning not long after sunrise, I must be walking in a westerly direction.

For some reason, I always feel I am going south to north when in actuality I am walking east to west.

See how easy it is to be disoriented as to direction without a compass? No wonder people get lost.

Of course as long as I stick to the trail I won't get lost.

See what I mean about a series of bridges. Already I am approaching another.

Actually this photo was taken from the other side of the next bridge. You can see some of the homes that run along the tree line and path in the background.

From here the path will be wider and paved and will parallel the Bellevue Boulevard. This was the point where I crossed that street and went up the hill to the Cauffiel House, but we are going to pretend I just kept going up the path.













Just throwing in a couple more shots of this section of the trail before I leave the tree line behind and move on.

We come out of the woods and now follow the street.

It was odd when I came walking down here along this trail. A car came from toward the river and slowed. The driver seemed to be looking at me, studying me. I thought he was going to stop, but he didn't. He finally sped away to where ever he was going.

It left me wondering what he was thinking. Did he recognize me from somewhere? Did he think I was someone he knew? Or was he just surprised to see someone walking along this section?

I don't think I looked quite as much like a bum as I often do. I had on my "good" winter coat, one new a year ago. I was all in black this morning, the black jacket, black cap and black jeans. It was pretty cold. I had on a dark gray hoody under my jacket, but I'm not sure I had the hood up. I don't think I did. I believe I looked quite respectable.

Oh, the street ahead is Philadelphia Pike. We will reach it and cross it soon.

Anyway, I don't always look this respectable.

Often I look less so, I guess. These chill mornings, especially if a wind, will find me wearing my old light brown jacket. It has its own hood and comes down long on my thighs. It is fairly warm against blustery weather. The problem is it is quite old now, faded and stained, much like myself,  and worst of all ripped down the left sleeve. The tear is bad and the inner stuffing between the outer layer and inner lining puffs out through it. It gives me a somewhat down and out  look I fear. My middle daughter gave it to me many moons ago for Christmas, when she was still in her early teens. I always liked the jacket. It got ripped at a super market one day. I was pushing my cart into the checkout and my sleeve snagged on the edge of some kind of display rack they had and it just ripped.

We have crossed the Pike and caught the Northern Greenways path once more. It is now going to lead into Bellevue State Park.

See, the path curves away from the highway up toward that stone wall.

This takes us by the Mt. Pleasant Meetinghouse, a Quaker church from 1838. It is on the historical registry and owned by the County. You can have events here, too.

We need remember this part of Delaware was once part of Pennsylvania, owned by William Penn. The heritage of much of this area is Quaker and you will find a large number of small meetinghouses scattered about and a confusion of Meetinghouse Roads.

I guess if I were to learn the history of this particular meetinghouse I would have to go on one of the occasional candlelight night tours of the building and the cemetery behind.

Although over the years the Little Woman and I, and sometimes our kids when young, were frequent visitors in Bellevue, the trails here are new to me.  I just never had occasion or reason to wander down this way in the past. I wasn't even aware of this little graveyard.

These are more less frequented paths. They are very much corridors, kind of dark and forgotten, even though they run silently behind a parking garage servicing a corporate plaza next door.

I have to admit, I haven't met another soul this whole time yet. It is as if I were the last man on Earth.

Here is an information board and a bike rack, totally empty of any bikes.

The path weaves about this station.

It is all first time places to me.

I come past these evergreens and meet the first person this morning, a lady jogging down the trail. We say hello and she jogs down the path I just came.

These are empty places and I wonder at the women I pass out walking or running alone through these woods. I've done it all my life and it never occurs to me how isolated many of these trails are. But I'm not a woman, although I suppose as an old man I am someone vulnerable too. Still, I pass these women all the time on my walks, alone and so often dressed in revealing clothing.

You are probably thinking, "Well, yes in the summer when they can wear shorts and halters, but this is late fall and a nip of early winter is teasing the air. They must be bundled from the cold." They are not bundled how we think of bundled, in bulky coats and heavy scarves. They ware skin-tight running suits or tights. I don't know, The Little Woman says she would be nervous on the trails alone.

But now as we get more into this corner of Bellevue we begin to meet more people.

I'm not the Lone Ranger anymore.

I'm still not into the parts of the park I know well, so I am still exploring it is just I am not the only one on the trail and am saying hello here and there.

There is a couple strolling ahead.

I have much on my mind. I am still thinking about the future of my Blog in the coming year. I feel I have been wandering in some cyber back woods lately, that I am alone on my path of words.

No one is reading it, I am just walking along here talking to myself and not getting any answers.

I like to wander these forests alone, but I am not sure I see the point of writing to no one but myself.

Maybe it is time to pull the plug.

Ah, with this bench I have come back into territory I have walked before and the bench is a welcome sight. Not because it is familiar, but because my shoelaces have untied themselves and it is a convenient place to retie them.

That chore accomplished, I continue up this trail on my walk. I will go up a bit and cross over into woods again.

It will be a path in that woods where I will meet the deer I posted about the other day.

Again, no response from anywhere about my deer encounter, no comments, no feedback, just another sign that this Blog has served its purpose, if it had one.

There in the distance, distracting me from my gloomy thoughts is a couple walking some dogs. I meet a lot of dogs on the trails.

Now I meet the deers and then I go almost down to Bringhurst before doubling back.

I go up onto the oval track and follow it around to go back to the parking lot.

Sitting beneath a tree I see a new old friend.

He is just sitting there until he sees me and then he gets up and ambles down to me in greeting. He rubs against my legs and looks up.  I guess he does live here. It's nice to see him again and it's nice he remembers me. Somehow I always have animals to cheer me up.