One Man's Maine

Birds and firs

2012-02-01T15:37:00.003-05:00

This morning a swarm of birds was flying in and out and around and between the firs standing on the bank. One pair even swooped in tandem twice around a tree, a few inches apart, leading or chasing, I couldn't tell, exploiting gravity with wings stiff like fighter jets, although not so malignant or ostentatious. I'm not sure what kind of birds they were, I'm embarrassed to say. In defense I'll state that it was hard to see markings and colorings against gray sky and gray bay, even with binoculars, especially when the birds were flying about at such speed and in such joy and causing rather comical arm movements and dizziness in yours truly. They looked like fat house sparrows (at least from the Stokes Guide, in which they are absolutely the last bird in 700+ pages, by the way) but their flight was somewhat undulating, which is more like finches. Not exactly knowing what they were did not diminish my pleasure for those few minutes, until they suddenly all left, requiring me to go back to an essay I'd been trying to ignore.

The binoculars were the source of another embarrassment besides the comedy of arms. They revealed weird spikes on the balsams' branches. At least I (or rather, Google) could solve this one. Cones on a balsam fir grow straight up from a branch, and when the seeds fall off, they leave a spike sticking up like a candle. (Apparently, German tribes got their idea for candles on Christmas trees therefrom.) There were hundreds of them on the firs. The embarrassing part is that in many years of coming to Maine and seeing fir trees, I'd never noticed them.

Scores of birds, scores of cone spikes - how wonderful to take the time to find out what you don't know. And then, in the flush of inspiration, to take up the flight of words again, also to find out what you don't know.

Country mouse, city menagerie

2012-01-25T15:46:00.006-05:00

I spent last weekend at my brother's new house in rural Ohio, set on some twenty acres of woods. Among other things, we talked about the odd phenomenon of seeing more wildlife in the city than in the country. Around his suburban house he saw deer, groundhogs, raccoons, turkeys, vultures, hawks, egrets, and innumerable songbirds. So far, six months in the country have produced only deer, a few birds, and a hundred trapped house mice, although muskrats are rumored to inhabit the pond. I related similar experiences in comparing suburban Massachusetts to rural Maine.

A hunter this fall did stop by and ask if he could continue to hunt in the woods. Dave had no objections and the man eventually bagged his buck and displayed its carcass for the edification of the city folk. One wouldn't experience that in the burbs. One also does not experience there the vaunted independence of country people, so stubborn about it that they will often vote Republican against their own interests of healthcare, income equality, education and fair taxation. In this election year the contrast between right and left seem to be even greater. Unlike wildlife, people don't seem to be adapting and changing to fit the times any more, but just harden and isolate their positions and fire salvos from their redoubts.

Of course, the escape of people like my brother and me to the country often seems illusional, or delusional. Certainly, it's noisier in the country, not politically, thank God, but decibel-ly. He's got the trains that traverse the I-90 corridor, I've got the airport, and we both have the infinite variety of country engines: pick-ups, riding lawn mowers, chain saws, wood splitters. Dave doesn't have the illusion of "real" wild life, like the bears and moose and bald eagles of Maine, not to mention the immense bulwark of the Great North Woods. He makes do with his acreage. We all try to survive hunting season as gracefully as we can.

Big and little oil

2012-01-18T14:35:00.003-05:00

The rising price of heating oil ($4.09 per gallon this week here in Massachusetts) coincides understandably with news stories about diminished support for the heating needs of the poor, and coincides terribly non-understandably with the warmth of the winter. The poor are hit with a double whammy: the high prices themselves and cut federal aid programs (one of the many, many costs of smaller government). The oil companies seem to be unconscionable in flouting the laws of capitalism (like certain Republican presidential candidates recently criticizing Mitt Romney for being a capitalist!) which usually suggest that increased supply means decreased prices. Not so when the companies have everyone over a barrel (so to speak).

