Road Trip 2009, Day One, Part II

Late afternoon found me heading North-West along a stretch of US-40 I had driven before. I took it as far as Uniontown, PA, stopping along the way at General Braddock's grave. Even though I live within easy reach of Braddock Road in Alexandria, I never knew who Braddock was, and had always assumed he was a Civil War hero. Turns out he was a British general during the French and Indian Wars of the 1750s. Washington was a colonel under him. Braddock was fatally wounded in a failed raid on Fort Duquesne (modern-day Pittsburgh) in 1755, and died as his troops retreated along the route I was now driving. He was buried in an unmarked grave to prevent local Indians from discovering and desecrating it. In the early 1800s, the grave was discovered, Braddock's remains exhumed and moved fifty or so paces closer to the road, where a monument now stands. During the ten minutes or so I spent at the site reading the plaques and displays, I was the only visitor.

I reached Uniontown, which I had also visited before, and which claims to have been founded on July 4th, 1776, a little before six. Its small downtown looks and feels more prosperous than one might expect, owing no doubt to its proximity to some luxury mountain resorts in the area as well as Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. I was tempted to stop and walk around a bit, but decided to press on to Pittsburgh in the interest of time. Heading directly North on PA-51 through a part of the state rich in auto repair shops and purveyors of lawn equipment, I was within city limits in a little under an hour.

Downtown Pittsburgh is respectably sized and infamously canyon-like, and urban renewal of the 1950s did not do it any favors, surrounding it on all sides with a tightly-woven net of highways and ramps like a giant squid choking a whale, but I managed to find my hotel - the Pittsburgh Doubletree (1 Bigelow Sq.) where Hotwire.com had put me - with fewer than a dozen wrong turns and without crossing either of the city's two rivers unnecessarily. Checked-in and cleaned up, I headed to dinner at a place that J. and I first tried when we were in Pittsburgh a couple of years ago, and that has a bit of a legendary status in beer circles - the Church Brew Works (3525 Liberty Ave.) in the Strip district.

Built as the church of St. John the Baptist in 1902, the building was deconsecrated in 1993 and opened as a brewery and restaurant three years later. When a good friend originally recommended the place several years ago, I was mostly intrigued by the concept - it is always gratifying to see religion's most wasteful and self-indulgent aspect turned on its head and used for what's truly important. The fact that the mash tuns and fermentation tanks are located where the altar had once been only added to the appeal. Having been there twice now, however, I must say the excitement has worn thin. It's impossible to make a space of that size and scale feel quaint and intimate -- required attributes of a good pub, and while certainly unlike anything else, the Church did not feel particularly inviting on this visit. The beers were mostly good, but not particularly unique, and in one case downright disappointing.

I started with a Thunder Hop IPA, which was an excellent exponent of its style. More bitter than floral in its hop flavor, it was big and tasted exceptionally fresh. Thanks to the generous dry-hopping, the nose was huge and fragrant. Delicious all around. I moved on to their Breakfast Stout. Brewed with six kinds of malt plus oats and sweetened with milk sugar in a quasi-Belgian twist, it was very rich and relatively sweet, but still well-balanced, probably due to the coffee added to the beer after fermentation. In fact, the flavor was surprisingly subtle for something that has both coffee and oats. I liked it. My dessert - I could sample to my heart's content thanks to Doubletree's city-wide free shuttle - was a goblet of Millenium Trippel. This was the disappointment. Though it looked the part, it was one-dimensionally sweet. The best Belgian (and a small handful of American) triples are sweet to be sure, but something about the yeast strains used to make the good ones balances out the flavor - something that the Church's brewers completely missed. The beer was cloying. To accompany the beers, I ordered a bowl of chile pork stew which was surprisingly respectable, though not nearly spicy enough for something that has the word "chile" in the name.

It was quite late by the time I was done, and, having armed myself with the bartender's recommendation for a breakfast spot, I returned to the hotel and turned in in anticipation of another long day of driving.

Road Trip 2009, Day One, Part I

For the past six years, I have been making a trip to Ann Arbor, MI, to visit my dear friends G.&N. I usually spend three or four days in Ann Arbor, but I felt like I needed more time than that away from home and work this year, and J. was not able to travel with me, so I decided to make the entire trip using back roads, stopping along the way to see random things and places and attempt to capture what little local color might be left over from the pre-interstate age of automobile travel. It would take me two days to get from Alexandria to Ann Arbor, instead of the usual nine hours, and I would spend the night in Pittsburgh.

