Home Is Where the Fright Is

What Happens When I Spend Too Many Nights Alone 

January 30, 2013 — I’m writing this post in frozen terror. Or at least to stave it off. A few days ago, my wife and kid took off for the Mid-Atlantic to visit family. My work schedule is less flexible, so I stayed back. That puts me by myself for two weeks.

Don’t worry, I know where Taco Bell is and I have enough clean towels for a beach party, so I’ll be fine.

But I know it’s coming. Any night now I’m going to freak myself out.

Now, I’ve done a lot of spooky stuff in my life: midnights in asylum cemeteries, overnights at murder scenes and abandoned prisons, the house of Beatrix Potter. I had a blast every time and love to do that kind of stuff. The thing is, my irrational fright instinct doesn’t kick in when I have at least one other person with me or if I’m on site at a place that I plan on writing about. In those cases, I’m Captain Courageous. At home alone with just my brain eating itself for consecutive nights, my liver sprouts lilies.

So at the risk of naming the devil and getting his attention, here are the parts of my 120-year-old home that panic me:

My Basement
You guys have met this place twice before. Once, when I set up an impromptu theater down there for a horror movie night and again when we played with a Ouija board for the first time. Its walls are massive rough-hewn blocks of granite, and its floor is packed dirt. So spooky intrinsically.

Oh, and the entrance to it is a dark, ominous hole in my kitchen floor.

Worse, the basement is always below me (that line takes away all my confidence as a writer). Every time I creak a floorboard walking around, I imagine that I’ll get an answer from below.

And the dirt floor doesn’t help my peace of mind. If even one murder was committed in this house in the more than century of its existence, that is where the body will be.

Little known fact: Walls keep people out, roofs keep weather out, the floor keeps the dead out. So I’m basically exposed to the dead. I was an inexperienced homebuyer when we picked this place.

My Cat 
My black cat is barely a pet. She’s only active at night, so I rarely ever see her. But, man, do I hear her. She climbs walls, runs from invisible pursuers, and vocalizes a wide range of weird syllables that never even come close to a meow.

And while it’s a great relief to blame every strange nocturnal sound on the cat, truth is, in horror movies, “It was just the cat” is always the prelude statement to something worse. In demonese, I believe it’s translated, “Please come into my home and devour my soul. There’s Tabasco sauce in the refrigerator.”

My Barn 
I live in town, so I don’t deserve such a giant outbuilding. Nevertheless, I have what’s basically a two-story barn shoved onto my little plot of land. That by itself is suspicious. It must be covering up some dark secret buried there centuries ago by the town’s forefathers. Of course, other than to grab the snow shovel, I’m hardly ever out there at this time of year. But the problem is the motion-activated flood lights attached to its exterior.

They go off at all times of the night for no apparent reason.

I know, I know, it’s probably just the wind or one of the feral cats in the neighborhood. But walking by my window at night and seeing it alight just tells me, “Someone or some thing just walked across my property.”

It’s even worse when the lights refuse to shut off. Because that means whatever it is…is still there.

My Study Doorway 
The desk where I write sits in a nook under a picture window in my study, so my back faces the entire room (back faces?). I’m always afraid that I’ll look over my shoulder and catch some humanoid form walking casually but quickly across the doorway.

I’d rather it run straight at me with a bloody knife singing Volare.

Heck, the doorway is behind me right now and the small hairs on the back of my neck are pulling toward it as I write. Sucks.

My Windows 
Windows are the Jekyll and Hyde of residential construction (that line doesn’t restore my confidence as a writer). During the day, they’re awesome. At night, they’re the worst things ever invented. And mostly I’m talking about the ground level windows. The ones somebody can just walk up to and stare into my house whenever they want.

Because I live in a town, it’s never pitch black out there, so there’s always something vaguely visible in the darkness. I've done double-takes so many times because of those stupid windows. Like that old campfire tale about the person who sees a man fitting the description of an escaped serial killer staring in the window and it turns out to be the murder’s reflection…he’s already inside the house.

And, naturally, it snowed on Monday, the exact same day I learned about this. Don’t click that link if you currently have snow cover around your house.

