Slippery Rock, PA

I enjoy a good road trip, especially one that can include nights in hotels with American television.

A few weeks ago I was on such a trip, this story picking up with me deep in the heart of Pennsylvania. I've got a surprising amount of Pennsylvania stories, but this one involves very little. Just me driving by a sign for a town named Slippery Rock.

Slippery Rock. What a name.

It amused me as I drove by, my mind filling with images of just how a town could get such a name.

I picture a young village being built, people excitedly moving into their homes as the villages founder sat at his desk, quill in hand and he scribbled out potential names for the town. He needed the perfect one, the kind of name that would inspire the villages' citizens to do great thing. The kind of name that would bring them pride. The kind of name that would see this village grow to one of America's largest cities.

He took his job seriously, sitting at that desk day after day as he burnt away the midnight oil at an alarming pace. It probably would've been smart not to burn the midnight oil during the day, but he had more important things on his mind, so burn it did.

Then one day he had come up with it! The perfect name, one that was classy, that demanded respect, one that captured the spirit of its citizens and the geography around them.

He called all the villagers together, dozens and dozens gathered down by the river. To address them all the village's founder stood up on a nearby rock and he began to speak to them.

"We gather on this momentous occasion to name this beotch of a burg."

Okay, this may not be a direct quote.

"And folks, I have thought long and hard," he continued, "and today I proclaim that our little town shall forever be known as..."

Now the rock that this man had stood upon, being so close to the rivers splashing waves was a little damp, and it was at this particularly inopportune moment that he decided to shift his weight, causing a foot to give way.

He began to loose his balance, on the verge of falling and embarrassing himself. Luckily a panicked flail of his arms had saved him this humility. But still he'd lost his balance and was not looking to graceful, so he begins to laugh it off.

"Slippery rock," he chuckled.

Suddenly the crowd began to cheer. Hats were thrown, a fiddler randomly starts a'fiddlin' and everyone begins celebrating.

Confused the village's founder stands upon the rock trying to understand what was going on.

Then slowly he realizes, he had just proclaimed the town to be forever known as Slippery Rock.

Desperate he tries to tell nearby revelers the real name he had carefully crafted but they are to busy celebrating.

That's how I imagined it went down, but a fact check on this story informs me that it is not the case.

Here's the story those Slippery Rockians would have you believe.

Natives went and attacked Fort Pitt, another unfortunate victim of bad naming. This attack sort of frustrated the folks living in the fort, so they decided to chase the natives. As they did they found themselves crossing a river. They were gaining ground on the group of natives, closing in. But the floor of the river was muddy. This didn't cause the natives any problems, but the Americans in hot pursuit began slipping and sliding in the river, giving the natives a perfect opportunity to get away.

So I guess as a slap in the face people living nearby said, "Oh wow! You soldiers sure are something! In fact to honour your amazing soldering we're going to rename our town after you!"

Missing the sarcasm one soldier probably asked, "really? Like 4th Battalion City or something like that?"

"Oh no, no, no. We were thinking Slippery Rock." And then the town laughed in their face.

Think about that, the soldiers screwed up and a town was renamed after their screw up.

What if your town was renamed after a particularly bad mistake you made?

I believe this is how Enterprise, Alabama got its name. You know, after a guy's girlfriend stumbled across his shockingly large collection of Star Trek Enterprise collectibles, and don't even get me started on the embarrassing incident that led to Spanish Fork, Utah.

I don't live in a small town myself, so I feel spared such a fate as thousands of embarrassing things happen every minute in this city I am sure. I did go to college in a small town though, and I can't help but imagine if a poor choice on my part had been immortalized by the locals.

I once had one to many Canadian Killer Kool-aids, a drink consisting of vodka, amaretto, melon liqueur and cranberry juice as it turns out. The problems included a 'drunk dial' that night, and then a sleeping in and missing the call time I had to be on set for a cooking show... I was directing.

The point of this story was supposed to be thank goodness they didn't rename the town Killer Kool-aid, Ontario but now that I think about it that actually sounds really cool.

Belleville, Ontario you may have this idea, you're welcome... but get on it before Jonestown, Guyana beats you to the punch.

Train in Vain

I enjoy traveling. I enjoy discovering the slight differences in an otherwise generic string of hotel rooms, in spending hours waiting for a flight, in the way the waiting just slows down your thinking and forces you to take a little time for yourself. Why I differ from your average traveler on the joys of waiting, I am not sure, though this one trip may have something to do with it.

