The Plan
As I began planning my alley cat several months ago, I wanted to come up with a good name. With it being Halloween weekend, I considered names like Spooky Alley Cat, but nothing really grabbed me. Then it hit me: We would be visiting cemeteries, and the ride would start and end at Jordan Engineering, where Ashes the cat lives. Thus, it became the Ashes to Ashes Alley Cat.
Ashes showed up at Robert's and my door early this year. She was the cutest thing, but we couldn't keep her at our house. I'm allergic to cats, and our greyhounds aren't kitty friendly. Therefore, she became the Jordan Engineering office cat. I love visiting her when I go to Jordan Engineering every Monday evening for spin class. Ashes is very affectionate and always wants attention. Happily, she doesn't seem to trigger any allergic reactions in me.
Planning the checkpoints was fun. Between my existing knowledge of local cemeteries and some online research, I came up with a list of cemeteries to visit. I selected ones that could be visited in a roughly circular route; I didn't want to make navigation overly complicated. As I visited the sites during the planning stage, I couldn't find one of the cemeteries that was supposed to be there. I wanted to keep the other cemeteries that I had already selected, and I wanted to keep the total route length around 35 miles. So, I used a bridge sign as one of the checkpoints to force riders to take a particular path. I told them that if they complained about it not being a cemetery, they would be dead to me.
Another fun part of the planning was coming up with a question to be answered at each checkpoint. The question usually involved a particular grave. I selected a grave close to each cemetery entrance so that participants wouldn't have to search very long.
To set the mood as we gathered, I created a playlist of songs:
"Ashes to Ashes" by David Bowie
"Cat Scratch Fever" by Ted Nugent
"Cat's in the Cradle" by Harry Chapin
"Wild World" by Cat Stevens
"The Lion Sleeps Tonight" by The Tokens
"Santa Baby" by Eartha Kitt (and a tongue-in-cheek poke at the fact that Christmas advertising begins at Halloween these days!)
"Eye of the Tiger" by Survivor
"Animal" by Def Leppard
"Josie and the Pussycats" TV theme song
"The Pink Panther Theme" by Henry Mancini and His Orchestra
Bill the Cat also greeted everyone. Like Ashes, he is Halloween colored!
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| Bill is stylin' in his Mardi Gras beads |
Cemeteries (Part I)
I didn't expect a big crowd, and I really wasn't surprised that it turned out to be only Robert and me and our good friend Chad. I didn't mind a bit, though. We purposely rode at a mellow pace and took our time exploring the cemeteries.
Our first stop was the cemetery at Robert's and my church, Monticello Presbyterian. Although the official question there was about my friend Miss Blossom, who died several years ago at age 97, we lingered longer at the grave of Robert's great grandfather:
By the way, do you know the difference between a cemetery and a graveyard? A graveyard is always next to a church, but a cemetery is located on a piece of land not adjoining a church. Cemeteries came into being because over time, people realized the impracticality of tyring to bury everyone next to a church. Most people use the two terms interchangeably, however.
Farther down the road, we went to Adgateville Community Cemetery. I made the guys read and answer the official question: Eeek! I'm dead! Wait, it's a different Betty Jean. What is her last name?
It was interesting to note that she has two headstones. I like Robert's theory. Like me, she always used her middle name along with her first name. When someone left her middle name off of the first headstone, a family member had a second one made to get her name right.
After the Adgateville cemetery, we rode on the first and gravelliest unpaved section of the day. It touches on the northern side of the Piedmont Wildlife Refuge, one of my favorite places to ride or just be in general.
Toward the end of this section, Robert got a flat:
At least we had a pretty view while he changed his tire:
Robert was concerned about getting another flat, and he had a few more hours on his training schedule anyway. Therefore, when we got to the next paved road, he rode home to get his road bike and started riding the course backward to meet up with Chad and me again. (The course had one other dirt section later on but was all paved after that.) In the meantime, Chad and I continued on the original route.
Chad is a huge history buff, and I knew he would like the next cemetery - actually, a graveyard :) Neither of us had ever seen another headstone for a Spanish American War veteran:
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| Today is the 60th anniversary of Mr. Thomson's death. |
They are made of concrete and have hand carved inscriptions. We suspect that that's all they could afford because they died in the Depression/World War II era.
