Pioneering 2013: A no-electricity adventure

When my husband and I lived on the prairies of Illinois, we were without power occasionally, but never for very long. 

Normally, when we lived near Galesburg, we could hear the transformer “pop” or look out our family room window and see it hanging askew. A call to the power company with the exact location of the problem would bring the sound of a power truck to the road outside our home without much delay.

Later, when we lived south of Bloomington, our power was supplied by a main feeder line that apparently ran somewhere along Historic Route 66 near Lincoln. We were without power once for 36 hours in the dead of winter. It was COLD out. 

We retreated for a while to my brother’s house almost an hour away, and returned home a few hours later to see if the power was back on. Just as we were to head back to my brother’s, the house lit up. 

Believe me, electricity is something we take for granted. Go without it for 75 and three-quarters hours sometime, and you’ll know what I mean. 

That’s how long it took our rural Missouri electric co-op to get to our outage and repair it last week. We were lucky. Some were without power for a day or so longer than we were. 

You know what, though? 

I don’t regret the experience. It brought out the tough in me and in my husband. We survived and we learned from our adventure. Still, we’re not ready to relive it anytime soon. 

I’m a farm kid, so I grew up with occasional power outages, times when the pump on the well malfunctioned, or snows that had us housebound for several days. You learn to prepare if you have time, adapt whether you have warning or not, do without the things you want, and get by with the things you have on hand. 

The culprit responsible for this power outage was a winter storm. It dumped several inches of very wet snow and a bit of ice on mid-Missouri and was accompanied, in some instances, by nasty winds. It knocked out more than half of the power in the 2,300-square-mile area served by our rural electric cooperative. 

In the five days the power company worked to repair all the storm’s damage, its linemen were joined by workers from nearly 20 other utility companies, some who had completed repairs in their own areas before coming to ours. Through it all, the communications team from the coop used social media to keep us apprised of the status, inject a little humor, exude a lot of compassion. 

What did we do to survive, to stay in our home without freezing, suffering the potty woes of the passengers on the recent cruise ship disaster, dehydrating, or starving? 

We planned for it—thanks to the advice of some farm-bred neighbors, my experience as a country kid, a bit of good old common sense, and a dose of Girl Scout preparedness. We had the right stuff—from water and batteries to muscle and persistence. 

Our home has a gas furnace, stove, and water heater, but each of them works in conjunction with electricity. Fortunately, we have a wood burning cast iron stove in our living room, too. 

Our home overlooks a really big lake, but our running water comes from a community well with its pump powered by—you guessed it—electricity. 

So, not only were we without heat and lights, we were without water. 

We had a plan, though. 

For heat, we’d use our wood burning stove. We had some wood cut, split and ready, and more that could be firebox-size with just a little work. We had plenty of matches and, even better, several of those lighters designed for gas or charcoal grills, candles and the like. 

We had a stockpile of candles, several flashlights and a battery-operated camp light or two. We also had extra batteries. 

To cook our food, although the electronic igniter on our stove wouldn’t work, we could turn the burner switches to “ignite” and use a match or lighter. We did. 

Thanks to the advice of a neighbor, we filled our bathtub with water, which we used to flush the toilets. We also had several gallons of drinking water and a little more than a case of individual bottles of water. 

I had books to read and hubby, though he much prefers television, spent time watching the flames in the fire and reading magazines—when he wasn’t splitting or carrying in wood. 

There are a couple things we now have in the house that we didn’t before—larger bottles of hand sanitizer and a tub of diaper wipes for sponge baths. 

This time, we were fortunate that the roads were cleared after a couple days so that we could leave our neighborhood. We were able to shower at a friends’ home and to eat some warm meals at local restaurants when our refrigerated and frozen food began to go bad. Though we had plenty of things like peanut butter, canned foods, crackers and chips, after a couple days, we were longing for a warm meal. 

By the third day, our originally half-filled bath tub was running low, so I’d begun to melt snow on the stove so we could flush toilets. 

The best thing about our adventure was that it gave me a chance to read—an entire book. I chose “Tales from Two Rivers I,” a collection of nostalgic essays written by Illinoisans who were born and grew up in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. 