See I once spent twelve hours traveling from Belleville, Ontario to my home in Toronto. For those of you unfamiliar with this distance let me just say that normally, on a normal train ride, you could cross this distance in slightly over an hour. I said just slightly over an hour, not just slightly over twelve hours. Through some quirk in the universe I found myself boarding a train at 7pm and getting off at 7am.

So what happened? Well I’m glad I’ve rhetorically asked myself that, see it began as soon as I had boarded the train in Belleville. No sooner I had sat down then the train started to roll backwards. And it kept going. It wasn’t just a “whoops, through that into reverse” sort of embarrassing lurch backwards before correcting it. It kept going.

A half hour later our reversing stopped. And then we just sat there, in the middle of nowhere, the nearby woods all around us just ever so slightly backlit by the moon in an intimidating ‘your screwed if you leave that train’ sort of manner. We sat there in what quickly became complete silence, after everyone on the train car exhausted looking around and going “what do you think is going on?” and the person next time them replying “I don’t know?”

Finally we got some information as the captain… is it a captain on a train? A pilot? I think it’s an engineer who drives a train… well after a quick research session of typing “who drives a train?” into Google I’m happy to report the first search result is “Brazil's president drives bullet train on private leg…” Since this about exceeds the budget for research I have hear at Confessions of a Cidiot, or really just exceeds my interest in knowing, we’ll have to go with this.

So Brazil’s president comes on the PA system, deciding to fill us in, “Hello everyone. You may have noticed we were traveling backwards there for a little bit…” he seems unsure of this statement, as if perhaps without degrees in train driving we might not have caught this little tidbit for ourselves.

“What happened is this,” continued el presidente as he went from unsure to the tone reserved for a man about to explain to his wife how he ended up smelling like stripper. “Another train broke down out here, and so we’ve, we’ve, well we’ve decided to backup so we could hook the other train onto ours and just pull it on into Toronto!” His confidence building towards the end, before adding for good measure, “so yeah, once we hook the two trains together we should be on our way.”

What our good friend the president of Brazil left out was that no one aboard his train, or that of the train behind us, knew anything about hooking two trains together. This was information that probably would’ve been good for the Prez to know ahead of time, before we say started a half hour trip away from our destination, but now it was to late and none of us 400 passengers were going anywhere until someone figured out the correct way to hook two trains together.

Of course being towards the front of the train we had little idea as to what was transpiring, the attendant in our car every few minutes bitterly informing us it would just be a couple of minutes more. For those of you unfamiliar with Canadian train customer service, each train car is staffed with one attendant who is, surprisingly and what one would assume is a physical impossibility, always a little more bitter then your average bitter flight attendant. She, and it seems to be about 80 percent of the time a she, with 15.5 percent of the time a bald man, and 4.5 percent of the time a man with hair, almost always speaks in a thick French accent. This accent always hints at being a little forced, as if in the hopes that if you think English isn’t their first language you won’t ask stupid questions like “why did you sell more tickets then seats on a train?” (It’s happened) or the more timely “why have we spent two hours on a train and are only further away from our destination then when we started?”

Traveling by train in Canada makes you appreciate flying, in ways you thought not possible in this day and age of liquid fearing, pay us if you want your in-flight meal, and we’ll have to run a background check on you before we give you the plastic knife, airline service.

People began to grow restless, our female attendant and the bald male attendant from a few cars up who had come to help her out began fielding questions from every person missing a connecting train, bus or plane, every person who had a special event to go to that night, or just anyone who didn’t think spending the night in a train not built for overnight service was a fun idea.

“What’s going on?” was the standard question. The attendants sighed (forcing them to interact with a passenger is really asking a lot) before launching into the fact we’d only be a few minutes longer.

The true answer went something more like this: the diligent engineers at the back of the train, with their handy tools for the job, one watt key chain flashlights and all, had finally identified why the concept of hooking one train to another was just so darn tricky. The train from Montreal, the one that had broken down, had at some point along the way collided with a deer. The key clamp that would secure their train to ours was now buried deep under a pile of White Tailed Carcass.

But again we didn’t know all this up in our car. Instead we were greeted with our own personal bad news; the train was out of food to sell us. Well they weren’t completely out of food, but as the bald attendant tried to explain in thick accented English when pressed on the issue, “well, we are not totally out of food, but we do not have enough for everyone, and so we will not sell any of it to anyone. It’s only fair.” The man’s reasoning was not greeted with as much understanding as he seemed to be expecting, perhaps had he explained to us about the mush formally known as deer no one would be quite in the mood for food.

