dude, where's the stone?

[OT from cottage renovations]
[crossposted to then_now]

the Grove was laid out along the intersection of two ridgelines and its topography has two saddles.  accordingly it is the headwaters of four tributaries of the Potomac River: Crabbs Branch, Mill Creek, Muddy Branch and Whetstone Run.  Crabbs Branch and Mill Creek feed Rock Creek which enters the river down in the District of Columbia; Muddy Branch joins at Pennyfield Lock and Whetstone Run feeds Seneca Creek.  these confluences are spread out along 23½ miles of the river's N bank. 

the West Woods contain two sources of Whetstone Run: Maple and Whetstone Springs.  the former feeds into Maple Lake, whose outflow joins Whetstone Run near its eponymous spring. 

years ago volunteers were raised in the Grove to clear out and clean up Whetstone Spring.  the left half of the image below shows its condition at the conclusion of that work in 1961; the right half shows its condition today. 

development in the area has greatly reduced the flow of water, a condition exacerbated by the past three months of drought.  the spring has silted up and the capstone was  stolen  hauled off by somebody in the late 1960s. 

one of the many goals of the woods revitalisation project is to see that the spring is restored to its prior condition over the next couple of years.  as that work moves forward we'd really like to recover the capstone.  the spring and creek are named for it: local legend has it that George Washington sharped his sword on it while passing through with Braddock's expedition in 1755 (he is not, however, said then to slept here; the Grove was established 118 years later in 1873). 

efforts are underway to try to locate the capstone and to see whether its current custodians, who have had the use of it for coming on 50 years now, might be willing to consider returning that piece of our heritage to us.  as we work to get its setting fixed up its absence will become even more conspicuous. 

(click through this thumbnail for higher resolution image)

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Whetstone Spring,
West Woods

July 1961  /  August 2007

1961 photo: Jim McCathran

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• 1961 detail
• 2007 detail (or see it in colour)

last Friday: leaving Brattleboro

[OT from cottage renovations]

even on those occasions when the train runs on time it does not make good connections to the flights we needed to catch back to Illinois -> Alaska and to Maryland.  better timing was afforded by the motor coach service of Vermont Transit so in the warm morning we duly presented ourselves at its terminus, ready to ride back down the valley of the Connecticut with a change at Springfield MA whence Peter Pan was at the ready to forward us to Hartford. 

in Brattleboro the thrice-daily stages do not call at the train station, preferring instead a modest facility to the N of town in a parking lot behind a filling station.  to call the depot unlovely would be an injustice to things that are merely homely: it was a converted house trailer, but one in which amiable staff provided a small lending library whose collection of titles was eclectic bordering on the bizarre (e.g., a spiral bound 1982 Chocolate Lovers month-at-a-glance appointment calendar whose worn edges and slightly fraying cover and pages betrayed much thumbing through over the quarter century since it was issued). 

having a few minutes of leisure in the slanted morning light I wandered around the grounds, such as they were, to seek out roadside botany. 

(click through these thumbnails for higher resolution images)

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Brattleboro VT

Cirsium

( ..+2.. )

the pale touch-me-not of which I had learned a week earlier in the Grove was also present, like the thistle attracting a pollinator. 

Impatiens pallida

with an unnamed creek in the background this spike, laden with blossoms, towered up at the edge of the parking lot. 

another familiar cultivar was this cleome, one of a bright row in a bed along the N side of the filling station out front. 

Cleome

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good news

for the benefit of any who might have worried that our visit might have been incomplete due to the lack of an encounter with a devouring fungus, relief was at hand:

we don't seem to be living in the storyline in which it expanded to encompass the whole of Brattleboro.  surely that would have made the news.  unless, of course, nobody survived to report the incident.  you can never tell. 

what a rush

[OT from cottage renovations]
[crossposted to railroading]

through I try to avoid  wasting  devoting too much of the content to the topic in this space, there is such a thing as an aesthetic of railroading.  like the subject it can be astonishingly diverse, multifaceted and polymorphic. 

railroading is an undertaking that is visual, auditory, tactile and olfactory.  trains: you can watch them, ride them; you can follow their progress in the real world, in real time across data networks and over the years through the histories of the people, institutions and economies they touch.  but every encounter is different from the one before and the one that will follow. 

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since its inception the Grove has always been served by rail: it was the opening of the B&O's Metropolitan Branch that made the Grove even possible.  whenever I can I try to take advantage of that convenience by arranging travel around the weekday service running downtown in the morning and returning in the evening.  the trip back from Vermont worked out quite handily in that regard: one flies into the Baltimore airport, catches a shuttle bus over to the rail station, rides the next southbound train to Union Station and then comes home on the commuter train. 

(click through this thumbnail for higher resolution image)

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BWI rail station

the BWI station is on Amtrak's busy Northeast Corridor so that wait is often enlivened by the passage of other trains.  before the southbound local was due this Acela express came though.  heir to the Pennsylvania Railroad's Congressionals and to the Metroliners, its electric locomotives are quiet almost to the point of inaudibility.  what it lacks in the way of sound it compensates for with pure speed: the thing came whooshing though the station so quickly that the waiting passengers to the L haven't been able to turn their heads fast enough to track its movement from L to R. 

the moment is all the more intense for its brevity.