I
was sadden to hear that Charlie Daniels passed away the other day from a stroke.He was 83.I mostly knew Charlie
Daniels from one song, but in reading about him at this Rolling Stone magazine obituary he had a very long career.He wrote songs for Elvis, played with Bob
Dylan, and was a sort of hippie southerner before he became a right wing
southerner.He played for the Jimmy
Carter presidential campaign in the 1970s and for the NRA afterward.Some highlights from the obituary.
Singer-songwriter and
multi-instrumentalist Charlie Daniels, who played bass and guitar on Bob
Dylan’s 1969 Nashville Skyline LP and would go on to pioneer the burgeoning
Southern rock movement with his namesake Charlie Daniels Band, died Monday at
83. His publicist confirmed Daniels’ death from a hemorrhagic stroke to Rolling
Stone.
With his fiery fiddle at
the forefront of much of his recorded output, the leader of the Charlie Daniels
Band paved the way for the mainstream country-rock success of that group and
others, including Alabama and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and crossed over into the pop
charts with his best-known song, 1979’s Grammy-winning “The Devil Went Down to
Georgia.” A country chart-topper about a fiddle contest between a boy named
Johnny and Satan, the song also spent a pair of weeks at Number Three on
Billboard‘s Hot 100.
Charles Edward Daniels
was born October 28th, 1936, in the seacoast town of Wilmington, North
Carolina, the only child of teenagers William and LaRue Daniel — the “s” at the
end of his name was the result of a mistake on his birth certificate. Two weeks
after Daniels started elementary school, his family moved to Valdosta, Georgia,
bouncing between there and Elizabethtown, North Carolina, until finally moving
back to Wilmington. A feverish bout with childhood measles forced Daniels to
wear eyeglasses for most of his life, making him a target of school bullies,
but the youngster, who grew up on Saturday matinees of Western films and
Saturday nights spent listening to the Grand Ole Opry, would soon find his
niche performing and writing songs.
You
should read the entire obituary.I bet
there’s a lot you didn’t know about him.For instance, that he played quite a number of instruments: bass guitar,
mandolin, violin.
Here
is first hit, “Uneasy Rider,” a hippie tour de force.
Perhaps
my second favorite Charlie Daniels song is “Simple Man.”I don’t endorse the vigilantism message of
the song, but I do love that guitar riff and the passion against our
contemporary evils.
And
then there is the great, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”This from the obituary is what Daniels says on
how the song came about.
“I don’t know where the
phrase ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’ came from or why it entered my mind
that day in the rehearsal studio,” Daniels wrote in his 2017 memoir Never Look
at the Empty Seats. “I don’t even know where the song idea came from… But when
it started coming, it came in a gush. The band grabbed ahold, and when Taz
[DiGregorio] came up with the signature keyboard lick behind the devil’s fiddle
part, we knew we were on to something.”
Finally
let’s end this retrospective with a rollicking patriotic song that is so
relevant today and perhaps fits the campaign of one of the presidential
candidates.I’ll let you guess who.;)
Eternal
rest, Lord, grant onto Charlie Daniels, and your eternal light shine upon him, a
man who by appearances loved God, family, and country.
This
may be a new category for the blog.Call
this “interesting trivia.”I subscribe
to a trivia site, which floods me with advertisements and emails.But I enjoy trying to answer the trivia
questions.
This
question listed the top five cities in the world with the most bridges.The introduction actually started off with Portland Oregon’s claim they are the
“City of Bridges” having a grand total of twelve.Ha!I
laughed.Here in New York City we
probably have twelve in one borough.After all we are on a harbor with two rivers coming together and a host
of islands.Still I wondered if NYC
would make the top five.There are a lot
of cities with harbors and rivers.
So
here are the top five in reverse order with a count of the bridges.
5. Venice, Italy, 391 bridges.
That
doesn’t surprise me.After all,
everybody has at least one bridge on their block.If anything the number seems low.But Venice is not a very big city.It is a very beautiful city though.I’ve been there.It may be the most beautiful city in the
world.
4. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, 446
bridges.
Now
that surprised me.I would not have
guessed.I have been to Pittsburg and it
does have a confluence of three rivers.It’s
not that big a city, but I guess they love to build bridges there.It used to be one of the world’s steel making
capital.The certainly had lots of
I-Beams to build with.