The P.A. system jumped into action again, “hello, this is your president of Brazil speaking (as you can imagine this isn’t a direct quote), what we are going to be doing is pulling forward, then backing into the other train. Thank you for your patience.”

And so we did, for the first time in hours the train began to move forward, then backward. The engineers had decided removing road kill from the front of the locomotive wasn’t in their job description, but perhaps if we backed into the train the force of our train hitting the other would dislodge the deer and we’d be good to go. This line of thinking is perhaps why Hollywood has produced few films where the hero was a brilliant train engineer.

The deer remained stuck, and, as we’d learn later, the engineer radioed up for the train to pull further ahead, then back faster! Nothing, “faster!” the engineer called again. No one ever recounted a story about any crew member wondering if it was such a bright idea to slam two trains together over and over, faster and faster. I suppose possible train derailment is a good alternative to deer guts on the hands.

El presidente took us up to ramming speed on the third pass, and miraculously it did the trick. The two trains were hooked. The funny thing was, in all the commotion in trying to hook our train with good old disabled Train 65, no one thought that once we were hooked up together we’d still have to overcome the mechanical difficulties that plagued the first train in the first place, problems with the brakes.

“We are all hooked up to the other train now; we’ll just be a couple more minutes, thank you for your continued patience.” The PA system ensured us. Somewhere at the back of the train our heroic engineers went to work.

Myself and the girl sitting next to me took this additional couple of minutes to get to know each other. When these ‘couple more minutes’ turned into several long hours we began to find we had learnt more about one another then some family members knew, and we were dangerously low on idle chit chat to pass the time.

Our fellow passengers in the car were starting to get a little paranoid in ways only passengers aboard a train in the 21^st Century could, the best theories on what was really going on it was agreed, were a terrorist attack or a hidden camera reality show.

The reality show theory began to gain steam as a third attendant, this time representing the 4.5 percent young, not yet bald male’s, came aboard our car and informed us every bathroom on the train had been used to capacity, that the septic tanks were full, and that we were going to have to go outside from here on in.

The women aboard our car were outraged, and for the next half hour or so anger over the idea of using the woods as a washroom filled not only our car, but every other car in the train.

Slowly people broke down and gave in, leaving the train they were instructed not to go more then five feet beyond the tracks by attendants who held flashlights on everyone, ensuring no one tried to flee the prison we had all paid to board and make a go of it in the woods.

Every so often a woman would come back in from outside and exclaim “I just urinated in the woods!” and all the other women aboard the car would cheer, as though we had entered a very, very, special edition of Oprah.

I myself eventually gave in and left the train to venture out into the cold January night. Walking past my fellow travelers to a secluded little spot I looked all around at the thick, pitch black wall of forest around us. As I began to unzip I started to do some calculations. I began to run the odds of the fact that maybe I wasn’t a main character in this story; here I was the furthest one away from the door to the car, adjusting the glasses I wore in only the way the first guy to die would. His body mysteriously being dragged into the woods by some unseen force, another passenger, perhaps our hero, seeing me lifelessly disappear into the woods would try to warn others, but who would listen? Not only does the first person to die in a horror movie have the sad fact that he’s dead going for him, his death always goes unnoticed.

I quickly zipped up and returned to the train.

Before long we were finally moving, another half hour we were back in Belleville. Seven hours of traveling and I hadn’t made it an inch closer to home. We stopped well some people were unloaded onto stretchers and the rest of us used the stations washrooms and lone vending machine.

An hour or so later we boarded again. The trip, we were reassured, would not be much longer.

A half hour past Belleville we allowed a freight train to pass us, how this is possible to allow one train to pass another train I may never know, but needless to say as it got past us is broke down. In all seriousness, it stopped dead in front of us. We began the waiting game again.

And so you see to this day I can stand, no, I might even enjoy a red eye from Los Angeles to Toronto with a four hour stop over in South Carolina. At least there’s no deer.

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Pack Rat Den-Aisle

I find myself traveling at least once a month these days, living out of a suitcase and being suckered into buying a shot glass with my name and a drawing of a local landmark on it. I’m not really sure who these novelty name items are targeted at, maybe people who suffer from random bouts of amnesia?

“Hmm, if this keychain in my pocket is correct my name must be Derek, now if only I had an overpriced coffee mug with my address on it.”

Unlike most people I enjoy the generic hotels, the three hour layovers at the airport, or rationing peanuts to last the length of the in-flight movie. For the sake of full disclosure I also enjoy the smell of tar, so there may be something slightly off about me.

This is not to say I am always immune to the discomforts of travel.

