Three days before the year’s end, and the weather had turned suddenly colder.

Scattered fat snowflakes darted through the scrub oaks clinging to the steep banks of the Shenango River in western Pennsylvania, a 100-mile long tributary of the Beaver that eventually flows into the Mississippi River.

Shenango means “pretty one.”

My brother, David, and I joked that if we believed in ghosts, our mother’s would be down there on the marshes along of the Shenango, gigging frogs with her dad, a rough, hard-drinking steelworker.

At our feet, on the heights above the river, were the headstones of our mother and father. Dad was buried there in 1981, Mom just a little more than a year ago.

Neither of their lives or deaths was particularly easy. But all that’s done, now.

Water, flowing water, has always held me fascinated. I grew up in northeast Georgia, along the Oconee, whose name is a corruption of the Creek word meaning “born from water.”

The Oconee’s waters tumble down over the fall line to join the Ocmulgee to become the Altamaha and finally the Atlantic.

I now live in southern Pennsylvania along Marsh Creek, which joins with Rock Creek to become the Monacacy, which flows into the Potomac. The heights between Marsh and Rock creeks were the site of the Battle of Gettysburg. Bullets and other martial debris show up in the farm field behind our house.

The thing about rivers and creeks is that they seem from moment to moment to be fixtures, but in truth they are never the same. Blink and you missed something, something that will find its way to the eternal time-sink of the sea. So they are at once symbols of opportunities lost and of hope. That’s how I think of it, anyway.

David still lives a short walk from Born from Water.

We don’t get here often. It’s a long haul for me, and a longer one for him. Visits to our mother’s sister bring us back, and we always make the trek to Riverside Cemetery. I don’t know how often we would get back if not for her.

This is our first trip back since Mom’s ashes were interred over Dad’s grave.

I will not speak for David, but I usually spend an hour or so sitting on Grandpa George’s headstone, gazing over the tops of my parents’ stones, down toward the river.

I am not there for them. There’s nothing beneath the assorted Burger and Miller stones but ash and the odd discarded mechanical parts, the odd bone or set of dentures.

I go there to address memories, good, bad, indifferent, sometimes surprising, things I had forgotten. I speak, sometimes out loud, about this or that. Long ago, there was not a little anger, as I worked through things as I aged.

I’m in my sixties now. The anger is gone, dispersed by understanding, nubbed by weariness, and sometimes by no longer giving a damn. There were ordinary people, flawed, beat down and badgered by their own past. Who am I to be angry?

I leaned against the big oak above the graves. The wind was picking up, the flakes coming more heavily.

In a few weeks The Pretty One will be frozen over. In the old days, there were spots where you could drive a car over it. In recent decades, the winters have been thinner, meaner, somehow.

David and I climbed back into the car and wove our way through the steel-town blackened gothic stones and back into the end-of-the-year bustle of town, leaving The Pretty One counting down the moments to winter.

“Bits” here being used advisedly: These bits were small compared to the critter they came from, but pretty doggone big to the rest of us.

The dinosaur debris belonged to one or more individuals of a species called Alamosaurus sanjuanensis, brought out of the New Mexican desert by Robert Sullivan, senior curator in paleontology and geology at the State Museum of Pennsylvania.

Sullivan has spent his summers for the past 30 years working the dinosaur bone-yards in the blank spots on the map to the northwest of Santa Fe and Albuquerque. It is hot, hard work, and the teams are small, only two or three people from each sponsoring group, in this case, The University of Montana’s Museum of the Rockies, and the State Museum of Pennsylvania. That means that only a small number of fossils per season can be dug out of their surrounding stone, prepared, and carried out in knapsacks or on stretchers. It’s got to be something you believe in.

 I am trying to remember how we ever really believed in dinosaurs until the movie Jurassic Park came out. And yet, we did. Even when all we had to rely on were drawings and paintings in National Geographic, the clunky “claymation” monsters in bad science-fiction films, and, of course, our own fevered imaginations, we believed.

I’m no spring chicken, and dinosaurs thundered around in my imagination as long ago as I can remember, without benefit of full-size, full-color, bellowing digital versions of the creatures. I have to guess that people working in the field today spent time as children looking out over a pasture or into a murky forest and imagined vast shadows moving, shaking the ground with each step.

Maybe they still do, looking up from editing research papers, imagining they just caught a shudder of vibration running through the heating ducts, a furtive rustle in the shrubbery outside.

