Little Adventures

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Beeline

One of the many interesting things I learned about as a Boy Scout was the beeline hike, named after the straight-line route that nectar laden bees take back to their hive. We Scouts would pile into cars at dawn and be driven up to Cook Forest State Park, some 20 miles away. When we arrived, we put on our day packs containing lunch, a first aid kit, and a change of socks. We then split up into patrols, and were given a map with an "X" marked upon it. We were to walk a compass bearing straight through the woods and arrive at the designated location by the end of the day.

All morning long we would hike through the woods, using our compass as our guide. We might deviate from our course just a little to avoid a swamp or to skirt a bramble thicket or to ford a stream at an easier spot, but we always afterward returned to our beeline and kept walking along toward our destination. At lunchtime, we wrapped potatoes and biscuit dough inside tinfoil packets and threw these into a small fire. As these baked in the hot coals, we used the rest of the fire to warm instant chocolate and frizzle pieces of corn on the cob. Our meals were often marred by culinary failures, but our appetites were so huge we always ate everything, burnt, raw or just right. After lunch we did the long, tired second leg of the hike, and about four o'clock we would arrive at the spot marked "X" on our map. There we were picked up in cars and shuttled home… dead tired, dirty as dogs, and oh so satisfied with the adventures of the day.

When I lived in Newark, Delaware, I would drive up to Clarion three or four times a year. The distance between these places is a little over 300 miles, but only if you go on the interstate highways. I grew bored with these and started traveling by other routes to add novelty to the journey. I began with a beeline route, following the roads that caused me to cross and re-cross a straight line drawn from Newark to Clarion on a road map. Sometimes I would select a town that I was interested in seeing, and then do a beeline from there to Clarion. These beeline routes were always interesting. Between Newark and Clarion lie the Appalachian Mountains, and I had to find a different way across them with each new route. There were times when I got so lost that I actually had to ask for directions.

As my interest in history and in "match shots" grew, I found other routes home. There was the "water" route where I followed, as best I could on the road, the line of the old Pennsylvania Canal westward to Pittsburgh, and then the Allegheny and Clarion rivers north to Clarion. There was the "old road" route which only included roads built before 1850, and along which I found many a quaint old diner to select from for my noontime meal. What with my many different routes home, I ended up knowing my way around a fair chunk of country, and I also gained some knowledge of how that country developed from Penn's Woods into the Pennsylvania of today.

I don't jog, but I do enjoy a long walk in unfamiliar surroundings. Whenever business travel allows, I budget an extra day to see the city that I am visiting. On that extra day, I often put on blue jeans and an old shirt and go on a beeline hike along unfamiliar streets, from one city attraction to another. Usually I figure things so that I get to walk through a park or the old part of town, and as I walk along, I stay very alert to my surroundings. I have walked 90 blocks up Fifth Avenue in New York at a late hour on a noisy Saturday night. (In the 1960s. I wouldn't try it now.) I have walked through a beautiful spring Sunday morning in Baltimore to the glass conservatory in Druid Hill Park. I have wandered, befuddled and confused, through the eerily, silent medieval streets of Lyon, France at siesta time on a hot August afternoon. The best of these rambles gave me a sense of the life of the city I was visiting, the worst of them made me grateful I lived elsewhere.

Last summer my nephew, John Pierre Hufnagel, who is a couple of years older than Pete, came to visit. One Thursday afternoon, I drove him and Pete out to Megnin's farm for a look around their old barn and a short beeline hike. The Megnin's live way back in the beautiful boondocks, in a valley surrounded by hills. We spent the first half hour exploring the barn, with its interesting haylofts and piles of rusting farm machinery. The boys had a good time feeding grass to the horses, and I remembered doing the same thing at a different barn when I was a kid. Finally, I rousted then out of the barn, pointed to the bare top of a forested hill, and told them it was time for our hike. I gave them each a compass, and we took a bearing on our destination. Then we began to walk. We went straight through a large fallow field filled with weeds, across some swampy ground and a creek, and up into the pines, rhododendron, and briars. They both struggled manfully with the obstacles we met, and after a rugged forty minute climb we arrived at the open area at the top of the hill.

As we reached the summit we looked back and could once again see Megnin's barn and the track of our beeline across the field of weeds, pointing straight toward where we now stood. From up there the view stretched for miles, and we had a sense of satisfaction at having been such good little bees.