Turn Around And You're There

Off I went on another paint delivery into the deep boonies of Crawford County, Pennsylvania. Vinny gave me directions to C&M Hardwoods on Leboeuf Trail in Centerville. He's not my first choice for directions, but of all the humans currently at Sherwin Williams Meadville, he was the only one who knows where it is. "Go up that street there, what is that, 27?" Great, not even out of sight of the store and he's unsure of his information. "You know where you turn left to go up the hill to the Fairgrounds?" "You mean 77. Yes." "Go on up the hill to the KwikFill" Good. If there's a KwikFill, a Country Fair or a Sheetz, he's all over it. "Keep going through Blooming Valley, and on the other side you'll go up the hill and keep going until you come to a road to the right called Lyona Road. There's really no landmarks out there to help you find it."  So far so good. "Turn right on Lyona Road and go to the end. The highway (he means 408) bends there, so going straight from Lyona Road puts you on the highway to Townville. Go through Townville, and on the other side you'll come to a four way intersection. I always look for a dilapidated trailer, and soon after that there's this four way. There's a sign there that says C&M Hardwoods. Turn right. It's a dirt road. Go about, I don't know, I'm terrible with distances, maybe a mile and a half?" I shrugged. "You'll find it. There's a building on the right and a building on the left. I don't think there's a sign, but you'll see Chris' green Ford truck." Well, I thought, I've gone farther on less before, how far wrong can I go? Let's find out.

The early stages were easy. But once I was past the KwikFill, I felt like I was in uncharted territory. On I went through Blooming Valley and up the other side, and on and on, trying to read every street sign going off to the right, knowing how well unmarked much of rural Pennsylvania is (see "The Road Less Marked" several posts back) and keep up speed so as not to piss off the local drivers. After way too many minutes of barreling along Route77 on the far side of Blooming Valley, I decided I must have missed it. I began looking for a place to pull off this busy highway. Up ahead there was a road off to the right. I slowed down and turned right onto, you guessed it, Lyona Road.

On I went on Lyona, rereading my notes I took while Vinny rambled. Miles down the road I finally came to the double stop signs in series taking you in a straight line from Lyona Road to the eastbound leg of Route 408. On through Townville and out the other side. Now I have gone there and back again, and I still couldn't tell you where this dilapidated trailer is. Perhaps, after all my decades in the South, I have a different idea of what to look for when it comes to dilapidated trailers. Anyway, I kept going and going until I figured I must have missed it. I began looking for a good place to turn around. There was an intersection up ahead. Oh look it's...Leboeuf Trail. There's the C&M Hardwoods thataway sign. I pulled off and found my delivery ticket. 11505 Leboeuf Trail was the address. On I went.

As usual, house numbers were hard to come by, but enough people had numbers on their mailboxes for me to track my progress from 12530 down through 11875 and then there was a cluster of mailboxes with four digit numbers! I went too far? How did I do that? I looked for a place to turn around. Guess what. C&M does have a sign. Right there.

The cluster of mailboxes served a cluster of houses down a little dirt cross street. Silly me.

CATA

The first public transportation I ever took was the bus system in Washington, DC in the mid-sixties with my worldly grandmother. I didn't know anything about it other than to keep a hold on her hand and ride wherever she took us, to the theatre and then back to the National Geographic building where my dad worked. Second was about forty miles and several years down the road. Having never wanted a vehicle, my first mission when I moved in 1971 from Vero Beach, Florida to Glen Burnie, Maryland was to learn the Baltimore City Bus System. My brother and his wife Liz lived in northeast Baltimore, and I visited them once a month or so. Liz was a Baltimore native who had taken city buses to school and everywhere else all of her life, so she could rattle off route numbers from anywhere to wherever. I quickly became proficient at it as well. The phone book had the system map in the front with the other maps - very handy if you could find a phone booth (remember them?) with an intact directory.

In May of '75 I flew to London, and was issued a transit system map in my tourist packet, which I used daily for the seven days of my "London Show Tour," covered in detail in my post from October 8th, 2009 entitled "Four Plays." In October of 1977 I got a job delivering new trucks all over the east. Figuring out transit systems became part of my skillset. From New York and New Jersey or Chicago or Atlanta, I'd breeze into a city, deliver my truck and then figure out how to get home to Baltimore, by bus, train or plane. In December of '82 I took my 13-year-old little buddy Heather Bowers on the "snow tour" to New York City, Buffalo and Niagara Falls, Ontario, complete with a hair-raising adventure on the New York Subway System ("Slowly I Turned" posted October 21, 2009.) Since then, I've used the Orlando LYNX system, learned Boston's MBTA better than their own information people, and put Albuquerque's buses to a lot of good use.

Then we moved to Meadville, Pennsylvania. I knew before we moved that Meadville has a bus system, the Crawford Area Transportation Authority, but I didn't pay it much attention, Meadville being so small and much as I like to walk. Then I had knee surgery. Suddenly that fifteen degree hill from Grove Street to the top of Chestnut Street became a long hard painful slog. Suddenly I was motivated to learn the system.

Three buses. That's all it is. The routes are divided into five, but it's really three. Blue Route A and Blue Route B are the same bus, same driver, A leaving the Downtown Mall on the hour and B on the half hour. Red Routes A and B are exactly the same hour and half hour schedule. Green is the long one that takes a full hour. It goes out to the Walmart, the movie theater and the Park Avenue Plaza among other attractions. That's it, the CATA bus system. Since I've been out and about after surgery, I've taken Green out and back once. Blue A, however, takes twenty-some minutes to haul my fat ass around the southeastern Meadville area from a block and a half away from work to the top of Alden Street, a block and a half from my house. It may be small, but it does the job I need it to do. That's all I can ask of it.