Leaving home at the tail end of the morning rush hour on a Friday, I headed West on VA-7, intending to stop in Leesburg, VA. Strange as it may sound, in my ten years, give or take, of living in the DC area, I have never been to Leesburg, and never driven on Rt. 7 any further than Tyson's Corner. To my great disappointment, the road proved to be far from the idyllic country drive I had hoped for, though I suspect until ten years or so ago it mostly was. Today, however, it cuts its way through the worst kind of exurbia, punctuated by a traffic light every half mile, all of them, needless to say, red. I didn't arrive in Leesburg until after eleven.

Historic downtown Leesburg, however, was attractive, quaint, and quite lively, sustained by a combination of tourists and day-trippers from DC and the horsey set from the surrounding Virginia countryside. I parked the car and walked around a bit, taking mental note of places worth visiting if J. and I were to come there together. I had my coffee mug refilled at the Shoe Coffeehouse, evidently a shoe repair shop in its previous life. The coffee was decent, albeit on the weak side. My attempts, admittedly lame, to joke with the barista fell flat.

Leaving Leesburg, I headed North on US-15, crossing the Potomac into Maryland at Point of Rocks. I was now driving through the sort of environment I had been hoping for - the two lane road winding through thick greenery on both sides. The traffic was still fairly heavy. Bypassing Frederick, MD, which I have visited numerous times, entirely, I headed for Hagerstown, MD. My original intention was to take US-40 as far as was practical. US-40 was the first major US highway designed for automobile travel in the 1920s, and had once crossed the US from Atlantic City to San Francisco. Today, however, the segment West of Park City, UT, has disappeared entirely, and the remainder has been subsumed in many parts by interstates, including I-70 in Maryland. So I took what the DOT now calls "Alternate US-40," a genuine back road that apparently hews closer to the path of the old National Road, originally planned in 1806 and approved by Jefferson himself. I was in downtown Hagerstown a little after 1:00 p.m.

To many DC area residents, Hagerstown is known primarily for the large outlet mall on its outskirts, but apparently the city, originally an industrial railroad town that has been hit by the disappearance of railroads, mining and manufacturing like countless others in the Steel Belt, has been making an effort to reinvent itself as a tourist destination, boasting of quaint neighborhoods, bed-and-breakfasts and antique shops. Based on what I saw, it has been partially successful. Downtown Hagerstown was larger than I expected, stretching for many blocks in every direction. The neighborhoods leading up to it looked like the neighborhoods I've seen elsewhere in Maryland, and seemed none too prosperous - narrow pot-holed streets, run-down brick townhouses, a dented Chrysler K-car parked here and there. Downtown proper, however, had a bit more life to it. Most of the storefronts were occupied, there was a fair number of people on the sidewalks, and traffic was congested. While it didn't quite reach bustling level, it was clearly a city that has managed to retain, or regain, at least some vibrancy. The most obvious sign was an abundance of late-model Lexus and Mercedes cars, obviously not owned by locals, parked all along the streets. I parked my own far less impressive vehicle across the street from the large, institutional-looking public library and set out in search of lunch.

Walking around, I realized quickly that in its heyday, the downtown must have been gorgeous. Ornate facades, some preserved or restored to something resembling their original glory, were everywhere, and the building themselves had the impressive heft born of the confidence the community had once had in its position in the world. Some, to be sure, were in disrepair and looked sad, but enough remained at least to tickle my imagination, if not quite enable me to experience Hagerstown's golden days first-hand.

A couple of pubs downtown were open, and fairly well peopled with customers, but I opted for Skyline Coffee (2 Washington St.), located on Public Square, the geographic center of Hagerstown. For all the world, Skyline looked and felt like a big-city café, with the menu hand-written on giant chalkboards and the walls painted an inviting brick-red. The woman behind the counter looked like a textbook coffeehouse employee, too - young and attractive, with pale skin, green eyes and straight red hair worn in a disheveled ponytail, dressed in a tank top and hiking pants. My optimism, however, was shot down quickly. The woman, who I later found out was the owner, had the flattest affect of anyone I have ever met. No smile; monosyllabic responses. She clearly had no interest in making her customers feel welcome, much less being engaged in a conversation. In fact, she looked like she had no interest in anything at all. I ordered the grilled ham and cheese, which according to the menu came with green apple chutney. When I found none on the completed sandwich and asked what happened to the green apples, she replied, her voice never wavering from its original frequency, that they had none. By the time I was done with the mediocre sandwich, she was sitting at one of the outside tables smoking a cigarette, looking straight through me at some non-existent point far in the distance. Really wanting to like the place in spite of my experience thus far, I went back inside to find another employee, a tall and emaciated man of indeterminate age with vaguely exotic features and long black hair worn in an looped pony tail the way an American Indian at one time might have. He turned out to be quite a bit friendlier and, to give credit where it is due, made me an absolutely delicious espresso.