As I read of young school teachers traipsing through snow, mud and wetlands to get to school in time to fire up the furnace for their students, of people traveling by horse-drawn carriages or in Model T automobiles on rut-filled roads, sometimes overturning or having tires explode, and of all the other trials and tribulations people like my grandparents faced, our little power outage seemed more like an adventure or minor inconvenience than like a catastrophe. 

I realized I had a lot to be thankful for—a roof over my head, a warm home, a hubby willing to split wood and keep the fire stoked, water for flushing and for drinking, and friends who opened their home for a warm shower on a cold day. 

They offered a bedroom, too, but even when the conditions aren’t optimal, there’s just no place quite like home. 

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2013

(Image via)

It didn’t used to be this complicated

It used to be pretty easy -- going potty, that is. 

When I was a kid visiting my grandparents’ farm and decided to use the outhouse instead of the indoor bathroom, I had but two choices to make – whether to sit on the adult-sized potty hole, where I had to tense the muscles in my arms to brace myself and keep from falling in, or on the child-sized hole, which I was soon to outgrow. Then, business taken care of, I had another choice to make – corn cob or Sears Roebuck catalog. One was scratchy, the other so slick it was as if I hadn’t wiped at all. Of the two, though, each had its benefits, depending upon the outhouse business that trip. 

Today, bathrooms are way too complicated. 

C’mon, admit it. You know what I mean.  Be it the sink, stool, soap dispenser, towel machine, waste receptacle, door or hot air dryer, you never know from one potty stop to the next what you’ll need to do, how things will work. 

On a recent road trip through Illinois and Missouri, many of those miles traveled along Route 66, I made more pit stops than I’d like to admit – at fast food restaurants, highway rest stops and super discount stores. It seemed as if at every stop, I had to re-learn going to the bathroom. 

Seriously now, how did it get so confusing? 

Take toilets, for instance. 

Some flush when you get up, some don’t. Of the flush-when-you’re-done variety, some do it right away, some wait until the next person is through the door, seeing the evidence you left behind before it all swooshes away – if it does. Some stools supposed to flush on their own don’t do as intended. When that happens, you’ve got to figure out what to do – move your hand back and forth in front of the electric eye or push a button. If there’s a button, where is it – top or side, black or chrome? 

And, with it all so automated these days, it’s becoming easier and easier to just plain forget to flush at all. Occasionally, though, you will still run across a toilet with a lever, especially at home, where the next person in the bathroom knows your name and can nab you as the “who-done-it” when you do forget to flush.

In this little piece, we won’t even talk toilet paper dispensers or stall doors. They seem to be the least complicated of any of this stuff these days. 

But, hand-washing – what a challenge it’s become! 

Does the water go on by itself or do you have to push or turn something? If it is automatic, where exactly do you need to hold your hands to get the water flowing? If you have to push the faucet on, does it go off by itself, or will it still be running when you’re 10 miles down the road? 

We women must be a bit ahead of the men on the receiving end of restroom technology – that or we visit more restrooms. The other day, my hubby told me he’d just run across his first automatic soap dispenser.  

What about those things? Did you ever mistake one for the faucet? I’ll admit it. I have.

As for the regular soap dispensers, how often have you tried to use one, only to find it’s empty and, instead, there’s a bottle of dollar store soap on the counter – or nothing at all? Or you go to lather up with soap and discover you’ve used the antiseptic hand sanitizer by mistake? 

Come time to dry your hands, all the confusion often begins anew. Is the dispenser automatic or isn’t it? 

Automatic? Where do you hold your hand for the dispenser to kick the towel out? 

Manual? Do you turn a dial, pull down – or what!? 

Is it one of those bathrooms with fabric towels? Ewww! How many germs are breeding there?

Or perhaps there’s an electric hand dryer. 

Now you’ve got to figure out whether to push a button or not, hold your hands here or hold them there, wait for them to get blown to kingdom come or wonder if the air is coming out at all. 

About to go out the door, if said bathroom is one with towels, you’ve got another dilemma.