Computer Generated Imagery in films like Jurassic Park brought dinosaurs to life, starting with the first film in 1993, and several times since in sequels with increasingly lame plots and acting. Well, for the humans, anyway. The acting on the part of the digital dinosaurs seemed top-notch, at least in my book.

With the advent of CGI, the monsters moved with a spontaneity that made one want to sit astride their lumbering backs, or run away squealing. On the other hand, I wonder if seeing them so apparently real has damaged our ability to imagine them. I hope not. We believed, back in those technologically deprived days, because we needed to. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was a need to believe in vast and dramatic lives in a time so distant it implied a hope in a world after our own. Maybe, for those of still children and feeling insignificant and powerless, it was good to populate our spirits with beasts so big as to be undeniable, unstoppable, and inexpressively awesome.

Alamosaurus is a pretty big deal. For one thing, it’s simply just damned BIG. Two of the recovered pieces are vertebrae, one from back around the beastie’s hips, the other from the lower part of its long, long neck.

The remaining piece is a little less than half of an Alamosaurus’ thigh bone. It’s nearly four feet long, meaning that this bone, from knee to hip, was eight feet long and more than a foot thick.

Bob wouldn’t speculate on the animal’s size because this particular type – long-necked and –tailed herbivore that ambled around on four legs – came in a variety of models that might have enough variation to make scientific guesses about its length, weight, etcetera, just that…guesses.

Even so, the University of Montana put out a graphic showing an estimated comparison between a generalized Alamosaurus and a typical full-grown human male. The other silhouette is a representation of one of the vertebrae found at the New Mexico site.

Feel humbled? You should. The Alamosaurus was one of the biggest creatures ever to walk on land, though there was another, similar herbivore, Argentinosaurus, which was slightly larger. Full-grown, Alamosaurus was more-or-less the length of an Amtrak passenger car.

Nobody has yet found the skull of an Alamosaurus, so nobody can say for sure what it looked like. It likely had a brain the size of a tangerine, so if it were around today it could probably run for public office.

There are a lot of reasons we can be grateful that the real dinosaurs are long gone, I suppose. On the one hand, I really do enjoy picturing one lumbering through the field across the road from my house, chomping and belching its way through the soybeans.

On the other hand, I think keeping something the size of a city bus out of my tomato patch would be a major pain.

By T.W. Burger

I have to admit that a teeny part of me thinks there is somebody absolutely brilliant behind all this.

Americans destroying what it is to be American in order to protect America from people who would destroy what it is to be American.

I mean, WOW. It’s like MAD magazine on crystal meth.

On Tuesday the U.S. Senate, which, I’m beginning to think, may be the terrorist organization we really need to worry about, voted to keep in place a controversial section of the defense spending bill that would allow the indefinite detention of any terrorism suspect, including American citizens.

I can really see the attraction, to be honest. There are, plain and simple, really scary people out there. Some of them are just plain crazy, and some of them are crazy but think they are acting on behalf of Allah, or Jesus, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, for all we know. Like it or not, they’re out there, walking around, watching the world through the warped lenses of their assorted lunacies, and perfectly happy to go to glory on behalf of their own delusions, if they can just take some of us – preferably a whole lot of us – along for the ride.

Well, that’s the picture that’s hung on the side of legislation like this, anyway, a poster to convince us that we must do everything in our power to quell the threat against us.

No matter the cost.

That last part is not even in the fine print. It is not even mentioned.

Of course, we are really pretty vague about whom that threat actually comes from. The terror-of-the-moment is anybody who worships Allah, and there are some good reasons for that. On the other hand, back in World War II, We The People locked up a lot of innocent folks – 110,000 Japanese-Americans and about 16,000 German-born citizens and immigrants for much the same reason we want to lock up people who go to the wrong place of worship on the suspicion that they may be jihadists.

Of those Germans, perhaps one in 10 was members of the Nazi Party. Eight were actually suspected of espionage.

Eight.

I spent an afternoon walking around what was left of the Manzanar Japanese internment camp in Southern California some years back. It had just been handed over to the National Park Service, but nothing had been done to pretty it up. I was OK until I found the cemetery. A number of the graves were very small, only a few feet long, with toys, trinkets, and folded blankets placed over them, by people, perhaps, who are not simply shrugging their internment off as a temporary inconvenience.

Guess what happened to their jobs and property while they were gone.

