Editor’s Note: This winter, Greenfield Recorder sports columnist Chip Ainsworth has been traveling the southern part of the United States. This is the first in a series of Saturday columns about his travel experiences.
Cabin fever hits in late autumn, after baseball season has ended, the leaves are down, and the sun is a sliver on the southern horizon.
My Northfield bungalow was an igloo the morning I swapped cars with Liz Spaulding and drove her Honda CR-V to Tequesta, Fla., in northern Palm Beach County.
Driving to Florida is cheap, when gas prices in some states are as low as $1.79 a gallon, and E-ZPass fees cost about $25 southbound compared to $45 northbound.
I exited at the South of the Border amusement park in South Carolina, and stayed at Clark’s Inn, which charged $98 for a quiet room, king-sized bed and bacon, eggs and buttermilk biscuits for breakfast. But alas, I was on the highway again before the dining room opened.
In Florida, I stayed at Tequesta Palms Inn, a small motel on Route 1 near Jonathan Dickinson State Park, and at sunrise I jogged on paths near the Loxahatchee River, where egrets poked for minnows and herons cackled overhead.
In a stupor from driving 1,400 miles in two days, the previous night I’d bumped my head on the Honda’s rear hatchback.
“Do your friends up north think you have a mean girlfriend down here?” laughed Jeff Golden, who noticed the glistening piece of liquid adhesive the staff at Urgent Care had pasted onto the gash on my forehead.
It’s true my Florida visits always seem to include a trip to a doc-in-a-box — a broken arm at a spring training game, a twisted ankle at the Orange Bowl, stomach poisoning from oysters at a seafood festival in Port Salerno.
Golden owns Ortho Max Inc., a company that sells orthopedic implants and surgical instruments. At his office in Palm City, he plucked a box the size of a cigarette pack and pointed to what looked like a big raisin inside the airtight, sterile package.
“It’s a spacer for an arthritic big toe,” he said. “This little thing the size of a Jujube sells for $4,500.”
Golden’s biggest client is an orthopedic surgeon at St. Mary’s Hospital in West Palm Beach, whose specialty is making people taller.
“He’s like a rock star at conferences,” Golden said. He held a 3-inch stainless steel tube in his fingers. “He breaks the femurs, inserts these ‘limb-lengtheners’ and ratchets them up. It takes six months to heal and it costs $200,000.”
On New Year’s Day, Liz Spaulding stepped off a JetBlue flight from Boston and into her washed and vacuumed SUV. We had dinner that night, and the following morning I flew into Boston Logan International Airport, found my car and drove back to Northfield.
The yard was barren and Christmas lights shone from the neighbors’ yards. I reached for a plastic jug, added water and began prepping for a colonoscopy.
Welcome back to the real world, but not for long.
Between trips, I binge-watched Ray Donovan episodes and scribbled an itinerary that began at 6 a.m. in Northfield and ended the following night in Jacksonville, Fla.
New trip, different route, from Hartford, Conn., into Pennsylvania on Interstate 84, listening to Del Reeves on Sirius-XM’s Outlaw Country.
At Roady’s Truck Stop southeast of Scranton, Pa., I sat behind two truckers hunched over coffee and read the cover story in a weekly shopper called “Our Town.”
The author described a hazy night-time photo of his front yard, where two dogs (Daisy and Max) sniffed snow-crusted ground near the woodshed. A deer his wife, Dorothy, had shot hung from the top of a snowplow next to the porch.
The eight-pointer would “put meat in our freezer,” and the outdoor furnace would burn 25 cords of wood. “Our driveway is a mile long, and that’s the plow that goes on the tractor to keep the road open,” wrote Robert Beierle.
The view of Scranton/Wilkes Barre from Interstate 81 reminded me of vistas on television of crowded South American cities. Clusters of houses, strip malls and commercial buildings consumed the valley and were encroaching on the mountainsides.
My ears popped and big rigs struggled up the climbing lane near Hazleton, Pa., where Cubs Manager Joe Maddon’s mother “Beanie” had worked as a waitress. I passed exit signs for Paxtonia, Nuangola, Nanticoke and the aptly-named Frackville. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Pennsylvania mines the second-most natural gas in the country.
Technology is reconnecting travelers with the highways of yore, and in Virginia, the GPS guided me southeast onto U.S. Route 17 past white picket fences and rolling farmland.
The next morning, I strayed off the interstate onto Route 301 past an algae-stained sign that said, “Welcome to North Carolina.” The desolate two-lane road was strewn with dirty clumps of cotton, and the muddy, swollen Roanoke River wended between dormant farm fields.
The Wilson (N.C.) Times cost $1, and the lead story reported that growing hemp became legal last year when President Donald Trump signed the Agricultural Improvement Act.
Hemp is used to produce therapeutic oil, but a local farmer said he’d had mixed results with his first grow. “We’ve been growing tobacco since the colonists came across and we still learn things about it every year,” Bill Harrell told reporter Drew C. Wilson. “I don’t think it’s the cure-all, and I don’t think it’s going to be the golden cow that tobacco was at one time.”
In downtown Enfield, N.C., a sign pointed to Aunt Ruby’s Peanuts. It was early Saturday morning, but the store was open and Bob Allsbrook greeted me in the front part of what was had been A&B Milling, the family’s shuttered cattle feed company.
His mother opened the peanut store in the 1940s. I told him that on previous trips, I’d seen the billboards but couldn’t pinpoint the location.
“They’re there to remind people,” he said. “We’re mostly mail order.”
The showroom is clean and spacious and the shelves are stocked with tins and bags full of locally grown peanuts — country style honey roasted, roasted redskin, cajun, salt and pepper. I spooned a handful of the roasted peanuts into my mouth. They were bigger and crunchier than the conventional brand, and of course, fresher.
The 75-year-old Allsbrook wore a gray flannel vest over a blue cotton shirt. In a soft, southern drawl, he said, “The growing cycle is 150 days in sandy, loamy soil. It’s a very tolerant plant, can go a month without water.”
He pointed to a photo of men in the field loading bags of peanuts onto horse-drawn wagons.
“Mechanization killed all that labor, which is why all those stores you saw (on Main Street) are empty,” he said. “It put people out of work. Those abandoned houses you saw coming into town were for tenant farmers. The federal government thought it was doing the right thing, but four generations have been on welfare in all of eastern North Carolina. It’s a way of life, and it’s a shame.”
The door jingled and a cheerful woman came in and plopped a 5-pound bag of raw peanuts next to the cash register. She laughed at herself and said, “Mother said we have to stop at Aunt Ruby’s and I’m thinking, ‘Who’s that, a relative?’”
I bade Allsbrook farewell, stashed six cans of peanuts in the trunk, and resumed my trek to points south.
Chip Ainsworth is a freelance writer whose Keeping Score column is a regular feature on the Greenfield Recorder’s Saturday sports page.