Is there a wastebasket? Is it in the counter, under it, beside it, or across from it? What kind of gymnastics do you have to do to open the door with the towel, brace it with your shoulder, and reach back around without touching anything to toss the paper? It isn’t easy sometimes, is it? 

To make things even more complicated, some of these bathroom doors have a pedal on the bottom. It’s supposed to open the door – great idea. No cooties after you wash your hands. There’s just one last problem here. It seems like you need a Ph.D. in restroom innovation to know how to work it. 

Next time I’m road tripping, I may just forgo all the potty stops and try to find an old abandoned farmstead. 

In my dreams it will be as simple as they get. Out back I’ll find a one-hole outhouse with a yellowed phone book for toilet paper and, somewhere nearby, a pump with a bar of lye soap, hole in the center, hanging from a string. 

As for the towels, who needs ‘em? 

It’ll be a lot less complicated if I just shake my hands dry as we did back in the good old days.

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2012  

(Image via)

It’s all about enthusiasm

But a lot of hard work helps too – and a little talent – and some encouragement. Don’t forget the right environment, a nurturing community, a fan or two, and, oh, yeah, some family support. 

About a decade and a half ago, my husband and I moved to a small town on Route 66 in Central Illinois – a town where everyone wore purple, without the red hats.

It didn’t take us long to learn, back there in the last half of the final decade of the twentieth century, that the move we’d made was to a football town – and a pretty good one at that. Seriously, that town was so into football that it seemed 95 percent of its residents were under the Friday night lights. The rest of town looked like a ghost town during those games.

Now, I’ve never understood football – and I probably never will – but I lived for those games, partly because my daughter was in the high school band and I love being a band parent, partly because it’s really fun to see your team take off, get bunches of touchdowns and go into post-season play year after year. 

There was one thing, though, that I really loved about those games – not a thing, but a person. It was the team’s water boy, the coach’s son. 

That little kid, who must have been nine or 10 at the time, ran out on the field with that carrier of water bottles as if his life depended on it, as if the game depended on it, as if it were the most important job in the world, as if he loved being a water boy. 

And, maybe he did.

But, as I’ve watched this little guy grow into a man and followed his career in his hometown paper and mine halfway across the state, I think maybe what he loves even more is that game – football. 

And what he has, as much as talent, as much as determination, as much as the love of the game is enthusiasm.

As a quarterback at that high school with the purple uniforms and later at a college that donned red, Alex Tanney played football, the same way he carried those water bottles – as if his life depended on it, as if the game depended on it, as if it were the most important job in the world, as if he loved being a quarterback.

I think he does.

This week, the Lexington Minutemen and Monmouth Scots legend, the record-breaking player, viral video sensation signed to play professional football with the Kansas City Chiefs. 

I still don’t understand that game, and I doubt that a small-town boy making the big time will help my sports literacy. 

And, too, as much as I like that poem that says, “When I grow old, I shall wear purple with a red hat,” I’ve never donned the two together, hesitant to join a group which conforms on such a non-conformist concept. 

But come fall, you never know -- you just may see me wearing my purple Lexington sweatshirt with a red Kansas City Chiefs hat. 

If anything can make me wear purple and red together, it might be this guy. 

Don’t be surprised, though, as he’s running out onto the field in a great big stadium, and I’m watching at home on the television, when you look in my eyes, you’ll see I’m a million miles away. I have a feeling that instead of an NFL quarterback, I’ll see that big, strong man shrunk kid-size again running with water bottles out to the huddle. I’ll be remembering that cool little kid.

Congratulations, Alex. Way to go!

Move over, slow down, don’t forget to wave

I was driving a long, flat, lonely stretch of highway in central Illinois the other morning when I saw an oversized pickup truck coming toward me pulling something that extended way beyond his vehicle on both sides and overlapped the stripes marking his lane.

I couldn’t tell what it was at first, but as I got closer, I could tell that it was a disc, a farm implement often used to help prepare the soil for planting.

Back when I was a kid, halfway through the last century, some of the discs pulled by tractors like our Oliver 77 were maybe five feet wide or so. Today when fully extended, some can extend more than 40 feet. Even when they’re folded up, they reach way beyond those widths I remember.

