Scenics Archives

December 10, 2013

Marble Hill Artesian Well

A trip to or from Cape Lewallen wouldn’t have been complete without a stop outside Marble Hill to fill up canteens and water jugs from an artesian well on the south side of Missouri Hwy 34. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)

Been on my bucket list

Getting down to see if the spring was still flowing has been on my bucket (bad pun) list for a couple of years, so Mother and I took off to Bollinger County to see if we could find it. We headed west on Missouri Hwy 34 and thought it was near Woodland School, but we couldn’t spot it. There was a lot of road work going on, so we were afraid they might have “improved” it like, I think, Cape County is going to do to the spring off Bloomfield Road.

After driving four or five miles, we headed back toward town. There, just before the school, just like we remembered from the old days, was a nice paved parking spot right at the artesian well.

Listen to the sound of the water

I produced a short video showing where the spring is located and what it’s like. To be honest, I think the audio of the rushing water is better than the pictures. It’s worth 1:07 of your life.

Road to be dedicated December 17

The pull-off gives you plenty of room to get off the road and would easily hold half a dozen cars parked side-by-side

The Missourian had a story that there will be a ribbon cutting December 17, 2013, to mark the completion of a project to add shoulders and curve corrections along that stretch of road.

What’s the history of the spring?

I didn’t think it would be hard to find out when the well was drilled, how deep it is, how long it’s been flowing, etc., but I struck out. I figured if anybody would know, it would be Missourian blogger James Baughn who wrote about it in 2008. James is a pretty thorough guy, so surely it’ll be in his story.

He must have run into the same problem: about the only fact he had other than a Wikipedia definition of an artesian aquifer was that it was a test drill for oil and mineral exploration.

Cold and sweet

When I went back down to Marble Hill to shoot the flags for Veterans Day, I made sure to bring along half a dozen gallon jugs to fill with the pure spring water for Mother to use in her coffee maker.

While researching this, I ran across a 1907 United States Geological publication called Underground Waters of Missouri – Their Geology and Utilization. It listed just about every source of water in Missouri and some of the surrounding states. This well, unfortunately, wasn’t one of them.

The section dealing with mineral waters, including Excelsior Springs, was particularly interesting. “When the the intelligent practitioner reads that a certain water is positively curative in an imposing list of diseases set forth in divers pages of testimonials from renovated statesmen, restored clergymen, and rejuvenated old ladies, and then learns from the analysis that it contains 2 or 3 grains of lime salts to the gallon, with the remaining ingredients required perhaps a third or fourth decimal point to express, he can hardly be blamed for tossing the circular into his wastebasket, with an objurgation upon quacks generally, and mineral springs quacks in particular,” Dr. Cook wrote.

OK, maybe mineral waters DO help

Then, he conceded there COULD be some benefits: “There is no doubt that much benefit is derived from most of the health resorts connected with mineral springs or wells; and while a great deal of it is undoubtedly psychic, some is unquestionable due to the use of the waters. People who are broken down from overwork or who are troubled with many incipient diseases find at these resorts rest, which they perhaps can not get elsewhere; a change of air; a new environment; distractions from trouble; and they use, both internally and externally, perhaps a much larger amount of water than has been their custom at home; these, together with faith in the curative qualities in the water (since every wise physician recognizes faith as a helpful element in cure), form a stimulus to nature in the restoration of normal action to the functions of the body.”

Just for the record, the spring waters not captured in canteens and gallon jugs, run into Crooked Creek.

November 30, 2013November 22, 2020

Deep in Missouri’s Dixie

The fields in parts of Missouri’s Bootheel look like they are decorated for the holidays. (Click on the images to make them larger.)

Strange looking hay bales

On our way down to Hayti to meet with Bishop Benjamin Armour to talk about the New Madrid baptism project, we saw round bales in the fields. Mother thought it was odd that hay bales would have different colors down there.

When we got closer, we could see the bales were cotton, not hay.

“Loaves” of cotton

Other fields contained what hooked like “loaves” of cotton.

