… Where girls are so pretty,
I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone!
So goes a famous old Irish song, done here on You Tube by The Dubliners.
I thought of this song when I read yesterday that the spread of Zebra Mussels across Lake Minnetonka appears to be steady and unstoppable. Infestation is probably inevitable, though there have been efforts to slow the advance of this invasive species by encouraging boat owners to drain, clean and dry their boats before moving from affected waters to clean ones.
Ah, well.
At least when Minnetonka’s docks and shores are completely encrusted with sharp shells, we can sing to our new overlords about their relentless advance.
I love to go boating,
A-drifting and floating,
On summertime days in the suburbs out west.
The lakes get quite rowdy.
They’re frothy and crowdy.
With Zebra Striped Mussels, Alive, Alive-O!Alive, Alive-O! Alive, Alive-O!
They’ve got Zebra Striped Mussels, Alive, Alive-O!On Lake Minnetonka,
They drop so much stray junk ya
can’t even see water beneath the debris.
The piles are fantastic
They’re discarded plastic
And Zebra Striped Mussels, Alive, Alive-O!Alive, alive-O! Alive, Alive-O!
They’ve got Zebra Striped Mussels, Alive, Alive-O!So thanks to the sportsmen,
The starboard-and-portsmen,
Who go lake-to-lake with their vessels un-drained.
They’re spreading and trading,
Wholesale propagating
Those Zebra Striped Mussels, Alive, Alive-O!Alive, alive-O! Alive, Alive-O!
They’ve got Zebra Striped Mussels, Alive, Alive-O!
Do you pick up hitchhikers?
Trail Baboon 
Oh my, so early…
Spent part of my long weekend de-milfoiling (stuff gets chopped up in props and floats over to our yet non-weedy part of the lake).
As for hitchhiking, we’ve actually had three couples — German, Floridian and Quebecois — come CouchSurf (www.couchsurfing.org) since moving in early June, even before any family!
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I’ve read about couch surfing. Have you done it yourself? Interesting concept.
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thanks, Dale, for another whiplash-causing question!
so sad – that poor lake.
used to hitchhike and pick up hitchhikers, but sad to say that i don’t anymore.
although we’ve had some kitties trailing along with us since last Fall. a single, feral kitty stayed in the barn all winter and before we could get our act together to catch her for spaying, she had three kittens. we have an appt. for Northland spay/neuter next week for all four and we’re in the process of catching them right now. two kittens in the bathroom, momma on the porch. one very shy kitten to go. then i’ll try to socialize the kittens. we will try to find homes for them after they’re “fixed” and will just release momma when she is healed because she is very, very wild and a very good mouser. (the kittens are wild also, but i think can be tamed with patient sitting in there and letting them get comfortable.) in a way, they are hitchhiking (but not by their choice). it’s the goats’ milk that they lust after. twice a day i get to see them, lined up and waiting for me to dump some, fresh from the goat, into their dish.
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When my dad was a kid on the farm, all the cats would line up by him when he milked the cows, waiting for him to squirt them in the face. He always has had a soft place in his heart for cats.
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This is the kind of story that makes farming seem soft and romantic.
Then I hear BiB’s stories about milking goats at 5 a.m. in the seriously below zero temperature!
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cat-lovers, if you haven’t already, check out the bing! photo du jour.
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cute!
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Rise and Shine Baboons!
Nope. A friend and I tried hitch hiking several miles to the college-town shopping center back in the 1970’s. In the process we were scared to death, certain that the driver was driving off into the countryside with us when he entered the shopping center by a different entry than we usually took. As a result, we swore off hitch hiking ever again. And for me that included picking hikers up, too.
However, my dad told many stories of hitch hiking home (dirty laundry in tow) in the late 1940’s-early 1950’s from college. He clearly felt safe and saw each encounter as a new person to talk with.