In any case, the long internment of so many without due process, based in large part on the way they looked or talked or cooked their sausage has been a matter of some shame to the U.S. Apparently, it has not be so much of a shame that we have been cured of heading in that direction again.

Perhaps the fact that our detention camps are not, strictly speaking, on American soil helps make our updated detentions seem more humane, or at least less un-American.

Sixteen Democrats, among them Pennsylvania’s own Robert Casey, joined the usual foam-at-the-mouth crowd to vote against amending the legislation to remove the section on authorizing indefinite detention. It gave me the same sensation I had when I once was convinced there was a snake in my sleeping bag.

To be sure, there are not very many people locked up at the nominally illegal military prison in Guantanamo. At last count, there were perhaps 170 or so people who are adjudged to be too dangerous to let go, but who for one reason or another cannot be tried under whatever legal rules they are still sticking to down there.

OK, so these are arguably really bad people. I’m sure they honestly hate us. If they didn’t hate us when they were thrown into that hot, humid dog-run years and years ago, they do now. Maybe it’s hard for some of us to feel sympathy.

But think about it.

The renewed authorization would make it possible, LEGALLY possible, to snap you up and haul you away for as long as they want, even for the remainder of your natural life, without ever allowing you to be charged, to have your day in court, without ever speaking to a civilian attorney. And all because somebody somewhere with the right title on his or her door decided you were a threat to national security, based on an informant, an astrological forecast, or the reading of chicken guts. Doesn’t matter. A paper gets signed and you are gone.

There are people who like this bill, obviously, who think it’s just the thing for combating the newest crop of boogie-beings that haunt our dreams.

President Obama has threatened to veto the bill if it contains the “indefinite detention” language in it, and hooray for him. The really stupid thing about it is that throngs of people who hate anything as long as Obama is for it, would, when not drinking that particular Kool-Aid, be whooping his praises for standing up for the Constitution that is supposed to protect us from this kind of tail-tucked hogwash.

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© 2011 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.

Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

It just occurred to me that we are wasting our time.

Look, in this country, there are darned few outward impediments for any citizen who wishes to vote being able to do so. It’s not as though people have to ride burros or camels over rugged trails to get to the polling place, hoping that no brigands brandishing assault rifles would get in our way. The only impediment to voting in the U.S. of A. is our collective inability to pull our sorry butts away from our daily routines and spend a few minutes once every six months making a difference.

I would imagine that many of those folks who can’t be bothered to vote for their legislative leaders are all to eager to vote someone on to the next round of Dancing with The Stars, or off the island. And no, I don’t think making it possible to vote by hitting a set of numbers on your cell phone is a good idea.

I think we need to change our way of looking at this problem. Maybe we should stop thinking of it as a problem. Reduce our stress. Take a load off.

We who vote should simply think of ourselves as the elite, the real citizens, the crème de la crème, as it were. That’s the ticket.

After all, while the non-voters claim that they are all taxpayers, so are we. But we do the heavy lifting, the comparing of candidates, thinking about the issues, weighing our choices. Well, that’s the theory, anyway. I know some just vote on anybody who’s a member of the same party they are, regardless of qualifications for the job or the lack thereof. That’s their right, of course. The fact is that straight-party voting is, in my view, the result of thinking about elections the same way we think about sporting contests. It may be fun and a great distraction, not to mention leaving out the hard work of having to think about one’s choices. But it does remove some of the filters. Somehow, it doesn’t sound very edifying to cheer that you won the race by putting an idiot in office, on the argument that at least he or she is YOUR idiot.

Sure, all those people out there who don’t vote are missing out on being part of the system that is going to nudge their lives in one direction or another over the next however many years. We can bite our knuckles and come up with all sorts of schemes to get more people registered, as if that is somehow going to get them out to vote. We have been deluding ourselves into thinking that there is something in the way that prevents them from slogging down to the polls and making a few inky ovals on a paper, or pushing the right spots on a screen.

We would be right, of course. But what is in the way of these good people going to vote is that they don’t care. Oh, they’ll grouse and gripe at what gets done or not done, but that’s their right. Bellyaching is protected by the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, not in so many words, but it’s there.

But griping about the actions of a government in which you gave not the least participation is really the worst sort of Monday morning quarterbacking.

© 2011 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.

Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

It’s not as though we don’t have enough to worry about, what with the economy in a shambles in just about every place that has an economy. And of course there’s politics, speaking of shambles, with a president on one side whose opinion polls put him somewhere in the neighborhood of a fart in church, and the opposition party offering up a field of candidates who come off as a bad hybrid of Keystone Cops and extras from Night of the Living Dead.