My Bed 
My fear of this piece of furniture is probably my biggest. After all, the stuff I just listed is ignorable once I’m in my bed…I have two floors of separation between me and the basement, I can shut the cat out of the room, the floodlights on the barn aren’t visible from there, I’m nowhere near my study doorway, and my bedroom windows are all curtained and open onto a story worth of air.

But I swear to God one of these days, I’m going to lay down to find somebody already in my bed. Or worse, rolling over in the middle of the night and hitting warm body when no warm body should be there.

That said, even when my wife is home and in bed with me, I still have this fear.

Honorable Mention: My Fan 
I sleep with a desktop fan on regardless of the season because silence is suffocating. When I’m alone, my head turns the white noise into voices sometimes.

In conclusion, the next two weeks I’m going to be on social media a lot, I think. Say sunny things to me.

This guy, on the other hand,
no problems with. We watch episodes of
Sledgehammer together.

Your Corpse Will Not Be So Majestic: Boneyard Beach

January 27, 2013 — In some timeline on some more boring version of Earth, our drive from Savannah, Georgia, to our hotel in Charleston, South Carolina, was not worth remembering. Maybe we stopped for food. Maybe we almost hit an armadillo. Maybe this pair of fake pink and gray elephants was the highlight of the trek.

Fortunately, that wasn’t our timeline. Because we discovered Boneyard Beach.

We’d finished our day trip to Savannah earlier than we’d expected, and on the way home thought we might find something en route worth spending some of the waning daylight on. My wife was driving at the time, so I was on smartphone duty. I fussed with the finicky touchscreen, persevered through spotty connections at highway speeds, squinted at sites meant to be viewed on much bigger panes of glass…and came up empty-handed.

So my wife asked me to find her an avenue of live oaks so that she could take some pictures. Live oaks are those massive trees that never lose their foliage and can be found on just about any of the southern coasts of the United States. They’re big and have long, snaky, dramatic limbs that are always leaking Spanish moss. They’re pretty cool, and so far I don’t think I’ve published a single article about the Charleston area that didn’t contain a reference to them.

They often line paths and back roads with startling effect as the branches meet overhead and create an arboreal tunnel that seems like a portal to faerie lands. These kinds of avenues are plentiful in South Carolina, and it didn’t take me long to find one near us.

But it’s where that avenue led that was the surprise: Boneyard Beach. Much better than a faerie land.

The name is enough to make you want to visit, and the images online enough to make you think it a place computer-generated for wallpaper and screensavers. However, it’s actually a part of Botany Bay Plantation on Edisto Island.

Botany Bay Plantation is a 4,680-acre wildlife preserve that includes the remains of pair of 18th Century plantations, Bleak Hall and Sea Cloud. The area is used for a variety of recreational pursuits, but the centerpiece is a six-mile driving loop that takes you through excellent natural vistas and historical buildings from the plantation days.

But we were really only there for Boneyard Beach.

It didn’t cost us anything to enter, but we got there about an hour before its dusk closing time. Fortunately the Boneyard Beach access was the first stop on the loop.  We pulled into the small, dirt parking lot and set out on the half-mile walk to the beach, racing the dropping sun. 

And what a walk.

The path cut right through a vast salt marsh that extended on either side of us all the way to the horizon. Unidentifiable birds and animals rifled the tall, golden grass and strange noises erupted variously from its muddy depths. It was the kind of landscape that makes me want to run across it at full speed, even though I knew the first step would suck me down into disgusted flailing.

Eventually, the marsh terminated at a thin grove of oak and palms that a sign designated as one of the state’s 3,500 hammock islands, each of which is less than 1,000 acres. I’m not even going to pretend to understand the geography that we’d traversed since exiting the highway. All I know is that just past the grove was sand, ocean, and the bleached skeletons that give Boneyard Beach its name.

The skeletons were the remains of a veritable forest of dead trees, most of which still stuck steadfastly upright in the sand pretending to be the trees that they used to be. So ghosts as well as skeletons. Depending on the tide, some of the trees were surrounded by water turning them into giant claws reaching up from some monster ocean cave or doomed vessel far, far below the surface.

