City of Ice

July 4

Gibbie’s bar had been ridiculously noisy on Thursday night. They were just finishing up quiz night. The last question was something like “What doll appeared on a U.S. postage stamp series about the 1980s?” Then they put music on so loud that nobody would be able to think of a proper answer.

I was screaming at the barkeeper: “DO YOU HAVE HALF PINTS?” I love half pints in a good bar because I get to try more taps.

She screamed back something that sounded like “Yes.”

“I’ll have a half pint of the IPA.”

There must have been a soft passage in the background music, because she said, “We don’t have half pints, only 16 and 20 ounces.”

The answer, by the way, which everyone got right in spite of the noise, was the Cabbage Patch Kid. Remember them? People used to rush to buy every one that came out because they were convinced the things would increase in value. Investment toys.

They were made in Canada, where they weren’t selling at inflated prices. Before that trade went bust, people were restricted in the number of Cabbage Patch dolls they could carry across the border into the States.

I didn’t get to bed till about 3:30, but managed to get up in time to have breakfast and check out by 11.

Getting to the car took me past something that I hadn’t noticed the night before. Maybe because I was thirsty and bent on getting to Gibbie’s. Anyhow, on a glance it looked like a strange business, City of Ice Quip Men. Fantastic. Where is the City of Ice? Or are they ice quip men? Like Henny Youngman impersonators with nerves of steel?

But I didn’t have time to find out. I had to make plans.

I opened the map in the car. OK, where to go next? Should I look at more West Virginia? or go to Pennsylvania, where the food and the beer are marginally better?

What decided for me were two small marks on the map at Moundsville, W.Va., which is on the Ohio River. That’s good. I get to see the Ohio River and think about Mike Fink. What’s more, if I keep my eyes open for the turnoffs, I’ll get to see not only the Palace of Gold, but also the “Grave Cr. Mound N.H.S.”

All right, mound, national historical site. I’m going to see some remaining Indian influences on the land. Wonder what the Palace of Gold is.

This was the Fourth of July, remember, so when I saw this, I knew I had a picture of the day. I had to go down the highway a mile or so before I could find a safe place to turn around. You’re not going to do a K-turn on the highway out here. The sight distances are too short.

The house is right by the roadside. Wind had blown the tin roofing back to expose stripes of rust and white. I guess somebody saw what I saw and added the plastic stool to complete the illusion. Either that or it was blown up there by the same storm.

I had a Stephen King moment not far from Moundsville. There was a rough stone obelisk about three feet high painted with the house number and the name “Korngiver.” Is this He Who Walks in the Rows?

I came around a bend and just in time saw a sign pointing down a side road to the Palace of Gold.

I followed the road and met the most laid-back peahen I’ve ever seen. She was walking down the middle of the road. Originally I thought it was pheasant.

I hit a pheasant once on a county highway between New Berlin and Norwich, N.Y. It was walking with determination out a field and crossing. Traffic be damned. I hit the brake and almost managed to stop in time. I bumped into its wing.

The bird took two steps sideways from impact, gave me a stare like a pissed-off New Yorker, and continued across the road.

The peahen was just cool. That’s all. She stepped out of the way and then all I could see was the comb on top of her head. I expected her to take off when I got out of the car, but no. She couldn’t care less.

My camera battery was dead. I got a new one from my duffel bag in the trunk, and she was still there.

The Palace of Gold, I learned shortly after my peahen encounter, has nothing to do with the Mounds in Moundsville, but it most certainly is an Indian influence on the land. It is a complex that includes shrine, temple, lodge, meeting room, picnic ground, and other stuff for the Hare Krishnas. In West Virginia of all places.

There must have been a couple of hundred people, or maybe a million (I’m not good at estimating crowds), all out saying their prayers, taking a tour of the shrine, and lining up for the vegetarian lunch. Most of the crowd was clearly Indian, even though the Hare Krishna movement is American. That surprised me for some reason. I don’t know why.

I hiked up the hill (always hills because it’s West Virginia) from the parking lot to the shrine. You stand on the porch of the place and look out at wooded mountains, like something out of a Davy Crockett movie, and then you turn around to find gilded domes and stupas.

I got into a chat with an American lady, who had the mark of Rama drawn on her forehead and was selling tour tickets at the shrine. I didn’t feel like taking a tour, but she was very nice. She asked me where I was from, and it turns out that she was in New York, not far from Montclair, a few weeks earlier.