As the truck and its tow load got closer, I noticed a road sign on the other driver's side of the road, which meant he had some choices – to slow down, so that he didn’t reach the sign as we met, to pull out around it, edging further into my lane or to stop – probably not a good idea.

I had choices, too. The best one I saw was to slow down and move on over to the shoulder, which, fortunately, was wide and level.

What did happen was that we communicated without communicating – farmer today to farm kid of yesteryear – both knowing what had to happen. We may have raised chickens at some point in our lives, but we both knew better than to play “Chicken.”

The farmer slowed a bit, I scooted over some and we passed without incident before the road sign – or one of us – became a victim.

It was a simple act, really, just the type of thing folks who live in the country do for one another – move over, slow down, wave an acknowledgement, a “thanks” and a “hey, no problem.”

The problem, this time of year, though, and through the summer into fall, is that not everyone traveling the roads of rural America is a farmer or grownup farm kid, a cautious driver or a patient soul.

As they fly down a 55-mph road at 70, radio blaring, checking text messages, bounding over the crests of hills or around curves as if they’re on the world’s fastest roller coasters, drivers often fail to consider that, somewhere along that road, may be one of our nation’s farmers driving a slow-moving vehicle or pulling jumbo equipment.

When drivers aren’t paying attention, it’s an accident waiting to happen.

In the coming months, if you travel those farmland byways, keep your eyes carefully on the road – no texting, careful with the cellphone use, don’t take your eyes off the road to adjust the radio.

When you come up over a hill or around a curve, slow down. You never know when a farmer may be traveling that road to get from field A to field B or going from the machine shed on the farm that’s been in his family for more than a century to a piece of land he’s cash renting down the road a piece.

He’s someone’s son, maybe a dad, an uncle, a cousin, a nephew or a grandpa – or she’s a daughter, a mom, an aunt, cousin, niece or grandma. Your inattentiveness could rob others of precious years together with this farmer they love, so, please, stop and think when you’re driving those country roads.

Move over, slow down, and when you meet or pass that farm driver, whether on Route 66 or another tranquil two-lane, don’t forget to wave. Betcha you’ll get a wave in return.

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2012

(Image via)

Road trippin’ next to Route 66

{EAV:b736ad22f13e0c87}

I had to giggle as I realized the name of the train I was taking home from a recent visit to the St. Louis area.

I, Lincoln Buff 2, had a ticket to Lincoln on the Lincoln Service. I snickered to myself as I heard the name of the train called out in the station, reported to the conductor that I was “Lincoln Buff 2 to Lincoln on the Lincoln,” and smiled as I posted my status on Facebook.

In fact, I was still smiling more than an hour later as I wrote the musings below.

Looking out the train’s window, I realize that for much of the journey, the tracks run parallel to the iconic highway, Route 66. From time to time, I see undeveloped timberland very much like the timbers in Sangamon County where Lincoln lived for so many years – woods full of bramble bushes, water-slogged low spots and centuries of leaves falling one on another year after year.

For much of the trip I can also see I-55 – that hustling, bustling always-at-least-four-lane-sometimes-more road, built to make an easier, faster thoroughfare between Chicago and St. Louis. It does the second, of course – makes it faster.

Easier, I think, is relative. Is it easier to have to dodge 80-mile-an-hour weavers, who change lanes on a 65-mile-an-hour highway faster than a fickle teenaged girl changes boyfriends?

I like to think easier today is taking that old road, Historic Route 66, or taking the train and having time to muse.

What strikes me most on this journey is the tranquility, the time to sit here and, if I wish, just do nothing. Or, if I’d like, reflect upon my journey, wonder about the people living in the homes and on the farms along the tracks, wonder about the stories of the people sitting near me on the train. Where have they been, where are they going, what baggage do they have besides what they’ve stowed near the door, on the overhead rack or under their seats?

To a writer, everything is a story – things like the town we just passed through with its old abandoned school, businesses and tumble-down homes. I wonder, as I look, which makes for the more interesting story – the “real” one or the one I create as I look out the window?

