I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Oct. 11, 2009

In the movie “Smoke,” Harvey Keitel plays a kindly and slightly eccentric cigar store owner who spends his days talking with customers and his mornings taking a single snapshot of the same corner in his Brooklyn neighborhood. The photos he puts in an almost endless series of scrapbooks, page after page of pictures of the same street corner.

A customer who becomes a friend, played by William Hurt, one day comes to look at the photo gallery that “Augie” has compiled. At first he s bemused, then slightly bored, then slowly overwhelmed by ho the same scene can take on so many different hues and shades and meanings. In an instant, he sees the figure of his deceased wife, killed in a bank robbery close to that same corner. She had been walking by the camera as Augie snapped his single photo that day.

It is a powerful scene, and on that reminds me of autumn.

Don’t’ ask me why. Do I associate the season with impending demise? Do I view it as the most romantic of all the four seasons? Did I see the movie in the fall and transfer the sensory bombardment that we get here in Chester County to my thoughts of the film? These are questions I cannot, and shall not, try to answer.

But what I am thinking is this. October is the time when every day the same scene outside your front door becomes different in incremental, but nevertheless entirely noticeable, steps. The light is demonstrably different; the sun finding its way up over the horizon at a different angle. The temperature makes its way south down the thermometer. But mostly, the pigment that has been waiting to explode in the leaves of the trees outside gets its chance to burst through.

In the spring, those changes in the foliage e see on our way to work or from our favorite window seem to go from zero to 60 in a minute, like a vernal Lamborghini. One day you notice a small green blossom on a tree as you get behind the wheel to drive o work, and then next day there are cherry blossoms and apple blossom and pear blossoms all over your windshield. Then by the time you get around to loading the camera to take a picture of the pink snow that envelops the branches above your head, it’s gone.

In the fall, you get a change to linger with the changes. Right now, I can see bits of yellow in the tips of the leaves outside the window. There is an orange chunk on the tree across the street. Red dots the top of the bush I pass by on my way home from Sunday services. And I know that little by little, those colors will replace all of the green that still makes up he bulk of the landscape.

I wax rhapsodic about these autumnal sights because I love the season so. I would not trade the hillsides of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware in fall for all the palm trees in Florida, or the sandy beaches of Hawaii. I moved here to Chester County in the fall, driving over the Allegheny Mountains in a 1970 Dodge Dart that held virtually everything that I owned to find a job on a newspaper that I had never heard of until then. The Phillies beat the Montreal Expo on a Mike Schmidt home run in the 11^th inning of the next to last day of the year, and I started getting to know the people I still call my friends.

Here is what the songwriter Robbie Robertson said about the fall when he was talking with a filmmaker about the meaning behind his ode to life and hard times, “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)”:

“In the story to me, it’s another piece I remember from my youth, that people looking forward, people out there in the country somewhere, in a place; we all know it, may have been there, may have not. But there are a lot of people for whom the idea of come autumn, come fall, that’s when life begins.

“It is not the springtime where we kind of think it begins. It is the fall, because the harvest has come in.”

Welcome back.

Missing Ponds

This column originally appeared on Oct. 4, 2009.

There is nothing more comforting than a good map.

When confusion or frustration come calling, I find great solace in grabbing a book of maps and staring at places I have been, or want to go, or have never heard of before. When I sit down to write a news story about someplace I have never been and required to describe, I find the assistance that I get from looking at a map of the place invaluable, and reassuring. If I stick to the map, I cannot err.

Is this comfort a reminder of those days that I spent in the passenger sat of my family’s 1973 Dodge Dart, patiently explaining to my mother that she had 15 more miles before she had to take the New Stanton exit of the Pennsylvania Turnpike? Well, certainly. Aren’t we all put at ease when confronted with things that are familiar to us? For me, opening a map is not unlike opening the front door to your home and smelling a cake in the oven.

Which is a round-about way of stating that the road map I have of Chester County lacks detail when it comes to our ponds and lakes, a situation that I would be more than happy to help sort out should I be asked.

The subject came up for me whilst sitting in a recent court hearing over the future of Kardon Park in Downingtown. The park, such as it is, has four ponds running from north to south along the so-called Lion’s Trail. The ponds are called, according to more than one witness, First Pond, Second Pond, Third Pond, and Fourth Pond. Remember, the walking trail has a name that is associated with something – a mammal, a social organization, whatever. The ponds are known only by numerical order.

But those ponds are lucky, you see, because at least they have names. There are ponds across Chester County that have existed along the landscape for years, and still they go unnamed, at least map wise.

And it is not as though there are not lakes and ponds across the county that do not have proper names that are listed on the map. The book of maps that I was staring at when these thoughts occurred to me lists 12 distinct named still bodies of water. They range from the familiar – Struble Lake, Marsh Creek Lake, Sharpless Lake – to the strange and slightly odd –Gotwals Pond and Grace Mine Settling Basin.

A popular fishing website lists 23 lakes or ponds suitable for dropping a hook and line into, including Icedale lake, the Rodebaugh Dam and Sinkler Lake. Try to find these on the map and you are on your own, unless you happen to be sitting next to someone from Honeybrook who grew up fishing on Icedale Lake and can tell you that it’s right off Route 322.

There are definite needs to differentiate which lake is which, or else you might find yourself confused between the Westtown Lake on Westtown Road with the Westtown Reservoir on Reservoir Road and the West Chester Reservoir on Airport Road. And since Westtown Lake is open to the general public for visual enjoyment but West Chester Reservoir is a gated community, so to speak, with water too precious for human sight, according to the folks at the water company that owns it, you want to know these things if you are out looking for a place to see the clouds reflected on the water.

I could come up with names for the lakes and ponds I see spotting the map like so much water running over a dam. There would be Red Bone Lake in West Vincent and Woodview Lake in London Grove. I could give you Pine Creek Park Lake in West Pikeland and Trout Run Lake in New Garden. Not a problem at all to drop the name of Boot Jack Lake off Gum Tree Road out Cochranville way, or Limestone Lake down there in Londonderry. Look, I’m a professional newspaper reporter; whatever else, I have time on my hands.

The feeling of discomfort that disturbed me most during my recent quest of watery names came when I went searching to see if the pond I enjoyed the most had a name. I found it one day while driving along Hilltop Road in Newlin, a road that starts along the woods near the Brandywine Creek and rambles skyward until opening on rolling meadows high above the western end of the Great Valley. I stopped where the road meets Green Valley Road, and hopped out to spend some time staring at a quiet pond as the sun went down.

I checked. It’s not there, according to the map.