Good Grief, Chuck Sepia!
Nothing goes quite to plan on Christmas Eve... but it all works out in the end.
Finding ourselves with more or less a "day of nothing" on Christmas Eve, Kitten and I decided to head over to Tyler State Park and try to get in a hike.
We parked at the lot by the "Danger Dam"—where I noticed a path I'd somehow never seen before, which seemed to go under the bridge and run along the creek.
Let's check that out real quick!
We made it about 25 feet...
Well, hell; let's check it out anyway!
If we stayed on the dry leaves, we should be just fine...
...But, one step in, and I damn near Marv from Home Alone'ed myself.
Who knew?
And that was about when we said, "Not today, Satan!" and backtracked to higher ground instead.
There's a Christmas wren—or at least something winged and brown—in this next photo...
But, crikey! A few minutes later, we made it to the legendary Danger Dam—and I knew we had to move in closer, "just to see what 'appens!"
Ever since I was here in my late teens once and saw a handful of five-year-old kids happily frolicking on the thing and repeatedly using it as a waterslide, I've found it more than a bit underwhelming... except when the water level is a foot or two higher, which changes things substantially.
We discovered that the do-gooders have been here to post their anti-suicide propaganda like they had at Core Creek Park...
The Danger Dam is nothing if not beautiful though (and, okay, a tad loud when you're standing this close to it)...
It's no wonder this little guy chose to make his home here...
Even up here on higher ground though, things were remarkably muddy; and it was evident that floodwaters had come raging through here pretty recently...
We tried to navigate the path running along the creek; but neither of us felt like taking a spill, and so we cut our losses and returned to the car to head over to the parking lot by the foot bridge so we could try our luck there instead.
Fortunately for you, we can skip over the mundanity of that and just teleport you right to this moss-covered log instead!
BLAM!
Things looked much dryer here...
We stopped for a few minutes to debate whether the positioning of these fallen trees was more likely natural or manmade...
Kitten reasoned that they just seemed to have fallen a little too perfectly, and so perhaps they had been specifically placed to try to slow the process of erosion.
Quite possible!
I, on the other hand, pointed out how easily a good bit of runoff flowing down that hillside could push around even large logs that would seem impossible to budge.
I had been curious about runoff-related matters a month or two back when we were dealing with the stormwater-management issue, and I had actually crunched some numbers myself:
If you consider just one inch of rain falling over a one-acre property, it's relatively straightforward to calculate how much water that yields.
Consider that...
1 acre = 43,560 square feet
1 inch of rainfall per square foot = \(\frac{1}{12}\) cubic feet of water
1 cubic foot of water = 7.480519 gallons
...and so...
(43,560 / 12) cubic feet * 7.480519 gallons = 27,154 gallons of water per acre for every inch of rain!
If the entire acre in question happens to be a slope...
...And the soil composition is heavy in clay and doesn't readily absorb water...
...And, perhaps just a few inches below the soil, you're already hitting bedrock...
Then I think it's fair to say you could have a full-on swimming pool or two worth of water barreling down the hill, and that much water is just going to Kool-Aid Man some dopey log right out of its way—or carry it along for the ride until the log gets caught against some still-standing trees whose root systems are actually massive enough to withstand the power of all that water.
It's impossible to know for sure whether man or nature arranged those trees the way they're arranged.
Movin' on!
The "panorama" feature on most cameras tends to bend everything around a central point and make it look all radially distorted, like so...
So, I tried to manually create a pano by stitching three linear shots together after we got home.
But it turned out that I had inadvertently changed my angle too much while adjusting my footing in the creek before the third shot, and so I couldn't make that one work.
But, not too bad a result in combining the first and the second...
If I were Charlie Brown, this is the Christmas tree I'd bring home...
Finally we hit some mud that we couldn't safely traverse...
...so we turned back.
We spotted a group of teenagers "parkouring" the stream below, as we've done several times in the past :)
Rowing vs. Wading
We got back to the actual creek—
And, the Neshaminy Creek is, in fact, a creek: This distinction will be important momentarily.
—to encounter these curiosities posted on a... well, on a post.
In my book those are both features, not bugs; so, I think there's some skullduggery afoot here, and someone's trying to convince the rest of us to pass on what may well be both a delicious and a nutritious fish.
Like, what are you guys basin that distinction on? Or, was it just a typo? Like, once Gary down in advertising spotted it, he said to himself, "O-CEAN! I didn't even sea that. I just ordered an entire brooklet of these; but now I'll have to runoff to the printer and have them change it, and the order will probably be delayed until spring."
But, that's what you get!
Then there's this...
I have this personal "hobby" where I love translating Spanish to English as literally as I possibly can:
Don't enter more at Neshaminy River.
But, why does this sign try to play it off like the guy's as good as dead by the time he's only in up to his knees?