She lives in Mexico, but went to the Hare Krishna headquarters in New York for some event and while she was there got a tattoo, which is apparently on her ribs and hidden by her sari. She pointed in that direction, but didn’t show it to me, so I’m not sure.

Then she came to West Virginia to play the Palace. She said the complex has been here for a while. It opened in 1972 or ’3.

The mounds, or actually mound, was easier and harder to find at the same time. The map made me think there was a cutoff to the site outside of town. I didn’t see any sign and wound up buying gasoline at a convenience store in the middle of a commercial stretch in Moundsville

I asked a lady inside the store about the mounds. “They’re right up this street,” she said, pointing the way. “You can see them from the window. I drove uphill a block and sure enough, there it was, the Grave Creek Mound Archeological Complex.

Maybe when the museum is open you can get inside the fence. It was closed for the Fourth, so I can’t tell.

There’s something spooky about Neolithic monuments. This was built by a people who did not work with metals. The structures, at least in North America, that they left standing are made of rocks and earth. 

Some time in the first half of the last century explorers bored holes into the mound and found a couple of burial chambers. Who built this thing? Why so big? What were they thinking? It’s like the Old Judy Church: Some things are just mysteries.

It’s fun, too, that the mound is directly across the street from a state pen. This is a long  building made to look like a fairy tale castle. I wonder if that’s so the prisoners wouldn’t feel too sad. The guys celled on this side of the pen got to see the mound, too. I wonder if that kind of novelty was an incentive for a life of crime.

There is a church down the street where maybe they could go to reform.

I crossed at Moundsville into Ohio.

I was winging it in Ohio, following a highway up the river. I expected to run into U.S. 30, the Lincoln Highway, but instead I came to U.S. 22.

My internet connection had conked out in the morning, so I wasn’t able to look up Pretty Boy Floyd. But I crossed into Ohio anyway. I knew that he had been shot in a field in southeastern Ohio, but couldn’t remember where.

I had been on the road for a couple of days and had come across nothing involving a former Public Enemy No. 1 or Stonewall Jackson, so I was starting to have withdrawal symptoms.

I found out later that I had come within perhaps an hour of the place. Floyd was shot—perhaps by Melvin Purvis, who led the dispatching of Dillinger four months earlier—just off Sprucevale Road near an Ohio hamlet called Clarkson, not far north of East Liverpool, Ohio, which you can find on Google Maps. All right. Now I have another road trip planned. Maybe it will include Dillinger’s grave in Indianapolis.

Anyway, I took 22 back into West Virginia for a short time and then into Pennsylvania. the bonus for going that way is that it took me across a cable-stayed bridge. These are the bridges with the fans of cables spreading from central arch.

The route took me past Pittsburgh, which looks like Baltimore or Houston or maybe like almost all cities that have a central core dating from the late 20^th century. The old city appears to be decaying around a few prosperous areas built within the past 50 or 60 years.

I wound up in Clearfield, Pa. That’s the home of Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub, and I had a yen for red ale and elk. With the help of the GPS, I checked into a Super 8, and then headed up the hill to Denny’s. Which was closed. What? Another national institution closed for Independence Day.

The GPS failed me this time. My second choice was somebody’s pub and grill. The GPS took me to a Sheetz gas station and convenience store.

But down the block was a place that was open.

No elk, no red ale. No ale at all, for that matter. But there was Guinness. In the bottle.

I ordered a pork chop, but word came back from the kitchen that they were out of it. So I had chicken marsala instead. Clearfield is in the middle of Pennsylvania and so, regardless what your teacher may have told you, is in the Midwest. The Midwest begins somewhere around Morristown, N.J.

I think the marsala part may have been prepackaged. It wasn’t bad, but wasn’t great.

A group of people were sitting at the far end of the bar. One guy described his plan for solving the problem of illegal immigration at the Mexican border. He was particularly concerned about marijuana mules.

The idea is to buy a perimeter at the border and move the military bases there. Then they use the borderline as an artillery ground. Shoot explosives there all day. You’re going to do that anyway for practice. Nobody is coming across.

If that’s what scares you, then it makes sense.

I went back to Super 8, and that was it.

Good night, all.