I read recently that cotton farming became big in the Bootheel because boll weevils ruined the crops in Alabama and Mississippi in the 1920s. It gets cold enough in Southeast Missouri to kill them off in the wintertime.

Travel update

Pulled into the driveway Saturday night after 6,393.8 miles on the road through Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and several side trips through the State of Confusion.

Please keep that DONATE button at the top right of the page in mind. The gas bills will be coming in for a long time.

November 28, 2013November 29, 2013

Through the Mountains

I hated not being home for Thanksgiving, but I liked the empty roads the holiday presented me. I had a pleasant day’s drive through the mountains in West Virginia and Virginia.

Jan was driving last time

I pretty much missed seeing the mountains the last trip through there with Friend Jan.

A. It was at night.
B. I was asleep because I found the best way to be a passenger when Jan is driving is to have your eyes closed.

I wish I had done a better job with these. It’s hard balancing the camera on the steering wheel while you’re rocketing downhill on a twisty road. If I had been able to adjust the polarizing filter and diddle with the zoom and exposures, these would have been more interesting. As it was, I just pointed and pushed the button.

Photo Gallery

Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the sides to move through the gallery.

November 24, 2013

Pine Cone Magic

It’s been a warm October and November, but we’ve had about a dozen days so far that called for a fire in the fireplace. Tonight, possibly the last night I’ll be in Cape until the spring, is one of those nights. Weatherbug reports it is 25, headed to an overnight low of 18. I didn’t bother to look at the windchill numbers. When your nose hairs freeze, windchill is a non-factor.

I noticed that Brother Mark had a box of pine cones dipped in wax in a box near the fireplace, so I tried one of them as a fire starter. It burned like a champ. (Click on the photos to make them larger. They might make you feel warmer if you live up north. Plus, they’re kinda pretty.)

I’m cheap and lazy

I knew the wax would enhance the burn quality of the cones, but I didn’t want to go to the trouble and expense of buying, melting and spilling the wax, so I thought I’d see how well plain ones would work.

Mother and I cruised around until we saw some pine cones sitting on the ground under a tree in a park in Jackson.

They followed us home.

It was amazing at how easily they caught fire. (Something that you might want to think about if you have pine trees that have dropped a bunch of cones around your house.)

Just the touch of a match

All it took was the touch of a match to get the cones to burst into flame.

A thing of beauty

I was watching one just as the flames were dying down and the cone was a mass of glowing red. I dashed across the room for my camera, but it was one of those things that was perfect just for an instant.

That’s when I threw some of these cones into the fireplace trying to duplicate what I had seen seconds before. Didn’t work: the magic had all leaked out. Some of these are nice, but not close to what that first one looked like.

How to start a fire

I found the fastest way to start a fire with these was to wrap half a dozen in a couple of sheets of loosely twisted newspaper. (See, newspapers ARE still good for something.)
Put a few sticks or other light kindling on top of the newspaper.
Light and run away (That last part is for fireworks; you don’t have to run away.)
If you feel lucky, you could go ahead an put a log on top of the kindling when you light it, but I usually like to see that it’s going to take off first.

Oh, my aching back

I got smart before we went on our next pine cone mission: I stopped at a local hardware store and picked up something similar to this aluminum reacher and grabber gizmo. (Buy it from this link and I’ll make a couple of pennies. Or, go to just about any hardware store and get it for about the same price.) It’s not a high precision piece of equipment and it’s not going to last forever if you pick up heavy stuff (or give it to your grandkid to play with), but Wife Lila and Mother have found it useful.

It does an excellent job of snagging pine cones.

Photo geekery

I was going to give you all kinds of information about exposures, but they were all over the place. The only constant was that I underexposed them by two stops from what the camera said was normal.

The camera looked at all the dark areas in the photo (most of which I cropped out) and said, “I want to make those areas lighter.”

I wanted the shadows to go dark, which also brought out the rich colors in the flames, so I told the camera to give it much less light than it thought it should in the theoretical world. Is there a scientific way to calculate the right exposure for something like this? Probably, but I just guessed, looked at the image, liked it, and kept shooting.

It’s a shame about the magic leaking out, though. You’ll just have to trust me when I say that first cone was the prettiest.