Museum Quest

September 7

I need a safari jacket for our trip to Thailand next month, and an online search discovered that Cabela’s carries them. That seemed like a good reason to go museum-hopping in Pennsylvania.

After all, Cabela’s, with all the guns, knives, camping gear, and stuffed trophy animals, almost qualifies as a museum itself.

There are others I plan to visit along the way.

The store is farther into Pennsylvania than I remembered. It took an hour to get to the Delaware River Bridge on Interstate 78 and almost another to get to Cabela’s in Hamburg.

 I found the way to the store through a sprawl of suburban commerce. I passed the sign on the hill that warns fools like me to focus on what's coming up: “Attention DIP Ahead.

The parking lot is about the size of an airport, and it was almost empty. Great, I’ll have the place to myself. I took photos of some of the stuff outside. The bronze of the Indian and trapper running the rapids, for instance.

The store sits on top of a hill, so I snapped a couple of scenery shots. I don’t know why. They never come out right.

At the store entrance, a man came up to me and said the store had lost power and was closed. The whole area was out of power. That’s why the signals were out, and members of the local fire department were out directing traffic.

The man said they might have power back around 2 in the afternoon. 

Cabela’s is why I came to Pennsylvania. So what to do? Give up? Sit in a parking lot for two hours? 

I took the only other practical option, which was drive to Reading. Daniel Boone grew up there, but I had never been to the city.

On the way into town, I passed a small point of ground with a large bronze horseman on it. Wrong state for Stonewall Jackson. Who could it be?

I found my way back and was introduced to a local Civil War hero. It was a monument to General David McMurtrie Gregg. The name wasn’t familiar, but he had been involved in several important engagements.

He was a brigadier general in the U.S. Cavalry. His unit and Custer’s stopped an attack by J.E.B. Stuart at Gettysburg. He later led the cavalry at the Battle of Yellow Tavern, where Stuart took the bullet that killed him. 

The statue stands in a tiny park on Pennsylvania 61 in an upscale section of Reading. There are six plaques telling his life story. The text is the same as the Wikipedia entry on Gregg.

He was born somewhere else in Pennsylvania, but settled in Reading because it was his wife’s home town. He died in Reading in 1916.

In wandering in search of the main business street (always a good place for a walk) I passed lots of corner stores and service businesses with signs principally in Spanish. I felt right at home.

Parts of the city look remarkably like Paterson, late 19th and early 20th century wood frame row houses that have seen better days. 

Still, the place is charming if you like the graceful forms of Federal architecture. Like Georgian, it uses the Golden Rectangle for many of its proportions.

Downtown seemed to be centered around Penn Street.

For about two blocks, Penn is a commercial boulevard. Two lanes each way separated by an island. Still room for angled parking and wide sidewalks. A mix of old and new buildings, mostly occupied.

This was an important thoroughfare in Colonial and Federal times too. Signs commemorate early settlers and Revolutionary War heroes who used to live on what is now the street.

A repurposed bank building sits on the site of an 18th century pub called the Federal Inn. The sign on the sidewalk says George Washington and his staff stayed there when, as president, he led troops to put down the Whiskey Rebellion.

There is even a monument from 1904 that celebrates the Temperance monument.

Plenty of evidence along the street today reassures me that this was a bit of long-gone history, thank Goodness. It was too early to take a sample at any of the bars, but their presence was reassuring nonetheless.

There is also an imposing Neoclassical library, columns and all. After the security guard saw my photo ID, he unlocked the men’s room for me.

Meanwhile back in Hamburg, the signals were working and the firemen gone.

It didn’t surprise me that there were no safari jackets in the store. I’ll buy one online.

Knife selection OK but nothing too attractive, so I’ll wait till my next time in Tennessee, maybe in a few months. Even the Buck knives are made in Red China now.

The stuffed animals are everywhere, and amazing. There are musk oxen on top of a rack of men’s clothes. The central feature of the store is a large fake mountain covered with specimens that range from pumas and elk to brown bears and turkeys.

Needless to say, a shot of that is the photo of the day. My apologies to the vegetarians, but remember, I come from a long line of deer poachers.

