Hoosiers, did you get out and vote today? For the first time in my memory, a Presidential primary meant something in Indiana, at least to the Democrats. And do the Democratic candidates know it. They’ve spent enough time here in the past several weeks that news crews statewide have forgotten what their families look like.
I skew conservative and so my vote today was pretty unexciting. I briefly considered crossing the line and filling out a Democrat ballot to vote against Hillary Clinton, but I have a hard time casting even a protest ballot for anyone who wants universal health care. It’s not that I think the current system is fabulous. It’s that I worked for four years for the nation’s largest private health insurer in a division that executed large Medicare contracts. I dealt directly with government workers at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services – fine people for the most part, just like you’d find in any workplace – but was not amused to see how the political pressures they were under shaped their decisions. If that’s how our government manages healthcare, then I never want the government to manage mine.
My parents splurged (at $2.95 a month) on cable in 1972 so Dad could watch his beloved White Sox on Channel 44 from Chicago. This opened up a whole new world of TV entertainment for my brother and I. Ray Rayner on Channel 9 got us off to school every day (”Ten minutes to eight, don’t be late!”) and the Three Stooges and the Little Rascals were waiting for us on Channel 32 when we got home. And Channel 44 had a whole bunch of great cartoons, including many of the Marvel superhero series from the 1960s.
But the best of Channel 44’s cartoons, the one my brother and I went nuts for, was Speed Racer, an early anime about a young race car driver. (You probably haven’t escaped the trailers for the movie, opening this month, based on this show.) Speed Racer had a style and intensity missing in the cartoons that filled our Saturday mornings. We were taken in by the mystery surrounding Racer X, a driver who always arrived at the right moment to give Speed advice or save his bacon, but then disappeared – and Speed didn’t know that Racer X was actually his older brother, Rex, who ran away from home some years before. Nobody at Hanna-Barbera was writing cartoons like this.
This 40-year-old series is available on DVD today, and I own the first volume. A few changes were made to the opening and closing sequences as the films were remastered, so today I share with you what they looked like when I first saw them in the early 1970s.
A few pictures from my walk along Spring Mill Road turned out all right.
I took this northbound photo at 103rd St., which is just beyond the I-465 overpass. I really like how the road ripples where the two cars are on it. The redbud with its purple-pink flowers is common throughout Indiana. There are tons of them along this part of Spring Mill Road.
Hard to believe, but this is considered city, since it’s within the Carmel city limits.
I wanted to stop to take photos at many places as I drove north from here, but Spring Mill Road is narrow and shoulderless, and I wasn’t sure the Carmel police would understand if I parked in the grass alongside some subdivision. This prevented me from getting a photo of a short abandoned segment of Spring Mill Road.
Orignally, to stay on Spring Mill you had to jog right onto 116th St and then left onto Spring Mill again. The remnant of the original route follows the line of trees in the photo. I’m pretty sure I remember driving this jog a long time ago. The jog was probably fine when this was just a farm road. But as businesses began to locate in Carmel and people figured out they could avoid congested US 31 (the next road to the east) on Spring Mill, it probably got hellaciously congested. First the road curved to avoid this jog, creating a 4-way stop. Then a year or so ago roundabout-happy Carmel built a roundabout here. The aerial image is from before the roundabout, but the Google Maps label overlay shows it. I used to think that Carmel built roundabouts because they didn’t have enough to do with all their money, but now that I drive up here all the time I find that these things really do keep traffic flowing better.
Sorry, enough roadgeekery, back to the flowers. A couple miles north of 103rd St., in the 12600s, the road is lined with what I think are ornamental cherry trees. Their white flowers create real drama along the side of the road.
These trees’ powerful scent filled the air. I liked how the one in the photo below reaches the ground, just spilling over.
I wished I had time to take more photos, but I was sort of playing hooky as it was. So back to work I went.
I feel fortunate to have a really pleasant drive to work for the first time since moving to Indianapolis many years ago. From my Northwestside home I can take any number of routes along surface streets north out of the city. These are the old suburbs, filled with low ranch houses set well back from the street behind tall maples and oaks. Even at rush hour I can drive at least the speed limit.
Spring Mill Road was first cut through the central Indiana countryside at least 150 years, based on old maps I’ve seen. The road was straight then and surely a real adventure in a few places where the terrain was rugged (by Indiana standards). Today, the road is curved to avoid them, but this has made for treacherous driving on snowy and icy days. But on a day like today, when the sun is out and the trees and flowers are in bloom along the route, I make my drive to Carmel, the city where I work, on Spring Mill Road all the way.
96th St is the gateway into Hamilton County. It wasn’t very long ago that southern Hamilton County was all farmland, but today most of the land is covered in luxury subdivisions and has been annexed by Carmel. Still, driving Spring Mill Road in Hamilton County feels plenty rural. The few remaining farms set the mood, and the subdivisions are all set way back and generally kept behind stone fences with plenty of trees planted near the road. I’ve watched any number of deer cross the road ahead of me, and have even had to stop hard once or twice. Only the roundabouts at each intersection remind you that you’re still in civilization.
Along Spring Mill Road this week the trees have been in full bloom, purples and pinks and pale greens and whites. For long stretches, it’s like driving through a tunnel of color. Yesterday I took a late lunch, hoping traffic would be low, and went out with my camera to try to capture the beauty. I failed! I may post a couple of those photos later this week so you can see, but they don’t show the full experience of enjoying the colors as they go by. But I noticed one thing while out on the road’s shoulders that eluded me at 40 mph – the scents. The section of Spring Mill Road nearest my work is lined with what are probably cherry trees with their white blossoms. As I stood at the road’s edge taking photographs, I could not escape those blooms’ scent. They filled my nostrils with every breath, making me a little dizzy. I have never experienced something like it before.
What’s been your best springtime experience so far?
This being my first spring in this house, I wondered what surprises the yard would bring as it came back to life. My neighbor tells me that the couple who built this house did some landscaping about ten years ago. After they both passed away, the property became a rental and was only minimally maintained. The grass is half weeds and bare spots.
The beds appeared to be in slightly better shape, at least until the dandelions started to fill them. A few weeks ago, green evidence of bulb plants started to push through the ground in the biggest bed, ten steps into the yard from my front door.
They started blooming last week, the narcissus first, white and then yellow. The tulips came next, the red a few days before the purple. I don’t recall ever having seen purple tulips before, but I haven’t historically been terribly observant of such things. I liked tulips as a young boy because they were easy to draw.
I will probably plant some annuals around the edges of this bed in a few weeks. But I sure love these bulb plants, an annual gift from my home’s original owner.
A lot of these little blue-violet flowers have come up in clumps in this bed, too. I like how their petals are all different lengths. I have no idea what these flowers are, so tell me if you know.
Click any of these photos to see them slightly larger.
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