Duck, Duck Loose

Strange Maps is one of the 33 blogs I follow (it’s not as hard or time consuming as it sounds with Google Reader on my protopage!). This post there a few days ago really caught my attention and imagination!

In January of 2002 29,000 plastic bath toys washed overboard en route from China to the US. Their journey has revealed duckloads of information about ocean currents to scientists, largely because they are made of durable plastic, watertight, and much more likely to be reported when seen.

It’s taken 15 years, but the ducks are now predicted to reach the shores of Britain this summer. Now stop and think about that for a minute. Ducks lost in the PACIFIC OCEAN are about to reach Britain, in the ATLANTIC OCEAN! Their journey has included a five year freeze in arctic ice, moving a mile a year through the Bering Strait before thawing and resuming their watery trek toward Britain. There’s another article here about their predicted landing.

Sometimes truth IS stranger than fiction!

Keelgahan Quest – Part 2

So…a quick recap of our story thus far (or just read Part 1 here):

* Fall, 1999: We hear the James Keelaghan song “Rebecca’s Lament” live in concert with its accompanying story about Rebecca Galloway and native leader Tecumsah where we hear the Rebecca’s family’s cabin still stands.

* December, 1999: We go looking in Chillicothe, Ohio for Rebecca’s cabin, said to still exist, then realize it was supposedly in Xenia, Ohio, NOT Chillicothe.

And now, the rest of the story…

After the trip to Chillicothe, the quest languished for 5 and a half years. We saw James Keelaghan in concert several times in those 5 years and thought about the unfinished quest, but we were never near Xenia and the timing just wasn’t right.

Then in April 2005, John surprised me with a weekend trip to our alma mater, Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. On the way home in John’s GPS-equipped Acura, we realized that Xenia wasn’t too far off our track home, so the quest sprang to life again.

The only info we had was that the cabin was behind a K-mart in Xenia. Luckily, John’s GPS quickly located the only K-mart in town. When we discovered this intersection of Main and GALLOWAY streets just in front of a giant K-mart, we KNEW we were close!

We kept driving, trying to get behind the K-mart, which was apparently built right in the middle of Galloway street. Rounding the final corner, we found the cabin!

It felt SO GOOD to have completed our quest. We didn’t even care that it was raining!

We walked around, learned that you can actually enter the cabin, though not on Sundays. We took a picture of the Ohio Historical Marker, and after 15 minutes, proclaimed this leg of the quest completed. I hope someday we’ll be able to return and tour the inside of the cabin!

We next saw Mr. Keelaghan in Lemont, PA on June 11, 2005. We presented him with photos of Rebecca Galloway’s cabin and a summary of the quest his song had inspired. The whole quest was a memorable and fun experience we will never forget!

Keelaghan Quest – Part 1

On James Keelaghan’s 1990 recording “Small Rebellions,” he includes a song called “Rebecca’s Lament” about the relationship between Rebecca Galloway and the native leader Tecumsah. The song is riveting; James plays it nearly every time he visits Ohio and makes an apology for mispronouncing the city of Chillicothe. In Ohio, it’s pronounced “CHILL-uh-KOTH-ey,” but James didn’t know that when he wrote the song and pronounced the name “CHILL-uh-coat.”

At a show in the fall of 1999 at the now defunct Brick Alley Theatre in Cleveland, James introduced the song and told the story of the cabin where the last part of the story took place. Apparently, the Galloway cabin still stands behind the K-Mart in Xenia, Ohio. We remembered all of this except the Xenia part.

On December 30, 1999, we were returning to Ohio by car from a trip to North Carolina listening to “Small Rebellions.” Remembering the story of the cabin (or, at least, some of the story), we took a slight detour to Chillicothe in search of the cabin. We roamed around the town until we found a state park. The ranger didn’t know anything about Rebecca Galloway and Tecumsah in the Chillicothe area.

We drove around a bit more and enjoyed the sights in Chillicothe, but considered our pilgrimage to be a failure. After a bite to eat, we decided to head home. It was getting late, and we still had several more hours to drive before we got home.

On the way out of town, we passed a K-Mart. We drove around it, looking for a cabin. This is what we saw:

As you can see, there was no cabin in sight.

On the drive home, John suddenly remembered that it was Xenia, not Chillicothe, where Rebecca’s cabin was supposedly located! We resolved to continue our quest another time.