3. New York City, New York, USA, 789
bridges.
There
we are!We made the list.Now that’s a lot of bridges.I didn’t think we had that many, but they are
around.I’ve posted plenty of pictures
of my walks over the Brooklyn Bridge.Here’s one.And I’ve also posted pictures of the Verrazano Bridge, here.
2. Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1281
bridges.
That
would make sense.Amsterdam is built on
water.I wonder if they are floating
bridges.Could they have modular
bridges?Nonetheless I bet they are not
very big bridges.
1. Hamburg, Germany, 2300 bridges.
Hey,
I’ve been there too!I posted on my
business trip to Hamburg, here.Oh wow, it’s been almost seven years
now.I didn’t think it was that long
ago.That’s a city with at least one
river and a big harbor.I am surprised
it has that many bridges, but I did notice quite a few.
Now
that is a weird-looking bridge.Only
German engineering.;)
So
I have been in four of the five cities with the most bridges.I would never have guessed.
This is the second part of a series on Flannery O'Connor's short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find." You can find Part 1 here.
Let
me push the discussion a little further, into a reading that perhaps no one has
considered.Let’s look at the encounter
between the grandmother and the Misfit not from realism, but from a
metaphorical, even symbolic, perspective.You might even call this reading a metaphysical perspective.Keep in mind, this reading doesn’t undermine
the realism, but amplifies it.It
creates another level to action than the immediate.
By
all rights, when a car flips 360 degrees into a ten foot deep ditch and
passengers are not even wearing seatbelts as they wouldn’t in the 1950s, it is very
likely people in the car would have died.You don’t walk away from accidents like that.Let’s say, metaphysically, they have died and
unbeknownst to them they are dead and waiting for what comes next.The family is sitting in a ditch, ten feet
deep, which is not exactly the six feet of a burial, but O’Connor may not want
to make it obvious.But they are below
ground.Behind the ditch are woods.O’Connor describes them as “tall and dark and
deep.”That language is an allusion to a
famous poem by Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”That poem is ultimately about death (silence
of isolation, snow as symbol for death, frozen lake recalls the lake in Dante’s
Inferno).Read the last stanza:
The woods are lovely,
dark and deep,
But I have promises to
keep,
And miles to go before I
sleep,
And miles to go before I
sleep.
O’Connor’s
echo of “dark and deep” is not accidental.The grandmother has gone on a journey of many miles, her vacation as we
have seen; you can even stretch that to her life time, and now she has come to a
stop.Along comes a “big black battered
hearse-like automobile” which contains beings (angels?) who are going to bring her
and the family to their final end.“There
was not a cloud in the sky nor any sun.”We hear that several times.How
could there be no cloud in the sky and no sun?We are in a state of another world.They look up and it’s the heavens.They are in another plane, somewhere in between earth and heaven.They are going before the final judge.
So
that would make the Misfit, the executer of that judgement, and that would be
Jesus Christ.The Misfit even compares
himself to Jesus at one point.“Jesus
thown everything off balance,” the Misfit says.“It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn’t committed any
crime…”Well, the Misfit has thrown
everything off balance too, and he clearly links himself to Jesus.Just before that connection to Jesus Bobby
Lee throws him the shirt with the parrots on it.Parrots have been used as representative for
the Holy Spirit at least since Gustave Flaubert’s story “A Simple Heart,” about a hundred years prior to O’Connor writing hers.We saw parrots as suggestive of the Holy
Spirit in Willa Cather’s novel Death of
the Archbishop.O’Connor was very
conscious of great writers, and I’m sure she read Flaubert’s story since it had
a Catholic dimension to it.So the
tossed shirt with the parrots flying onto the Misfit is certainly suggestive of
the Holy Spirit coming onto him.And
then the Misfit puts on the shirt.This
is all very symbolic action.
But
it goes even beyond that.Notice that
the Misfit is squatting down the whole time he is speaking to the
grandmother.“The Misfit squatted down
to the ground,” we are told early in the encounter.The whole time the Misfit is speaking to her
he is doodling on the ground with the butt of his gun.“The Misfit kept scratching in the ground with
the butt of his gun as if he were thinking about it.”Even just before the end he hits the ground
with his fist. The Misfit squatting and writing on the ground parallels Jesus
in John chapters seven and eight with the woman taken in adultery to be stoned.There too a woman’s fate hangs in the balance
while Jesus writes in the sand.If Jesus
agrees with the men who intend to stone her, she is doomed.