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Good morning to all:
I haven’t participated in carrying zebra mussels around as hitchhikers and there haven’t been any CouchSurfers hitching up wirth me. I have picked people up along the road that needed a ride. I am more careful about this than I was in the past. Most of those hitchhikers look like they might not be the best people to have in the car. The last one I picked up seemed very spaced out and I waas glad when he exited the car. Years ago I picked up a guy late at night because I thought he really need a ride. He wanted me to let him camp out for the night in my back yard. I didn’t think this was a good idea. I think he wanted to be a back yard potato.
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I intended to say back yard surfer not back yard potato.
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i like potato
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Agree – “potato” is most evocative, roots and fat tubers and all.
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Okay, then I will say back yard potato. I think the guy that wanted to camp in my back yard was kind of a potato head anyway and not too much into surfing.
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I was raised to eschew hitchhikers and hitchhiking both bivalve and biped.
In high school we borrowed a summer school teacher’s 2 seater sports car to go pick up lunch (my how the world has changed). There were 3 of us in the car which precluded picking up the hitchhiker. We especially regretted passing him by because he was traveling with a large aquarium and we wanted to hear the story.
Hey booners, in honour of Molly Malone and Dale use your muscles today not your mussels!
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great opening line beth ann. and all before 7 am
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indeed
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When I was in 9th grade, my family moved across town – away from my friends and social network. Since I didn’t drive yet, the constant back-and-forth meant a lot of working out rides. One summer day, when I was in my old neighborhood, plans changed and I need to get home. For the first time ever, I tried hitchhiking. Within a couple of minutes after sticking out my thumb, a big maroon Lincoln pulled over… my dad! It was a very silent ride home.
Fast forward about a month. Almost exactly the same scenario and I thought I’d try hitchhiking one more time. Any guesses? You got it… my dad again. The odds were astronomical, but I figured that clearly the gods were trying to tell me something. I never stuck out my thumb again!
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i think your dad was ok to get a ride with. what was the problem?
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The problem was the chewing out I got from my dad the first time and then the additional chewing out/grounding that I got from my dad the second time. Of course, it was about this time that a young woman was attacked and lost both her arms after being picked up by a pyscho.
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Just imagine, VS, if life were like an Alfred Hitchcock drama. I’m assuming your father is no longer alive. So I see you going out now along some lonely road and sticking out your thumb. (Cue the creepy music!) And–can it BE?–here comes a big maroon Lincoln!
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perfect
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Great story Dale. But now I’ll have that tune stuck in my head the rest of the day! :-))
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but a good tune to be stuck with.
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In the summer of 1972 I was in a car that stopped for a hitchhiker, a handsome blonde dude named Owen. We stopped because his hitching technique involved a dance routine that was quite creative. Owen turned out to be a college kid out on the road exploring the “true” America, and he turned out to have some good drugs in his backpack. It is easy to remember Owen because that was the last time I’ve thrown up, and I blame the undercooked lake trout and not the drugs for that.
Two years ago I picked up a fellow and gave him a short ride. I don’t generally do that, but he was traveling with a set of bagpipes, and I have yet to hear of anyone being mugged by a vagrant carrying bagpipes.
Speaking of hitchhikers, the welcome mat is still out for anyone who wants to sneak in a cabin visit to my Cornucopia place before it is sold. Plane Jane from Saint Paul is coming with her husband in about a week, and I hope people are still thinking of the August 25 date we mentioned earlier.
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i have it down on my calendar with no conflicts so far.
you haven’t thrown up since 1972? wow man, you have been scoring good drugs.
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My doctor asked me the last time I threw up when I was doing a routine physical recently. He was astonished at my answer. And I eat my own cooking!
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One of my small sorrows is that I cannot go see it, but so little compared to yours for losing it.
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It is going to be hard to let that land and the cabin go. That place is a bit of heaven. But I went up alone a few weeks ago and ended up fleeing back home early because it feels so wrong to be there alone. I won’t try that again. So either I get married or I sell the place. Anyone who wants a cabin on the shores of the big lake just has to accept me as part of the bargain, and I will accept applications via e-mail.