The denuded forms of these dead live oaks obviously gave an odd aspect to the beach. It certainly wasn’t a place to throw down a blanket. Not a place to show the uglier parts of your body. Not a place to blast Rob Bass.

The tree were killed where they stood by the constantly eroding environment of this unsheltered shore, the salt air blasting them, the soil impoverishing into silicate, the briny water drowning their roots.

Trees can’t run from impending doom. It’s what makes them such symbols of heroism in literature and art.

Not me on the branch...but it should have been.

And we accidentally hit the place at a great time. The sun was sinking like it was suffering the same fate as the trees. Looking in one direction, away from the sun, the sky was pink and blue, the details of the tree corpses easy to pick out. Looking toward the sun, everything was gold and black, the trees ominous silhouettes sneaking up behind us.

As a bonus, at our feet was one of the richest collections of intact seashells that I’ve ever come across, many of which still had tenants. And, naturally, you're not allowed to collect any of them under penalty of fine and ghost pirate curse.

We remained less than an hour, and during that time only ran into one or two other couples. Botany Bay Plantation has only been open to the public since 2008, so the destination is still a bit on the obscure side, I think.

Anyway, I’m not a guy to include a moral in my stories unless I need to pad out a piece. But with online photo archives, review sites, and, hell, stupid travel sites like mine, you more often than not bring to every new destination a load of preconceptions, both right and wrong. Showing up without any of those when we just narrowly missed out spending that time at a Bojangles made the experience more ours. So you’re dead in your rights to curse me if you’ve made it this far into the article.

The downside to visiting the plantation at dusk was that we didn’t have time to make the full six-mile circuit. And we couldn’t go back the next day because the area would be closed for hunting and all my hats have antlers.

But we got to see the best part.

And in some other timeline we got to see the rest. Cheers to those guys.

The Art Museum as Refrigerator: The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art

January 23, 2013 — So I was at a museum dedicated to children’s book illustrations when I heard a six-year-old boy say, “Are we done yet? Can we go?”

That’s fine. He wasn’t really the audience. I was.

The museum was the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. You might not know Carle by name, but you probably know his caterpillar. His very hungry caterpillar.

So far, Carle has written and illustrated some 70 children’s books in his career, which started after a childhood in war-time Germany and then the usual time served at New York newspapers and ad agencies.

At 38, he found his audience. And they were three years old.

For his illustrations, he paints, cuts, and fits tissue paper together into collages that form vivid, textured images that burn into your childhood retinas and stay there until adulthood. That’s why most of us can spot his art from three shelves away.

Personally, I have no real view of his work. I just know about it and dig book illustration in general, which was why I was there. This guy, on the other hand, hates it.

Anyway, Carle garnered more success for his picture books than all the winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction combined, and in 2002, he opened his own museum dedicated to the often overlooked art of the picture book.

The 40,000-square-foot museum is in Amherst, Massachusetts, right on the Hampshire College campus. Carle’s own work is used in the branding of the place, and he has a permanent exhibition there, but the museum also showcases the work of other children's illustrators. He also has a series of massive watercolors in the main hallway that depict, uh, watercolor, I guess.

Judging by the fact that I have no pictures of the various illustrations that were on display, I’m pretty sure photography wasn’t allowed in the exhibit areas. Also, this was a couple years ago, and I don’t remember who besides Carle was hanging on the walls, so I probably shouldn’t be writing about this place unless I revisit it. I’m assuming a lot of anthropomorphized animals, though.

Still, the exhibits were set up just like an art museum, with the images framed without the context of the rest of the book and then hung on blank walls for the usual cold art gallery experience. There were no jungle murals or people in Very Busy Spider costumes or “please-touch” pieces. All very serious and adult, actually.

However, there are a couple of things for kids to do who like their illustration in books and not on walls. There’s a reading library, a gift shop, and a children’s activity room, where kids can make their own illustrations, including some Carlesque collages.

Apparently they allowed photography in the bathroom.

And that’s actually where the kid I wrote about earlier wanted to go. He didn’t want to look at pictures. He wanted to make them.

