A Weekend Away. Tales of Yankee Power.

Last weekend we had one of our little adventures. It was a trip in a time machine/space ship traveling at right angles to reality. Food, fun, fire and a bottle of bubbly from plastic tumblers at a picnic table right next to a wooded hill. Three days of escape, chilly hikes through thick trees and a foray into the retail, fashion exposition, food emporium known as Yellow Springs street fair. 

Yellow Springs almost seems like its own country. A liberal, congenial, aging, poor community in southwestern Ohio, crowded with old buildings filled with progressive ideals. Street Fair amplifies, intensifies the values of the little village. It is the best place to find tie died t-shirts, Baja shirts and leather bracelets that we have found.

I remember a trip to Tennessee, when we walked through a small shop advertising itself as a different time and place. It was filled with incense, Frisbees, Dead head stuff, knit caps, army jackets, all at premium prices. All trying to appeal to a sense of better days left behind for a price. Simon and Garfunkel played silently, softly, comfortably in the back ground. I enjoyed the stroll, but didn’t buy anything. Everything was packaged and prepared and folded and presented as if it were a museum. It was too sterile, too orderly to ever represent the chaos of real life.

Yellow Springs and Street Fair don’t have that problem. It is a medieval market with Puerto Rican food, Cajun delicacies, bourbon chicken, jazz on one corner, blues on the other. Cigar box guitars, jugglers, and people packed into narrow paths, filled with a dizzying variety of products. If you want something you have to earn it. Fight your way to the front and claw it off the pile. Retail as a combat sport. Exhilarating, and you really appreciate your purchase.

We stayed at Buck Creek State Park, a wonderful area just north of Springfield. We have come to relish state parks. And Buck Creek was no exception, wrapped around CJ Brown Reservoir it is a treasure of trees snuggled into farms and pastures. You have to love the contrast.

Buck Creek is delightful. The cabins were everything we have come to expect. It is hard to describe the feeling of seclusion even though there are cabins so close you could hit them with a poorly thrown tennis ball. Whoever devised the layout had a flair for the use of natural barriers to provide a sense of distance. We sat around our fire pit and it was as if we were the only people in the park, even though it seems most of the cabins were in use.

There is one difference between Buck Creek and the other state parks we have tried. The level of courtesy was drastically inferior. We arrived a little early, it is hard to time it exactly, sometimes you are a little later than check in and occasionally you are a little early.  It wasn’t a lot, and we had already driven past the cabins, just to see where we should be. Since it was Friday, and Thursday in the fall is probably pretty slow in most parks, the place was almost abandoned. It was obvious that housekeeping was finished, nobody was anywhere near the area. It was quiet, empty.

“You can’t check in until 4:00.” She looked at me, and there was no “customer service” in that look. It was hard to say if she was angry or just indifferent, sometimes those feelings are too much alike. I worried we might stand there for forty minutes. With silence crashing around the small room, it was Catholic school all over again, a steely, apathetic glare and me with no place to hide. I wasn’t sure if she wanted me to leave and come back at a “more appropriate time.”

Eventually, she lowered herself to allow me to check in. But not before she warned me about the danger of trying to get into the cabin ahead of time. We took her seriously, and walked around the Lake View Trail until 4:00 precisely. Then we went in, unloaded our car, and made ourselves at home. It is so easy to make yourself at home at a state park.

We will go back to Yellow Springs, and we will definitely go back to Street Fair, and we will probably go back to Buck Creek, it was too nice, and had too many things we want to see. But, we won’t show up until 4:00 and we won’t expect to be treated as a guest.