Art/Artists & Personal & WAAGNFNP Posted by Bill Benzon, 27 Jul 2007 05:10 am

Journey to 3Tops: Indiana SLuGS and the Land that Time Forgot

About two weeks ago (I’m writing this on 23 July 2007) I was checking my Flickr account to see if anyone had commented on any of my photos. I hit paydirt. One PLASMA SLuGS (red ribbon for WAR} (yeah, all of it, including the little twiddly brace at the end) had made the following comment about one of my graffiti photographs: “please if u dont mind tell me where n how to get here.” Bingo!

As some of you party loyalists may know, I’ve been photographing local graffiti since last Fall. The visage of our fine and noble 3Tops is, in fact, one of the grafs I’d found, not to mention other WAAGNFNP notables, such as Toothy. Grafs, however, are generally illegal, and the people who paint them don’t leave contact information on them. Thus, while I now have hundreds, thousands even, of photographs of grafs within a mile or so of my apartment, I don’t know who painted them. And, since I have no roots in the area, I’ve got no social network through which I can track them down.

That’s one of the reason I’d started posting my photos to Flickr. I figured that some of the writers (a term of art) would see them and perhaps, one day, one of them would contact me about them. SLuGS is the first.

Of course, I told him where the picture was taken - in Jersey City, about a mile in from the Holland Tunnel near the old Bergen Tunnel. I also offered to take him on a tour of the local grafs. He took me up on my offer and showed up that Sunday afternoon with his wife, a backpack full of spray paint, and a Canon single-lens reflex camera. I revved up Google Earth and showed them where we were, where the grafs were, and off we went, with the intention of going into the Erie Cut.

On the way there SLuGS did a little painting, with both his wife and I snapping pictures:

laylabill07.jpg

That’s the SLuG, the identifying mark that he uses instead of the nickname that most writers use. It’s painted on the base of one of the columns supporting I78 as it comes down off the Jersey Heights (or the Jersey Palisades) and feeds into the Holland Tunnel. He’s done thousands of these here and there, mostly I’d guess in the New York City area, but other places as well. He’s been to Amsterdam and he’s made cooperative arrangements to get the PLASMA SLuG up all over.

Here’s an action shot:

aint no mountain.jpg

After that we started making our way to the entrance to the Erie Cut. On the way there we had to go over the bridge beneath which one finds the image of 3Tops:

in the whole.jpg

When I took the above picture I was standing on the bridge; 3Tops is below me and to the left. That train is going into the Bergen Tunnel, built in the mid-19th century.

Indiana SLuGS on the Bridge of Doom

That’s SLuGS hanging onto the bridge while he paints some SLuGS on it. You can see 3Tops’ tail below him at the bottom of the picture. That’s his wife at the top walking across the bridge. We followed her across and then I led them up the hill to the right and down into the Erie Cut. Here’s the approach:

Palisades Arch

And here’s what’s painted underneath that arch:

on the wall.jpg

The Cut is 85 feet deep and almost a mile long. It was blasted out of solid rock in the early 20th century to make a channel bringing four railroad tracks to the port at Jersey City. Jersey City - like Hoboken to its immediate North (where “On the Waterfront” was set) - is no longer a port city; those tracks have been abandoned and only one of them remains (you see it at the bottom of the picture). No one goes into the Cut except graffiti writers, historic preservationists, and other assorted miscreants and adventurers.

Once you’re in the Cut you’re in another world. Yes, New York City is two or three miles to the east across the Hudson and Jersey City is all over the place 85 feet up. But down in the Cut, those places aren’t real. The Cut is its own world, lush vegetation, crumbling masonry, rusting rails, trash strewn about here and there, mud and muck, and mosquitoes, those damn mosquitoes! Nope, it’s not Machu Pichu and it’s not Victoria Falls, but it’s pretty damn good for being in the middle of one of the densest urban areas in the freakin’ world.

And so we walked on in muck and wonder and SLuGS painted and his wife took pictures and so did I. That creature to the left was painted by Jersey Joe, aka rime:

3 makes company.jpg

Here we see that there were others along on this adventure:

Wide Screen

And this one is beneath an arch, actually, it’s more like a short tunnel (it’s dark in there and that’s a slightly blurred long-exposure picture):

Indianna does the Can Dance

We made our way through the Cut where there was more painting and photographing. And stickering; here we see SLuGS’ sticker on the left and his wife’s on the right:

His and Hers

She paints too, but not on this trip.