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hitch hiking has changed from back in the good old days. it used to be that the class of people you would meet were poets and free spirits and today they are misfits. i don’t think its that i have changed that much from the days when hitchhiking was part of the deal but there may be something to that too. the last couple of hitchhikers i have picked up have been messed up and felt the world owed them a free ride and a free meal and a free place to sleep. how about if i just give you a ride for another couple of miles and wish you a happy life…i do get rides from people when i run out of gas or have a flat that requires me doing more than sitting in the car with a cell phone. when i do that with my family in the car they are amazed by the ritual of sticking your thumb out and hooking a ride with a stranger. where did that set of behaviors come from? my drivers are always nice and are appreciated but that is a different story from the traveler on the freeway ramp with the world in his backpack.. those guys have gotten scary.
zebra mussels…the whole notion of introducing stuff from other places that comes in and takes over really ticks me off. those lady bugs that they brought in to dakota to kill something but the they spread and are everywhere biting the heck out of your ankles, the beetles and bugs that are messing with the ash in minnesota and the pines in the rockies, the zebra mussels milfoil and flying carp that get introduced when the ships dump their ballast waters in the great lakes. it is like when the white man came and killed off all the native americans with disease they had no immune defense for. whoops, there goes another standard of life because some nitwit was unaware there is an option to being asleep at the switch. can’t we just fill the lake with battery acid and kill those mussels? oh wait that would cause other problems wouldn’t it.
great lyrics dale. minnetonka is sad but i feel for the nice little lakes where the intro goes unnoticed and then bammo. its too late. life in the new millenium. bammo!!!
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Ha tim – another baader meinhof moment in my life — I’m listening to Sarah Vowel’s “Wordy Shipmates” in the car this morning and she is discussing the wipeout of the New England tribes from the diseases introduced by the Europeans. (Now I know that there really isn’t anything cosmic happening and that baader meinhof is really just my brain preferring to see patterns even when there aren’t any, but it sure SEEMS like something is going on.)
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I was behind a car yesterday whose license plate was “AEIOU.” That was puzzling until I figured the driver’s last name must be “Vowel.”
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That’s not actually a Baader-Meinhof, strictly speaking. It’s a Joy Of Juxtaposition. The distinction is that a B-M is something that you had never encountered or heard of before you encounter it twice. A JOJ is a confluence of references to something that was already in your knowledge base.
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Hmmmm. I lots of both, but today’s was the JoJ type!
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Have never picked up a hitchhiker nor hitchhiked. I rarely see one any more now that I think about it.I used to live on one of the major drug-trafficking routes in America, the North Shore Drive. A few of my ex-students were killed in car accidents there in cars loaded with drugs and more were arrested. The various levels of police forces used to send warnings to those of us who lived right on Hwy 61 re various dangers. I should do a guest blog about my interactions with travelers, but none related to drug trafficking.
Dale, I used to be a devoted reader of James Thurber and had, until my recent down-size, several beat up old paperback collections of his essays. I do not think I have ever referred to them on here, but I am often reminded of them. One of my favorite of his New Yorker essays was written about the release in the late 40’s or so by some famous singer [or was it the Andrews Sisters?] of a Bowdlerized “Molly Malone” in which the ending was changed. I remember the last line: “Now they both wheel a barrow through streets wide and narrow, the man that she wed and sweet Molly Malone.”
So Thurber did a similar version of new endings for various famous tragedies. I remember one of his lines: “I am mending, Egypt, mending.”
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My husband did a fair amount of hitchhiking when he was in college in the 70’s. We don’t pick up hitchhikers, as times seemed to have changed. I hear fairly frequent stories out here of cats who hitch rides to town in farm trailers and vehicles.
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You’re putting us on! Cats don’t have thumbs.
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But her story did give us paws to consider.