I've long thought the price of oil has to go up considerably in order for us to make real conservation gains - the portion of the price represented by taxes, that is. I'd also be in favor of regulation of fossil-fuel companies. Make them semi-public, like the utilities, and subsidize those members of the public who can't afford the basic needs of heat. It seems unfair that southern folks get the benefit of regulation for their air conditioners, but northern folk suffer the worst of free-market excess for their furnaces. All of this preaching smacks of socialism, I know, but if Newt and the Ricks (great name for a polka band) can criticize the free market, why can't I?

Of course, unlike other warm-blooded animals, bears, for example, or farmers in the Great Depression, we don't exactly make much effort to maximize our own heat. We don't cuddle together in dens or live in kitchens and leave the bedrooms unheated. Indeed, our houses are really too large for this climate, not to mention poorly constructed. The old houses of New England are a particular problem since it takes more dollars and will than most people have to make them efficient. And we won't go back to caves and woollies, God knows. But how about a little better management of a scarce resource, on levels both environmental and personal? Lack of compassion for those in need and for the earth has no price, but oh, what a cost.

Conquering nature

2012-01-09T15:44:00.003-05:00

Another house is going up on Ash Point Drive, once again in the modern style of construction: buy big lot, knock down all trees, build large house (of course, large - when was the last time you saw a small house being built?). I'm at a point in my life where almost any new construction pains me. Less and less do I understand the urge for the new. There are so many existing structures that could be rehabbed, or even knocked down and begun again, and one more acre would be saved for the trees. Even the bare timbers and planks and studs of a new building seem to plead in some agony. Perhaps that's why the builders cover them up as quickly as possible with Tyvek and clapboards and shingles, to stop the screaming.

After the house will follow the manicured grass, the scalloped edges around ornamental bushes, the tarred driveway, the mulched flower beds, the three-car garage, all the impervious surfaces and domesticated plants that keep nature at bay. The need to dominate and tame and control must be a recent human evolutionary development, going far beyond using nature for food and shelter. Now people must conquer it. Their terror must be extreme, even if they won't acknowledge it. Their answer to terror is apparently to barricade oneself in with stuff; construct huge living spaces that one can control; install floodlights against the woods. Everyone gets, or desires to have, a separate bedroom and bathroom and screen. Families stay inside, passing by each other in the halls, perhaps meeting to snack at the Sub-Zero. They don't go outdoors: a coyote or a neighbor, a gnat or a terrorist, might attack.

If I were to be honest, most human works, not just new houses, pale in comparison to nature. Something utilitarian doesn't bother me. But useful items these days so quickly degenerate into prestige and greed and ostentation. Only something made to be quite useless, ie, a piece of art, can come close to satisfying what nature does so easily. That little bit of wetland that I walk by most days, for example, is especially beautiful this winter. A transparent skin of ice on the standing water produces a blue sheen like a tropical ocean. This rainy mild winter has given moss a big green boost, and it covers the mounds of rock and stump like thatched huts on a shore. Somewhere in the mud peeper eggs lie housed, waiting for spring. They have no need to conquer nature, or preen. Our life cycle is as short as theirs, considering infinity: would that ours were as glorious.

Walking the dog on holiday mornings

2012-01-02T16:00:00.002-05:00

With Christmas and New Year's on Sunday this year, there were four opportunities - twice in the country and twice in the city - to walk the dog on holiday mornings, one of the small pleasures in a cacophonous time of big ones. Today and yesterday in the country were not that much different from usual walks in Maine: the fresh sea air, the naked deciduous trees, the clothed conifers, the winter berries shining in the sun like bits of red neon, the faint sounds of someone working in the woods, an airplane landing. No people were around. One car moved along Ash Point Drive. Crows cawed in the trees, and moss seemed to roll in waves across stone and stump, bright-green in this weirdly mild winter. The ocean was calm.