Now that we’d made it through the Cut it was time to head back. While the walk hadn’t been difficult, it had been messy. We’d all picked up some mud, mosquito bites, and scratches. Was there an easier way back?

Well, there is the Bergen Tunnel, the one into which we’d seen a long freight train go an hour before, the one that would lead us straight back to 3Tops. It came out about 30 yards away from the western mouth of the Erie Cut. That’s it, dead center:

bergen-tunnel-west-end.jpg

The western mouth of the Cut is behind the trees to the right. We could walk back through the tunnel. It’s less than a mile long and you can see straight through it. I’d walked into the tunnel many times on my photo excursions and given serious thought to walking through it. Now that I had companions, who had brought up the idea of walking the Tunnel . . . And so we decided to walk back through the tunnel.

I figured there were two potential sources of danger, a train coming along (forcing us to the sides of the tunnel, where there seemed to be plenty of room) and the lack of light making footing treacherous. No train came along while we were in the tunnel; it was Sunday, after all.

The lack of light, however, proved to be troublesome. While you can see through the tunnel from one end to the other, once you get more than, say, 50 to 60 yards into the tunnel, you can’t see your feet. You can see the light at either end of the tunnel, but not your feet. And that proved to be troublesome. Walking train tracks is awkward. The ties are at an inconvenient distance. The distance between adjacent ties is longer than a single (adult) step, but a step length of two ties is a bit long - though doable. So, you have to be careful what you’re doing, especially when some of the ties are slick with thin mud, as some were.

Of course, you don’t have to walk on the tracks, you can walk beside them on the roadbed. Ha! There you have a coarse gravel hump that isn’t wide enough for a comfortable footpath. There’s no place that’s convenient to walk.

We ended up flashing our cameras to get some light. That helped. But still, I managed to stumble and fall. SLuGS and his wife helped me up. I got dirty, ripped my jeans, bruises and scrapes, lost the lens cap to my camera, but nothing serious.

We exited the tunnel and saw the throwies SLuGS had done earlier when we had been up on the bridge:

slugs over 3tops.jpg

We passed 3Tops on our way out:

3Tops & Weeds

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Responses to “Journey to 3Tops: Indiana SLuGS and the Land that Time Forgot”

  1. on 27 Jul 2007 at 6:13 am 1. JP Stormcrow said …

    Great stuff Bill.

    I am intrigued by the whole Jersey Cut terrain. It expands the “vacant lot” theme from a couple of posts back quite nicely. A big, interesting vacant lot “hidden” in the midst of the NY Metro area.
    Here is a Google map satellite view, which shows the Jersey Cut as the green slot running SE to NW below and parallel to the major road. (Bill informs me that 3Tops is located just off the map to the lower right - scroll down to see the maze of overpasses and RR tracks and bridges. Also zoom in for a better view.)

    It reminds me somewhat of a great essay I once read by Robert Sullivan on looking for where the “remains” from the original Penn Station are buried in the Meadowlands. (which are just past the NW end of the Erie cut and much of which are relatively inaccessible - as i recall he had to canoe to a lot of it.) I see that Stewart has written a book The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures on the Edge of a City which looks to be a good read.

    It is sometimes overlooked, but New York City is set in a pretty spectacular physical setting with very interesting geology. For instance I sometimes think that paradoxically the Palisades would be much better “known” as a natural feature if they were not right up on New York as they are. (I think the Great Falls of the Potomac just outside of DC are similarly “neglected”.) The overlook across the broad esturial Hudson from where they reach 500 ft. near the NY/NJ line is stunning and unique. The volcanic and metamorphic rocks make for quite interesting landscapes. (One of my nerdish regrets is that I have always lived “on” sedimentary rocks.) Even Long Island and its moraine is a pretty interesting geologic/geographic feature.

  2. on 27 Jul 2007 at 6:17 am 2. JP Stormcrow said …

    Also, I was quite the acrophobe in my youth and still have enough of it in me that often my first thought on seeing some graffiti is; How did they get there? and How did they paint it when they did? The picture of SLuGS on the “outside” of that modestly high bridge gives me a bit of twinge, even just looking at it.

  3. on 27 Jul 2007 at 7:08 am 3. Bill Benzon said …

    Here’s a link with information about the Erie Cut/Bergen Arches. And here’s another Flickr photoset of pictures around and about the arches.