Thank goodness for lonely two-lane highways and passenger trains. They give us what we rarely give ourselves – time to think, time to imagine and, if we’re lucky, time to unwittingly overhear the phone conversation of a fellow passenger checking up on his mother, encouraging a friend and gently guiding a family member facing a decision. I like that guy sitting behind me without even turning to meet him. It’s the caring in his voice, I guess.

I love the peace and quiet, the time to think, the time to write – but don’t you wonder sometimes what it might be like to visit for a bit one-on-one with a fellow passenger, to hear her stories? I do that, too, sometimes, and they always seem to include twists and turns, trials and triumphs greater than what I could have dreamed up on my own.

Do you suppose the seat we end up in on such a journey is there waiting for us so lives can touch – if only for a few minutes – so we can be comforted or show caring, receive affirmation or provide encouragement?

Imagine the stories those rail cars could share if only they, too, were storytellers.

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2012

(Image via)

The musings begin

More than a dozen years ago a writer-wannabe moved into a house a couple hundred feet from the train tracks that took Abraham Lincoln to Washington, D.C. a century and a half ago and brought his body back home a few years later.

On the other side of those tracks was Historic Route 66, the Mother Road, often called “the most famous road in the world,” one that stretches from Chicago to California.

She could look out her bedroom window or stand on her deck and see these two roads, which had moved so many people and held many stories.

She could see another road, too.

Just beyond Route 66 was Interstate 55, a hustling, bustling road, stretching from Chicago to St. Louis, a thoroughfare where people drive too fast, get too impatient and seldom treat their fellow sojourners with caring and respect.

The writer-wannabe had loved playing with words for as long as she could remember -- watching them bound off of a page to tell her a story, putting them together to share her own stories or to spread her love. But instead of using her words to make a living, she’d spent more than four decades going down a different trail.

When her path led her to Lincoln’s rails, Route 66 and I-55, she was working in a box (a cubicle) within a much bigger box (a corporate office building) in one of a pair of twin cities through which these three roads passed.

If she’d been adventuresome, this writer-wannabe may have been able to hitch a ride on a rail car to get to her job in the box, or like many others from her community, she could have endured a stressful commute a la interstate.

The road less traveled

But this commuter chose the third, the less-traveled path each day. She took Route 66. Instead of jockeying for position, she could take her time, have her space, reflect on whatever thoughts crawled into the passenger seat of her minivan.

About this time, the writer-wannabe, who had attended a writer’s workshop the year before, began listening to books on tape – essays by authors such as Robert Fulghum, Maya Angelou and Erma Bombeck. She found the more she listened to their essays, the more she found herself writing her own -- in her head, if not on paper.

As Memorial Day approached, she submitted a piece about her reflections on the holiday to the area-wide paper. The op-ed editor liked it. Her words were in print.

Then she started writing freelance book reviews about Illinois-related books for a major downstate newspaper. The reviews gave her the writing samples she needed to apply for a job writing for the corporation where she worked. She moved to a different small box in a different big box, and she wrote for a living.

Yet, she still didn’t feel like a writer. The words she wrote were those the organization needed her to write. Even though the letters were dropping from her fingers onto the keyboard, they weren’t her words. They were what the corporation paid her to share.

She longed to write her own words, and took a stab at it from time to time, writing late into the night on a yellow or white legal pad, sitting at her desktop computer until she nodded off at the keyboard or preparing speeches to share with her fellow Toastmasters.

Directions, please

In the fall of 2008, driving through life seeking direction, the scribe ran smack dab into something that was to change her life forever. As she got her morning word fix, reading the daily paper, a front-page article told of a course to be offered at the community college about “The Life and Times of Abraham Lincoln.” It was the college’s way of commemorating the upcoming bicentennial of the 16^th president’s birth.

The writer-wannabe, a lifelong Lincoln enthusiast, took the course, started a blog, began using social media to promote it, and used vacation days to attend Lincoln events nearby and far away, chronicling her journey on her Lincoln Buff 2 blog.