In the city, Christmas morning is the best time of the year to walk. This year the pleasure was doubled. On neither Sunday or Monday did I see more than one moving car. A cardinal flashed in and out of a hedge. There were no other dogs to frighten our little one. Among the mass of suburban houses and yards I saw a total of four people: two stepping off a porch, a woman walking, and someone de-limbing a felled tree with an electric chain saw. This last man and his strange activity on Christmas morning made me think he was making a political, anti-Christmas statement, or maybe he just got the saw for a gift and was celebrating in his own way. The whole rest of the neighborhood was inside, with family or friends or quietly alone, celebrating the gifts of the season.

Such mornings are one of the few times the peace of the country invades the city, and one can walk without thinking about the waste of carbon and time and sentiment. It is mostly quiet and peaceful, like a country lane. The grass rolls across the yards, bright-green in this weirdly mild winter. The soul is calm.

From the sublime...

2011-12-22T14:37:00.002-05:00

Successive stories on Maine Things Considered last night, with no editorial comment between:

A timber management company is buying 3,200 acres on Maine's Schoodic Peninsula, a parcel formerly under contract with a developer who, under the banner of eco-resort, was intending to build hundreds of houses plus the usual amenities. The "eco" part was a small nature center. The new owner intends to place at least half the land under a conservation easement.

Hundreds of homes were also the subject of the next story but the locale is hardly so pristine and wild as Schoodic. A Maine company won a contract to put up cedar log houses on an artificial lake in China, to be sold to the nouveau riche and priced in the hundreds of thousands of dollars each.

My only written comment today will be to ask which country is on the rise and which is on the decline.

Dead last

2011-12-19T14:22:00.002-05:00

The governor steps in it again. When Forbes named Maine as the worst state in the nation for business, LePage apparently phoned them up for ammunition for his political agenda and claimed Forbes told him, among other things, that Maine's welfare costs were ruining the state. Forbes denied it. In fact, welfare isn't even a part of their formula. But LePage is desperately trying to get rid of 65,000 MaineCare recipients and will say and do almost anything to achieve Teabagger politics, as Maine residents well know after a year of it. Those recipients are of course poor and old and sick and should have the decency just to go away and die in the woods.

Politicians are notoriously shortsighted, but this one is dead last in that category. Balancing budgets on the backs of the poor is not only immoral, but idiotic. Denying basic medical care to those 65,000 will cost more health dollars, higher insurance rates, more ER visits, and higher unemployment among the people who take care of them even while tax cuts for the better-off continue. In some ways I'm proud that Forbes rates Maine so poorly. People don't act like businesses here. There's a tradition of taking care of people here. There are communities here. There is tolerance here. None of these attributes are exactly hallmarks of business, are they?

I'm also happy to report that Forbes ranks the US's other paradise state - Hawaii - at number 49.

The color hour in winter

2011-12-12T14:56:00.006-05:00

That would be 4:00 pm, when the sun goes down and the sky in the east, out over the islands, turns subtle shades of blue and indigo and violet and even a little red, and if you look closely, you'll see them all in the water too. That would be 4:00 pm, when green turns to gray, gray to black. 4:00 pm, when there's little left to look at on the bay, no boats, an occasional flash of white gull in a shaft of sun, or a few hardy ducks still diving, when you look back at what you've accomplished during the day and it seems a glowing golden edifice, or a black heap of ashes, or (more commonly) an average piece of granite on the shore, a little pink if you're lucky. At 4:00 pm the stock markets close, and it is permitted to see if you're in the red or in the black. It's the time you sink into a brown funk or soar into an azure high, until a silvery drink and a creamy cheddar level the world again. But most of all it's a time to stare at the sea, at the surf breaking in white necklaces, at the surface of the water turning from blue to match the purples of the sky, at the bluing patterns of the breezes, at the edges of the island where the water is a calm blush or a ruffled pink, depending on the direction of the wind. The ocean is that most perfect of oxymorons, an ever-changing constant. Every day's color is a different show, or sometimes no show at all, just a quick graying into night - except that deep in the bay light and color and the concerns of humans do not reach at all.