With all this in the air, I go online to read some nature news, thinking that will get me out of the mind-set that the world as we know it is coming to an end.

Big Mistake.

On one website, I learn that a piece of ice twice the size of Philadelphia is cracking off from the Antarctic ice shelf. The crack so far is about 20 miles long and up to 200 feet deep, and growing at a rate of nearly seven feet per day.

And it’s not even caused by “global warming.” I forget just now what the scientific term for the effect is, but it basically means “s**t happens.”

The whole thing is supposed to break off and start drifting around in the open sea later this year or early next year. Earth on the rocks, shaken, not stirred.

Nobody seems all that concerned. Maybe I shouldn’t be either. On the other hand, having a chunk of ice the size of a small South American nation bobbing around in the ocean just doesn’t sound like good news. Twice the size of Philly? At least it will be cleaner.

And then there’s the asteroid.

The news outlets describe it as an “aircraft carrier-sized asteroid, a little over four football fields in diameter.” It will pass by our little old home planet, closer to us than the moon.

And the moon is only about 250,000 miles away.

That sounds like a far piece, but in astronomic terms, that’s like having a bullet pass by your head close enough that you can hear it buzz.

It’s supposed to pass us by this coming Tuesday. Just so you know.

NASA, known for calling the catastrophic explosion of a Delta 2 rocket as “an anomaly,” has classified the asteroid as a “potentially hazardous object.”

There was a time when if NASA said it would be a near miss, I’d relax. But not too long ago, the space agency aimed a satellite at Mars and missed the whole freaking planet, so, yeah, I’m gonna chew my nails just a little bit.

If this asteroid hits, it won’t be the end of the world, but it will bust things up pretty well. It would make a 4,000 megaton blast, (nearly 20,000 times the force of the bomb that fried Nagasaki), a magnitude 7.0 earthquake. If it hits the ocean, it could cause a tsunami 70 feet high. The tsunamis that hit Japan earlier this year were no more than a third that high.

One of the wire service stories said “Encounters of objects this large this close to our planet won’t happen again until the year 2028…” That one will be a wee bit closer than this one. Wonderful.

I closed the laptop and turned on CNN, only to see some goon in a suit dodging questions on his candidacy. I flipped over to the USA Network to an NCIS re-run. Give me over-the-top violence and improbable stunts any day. It beats watching a planet on the rocks and under fire, and anyway, I’d rather see the bad guys get blown away than elected.

One of the newspapers where I used to work posted it on their website today.

“If the woolly worms are correct, schoolchildren might be getting a number of snow days this winter,” the story’s lede read.

Sigh.

I think the paper runs this story every year. Or a version of it. I know, because I’ve written a couple of them.

Actually, over the years, I have written my share of weather stories, and stories like those of wooly bears and other arcane folk methods of predicting the weather.

I’m not picking on that paper. I would be willing to bet that every news organization in the U.S., if not the world, is writing stories on the same old humbug every year. It’s a journalistic tradition. Not necessarily a good or useful tradition, but a tradition nonetheless.

Weather stories fall into two main categories.

The first are the ones like I’m talking about here, where some group of local experts or shamans or hoodoo doctors picks some innocent critter, like a wooly bear caterpillar or a groundhog, and bases some prognostications about what the weather is going to do in the coming weeks or months.

The caterpillar is covered with a black or dark brown fuzz with a band of orange or light brown fuzz in the middle. Supposedly, the more black fuzz there is, the harsher the winter will be.

Why anyone would think a bug would come equipped to tell humans that winter was going to be cold I’ll never know. I guess it’s an effort to pretend that the world is set up to somehow benefit humans. It would be nice if some thoughtful designer had set these things out for the truly wise so they’d know how cold they were going to be.

Sorry. The amount of black on the thing depends on how far long it is toward being full grown. The older the caterpillar is the blacker and less orange he is.

All the caterpillar knows, if caterpillars can be said to know anything, is that when it gets cold he goes to sleep and wakes up in the spring as an Isabella tiger moth. Whether this state of affairs is alarming to the former caterpillar is not apparent.

The second type of news story are the ones where the reporter spends an hour or so writing a story about how it snowed, so that his readers can shovel their way out through the snow to their newspaper tube and read about it.

