South Texas Heat

So I got these big coils of braided steel wire. I got em in Gallatin, Tennessee and they are going to Mexico. I'm in Laredo. The high tomorrow is supposed to be 103.
I drove to West Memphis the first day and then to Buffalo, Texas the next. In Buffalo I took a walk on a lovely early summer evening. A sluggish creek. A field of cattle all looking at me.

On the way south today I stopped in Kyle, Texas in hope of scoring some pie at a place I had heard on the radio had great pecan pie. Boys with signs pleaded with me to pull into the ridiculously small DQ parking lot and have the truck washed for their fundraiser. The pie place was closed. It being Sunday.

I stopped again in Dilley, Texas. I had stopped here before. I wrote an entry on the town at the time. A few weeks ago i was paging through my old entries looking for comments I might have missed and found a disappointing one, in response to this entry, which you can read. It is unfortunate that the internet has, in places, become a place for anonymous, unjust, and unnecessarily mean criticism. Everyone wants to be Simon Cowell. The poster made a number of assertions that were untrue and I was pleased to find upon my revisit that, at least in my perception, I was factually accurate. I added a picture to support one of these observations.

Before this load I took some metal building parts from Laurinburg, North Carolina to Chattanooga, Tennessee. On the way there I had a lovely, though at times hair raising drive through the rainy foggy north Georgia Mountains. The metal buiding parts were going to be an addition to a plant that was making towers for wind turbines. Completed ones were lying around outside.

Hurricane, West Virginia

More coils of steel. These are sleek and black and being taken from a mill in Monroe, Ohio (between Dayton and Cincinnati) to a place that makes "wood framed upholstered furniture" in High Point, North Carolina (between Winston-Salem and Greensboro.) I am guessing that the steel will be cut into strips and made into springs for the chairs, of the recliner sort, i am thinking.
It is astonishing how much steel is being moved around this country. I guess this is the price we pay for having left the stone age.

I took some minor roads from Monroe over to Chilicothe. Perhaps too minor, sometimes very hilly and curvy and small but a good workout (not a physical workout, per se) and a good reminder that driving can not always be a mindless cruise down the interstate. In a car, these are the roads I would seek out. curving up and around hills and down into river valleys. ribboning through fields of wheat while your organs slosh around in your body. Good times
Now I am relaxing in Hurricane, West Virginia the origin of this seemingly out of place name is expained by wikipedia as such: "Hurricane was named after Hurricane Creek. Hurricane Creek was, in turn, named after a group of trees at the mouth of the river bent in one direction. A party of surveyors commissioned by General George Washington noted the site appeared to have been struck by a hurricane, so they named it so."
hmmmm.
The weather is not threatening. it's cool and today was a welcome sunny change from the monsoon that I had been in throughout the weekend.

One easy week, from Maryland to Asheville

I left the house on Monday morning to go to Sparrows Point, an enormous steel mill in Baltimore's outer harbor formerly owned by American steel Giant, Bethlehem Steel. As the sparrow flies it is about 25 miles from my house, right across the shimmering Chesapeake, but semis don't fly and I don't care to find out if they can float so I took the roads down to the Bay Bridge and back up to the city.

The William Preston Lane [former governor of the Old Line State] Memorial Bridge, as it is more formally known, is a twin span 4.5 mile bridge that was, when it was built, the longest bridge of its type in the world, it is part suspension and part truss and very high so as to allow cargo ships to pass beneath it and cause panic attacks to those above it. It is the only crossing of the middle bay (another bridge crosses the Susquehanna at the northern end of the bay, and a 17.5 mile bridge/tunnel combination connects the Virginia part of Delmarva to the Virginia Beach Norfolk area near the mouth of the bay. It wasn't built until the 50s and up to that point the eastern shore was relatively isolated connected to the Baltimore/ Washington side only by ferries and passenger steamers. It was probably similar to the present system of ferries that like Seattle to the Sound Islands and Olympic and Kitsap Peninsulas. Many people think it would be nice if it were still isolated and, once you get away from the bridge, it pretty much is, especially if you go north to where I grew up.

Most of the traffic that crosses the bridge east bound heads south to the snooty getaway spot in Talbot County (Easton, St. Michaels, Oxford, many politicians, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, e.g. have houses here) or to the more proletarian beaches on the southern peninsula, Rehoboth in Delaware and Ocean City in Maryland. Until the bridge was built there were great amusement parks and victorian resorts along the eastern shore of the bay, especially in Kent County, directly across the bay from Baltimore and easily accessible by regular ferry service. The resorts of Tolchester and Betterton are pretty much dead now but there's an ironic twist.

The bridge at present is horribly packed in the summer with people going to or from the beach. The state wants to build another bridge with three options: 1.) a third span where the present two are, connecting Annapolis to Kent Island. (This is problematic since there is little room to add approach lanes on either side (we are dealing with islands and peninsulas here, at present packed with businesses on either side of the road)) 2.) a span further south connecting Calvert County to Dorchester, problematic since a span through Dorchester would plow through some extensive and significant wetlands and 3.) a span to the north, from east Baltimore to Kent County, right into Tolchester where once there was a great amusement pier the evidence reduced now to some curious paint on the crushed concrete that lines the banks. An amusement pier that was killed by the bridge to the south, whose congestion now threatens to destroy the county as a whole, turning what is an astonishingly rural appendage on the eastern seaboard into another burger boulevard. That would be bad news, if you ask me.

Anyway, I picked up two big coils of tin plated steel or some such things and had to secure and tarp them in the rain. By the time I was ready to go I was completely soaked and looking like a drowned rat. I changed and took off for Paris, Texas, the Paris of Texas to a Campbell's Soup plant so large that they had their own can manufacturing facility. The noise in the plant was deafening as huge presses stamped out and shaped pieces of sheet tin, the air smelled comfortable, in a soupy sort of way.
From there I was sent to the north side of Dallas to pick up 4x8 sheets of 2" thick foam insulation. The wind was ceaseless and the act of throwing straps and tarps over this load looked more like a three stooges routine than work.
That went to North Little Rock to a building supply store on a seedy street beneath a grey sky.
Another quick load assignment, this one to Malvern, Arkansas to pick up giant reels of cable from General Cable, a business so big it has no need for a fancy name. As you leave the highway and head toward Hot Springs the land suddenly bursts into swells unknown to travelers of I-30 headed to Texarkana.


I headed east and spent the night 40 miles east of Memphis. A beautiful evening, the air warm and breezy and easy to relax in.



















These are headed to The City of Monroe, North Carolina, to maintain or expand their electrical infrastructure.
The delivery is not until Monday and I am spending the weekend in Asheville with some friends who went to college with my sister. Nice to have a weekend. and I'll be back in Chestertown next weekend, easy as pie.