Soon it will be time to turn on harsh electric lights. Or maybe I'll just sit on for a while in the dark, waiting for the full orange moon to rise.

Trending into Maine

2011-12-09T15:05:00.002-05:00

Feeling somewhat at sea (more than two weeks now since I've been in Maine), I went to the library and reviewed the 974.1 section of nonfiction. Not too much I hadn't already read, or decided not to read, except for an old copy of a book called Trending into Maine. Just the thing to soothe anxiety, I thought, taking it down from the shelf, and noting with further anticipation that it was written by Kenneth Roberts, one of those few authors whose books last from boyhood on, published in 1938 by Little, Brown, my old company, and illustrated in color by N.C. Wyeth, father of Andrew. Very promising.

At least it started off well. Chapter 1, "A Pretty Good State," is a paean to Maine's people and landscapes that routed the anxiety and roused the blood. Here's a quote: "My provincialism is so pronounced that I freely admit that I have never seen any other part of the United States that seems to me as desirable a place to live; but I know at least a hundred spots in Maine where I am eager to have a home."

Sorry to say, Mr. Roberts, that I don't have too much to say about the book past page 15. It devolves into long quotations from letters about dead Mainers, strange pronouncements that Maine food like baked beans and hash and fish chowder is infinitely better than the fare in New York and Paris restaurants, lists of boats built, lengthy exploits of war, endless sea stories, a chapter on Benedict Arnold's expedition to Quebec that Roberts told much better in his novels, quotidian chapters on hunting and fishing, and someone's else's memoir about a Maine country character. Oh, and the Wyeth illustrations were tepid and corny. The final chapter, "Vacationland and Real Maine," was better (except for numerous and weird lists of road signs seen in various sections) and its last few pages on Aroostook County was good again- a return to Robert's feelings, not facts, about the state.

So I've discovered a good cure for place-sickness. Read a bad book about the place you love, and it will curb your enthusiasm for a while, perhaps just long enough for you to return. Read a good book about it, and you'll only feel worse.

Jobs

2011-12-06T11:36:00.004-05:00

As one of Maine's largest employers, Bath Iron Works is often in the news around here. New federal contracts provide a steady supply both of news and of jobs and will so for years to come, thanks to the strong Maine work ethic and the political and DoD connections of General Dynamics, BIW's owner. Shipbuilding on the Kennebec is nothing new, spanning some 250 years. Making warships started over 100 years ago with various precursors of BIW, and WWII completed the transition to complete dependence on Washington. These government programs, by the way, are perfectly acceptable to most politicians and most people; building engines of mass destruction is necessary to maintain the peace on our shores, and the jobs are pretty welcome too. War will always be lucrative, and self-justifying.

Other parts of the economy aren't so lucky, or so protected, and therefore need new justification for their increasingly marginal activities. The main rationale for approving casinos these days is that they will create jobs. Some Republicans are against any new taxes on the rich, because the wealthy create jobs. Democrats propose extending the payroll tax cuts; not to do so would increase joblessness. Most states, even those like Maine that are controlled by various blends of Tea Bags, continue to take federal money because to reject it would increase their unemployment. (Maine finds itself in the illogical position, for example, of participating in lawsuits against Obamacare, yet accepting federal grants to set up healthcare exchanges.) Pipelines from Canada, fracking, new child labor laws, relaxation of clean-air and wetlands standards - all justified by the terrible jobless rate. Earnest estimates of job numbers are now part of standard press releases, to obscure the ideology that's driving them.

What's hardly ever discussed are job training and re-training programs. Businesses will train people only for new contracts won, not re-train people if old contracts are lost. Old industries collapse suddenly, or die slowly, both at immense human cost. The individual is apparently responsible for adaptation even though the new world is far beyond his control. In Maine skilled jobs are going unfilled and the administration mouths some token works about needing to revise educational curricula, but in reality blames teachers and their unions for somehow failing the public.