And he has a point. But he’ll mature past that eventually.

Anyway, the exhibit space isn’t too big, and didn’t have a ton of art on display, but that might change this year since it’s the 10th anniversary of the place. Regardless, the museum does fulfill a relatively unique niche in a world where most of that type of artwork gets ripped in half, gnawed by dogs, and has milk and tears spilled all over it.

Whether they love or hate a book, kids are harsh critics.

Richard Pryor for Sale: The FAO Schwarz Flagship Store

January 20, 2013 — January is the saddest month to visit a toy store. Still, earlier this month I found myself in one of the more famous toy stores in the country: The FAO Schwartz flagship store.

Standing in front of the large glass-fronted building at the south end of Central Park, I couldn’t say it looked much like a toy store. No bright colors or cartoon animal mascots adorned its façade. Even the name of the store above the entryway made it seem more like a bank or investment firm. However, it did have an enthusiastic doorman dressed like a toy soldier. I assumed he was under its employ, anyway. Otherwise I take back my high-five.

But FAO Schwartz was always the upscale toy store chain, appearing in only the more posh malls that would rather go under than lease space to a KB Toys (RIP, good friend).

It does have a pretty auspicious history, though. For a toy store.

It was started in Baltimore in 1862 by a German immigrant named Frederick August Otto Schwarz. Back then it was called Toy Bazaar. The New York City location opened up eight years later, where it moved a few locations and changed names before finally settling on its current appellation and then on Fifth Avenue in 1931. It moved up the street and across 58th Street to its present site in 1986.

It wasn’t my first visit to this particular bit of Manhattan. I’d been there seven or eight years ago. It was in December, the happiest month to visit a toy store. I remembered the place being quite the spectacle.

I mean, it wasn’t anywhere close to the experience that its counterpart Toys R Us Times Square is, with its life-sized moving Jurassic Park T-Rex and indoor Ferris wheel, but still, lots of people looking at lots of cool things and wishing they could pull a reverse Big in order to enjoy them without shame.

Not so much this time. Again, January, I’m assuming. The month that’s cool for exactly one day.

Inside, the store has three levels. The basement is preschool stuff, the ground floor is the candy (FAO Schweetz) and the signature high-quality-and-priced stuffed animals that they’re known for. The top floor is the bulk of the toys. The layout hadn’t much changed since my visit. They seemed to have fewer of the high-end stuffed animals, and they’d installed a build-your-own Muppet niche.

So the top floor was where we spent most of our time, highlights of which included the Lego room, complete with large figural Lego sculptures, photo ops (for a price) with Iron Man and Spider-Man, and a whole line of Richard Pryors. No Spaceballs toys, though.

And, of course, there was the Big piano.

You knew that earlier Big reference wasn’t random.

Today, the FAO Schwarz flagship store is less famous for making the birthdays of rich kids better and more famous for being the site of the scene in the 1988 movie Big where Tom Hanks dances Heart and Soul and Chopsticks with Robert Loggia on a giant, floor-mat piano.

And it’s still there. Kind of.

But first let me interject that I think the scene was filmed in the pre-1986 FAO Schwartz location, which is now a clothing store. My conscience is clear. Let’s move on.

Anyway, a giant floor-mat piano is, in fact, on the third floor, but I’m pretty sure it’s not the original.

First, they don’t really push that it’s from the movie, not on site or on website. No plaques or signs or picture of Tom Hanks blowing silly string out his nose. Sure, they call it the Big Piano, but they seem to be using “big” in a suspiciously generic way. Also, according to this news blurb, the real floor piano from the movie was donated in 2009 to the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia by a private collector who’d picked it up after the movie debuted.

Plus, they actually sell those pianos for thousands of dollars, so a replacement would be no problem.

By the way, they do the same thing with a Zoltar fortune telling machine on the ground floor. It’s obviously a Big reference, but they don’t really come out and say that.

And what bottom-line-driven company has ever been subtle?

This’ll be one of those articles I edit without telling anyone if somebody is able to educate me on the whole matter.

Also, I’d be remiss as an analytics-driven website if I didn’t mention that is not the only Big shooting locale I’ve ever been to. The first can be found here. You'll have to scroll down a little bit.

