"Out To The Arundel" - an old expression from when I was a kid
There now is a gathering of condominiums at the head of the North East River which is called North East Isles. A nice long pier - shown above - is one of the amenities offered for living snug-by-jowl with your neighbor. This pier is set up nicely for moorings and bears the appropriate signage stating that it is for residents only,
but years ago, another pier - locally called The Arundel Pier - in the same location was built to contain a small spur from the Pennsylvania Railroad used to bring in open-top freight cars in which to load the unending streams of gravel brought in by barge from various open mining pits and from dredges that were mining the waters of the river it self - my dad as a budding young man worked there as a 'loader' shoveling eight hours a day with other labourers (for a pittance I'm sure) - over time the mining of gravel continued through out the county but the means of hauling shifted to large 'gravel-trucks' that lumbered day and night through-out the area - and by this time I was a young teen-ager and the 'Old Arundel' was vacateds creating a small magnet for teen-aged boys by days and drunken tramps by night - it was dangerous diving and swimming into the deep waters for down along the bottom all manner of debris was strewn from the halcyon days of uncontrolled dumping of any cast-offs anywhere and especially into the all cleansing sight of open water and especially for some reason the dumping of dozens upon dozens of wire coils which where like a modern denizen of the netherworld waiting to ensnare the unaware - it was a place specifically banned to me by my father but those bans have been broken through untold generations of parents and kid and I have memories of several 'close encounters' of harrowing kind - but those will be for another day
Junco - II
- and to continue the lens cleaning story - this is the previous post (at 24x zoom) cropped for a digital close-up with quite reasonable detail
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)