Thanks to the Internet, the readers can now find out it snowed without having to dig through the snow to find out.

Unlike the first category of weather story, this one can be very useful, because the reporter can include helpful information such as when the local snowplows can be expected or, in today’s time of budget cuts, IF they can be expected, and whether or not there are school closings. Most parents pray that there are not, I don’t care what they say in public.

I have a friend who worked for a regional almanac for a number of years. I met him when I did a story on how his weather predictions, using all sorts of odd calculations based on a formula put together hundreds of years ago, had hit every major winter storm on the nose.

Caterpillar readers everywhere nodded sagely. See? Those scientists don’t know everything.

Well, actually, my friend IS a scientist, in fact, and the almanac stuff was more of a hobby, like tying flies. That year, by the way, was the only one in a very long while that the prediction had any accuracy to speak of.

The folks at the reported wooly bear-reading ceremony said that winter is going to be severe with deep, deep snow.

Interestingly, “AccuWeather is forecasting a stormy and cold winter for central Pennsylvania with mild spells. An early-season lake-effect snow could blanket the northwestern part of the state,” the newspaper story said.

The reading was made in Lewisburg, a town a ways north of Harrisburg on the Susquehanna River. It is very often cold in winter, and often snowy, in Lewisburg. The folks at the reading claim the furry worms have an 80 percent accuracy rate. With predictions like that, it’s no surprise.

Of course, with all the changes going on in the world climate, weather predictions are going to get a lot stranger. Places that are cold will get colder, places that are hot will get hotter, and sometimes everything will get turned on its head. Severe weather will get more severe, and also harder to predict.

And I mean harder to predict by even more scientific instruments than fuzzy bugs.

But, OK, just to show that I’m not as grumpy as I seem to be, I’ll get into the spirit. I’m on vacation, at a wonderful B&B called The Tipsy Butler in a Maine seaside town where they have an annual pumpkin festival. I paid close attention to the number of old guys on Harleys tearing up and down the street past the rows of carved pumpkins. The sky was clear and sunny and the temperature was a highly unusual 83 degrees. In October. In Maine.

Hence, a lot of those guys were wearing sleeveless shirts, and their arms were almost all a bright pink.

So, based on the amount of pink biker hides I saw at the Damariscotta Pumpkin Festival on October 9, I predict a winter with temperatures and snowfall within the normal 100-year range.

Check back with me on the first day of spring, 2012, and we’ll see who was right, the Midlife Crisis Cavalry of Maine, or some fuzz-bearing leaf-eater.

I wasn’t thinking about bald eagles that morning.

Coffee. I was thinking about coffee.

I stood in front of the big windows in my bedroom. They look out over the impoundment area upstream of an old dam on Marsh Creek in Adams County, a little south of Gettysburg. I was doing nothing more dynamic than dragging my suspenders up over my shoulder, thinking about my schedule for the day, when I saw it.

A bald eagle. Not a photo or a painting or a patch on a motorcycle jacket, but the real thing.

Heading straight for the window.

They’re coming back, you know.

A in the early 1980s, experts only managed to locate three nests in the whole state.

But this June, the state wildlife folks announced that Pennsylvania is now home to 203 bald eagle nests in 50 counties. Not exactly a throng, but it’s a start.

And now there are 204 nests in 51 counties, and that most recent nest is just west, over the mountain Franklin County, according to Dale Gearhart, of the Conococheague Audubon.

Dale told me that he’s been watching a nest just outside of Greencastle, in a sycamore along the Conococheague.

The eagles were in the sycamore, not Dale.

The pair of eaglets is completely fledged now, though lacking the white head feathers that distinguish the species.

Sly Dale kept the secret for awhile, not wanting thundering herds of the curious to come smashing and cracking through the area for a peek before the young’uns were older. There’s nothing the average person likes to do more than love nature to death by going to look at it in droves. It makes me think of those people who don’t understand what’s wrong with the idea of putting roads through a designated wilderness area so they can go see it.

Anyway, back to the eagles.

On the morning the eagle buzzed my bedroom, I didn’t even think about my camera, not at first.

To be honest, I didn’t think at all.

And then I was sure the eagle was going to fly through the glass and into my bedroom.

But it turned that stunning head to its left, and peeled away to follow that gaze in a steep bank that gave me a clear view of that enormous wingspan, at least four feet from tip to tip, maybe more.

I remembered the camera right after I remembered to start breathing again.