As the bicentennial wound down and she took a much-needed rest from blogging (she’d done 200 in a year, after all), the blogger realized she’d found something else she loved almost as much as Abraham Lincoln – connecting with people, learning from others and sharing what she’d learned, using social media.

In early 2011, as she looked forward to a physical and a career move, she knew that what would bring her the most happiness in the next phase of her career was a marriage of those two things she loved – writing about things that moved her and sharing them using social media.

A writer I-yam

I was that writer-wannabe. I am no more. In April 2011, I became a full-time writer and editor. I work from home and I love what I do.

Now, having rested from blogging for a while, in addition to my professional writing, I’ve poured tens of thousands of words into four manuscripts, one finished and awaiting its next revision, another barely begun, a third off to a healthy start, and a fourth pouring itself onto the page so furiously that I can barely keep up with it.

Along for the ride

I’m ready to blog again, but the musings I want to share this time don’t belong in a blog dedicated to the legacy of Abraham Lincoln. Though it’s been more than a decade since I lived in the house near Route 66, these words are the legitimate offspring of those “passengers” on my contemplative commutes. The words, the musings - they still occupying the passenger seat of my minivan, but we’ve got room for more riders.

Please, join us on this journey. It’s bound to be an adventure.

Welcome to “Musings on Route 66.”

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2012

(Image via)

Musings? What musings?

The concept for this blog truly was born one morning as I drove to work on Route 66. It was one of those periods in a writer’s life when the words were coming so fast and furious that I couldn’t begin to get them all down on paper. (If you’re a writer, an artist, a musician, you know what I mean.)

The little town where we lived had a small newspaper, one of those publications where just about anyone can submit just about anything, from a report on the bonnets at a ladies’ club tea to the latest pee-wee league baseball scores. (Believe me, it had both.)

I was musing and I was on Route 66. What better to call this venture than “Musings on Route 66”?

I was thinking of approaching the local editor with my column concept, when we learned we’d be moving to another Illinois community. It didn’t seem right to abandon a town, yet expect to have my words included in its local paper, so I abandoned the idea as well.

But, still, it kept nagging at me – or was it “calling out" for me?

Here, there and everywhere

Today, my musings take place almost anywhere – yes, even in the shower – but I still like that early name and what it represents – a slower pace, a time to look back, look forward, to travel in time and in thoughts.

As I realized that this blog was determined to write itself, I decided maybe I should think about the sorts of things I’d share here.

Stories begging to be shared

Here’s what I know now that I will share.

But don’t forget. I’m a writer.

Writers often have stories that just tap us on the shoulder, haunt us in our sleep, jump up and down on the passenger seats of our minivans, saying “Write me, write me, write me.” So, we must. Those stories may not always fit into one of the categories I’ve chosen, but one thing is for sure. They’re destined to be shared.

As this blog begins, I have plans to share musings that I can neatly plug under these headings. Click on the tabs at the top of the pages to learn what types of things I’ll be sharing in each of these categories:

• Been thinkin’
• A book is perking
• Books worth reading
• Boomer banter
• Found a quote
• Inspired in Illinois
• Missouri minutes
• The Mother Road
• Sensational beings
• Simple things
• Wanna be a writer?

I’m hoping, dear reader, that if you found your way to this blog, there’s something in one of these categories that may interest you. Click on the links, check out the introductory posts and watch for links to future posts.

Just like the people who journey down Route 66, we’re heading out on a great adventure. Can’t wait to see where it takes us.

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2012

(Image via)

Meet Robert Waldmire

When I think of Route 66, I think of one man, Robert (Bob) Waldmire, and his VW bus. Waldmire was an artist. His subject was the Mother Road.

Waldmire spent much of his life traveling the highway, capturing its heart and soul in his work, living in his vehicle.

As he was nearing the end of his life, the Chicago Tribune interviewed Waldmire in the converted school bus he called home.

I never met Bob Waldmire, but I have always been convinced that if I had, I would have liked him. We’ve got a common bond. I don’t know about “kicks”, but I think we both agree we got our ideas on Route 66.

(Video via)

Text © Ann Tracy Mueller 2012