The fish aren’t stuffed but alive in the pool. Maybe that touch was a nod to feng shui. Our hotel in Montreal in the edge of Chinatown was built according to feng shui principles, and it had a pool full of fish too.

Easton turned out to be a real surprise. 

When I checked in at Days Inn, the lady handed me a map of the neighborhood. The hotel is two blocks from the circle at the center of town. There is more in a six-block radius to eat, drink, and see than I’m going to have time for. 

I may not move the car until I leave town.

There are bars, a museum or two, an artists’s alley. Think New Hope combined with Lambertville. It’s a great place to spend a long weekend.

First destination was a four-block walk to a place I’d not heard of: Bachman Publick House, which dates back to 1753. I went there first in the hope that it was still a public house.

The sign outside really cheered me up. It said the place was keeping the colonial traditions alive. What kind of ale would they have? 

But no, that’s not the case. It’s a museum where re-enactors portray colonial people doing colonial activities. And it was closed when I got there.

But there is no shortage of alternatives here. A small alley leading off the traffic circle is occupied by a half-dozen beer and food joints. 

Pearly Baker’s presented an array of Pennsylvania brews. The food was strictly bar. For me, a great, very rare hamburger and some Brussels sprouts, which were too sweet and too tough to be really good.

Weyerbacher Double IPA, brewed in Easton, has a light fragrance and a bit of sweetness, maybe from the 9 percent alcohol content.

Yards Cape of Good Hope is another double IPA, at 9.7 percent. It’s a cask ale, which means it is carbonated when it is fermented, not force-carbonated at the tap. This may have been the best of the night, and had very good bubbles for a cask ale.

Lancaster Hop Hog was on nitro instead of CO2. It makes for a very smooth drink. Nitrogen gives Guinness stout its characteristic effervescence. The Hop Hog had a faint fragrance but some good hop bite. 

It had an almost smoky flavor at the back. Strange, but good.

Evil Genius Stacy’s Mom Citra IPA has a sweet fragrance and an unusual flavor, not nutty, not too bitter, a touch of sour (maybe from the Citra hops), and almost savory like a grain, but not barley sweet. Who the hell is Stacy’s mom?

Penn Brewing IPA is very fragrant—like drinking perfume, Joanna would say. It’s delightfully bitter, and the flavor seems to have almost a touch of sour, but not quite.

The last three ales ranged from 6 to 7.5 percent alcohol

So I managed to walk home and conk out.

Good night, everybody.

Harry

Oh Canada, au Revoir

August 2-4

We got back just fine, and on time. We pulled up at Joanna’s house around 5 on Friday. We had another family gathering to attend on Saturday in central Jersey, so we’ve been keeping busy.

There were a couple of things that I forgot to mention about our stay in Vermont. 

Joanna and her sisters, as they often do, were gardening together, moving some small saplings and flowers to more advantageous places in the yard.

I’m no gardener. When I touch plants, they usually die.

Rocks, on the other hand, are safe enough around me. So I helped Jeff pile the rocks for a stone wall he is building next to the driveway.

He picked up the heavy ones with a forklift on the front of his tractor. They were used as the first course and pretty much stayed where they fell. I tried to jockey one into a better position and it didn’t even show I was there.

OK. Smaller rocks.

I did all right for a while. I was bending to put some medium-size rocks on the forklift. When I stood up, the world got a little strange. 

I’ve had this before. I grabbed onto the top of the lift for support while my head cleared. It must have been apparent that something was out of whack, because Christopher asked if I was OK.

That was it for me. They wouldn’t let me do any more stone work.

A very colorful moment occurred when several of us were sitting on the porch of the house next door. This is the original farmhouse from the early 19th century. 

It has been expanded and updated over the years, and Dave, Jeff’s brother, lives there in the summer. He goes back to Florida for the winter.

A flash of iridescent red winked at us from inside a small tree by the porch. The reflection of sunlight was so intense that it seemed the red spot was a lamp.

Dave told me it was a ruby-throated hummingbird. 

There is a hummingbird feeder near the tree. It has small flower-shaped access points where the birds can reach in and drink sugar water.