I ran out on the deck, and the camera caught a few images of the bird perched on a branch across the creek, 200 feet, maybe further, a bit more than the lens was capable of handling well. On the computer screen, the eagle looked like a portrait in colored chalk.

Even so, I kept the photos for a couple of years, until I lost them in a hard-drive meltdown a couple of months ago. They weren’t great photos, but I was proud of them.

At its closest, the eagle was perhaps 30 feet away, close enough to hear the air whisper through its primary feathers, had there not been a window between us. It was a little bit like a miracle.

The bald eagle as a symbol has been through the wringer, somewhat. In the turmoil of the 60s, it took a beating. Those in opposition to the war in Vietnam were fond of pointing out that in times of great stress, the eagle will eat its own young, a metaphorical coincidence that seemed fitting, given the mood of the time.

The eagle also steals prey from lesser birds, and innocent enough fact in the red-in-tooth-and-claw real world, but a little awkward for a national symbol, or so some of us thought. Famously, Benjamin Franklin himself, no less, wanted our national bird to be a turkey, which is only found in the New World.

I can only imagine what a field day the editorial cartoonists would have had with a turkey.

So attached was I to the bald eagle as a symbol for the U.S., that the first time I saw one in the flesh — in Nova Scotia — my first reaction was “what’s it doing HERE?”

But it wasn’t only as a symbol that the bald eagle has had a rough go of it. The near-disappearance of our national bird because of hunting and environmental poisoning is well-known.

Recent years have brought better tidings, despite ongoing threats from idiots who just had to kill one, to chemical companies who were dragged kicking and screaming to more responsible insecticides and herbicides.

When the state announced that Pennsylvania had passed the 200-nest milestone, one of the game commission hotshots said folks have a better chance of spotting a bald eagle here than they have since the Civil War, almost 150 years ago.

That spring on Marsh Creek belonged to the eagles. Yes, plural. A few days after the first sighting, a pair of them swooped and glided over the pond, or sat grandly in the trees. They fished, though never caught anything the few times I saw them. Maybe that’s why they didn’t hang around. No nest for Marsh Creek.

I hope I see them again. That I saw them at all, I think, says something good about us, all of us, in that we had the awareness and the will, to take enough notice of our erosion of the natural world to bring the eagle back from the brink.

We The People bore down on the effort to save the bald eagle because of the bald eagle’s emotional link to our patriotic feelings. It would be great if we would put the same passion into saving creatures other than the ones we have decided are noble, or precious. But we’re not there yet.

Even so, those few moments watching those magnificent birds carving the air just outside my window left me breathless and full of wonder.

By T.W. Burger

It is hard to say just what makes one day more perfect than the other.

One day can be sunny and clear and in every aspect fine, but only run-of-the-mill fine.

The great thing about being a member of a species that lives longer than a mayfly, for example, is that most of us have an opportunity to have enough days and nights that we can compare one to the other, or at least note that one particular day has something that another lacked.

Or, maybe I just have too much time on my hands.

But, there it was. You just knew, in the way the rolling fields of timothy waved in the breeze on either side of Pumping Station Road, a scenic drive I normally would not normally take except as a detour.

The new bridge going up on the main road pushed me to this longer route, and most days I’m glad of it, except when I’m rushed.

I drove slowly, waving more impatient, and presumably more important, drivers around me, and ignored their scowls. I drove with the windows down, slowly enough to hear the breeze in the grass, and the rusty-hinge song of the redwing blackbirds.

Nearby, a man on a riding mower buzzed his lawn, an flying circus of barn swallows dive-bombing the bugs he stirred up. He seemed oblivious to the acrobatics of the birds, intent on making each row perfectly straight. There’s a parable there, I think; sometimes we pay close attention to all the wrong things.

But the day was too perfect for ponderous thoughts. Let the man keep his rows geometrical while a squadron of swallows filigreed the air. His loss.

Back home on the deck, a half mug of single malt at hand, I sat with my journal as the trees on both sides of the creek poured out cheeps and chirps, as their populations of songbirds held forth on their thoughts about the day’s proceedings, or on seed futures, or whatever they talk about at twilight, fidgeting from branch to twig, looking for a place to alight and settle as the shadows lengthen.

The leafy treetops flared in the setting sun, their green growing deeper closer to the busy ground below. Deer stirred in their thickets, preparing to make their clockwork trek from here to there on ancient paths now intersected with paved roads, and the predators slipped out, stretched, sniffed the air seeking prey that is not quite fast enough.

