Watch-ing The Sunrise

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Sept. 27, 2009

My guess is that the watch had something to do with it.

That is, I just purchased this new Casio watch and it has functions that my Uncle Harry Redborg, whose Elgin watch I was given as my first wristband timepiece, could not have imagined if he had lived to be 150 years old. The watch not only tells the time and date, but also has a picture of the phase of the moon, presumably for werewolf protection. It has a component wherein I can tell the best time of day to hunt or fish for any particular date between now and, well, eternity for as much as I can figure out. And more.

It has a stopwatch and an alarm, and graphically tells me how much daylight is available. It has four buttons that do things I have not figured out, and a way of lighting itself if I turn my wrist just so. I believe it also predicts tomorrow's Dow Jones Industrial Average, albeit not as accurately as you might like if you were thinking of sinking your life savings into Tastykake stock.

But the function I spend the most time fiddling with is the screen that tells me the time of the day's sunrise and sunset. And this is what I was getting at earlier: being able to see just when the sun was expected to rise and/or set has got me thinking about those daily occurrences, and how much people enjoy them.

I remember once walking home from the Daily Local News and turning around to see the sun setting over Sam's Pizza on Hannum Avenue. The shades and the clouds and the sunrays were so dazzling, I picked up a pay phone and called back to the office to tell anyone who was there to step out the back door and enjoy. Which they did. That's the way it is with sunrises and sunsets; you see a really great one, want to share it with people. So I asked some former Daily Local colleagues if they could recommend really good places to enjoy the sunrise, since I figured my watch would give me the opportunity to plan ahead on when to go if only I knew where.

I had an idea that the best places would be near water. I remember once seeing the sunrise over the Octorara Reservoir down around Nottingham, by Camp Tweedale. It was picture perfect, and the reflections of the reddish yellow clouds on the surface of the calm water made it doubly enjoyable. But Octoraro is a 25-minute drive from my house, longer if I don't avoid the state police speed trap on Route 1, so I was hoping for a place a little closer to home.

Kyle suggested Valley Forge National Park, which he said offered an overlook of the upper stretches of the Schuylkill and had the enjoyable ambiance of the rolling hills that make up the start of the Great Valley. But Kyle pointed out that much of the panorama is made up of Route 422 and the nearby malls, and by the time he had finished enumerating the defects of the view he had pretty much talked himself out of the whole thing and gone back to bed.

Melissa weighed in by suggesting that the Stroud Preserve in East Bradford provides a particularly good viewpoint over the East Branch of the Brandywine Creek, which happens to be my personal favorite of the two branches. I have spent a good enough amount of time wandering the stretches of the former Georgia Farm there to know that it would offer some particularly pleasant vistas. But it also offers a significant amount of Canada goose guano, and that is something I try hard to avoid in the near darkness of early morning.

Christine offered visual aids in her advice that a stretch of the Route 30 Bypass near the Chester County Airport gave her the most memorable sunrise in her recent memory. According to Christine, she was on her way to work in the early morning from her home in Sadsburyville when the sun rose spectacularly over the flat road where the airport stretched out ahead of her. The picture she shot of it from her camera phone was impressive, I admit, but I have a hard time accepting that anything good can come of something if the word "Sadsburyville" is attached to it.

The watch on my wrist Saturday morning said sunrise came at 6:50 a.m., and so I dutifully rolled out of bed a half an hour beforehand to go sunrise hunting. But rather than drive for miles in my quest, I climbed instead to the top of the Chester County Justice Center Parking Garage, conveniently located behind my apartment.

And as I watched the clouds brighten and the shadows disappear and the color come back into the red brick sidewalks of my beloved hometown below me, it occurred to me that any sunrise you live to watch is the best one. Even from a parking structure.

Get Out Of Town Day 2009

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Sept. 20, 2009

You want my town? You want this one mile square piece of geography? You want this county seat? You want to take over the central business district for a one-day bacchanal of gastronomic engorgement? Go ahead, take it. I’m gone.