What
we see in this symbolic reading is the grandmother coming before judgement, and
the fate of her soul hanging in the balance.
No,
the Misfit is not Jesus, but O’Connor is using the Misfit to expand the meaning
of the story.Remember in this reading,
she is already dead from the car accident. The bullets are not what causes the
death, but what decides her judgement.The question then that beckons us is, what is her judgement: Saved or
damned?
###
My
Reply to Susan Margret to why the other characters don’t receive
a judgemtn like the grandmother;
Susan,
as a short story, the focus is usually on one or two characters. There just
isn't space enough to develop and bring to a conclusion secondary characters.
The rest of the family are there to move the plot. Each successive execution in
the woods is a means for the author to "turn the screw," as Henry
James would say, tighter on the grandmother's moment of truth. We should talk
about her moment of truth. Something changes in the grandmother. Notice what
happened at the story’s climax:
“I wasn’t there so I
can’t say He didn’t,” The Misfit said. “I wisht I had of been there,” he said,
hitting the ground with his fist. “It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I
had of been there I would of known. Listen lady,” he said in a high voice, “if
I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn’t be like I am now.” His
voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant.
She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and
she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” She
reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a
snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put
his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.
At
the cracking of the Misfit’s voice and then seeing him almost cry, the
grandmother has a transcendent vision. With each shot, she has called out
“Bailey boy,” as if recalling her son as a child. This has been on her mind,
but has had to focus on the tension-filled situation and the preservation of
her life. When the Misfit pounds the ground with his fist—something I can see
John Wesley doing—and nearly coming to a cry, the grandmother's social pretense
of proper decorum falls away, her selfish sense of preservation falls away, and
she has what O’Connor is always aiming for in her stories, a moment of grace.
“Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” she says. All of
a sudden she no longer sees a murderer but a child, a child perhaps who has
gone wrong, but nonetheless a child of God and as a mother herself sees in him
her own child. This is in complete opposition to everything we have seen of
her. That litany of sins I enumerated above dissolve, fade into a memory. The
willful striving to be socially respectable also dissolves, and the compassion
of her heart is laid bare, honest and forthright.
This
is why the Misfit at the end says, “She would of been a good woman, if it had
been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
Samuel
Johnson, the 18th century writer and intellectual has a famous quote: “When a
man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind
wonderfully.” The grandmother needed that moment of impending death to
concentrate her mind and accept God’s grace. This was her moment of truth.
###
Irene
Comment:
"When the
grandmother reaches out to the Misfit in recognition that he could be one of
her babies, is she having her first moment in the story of moving away from her
narcisistic inward obsession?
My
Reply:
Irene, we posted nearly
the same time. Yes, it is a moment of repressing her natural narcissism. I
don't know if she's recognizing her sins. If somehow she would have survived
and lived on, I could see her return to her previous way of life. But then it
could be life altering. On that we'll never know. However, for the state of her
soul at death, I would say this was enough of a repentance to be saved. With a
heck of a lot of time in Purgatory!
Today
after fifteen weeks, I returned to Mass since the Coronavirus caused the
lockdown.It was the first Sunday Mass allowed in New
York City, the first Mass had been allowed this past Monday.I had not the opportunity to go the entire
week.
Yes,
we had to wear masks.Yes every other
row was cordoned off from sitting, and there were tape marks on the pews
locating a six foot distance.My church
has two center aisle sets of rows of pews and one set on each side.The two outer set could be used for families where
one was not required to sit six feet apart.
People
were, however, required to fill out from the front of the church towards the
back.As it is my habit to get there a
half hour early, I sat in the first row on the family side with my son.There would be no collection at offertory,
but everyone should drop their envelope or offering in the basket at the rear
of the church.That is how I know we
missed fifteen weeks of Mass. I had
fifteen envelopes at home before I got to the one with today’s date.
Everyone
wore masks, even our music director, Ms. Williams.There was no choir and she sang alone with
the mask on.We were actually surprised
to see her.We thought it would be a bare-bones,
no music Mass.There were no altar
servers or readers.The priest had to do
all the readings.But there was precious
music.
