Two Bottles of Mead on the Wall

19 March, 2001
(Cleveland, OH to Cochranton, PA)

After a relatively quiet weekend, friend and activity-wise, I suddenly needed to be in two places at once: Ann "Groa" Sheffield had been in Kentucky over the past weekend, when it would have been advantageous of me to go and visit her. Indeed, I was really close to her house while on that forty-mile detour to get around the I-90 closure in Erie (described in 2001: A Pennsylvanian Odyssey). Driving there Monday seemed easy enough, until we found out that she'd been picked for jury duty starting that day, and who knew if she'd be picked for a case, or if she'd be excused. The plan then became one of waiting for Groa to break free, or at least knowing when she would be able to do so, then drive to her place. It'd been my intention to spend the evening there, then drive back to Cleveland, sleep, and head directly to see Lissa Detroit in the morning, as she'd taken Tuesday off to visit with me.

It didn't quite work out the way I'd planned...

I spent Monday morning waiting by the phone and noodling around online. Around one, Groa called when they'd sent her off to lunch break, offering that they'd probably be done with her around three. I sorted my now-substantial pile of dirty laundry, which my sainted mother volunteered to wash for me that night while I was off in Pennsylvania -- for the record, I hadn't even hinted that she do it for me, she just declared she would, which was fine by me.

I put on one of my shirts from one of the local heathen gatherings in Big Sur, California; it was clean (I kept it for when I was doing heathen networking), and really didn't need to be around when Mom was potentially nosing all around in my luggage (that whole "don't ask, don't tell" policy again). I threw my SETI shirt into my pack to wear tomorrow, a clean pair of undies, some essential toiletries, and noodled around some more until three-ish, when Groa called again -- yep, she was home now.

Unfortunately, a bit of adminstration was required to my home server just then, so it was about a half hour later that I could actually leave, at which point I threw everything into the rental car and drove off. I expected it to take two hours to drive the hundred twenty miles across Interstate freeways and country roads.

Now, in California, this would be shocking. I'm leaving a place in the city proper at three-thirty, nearly four in the afternoon, and proposing to drive clear across the metropolitan area, and actually make a hundred twenty miles at an average speed of sixty miles an hour.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, it can take two hours to drive less than half as far, and that's in normal traffic: San Jose to Berkeley during afternoon rush hour. At three-thirty to four, probably more like an hour and a half, one-third to one-half of which would be spent in approach to something providing cross-bay access: a bridge or State Route 237, the road across the bottom of the bay. And leaving from San Francisco proper, heading east? Forget it!

Downtown Cleveland has a sane Interstate system: it sits at the confluence of three major (i.e., two-digit) Interstates (71, 77, and 90), with a fourth not far south of town (I-80), and sufficient three-digit loops to bypass anything you don't care to face. Plus, the Greater Cleveland area doesn't have San Francisco's main problems: having only a narrow strip of habitable land between the mountains and the water, and that aversion whatsoever to tall apartment buildings. The entire metropolitan area is less than two milllion people, too.

Mom once warned Mike and I about coming into town during rush hour. We immediately thought of California and cringed -- until we drove in and only slowed under fifty miles an hour once during the entire trip through Downtown. That's traffic, Cleveland style.

Anyway, all this goes to show that I wasn't particularly insane for proposing to drive a hundred twenty miles in a 'mere' two hours. I got on I-90, drove right through the middle of town, and had no trouble. Ohio State Route eleven cuts down the side of the state near the Pennsylvania in nearly a straight line: I took that to Ohio 167, one traffic-free lane each way through pleasant farmland. Ohio 7 saw me for a few miles, then US 6, the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, one of those things you used before Interstates got you places before you could blink. Farmland gave way back to forest on 6, and a sudden low, rolling ridge in front of me, first of several signalled an important geologic landmark: the terminal moraine, place where the glaciers stopped.

Out west, the primary forces for shaping the land are tectonic: volcanic mountains, folded mountains where the plates crumple in a slow-motion crash Hollywood has yet to be able to duplicate. Glacial effects are secondary in places central to the Bay Area mindset: they smooth Yosemite into a U-shaped valley from a narrow V and similar flourishes.

Only the Central Valley comes close to a primary glacial effect: only these slow-moving frost giants could have so cleanly planed the land while depositing silt so rich in their wake farmers can still grow, it seems, everything but lampposts. The Central Valley is the Great Plains writ footnote-small, contract-small.

The Appalachians, too, are folded mountains, but far older than their raucous western cousins in the Rockies and Sierra Nevadas. Aeons of wind and water have worn the sharp rocky promontories to rolling curves, and none are so tall as to have a treeline. The greater availability of water, coupled with yearly frost, covers them with millions of acres of broad-leafed maples, sprinkled with other trees. Native Coloradans and Californians sniff indignantly, conveying disrespect of these grand old dames: they aren't "real" mountains.

The mountains (for mountains they are), fade to foothills in extreme western Pennsylvania, and in Ohio they make way for the plains, a couple thousand miles where the glaciers held sway for millenia. When a glacier passes, the ground is smoothed. When a glacier stops, it makes a mound of the rocks and soil it has gathered in all the long journey since the far North where it began: these are moraines, glacial hills. The terminal moraine, then, marks the southernmost stop on the frost giants' continental tour: it passes east and south-east of Cleveland, near the Pennsylvania border.

