The Bane of Winter

  It is now early January, and we are just a little past the Christmas season.  The holiday lights and decorations are gone, except for a few lingering reminders.  Soon those few remaining displays will be gone as well. We are now entering the bane of winter, which is why I took the pictures that appear here.  I wanted to go out and get some shots of bare trees to convey the image of this time of year, just past the holiday season, and the winter solstice, and before the thawing of spring comes.  It’s a time of short, cold days although they get progressively and noticeably longer as the winter moves through February.  There is often snow on the ground, although there has been very little of it so far in this area.

  The weather was actually warm on Saturday when I took these pictures.  It was a great day to go outside, especially since there won’t be too many days like it in the months to come.  But the actual weather didn’t matter a whole lot to me when I took these pictures.  The trees will still be bare, and the camera can’t catch the unseasonably warm weather unless there are some visual indicators in the background, like someone wearing shorts or a few crocuses popping up through the grass.  There were boats out on the lake that day, but not at that moment.  What I got was a winter picture, although a frozen lake and snow would have made it look more convincing.

  In the months ahead, we’ll be looking at more cold weather, with a few mild days here and there.  Although there has been very little snow so far, there will likely be some snow days coming.  We have a few snow shovels in our basement, and I expect to be using them before the winter is over.  I’ll be using my camera as well, to capture the images of the fallen snow when it comes.  Right now, I’m still using the heat and defrost in my car.  The cycle of time will turn as it always does, and spring will be here before we realize it.  The weather will get warmer, the days longer, and the trees and bushes will bloom.  But until then, we’ll be going through the bane of winter, as these pictures show.

O Tannenbaum

  This is a picture of the Christmas tree which sits in the community park in Langhorne.  There was an illumination ceremony last Friday night, for which part of the street was closed off to traffic.  It’s something that has been happening all over around this time, to kick off the holiday season.  And of course I came across plenty of houses with Christmas lights, but I haven’t mastered night photography, and I don’t really know if my camera has the settings to capture it.  Most of the Christmas lights came out blurry, and I didn’t know how to sharpen the image.

  After a quick Wikipedia check, I found that the tradition of lighting Christmas trees originated in what is now present day Latvia and Estonia in the 16^th century, and in Germany a little later.  Those trees were first illuminated with candles, which sounds like a fire hazard.  They were adorned with religious ornaments, such as the communion wafers used by the Catholic Church, and later sweets were added for the children.  I didn’t research how the Christmas tree eventually became a household item during the holiday season.

  Every year when I was a child I watched the children’s special Santa Claus is Coming to Town, which I now also have on DVD.  For most of my childhood, that was the official story of how Christmas trees were first illuminated.  It happened during the wedding of Chris and Jessica Kringle in the forest, with the Winter Warlock using his magic to light all the trees.  It’s an easier and more appealing way to explain to children where all the stories and traditions came from.  Most people probably didn’t bother to research the actual story anyway, as it’s just a curiosity.

  I’ll be taking more walks in the upcoming weeks, and I’ll probably have my camera some of the time.  I may be able to get better pictures of some Christmas house lights.  There’s also going to be a live nativity scene at the Langhorne Methodist Church on Christmas Eve.  If I get some pictures there, I’ll post them here.

 

Overlooking Jim Thorpe

  I took this picture about five years ago, and I believe I was using my old film camera.  I stood on a vista overlooking the town of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania.   Since my mother grew up there, and my father in nearby Lansford, I visited this area frequently as a child to see our relatives.  It was later, sometime in the 80’s, when Jim Thorpe really boomed into a tourist town.   The place I stood to take these pictures is outside a nightclub called Flagstaff, built sometime in the early part of the twentieth century.  I don’t know if it’s the same building that once housed big bands like the Dorsey brothers or if the original building was torn down and replaced.  The vantage point was an obvious draw for the venue, where people could dine and listen to music, while at the same time viewing the town from several hundred feet above.

 For anyone happening to read this that is unfamiliar with the town or the person, I’ll try to give a Wikipedia in a nutshell summary.  Jim Thorpe is named after the famous athlete of the early twentieth century.  He played professional football and baseball, and won several gold medals in the 1912 Olympics.  However, he is also well known for having those medals revoked after it was learned he had been paid to play football and baseball.   That of course meant he was a professional athlete and technically ineligible to participate in any Olympic event at the time.   During his lifetime, he probably never set foot in the town that is now named after him, and I believe the closest he came to Mauch Chunk (the town’s name at the time) was the Allentown and Bethlehem area.  He was raised in Oklahoma as a Native American, and spent the final years of his life as a struggling actor in Los Angeles.  Off the field, his was a troubled life, plagued by alcoholism, financial difficulties, and two failed marriages.  Professional sports were not a multi-billion dollar industry during Jim Thorpe’s time, so being a professional athlete did not bring him fortune.  He was able to get some small roles in Hollywood, but unable to establish a solid acting career. It was a few years after his death in 1953 that Patricia, his third wife and widow, found the town of Mauch Chunk an attractive place to bury her late husband, and one that would build a memorial for him and give him the respect his family believed he deserved.