I have only seen hummingbirds once or twice before. They are tiny things. And when they hover, their wings beat so fast you can’t really see them. All you pickup is a transparent blur. 

On Wednesday morning in Montreal, Joanna suggested we go a basilica up on the mountain, St. Joseph’s Oratory.

It’s a trip of a few miles from the hotel, and the Metro doesn’t run up there, so we took a cab. Besides getting us there, the driver took us to the upper parking lot and saved us a lot of stairs. 

I don’t know how many stairs there are, but it may really number a hundred or more. And the middle of each flight of steps is reserved for people who want to make the climb on their knees.

I had heard about places where worshippers do that, but this was the first time I had actually visited one.

Joanna had been here back in the '70s so she picked up a brochure that told how this place got its start. It’s uncanny.

A kid with a hard-luck life was born in New Brunswick to a penniless French Canadian family. He didn’t go to school. He and his siblings were orphans by the time he was 12.

He worked odd jobs in Canada and the States, and one day showed up on the steps of a monastery, where he asked to join as a brother. The guy couldn’t read or write, so what were they going to do with him?

They made him janitor at the College of Notre Dame, which is across the street from where the basilica is now.

He took the name Frere Andre and worked as janitor for 35 years. During that time, he started to receive stray people. He listened to their complaints and their stories. 

He told them to pray to St. Joseph. Many did and some claimed to be healed of their bodily and spiritual ailments. 

Word got around and more people came to see Brother Andre.

Meanwhile, he made a practice of climbing the mountain across the street to say his prayers in a grove. One day he scattered St. Joseph medals on the spot and told the saint that he would like to build a shrine to him on the site.

He floated the idea around and got backing to build a one-room chapel there. He also apparently lived in it because there is a tiny apartment above the chapel.

The walls are covered with plaques thanking St. Joseph for his help. There is a collection of used crutches. One plaque said the donor had been cured of cancer.

There are more thank-yous, crutches, and canes inside the basilica.

I’ve seen this before—at St. Lucy’s chapel in Syracuse and at the altar of the Infant of Prague, for instance—and I love it because it puts us in touch with our pagan roots.

It doesn’t matter what you believe or disbelieve. The human brain is hard-wired for this kind of mystical poetry. The Neanderthals threw flowers into the graves of their dead.

The basilica has grown in stages. Originally it was a larger chapel, now called the crypt, and it may have been built before Brother Andre died in the 1930s. 

He is a saint in his own right and is buried in the crypt. His heart is in a reliquary a floor above.

We cabbed back for a breather at the hotel before we strolled out to The Keg, a steakhouse in Old Montreal. We had stopped for a couple of beers on Tuesday and knew the Guinness was good. It’s great with red meat.

Remembering how much fun it is to drink beer and watch people walk by, we opted for dinner at a table outside. We were doing all right, too, until that thunderstorm hit. 

We grabbed our plates and drinks and ran inside along with everybody else. I had to make two trips because we couldn’t carry the bread on the first run.

Thursday was museum day. I had been on the web site of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and learned that every Thursday people over 65 get in free.

The museum is fun even before you get inside. There is a large bronze bird made of machine parts that appears to be laying a huge egg. A vivid orange glass installation by Dale Chihuly is on the steps. 

The street next to the museum is closed to traffic and is filled with a maze-like installation of what may be enameled sections of angle iron in various colors. You can walk through it, as Joanna did. Kids run and skip through it.

On the far side of it was a man in slacks and a woman in a skirt playing catch with a football. It almost seemed like performance art. Maybe it was.

We went to the part of the museum that starts with the 17th century and moves to contemporary art.

I love the Dutch masters, and there were several, mostly new names to me. There were none of the grand-scale groups that are so much fun in the Rijksmuseum, but even so, the detail and subtle color of the small-scale landscapes were terrific, as usual.

There were a few Rodins, including a small version of the Thinker. Renoir was there and so was Monet.

One gallery was devoted to paintings influenced by observations of nature, a 19th century realist movement. An animated video of birds and tree limbs in the breeze was projected on the walls above the canvases.