  4. on 27 Jul 2007 at 9:06 am 4. Oaktown Girl said …

    Thanks for this post, Bill. I’m really quite fond of many of those photos you took. Too bad Kiera is away this week. I know she’d have something especially nice to say about tiny travel-sized Gojira and Friend looking on.

    And for anyone concerned about the rather weathered look of 3Tops in the photo, not to worry. The real 3Tops is kickin’ it at Ministry of Justice headquarters and taking care of business. That’s only a picture of 3Tops that we keep over there for the WAAGNFNP pilgrims visiting the sacred birth place of 3Tops, Toothy, and Alien Guy 24 (among others). And as you can see, the picture has begun to show slight wear and tear from the harsh East Coast seasons. But you’ll note it has not lost anything in portraying her true majesty.

  5. on 27 Jul 2007 at 9:19 am 5. geo said …

    thanks bill - interesting adventure and meeting of unintended consequences - i think part of the untold story is why the graf writers and artist do this - what drives them to risk life and limb sometimes to do graf especially in places nobody sees - and to write their names or tags on walls with no way of getting feedback other then more often then not from their own immediate group or crew or taking photos - and now-a-days its not as much about the making the art on the walls which is in many places like in paris taken off the same day or a few days afterwards - its more about the photographing of the event - also when i was photographing graf in europe 1987 it dawned on me it was contemporary hieroglyphics - more commentary and poetry and in america its more about tagging and the art of writing - at least that is my take on it - food for thought - geo

  6. on 27 Jul 2007 at 1:31 pm 6. Oaktown Girl said …

    My personal preference for this type of art is the more pictorial style, 3Tops being a prime example, of course.

    I appreciate the skill that goes into much of the script/lettering style of these graphs, but it doesn’t really move me at all, if you know what I mean.

  7. on 27 Jul 2007 at 2:29 pm 7. Bill Benzon said …

    3Tops? Did I hear a request for more 3Tops? Here it is. And as a bonus there’s one with our Chairman for Life when he was confabulating with 3Tops on matters of State and she was teaching him how to Do the Tiger.

    The lettering takes some getting used too, Oaktown. And I don’t know whether it helps or not to know that the lettering is almost a name. For that matter, 3Tops herself is a name, Joe. She was painted by Japan Joe. Once the so-called “wild style” was created back in the day, it just got wilder and wilder so that the name is often difficult or even impossible to read, even to those familiar with the styles. When you see something really complex it sometimes helps to sorta’ cross your eyes and let it fuzz up so you can get the gestalt. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.

    What geo says about doing the art in places where no one can see, that’s interesting and important. On the one hand, there’s certainly element of prudence born out of a desire not to get your ass tossed in jail. A tag can go up in less than a minute, a throwie maybe five or ten minutes at most; you hit it and you’re gone. If you know the flow of the area where you’re working you can time it so you’re not likely to get caught.

    But a piece (short for masterpiece) is different. It may take several hours of work, not to mention lots of cans and perhaps rollers and primer as well. You don’t want to do this where you’re likely to get caught.

    But I don’t believe that’s all there is to it. Not at all. An archeologist who’d done a lot of work with cave paintings told me that the best stuff is often deepest in the cave, where it was darkest and hardest to get to. Why? Don’t really know, but it’s not fear of cops. It’s something else. Maybe a sense of mystery and mysteries, of the sacred? I think there’s some of that in these pieces.

    Here’s some more photos of the Erie Cut / Bergen Arches.

  8. on 27 Jul 2007 at 3:45 pm 8. James Killus said …

    I’ve heard that in some medieval cathedarals there was intricate woodwork that was in places that could not be seen from the ground: in the rafters, or beneath protective metal coverings. The argument at the time was apparently that “God can see even the hidden.”

    Of course the artist sees a work, no matter how hidden or ephemeral. We’ve had several incidents of Tibetan Buddhist sand paintings that were disturbed or destroyed, accidentally or deliberately by vandals during exhibitions. The only ones undisturbed were the artists; the whole point of the sand painting is its ephemerality.

  9. on 27 Jul 2007 at 4:03 pm 9. Seattle said …

    Man that sattelite view of the earth is addictive. You just had to include that link, didn’t you? Now that I’ve traced the Hudson back to it’s sources and viewed most of the Jersey Shore, I’m reminded of the petroglyphs in the Columbia River Gorge. The most famous is “She who watches”
    www.columbiagorge.org/about-museum.html

    Another is River devil/monster:

    http://www.dmcphoto.com/PetroglyphCRG.html

    Speaking of out of the way places, I hunted up the site of some of these petroglyphs about 20 years or more ago when I was working a state job in the gorge. Back then you had to wander over some train tracks and crawl up into some basalt cliffs. It was startling to come across these pictures. Unfortunately a large number were drowned when the dams were built on the Columbia.