One of the good sides to visiting in a down month is that you can get easy access to the piano without having to wait in line or sharing a chord with thirty thousand kids. Unfortunately, the lighted keys were stuck and the music seemed only sporadically triggered by stepping on the keys. The thing was definitely old and well-trodden upon and could at least have been a contemporary of the famous Big piano. Maybe this one just got passed over for stardom at the casting session because it had moral lines it wouldn’t cross.

As a result, it was basically an opportunity for kids to slide around in their socks and FAO Schwarz to sell pictures of them doing so.

So I’ve been calling the place the flagship store throughout this article, but the truth is, thanks to a series of bankruptcies earlier this century, it’s the only FAO Schwartz left on the planet. And it’s operated by Toys R Us.

So we’re getting close to living in a world without toy stores, and when that happens, every month will be the saddest.

Posts about toy stores shouldn’t end this morosely, so please scroll through the remaining pictures and then watch the video at the end before you move on to more interesting websites:

Better Than Nature: The American Museum of Natural History

January 17, 2013 — I don’t have to introduce our pics from the American Museum of Natural History, do I? It’s only one of the best and most famous museums on the entire planet that it microcosms. Heck, it’s almost better than nature and history itself.

In reading about this place, you’ll mostly encounter astounding facts about its size, that it maintains a staggering 48 exhibition halls across some 25 buildings, most of which are research and archival centers. That the collection numbers some 32 million specimens, way too many to display, and that it attracts about 5 million visits a year. And all that is extremely impressive and extremely daunting.

But beyond that, just as a public museum, what really stuck out to me about this place over, say, Chicago’s Field Museum or my beloved Smithsonian in DC (which dwarfs those above numbers), are that it features some of the best designed, most elegant displays that I’ve ever seen in a natural history museum.

The taxidermy was grouped into elaborate dioramas that seemed to glow in the dim library-like rooms like rows of portals into other worlds. These displays were always multi-creature, and often multi-species, frozen in interaction for as long as New York City avoids becoming a Snake Plissken movie. The artifacts of indigenous people were arranged majestically, exactly how I’d want a future civilization to view my own. The Hall of Ocean Life made me feel like I was at the bottom of the ocean. The dinosaur skeletons were set in clean, bright rooms, liberated and far removed from the dusty rocks that so long imprisoned them. It’s hard for me to describe. Hard for me to depict in pictures. Easy for me to make excuses for my failings.

Tuesday was my first ever visit to this 144-year-old institution, and it’s not really the type of place that you can adequately experience in the few hours that we dedicated to it. For instance, we missed out on the special exhibits (which, honestly, weren’t too compelling at the time we were there…some butterflies, some photos, some movies), the space stuff, and the rocks, which will kill me for years since I missed out on seeing the largest meteorite on display in the world (34 tons) and the famous Star of India sapphire. Who knows what else I missed.

Still, I have enough highlights to console me during the moments when I wake up sweat-drenched from those nightmares where I don’t end up seeing everything on the planet before I die. Stuff like Jivaroan shrunken heads, a mummy dinosaur, and the fantastic lighted wall of mixed specimens that was the entrance to the Hall of Ocean Life.

The museum’s located right on Central Park on the upper west side of Manhattan, which, like everything else in the borough, means that the only real downside is the cost. There’s a general admission fee, extra fees for special exhibits, parking’s expensive. Of course, the admission is technically only suggested, so I guess you could save on that.

But whatever it takes, make sure you see these giant rooms of dead and antiquated things before you eventually become one.

Actually, that’s a great idea. Wife, bury me in a natural history museum exhibit. Your choice.

A Mundurucu head, kind of like a shrunken head...
except not shrunken.

I can't come up with a natural segue to the other shrunken
head collection in NYC, so here.

A colossal Olmec head carving...sucker
was like six or seven feet tall.

"Mummy" used loosely to mean that more than just
bone structure was preserved on this dinosaur.

Decorating ideas.

The skull and outline of a prehistoric rhino, which was
taller than a house.

More decorating ideas.