  In 1955, the issue was left to voters on a referendum as to whether to provide a memorial for Thorpe and rename the town after him.  By a narrow margin, the residents of the two boroughs of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk, separated by the Lehigh River, voted to merge and rename the town in Thorpe’s honor.  The memorial was built, but went mostly unnoticed for several decades before a tourist railroad helped revive the town.  With the railroad and its natural beauty, Jim Thorpe was reinvented as a tourist town and mountain resort.  During the anthracite boom, Mauch Chunk was a transportation center for coal coming from the nearby towns.  Once it arrived there, it would be shipped by canal alongside the Lehigh, then the Delaware River until it was loaded onto ships in Bristol, Pa.  Later, when railroads took over, Mauch Chunk was the railroad center for loading trains with coal from the nearby towns.  From World War II onward, the area had been dying after oil replaced coal as the home heating fuel of choice.  Some mines were still operating as late as the early 1970’s, but were manned by a skeletal crew. 

  I remember it was in July when I took these pictures, and it was a bit hazy, so it wasn’t a totally clear day.  The Lehigh River divides the old town of Mauch Chunk on the left from the small part of the former East Mauch Chunk visible on the right.  To the left of center is the Asa Packer mansion, and the building with the clock tower is the Carbon County Courthouse.  The train station is toward the bottom center, and is partially obstructed by the trees.  From this height, the town looks almost like a model train display.  The vista where we stood is actually on the west side of the river, as the bend in the river is also obscured by the trees.   

  I haven’t been up there in a while, but I hope to go back soon and get some more pictures from ground level.  I do have some pictures I took over 10 years ago that I may post here sometime, but I actually snapped those pictures on a disposable film camera.  It was later on when I wanted to get more serious about photography.  Photographing Jim Thorpe is one of the things that got me interested, as I wanted to take people there to see the area, but obviously I can’t take everybody.  Since I couldn’t always bring the people to the places, photography provided me with a way to bring these places to the people.

A Willow Tree's Place in the Game of Golf

  While I was out walking today, I took this picture from a hilly side street near where I live.  Part of that street runs along the border of the Middletown Country Club.  The willow tree pictured here sits by a pond, in a small valley between the hill on the right and the mound on the left.  The fairway lies on the hill to the right, so the object for this hole is to get the ball over the pond and have it land it on the green.  The challenge is to not overshoot or undershoot the ball.  Undershooting can run the risk of landing the ball in or near the water.  Overshooting can take the ball off golf course property.  Just to the right of the green pictured here is a large net meant to catch balls that sail past the green.  However, they often go over and through it.  I know the man who owns that property.  He has told me that he sometimes hears the balls hitting the side of his house, and he is always picking up balls from his yard. 

  Since the golf course property runs along the street, which is another way to lose a stroke.  Even though the street is a little off the trajectory between the hill and the green, aiming the ball too far the wrong way can land it on the concrete.  On the whole, I don’t know how this course rates with professional or experienced golfers.  My only experience has been with miniature of chip and putt courses, so I would find any real golf course challenging.  The only remote idea I have of what it’s like to play 18 holes comes from playing the old Sega Genesis video game about 15 years ago. I don’t think I’d be able to clear that pond or the trees if I had to shoot from the hill.  But in the middle of all that is this willow tree by the pond, which I thought would make a nice picture.

More Pictures of Core Creek Park, Back in May

  I’m going back to the archives again for these pictures, which I took back in May at Core Creek Park.  The lake pictured here is Lake Luxembourg, which was constructed sometime around 1980.  Previously, it was a park named after the creek which ran through it, which was dammed up to form the lake.  Core Creek remains a stream as it enters and leaves the park property, but most of its run within the park limits is now flooded out.

  I’m not an engineer, so I have no real idea how it is planned.  I didn’t see any models or drawings of what the proposed lake was projected to look like.  There are busy roads nearby, and at least one bridge across the creek that probably had to be replaced.  There are several developments around the perimeter of the park, but in 1979 it was almost all farmland, and it was probably far enough away from the lake not to be affected by the flooding.  The development boom came later, in the early and mid-80’s, and this of course would make park side and lakeside properties desirable and expensive.  The houses and estates would maintain a high asking price as long as the flood hazard was minimal.