Father
Eugene was alone in procession on the opening hymn, wearing a mask, but
thankfully took it off once he got behind the altar.Before Mass, when he came out to ensure the
altar was set proper, I was able to speak to him.If you remember I mentioned he lost hismother to the virus early on.I passed
my sympathies to him, and then he told me between family and friends he had
lost six to the virus.Oh my, I was
stunned.What a cross he has had to bear
through this.My son said he had a tear
in his eye when he was retelling it.I
was so stunned I had looked away and not noticed.
There
were no missals to avoid sanitizing them, but I knew this would be, so I took with
me my monthly Magnificat which has
all the readings.
And
then we stood for the opening hymn, “Table of Plenty.”
Come to the feast of
heaven and earth!
Come to the table of
plenty!
God will provide for all
that we need,
Here at the table of
plenty.
As
the organ played and Ms. Williams, opera voiced trained, sang, Father Eugene in
green vestments walked down the nave, genuflected as he faced the tabernacle,
held that genuflection on his knee for a good moment, walked up the altar
steps, got behind the altar, took off his black mask, bent over and kissed the
top of the altar as is custom, and stood facing the congregation.“Welcome back home,” were his first words.
And
for the next hour, all the troubles of the last fifteen weeks, the virus, the
lockdown, the ventilators, the deaths, the protests, the riots, the statues,
the cops, the cancel culture, the controversies all disintegrated into
particles one by one before one’s eyes and fell from the air like dust mites.Time suddenly transformed into the timeless
time of heaven, and peace settled into the sacred space.
A
family of five and the grandmother from Georgia go on driving vacation toward
Florida when the grandmother connives her son, the driver, to take a detour to
a southern plantation she remembers.The
detour turns into a dirt road, and the grandmother’s cat jumps out of a bag to
disturb the driver, leading the car to flip onto the side of the road.Coming to their assistance is an escaped
convict, who calls himself “The Misfit,” and two of his henchmen, which leads
to a climatic dialogue between the Misfit and the grandmother.
We
have two weeks to read and discuss this story.Let’s not give away the ending the first week.We can discuss the ending starting next
week.This will give everyone a chance
to read it without it being spoiled.In
the meantime, there are at least three ways to enjoy this story.
(1)
Enjoy all the witty and zany humor that runs throughout the story.Heck, there’s even a monkey in the
story.What’s a monkey doing in rural
Georgia anyway?I picked this story
because we wanted something a little more fun after all this pandemic
news.There’s even a reference to the
Spanish flu in the story!
(2)
Notice the sequence of events that string together that leads to the climatic
ending.Notice the situational irony in
the events and verbal irony in the dialogue.
(3)
Compare the characters of the Misfit and the Grandmother.What makes them different?What do they have in common?
Next
week when we open this up to discuss the ending, we can discuss the deeper
implications of the story.What is,
after all, a “good man?”What are the
theological implications of the story?
Let’s
start with some aspects of the grandmother’s character.We see her chief trait in the very first
sentence of the story:“The grandmother
didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in
east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind.”And later in the first paragraph she tells
her son, “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the
Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to
these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction
with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I
did.”Grandma, as I will refer to her
since she is nameless, is manipulative, scheming, calculating, devious, and I
would even say, passive-aggressive.And
those aren’t even her only sins.When
she doesn’t get her way, John Wesley, the boy, tells her to stay at home.Grandma responds back in a childish exchange
with the two children.
“She wouldn’t stay at
home to be queen for a day,” June Star said without raising her yellow head.
“Yes and what would you
do if this fellow, The Misfit, caught you?” the grandmother asked.
“I’d smack his face,”
John Wesley said.
“She wouldn’t stay at
home for a million bucks,” June Star said. “Afraid she’d miss something. She
has to go everywhere we go.”
“All right, Miss,” the
grandmother said. “Just remember that the next time you want me to curl your
hair.”
She’s
vindictive, petty, and childish, reducing herself to their level of childish
bickering.Obviously this wasn’t the
first time.June Star turns out to be
right, Grandma is the very first person ready for the trip the next morning.The kids know her well.And still these aren’t her only sins.We see she is racist, uppity to those who may
not have as much money or privilege as she has, and down-right
condescending.
