So remind me again … what day is it? I know it was two or three Wednesdays ago that I announced my retirement as Flyer editor, handed off the reins to the very capable Jesse Davis, loaded up the Subaru, and set off on a road trip to the East.
For the next couple of weeks, I didn’t pay much attention to dates or destinations. I knew I needed to get to Western Pennsylvania for a few days of fishing, and afterward I knew I wanted to drive over to Connecticut to visit my son. Beyond that, it was just me and podcasts and Sirius radio and all the music I could possibly listen to through my phone over the car speakers. (I also learned to hate the opening bars to “A&E” by Goldfrapp, which came on when I started the car because it’s the first song on my alphabetical song list.)
I headed north into Kentucky on I-65 and then east on the little-traveled Bluegrass Parkway. After that, things got a little muddled. I had a slightly meandering route planned with the help of Siri, but I lost her somewhere in the middle of the state and missed a turn. It was a good miss. I found myself on a beautiful winding route, passing through the hamlets of Stab, Dwarf, Paintsville, and Louisa. I always try to imagine the name of the local high school mascots for these kinds of places. The Stab Wounds? The Dwarf Stars? The Louisa May Alcotts? But I digress. Which is the whole point of this trip, to be honest. Eventually I came onto a scenic blacktop that paralleled the rambling Big Sandy River along the state’s eastern border, and once again “I knew where I was.”
Here’s the thing about traveling without a rigid schedule: You’re never lost. You’re not going to be late to anything. You just keep driving in the general correct direction and you’ll come out all right, which in this case was onto the Hal Greer Boulevard Corridor in Huntington, West by God Virginia, which is almost heaven, except for the refineries. (And I bet I’m one of the few people who knows who Hal Greer was.)
I spent the night in Flatwoods, north of Charleston — which isn’t at all flat and has a Days Inn atop a mountain with the greatest view $89 can buy. The check-in clerk was wearing a faith-based mask over her chin, but since I’m vaxxed and waxed, I didn’t really care.
The next day I got to Beaver Creek in Western Pennsylvania, a little stream that’s kept stocked with big fish, a hidden paradise I’ve been going to every May since the mid-1990s, meeting the same three guys, (sans one, who eased into the mystic 10 years ago). We missed our rendezvous in 2020, of course, so the reunion was extra sweet this year. We didn’t skip a beat, falling back into the same routines, the same dinners, the same jokes, the same memories and stories. The fishing was stellar: Seeing a large trout emerge from a deep hole to inhale your wispy dry fly never loses its magic. After a few minutes of runs and jumps (by the fish, most of the time), you remove the tiny barbless hook and the big brown goes back to its home under the rock, a little wiser, perhaps, a little more wary.
Part of the allure of this place is that it’s so deep in the mountains that you can only get internet if you walk 100 yards up the nearest hill, which we did with a cup a coffee in the morning to check messages and emails. News, politics, sports, Twitter, Facebook, etc. got put on the back burner for four days. Very cleansing.
Then it was over to Connecticut to visit my son, who also lives in a house in the woods, surrounded by deer and a resident flock of ravens. We hiked and went thrifting and ate lobster, and I even got to fish the Saugatuck River, which was on my bucket list. There were other adventures and excursions but space is tight, so I’ll save those tales for another time. I’m happy to be back.