Today, as many of you may know, is the annual West Chester Restaurant Festival, where literally hundreds of restaurants and funnel cake vendors descend on Our Fair Borough like so many Mongol Hordes and bring with them hungry interlopers in numbers not seen since the recent Teabagger protest in Washington, D.C.

For those of us who live in West Chester, however, today is not known as Restaurant Festival Day. It’s known as Get Out Of Town Day. Rather than fight the crowds and battle with the interlopers over parking on our streets, we choose to find something else to occupy our time, someplace else to go and enjoy the wonders of late summer.

Some of us choose to replicate the experience of the restaurant festival by finding the nearest traffic jam and joining the queue. Others of us offer up hundreds of dollars of our hard earned cash for mushroom-sized appetizers at the nearest convenience store, estimating correctly that the cost is equivalent to what we would expect on Gay Street, but the wait is far less.

Me, I’m heading for the hills. More specifically, I’m going to take a nostalgic drive up Route 282 north of Downingtown into the wilds of Wallace and the Nantmeals.

Route 282 is not the most picturesque back road in Chester County, but it does crack the top ten. It meanders nicely alongside the East Branch of the Brandywine Creek for miles and miles, passing through villages like Lyndell and Glenmoore, Springton and Cornog, until it terminates at an intersection between Barneston and Huntsfield.

It is nostalgic for me because it is the scene of one of the first prime assignments I received as anew report at the Daily Local News in the late fall of 1982. The news editor saw I wasn’t busy and told me in no uncertain terms to get out to the Cornog Quarry and find out what all the fuss was about.

What the fuss was about was a state police dive team searching in the murky waters for cars that had been dumped there. I wasn’t the only one who arrived at the scene to judge their progress, and wondered why so much attention was being paid to an operation to clear and otherwise unused former quarry of dumped cars.

It was not until after I had filed my piece that I learned that what police were really searching for were the bodies of the two young Reinert children, part of the eerie criminal case surrounding teachers at Upper Merion High School. The whole thing happened under my nose without my realizing it, and now wherever I wander up Route 282 and pass by that quarry, I am reminded of how little I really know.

But the ride up Route 282 also brings back more pleasant memories, of finding out of the way people who are as friendly and as open as the fields that developers like to gobble up in northern Chester County.

On one spring Sunday after a series of hard rains, I was sent out to talk to people who now had lakes in their backyards as the Brandywine overflowed its banks. I wandered up the road and made my way to Glenmoore, stopping along the way to knock on doors and interview the flood victims. Those I spoke with were open and forthcoming, if a little quizzical about why a reporter would be so intensely interested in the water level in their basement. I suppose that in those days before cable television and incessant news hounding the sight of a person with a notebook showing up on your doorsteps was still something you would face with a sense of excitement, instead of one of ennui.

I also like to slow down as I pass through Lyndell and look up on the hillside at the gazebo that sits on the property where Jim Croce once lived, and imagine him writing those faux folk hits in the 1970s that occupied so much of my radio listening time when I was in high school. I used to be able to sing a few verses of “Workin’ at the Car Wash Blue” at the drop of a hat, and wonder always if that’s where the idea came to him, on that hill.

So if you want my town, go ahead and take it; I’m planning on invading a few places of my own. Just make sure you have it back by 7:30.

One Man's Meat Is Another Man's 4-Way

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Sept. 13, 2009

So that we are clear about this, I will start today by declaring openly that I am not in favor of gluttony. However much you think that my adherence to the sin of sloth in my position as a professional newspaper reporter would ipso facto lead me down the road to wholesale acceptance of sins such as lust and greed and wrath, I would like you now to disabuse yourself of that notion. For me, gluttony is right out.

But that being said, let’s hear it for Bob Stoudt of Royersford. Because he is a man who has lived my fantasy for me, and with Cincinnati chili.

