Lou’s View: 2020 Vision

By Lou Bernard

I think we can all agree that it’s been a historic year. Not historic in the way that, say, the founding of Lock Haven was historic. More historic in the way that the 1936 flood was historic. Nobody exactly enjoyed living through it, but everyone would remember it for a long, long time.

At the outset, 2020 looked like it had the potential to be a pretty average year. And isn’t that depressing, when I look back and think of how average it could have been? As the year began, everything seemed to be going okay. And then, midway through March, there was this pandemic, and suddenly I was working from home, and my son was out of school, and everything was going straight to hell. It’s fair to say I did a lot of day drinking.

Everyone has to wear masks. Everyone has to remain as distant as possible. Who’d have ever thought Glen Union would have the right idea? So, home with my little boy all day, I decided to work with him some, and teach him a lot of what I know. Mostly, what I know is how to do historic research to go on adventures, and then a bunch of survival skills for when that goes terribly wrong. It’s not easy being a stay-at-home paranormal investigator.

There was little point in showing Paul how to find obituaries and deeds, as he hadn’t yet learned to read. But he could look at a map, and we did, checking out the old ruins of a railroad storage building along Liberty Street. Based on the maps and whatever documents I could find from home, it was built in the early 1900s and stood past 1925. Paul and I rode down to take a look, figuring that a small ruin in a field is socially distant enough.

We explored it, and then we noticed that there were letters carved into the concrete. Not readable, but it gave us something new to learn. I showed Paul how to use chalk, mirrors, and shaving cream to clarify letters written in stone, and we spent a couple of days trying that. We never did get them readable, but he’ll remember how to do it.

I spent a lot of time teaching Paul survival skills, as well, which is another one of my specialties. We learned first aid. We took his oversized stuffed gorilla, and splinted its leg. Then I showed him how to make a stretcher out of two branches and some jackets, and we carried the gorilla around the yard. Next we gave CPR to his stuffed duck. The president of the Ross Library’s board of directors lives across the street from me, so she got to see me and my son out on the sidewalk, resuscitating a duck.

I taught him several different ways to start a fire in the forest: Batteries and steel wool, a magnifying glass, flint and steel. You never know when you’re going to need to burn something. I showed him how to collect water. One rainy day, we went outside and practiced drinking water off of leaves. I taught him how to gather water by tying a bandanna around your ankle (for everyone who has always wondered about my bandanna, that’s one use.) And we built a solar still in the backyard, using a garbage bag, a can, and some rocks.

Since the recycling trucks weren’t picking up, we did some recycling of our own. I showed Paul how to make a fish trap out of an old bottle, and how to use a battery and some foil to start a fire. We made fish hooks out of beer can tabs, and the converted a coffee can into a small outdoor stove. Paul liked that one so much he had me toast a bagel on it three days running.

It was a rough year, and in a lot of ways, a terrible year. But I tried my best to make sure my son got something out of it. And now, as the year ends, I look back at the time we spent together, and I think, Well, that was okay.

And one day, far in the future, Paul will take his own family on an adventure. They’ll be out somewhere remote, and he’ll show them what he knows. And his kids will ask how he knows all this. And Paul will say,”Once, when I was a kid, your grandfather and I were home during this pandemic…..”