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Hispanic anomaly
Saturday, August 22 2015
location: Catoctin Mountain, Frederick County, Maryland
At some point this morning, there was a flurry of sandwich-making activity in the kitchen and then all eight of us loaded into two separate vehicles and drove west across the ridge to Greenbrier State Park, which features a smallish manmade lake. Apparently Greenbrier is an extremely popular park, and there was a good chance it would be at capacity when we arrived and we wouldn't be let in. So the expectations had to be managed among the kids. But we were lucky and both of our cars were allowed in. The price was $5/each for Maryland residents, which the friendly woman at the gate assumed we all were (even though half of us were in a car with Pennsylvania plates). Unfortunately, we'd had to leave the dogs behind, locked up in the cabin.
The unusual thing about Greenbrier State Park is that, though in the middle of mostly-white Appalachian Maryland, most of the people who recreate there are Hispanic. Gretchen's father had said that beforehand, but once we were parked and searching for a place to set up, it looked as if we were at a park in Honduras. From what we could see, about 80% of the people at the park were Hispanic, perhaps 12 percent were black, and only eight percent were white. There didn't appear to be any Asians. The sheer number of Hispanics caused me to make a few Donald Trump jokes (for example, an observation that there were relatively few Donald Trump 2016 bumper stickers), and for some reason Gretchen found this exasperating, saying that it seemed I was obsessed with the yellow-haired oaf.
Like Gretchen, Gretchen's father is a take-charge kind of guy, and his immediate goal was to take control of a picnic table even though the woman at the gate had said that there were no picnic tables now available. He quickly found one in the downwind plume of a meat-heavy barbecue, but Gretchen didn't want to eat there. There really was no reason not to just take a spot on the place on the ground where White Oaks cast a shade near the beach, so that was where we ended up. Soon after we arrived, I was down at the water's edge (which had been finished with trucked-in beach sand) helping my niece and nephew build a sand castle. We had a variety of buckets and plastic tools to work with, and before long we had a reasonable-looking medieval structure. Several little Hispanic boys showed up, and one tried to engage my niece in Spanish (evidently she looked Hispanic to them, though of course she's of Ashkenazi Jewish extraction). One of them tried to talk to me too, but when my Spanish proved terrible, one of them volunteered in accent-free English that he could also speak that. He just wanted to know if the kids were actually mine and, on finding out no, wanted to know if I had any. There was a little boy there too who kept babbling on at me in Spanish. I recognized the words castillo and playa and nodded my head and said mm hmm.
Periodically an announcement would come over the loudspeaker (first in English, then in Spanish) that, due to overcrowding, the swimming area had to be vacated for the next ten minutes. So everyone dutifully cleared out, waiting at the water's edge until the announcement came saying that the swimming area had been reopened. Evidently the hope was that some of the swimmers would have started doing something else and the overcrowding would take some time to reemerge. I didn't spend much time in the water, but I managed to be in it for three closely-spaced evacuations, though only two of those affected the beach I was on. During one of those evacuations, my niece wanted to have her legs buried in the sand, so I fashioned her a realistically-fluked mermaid's tail projecting out into the water like a peninsula. Another little girl was impressed and wanted me to give her such a tail, but I begged out of it by grousing about how much work it had been. That third evacuation was ordered due to a "sanitation issue," though we were on the north beach and it only affected the south beach. It was hard to imagine what the sanitation issue could have been other than a floating human turd. By this point I was out in the deepest part of the swimming area, offering non-submerged upper torso as a solid place to swim to for my much-shorter niece and nephew.
Later I spent a lot of time just lying on the grassy part of the beach above the sand, mostly avoiding the sun by various techniques (thankfully, I was wearing sun screen). By this point, my brother-in-law had brought out a sketchpad and was socratically imparting knowledge to my nephew with various integers and combinations of integers huddling beneath benchlike square root symbols. That might sound like an odd way to spend time on a beach, but apparently my nephew had grown bored of the swimming and sand castles and asked his dad to bring out the math, which was, of course, there for the bringing out.
Eventually we all returned back past the pretty green fields and solid stone barns of Wolfsville to the cabin. I continued work on my weather station project, this time sipping a Sierra Nevada Torpedo as I tried to debug why my code wasn't allowing me to page back and forth along the x axis of a temperature plot. Eventually Gretchen's mother made us a lupper of pot stickers, which we ate out on the deck as hummingbirds buzzed about.
Dinner was vegan "chicken" drumsticks with wooden rods standing in for femurs. It came out of the oven piping hot, and, not knowing this, I lifted the glass-handled glass lid with my bare fingers. It was searing hot, but somehow I made myself not immediately drop it, putting it back down carefully instead. That extra time of burn exposure was enough to raise a blister on the thumb side of my left middle finger.
By this point, I'd fixed myself another drink composed of yesterday's Sassafras tea (which nobody else cared about) spiked with gin. That could become a favorite drink of mine.
A number of group craft projects had been planned for this weekend. The first of those was the making of the trivets. This evening we all made bean art, that is, we all glued beans to a cardboard substrate in hopes of making mosaic-like pictures. This was mostly for the kids, I suppose, but adults made them too. Mine was a sort of frontal-viewed dog on which I'd hoped to simulate highlights and shadows using different-colored beans. But it didn't actually turn out very good.
As I was working on this, Gretchen's childhood friend Dina called Gretchen from Boston saying her husband Gilaud had been hospitalized for chest pains. How fortuitous it was, then, that there were two doctors on hand to provide advice. According to Gretchen's brother, the protocol in these cases is always to monitor for chemicals in the blood indicative of actual heart problems. If those aren't found, typically what happens is that the patient is discharged and no further tests are performed. Modern medicine only cares about heart problems, and if there aren't any, hospitals feel that their work (and liability) is done. Most chest pains, it turns out, are a consequence of digestive problems and are stress-related. That eventually proved to be the case with Gilaud, who has taken on far too much work of late. One of his unnecessary stress-inducers is a Hebrew school he agreed to help with its financials only to discover that it was hopelessly in debt.
Sand mermaid flukes at Greenbrier State Park while waiting to be allowed back into the water.
Gretchen and me at the lake.
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