Scene on the Road

Getting back to the Route 611 road trip and the Shrine of Czestochowa with more about the statues ("the Polish Pope who visited a couple of times when he was the Polish Cardinal...and an American nicknamed "Dutch."). THIS statue isn't one of those two, but part of a new outdoor Rosary Walk. There is something about open space that inspires.

Driving in, I passed multi-tiered parking lots with spaces for hundreds of cars. But on a cloudy weekday, between masses, I was able to find a spot in the front row, right under the twenty five foot high statue of Pope John Paul II, "portrayed with raised open, loving arms." There's a photo in my previous post. You can't see my car, a Honda Civic, because it's hidden by the statue's base. Like my cameras, and laptop, it's company gear. For those who've asked, I use Nikon. A D200, with fixed focal length 18mm and 180mm lenses and 28-70mm zoom. I keep a 300mm in the trunk along with a spare D100 body.

Towering another 200 feet above him is the Bell Tower and the main church. But I walked the other way, directed by the arrow for "Gift Shop." You can tell a lot about a cultural, educational, recreational -- or even spiritual -- institution by their gift shop. That's not quite a "Road Trip Rule," like "Don't eat anything that's served out a window (except ice cream)," but if it were, this one would make the cut. As far as gift shops go, it could even live up to the highway hype of a South of the Border or Wall Drug. It is one impressive gift shop.

Of course they have plenty of replicas of the "Miraculous Painting" of Our Lady of Czestochowa (story is the original was painted by St. Luke and first brought to Poland in 1382). And more Polish candy, crackers and snacks than you can find outside of Warsaw. They have shelves after shelves of Polish books and all kinds of religious articles, souvenirs, books, and Polish imports. There's even a cafeteria and Polish deli (open only on Sundays).

A priest and sales woman were speaking in Polish, then switched to accented English when a third woman joined them in a discussion about per-call-fees on the international phone cards the shop sells. "Sure, if she talks for three hours straight it's a bargain," the priest says.

Besides the thousands in the gift shop, I expect a religious shrine will have lots of religious statuary. So the secular bronze couple seated at a picnic table caught my eye.

I walked up just as Teresa Laudanski of Mercerville, NJ was greeting nearby workers in Polish. "Czesc." They're replacing the stucco on the main church with granite. She saw me climbing all over the base looking for weird angles and getting up close to photograph the bronze guy in the suit with the folk-costumed lady examining something tiny between his fingertips. She offered to take a picture for me with my camera standing next to them. After I introduced myself she said I should go find her building contractor husband Joseph, with "a big hat and beard."

So I did. He first started coming to the shrine after emigrating in 1979. He helped construct the stage when President Ronald Reagan was a guest at the annual Polish-American Festival in 1984. News reports from the time say Reagan, campaigning for his second term, drew cheers by declaring: "Thank God for Pope John Paul II," after Philadelphia's Archbishop Cardinal John Krol praised him for supporting federal aid to religious schools.

Twenty years later, Laudanski wanted to commemorate the historic visit. But he didn't want it to look like all the other hero statues "standing" in town squares. When he saw an old news photo of the president, sitting at a table holding up a single placki (Polish potato pancake) with costumed festival host Jennie Gowaty -- he knew he had his statue.

Except for the pancake. In the picture, Laudanski thought, it blocked the Gipper's face. So he had the artists leave it off. But they left the fingers holding ...? It was dedicated at last year's festival.

This year the festival will be the first two weekends in September, with polkas, food, rides and games for the kids, and even 17th century costumed cavalry reenactors doing battle.

All this reminded me of my maternal grandparents, Thomas and Katherine Opatz, who were farmers in the Polish immigrant heart of Minnesota. The area inspired Garrison Keillor's fictional town of Lake Woebegon, although HIS farmers are mostly of the Norwegian bachelor variety. I have childhood memories of grandma in her kitchen saying the rosary in Polish along with a priest on the AM radio every evening. If you go to the Lake Woebegon link, the photo is from homecoming at the high school my cousins attended. It was shot by photographer Richard Olsenius who was one of my heroes when he worked at the Minneapolis Tribune and their excellent Sunday Picture Magazine in the 1970's.

Still from last week's inaugural road trip north on Route 611, this is what the old 60-mile Delaware Canal and towpath looks like after last summer's flooding destroyed almost everything south of Easton. This recently restored lock, a remnant of the great canal building era of the early and mid-19th century, was right along the bike and hiking trail.

I show this photo to illustrate both the antithesis of serendipity and to ask you to send me YOUR photos to share.

I stopped along the canal at the suggestion of an outdoorsy photo editor here at the Inquirer. He said it was a shame, because it was such a great trail, and promised to show me some photos he shot. He's still looking for them. So that's where you come in. If anyone has any photos of hikers or bikers on the towpath from BEFORE the flood, I'd like to see and share them here. You can't upload photos directly to blogs on philly.com, but I just got an email address just for Scene on the Road, so you can send your photos to me and I'll post them. It's Roadtrip@phillynews.com. And see the state parks website for updates on trail repairs.

Now the antithesis part. The scale of the towpath/trail's destruction really was amazing to me. Just like walking through a dense forest crowded with underbrush and stumbling upon the trunk of a giant Sequoia, it's hard to show the scale of some things in a single photograph. No matter how impressive. The tow path was like that. But it wasn't just something I stumbled into. This was starting to feel to me a lot like WORK. Like a difficult newspaper assignment, the kind you can't just blow off saying "there's no photo there, so I didn't take one," because someone - editors, reporters, readers - are counting on you to deliver. Anything BUT the serendipity of wandering on a road trip. But hard as I tried, without other people to include in the photo for scale, I couldn't see a way to make a picture that effectively communicated what I was seeing. Especially when viewed as a four inch photo on the web.

But, after hiking for twenty minutes past the "closed trail" sign to reach the washed out area, I felt compelled to take a photo. That's 611 at left, the Delaware at right, and the washed out canal and towpath/trail in the middle.

If I were an artist, I could just call it expressing myself and not worry so much about whether or not anybody else understood. Whenever anyone every asks, I tell them that's one of the biggest differences between art and what we do as photojournalists.

Nobody asked me that last night when I spoke at the Churchville Photography Club in Bucks county, but I did get many other -- much smarter -- questions. They're taking the summer off (from meetings, NOT from taking pictures) but if you live in Bucks County, check out their website, and plan to attend the next meeting in the fall. It's an excellent club, with active and involved photographers.

I'm off now on my second road trip, this one on Route 206 in New Jersey, from Hammonton to Trenton and Princeton north to the NY border.