triple play

just a hint: those mill photos blow up. click a few of 'em.

we started out the day with rain, which is how we've started out most of the days since the first of june, but we hopped in the car anyway. big wednesday road trip.

stop one- brooks bbq. there is not much to say about brooks except that if you are in town and you choose to eat at the pizza hut down the street, you are a fool. there's chicken wallpaper on the walls. there's a lunch counter with five curves to it. they give you a plastic bucket for bones and every table is well supplied with wetnaps. the sweetie had ribs and i devoured nearly half a chicken, all at the senior citizen lunch hour of 11:30. hospitals don't boast as many walkers and canes as brooks during a weekday early lunch. this is not a complaint. i figure people who have been eating for seventy or eighty years ought to have a pretty good idea where to go for lunch.

fortified, we motored on up to ommegang. the best way to explain it is if ben and jerry had chosen beer to make instead of ice cream. it's a small operation and it sits right in the middle of an ancient hops field, surrounded with views people don't even deserve. and these good folks let strangers just walk in, follow them around and then drink their beer. and they're friendly about it. these are folks who think beer should have only a few ingredients. they think you should know you're drinking something when you drink their beer. they put their beer into cheese, chocolate, raspberry jam, mustard. they want you to be happy. i don't know how you could help but oblige. there are picnic tables everywhere on the grounds and the folks encourage picnicing. we walked toward a table just to sit and something odd caught our eyes. some sort of cross between barbie's dream house and mad max. out on a post, about chest high or maybe a little more than that, sat some sort of metal dollhouse made from discarded parts of the brewery, i suppose. two story, with doors that opened and furniture of sorts. no sign. no explanation.

we'd been considering the baseball hall of fame and although everyone in there played forever ago, baseball and i are not right now on the best of terms so we threw it over for hanford mills. if you've never been there, get in the car right now. there are plenty of things to recommend the place. first, like every other attraction in upstate new york, the grounds are like candy. you look around and worry you might be trapped in a postcard. but no, things up here are just like that. look, the view from our town's dump is better than any manhattan penthouse view and the smell of pine trees and clover as i drop off my recyclable plastics is intoxicating. but you don't get used to it, so with every new place it's a surprise. the plain and simple prettiness of everything. so there's that. then there's the fact that this is a working mill. they make things there, using water and the craziest wheel collection you've ever seen. there's the big wheel, which you can see here sitting still and waterless, then rolling like hell with water crashing over it. when you're standing right there on a wooden platform in front of it, surrounded by the other wheels it turns, your whole world shakes.

there were quite a few wheels belted up to this giant one, each smaller one belted up to a tool on the floor above. all the while, there's water running underneath, so there's no poverty of sound or motion. in a room around from all this wildness were the wheels. now, i know that you don't necessarily find the same charm in things that make my eyes go all dreamy, but these wheels, like hatboxes or cheeses, were too much. more planning, care and craftsmanship went into the making of each of these than into some of the buildings brooklyn has been allowing the past few years. it seemed like they had enough they ought to be giving them away to anyone who needed one or two. turns out they intend to keep them all because they're a chronology of the craft of wheelmaking in this country.

now, i get my heart broken regularly seeing crazy old machines, long dead before i was born, left to rust and wither. i want them to be mine. i'd have no notion how to fix them or what to do if i ever managed to, but still, i want to see them alive. and that's what's so kind about this particular place, hanford mills. they get these old beasts up on their feet and give them a little something to live for. this shingle saw, for instance, has that block in its jaws because it's getting ready to slice off a slab of shingle. nobody told the thing cedar shingles from out west came along and beat poor old pine shingles into the dirt. the folks at hanford keep this saw's teeth plenty sharp and tell it pine shingles are all the rage. and it makes beautiful ones.

this molding saw here is something else altogether. our guide explained that the person who ran it would need about six hours to set up all the gears and levers and bits for a single design. that means every time you want to shift designs, you'd need to be really sure about the switch, because your whole day would be all about rearranging. but all the joints and levers and switches on this thing hum when the water hits the wheel and the axles start to turn. they have things to do.

some things were just nice to look at. the detail on a label for a separator or the color of the worn wood the label lives on. dials, levers, pipes, wheels. the place was full of them. not shiny and polished, because living things get dirty, especially if they work. but the working things looked somehow more real.

at one point in the tour, our guide got very animated. she told us about a steam engine, not the one that lived here when this mill started, but another one from the same time, and how the mill folks found it on ebay, how it was sitting in a quarry, rusting, dying, broken. the mill folks snapped it up quick as anything and hunted up someone who knew how to fix everything that was broken on this engine. so now it works. and they use it. hard to imagine, seeing the photos that looked pretty much like chunks of rust. and the photo here is blurry. it should't be because this engine is something you can't stop looking at once your eyes fall on it. but i put the photo in anyway because i figure anyone with a little sense would rather see it blurry than miss a chance to see it at all.

there's more, of course. the farm house, barn, ice house, chicken coop. the various shapes water takes, still, bright pond, shivering waterfall, fat, lazy stream, skipping race. the whole town cuddled around this land and its pile of buildings, even now, even in this century. but the first and last thing we saw was this guy. peanut. we will have to go back again. for the chicken. for the beer. for the steam engine and the dog it belongs to.