Stoudt, of course, is also known as “Humble Bob” when he is out on the circuit of something called the International Federation of Competitive Eating (an organization that screams for a better acronym than IFCE, something along the lines of CRAM, for Competitive Regurgitation Appears Manly.) That’s the group who put on the eating contests involving things like Nathan’s Hot Dogs and Corn Beef and Rye sandwiches.

Last weekend, when I was blissfully celebrating the end of another summer and honoring the workers who proudly built this country so those who came after them could sock shelves at Wal Mart, Humble Bob made his way out to my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, to engage in a Labor Day Cincinnati chili-eating contest. He won. Dude put down 13 pounds, nine ounces of chili spaghetti in 10 minutes flat, bless his heart and digestive system.

Of course, the obvious question that sprung to my mind when I became aware that I had missed out on the spectator sporting event of a lifetime was: “Three way or four way?”

That is, in Cincinnati chili parlance, did Stoudt go for the spaghetti, chili, and onion (three-way) selection or the more traditional spaghetti, chili, onion, and grated cheese (four-way) option? In my youth in the Queen City, when an after-school snack consisted of an entire box of Kraft macaroni and cheese, I could easily have seen the pleasure of scarfing down a few pounds of four-way. Now, however, I am frequently made aware of the space that cheese, grated or not, takes up in the stomach and thus, would’ve gone three-way and damn the torpedoes.

But as I saw from the photos that appeared on the Internet of the plates of Cincinnati’s finest that contestants were required to consume at the event (and a better educational tool for the uplifting of our global community than the World Wide Web the world has not known, is what I say), it looks as though the organizers went with the cheese. Again, not what I would have done, but sticking with tradition is something ingrained in the history of Cincinnati and its chili. (How else to explain the side dish of oyster crackers?)

You should know that eating 13 pounds and nine ounces of Cincinnati chili in 10 minutes flat is not something we who grew up in the City of Seven Hills are normally wont to do. We are primarily a civil, polite bunch – the occasional police shooting or The Who concert riot notwithstanding. By the looks of the strands of chili smeared pasta coming out of Stoudt’s mouth as he chewed, and his apparent technique of using his hands to shovel in the food that I saw in one of the photos of the event, I would suggest that as a city we would more than likely not have invited him over for dinner if that was how he was going to approach a meal. Should that be how he wants to eat in his own home, fine. But really.

I will point out two things that struck about Stoudt’s comments after winning the $2,500 prize at the event. First, he said that Cincinnati chili “tastes great.” Secondly, he opined that when he had finished eating he intended to take his son on a roller coaster ride at Kings Island, the amusement park where the contest was held.

The first comment made me think that perhaps he had never eaten Cincinnati chili before cramming his face full of it, which struck me as so much putting the cart before the horse, and the second made me think that if I was in line at the Son of The Beast roller coaster at Kings Island with Stoudt and his son, I would probably let them go on ahead of me.

That all being said, what was important is that Stoudt got to do what I can honestly say is something I have always aspired to – that is, having as much Cincinnati chili as I wanted, within easy reaching distance, and without the approbation I usually receive from my Cincinnati vegetarian nieces when I suggest that a plate of three-way would taste as good at breakfast as it would at lunch or dinner. (400 people turned out to cheer Stoudt and his opponents on as they did battle, a lesson that my nieces would do well to learn.)

That is gluttony at its finest, I suppose. And, truth be told, envy as well.

Michael P. Rellahan is the news editor of the Daily Local News. To contact him, send an e-mail to mrellahan@dailylocal.com

Thrown For A Loop In Eagle

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Sept. 7, 2009

Pardon me if I interrupt your morning debate over the entire health care reform issue, from death panels to public options, but I’d like a chance to talk about something that has been bothering me for several days now. I’d really like to put it aside, get it off my chest, and deal with it now so that when my concerns are all out in the open I can rejoin the entire health care reform debate, as the program is apparently already in progress and I don’t have TiVo.