Are the sulfur-fish aggressive and bite-y like piranhas? Are we dealing with the shrieking eels from The Princess Bride? Because, if that's the case, I feel like that's something the first sign probably should've divulged.
You guys hang a flyer over at the wimpy little Danger Dam; but up here, where TGRI canisters abound, and all the fish are turning into Tokka and Rahzar and giving people 5-hour-energy farts, you've got nothing to say?!
As Vizzini would say, "Inconceivable!"
We spotted a few Canada chickens...
And then we saw that Christmas was officially ruined...
This is my favorite bench: the one that's four feet off the ground for no reason—where Riley and I sat and swung our feet that one time last September...
This is one massive tree!
...And yet, the creek pushed it around like it was nothing! (You can see that it sheared off some branches of neighboring trees when it fell perpendicular to the creek, but then the force of the floodwaters rotated it about 90 degrees counter-clockwise by the time the creek receded again.)
No one will be using this bench for a while.
I tried to give it a stirring eulogy, but I was so sad I couldn't think of anything to say.
As we were leaving the park, something that had never stood out to me before just happened to catch my eye this time for some reason.
So, I call this shot "Prelude to a Stop Sign"...
I don't know if the funniest part is that you can see the actual stop sign 100 feet ahead by the time you get here?
Or the fact that this sign is curiously stop-sign-shaped to help prepare you to recognize the real stop sign when you get there: "Guys, look! This is it!! This is the one that was prophecied!"
Why don't we do this for all road signage? Have, like, a preamble beforehand to gear you up for the real thing—kind of like using a vaccine to prime your immune system to fight the full-strength virus sometime later?
For example...
(We can't tell you what the speed limit is here, because this isn't the real sign. But the real sign's just 20 feet ahead, and it'll look exactly like this.)
Kitten and I were famished by the time we got back out on the highway; and luckily I realized, "If you're planning to cook our formal Christmas dinner tonight, what's the plan for tomorrow night when we're out of groceries and everything's closed for Christmas Day?"
So, we pursued the only course of action that made sense:
We drove two miles down the Newtown Bypass to the Langhorne Qdoba...
Pulled into the parking lot so we could look up the hours of the Neshaminy location, four townships away in Bensalem...
And drove to that store instead, because their portions are better. (Things just aren't the same at the Langhorne one, ever since Larry and Nai'mah disappeared.)
We got off Rt. 1 in Bensalem to wait at the red light—which nobody warned us was there, since there wasn't a single traffic-light-shaped "heads up" sign to be found!
By their fruits ye shall know them... except the light wasn't carrying any fruits, and so I didn't recognize it at all.
Fortunately the enormous metal ass of a Septa bus was there to make sure we didn't run the light by accident...
And as for checking out the Philadelphia Technician Training Institute by going to PTT.edu?
Pfft. Buddy, my policy is, I don't even go to P (except when I've had a lot to drink).
We made it to Qdoba in one piece—and made a pitstop at the Wine and Spirits store right next to it, since I had been craving Irish cream (and Athennia wanted 99 Peaches for some reason).
99 proof? That's got more octane than a sulfur-fish from the Neshaminy Ocean!
I'll fry my tobillos off!
When we got back to Qdoba, we found out they were about 10 minutes away from closing... and in true "EVERYTHING! MUST! GO!" fashion, the staff gave us an early Christmas present and loaded our bowls to overflowing :)
Then, of course, we had to head to McYuckald's to pick Riley up a Coke and a pack of sponge nuggets.
We came across the world's most boring car show in the parking lot...
The guy who took our order in the drive-thru mumbled so severely that I lack the creativity to meaningfully convey it via text. If you want to recreate the experience at home, just pop 50 to 60 marbles in your mouth and try to talk. That's about as close as we're gonna get.
Then, when we pulled around to the window, we saw... umm... Salt-N-Pepa here...
Kudos to her for her dedication to the reduce, reuse, recycle mindset, I guess.
Perhaps she was a member of Mother's Against Drunk Driving, and she was putting a "Thinking of suicide?" notice on the side of the trash can:
Think again! 500+ horsepower trashcans kill thousands of unsuspecting teens every year. Maybe go catch two fish from the Neshaminy Rivercreek and eat them with some barley bread while you ground yourself in nature and contemplate your life choices.
By your toots, we shall know you."
Plastering your pamphlet on a trashcan, of all places, is already taking a pretty decent gamble that this caliber of human being is the type to throw their trash anywhere but out the window.
We got home and ate like kings; and then Athennia wanted me to watch White Christmas with her and Riley... but, having watched it with them last year, I assured her I'm good for a solid decade or so ;)
So, the two of them watched it together in Riley's room—and I was informed via photographic evidence that Riley got quite cozy under the king-sized s'mores blanket we bought for her a few weeks back...
Not too shabby of a day, all things considered.
A few hiccups here and there, and things didn't go exactly as we had envisioned; but we still got to wade into some fun way past our tobillos.