  10. on 27 Jul 2007 at 5:14 pm 10. Bill Benzon said …

    She who watches = 3Tops = MOJ?

  11. on 28 Jul 2007 at 8:36 am 11. JP Stormcrow said …

    My daughter point me to this fellow she found via one of her Web Comics. he is different in that he generally uses stencils. Exploring from his site, I came upon this lively place. Most interesting to me was the graffiti discussion board, with advice on things like how to do “freight”. (I happened to parallel an elaborate piece on a coal car for a few seconds on my drive home last night.) It makes me wonder how much of the work is actually getting on to the web and is there a cohesive web community. (BTW, here is what appears to be Plasma Slugs’ myspace.)

  12. on 28 Jul 2007 at 9:01 am 12. Bill Benzon said …

    “Freight,” sometimes spelled “fr8.”

    There’s a lot of graffiti online, a lot. Plus discussion, and some fairly sophisticated analysis and scholarship. Check out:

    http://graffiti.org/

    Remember, a lot of this really took off on the US East Coast back in the 1970s and 80s, particularly NYC and Philadelphia. In NYC the deal was to do subway cars, outside and in. This put the writers at war with the subway system, who tried to keep the cars clean. So, the writers would photograph their work, knowing that sooner or later it would be gone. In Style Wars, a very good documentary (which you can rent from Netflix and, not doubt, other sources), there’s a scene where writers are gathered with albums and shoe boxes full of photos, discussing their work.

    On the one hand, then, graffiti is intimately associated with trains. It’s a small matter to switch your activity from subway cars to fr8s; all you do is go to a different yard and that’s it. Many of the cars on the trains going through the Bergen tunnel have grafs on them, some of it fairly elaborate.

    On the other hand, taking photos of your work and sharing them with others has become part of the culture. It’s part of the activity. Not only do you shoot the work, but you shoot the writers in action.

    Another good quasi-documentary is Wild Style. I’ve read that when this hit Japan, that’s what got hip-hop and graffiti going there. Graffiti is closely associated with hip-hop culture.

  13. on 28 Jul 2007 at 9:13 am 13. JP Stormcrow said …

    I was always fascinated as a kid by the jumbled post-industrial landscapes, generally criss-crossed by viaducts and the like. The first area that attracted my attention were the Flats along the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland (the northern end has since become somewhat gentrified.) Part of the fascination was the relative “indeterminacy” of the street pattern, a friend of my father’s had a route to Cleveland Municipal Stadium through the valley that in its extreme version included a jaunt the wrong way down a one-way street and crossing a short railway bridge - you would only dare try it in the deserted wasteland that was Sunday in the Flats.

    Others that I recall with fondness were the scenes from the Chicago and Buffalo Skyways.

    New York certainly has it’s share, such as Gowanus Canal and Red Hook. The one you have there in Jersey City is really quite special. One of my favorite pastimes as a kid was drawing imaginary maps of, well, everything. (Some day I will do a post on this - and in an aside in Life As We Know It MB mentioned that he did the same.) But one of my favorite things to map would be docks and wharfs and Railroad tracks and jumbled roads, generally under an impossible spaghetti web of bridges and freeway ramps. In other words, 3Tops land.

    Some websites for other map nerds:
    Strange Maps, a great blog which lives up to its name. My recent favorite from there is a great map of the Internet based on the Tokyo subway map.

    The Map Room: blog about all things mappish.

    And for an interesting example of imaginary map-drawing see this guy’s maps.

    The whole imaginary maps things (especially those not associated with books and other narratives - but are just maps for map’s sake), strike me as being a private distant cousin to graffiti.

  14. on 28 Jul 2007 at 9:34 am 14. Bill Benzon said …

    Maps, yeah. I used to draw maps of prospective model train layouts. And caves.

    I’m fascinated by the ethno-cultural geography of this area of Jersey City, and it’s very closely related to the fact that major transportation routes go through here. That, of course, is also related to the topography.

    When I walk these sites, it all seems complex and intricate. It was a revelation to see the area on Google Earth. But, that’s also misleading because it doesn’t give you a clear idea of how HAVE to or CAN walk it. The richness and complexity comes to something of a climax around and about 3Tops. I could convey some of this by walking the territory with a video camera. But that has its limitation. You wouldn’t want to look an unedited footage of such a walk, as much of it would be boring. But as soon as you start editing the (proper) sense of time and space collapses.

