A trail in the woods

I was walking on a paved trail through the woods.  It was mostly asphalt, about 10 feet wide and for a long ways it ran straight, although up and down hills.  There were a lot of people walking and jogging and riding bicycles so that it wasn’t really a quiet walk in the woods, but it was pretty.  For a ways there was a brick wall on the left, like in Allerton Park and at several points it got wet and muddy at the bottom of the hills.  Suddenly there was a roar as a pack of motorcycles came flying by at high speed.  Everyone scrambled to get out of their way and it occurred to me that it was really dangerous and that they probably weren’t supposed to be there.  Just then one of them crashed as he landed after being airborne at the top of a hill.  There was a lot of water along the trail and out onto it where he landed and I thought he was going to slide into it and drown.  Fortunately for him he stopped with his head out of the water.

About this time someone grabbed my left hand.  I looked over and there was a little girl, probably 6 or 7 years old.  She was scared, probably by the motorcycles, and seemed to be by herself, and was just looking for some security as she walked along.

We came up out of the woods into an open grassy area next to a lake.   There was a building along the trail here, a rest stop of sorts.  I went up to it and there was an information plaque on a post outside it that mentioned that the building had been donated by Bill Cosby because he was a long time property owner around the lake and loved the area.  People were commenting about how he probably donated it so all the people on the trail would stay off his property and that you weren’t likely to see him here with the commoners.

I had made a quick tour of the building and was headed back out to get on the trail when I saw Mary Walker coming the other way.  As I past her I put my left hand out to high-five her, intending to keep walking.  She stopped and said, “I haven’t seen you in what, five years?  You can’t just keep walking.  Catch me up to date on what’s going on”.  So, I stopped and lay down on my belly on the shag carpet.  Mary sat in front of me and we talked about our various common interests.

At some point she dropped something that disappeared into the carpet.  I could tell that it was valuable to her, so I started combing through the pile looking for it.  After several minutes I pulled back a place and there stood a tiny, 1 inch tall man, staring at me and looking greatly relieved to have been found.

Pastors

I came to a glass wall, kind of like at the Assembly Hall in that it was leaning away from the vertical.  It had a door that was locked but somehow I was able to walk around to the other side of the opening and unlock it.  Since I was already inside it wasn’t an issue of getting in, but of concern that I be able to get out.   The room had another door in it, but it was locked and I didn’t have a key.  The top of its concrete wall was about 10 feet up and there was lots of open space above the wall up to the ceiling.  I was able to take a little run and bounce off one corner and get my hands on top of the wall and swing myself up.  I dropped down on the other side and was inside a theater-like lobby.

It had red carpet on the floors, dark wood paneled walls and old fashioned stuffed chairs.  There were some glass display cases along one wall and in front of one of the cases Stan Gockel was arguing w/ a Vineyard pastor about some point of theology.  I listened for a while and was not surprised to find that Stan was taking the liberal position.  I thought he was pretty clearly proven wrong on whatever the point was, but he didn’t concede anything. 

There was a balcony that looked over the lobby and I went up the stairs to it and as I was part way up I noticed Jim Egli sitting in one of the overstuffed chairs smoking a long thin cigar.  He was just under the balcony in the area that I assumed had been designated for smoking.  He was taking short puffs like he wanted to try to smoke without giving off much smoke.  He had his legs crossed and was obviously enjoying his cigar a great deal.

I continued upstairs and saw Happy Leman sitting on an end table sized leather covered dais.   I went to him and he got up to meet me.  When he did, he straightened up slowly and winced as he did, in obvious back pain.  I asked him if he had been lifting weights and he said he had and had probably overdone it.  I said I wanted to talk to him and he said that was good because he wanted to talk to me, too.  As I sat there it was like the dream ended and everything went dark before we could start the discussion.  I tried to call it back and got back into the room, but Hap wasn’t there anymore.