A few miles and cemeteries later, we discovered this headstone:
The more we studied it, the more intrigued we became. The first interesting point was that Mr. Stone, on the right (can't quite read his first name), was killed in a Civil War battle in Florida. We don't often think about the Civil War extending into Florida. His wife Lucinda is buried on the left. They married in 1862, when Lucinda was 27. That would have made her rather a spinster for that day. However, maybe that's not the whole story. Next to these graves are other Stones. I didn't take a picture, and I've forgotten their first names, but they are a husband and wife who were born in the 1850s. The man could have been Lucinda's son. But his last name wouldn't be Stone, would it? Hmmm...maybe the Mr. Stone buried with Lucinda was actually Lucinda's second husband, and Mr. Huff was her third husband. Mr. Stone could have adopted Lucinda's son from her first husband who died. This may not be what really happened, but regardless, Lucinda certainly has an interesting story to tell.
Chad and I speculated some more about Lucinda, wondering whether she was born in the area or maybe moved here with her husband. About that time, Robert rode up on his road bike.
A Lesson in Land Surveying
Joining the discussion, Robert wound up giving us a fascinating overview of land surveying. (He's a land surveyor in addition to being a civil engineer.)
In the late 1700s after the Revolutionary War, each head of household in Georgia was granted a 200-acre tract of land with the option of purchasing an additional 50-acre tract for each family member or slave, up to 1000 acres. These were known as headright grants. They occurred in the original part of the State of Georgia, east of the Oconee River. These parcels were shaped irregularly, with creeks, trees, and other natural objects forming boundaries.
As whites moved west and obtained more land from the Native Americans, land lotteries were conducted. The first land lottery in Georgia occurred in 1805 and conveyed the area between the Oconee and Ocmulgee Rivers, including Jasper County. In this land lottery, the square tracts were oriented at a 45-degree angle from north. Subsequent land lotteries in Georgia and farther west had parcels oriented at 35 degrees from north and later oriented due north.
Large tracts, such as townships, were laid out in states farther west. It was noted that the vertical boundary lines of these larger tracts aren't parallel due to the curvature of lines of longitude. An adjustment is required to represent the three-dimension surface of the earth on a two-dimensional mapping system. Some systems more accurately adjust east-west dimensions, and others more accurately adjust north-south dimensions. Georgia, being a longer state than it is wide, uses a system that more accurately adjusts north-south dimensions. (Georgia actually has two state plane coordinate systems, east and west.) Tennessee, in contrast, uses a system that more accurately adjusts east-west dimensions. Each state has its own state plane coordinate system. All of these state plane coordinate systems were combined into one with the North American Datum of 1927 (NAD27) and, later, the more accurate North American Datum of 1983 (NAD83). So, this accounts for necessary adjustments to horizontal position. What about elevation adjustments?
The shape of the earth is idealized as an ellipsoid (3-D ellipse). However, the gravity vector measured from a given point on the earth might not point to the earth's center of mass because of influences like mountains, which skew the direction of the vector. In some places, measured gravity is greater than the idealized ellipsoid; in other places, measured gravity is less than the idealized ellipsoid. The true set of gravity vectors is the earth's geoid. Surveying involves using GPS data to calculate the difference between the ellipsoid and geoid at each measurement point.
We represent the physical world as accurately as we can with our measurement systems. That's all they are, though - representations. They aren't the actual world itself. This is similar to all of the people in the cemeteries that we visited. The best biography in the world is only a two-dimensional representation of a real person and can't capture all of his/her nuances. I also remembered a quote that Robert once shared with me. The gist of it was that even the most well-written, multifaceted fictional character isn't nearly as complex as the most seemingly ordinary real person.
Cemeteries (Part II) and Semi-Fabulous Prizes
We had a couple of cemeteries left to visit. The last one was Westview in downtown Monticello. We stopped to say hello to Robert's grandparents:
Robert never knew his grandfather, who died when Robert's father was a teenager. Robert's grandmother ran their dairy by herself for about the next 25 years. I never knew her because she died a couple of years before I met Robert, but I think I would have liked her a lot.
At last we arrived back at Jordan Engineering. Chad got the semi-fabulous prize for the first male finisher. He is a physics professor, which makes this particularly appropriate for him:
As the only female participant, I got the semi-fabulous prize for the first female finisher. I'm not sad. Note that the top reads both hello and bye, another reference to Schrödinger’s cat:
The lanterne rouge prize went to Robert. That's only because I had three semi-fabulous prizes, and there were three riders.
Then it was time for refreshments. Nothing like beer and cookies after a ride. I had made the cookies the night before.
Ashes was her usual sweet self as we sat around being refreshed.
Then we went to The Vanilla Bean on the square for real lunch:
The day held all I could ask for: beautiful weather, great friends, a little history, and simply being outside and pedaling in the fresh air. And maybe just a touch of spookiness.
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