And
still these are not her only sins.She
idolizes a time of slavery, “the plantation,” and measures the worth of people
on whether they own mansions and hold stock.When June Star tells Grandma that she wouldn’t have been interested in a
man that just brought over watermelons, Grandma responds, “she would have done
well to marry Mr. Teagarden because he was a gentleman and had bought Coca-Cola
stock when it first came out and that he had died only a few years ago, a very
wealthy man.”
And
she just lies.Now, I don’t blame her
for lying when faced with the Misfit holding a gun at her, but did she really
tell the truth to Red Sammy that he was a “good man?”Here she just got finished describing her
ideal man in Mr. Teagarden (a name that suspiciously sounds contrived and may
not have been a true story) when she tells a sort of slob of a guy, “the fat
boy with the happy laugh” according to his sign who the whole time is never
happy or laughs (actually he’s morose and sullen) that he is a “good man.”We don’t have enough information on whether
Sammy is a good man—he seems to be lying with his sign—and certainly Grandma
doesn’t have enough information.She
just met him. Maybe he is or maybe he
isn’t, but she seems to come to a conclusion on a simple anecdote.
Notice
what Sammy says after she tells him he’s a good man. ““Yes’m, I suppose so.”He agrees.We all think we’re good people.And the grandmother’s constant telling people they’re “good” is really a
projection of what she thinks of herself.She considers herself “good,” despite the litany of sins we see on every
page.She thinks of herself as a
Southern Lady, who is not common, who is above the modern people, above the
blacks, and above the Europeans.What it
comes down to is that she is prideful, the most damning sin of all.
###
I
know some don’t believe me this is a funny story.Without getting to the ending, which seems to
throw the comedy off balance—just like the Misfit says, “Jesus thown everything
off balance,” the climax throws the story humor off balance—let me highlight
some of the funny comedic moments.
In
the hopes of getting her son to change his mind about where to go on vacation,
Grandma says, “Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction
with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I
did.”Well that’s exactly what she does
in having them turn around and go down that dirt road.
When
we first see Baily’s wife she is described as having a face “as broad and innocent
as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points
on the top like a rabbit’s ears.”And
her personality is rather like a cabbage.
When
John Wesley is asked what he would do if he met up with the Misfit, he says,
“I’d smack his face.”Yeah, sure.
The
childish back and forth between the children and the grandmother is a sort of
low brow comedy, kind of like a TV skit.
Grandma
is dressed rather formal for a driving vacation trip, white gloves, a navy,
print dress accented with lace and a decorative pin at the neckline.And a rather pompous hat.Reminds me of characters in the TV show Hee Haw from the 1970s, which was full
of funny southern stereotypes.Ironically she thinks, “In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead
on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.”
The
road stop diner they stop to eat is owned by Red Sammy Butts, a man who wears
his pants just above his butt, has a belly flopping over that looks like a
“sack of meal,” “the fat boy with the happy laugh” as he calls himself, but as
it turns out as I said he is just the opposite, morose and sullen.
Chained
in Red Sammy’s parking lot is a monkey who seems to be scared of the children,
chattering and climbing the tree.Why a
monkey in rural Georgia?I’m not exactly
sure, but it’s awfully strange and comedic.It seems almost like a living gargoyle.
Of
course with the accident you have the cat jumping out of the bag, latching
itself to Baily as he’s driving, and causing the car to flip into a ditch.Then the children coming out shout for joy: ‘“We’ve had an ACCIDENT!” the children
screamed in a frenzy of delight’ and then find themselves sorry that no one was
killed.It’s slapstick.
There’s
lots of subtle humor.It really is meant
to be funny.
My
Replies to Funny Moments:
(1) Yes, Irene, the
Misfit's final assessment of the grandmother is very important and goes into
the theological dimensions of the story. We can discuss that next week.
To Kelly, yes that [Grandmother
getting the wrong dirt drive, the wrong state] was very funny. I almost put
that down in my list but I had to cut it off somewhere. I also thought it very
funny that the grandmother hoped she had damaged an organ in the accident in
the hopes it would delay Bailey's ire.
And another very funny
moment was Bailey's ire when Grandma tells the Misfit she recognizes him.