Walking back to the car, I stumbled upon a used bookshop called Barnwood Books (103 S. Potomac St.), and wandered in. The large main room was filled with shelf upon shelf of paperback romance novels and other popular fiction, neatly arranged, while what I tend to think of as "real" books were located, in great disarray, in a much smaller room off to the side. There was only one other customer in the store, browsing the romances. I looked around idly for a couple of minutes until I stumbled upon a hardcover copy of Joseph Epstein's Snobbery: The American Version. When I walked up to the counter to pay for it, I was shocked to hear the clerk, in response to my question, say that business was great, and that the recession has only made it better since people were buying used books instead of new ones. I must say hearing her say that made up for the bad lunch.

I was back on the road some time before three, staying on US-40 which paralleled I-68 just South of the Pennsylvania border. Bypassing Cumberland but going straight through the heart of Frostburg, MD, an appealing-looking college town, I finally crossed into Pennsylvania near Grantsville, MD, and headed due North across Laurel Highlands towards Pittsburgh.

Catching up

A few brief notes on recent things, for lack of a better word, that I haven't written up in a more timely manner

Céline
Finally finished Céline's Death on the Installment Plan. A slog if ever there was one. It had its moments, no doubt about it. The English boarding school, and especially its headmaster, were exquisitely chilling and powerful. Some characters, too, are priceless, or almost - in addition to the headmaster, De Pereires was downright cinematic. Every scene that involved him I could imagine on screen. On balance, however, the book got to be too much too quickly - when I've had enough, I realized I still had several hundred pages to go. Celine pushes the envelope, then pushes it some more. After a while, you just want to say, "Ok, I get the point. Let's move the story forward a little now, shall we?" But he spends a dozen more pages pushing the same envelope. Yes, when the book was first written, this was innovative, sensational, even scandalous. Perhaps this, like Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt (albeit for completely different reasons) is another example of a good book that did not age well.

Dogfish Head Grau Dunkel
J. and I go to the beach at Cape Henlopen, DE once or twice every summer, and like to stop at the original Dogfish Head brewpub in Rehoboth afterwards. They usually have one or two beers that are difficult, or in some cases impossible, to get anywhere else. This time, I tried Grau Dunkelwessenberg - a German-Belgian mongrel of a brew made with a mixture of wheat, rye and barley, some of which is smoked. Really smoked. I was not taking notes, so I can't give a formal review here. Suffice it to say that it had a serious bacon thing going on. Unique, but not necessarily delicious.

Dogfish Head Sah'tea
Another one of their exotic limited edition brews, I brought this one home in a bottle and opened it with my friend C.M. a couple of weeks later. It appears to belong to the series of reproductions of ostensibly ancient recipes that they started a few years ago with Chateau Jiahu. This one apparently takes its inspiration from an ancient Finnish proto-beer called Sahti, and Dogfish-Heads it with the addition of spiced chai tea. I did take some notes on this one, so:

Appearance: Slightly reddish caramel color. Murky. Thin head, dissipates quickly.
Nose: Nutmeg, allspice, overripe fruit.
Palate: Bananas. Bananas. A bit of tartness on the back palate, but not enough to balance things. Oh, did I mention bananas?

C.M. gave it a qualified endorsement by saying it was kind of like a hefeweizen without the bad parts. Another beer I am glad I tried but probably would not seek out again.

Nils-Petter Molvaer and Arve Henriksen
I really waited way too long to write this one up, and it really deserved a proper entry of its own. The Embassies of Sweden, Finland and Iceland held a week-long Nordic Jazz Festival in early June, and one of the shows featured Norwegian trumpeters Nils-Petter Molvaer and Arve Henriksen. They both hardly ever play in the US, so of course I had to go hear them. It was absolutely riveting. The show was long and featured two other bands, both led by young unknowns, so both NPM and Henriksen were sandwiched into the middle hour, which I thought was weird, because both musicians are masters of the long form, so to speak, and because NPM at least is a mega-star in Norway, and I was frankly surprised that he condescended to play for a half-hour in the atrium of an embassy. Henriksen went on first with his long-time collaborator Jan Bang, who worked the electronics. Henriksen would play, or sing, a phrase, which Bang sampled in real time (onto something that used floppy disks - I saw him swapping floppies throughout the performance), then altered it electronically, also in real time, to provide a background for Henriksen's subsequent phrases. It was breathtaking. NPM went on half-way through while Henriksen and Bang were still on stage and matched a long droning note of Henriksen's for a few seconds, allowing him and Bang to walk off. NPM, with two other guys accompanying, then proceeded to play a few typically NPM-esque tunes - heavy drum-n-bass beat and loopy electronics supporting an absolutely ethereal trumpet. I did not recognize the tunes, but it was sublime nevertheless. Musical experience of the year.