Scene on the Road

On Route 206, near Shamong in Burlington County, I pass a bunch of gas stations, each with signs declaring themselves "American Owned," punctuated with rows of American flags. Up the road, just past the Red Lion Circle, it's another row of flags, this one set back behind a big grassy lawn on tall poles. I wonder, is this the Pine Barrens headquarters of some movement? Or an early Fourth of July?

Neither, I find out as I pull into Acme/Lingo Flagpoles. Jeff Lingo is a fifth generation flag pole maker. John C. Lingo, his great, great grandfather, a tugboat captain on the Delaware River, started making wooden spars in 1897.

At the time, he was one of twenty-seven spar yards on the Camden Waterfront using trees to repair masts, booms and gaffs on sailing ships. John C. Lingo AND SONS, was soon making flag poles as well, eventually making the switch to steel. They have flagpoles all over the country, including the White House. Still a family business, and still in Camden, they're now Lingo Inc., a manufacturer & designer of "tubular metal pole products." Son Jeff spun off the flagpole business to the Pine Barrens.

He tells me his own tale of photo serendipity. A few years ago he was on his boat on the Delaware River on a Sunday afternoon when he passed the Camden Aquarium. The flagpoles he'd made for the building looked great against the puffy cloud-filled blue sky, so he took a picture with his point and shoot digital camera and posted it on his website that night. The next day, he gets a phone call from the prototype architect for the Home Depot chain. After 9-11, the chain wanted to put an American flag on their sites and they were looking for a supplier.

They open some 200 new stores every year, and now every one has a 28 foot Acme/Lingo flagpole, right in the middle of the Home Depot sign on the roof.

Heading north on Route 206 from Hammonton, in the Wharton Forest, a huge turtle on a stick just a few feet from the road catches my eye, where the Mullica River flows into Atsion Lake. Pulling over for some wildlife photography, I see Bill Schmidt in a kayak collecting a stick of his own from the shoreline of what nearly everyone describes as the "root-beer-colored" water of the cedar lake. His wife Marylee paddled up, also in a kayak. From Buena, he, a glassblower, and she, a retail manager, were in middle of their two week vacation staying in one of the cabins at the state park, and had the lake all to themselves (the turtle dipped under the water when I stepped too close). "It's what, twenty minutes from where you live," friends laugh, he says, when he tells them where he's going. Marylee adds that it's a great place to go, "especially before the crowds come after the Fourth of July." Bill also carves wooden birds, that he mounts on the driftwood sticks he collects.

Swimming is only allowed on weekends through June at the park, and after that, every day as long as there are lifeguards on duty. Bill and Marylee will be back, for a second vacation, when it's quiet again, in the fall.









Summer swimming isn't only a saltwater shore thing. If you have photos from Atison Lake's freshwater beach, send them to me as an email attachment at Roadtrip@phillynews.com. I'll post some on the blog.

This week I am on Route 206 in central New Jersey, driving north from Hammonton toward Trenton and beyond (passing through Columbus and an off-day at their weekend Farmers Market).

At least that was the idea. This is my second week of road trip blogging, and just like last week's journey up Route 611 in Pennsylvania, I am again living up to my premise that the journey is more important than the destination. Between talking with people I meet, and spending lots of time trying to get the photos just right, I am averaging somewhere around 7.5 miles per hour. So this week, my "Trenton and beyond," ended up being about as far as Lawrenceville.

This was also the same week the blog engaged in what's called “reverse publication,” with Scene on the Road web content spinning off into a column in the newspaper. So I able to make a mistake in two places instead of just one. I misquoted Teresa Laudanski in my June 16 post. I included the Russian word for "hi there," instead of the Polish one. I corrected it on the blog, and the Inquirer ran a "clearing the record" about the error in Saturday's paper. I apologize to speakers of both Russian and Polish.

The newspaper experience also presented an opportunity for editors at the Inquirer to weigh in, and most of their excellent ideas and suggestions will be implemented in the newspaper next week, and some of the online improvements have already occurred (see the more informative heading above).

That brings me to my greatest hoped-for improvement: getting photographs from you that I can post and share with everyone.

Flag Day just passed, and the Fourth of July is just around the corner, so in the spirit of Acme/Lingo Flagpoles (see the post for June 21) I am inviting you to send me your favorite American flag photos. Email photos as jpeg attachments to Roadtrip@phillynews.com.

I will post some for the Independence Day holiday, as I continue with my travels up Route 206, where I stopped in at the 1893 Battle of Trenton Monument (above). More to come. Cheers, TomG

This week I'm on Route 206 in central New Jersey, driving north from Hammonton toward Trenton in Burlington County. If you listen to traffic reports on KYW radio, you know the weekend boiler plate announcements: "Westbound Schuylkill backed up due to zoo volume...Kelly Drive closed for a regatta...the Martin Luther King Drive closed for recreation and in NJ...both north and southbound 206 is slow, with folks headed to a flea market in Columbus...."