Joanna said it reminded her of the Monet rooms at the Orangerie. We had read about them and went to the Orangerie to see them last April.

We walked back to the hotel and then went around the corner to Chinatown for dinner—great roast duck, fried rice, and choy sum. I love roast duck. Chinese roast duck, French roast duck. Fantastic.

I had two beers with it. They were bottles with a name I had seen in stores but not tried—Boreale, with a large polar bear on the label.

One was a stout that was very good. The wrong stout can be cloyingly sweet, but this was fresh and crisp. So was the second beer, a Boreale pale ale.

Right up there with the Guinness, they were among the best beers I had in Montreal.

Friday was moving day. We were out by 10. According to Google Maps, it’s a six-hour drive. We stopped a few times on the way, mainly to stretch our legs. 

So allowing for the stops we were right on time when we parked in front of Joanna’s house at 5 o’clock.

God bless and good night, gang.

And I’m going to remember: when somebody says “duck,” I’m going to answer “roast.”

Harry

Another Northern Journey

July 28-August 1

Here’s how we got to Montreal and what we’ve done so far.

We went to a gathering of Joanna’s family in northern Vermont. She and I left on Friday the 28th and took our time getting to Springfield, Vt.

We stopped on the way at Brattleboro, which is one of those cute little towns like New Hope, Pa., or the old town in Fredericksburg, Va. It’s full of local boutiques, bars, restaurants, and the Strolling of the Heifers, an annual parade in which residents walk their cows in a parade through town.

It’s part of a food drive that promotes local agriculture and food for the needy. 

There’s also a covered bridge, not a truly rare thing in those parts, but rare enough for us that we stopped to walk across it.

We stopped at Springfield, Vt., for the night because I didn’t want to drive the whole seven- or eight-hour trip in a single stretch.

We shared a New York strip steak at a local restaurant called 56 Main Street. 

We got to our destination the next day, Saturday the 29th, with no trouble and stayed in the huge rambling farmhouse owned by Joanna’s sister Philomena and her husband, Jeff. 

There were eight people staying there: Phil and Jeff, their son Ian, Joanna and I, Joanna’s son Christopher, Joanna’s sister Gladys and her husband Ken.

The house is so big that when you’re in your room, you can’t tell there’s anybody else around. Some years ago, it was an inn.

Seeing that we were out in the country, I was hoping for dark sky because Joanna has never seen the Milky Way. I’ve only seen it a couple of times, years ago from my mother’s back porch in Edmeston, N.Y., at the dark of the moon.

No luck this time. The moon was at half and very bright. I couldn’t see more stars than I can at home. 

Saturday, I helped Jeff lay stones for a wall he is building by his driveway. Joanna joined her sisters working in the front garden,

On Sunday, four of us—Christopher, Jeff, his brother Dave, and I—piled into the pickup to go to the Big Falls. You go out Highway 105 (maybe) and then take a dirt road to a cut-off. You climb over some rocks and come to a stomach-churning gorge where, a hundred or a thousand feet below you, the river cascades through the rocks. 

Waterfalls are always impressive, but this one was in a hemlock and pine forest. Climbing over the rocks, I thought at first that maybe I felt like Chingachgook. 

Then there was a correction. No, I felt like somebody playing Chingachgook. Good enough.

We entered Canada on Monday at a place called Derby Line. I had put my switchblade in the trunk, so when Canadian Customs asked me if I was carrying any weapons, I could say a folding knife in my pocket.

Anything that opens with a spring?

No, sir. (Not in my pocket, anyway.)

We took Autoroute 55 north to Autoroute 10 west, which brought us right into midtown Montreal.

One of the streets that Google Maps told us to take wasn’t there, so we were officially lost for a while.

Making it all more interesting, most of the streets in Midtown are torn up and closed. We were looking for Avenue Viger, which would take us to the Holiday Inn.

We were on Rue St. Antoine almost until it ended. In desperation, I took a left turn onto a street that ran in the opposite direction.

Joanna saw the street sign. “Viger,” she said. Damn, we were back on track.