    One thing I like to do is take shots that show certain buildings in the background — there’s a large red wharehouse that’s visible from many of these sites; water tanks on the tops of buildings are visible. You can even see the Empire State building in the distance from one of the sites. So that gives a global sense of location regardless of what you actually have to do on the ground.

    But when you’re down in the Erie Cut you can’t see out — just here and there you can look up and see a nearby building. And when you’re at one of the arches you can, of course, see it, and any signage on it. Otherwise, you can’t see out.

  15. on 28 Jul 2007 at 9:45 am 15. JP Stormcrow said …

    A little more on industrial/post-industrial landscapes. AKA Your neighborhood vacant lot all growed up.

    I did not appreciate the extent that exposure to these landscapes might be correlated with growing up in the Rust Belt (which seemed to start rusting about the time I was born … I think the Northeast had a longer history of industrial abandonment.), until I shared a cab with a young technical journalist from the airport to a convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. As we drove through a relatively tame factory/railroad portion of town she remarked with obvious distaste on how “industrial” it was - she was from some Sun Belt suburban community. “Gee,” I thought “Come with me to Gary, Indiana”.

    But, in fact, it exists everywhere, I just think it is more hidden in some places. My favorite tour for visitors when I lived in Houston was the oil refinery and steel area just southeast of town out to Baytown (but you could live your whole life in Houston and never see it.), and in LA I looped visitors to my Orange County home from LAX, via the coast, Palos Verdes hill, over to Wilmington and the port and Long Beach. (stopping for the Queen Mary & the Spruce Goose if we had the time.) I remember being bemused when one of the local LA weekly papers complained that a lot of To Live and Die in L.A. took place in an LA they had never seen. (Just get off I-5 along about Vernon) It made wonder if they thought it really was all movies, TV and tourists.

    Here in the Alleghenies, it amazes me how frequently even on hikes deep into the present woods, you hit the remains of an old mill, or mine or other industrial remnant. Man has indeed “worked” this land.

    Enough rants … I think I am seeing that basically:
    I ♥ Superfund sites.

  16. on 28 Jul 2007 at 10:12 am 16. Bill Benzon said …

    I grew up in Johnstown PA, steel and coal. And, of course, railroads. The area immediately to the North and East of me in Jersey City and Hoboken used to be freight yards. Most of that is gone now.

    Look at this picture:

    http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=765609982&context=set-72157594380716421&size=o

    I’m standing about 50 to 100 yards from my apartment building looking West. The Hudson River is behind me about a mile and a quarter and the Jersey Heights are in front of me. Those yellow brick buildings — a high school — are on the heights. They overlook 3Tops. The Erie Cut comes through just to the right of center.

    That red building to the right is the warehouse I mentioned. It’s now a document depository. The four train tracks through the Erie Cut used to come over the area in the foreground of the picture. The graf-covered wall to the right used to support a freight terminal. The white truck to the left has a pile-driver hitched behind. I was up there this morning taking photos and I looked at the girders that have been driven into the ground here and there. They’re marked at inch and foot intervals along one edge. I infer that they were driven to determine just where bedrock is. One of these days they’ll start constructing an apartment building on this site.

    The site is itself elevated, with retaining walls and foundation all around. Thus, you can’t see the graffiti from the street. The only people who can see it are those who live in facing apartment buildings.

  17. on 28 Jul 2007 at 11:04 am 17. JP Stormcrow said …

    I grew up in Johnstown PA

    Johnstown is quite an interesting place geographically, in fact I think it may be the most topographically segmented urban place of its size in America. Was just there at the Flood Museum last year (where we had an incredibly sharp and knowledgeable docent, and let me just say: All hail to the volunteer docents of America! They are individual beacons of light against the coming dark.), it is not town you just happen to “pass through”.

    I was reading up on the Buffalo Commons the other day, the proposal to basically ramp back all human activities in vast portions of the western Great Plains - make it in to the Mother of ALL Vacant Lots.) and came across mention of Camilo José Vergara and his proposal that 12 crumbling square blocks of downtown Detroit be preserved as a monument to the high period of early modern American capitalism.