The leaves of the oak, hickory and maple waved coquettishly in the breeze, and I think I may have been a little drunk, but unsure whether it was the scotch or the day. I decided it was a little of both.

When it became dark enough that I could no longer see to write, I put away the pen, closed the journal. The trees across the creek had been reduced to jagged outlines against the pewter dusk, the air pestered by a convention of grackles griping about this and that, as they do.

Good smells drifted through the screen door from the kitchen, and I gathered up my things and moved indoors. The day wass gone, like thousands of others in my sixty-odd years. A real keeper, too.

© 2011 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.

Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

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The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board just announced that its agenda for its April 14th meeting will include “consideration” of the sole available Category 3 license to operate a slot machine casino at a resort hotel.

Interestingly, this is coming on the heels of a March 21 summit meeting in Philadelphia for casino operators, racing executives, legislators, regulators, and other industry-related professionals. Some of the casino group said the state might want to step back and catch its breath before licensing any new casinos.

Very interesting, indeed.

Well, whether one is for or against the idea of casinos at any of the four sites contending for the license, it will be nice to have the decision finally over with. The decision was supposed to have come several months ago, but the board was reputedly not able to come to a consensus. And then there were some members whose terms were up and some wanted to wait for the new board to make the final decision. Never mind that the extensive and passionate public hearings were held in front of the old board.

So, the four outfits trying for the license are:

•    Mason-Dixon Resorts, LP, to be located at the Eisenhower Hotel, Conference Center and Resort in Cumberland Township, near Gettysburg in Adams County;
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•    Woodlands Fayette, LLC, to be located at the Nemacolin Woodlands Resort, Wharton Township, Fayette County;
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•    Penn Harris Gaming, LP, to be located at the Park Inn Harrisburg West, Hampden Township, Cumberland County; and
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•    Bushkill Group, Inc., to be located at the Fernwood Hotel and Resort, Middle Smithfield Township, Monroe County.
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The proposal for the casino near Gettysburg has gotten the most ink, because it will be located about a mile south of the Gettysburg National Military Park, 6,000 acres of what Abraham Lincoln, no less, called “hallowed ground.”

Of course it is hallowed ground, but the battle actually took place over 15,000 acres of area, including what is now my neighborhood. My septic tank is in hallowed ground, if you want to take things to their logical extreme.

At least one poll that was done by a local pundit said that an overwhelming number of local residents were in favor of the casino. Lots of anti-casino people questioned the methodology of that poll, and pooh-poohed the results.

Just today, the Civil War Trust, a national advocacy group, released results of a poll it had commissioned that said that two-thirds of Pennsylvanians oppose the plans for a casino.

The pro-casino folks think having it in Gettysburg would do wonders for employment and the community would thrive, etc.

Opponents argue that the “good” jobs would be mostly marginal, that gambling brings more ills that are hardly worth the money they do bring in, and in any case, as the Civil War Trust said in its prepared statement today, “such a Gettysburg casino would be an embarrassment to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”

Personally, I don’t like casinos. I think that despite all the glitz and glitter, they are nothing more than yet another tax on the people who can least afford it, and enrich people who already have plenty of money.

Gettysburg businessman David LeVan and former state legislator Joseph Lashinger Jr. are the public face of the effort to bring the casino to the town made famous by the battle. They want to turn the unsuccessful (LeVan himself told the board that the hotel was only seeing about 30 percent occupancy) Eisenhower Inn & Conference Center to a gaming resort with 600 slot machines and 50 table games. For all I know, there will be valet parking for bankruptcy attorneys as well.

Sorry. I just made that last part up.

In the midst of all this, the news out of Philadelphia brought me up short. People who are part of the gambling industry suggesting that maybe, just maybe, we already have enough casinos where ordinary citizens can go have fun losing money in a sour economy?

Put your affairs in order, because this must be the end of the world. Jesus will be here at any moment.

At that conference, it was reported that Pennsylvania’s gambling industry has hammered the casino industry in Atlantic City, and that Pa. could surpass AC in terms of gaming revenues sometime next year.

News sources are reporting that the 10 casinos in the Keystone State took in roughly $2.5 billion last year, compared to the $3.6 billion raked in by 11 AC casinos in the same period.

This is where the “saturation” part comes in. Among the items discussed by the casino operators etc., was whether Philadelphia should get a second casino and how many more casinos the state should have, with neighboring Ohio set to have new casinos soon.