So: What’s up with this Eagle Loop Road business?

If you have ventured north above Eagleview Boulevard on Route 100 in the past month of so, you know what I’m talking about. If you have not ventured north above Eagleview Boulevard on Route 100 in the past month or so, give yourself a treat and do so post haste. Make sure, however, that your collision insurance is up to date, because let me tell you.

Some background: A few years ago, the good folks in Upper Uwchlan (pending motto: “Where The Car Dealerships Look Like Churches, And The Churches Look Like Car Dealerships.”) looked outside the window of the township building and noticed something unusual: traffic wasn’t moving. Route 100 had become, little by little, inch by inch, McMansion by McMansion, the New Jersey Turnpike at rush hour of North Central Chester County. Being the good folks that they are, the Upper Uwchlan officials decided to do something to ease the congestion and -- realizing they could not simply erect metal highway barriers at the township line and keep people from driving through-- the concept of the Eagle Loop Road was born.

All good reporters love a road construction story. Because roads take so long to build (pending motto for East Whiteland: “Forty Years And Counting On That Alleged Route 202 Widening Phase”), you always have stories about them in reserve. Anytime the workload slows down and no new health care reform forums have been scheduled, you can whip off a “Fill-In-The-Blank” Road Construction Update in and hour and a half. Trust me, I know. For several years, I made my reputation on Exton Bypass stories. I could speed dial the Chester County Planning Commission official in charge of the project, Lee Whitmore, without opening my eyes from my afternoon nap.

The Daily Local News once had a reporter assigned to pay attention to the Eagle Loop Road fulltime, ever since it was first floated as a surefire way to make sure the commute time from Black Horse Road (pending motto: “Best Damn Dirt Back Road in North Central Chester County”) to Hannum’s Harley Davidson did not approach 90 minutes. But that reporter has left our employ and no one has taken up the Eagle Loop Road gauntlet, so to speak, in quite some time. Imagine my surprise, then, when on a recent trip north above Eagleview Boulevard I discovered that the project had been finished.

The original idea, as I understood it, was to build a road that looped around Eagle – hence, the name – so that motorists not wanting to stop off for a test drive at CarSense or have quiet dinner at the Eagle Tavern could just avoid the whole section of Route 100 through the village. Which made sense to me, even though I once reported a series of stories about how G.O. Carlson Boulevard in Caln, another inspired road project, had utterly failed to divert the thorough traffic off Route 30 in Thorndale.

But when I approached Eagle last month, driving under the Pennsylvania Turnpike Overpass like a motor driven Alice down the rabbit hole, my idea of the loop road became, well, shall we say, challenged. The road was going left when I was used to driving straight. Strange signs offered me detours onto something called Ticonderoga Boulevard (pending motto: “Benedict Arnold Has Nothing To Do With Us.”) I wasn’t certain whether a left hand turn meant a hard left or a soft left, and a woman in an Audi A6 decided that a helpful toot of her horn might get me going in the right direction. At least that is what I think she was trying to communicate with her helpful hand gesture.

The road makes no sense, or at least will take some getting used to along with some dented fenders. I know there have been traffic issues, because the good folks at Wolfington Bus Co. have placed a pair of school buses blockading their property and a portable toilet has been set up right at the loop road stoplight, presumably so that those local Eagle residents who want to watch the comedy show that has become rush hour there have a suitable place to relieve themselves when the laughter loosens things up a bit too much.

OK. I’m finished now. It is off my chest. The Eagle Loop Road may not be what I had imagined it would be, but I am certain that in short measure I will become as used to it as I have the Exton Bypass and G.O. Carlson Boulevard. So now you can fill me in on this entire health care reform debate thing (pending motto: “You Can Have My Blue Cross Card When You Pry It From My Cold, Dead Fingers.”)