  Also nearby and just out of the view of the camera is St. Mary Hospital, which borders the park.  I often see medical staff taking walks on their lunch break, and there is a back entrance along the park road for ambulances to get in.  The traffic near the main entrance of the hospital can get congested, so this offers a back way during the rush hours.  There have been some improvements made to the roads near the hospital, but some of them are still narrow and weren’t really built to handle heavy traffic.

  If I remember right, I took these pictures in the mid-afternoon, and they look a little shadowy.  The picture of the field now looks a little blurry to me.  I checked the settings, which were on a relatively low shutter speed.  I forget if I took these pictures on automatic or if I set the controls myself.  I also forget how much I played around with the editing on Picasa. However, there is something I like about the blurriness, perhaps just the way the grass swaying motion is blurred.

The Alternate Plan

A view across Neshaminy Creek at Tyler

Geese on the creek

  Up until Friday, the plan was to do a hike at Island Beach State Park in New Jersey.  However, because of commitments with the children and some home projects, we decided to keep it near home and do a hike at Tyler State Park.  This allowed them to take care of business at home, and also to bring their wives and kids along.  We all ended up doing a fairly short late afternoon walk through Tyler.   I was looking forward to going to the shore, but this worked just as well for me, too.  I was up for a few hours in the middle of the night, and this allowed me to go back to sleep at 6 and get up at 9.  

  It was a little cold, but still a nice November day to go outside.   Most of the leaves have now fallen from the trees, and what still remains on the branches has now turned brown and will soon be gone as well.   Up until about two weeks ago, there were still a lot leaves on the trees, and still a lot of orange, yellow, and red.  But now late autumn has set in, and winter will soon arrive.

Heading to the Shore on Saturday

This Saturday, I plan on taking a day trip to Island Beach State Park in New Jersey, and do some hiking on the trails around the park with my brothers.  The attached photo shows the southern end of the park.  I took that picture from a jetty by the Barnegat Lighthouse, which is across the inlet.  What’s pictured is actually the southernmost point of a long spit, another part of the east coast barrier islands.  The northern end, I believe, joins the mainland Point Pleasant Beach.  I was at Island Beach Park only once before when I was in high school, for a day trip.  I don’t remember much about it, except that it that got cut short by a thunderstorm.  Hopefully, there won’t be any problems this time.  Last I checked, Saturday’s weather is supposed to be mostly sunny.

    I haven’t really studied the route we’ll be taking yet, but a good part of it will go through the Pine Barrens, and will probably border the huge area consisting of the Fort Dix, Maguire AFB, and Lakehurst military bases.  We’ll go through Toms River and then across the Barnegat Bay to Seaside Heights, which has recently been put on the map by a popular reality show.   From there, we’ll drive down to the park.  I don’t know much about the trails we’ll be taking, but since they’re short, I think we’ll be going along several of them.

   Aside from its use as a beach and seaside park, I learned something that I found interesting about Island Beach.  It may not be known as a popular filming location, but I know of at least one movie, or at least part of a movie that was shot there.  When I watched the third segment of Creepshow, I noticed that it looked more like it was shot on the east coast than along the Pacific.  When I checked it out on IMDB, I found it was shot at Island Beach Park.  I didn’t make out clearly the lighthouse in the background, but next time I check out the movie on YouTube, I’ll look for the familiar half red and half white colors of the Barnegat Lighthouse.

     As far as I can remember, I have been to Toms River twice, once when I was passing through on the way to Island Beach Park, and one more time about 15 years ago.  A friend took me to visit his parents’ house, which was a part of the motel they owned on Route 9.  I knew we were near the shore, but it was dark by the time we got there, and Route 9 is a few miles inland.  We stayed a few house, and then were on our way back to Pennsylvania.  Other than that, there are two things I remember about Toms River.  One was that the original Amityville Horror movie was shot there.  The technical crew found a house in the town that was nearly identical with the haunted house in Long Island that was the subject of the film.  The other thing I remember happened more recently, when their little league team won the World Series in Williamsport, Pa.  The stretch of Route 37 running through Toms River is named after the hometown heroes.

  Assuming all goes as planned, I’ll be there on Saturday, and sometime next week I’ll have some pictures and a story posted.  I’ll try to remember to do a little more research on where we’ll be going and the trails we’ll be taking, so I’ll have a better idea.