And not just Ohio. The Associated Press reported on March 24 that Delaware’s equivalent to Pennsylvania’s Gaming Control Board voted to table an effort to allow two more casinos in the state. The argument given by opponents is that the gambling market in the region is already saturated.

Maryland already has slots casinos, and they have begun pushing to be allowed to add table games.

One of the investment bankers, at the Philly meeting, suggested that Pennsylvania might just be wiser putting money into its existing casinos, rather than approving new ones.

I hope the Pennsylvania Gaming Board was paying attention in Philadelphia. If people within the gaming industry itself are beginning to think that less is more, maybe the gaming board itself should listen. It would be a real shame for investors, dreaming of riches, to back a new casino that never quite lives up to its potential.

© 2011 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

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Maybe it’s something in the water, or in the food we eat, but as a species, Homo sapiens do not seem to be as sapient as it used to be.

Looking back on the species’ history, that’s saying a lot.

Get this: I live on a little private road off the main road that runs from a four-lane to Gettysburg, Pa. The main road, Steinwehr Ave. or Emmitsburg Road, depending on how long you’ve lived here, is how most tourists get to the Gettysburg National Military Park. That is, of the nearly 2 MILLION people who come to visit the battlefield, a big chunk of them use that road.

Our little road is getting an awful lot of traffic lately. That’s inconvenient, because the road goes half a mile, give or take, and into a cedar thicket.

The point is, for most of the cars and trucks thumping and banging down our road, there is nowhere to go. When this fact dawns on the car occupants, they mostly scowl at us -– as though this were somehow our fault — find a place to turn around, and drive off in a huff.

Let me explain.

My road serves the needs of 20 or so of the most independent individuals on the planet. Truck drivers, factory workers, a taxidermist, teachers, one of whom, Rob, is a Civil War re-enactor, a federal employee, one veterinary student, an attorney and a semi-retired journalist (that would be me.)

Driving down our road is like a visit to Ripley’s. Each section of the road is paved or not paved, according to the whim of the person who owns that section of it. The asphalt in the paved portions varies in width and depth, according to the negotiating skills and wherewithal of the owner.

So, here’s the problem.

On March 7, the state closed the bridge on the Emmitsburg Road, the one that leads to Gettysburg, with plans to demolish it and put up a shiny new bridge, one that’s wider and higher so that when Marsh Creek floods the bridge and its approaches won’t be under water. We all think that would be a pretty good thing.

The contractor put up BIG signs a mile or so in either direction, advertising “Road Closed. Local Traffic Only,” or words to that effect. These signs are painted a subtle orange with black letters, and are quite large.

About a mile later, spaced appropriately, are more signs, similarly garish in color, saying “Road Closed 1500 feet,” then “Road Closed 1000 Feet,” and “Road Closed 500 Feet.”

About 500 feet later, Voila! There are great big orange and black signs and black and white striped barriers. The signs say, you guessed it: Road Closed.”

Behind that are big yellow machines and men in orange vests and bright yellow hard-hats, busily demolishing the old bridge.

Last Saturday, we stood on the bridge for 10 minutes and watched 10 cars drive past all the signs only to stop and the construction, turn around and scoot back the other way, some of them squealing their tires.

About one out of every 10 turns right into our tiny road and drives past the sign that says NO OUTLET and into our little world. Some of these people turn around in our yards, causing all sorts of damage.

Those of us outside at the time wait patiently (well, sort of…) for the inevitable questions.

Car stops. Window rolls down. Is this how we get to Gettysburg?

Take deep breath. Censor first five or six really snarky things I want to say.

“No ma’am. This is a dead-end road. The sign as you turned in said so.”

Why weren’t there any signs telling us the road was closed?

Another deep breath. Censor the one big wisecrack I really, really wanted to say, one involving several old Anglo-Saxon terms.

“There were, ma’am. About a half dozen of them over that mile and a half stretch.”

Well, we didn’t see them.

“I sorta figured that, ma’am.”

A sour look pinches her face as the window rolls back up. The high-end SUV trundles and squeaks back down the road.

So, it’s early spring. The tourists season starts in earnest on Memorial Day.

It’s going to be a loooonnnnngg summer. Maybe we can get Rob to kit himself out in his soldier regalia and stand guard by the No Outlet sign. He could bayonet anybody with out-of-state plates who drove past the sign.

© 2011 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/