Tuesday on the river

In case you missed it, here's how we started our vacation, on Monday in the mountains.

On Tuesday Dear Husband slept in while My Awesome Parents (MAP) and I visited the goats, the Stoddartsville Cemetery, and the picnic area an easy 15-minute walk through the woods to the river. Stoddartsville is a cluster of eight homes in the middle of nowhere in the Pocono Mountains. John Stoddart founded a lumber and a grist mill by the Lehigh River in order to attract the business of a canal that was being built--alas, they stopped digging six miles away, so he went bankrupt a few years later.

Father Billy Goat was very protective of his family. Here he is watching us continue down the road toward the cemetery and historical center.

The cemetery is a mixture of new and old graves. The old ones have names like Elizabeth, Margaret, John, Egbert, Eleazer, Gomer, and Harmon; the family who gave their name to the nearby town of Blakeslee is also buried there. The picnic area was 15 minutes from our cabin in the other direction and would have been a nice place to eat, except it was either too hot or too wet while we were there.

When we got back, we had to divest ourselves of the ticks that had attached themselves to our clothing. Then it was time to pack lunches and gear so we wouldn’t be late for our river rafting adventure. As it turns out, we needn’t have rushed, as we were good and early for the orientation that didn’t start until after (almost) everyone else had arrived 30 minutes after that. I don't have photos, because we all left our phones in the car. 

We rafted a ~3-mile stretch of the Lehigh River that ran through Jim Thorpe, PA. You might have heard of Thorpe (Wa-Tho-Huk or “Bright Path," 1887-1953), a member of the Sauk and Fox tribes who was the first Native American to win (gold) medals at the Olympics—for pentathlon and decathlon in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1912. He was "discovered" at the infamous Pennsylvania Carlisle Industrial Indian School, which has been in the news for finally returning the bodies of some of its students. He excelled in multiple sports in school, as well as professional baseball and football after Stockholm, going on to co-found the NFL. Burt Lancaster even starred in a movie about him in 1951: Jim Thorpe: All American. Did you also know that he was belatedly stripped of his medals in 1913 because he had played semi-pro baseball a couple years before the Olympics? The medals were posthumously returned to his family in 1982, but the IOC has never corrected its statistical records to acknowledge his dominance. 

Do you know why there’s a town named after Jim Thorpe in northeastern Pennsylvania? After Thorpe died of heart failure in 1953, his gold-digging third wife, tired of waiting for $100,000 to be raised for a big burial and monument in Oklahoma, tried to get him buried in Tulsa. Then she heard that Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk, PA, were looking to drum up business, so she made a deal to have him memorialized there. The two towns merged and changed their name to Jim Thorpe in 1954. His mausoleum stands on dirt from Oklahoma and from Stockholm. His son, Jim Thorpe, Jr., tried to sue the town to return his father’s remains to the tribe in Oklahoma but died before he could find other plaintiffs to join his petition. The case was eventually heard, ruled in the city’s favor “as a museum,” and upheld on appeal; the Supreme Court declined to hear it, so his body remains in a city named for him that he never visited. (As a small consolation, at least it was the name of a Native American man that replaced the previous name(s) from a Delaware language.) There's another biographical movie in the making called Bright Path.

Meanwhile, out on the river, the four of us enjoyed a 3-hour tour with only a little bickering about steering. We had enough collected experience to navigate the class-1 rapids, and no one got wet who didn’t want to. Lunch was eaten sitting on shady grass, but then I made a fateful mistake: I re-applied sunscreen after lunch and immediately before swimming rather than before eating to let it set. It washed right off, and by the time we were changed and heading into Weissport to treat ourselves to ice cream for having been so patient with all the delays for latecomers, poor paddlers, and other rafting companies’ flotillas clogging up the river, my thighs and DH’s arms were turning red. (I had also managed to give myself a bruising rope burn on one lower leg while climbing back into the raft.) We had stupidly left our baseball caps at the cabin, since the expedition’s participant instructions made it sound like tipping out of the raft was a distinct possibility. We should not have been so naïve—or spent so much money on croakies to hold our glasses. To make matters worse, it took three tries to find a store carrying aloe vera. Thankfully we spent most of the next day inside and out of the hot sun. 

We loaded up on groceries on our way back to the cabin, recuperated, and tried to grill steaks—when the skies opened up. The rain that had been forecast suddenly all came down in about 10 minutes. The steaks were finished on the stovetop, and we ate cherries and cookies while playing Tenzi and Rumy before bed. We spent Wednesday on and off the rails.