Christmas Island

Ruth and I were on a boat about to dock at Christmas Island.  Christmas Island was located south of Australia and west of Tasmania.  It was known as a beautiful and remote place.  It was small, maybe the size of Champaign County and it was said to have no trees.  There were green rolling hills behind the bay we pulled into and while they may not have officially been trees, there were bushes or shrubs that were 20 feet tall.

We didn’t know anyone there but we were thinking of moving there.  We docked and walked into the town which looked to be the size to have a few thousand people, but it looked strangely empty.  There were several old brick downtown buildings and wooden houses off the side streets, but many of them were boarded up.  There were a few little brown kids who would stop playing to stare at us but would run off if we turned to look at them.

We went into a two story, brick house on a quiet side street.  This was the place where we’d been offered to stay.  It was a nice looking building, and had nice looking antique furniture, but it smelled musty.  I walked through the main room at the entry and there was a half stairs that went to a lower level room.  I went down the stairs and turned the corner into the kitchen/dining room area and saw that green water was standing about an inch deep over the back half of the room. 

I noticed a couple tumbleweeds lying on the floor and picked one up and tossed it toward a trash can about 20 feet across the room.  The can was the same size as the weed, but it was a perfect shot and went right in.  The weed had a few stickers on it that scratched, but didn’t break my skin.  About this time Ellen, Kyle & Audrey came in.  They had been outside looking around and were bringing back reports of things being less than idyllic.  Apparently many of the plants had stickers and tar-like sap.  They all had black sticky stuff on their shoes, socks, pants and legs.  We’d all been really excited about coming here, but we were beginning to understand why everyone had left.

Bedford Falls

I started panning away from Bedford Falls at the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life”.  The viewpoint backed away until I could see the town and four or five miles of hills all around from an aerial view, not quite directly vertical.  Then it started to scroll through time and I watched as development after development of George Bailey’s housing subdivisions and larger office parks and shopping centers started consuming the green.  Finally the entire view except the very outside edges was in orderly patterns of streets & buildings.  Seen from a distance, it wasn’t much consolation to know that George had gotten rich building them instead of Mr. Potter.  I had to remind myself that in this case seeing the big picture didn’t tell the story that the individual details do.  Either way brought change that we might not like, but one way improved people’s lives and the other didn’t.  Sometimes not seeing the forest because you see the trees is a good thing.

A party!

I was at a clubhouse like would be at the center of an apartment complex.  There was a crowd of young people, high school and college age, getting ready for some kind of fancy event, like a homecoming dance or a prom.  There was loud music playing and everyone was in high spirits.  There were a couple of young guys following me around like I was their mentor.  I was looking at what people were trying on and giving goofy suggestions of things that might be fun to wear or do and these guys were right behind me soaking in as much of my schmoozing methodology as they could.  At one point the music started playing a song w/ the chorus like this:

Little darlin’, I love you love you love you

Little darlin’, you know I’ll always care

Little darlin’, I love you love you love you

Little darlin’, I’ll always be there.

It was like a scene out of Mama Mia, where everyone is dancing around and singing to each other while they’re doing whatever, and the whole scene was just great fun.

I danced my way from the main floor to an upper deck that looked down over the main room and was singing Little Darlin’ to all the girls down below who were all singing back.  I saw a metal stair frame folded up in a corner and decided to go even higher.  I pulled the frame out from the wall and the stairs swung into position and locked into place allowing me to climb up to an outside deck just below the roof.  I stepped on the railing around the deck and pulled myself up onto the roof and walked up to the very peak.

I stood there admiring the view and the warm night air and thought about jumping down to the ground, but thought that the 30 feet or so might be a bit more than I could safely handle.  I noticed two ropes lying over the peak.   I grabbed hold of them and began to float up in the breeze like a kite.  Since there were two, I could steer left and right by pulling harder on one or the other.  I steered around a little and soon noticed I was hundreds of feet in the air.  It was a great ride, but the steady breeze kept pulling me higher and I was wondering how I was going to get down. 