In a job market so rapidly changing, shouldn't all levels of government, and perhaps even business, make it a priority to help the workforce adapt? How about taking just a bit of the Pentagon's largesse and turn it into something humane?

Hull Creek

2011-11-29T14:49:00.002-05:00

Just finished reading Hull Creek, a novel by Jim Nichols. It's a good, strong book about lobster fishing on the coast of Maine - mid-coast, actually, and Camden, Rockland and Owls Head at that. Camden is very thinly disguised as Pequot but Rockland and Owls Head appear pretty much in all their glory. It was fun to read about local landmarks, sad to read about the increasingly pinched lives of local Mainers, and disturbing to read about the onslaught of people from away ("swanks"). Mr. Nichols might have been a little less unrelenting in his treatment of the foreigners - some of them (us) are harmless at worst and may actually do some good at best - but I can see his point, that there's a helplessness, an inevitability to this slow tide of money and manners. And sometimes not slow but a grab and a pounce at any price.

The book's descriptions of fishing and wildlife are excellent, and I expect that one take-home from the novel is that there's a chance there will be fishing and wildlife for years and years to come. The Maine way of life may be powerful enough to convert even the grabbiest of swanks, so long as the birds and the lobsters and clean water and humility survive. Even Camden's pretty nice in the off-season.

Red alert - human stuff

2011-11-24T11:32:00.004-05:00

Humans seem to use red much like plants do - to attract attention, whether it's a large flower pot placed at the end of a driveway or a door painted red in contrast with grey cedar shingles and still-vivid November grass. Being self-aware, we also use red to flirt and seduce, or warn of danger. At the very least a conscious vitality is implied, if not overtly advertised, a way to live on in minds and memories. Our blood is stirred.

I was especially pleased to see this grave bouquet in Ash Point Cemetery, red leaves and red berries commemorating Ms. Libby's apparent immortality.

Red alert - berries

2011-11-22T10:04:00.010-05:00

Okay, so the red berries and fruits of late fall can't compete with the grandstanding strawberries and raspberries of summer. The fruits, like rose hips and crab apples, are pretty lively in October but wither in November. The berries, both those more orange in hue and those that are spectacularly red, are gorgeous even though they don't provide food for the exalted human taste. Just as important, they sustain our fellow travelers, the deer and the birds. I like their wildness, their bravery, their inspiration, their modesty - muncher and munchee alike.

The winterberry, however, is the most heartbreaking of all. Its growth can be delicate, a few sprigs against a mossy spruce, or it can be profligate, spreading like fire along a lane. I cut a few twigs, and when I get back to the house, put them in a vase. Throughout the winter the berries will dry and fade and carry us through. For even months later, they will retain a kiss of red, a promise of cardinals and lilacs, a resurrection of spirit.

Next time: red human stuff.

Red alert - leaves

2011-11-21T13:50:00.009-05:00

Now that the fancy display of sumac and maple and oak and burning bush is done, it's a little harder to find the beating heart of optimistic red around us. But a walk in the not-yet-barren November woods does just fine (forgive the amateur pictures via phone camera). It's a wonderful time of the year, quietly sandwiched between the blaze of October and the garishness of December. Red is such a joyful color, and once you start to look for it, it's everywhere. Bah, therefore, to any political or financial connotations. Look at the world with your blood.

Next time: red berries.

Eats Leaves and Rots

2011-11-20T15:09:00.002-05:00

Just finished raking the lawn and depositing the leaves on the garden beds (we think it helps the flowers survive the winter). The raker appears to be a dying breed. Here in the country he has been replaced by the riding lawn mower which doubles as a mulcher. In the city lawn services and their multifarious motors rule the mornings: at the end of our street the other week, three guys wearing leaf blowers herded the little beasts into corrals, the guy with the monster yellow mower beat them to pieces, whereupon the blowers regrouped the remains for the benefit of a big tube that sucked them into a truck, which, even though it had a cover over its bed, leaked leaf particles like a dust storm. And we wonder why allergies are on the increase.