It wasn’t clear how we could get into the place. Then, as we passed, there seemed to be an entrance around the corner with a few cars in front. But the street, Rue St. Urbain, was one way in the wrong direction. 

I’ve driven in New York, so I know how this works. I circled the block and came up on the hotel. 

You go to the second floor to check in. That’s when you learn that you are supposed to pull into the garage under the hotel.

There was a little bit of running around—bringing the luggage to the room on a cart, getting the cab behind me to move, avoiding the woman who ran behind the car (with a child in tow, mind) as I was backing up—before I parked the car. 

I had hoped the location would be good, but once we were there we saw that it is in an excellent part of Montreal. We are on the edge of Chinatown and a couple of blocks from the Old City.

After we caught our breath at the hotel, we went around the corner to the pedestrian-only street that runs through Chinatown. We stopped at a restaurant and had gai lan, soft-shell crab, and a claypot of beef and dried tofu. 

It was all pretty good. Way too much garlic on the vegetable, and the beef was too sweet. But even so, we managed to put away a lot of it.

I had one Tsingtao, and it wiped me out.

I think I conked out before ten p.m. and didn’t get up till eight or so in the morning.

Tuesday morning we went out for a Chinese breakfast specialty sometimes called congee, but known as cheok in Cantonese. You pronounce that almost like “joke,” but with a diphthong. 

We had two kinds, one with chicken and preserved egg, and the other with seafood, which is my favorite.

Later we strolled up the hill to the Basilica Notre Dame de Montreal. The church is on or near the site of the original parish in Montreal, founded in the 1600s. The building, though, dates to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The church is in sight of the hotel, which was designed with the help of a feng shui expert. According to feng shui, it’s bad for the spiritual flow of a building to have its entrance face a temple. That’s why the door is on St. Urbain instead of Avenue Viger.

That may also explain the statue of Kwun Yum, goddess of mercy, and the fishpond in the lobby.

We had sat in the park across the street the last time Joanna and I were in the city, so this time we decided to go inside. 

Churches, no matter whose or where, are always fun to visit. 

The striking thing about this church is the altar wall. It is bathed in pastel light and covered with sculpture. There are allegories of the Eucharist involving Melchizedek, Moses, Abraham and Isaac, and Aaron. A tableau at the top represents Jesus crowning his mother Queen of Heaven.

I’ve tried to catch some of the flavor of it in the picture of the day.

Dinner was at a great French restaurant called La Gargote on Place d’Youville in Old Montreal. We had eaten here the last time we were in Montreal, about five years ago, so we knew it would be good.

The wines are excellent. I had a Cotes de Ventoux, a Rousillon, and a Cotes du Rhone. Joanna had a St. Emilion. 

I ordered the Rousillon because I knew the name was familiar, but couldn’t remember why.

Joanna remembered that we had been there. It is the town full of color which is a source of ocher.

As we often do, we ordered one dish at a time and shared it. 

We started with escargots. There were at least a dozen on the plate, some loose and others in a light pastry shell, in a Bourguignon sauce. 

We followed that with yellowfin tuna that had a dressing of diced tomato and capers. The salt and the sweet with the savory, meaty fish were terrific. So were the charred carrots that came with it.

Half an appetizer and half an entree left us room for dessert. The creme brulee trio was three small cups of custard, one with blueberries, another with traditional vanilla, and a third with basil and Triple Sec. Yeah, I know that last one may sound weird, but they were all dead-on perfect fun.

Be well, everyone, and may you all have fun. And don’t forget to eat your carrots. They may be surprisingly good.

Harry

August 1

How sad to have never seen the Milky Way.

But, hey, cheers, and a big hiya to Joanna!

JackT

August 2

Yes, dear Grasshopper. We did visit a village called Roussillon during your first visit to Provence. But sadly, that is not where your wine came from.

The Roussillon AOC (now called AOP) is close to the Spanish border, a bit west and south of where we were staying.

It is possible we had a Roussillon wine when we had lunch in Arles.

Similar grapes as in the Southern Rhone, but since it is further south, stronger flavors and more rustic. Higher alcohol, too

Larry