Then, to my surprise and relief, the ropes became pea vines that started sprouting leaves and growing pods.  The extra wind resistance of all the leaves broke up my lift and I gently floated down to the ground.  I landed in a garden behind the clubhouse and several people from the party came rushing up to me.  I picked a pea pod and bit off a piece and it was sweet and fresh and crunchy.  I started telling the kids to try it, that they’d never had peas like this.  Soon they were all eating peas and raving about them, too.

Uncle Floyd's house and Small beds

March 14, 2011

I was back at Uncle Floyd’s old house and since I didn’t think I’d remembered it correctly in a dream a few nights ago, I was looking at the layout from outside in detail.  Specifically, I didn’t think there had been a porch roof over the entry to the door in the kitchen and no wall next to it that I could have used to push up on.  What I saw this time confirmed that the earlier dream memories had been wrong.

This time I looked at the layout to see how the oldest section (closest to the road) had been connected to the kitchen.  This time there was an offset.  The oldest section faced north and the connection attached to the west side of the south face of the old part and connected to the east side of the north face of the kitchen.  This time the connecting section had a flat roof w/ parapets on the side. (In reality the house looked like a capital I, with the old section being the top crossbar, the connecting section being the stem and the kitchen being the bottom crossbar, and the roofs were all pitched.)

I went inside the living room (in the oldest section) and someone gave me a gallon jug of milk and asked me to take it to the kitchen.  I opened the door into the connecting section and several women were using it as a dressing room.  I put my arm up over my eyes as blinders and hurried through as quickly as I could.  They were pretty annoyed.  When I came through into the kitchen I had to duck my head because the ceiling was only about five feet high.  I opened the refrigerator and it had some half melted ice cream in it and was covered w/ frost about an inch thick.

Illinois football coach Ron Zook was standing behind me and when he saw me digging ice cream out of the fridge he got excited and said we should all have some ice cream.  So the men all went outside and ate ice cream while the women were still dressing in the middle room.

Later I went to visit Ellen & Kyle, but they lived on an island in the Pacific, not Mexico.  They were thinking about building an addition onto their house but were concerned about keeping it out of the water.  The soil around them was a red loess, which I remembered seeing and reading about in China.  Since they were planning to build they had a shovel handy, so I dug into the soil a little bit because I wanted to know what the famous loess felt like and how it behaved when worked.

March 15, 2011

Ruth and I went to some kind of event that involved an overnight stay where they separated the men and women.  The room all the men had to sleep in had rows of single beds packed in tightly to hold about 20 people.  The beds were built like baby cribs, with fences along the sides and solid boards at the ends.  I had the thought that it was going to be a cramped, uncomfortable night.  Then I noticed Mike Frerichs, the 6’-10” state senator, lying on his side, curled up to try to fit inside and sleep.

I wanted to talk to Ruth about something, but we weren’t supposed to have contact.  I saw her outside and we walked over and sat down on the pavement behind a parked car to hide while we talked.  A fairly continuous parade of people walked by from the other direction and didn’t look back to see us.

On top of a smokestack

I climbed up the steel ladder on the side of a 100 foot tall concrete smokestack.  When I got to the top there was a manhole frame on it and the lid was hanging off the side by a hook.  Ray Lu was right behind me on the ladder, so I climbed off and sat on the lip w/ one leg over each side.  We were thinking about pulling it over and we had a steel cable hooked on to the frame between us.  Ray gave it a couple tugs to make sure it was on tight and just then John Frauenhoffer, a structural engineer, popped his head up over the side and warned us to be careful about how we pulled on the cable.

We went down and at the base of the tower was a heavy metal frame w/ gears and pulleys and apparently some power source that we were going to use to pull the cable that would pull over the smokestack.  We released a lever and the pulley slowly started to turn.  I laid my hand on the cable and was letting it slide through, appreciating its smoothness, when it occurred to me that if it snagged my I would get pulled into the gears, so I let go of it.

