30,000 Tons of Bananas

As I blasted north on I-85 I couldn't help but notice that the trees had become less coniferous, more deciduous, as though the different species had been having a fight and here in the northern areas, the deciduous were winning.


Massachusetts greeted me with rain, traffic and a rear motorcycle tire that kept losing air at a precipitous rate, which made my arrival in Salem, the land of witches, much later than I had wanted. I had to pull over every 75 miles and fill the tire with air. I check tire pressure every time I stop, of course, and the tires had been fine from Maryland through Pennsylvania.

I stopped in Scranton, Pennsylvania, a place from my past long ago. Scranton and I didn't recognize each other; it had been 40 years, at least, since we'd last been in touch. I remember the forests, the warm rivers where I had learned to snorkel, had captured and released turtles and snakes, very fond memories. Scranton couldn't recall me, too many people, too much time. Its infrastructure, specifically the roads were in decay, and I suspect that one of the myriad potholes I hit on the highway was responsible for the tire damage.

I stopped at the corner of Moosic St. and Irving St., in old-town Scranton. Years ago, Harry Chapin, the musician most known for Cats in the Cradle, had written and recorded a song about the crash of a truck carrying 30,000 Tons of Bananas in Scranton. Being in Scranton again, I had to check out the intersection where the accident had happened, years ago.

When I stopped in Connecticut, I noticed the rear tire's gauge had turned completely red (I have pressure gauges on the tires' stems that show when the air is low - green is good, any red is bad). I used the tire pressure gauge and the rear PSI had sunk to 20, 20 PSI below the tire's optimum pressure. Concerning. I filled the rear to 45 PSI. I traveled 75 miles, checked again, and the tire had sunk to 15 PSI. This is known as "not good" in the business of travel. I stopped several times, through Connecticut and Massachusetts and filled the tire along the way. Looking at the wear on the tire, it was obvious I had been running a low PSI as I traversed blustery New York.

I'm in Salem tonight through tomorrow night.

The original plan had been for me to stay in Boston two nights but I changed my mind the night before last when I had stayed at the house of Laura, a Tennessee house purveyor from AirBnB. Laura was great, had put up her whole house, as opposed to simply a room, in Knoxville, and at a great rate to boot. She had left to visit a friend that evening which meant I had free reign of the plethora of books she owned and I stumbled upon an old gem, Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy, a familiar scholarly tome I had read eons ago, essentially an analysis of European-based art and literature regarding witches and demons. I had formed a hypothesis years ago that the Salem witches were actually the first vestiges of the women's rights movement and that the Puritanical men of the time leveraged religion to essentially quell and kill the uprising. I'll see if I have time tomorrow to look around Salem but that will depend on the tire's repair, of course.