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I know, it is quite a tail.
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my brother had a woman he worked with whose husband got drunk and ran his pickup into a ditch. when they went to get the truck they found a drunk in the back of the truck who must have crawled in while parked at the bar. he died and the guy who drove the car into the ditch was charged with manslaughter. i hate it when that happens
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American jurisprudence at its finest!
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Morning–
You’re all in rare form today!
I’ve never done either either.
The only story I can relate is an old family tale of my Dad trying to get the three oldest girls to school one winter morning and getting stuck in our driveway. They all walked up to the highway, flagged down a passing car and the guy volunteered to take the girls into town and school.
Road trip for me today; headed to Fairmont MN and back… I’ll be in the big red truck on I90.
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Open the windows and turn the radio WAY up!
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MPR classical, that is now, until we all lose it in south MN next month.
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We’re going to lose MPR?
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I’ll lose the MPR signal about half way.
It’s OK; I’ve got a stack of CD’s and I’ll be singing along…
Drop daughter off at summer school, get my Kwik Trip cappuccino and then I’m off.
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Krista, MPR is switching all of the news and music channels around us,such as St. Peter 90.5 and 91.5 will switch their content. If you now get 91.5 clearly now, you will still get the music after the switch in August. The music channels will now be “softer” (their term). You can read about this on MPR website, but you will have to dig.
It means my daughter will no longer get MPR classical, and she has written them telling them why she is no longer subscribing. It means I will not get it when I ride on the trail on my small radio or my MP3. So I am now dropping my subscription that I( had just renewed.
It also means as you travel around the area, you will often not get the music.
They have said in a couple of articles that they want to become known more as a news service than a music service.
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Thanks, Clyde. I guess I’d heard some rumblings but I wasn’t paying close attention because of the other, louder, rumblings going on lately. Thanks for telling me.
What the HECK is causing all this rumbling anyway? I used to live in a state that valued its natural resources, parks, transportation systems, education and quality health care. We wanted a strong and affluent middle class and now we want to protect the rich. And now even MPR is playing different tunes??? I think we’re on the dark side of the moon!
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Krista, I have no idea any more. None at all. I am so ashamed that one of my former students is a leader of the state senate. (Do you know senile and senate are derived from the same word?
I am sure that you should have no problem with classical between Waterville and the Cities or here. We travel west a lot, Sioux Falls and Brookings and will not have it much of those trips any more.
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bill kling’s moe to head up a news bureau to supply public radio with a news source similar to cnn may be the cause mpr which was so solidly behind classical music they had to oust the morning show , now wants to be known as the news people.
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I went, I got, I came home.
Detoured a bit… got off I90 to visit an implement dealership I know off in Wells, then saw Easton, Delavan and Winnebago. Down through Blue Earth for a picture of the Jolly Green Giant (family vacation history there) and over to Fairmont on the back roads.
Coming home I detoured at Grand Meadow to visit a friend.
Music was Dire Straits and Jethro Tull with the windows down some of the time and amusing myself by yelling at other drivers.
Was a nice drive.
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Nice parody, Dale. My dad hitched a lot between college (Cedar Falls, IA) and my mom’s home (Sioux City) the summer before they got married. It seems like it was just understood – that’s how you got around in that era if you were a college kid with no wheels.
I hitchhiked just once, in the Bay Area once with my roommate – can’t remember exactly where we were, someplace South like San Jose, but we managed to get back home OK. I was nervous enough, though, that I never tried it again. I now pick up only hitchers if I know them.