Later I was at a family gathering at Uncle Floyd’s old house.  There was a crowd inside and I had gone outside for something and wanted to get back in without barging in the normal door into the kitchen.  There was a small porch roof over the front door and a wall about three feet to the right of it, so I put my hands on the edge of the roof and pushed against it to walk my feet up the wall until I got almost level with the porch roof.  Then I gave a big jump and grabbed the peak of the porch roof and pulled myself up.

There was a window directly over the porch roof and it opened easily.  Inside the window someone had stored big garbage bags full of shredded paper, floor to ceiling.  I pushed my way in between the bags and when I got through I was in the attic space between the older and newer part of the house.  I started across the board floor and noticed there was mud on the floor sticking to my shoes.  I assumed it must have come from the last flood.  This space was only tall enough to stand in the center because the roof sloped down on either side.  Along both sides were pipe frames with hangers that lots of clothes had been hung on evenly spaced, like they had been put there to dry.

I walked by them and at the far side on the right was a steep, narrow stairway that turned back on itself, two flights to a story.  I hurried down them and ended up in the basement.  For some reason I didn’t notice the first floor door when I went by it, but as I turned back up I saw it there and knew it would open into the middle main floor room.

A race & a baby

I was running a distance race and came up over a hill to a point where the path I was on Teed into a boulevard street.  In the center of the boulevard was a rocky bottomed creek with vertical rock walls about 10 feet straight down on its sides.  The street ended about ½ block to the right so I ran to the end and crossed to its far side there where the creek was apparently underground.  When I crossed, the far side wasn’t a street, but was a sidewalk with storefronts right at its edge.  A little ways down it the sidewalk had fallen away but there was a section of curb that cantilevered out over the undercut creek below.  I thought about going out on the curb section and jumping the 6 or 8 feet across the gap to where the sidewalk resumed, but the chunk of concrete that was the curb didn’t look very stable.  I reached down and wiggled it and it moved easily, so I climbed down next to it and pulled it out.

At this point I had hold of a mostly flat chunk of concrete about 8 feet long that was sort of wing shaped.  I was now down in the creek bed and where there had been buildings to my right there was now creek flowing over a rock ledge about 50 feet wide.  I heaved the chunk of concrete out onto the ledge just behind the edge where it fell 5 or 6 feet to the main creek below and used it for a stepping stone to cross the deepest spot.  It helped, but there wasn’t enough of it – I still got my feet wet crossing the creek.

Later I was at a big family gathering.  I had the responsibility of looking after a baby and at two different times I reacted strongly to someone mistreating him.  The first time was an adult interaction that I can’t remember but the second time was when he was sitting on a ledge against a wall playing w/ one of those elastic exercise bands when a toddler a little bigger than him came up and took it away from him.  I grabbed the toddler’s arm, too firmly, and jerked the band away from him.  As I did it occurred to me that I didn’t need to react that violently and I hoped no one saw me do it.

I took the baby down because I thought he needed his diaper changed.  When I took it off him he stood up and peed down onto the diaper.  I told him I appreciated the thought of using the diaper, but if he had that kind of control I thought he could probably get to a toilet.

Someone else took charge of the baby and I went over to a couch, sat down and picked up a newspaper to read.  My (now long dead) great-uncle Joe Ackerman sat next to me and started telling me about a farm deal that he wasn’t happy about.  Apparently he owned a piece of land that someone was going to set up a dairy operation on.  There was a dairy manager and a farm manager who seemed to have all the control.  It was his land and he didn’t think it was right that he had no say about how things were done.  I found it interesting the first time through, but he kept repeating it with slight variations, so I started focusing more on the newspaper and less on his talking.  My Mom walked by about then and patted me on the arm, like she new how annoying it was to have to listen to Uncle Joe carry on and she appreciated that I was doing it.

Hopping through the woods

There was a crowd of people at our house on

Goat Hollow Road

on a beautiful summer day.  Ethan Benefield was playing w/ me outside so I decided to take him for a walk in the woods.  We went to the back property line and headed south.  After a little while we started downhill and I started to carry him. 

