Popular Post F_in Ray Of Sunshine Posted August 9, 2020 Popular Post Share #1 Posted August 9, 2020 ....or more accurately Bear Creek Road. A long, long, long, long time ago, when I was a kid, for two weeks each summer, my parents would ship my sister and I off to my grandparents’ house, on Bear Creek Road. This was the house my grandmother grew up in, and when my grandfather retired, they moved back there, from Brooklyn. Being the middle of nowhere, it was the perfect place for kids to....just be kids. (It’s only recently that I’ve realized that I probably also remember it fondly because it was the only time I was out from under my mother’s thumb....🤨) So yesterday, I rode from camp - which is about 4 miles south - to Bear Creek road and down it. One of our “big adventures” was to walk the mile from the house to the corner. There was a post office/general store. It’s gotten fairly seedy, but come to think of it, it wasn’t exactly palatial then. Behind it, is an old ice house. I seem to remember my dad telling me he can remember them using it. About halfway between the corner and the house was the train station. I seem to remember it being abandoned then, but someone has made a house/camp out of it. (I think it’d be cool to live in a train station, but I’m just weird like that). This is what it looked like, back in the day. (From the other direction). My grandmother was a telegraph operator, and her brother was the Station Agent. (I’m guessing she learned telegraphy by hanging around the station). Just before we got back to the house, we’d cross White Lake Outlet. There was a small dam here, no longer in use. We played here a lot. The more daring of us would walk across the top. (Looking at it now, I realize that if we fell in, we might get wet all the way to the ankles...🤨 but hey, it looked a lot bigger and scarier then) The downstream side was where I played a LOT, catching frogs and stuff. I’d make little boats in my grandfather’s garage and sail them in the creek. We also used to splash around in the water, when it was hot. Next, I passed my grandparents’ home....which I didn’t take pictures of because it makes me both sad and angry how it’s gone to shit . The road continues on for another three miles, getting more and more remote, until it ends in a trailhead parking area, on the edge of the Adirondack Park. It’s here that the reason for my choice of bikes becomes apparent: A couple of miles of forest gravel. Fun and fast - 16-18MPH on gravel feels just nuts. It finally ends at a “real” trailhead and I could go no further without the fatbike (and even then, I’d have a job - I know this because TK and I rode it to Sand Lake Falls and there were spots where I was up to the BB in mud...). If you read this post in reverse, you get an idea of the return journey. Back up the road to Rt 28 and the endless stream of Tourons headed north. (It literally took me about three minutes to make the left at the end of Bear Creek). 8 9 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Airehead Posted August 9, 2020 Share #2 Posted August 9, 2020 What a beautiful chapter in your biography. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MickinMD ★ Posted August 9, 2020 Share #3 Posted August 9, 2020 Wow! Lots of stuff revisited! When I was a kid, my mother would ship me to her sister's house outside of Wilkes-Barre, PA, which my grandfather built, where my mother was born and raised and my grandparents lived until they passed away. I played, along with my cousins, in the Breslau-Linnwood and Iona Little Leagues, etc. It is about 1/4 mile from the Susquehanna River and we had lots of fun playing along it. Today, all my dozens of cousins live on the other side of the river, but when I visit them I sometimes take the longer drive through town so I can see that house - which looks basically the same as it has through the decades as the two pictures below show: Here's the house now in 2020 according to Google Maps street-level view - my grandfather also built the mall house straight back: \ Here's my mother in 1937, age 15 on the right, with three of her sisters standing almost in front of the window on the side of the house closest to the street in the picture above. My mother's 19 year-old sister Sally, with her hand on my mother's shoulder, is the one who died of COVID-19 in April. She was my last aunt or uncle and would have been 100 on Aug 1: Here, a few blocks north along 1st Street from my aunt's old house, is the baseball field where I played and the river and island beyond it where cousins and I spent a lot of time. I stop briefly by these places and reminisce - then reminisce more with my cousins, the older ones who played along the river with me, when I drive across the Carey Ave. Bridge and visit their homes a few miles to the north. 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
F_in Ray Of Sunshine Posted August 9, 2020 Author Share #4 Posted August 9, 2020 1 minute ago, MickinMD said: Here's the house now according to Google Maps street-level view: ....invisible? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
F_in Ray Of Sunshine Posted August 9, 2020 Author Share #5 Posted August 9, 2020 1 hour ago, Airehead said: What a beautiful chapter in your biography. But it was only a couple of weeks each summer - and then only until my mother and grandmother (Dad’s mother) had a blowout and we never went back. Other than that, apart from a couple of years in my early twenties, none of it is worth revisiting. But I had my bike, my books and my skates, so it worked out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kzoo Posted August 10, 2020 Share #6 Posted August 10, 2020 When I was a kid growing up out in the sticks, our house was were our cousins got shipped off to during the summer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
F_in Ray Of Sunshine Posted August 10, 2020 Author Share #7 Posted August 10, 2020 Just now, Kzoo said: When I was a kid growing up out in the sticks, our house was were our cousins got shipped off to during the summer. My cousins were also shipped there (FedEx, I think). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kzoo Posted August 10, 2020 Share #8 Posted August 10, 2020 15 minutes ago, F_in Ray Of Sunshine said: My cousins were also shipped there (FedEx, I think). Mine were dumped off by their parents. They only lived in the next county over. We had an elderly neighbor who had a couple grandkids from Pittsburgh. They came for a couple weeks every summer. They were true suburban kids who really wanted to get every minute out of their 2 weeks - shooting frogs in the pond, sleeping under the stars, building tree houses, stomping through streams building forts in the woods - endless fun with them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
F_in Ray Of Sunshine Posted August 10, 2020 Author Share #9 Posted August 10, 2020 15 minutes ago, Kzoo said: Mine were dumped off by their parents. They only lived in the next county over. That’d be my sister and I. We used to live in NJ and I half-ass remember spending summers up there then, but we moved here (an hour away from grandparents) when I was seven. We spent a few more summers there after we moved here. Pretty sure my mother was just happy to be rid of us. The cousins came up from NJ and it was about the only time we saw them all year. Didn’t particularly hit it off with any of them, so it wasn’t too different from being home, in that respect. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kirby Posted August 10, 2020 Share #10 Posted August 10, 2020 Fum memories! It reminds me of my summers in the Catskills at my Grandma's house, including playing in the stream and the combined post office/general store. . It's nice to have these memories even if it was a limited period of time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
12string Posted August 10, 2020 Share #11 Posted August 10, 2020 Nice story, Ray. Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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