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Closest I’ve come is way back when I was young and (slightly) more foolish and driving an old rattle-trap car that leaked oil like a sieve. I had recently driven it home to the Twin Cities from a summer of working at the Grand Marais Playhouse. I was on my way out to Shakopee for a weekend of Renaissance Festival (did I mention younger and more foolish?) and it was hot. Africa hot. This was pre-169 bypass, so I was putt-putting along 212, past Flying Cloud (traffic was not moving quickly), with the windows down and the heat blasting because the car was running hot (and I really needed more heat…it was like bikram yoga in a 1978 Honda Civic without the sun salutation). I knew the car was not healthy, but I was praying to the Automotive Gods to get me to Shakopee. The gods listened, mostly, and ushered me to the edge of Shakopee where my car threw a rod, making a big bang and lots of smoke. I got out rather quickly and then stood there staring – not sure what to do next. A nice man, about my age (and rather good looking), pulled up ahead of me on the shoulder in his Jeep. He asked the obvious, “has it done this before?”…um, no. “Do you know what it did?” Nope. Leaks oil, I’m guessing I have pushed that too far – it made a big bang noise, started to smoke, and I figured it was best to get out of it quickly unsure of what might happen next. “Good choice. Bet you threw a rod…I just go the Jeep back from getting a new engine…Jeep did the same thing as your car. It’s probably not going anywhere.” Yah. Figured that. “Where are you headed?” Renaissance Festival site. “If you don’t mind a quick stop at my apartment, you can use a phone to call a mechanic, and I’ll drop you at the site on my way down to Mankato.” Still not sure what possessed me to take a ride from a complete stranger, let alone let him take me to his house, but he seemed so Boy-Scout-like. And he did, as promised, get me out to the Festival site. My knight in shining…um…Jeep.
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Nice happy ending story, Anna.
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One of my many aid-to-travelers North Shore tales:
One wintry evening in about 1987 I was at the church on Hwy 61 south of Gooseberry, and a young couple with three small children broke down on the highway with a major problem with their car. They were from the Cities but the wife’s parents lived in far West Duluth, almost all the way to Fon Du Lac, which was their destination. So I drove them to my house where they could call her parents to tell them why they were going to get there late (at my expense, of course). Then I drove them to West Duluth. The whole drive the couple lectured me on how Lutherans were going to hell. One of their many reasons is that we were not a loving/giving people. They did not offer, nor would I have accepted gas money.
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Good story, Anna. I can think of several different endings for it, though, some awful and some wonderful!
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He told me his first name, but not his last – so even if this would have happened during the Facebook era, I would not have had a way to track him back down. For weeks I intended to find my way back to where he lived (it was relatively easy to find) and drop off some brownies – but didn’t manage it. Alas. He was quite a dear…
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And the “alas” is for . . .?
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Alas for the lack of a proper “thank you”…and alas for the missed opportunity to get to know a nice guy better.
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Based on the information you’ve shared, your “knight” was surely gay.
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Whaaat, Steve? How on earth did you arrive at that?
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It is poifectly obvious. Here this guy has a young, attractive and apparently naive young woman in his apartment. We can assume Anna was dressed for the weather, which is to say she probably wore the minimum required for decency. We even know that Anna was strongly attracted to this white knight, and guys are quick to pick up such messages. But the guy never put a paw on her. What conclusions do you draw from all of that?
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He had a girlfriend….(hence the trip to Mankato). It was more years ago than I care to admit, but I do not remember having my gay-dar pinged at all – and it was pretty sensitive back in the day (remember, I was working at the Renaissance Festival).
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A person I know recently referred to someone as being “50/50”. I had to laugh out loud; never heard that reference before…
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bi or ac/dc are my references
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OT after reading yesterdays:
Hooby absolutely has to go into GOAT when I get a round tuit.
I now have two songs in my head, Molly Malone AND THe Kindergarten Wall…
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Love the music beat, VS.
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My grandpa gave me a round tuit when I was a kid. It was just a small wooden disk with the words, A ROUND TUIT on it. He said he wouldn’t take any more excuses… I wish I’d kept it.
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I had A Round Tuit, too. Wish I had mine as well.
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I had one too, It didn’t work, so I threw it out.