We were in the deep woods where there isn’t a lot of undergrowth, so the going was easy.  I noticed that when I hopped I would float almost like a balloon.  I hopped up, not very high, but it would be three or four seconds till I was back down close enough to the ground to be able to touch it.  Then I wouldn’t really land, but would just use my foot sort of as a paddle and propel myself forward w/ just my toes touching.  It was great fun floating down the hill, but I didn’t have great control over exactly where I went.

Eventually there was a big washout on my left, with a vertical face down about 30 feet.  I kept drifting toward it w/ each hop and I didn’t have enough contact w/ the ground to redirect myself away from it.  So when I saw that I wouldn’t be able to avoid it I gave a big last hop and went out over open space.  I went sideways enough that I crossed the gulley and landed on the far side bank, which was only about 10 feet lower than the side I’d left.  Normally a jump of 25 feet w/ a drop of 10 feet would be pretty jarring, but this wasn’t.  I did use both feet instead of just one like I had been, though.

I walked ahead and noticed an old concrete frame in the hillside to my left, completely overgrown w/ brush and trees.  To the right as I walked on down to where the gulley ended was someone’s back yard.  It occurred to me that it was a good thing I’d crossed the gulley or I might have hopped right into the house.  When I realized I was almost in someone’s yard I stopped to try to look around and make sure we didn’t surprise anyone. 

I saw an old woman who had been hanging up laundry, so I tried to hide, but she had seen us.  She walked into the woods and up to us and handed Ethan one of those little straws full of colored sugar.  He was excited about the gift and wanted to know if he could eat it.  I said he could and never thought till later that I didn’t know anything about the woman who gave it and I might have been teaching him to accept candy from strangers. 

Ethan wasn’t wearing a shirt and w/ all this hopping on a summer day he had gotten slippery, so we decided to head back home.  An instant later we were back in our yard.  I went in the door and Emma had set up the space right inside the door as her room where she had one of those Japanese style dividers separating it off from the rest of the room.  She said she needed some private space because the crowd had taken over the house.  I said that was fine, but I didn’t think right in front of the door was the best place.

Later, I went out to the barn because I heard there was drag racing starting there.  People were taking their cars into the barn and starting their runs inside on a floor of wood chips over dirt.  They would gun the engines and throw chips against the back wall and roar out the door.  I started talking w/ Bob Moser about what kind of car I wanted to try the run in.  I first said I was going to use an early 70’s Dodge Charger that had all the hot car stuff – huge engine, jacked up rear end, big wide back tires, etc., but as we talked about things that would be fun to race we kept changing to different cars and laughing about what it would be like to race in it.  I finally decided I wanted to run a Rambler w/ a U-Haul trailer behind it.

Reruns

I've been on a spell of not remembering.  I wake up w/ the feeling I've just been dreaming, but don't remember the details.  So here are a couple of reruns from before the blog:

January 1, 2011

I was out in a big open field covered w/ hard packed snow working w/ a small team on a project to get a kite of some sort up in the sky.  The person in front must have been driving some kind of vehicle because he was pulling two cables that were about 1000 feet long that had a curved section of fabric about 50 feet long by 10 feet wide, kind of like a parachute, at their ends tying them together.  The first person began to move fast pulling the cables and causing the kite to rise into the air.  The kite was aerodynamically unstable, though, so a second person followed behind the kite w/ another cord to keep it from whipping back and forth.  The team w/ the kite had gotten up to about highway speed when suddenly an overwhelming sound came from the sky.  It was so loud that it almost knocked me down.  It completely incapacitated me for a second or two.  It’s hard to describe a sound but it was almost electronic, like would come from a synthesizer.  It started w/ a note then slid to a tone lower.  The people operating the kite were stunned, too and stopped accelerating.  As soon as they slowed down it quit.  We didn’t know what we’d done to make it, but it was too powerful to just continue experimenting.