Now a lot of comedians and humourists have tackled the lack of leg room, and while this well worn topic is one we can all relate to, who hasn’t lost feeling in their legs by the time to captain turns off the seatbelt sign? And who hasn’t had the passenger in front of us recline his seat, allowing our tray table to double as a corset?

But leg room is nothing compared to the threat of the Tenant Traveler.

You may not recognize this pesky brand of passenger from name alone, so let me relate a story that happened to me not to long ago.

I had requested an aisle seat and wound up at a window, proving once again that the request seat button is about as effective as the button pedestrian’s like to pretend turns the light to ‘Walk’ faster (in fact the crosswalk buttons were disconnected sometime in the 80s when computer algorithms took over traffic control, not that this effects you. I’m sure if you continue to pound on it three or four more times the light will change, honest.)

The trip though started comfortably enough, despite the comedic cliché urge I’ll admit the leg room wasn’t bad and there was a seat between me and the woman on the aisle.

I settled in, turning my iPod up to a level that’d block out my fellow travelers while not loud enough to reveal some of my guiltier of music pleasures to the U.S.A. Woman’s Volleyball team seated behind me. Not that I am ashamed of anything in my music collection, I just didn’t want them throwing a game to Chile because they are to busy laughing at the curly haired guy on the plane who was listening to Was (Not Was)’s Walk the Dinosaur. You’re welcome Team U.S.A.

It wasn’t till around the time the in-flight movie started up - presumably something starring Mark Wahlberg or Pierce Brosnan as I can’t recall the last flight I took without one of them making up the trip’s entertainment - it wasn’t until then that the harmless woman sharing the row with me began to reveal her true colours.

She began by pulling out a bright assortment of celebrity lined magazines, apparently the only way to get fair and balanced coverage on the latest star’s divorce is to cross-reference between five different tabloids. An innocent action in and of itself, everyone likes something to flip through while traveling, but it didn’t stop there.

She started pulling out several juice boxes, an assortment of snacks.

Uh-oh, I thought as her tray table began to resemble a Vegas buffet.

Then came the electronics, the 1990s Sony Walk-Man, the laptop. Several tapes (Wikipedia the words ‘Compact Cassette’ kids, sorry to get all old on you), then a large hardcover book followed, tucked away into the now bulging seat pocket in front of her.

She was one of them, a nester, a Tenant Traveler.

I began to think about how horrible it would be to have to get up to go to the bathroom, to have to navigate my way through the woman’s home entertainment system in what under could conditions barely amounted to enough space for me to shimmy sideways… while it’d just be a complete disaster.

Sure enough moments after crossing my mind the need hit me. She was in the midst of pulling out a small pillow and a blanket from the bag she must’ve bought second-hand off Felix the Cat and suddenly all I could think about was my need to get to the bathroom.

She had set her little three hour and forty minute home and it was smack between me and the aisle.

I tried fighting it.

On screen Marky Mark (sorry again kids) appeared to be pouting about something in the rain, he wasn’t helping anything.

Like the Cidiot I am I sat there out of my depths, though I had faced her type before I had never figured out whether to let them know I needed to go by, waiting fifteen more bladder pained minutes as they packed up their camping supplies, or whether to charge like a bull, letting Pringles and Us Weekly’s land where they may.

The thought crossed my mind to open the emergency exit door beside me and go the long way around… ah yes, the emergency exit row, now you know why I wasn’t complaining about leg room.

Finally I couldn’t take it any longer, I stood up (or as up as a plane will allow you) to let the woman know I needed to go by. With a look best described as disgust she acknowledged me, bundling as much stuff as she could into her arms she made her way to the aisle, staring at me, seeing if I could somehow turn to rubber and bend my way around the tray table between the aisle and me.

I shuffled my way towards salvation, a maneuver that lasted about two seconds before I tripped on the bag she had left on the floor, staggering I sent a package of two-bite brownies flying across the aisle.

Getting my bearings again I stood up to take in the fact the volleyball team had chosen to watch me lurch around over Pierce Brosnan windsurfing.

Regaining my composure I made it to the aisle as the woman opened the overhead compartment, suddenly a jacket dropped from above, covering me in darkness. Startled I let out a scream, whipping the jacket from across my face and tossing it at a businessman. A few giggles filled the cabin.

Red faced I walked towards the back of the plane, convinced every eye was following me on my way by.

When I returned to my seat she had neatly arranged all her worldly possessions, she looked up at me, back down at her stuff, and then sighed. Across the aisle out of the corner of my eye I think I saw the business man covering his face.

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