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I used to hitchhike from Northfield to Faribault and back when I was at St.O. Everybody I rode with was nice. I remember one slightly disapproving fatherly type who asked me if my parents knew what I was doing. I don’t remember ever picking anybody up.
The zebra mussels will be difficult to control. All it takes is one larval stage mussel and a lake is infested. These are impossible to see and could be anywhere on a boat, trailer, jet ski, innertube, air mattress, beach toy, water shoes, bathing suits, anything that has been in infested water. It’s really important to thoroughly clean everything that has been in a lake before taking it to any other body of water. We are all to blame for the problem of invasive species and some of it occurs naturally. I’d give you the link to some info on the DNR website, but ALAS! it isn’t available due to the government shutdown!
I attended the rally at the Capitol yesterday. There were a few hundred people there – mostly union types. It was good to go; I wish there had been thousands instead of hundreds. One chant was “TAX THE RICH! TAX THE RICH!” I’m a country girl and being in the big city makes me slightly nervous but I found a place to park a few blocks north of the Capitol and walked.
Have a fun day, Baboons!
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I did a fair amount of hitchhiking in my youth, and I still pick up the occasional hitchhiker(s). Only once did I have a problem. It was a beastly hot Sunday afternoon in downtown St. Paul more than 30 years ago. With the temperature hovering near 100º F, the streets were deserted, except for two teen-aged black girls waiting at a bus stop. Because it was so hot and buses are few and far between on Sundays, I stopped and asked them where they were going. They told me the Midway area, and as it wasn’t that far out of my way, I offered them a ride. They got in the back seat and we carried on a pleasant conversation until I dropped them off at their destination. I continued on my way to Minnetonka to visit a blind friend for whom I was going to cook supper. It wasn’t until I stopped at his little local grocery store to pick up a few items that I realized that those two girls had stollen my wallet from my purse which I had foolishly left in the back seat. Naturally I was angry, but I was really more disappointed that two people who I had tried to help would do such a thing.
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Does anybody remember the best hitchhiking scene in film? It is when Claudette Colbert demonstrates the art of hitching to her cocky traveling companion, Clark Gable, in “It Happened One Night.”
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Yes, good movie; wonder how many movies in imitation of that have been made, but none as good, I do not think.
She did not want to expose her knee, but objected to anybody else’s knee being cut in. So she did it.
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I am spending the day sharpening, or getting back into prime shape, half of my carving tools, 24 in all, and all our kitchen knives, 8 of them. So if anyone has a buck knife for their hitchhiking, come on over.
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We did break the no hitchhikers rule once in my parents’ car. A young man was walking home in his ice skates because someone stole his shoes at the skating rink. No ice on the Maryland roads for skating so it was a very special dispensation.
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Greetings! I never hitch-hiked, but I remember being offered rides when caught in a bad situation. In college, my roommate and I were out dancing at the Prom Ballroom in St. Paul. Somehow we missed the last bus back to Mpls. So we’re standing out on the street corner at 1:00 a.m., hoping against hope the bus might come. A nice young man offers us a ride and because of the type of vehicle we had to squeeze in front seat with him. I bravely sat next to him, figuring my size and strength would be enough to protect my petite friend if anything happened; and I figured I could grab the keys and scratch him if needed. He was perfectly nice and dropped us off at our dorm no problem.
Another time, I rode the bus out to St. Paul to purchase a futon mattress. I carried it onto the bus all the way back to the U of MN – Mpls campus. But then I had a long walk home carrying this very bulky mattress. A nice young man offered to carry it for me. Hesitantly, I accepted. He brought it all the way to my apartment building and up the 2 or 3 flights of stairs and dropped it right in my bedroom. I thanked him profusely and he left — no problems, never saw him again. The world is full of heroes, but the creeps make us all skeptical and careful.
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Isn’t it a shame how we have to distrust?
I have on a few occasions offered help to a single woman, such as the young woman who could not find her car in the airport on a very cold night, and tried to figure out how I could make it clear I was no threat.
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