January 3, 2011

I was driving down a small country road that entered a narrow valley.  There was a car in front of me driving slowly and as it approached a road that teed off to the right it stopped in the middle of the road.  I stopped behind it, but I don’t think the driver was aware I was there.  I pulled way over to the left till my left wheels were on the dirt and squeezed around by him, but I don’t think he ever saw me.  I continued up the road and past a row of houses that each had an enormous tree in its front yard.  They were like palm trees that have the stubs of the giant leaves still attached to the trunk as each leaf falls off, only each tree was about 10 feet in diameter.  The bottoms of several of them had lost part or most of their leaf stubble bark, apparently from cars hitting them or some type of violent injury, so they didn’t look very healthy, but they were huge.

I followed the road past the row of houses until it split into two branches that both headed up out of the valley.  I took the left branch but it went around a bend and quickly deteriorated from hard surfaced to mud, so I backed down off of it and when I got to the divide in the two roads I turned sideways, blocking both of them to do a three point turn.  As soon as I got completely sideways, there was the car that had been blocking the road, now waiting for me to get out of his way.

Bridges

I was standing by an old steel truss bridge talking w/ Morgan County Commissioner Tommy Goss.  It was on a dirt lane in the woods and the creek that used to run under it had almost dried up.  There was a newer bridge that the main road was on, but the concrete on it had deteriorated badly over the winter and he was worried about having to close it, so he wanted me to look into whether we could reopen the old bridge.  The old bridge was fine for pedestrians and bicycles, but it had a light wooden deck and was made for an era when the heaviest vehicle was a horse drawn wagon.  I told him I didn’t think we could use the old one and we’d have to set up a detour until we could fix or replace the newer one.  The newer bridge was big, about 6 lanes wide because it was right next to an intersection and had all the turn lanes, so it was going to be expensive.

I walked across the street to the storefront on the opposite corner.  An IDOT guy called my name and asked me what I thought about the bridge.  We walked over to a building that was being remodeled while the company in it tried to stay in operation.  There was a conference room table in the main foyer (probably because the conference room was under construction).  An old woman was sitting at one end where I had to walk by.  Right when I got there she crossed her right leg over her left and started pulling on her hose, trying to straighten it, but blocking my path by.  She had kind of a twinkle in her eye, like she thought I might like what I was seeing.  I didn’t.  I was annoyed that she blocked me and made me watch what she should have gone into the bathroom to do.

I went up to the second floor to look at some wood work that I had been working on.  I had made a frame that allowed a panel to slide in and out of place, but it wasn’t quite done.  Since the last time I’d been there someone had driven something over the corner of the frame and mashed it.

A new house

I was in a group of people who had gone together to buy a piece of land w/ a house on it that was way out in the wilderness away from anyone else.  When we got there the house was pretty much finished, but the landscaping around it was still just bare dirt.  It had been shaped in a way that allowed us to walk in to the basement from outside, but just beyond the basement entrance they had left a hole, like a small pond, maybe 50 feet across, but only about 5 feet deep in the center.  There was a little bit of scummy water in the middle of the pond.  It seemed like a strange design to build a little scummy pond right next to the house, like maybe the builder was concerned that we wouldn’t have enough mosquitoes without it.  Just beyond the pond was a lightly wooded hillside where the scummy water could have been drained to.  We all stood around and puzzled what the point of the pond was.

One of the shareholders looked at the whole scene and said it wasn’t what he had expected and he wanted out.  We reminded him that he could leave if he wanted, but the contract didn’t allow for any reimbursements.  I showed him a pill about the side of smoke detector and told him that the builder said we were to put it in the badwater pond.

We went inside the house and I admired the hardwood floors that were everywhere.  I noticed that there was a sluice gate at one end of the main floor that would allow water to be let into the house and fill to about four feet deep.  There was a second floor around the outsides that was open in the middle so that we could keep water in the lower part and have access to the lower part that was to be kept full of water and apparently keep fish in it.  It seemed strange to me that the builder had gone to so much trouble to put hardwood in an area that would be flooded, but then I thought about how old boats were traditionally made of wood, so maybe it made sense.