This long, low ridge that I crossed, then, marker the end of the Plains. Nobody put up a sign for that, although for everyone but Homo sapiens it's a more profound boundary than the arbitrary line between Ohio and Pennsylvania, Granted, on this secondary road, they didn't bother with that, either. I flitted along US 6, and saw a sign, blue on white:

VILLAGE OF
PENN LINE

"But wait," I said aloud to myself, "They only do signs like that in --" Another sign:

"-- Pennsylvania. Oh." I kept driving.

Another hallmark of secondary roads through this part of the country is the local speed trap. These are small towns, quiet towns, and the local constabulatory can generate a decent amount of revenue by dropping the speed limit from the cheerfully brisk inter-city fifty-five, through as few intermediate speed limits as possible, and preferably all the way to twenty-five if they can get away with it. Linesville was like this, although at the town's one traffic light, I did manage to catch a sign declaring that I was now exactly (but was it exact?) five hundred miles from both Chicago and New York City.

After a few more turnings of the way, there was Meadville, Pennsylvania, similar to several of its type: a commercial center at one edge of town, where a Wal-Mart holds sway over perhaps two-thirds of the country's traffic lights, a tangle of US and state routes meeting in a heavy industrial area, then the routes all scatter to the winds again, and one is quickly back amidst the tangle of the forested hills.

If my husband described the town of Elkins, West Virginia, he could use that exact same paragraph, down to the Wal-Mart. I was spooked. Away south from Meadville, but my destination was near!

Turning right off another route onto a gravel road, the Oldsmobile Intrigue wound slowly down the hill towards Groa's as the sun set into dusky twilight. Hers was the only house on the left, surrounded on three sides by a broad deck. Decent-sized, too. I pulled around the house to the side with the garage, and a tall, angular man I didn't know waved me into a spot by the back door. I parked, got out, and waved. "Hey there!"

The man waved vaguely in return, "Ann's down by the hof. We're having a little furnace problem.

I blinked, and followed him down a shallow slope to the hof. I actually shot this the next day, when the light was better, but what the heck:

The hof is heated by a cozy little woodburning stove, vented with some stovepiping out to the chimney you can see in the picture. The stove, pipe and all, is but a temporary solution to the heating issue until they put in the real fireplace, so the stovepipe chimney is only a friction fit -- and their fit had lost all its friction, billowing wood smoke inside the hof, dirtying the white paint, and generally being a mess. Groa was inside, trying to reassemble the stovepipe.

After a fun-filled adventure with ladders, work gloves to handle the rather warm stovepipe, metal implements to keep it in place, and a bit of wire wrapped around a roofing nail to keep the whole assembly vertical, things were back under control, although my host looked a tad sheepish.

"Of course this happens right when you're coming over. I was going to have the hof waarmed up, a full horn of mead to present to you..."

I waved a hand dismissively, "No, no, it's all right. Listen, after dinner, we can pretend I just got here, and do it from scratch. Besides, I wanted to take you guys out to dinner anyway, in lieu of a proper gift, so it's probably for the best anyway." It turned out the lanky guy who'd led me here was Groa's husband, whose name has utterly slipped my mind.

Groa shrugged, "Unless he's staying home from his martial arts class, we'd've had to go out anyway; I don't cook."

After some internal debate on the part of the husband, he decided to go to class, and becomes Sir Not Appearing in This Travelogue, as I didn't see him after that. We drove to one Italian place, but it was closed Mondays, then to another, closer in to Meadville, which wasn't. Apparently they'd tried to put Ann on two different juries, one of which, the one she'd been excused from, involved child molestation charges against an eight-month old. The other one she couldn't talk about, except to say it was a much less emotionally sensitive case.

She had spaghetti and meatballs, I had ravioli. Yes, I'd just had Italian a couple nights ago, but the other choice was, apparently, the fine Chinese cuisine of western Pennsylvania, and I figured the Italian was probably a better choice. Afterwards, we drove back to her place, where the hof was now warm and aired out.

Groa cheerfully produced two bottles of homebrewed mead she'd recently acquired -- one elderberry, and one ginger, and we proceeded to fill the horn and sit across from each other on low wooden benches by the altar, which was destined to become the mantlepiece for a fireplace.

Again, I took this the next morning when the light was better: imagine this lit only by the altar candles to properly set the mood. We were sitting before and beneath it, passing a nicely-carved horn back and forth with delightful mead inside.

Above our benches, high in the rafters, cast into deep shadows by the flickering candlelight...

One of the things mentioned, in an evening that got respectably fuzzy after awhile, was using this heathenically correct scaffolding as a seidhjallr, and getting Diana or Laurel to prophesy from up there, or, even better, one about eight feet tall (this is about six and a half feet). It's a platform Groa herself also uses to sit out for Yule vigils.

I warned her that Diana would at least look askance, and that Laurel's answer stood to be a bit more colorful still, what with her leg and all.

For that segment of the audience wondering what the hell I'm talking about when I'm yammering on about seidhjallrs, check this out. If you don't want to read a whole other article, er, well, skip it and file it under 'amusing in-joke,' which just about covers it.

The night went on in honey-hued camaraderie, and eventually, the horn got water in it instead of mead, went around a few times more, and we wandered back up the hill to the house, and bed. I obviously wasn't driving back to Cleveland that night.