So as I approach the several acre Columbus Farmers Market on a bright sunny morning, it is with anticipation of seeing hundreds of bargain hunters at the outdoor flea market. Well, the outdoor market is open Thursday, Saturday and Sunday year round. I'm here on a Friday. So what I see are rows and rows of empty 12 foot wide spaces with empty wood tables, and in the middle of it all -- two trucks. Beside one, Art Weyman is tossing boxes into the back of a stake bed truck. Behind the other, a garbage truck, is George Faber. They and their crews are out early cleaning up the grounds after a busy Thursday, getting it ready for the weekend.

Weyman is normally the one who opens the flea market gate at 5 am -- most of the vendors have been waiting since 3 am. "I'll line them up like horseshoes, like a big S," he explains later during his breakfast break. On this day though, "three guys called out," so he's picking up cardboard for recycling with seventeen year-old Don Cummings (in passenger seat, at right), in his third year as summer help. It doesn't take long to fill up the bed, even with mother nature occasionally undoing their work: "seems like everything we start card-boarding, it gets windy."

Angel Lova with vendor left-overs.

Working with twenty year-old Angel Lova picking up yesterday's one-of-a-kind antiques and collectibles -- today's trash -- Faber asks me if I want the discarded copy of On Photography by Susan Sontag I've spotted. Her classic 1977 collection of essays included a line about photographers just like me-- and you? -- taking pictures, on road trips and elsewhere : "Essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality."

I let him toss the book into his bin along with old clothes, a pillow, a chair, a broken lamp and a framed still life.

Here's a thought for the day.

Sontag described photographing people as "something predatory." Comment below on how you feel about her view that "..to photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time."

So, what do YOU think? Does photography steal your soul?


Let me know. And don't forget to send in your favorite American flag photos for posting here during the week of Fourth of July. Email jpegs as attachments to Roadtrip@phillynews.com.

Plastic shopping bags were banned in South Africa in 2003, where some called them the country's "National Flower."

These bags are on the INSIDE of the Columbus Farmers Market. The high fence keeps them from blowing out onto Route 206 (rear) where I first saw them (not as dramatically back lit) during my drive north from Hammonton to Trenton and beyond. Even as I am taking this picture, the market's cleanup crew is along the fence picking up.

In March, San Francisco became the first big American city to ban the use of plastic bags -- unless they're biodegradable. Around here, Ikea has started charging 5 cents to customers who want plastic shopping bags.

Driving north on New Jersey's US 206, the Pine Barren and rural scene turns urban as the highway nears Trenton. Passing a few blocks from the NJ State House I head up the hill toward the neighborhood known as "Five Points." There a towering Doric column of granite (twice as high as the 75 foot tall obelisk I saw in downtown Easton on last on last week's road trip) rises over a small traffic-circle looking park. Since I'm still soliciting YOUR flag photos, it's the American flag I notice first in front of the Trenton Battle Monument. Atop the memorial, George Washington is pointing toward the site of his victory at the Christmas 1776 Battle of Trenton. But I'm still focused on photographing the flag, and just as I park, a huge dark cloud moves across the bright blue sky.

Waiting for the sun to return, I walk over to the bench where Carl Bailey, a US Postal Service letter carrier from Williamstown is taking a break on his route. He takes the NJ Transit bus into Camden, then the River LINE light rail to Trenton every morning, so we end up talking about public transit, when Henry Williams approaches. He is is 75 and works as the guide/ elevator operator at the site. He is there every Thursday through Sunday. "It's my place," he tells me. " I'm here, it's open. I'm not here, it's closed."

Williams has just received a cell phone from the city, and walked over to ask Bailey's help to make a call. After introductions, I'm intrigued by the elevator. The column is tall, but not very wide. I noticed the railing at the base of George's feet, but it never occurred to me I could go to the top. "It's a small elevator, probably the oldest in the state," he says of my pleasant surprise.

Inside the four-passenger elevator, Williams promises we won't get stuck. But if we did, he reassures me, it wouldn't be for long. "You can go underneath and crank the cables by hand." That's why he got the phone, he says. "I just call, and the police, fire department and everyone will be here in minutes." The monument, dedicated in 1893 originally had steps. They installed the elevator in 1920.

Just as we come down, Paul Gianakon from Hockessin, Delaware and his eighteen year-old daughter walk up. Majoring in history and the classics, Julie Gianakon is starting at Princeton University in the fall and had to drop off some paperwork. They visited the battle site in Princeton, and plan to see Washington's Crossing on the way home. At the top, dad asks Williams if you can see where Washington crossed the Delawarem and about the house where Col. Johann Rall, the commander of the Hessians, was taken after he was mortally wounded (during the battle, 22 of Rall's men died, 92 were wounded, and 948 were captured. Only four of Washington's men were wounded in this first American victory of the war). The humidity is low and the sky is clear. We can see for miles, but none of us knows where the house was.

As we all leave, I ask Gianakon's recommendation for a Delaware road trip. I know US 13 is the longest signed highway in the state, but that, he says is all four lane all the way. So he suggests Delaware State Route 9, not as long, but mostly all two lanes. So that's where I'll be for Week 3.