I shouldn't cavil about the motors (if I had to do yard work all day every day, I'd want it mechanized too). But at eight o'clock in the morning? And wouldn't requiring rakes and bags actually create jobs? for which nothing is more sacred these days.

The green lawn is actually a tyrant, isn't it. I wonder if anyone's calculated the waste of chemicals and water and gasoline it requires. I'm tempted some years just to let the leaves rot where they fall, but of course peer pressure and the glories of your own patch of conquered wilderness prevail every time. The natural world is perfectly capable of taking care of its own -why don't we let it? Maybe next year....

The edge of winter

2011-11-11T14:55:00.006-05:00

Back in Massachusetts for a spell, after another week of wrong-season weather in Maine. It wasn't quite warm to sit outside, but for a couple of those days it felt mild and bright enough to be the edge of summer rather than the edge of winter. It was as if the Halloween weekend blizzard in New England was the shortest winter on record. Perfect weather for hiking, of course, including an especially invigorating walk up Bald Rock with friends on Saturday.

"Invigorating" is the word people usually hide behind to disguise their fear of winter. Also, "loving the change of seasons," "fresh and healthful," "pure." All of those words are true; we've evolved to be conscious of the power of abstractions, self-delusion and even beauty. We've also evolved towards helplessness. Most higher animals deal pretty well with winter - migrating, hibernating, storing up food, making weather-proof burrows and nests. Modern humans have progressed even farther; no more stocking the root cellar, drying the deer meat, banking the foundations, communing with the family in the candle-lit darkness of the evening, now we're able to maintain our lives at the same level of comfort no matter what the weather. (Some think to escape to Florida but that's just trading in the tyrannies of oil heat and blizzards for A/C and hurricanes.) But when a big storm threatens, we find we have not progressed at all. We are totally dependent on people we don't know, on systems of delivering food and electricity and heat that are foreign and unfeeling. We last a day or two and then beg help from an anonymous utility, or government. We depend entirely on switches and ignitions, and if they don't work, we don't work. How humiliating for an apex predator.

What ultimately saves our bacon is the other human trait that's evolved so well - our social safety net. To see that under attack, devolving and shamefully underfunded, now that's real fear.

Deer yard

2011-11-07T15:33:00.004-05:00

For most of the summer and the fall, the deer have mostly avoided our little patch of civilization, leaving the hostas and phlox and other edibles in our yard alone. I see them just as frequently in the woods in back, however, as they cross and re-cross the several roads going down to the water. Including today.

We're well into hunting season here in Wildlife Management District 25, for moose as well as deer, although an appearance of the former in this semi-rural coast would cause a stampede of hunters more heavily armed with cameras than with cannons. I have eschewed the wearing of any orange hats, not expecting hunters to work so close to Hondas and picture windows. Yet the two deer I saw this afternoon, young does, I theoretically could have shot, had I an antlerless deer permit, a weapon stronger than words, and the proper temperament. They were standing in what I've always thought of as a deer yard, even though it's about as different from a real deer yard as it can be. It's a meadow-like place, with raspberries in July and fireweed in August, with some "weeping" trees whose branches form tents, with a few old apple trees on the edges, with larger trees all around. Sounds like a perfect place to gambol and all the other silly things we impute to wildlife. In reality, it's a terrible place to hang out, too open, too exposed, very unlike a real deer yard which is a place of shelter in the winter, acres of conifers on a south-facing slope that provide shelter from deep snow and high winds.

One of the deer was properly sheltered from attack under some of the weeping branches. I wouldn't have seen it at all if it hadn't been that its companion stood stock-still in the open, glowing in the sunshine like a holy thing. We watched each other for some minutes. I even picked up the dog so she could see, but her eyesight is no longer that good and she was indifferent when I whispered, "See the big dog?" When at last I turned away, I scuffed my foot slightly on the tar. Immediately, the two deer bolted away, white tails flagging.

