A t;rip through time

Monday, January 6, 2020

I drove through Sussex county to get to Scranton this time, avoiding the nutty traffic patterns on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware Watergap.

My last trip east through the gap had me in bumper to bumper traffic all the way from the foot of Route 380, making me wonder what the hell highway people in that state think they are doing by having the principal highway so utterly packed.

What should have taken me two hours to travel home took me three and a half, and I vowed not to repeat this for my holiday trip.

I hadn’t been up route 206 in more than two decades during those years when my ex-wife and daughter lived in Honesdale and it was easier to reach them through Milford than through the gap. Those trips back then happened during the early morning hours when I left from my baking job in Willowbrook though the landscape – except for the abortion of malls just after Newton – looked much the same, old farms and curious roadside businesses, open for this trip, mostly closed in those earlier hours.

Geographically, this was a longer trip – especially because there were traffic lights to contend with, and a few places through towns that slowed traffic from 50 to 25 miles per hour. But there were no bumper to bumper tragedies, no mad-rubbernecking scenes where drivers ached to see the blood shed of someone else’s demise.

My life has always been tied to geography, time periods completely associated with places I’ve been or seen or traveled through, accompanied with a cast of characters for each, as if a stage play. So driving through this part of the planet brings back times I’ve passed through here and people I’ve known, such as Terry Ripmaster – the radical professor I had at William Paterson College, who desperately sought to get back to the earth, trying to relive Woodstock on his own terms, who once lived in a commune in Teaneck, and later, built his own little world not far from the intersection of Route 15 and 206, a dairy farm I visited once or twice before his ultimate departure to Florida – where he briefly engaged in old style radical politics before dementia claimed him.

As I drive, I wonder what fate he has met with since I haven’t heard from him since 2013 when I tried to get a quote from him about the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, and he informed me about his condition, a jazz man who have delved into local history of Jazz as well as built a reputation dealing with the history of Paterson, gone (well, almost) but not forgotten.

Passing through Newton brings me close to my best friend, Pauly, who retired from the library to a trailer, a life long ambition I recall from those days when we were much younger and he dragged me to trailer sales lots on Route 22 in an attempt to find one he could afford, becoming something of a hermit in his old age (another life long ambition) so that I have never seen his trailer and not seen him in years, but heard from Alf, who lives up the road at Digman’s Ferry about the place since Alf paid a visit once, even though the two of them have not been close in decades (and maybe not even then.)

Then passing into Pennsylvania at Milford, I come into Alf’s neck of the woods, then beyond it, to strangely religious names such as Lord’s Valley, and recall how I once traveled this way when my ex-wife and daughter lived in a trailer too remote to reach by regular highways and forcing me to take back roads through a wooded world I remember and actually miss.

At my age, every trip like this hints that it might be my last, and so I take in everything as if I suspect I might not see it again, hoping later that when I do come back, I am more grateful for the opportunity, this being the only life any of us get to live, and recalling the cartoon that had two characters talking, one saying, “You only live once,” and the other saying, “No, you only die once. You live every day.”

It’s a great philosophy.