O'Connor doesn't actually use the cuss words, but we are left to imagine some
pretty intense four letter words coming out of Bailey's mouth.
(2) Haha!. Very good
Ashleigh. Yes, she's tricky, or at least she tries to be. Everything , however,
turns into a disaster!
(3) The other time we get
an insight into Bailey is when he screams at his mother. There's not much
O'Connor gives us. But given how unruly the children are, I don't know if we
can consider them good parents. What's interesting is that the Misfit seems to
have better control over the children than the parents. O'Connor does
characterize the mother as looking as innocent as a "cabbage." Is
that a compliment or a swipe? I don't take that as a compliment, especially
since she has a head-kerchief on that is described as "rabbit ears."
She seems silly too. O'Connor points out twice that she is wearing slacks,
which I take for 1950's South is outside the norm and suggestive of something.
I just don't know what it suggests.
(4) Bailey is not so
silent, but they are poor parents as far as I can tell. The children are
absorbing and obtaining the grandmother's personal defects. The children are a
bunch of misfits. ;)
(5) There just isn’t
enough material there to fully to understand Bailey and his wife. They are
minor characters who help move the plot. They are two dimensional. Even the two
children are more fully fleshed out than their parents. Really there are two
characters one needs to understand to fully get the story, Grandma and the
Misfit. They are book ends
###
Oh
what a treat I just found. Flannery O'Connor reads the story here on YouTube.
The audience laughs repeatedly.
This
year for our Father’s Day adventure (we go on one every Father’s Day) we decided to do another hike, but this year we decided to stay on Staten
Island.Last year we went to Bear Mountain,
which is a couple hours drive from us.We simplified this year and drove just ten minutes away.
Staten
Island has a nature reserve which is called the Greenbelt, and the Greenbelt
has a number of hiking trails.You can
read about the trails here and you can see a map of them here.
We
decided to do the red trail since it was only four miles long.
So
here are some pictures.First at the Nature
Center, which is the headquarters of the park, we’re trying to get our bearings
and figure out where the Red Trail begins.Here’s Matthew with the map on my phone.
Matthew
had a burst of energy starting out.He’s
such a kid.
Here’s
a little movie clip of him bouncing around the path.
Eventually
he tired out…lol.
We
came across some different terrains.Here’s an open field not far from a golf cource.
Where
am I in all this?Well here’s a picture
of me.
Towards
the end we couldn’t find our way back to the Nature Center where our car was
parked.We were still on the trail but
we had to split off to the blue trail to take us back where we started.We couldn’t figure out the split.We came across this rock pile, which
obviously has some meaning.
But
I was never a boy scout, so I had no clue.
We
made a decision to take a right bearing split, and for a while it seemed
right.But we were never reaching the Nature
Center.Matthew wanted to turn
around.Then he decided to start marking
trees with his pocket knife.
He’s
such a little boy.But I insisted we
continue on.Finally we came across two
women hiking in the opposite direct who seemed to know their way about.I asked if the direction they came was toward
the Nature Center.The older woman was
very assertive.She replied with what I
thought I heard, “You’ve got to look at your all trails map.”I said I have a map but I didn’t know where
on the map I was.“No, no,” she said, as
if I were an idiot.“You’ve got to look
at the All Trails App.”
Now
I knew what she meant.Last year for
Bear Mountain I subscribed to the All Trails App.It was about $30 for a year and supposedly
you get all the hiking trails in the country and it shows you where on the
trail.It didn’t seem to match the Bear
Mountain Trails, so I thought it was a waste of money.I didn’t re-subscribe, and now I was kicking
myself.
“So
which way to the Nature Center?” I asked.She looked at her phone, presumably her App.“It’s that direction,” she confidently said,
pointing to the opposite of the direction we were walking.“Oh, so were walking in the wrong direction?”She nodded.“Get the App,” was her final word of wisdom.So we turned and walked as they pulled ahead
walking in their brisk, confident manner.
So
we walked until we realized that we had reached an exit onto the street and we
were heading in the wrong direction.She
took us a mile out of the way.We were
in the right direction.She may have the
App but if she doesn’t know which direction you’re walking, the App is
useless.
Anyway,
we finally got back.The whole time was two
hours and eight minutes, and according to my Fitbit, hiked four and a half
miles.
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