    We could transform the nearly 100 troubled buildings into a grand national historic park of play and wonder, an urban Monument Valley…. Midwestern prairie would be allowed to invade from the north. Trees, vines, and wildflowers would grow on roofs and out of windows; goats and wild animals—squirrels, possum, bats, owls, ravens, snakes and insects—would live in the empty behemoths, adding their calls, hoots and screeches to the smell of rotten leaves and animal droppings

    Current residents or those still trying to make a go under the old economic paradigm of these “spent” places, be they Detroit or western North Dakota, are of course quite outraged by such proposals, but

    As the New York Times noted, in practice Vergara’s Motor City Acropolis already exists, though neither the city government nor tourists have yet discovered it. Vergara argues, ‘People need to say, “Damn it, this used to be a symbol of failure, but damn it, this is now something sublime.

    Reminds me somewhat of my proposal for Antioch College that I mentioned here earlier this summer.

  18. on 28 Jul 2007 at 6:35 pm 18. Bill Benzon said …

    Johnstown’s Flood Museum is in a building that used to be the public library — funded, of course, by Andrew Carnegie, whose buddy Frick was one of those owning property near the North Fork dam that broke and flooded the city in 89. Haven’t been back for more than a day or two at a time since I graduated from college. The town, obviously, has changed a lot. Much more action in the suburbs up in the surrouding plateau — shopping malls, office parts, etc. None of that was there when I was a kid.

    I lived in Richland Township, roughly east of the downtown. It was a suburban area bordering on rural. There was a wheatfield and farmhouse in one direction, forests in another.

  19. on 29 Jul 2007 at 7:40 am 19. JP Stormcrow said …

    Thinking about this it did occur to me that given the current depopulation trend in many areas and the general disregard of environmental issues back in the day, Russia is undoubtedly “blessed” with many, many post-industrial landscapes that go way part anything in the States to the horribly mutilated, “just don’t go there” places. I guess Chernobyl would be the extreme example.

    Along those lines. Canadian documentary filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes, reviewed by Dennis Hartley at Hullabaloo last night looks to be an interesting watch. It explores China’s industrial landscape.

    As captured by Burtynsky’s camera, strip-mined vistas recall the stark desolation of NASA photos sent from the Martian surface; mountains of “e-waste” dumped in a vast Chinese landfill take on a kind of almost gothic, cyber-punk dreamscape. The photographs begin to play like a scroll through Google Earth images as reinterpreted by Jackson Pollock or M.C. Escher.

    I know I have taken this a bit far from the wilds of North Jersey - but I do find some of the most intriguing art to be that which tackles man’s changing relation to the environment and world head-on, but without preachiness. Examples that I like include Koyaanisqatsi and some of Laurie Anderson’s work such as Big Science and many of her installations. (My not very funny running joke back in the day was that the Atlanta airport was actually one big Laurie Anderson installation. That was back when tram cars that spoke to you were a novelty. And I’d love to be able to get in a see Pittsburgh’s old air terminal again - basically it was only semi-functional and a pain in the butt when in use, but it is a classic example of late ’40s - early ’50s commercial architecture.)

  20. on 01 Aug 2007 at 9:35 am 20. The Constructivist said …

    For more on some of these images, check out The Collected Adventures of Sparkychan and Gojochan (Thus Far).

  21. on 01 Aug 2007 at 4:19 pm 21. JP Stormcrow said …

    Was amused that in Chris Clarke’s description of a nice trip he took to Seattle with a train trip back to the Bay Area, he included the following:

    Reflected that regardless of the town, each one, like most other such in the US, chooses to display its butt crack to the railroad.

    One man’s butt crack is another man’s photo op.

  22. on 01 Aug 2007 at 6:24 pm 22. Bill Benzon said …

    Yah know, it took 800,000 pounds of high explosive to blast the Erie Cut out of the Jersey Palisades. That’s one hell of a butt crack.

  23. on 01 Aug 2007 at 9:31 pm 23. JP Stormcrow said …

    And speaking of journeys, a Spyder almost sighting by a commenter (#4) at Creek Running North.

    Also, I believe intrepid CRN commenter Spyder was in attendance at the faerie fest deep in the woods of NW Oregon in which I also became entangled over the weekend, although I’m sorry to say I missed the playshop for which he was impaneled.

  24. on 02 Aug 2007 at 8:49 am 24. Kiera PSI said …

    Reflected that regardless of the town, each one, like most other such in the US, chooses to display its butt crack to the railroad.

    Considering how many sets of tracks run through my part of the central valley…the entire REGION must be a butt crack. Why am I not surprised?