As I walked back home, I tried to imagine aiming a gun at that creature who stood so clearly, so confidently in its own backyard. I couldn't.

Scolding

2011-11-03T14:39:00.004-04:00

In this part of Maine (probably in most parts) we have red squirrels, and on our property at least one. That is, I see only one at a time but for all I know, there may be many, taking turns running across the ground and jumping from branch to branch. They seem to be more tree-oriented than the gray squirrel that so bedevils urban dogs; in fact, the red I saw the other day was climbing to the very top of a 40-foot fir on the shore. It might have been up there for the view, for it was a particularly pretty day. More likely it was seeking fresh buds and needles and even cones, the seeds of which are its favorite food.

The red squirrel is quite cute, being not much bigger than a chipmunk. Beyond that, I doubt humans think much about squirrels except to curse them in their attics.

Nor am I sure how the squirrel feels about humans. It scolds me, from the safety of a tree of course, when I'm out splitting wood. It finds the deck railing a convenient place to pick apart a cone, leaving its tell-tale midden of discarded cone bits behind. I've even seen it climbing directly up and down the outside walls of the house, presumably using the cedar shakes (an ex-tree) for toeholds. No nature-based reasons for the last-named exercise come to mind; recreational or psychological ones do.

Climbing to the tops of things fulfills all kinds of desires. My house is bigger than yours; my dad is taller than yours; the seeds are always greener at the top of the tree; I'm at the top of the world, on top of my game, high on Jesus. You'd think that getting closer to the infinity of space would make us humble. On the contrary, it seems to make us proud. Thank goodness the red squirrel chides us for our hubris and runs up things just for the hell of it.

In praise of brown

2011-10-29T10:50:00.002-04:00

The foliage season this year has been brief and brown. We saw lovely color on Columbus Day weekend but had to travel north of Ellsworth to do so. The mid-coast never really reached the full left-hand side of the spectrum. In the suburbs of Boston most everything is still green. Late October snowfalls are completing a somewhat dismal picture.

At least the brown colors are amazing. Not usually a word to associate with "brown," I know, but the richness of the array on hillsides and next to roads has been outstanding this past week. I say "rich" deliberately; although individual bursts of reds and oranges and yellows are rare, most leaves have something of them, and they blend together in a huge variety of shades of brown. I've never appreciated its complexity until now. And the contrast with the bare white birch, the blue sky, the dark green firs, the bright green of hay field and lawn and verge makes the color sing.

Brown this year is not muddy. It is warm with licks of flame, hints of sun, flashes of the tropics. It represents the way I want to go into winter, not with a tourist blast, then nothing, but with a soft, slow falling into black and white.

Passing of time

2011-10-26T14:56:00.009-04:00

Watching television can best be - kindly - described as passing time. Slightly more elevated is the excuse that it's a recovery mechanism from the rigors of the day. (Public television, they say, needs no excuse.) Philip Larkin, librarian and poet who famously declined to be England's Poet Laureate, implied such therapy in an answer to a question about his day (part of an interview -actually, written answers to written questions that took him five months to complete - published in the Paris Review):

"My life is as simple as I can make it. Work all day, cook, eat, wash up, telephone, hack writing, drink, television in the evenings. I almost never go out. I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time: some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next; or there's my way - making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works."

I'm guessing that time was Larkin's friend. For the folks who rush about, time must be an enemy to be defeated or overcome or ignored until, well, until it kindly stops for them. Those of us of the rural persuasion empathize with Larkin. He had his routines, as do we, our circadian rhythms, our tides, our mornings of cerebration and afternoons of perspiration, and if our evenings also include cop show re-runs on the idiot box, then we too must be poets.

Actually, I'm looking forward to the state of mind of the 90-year-old mother of a friend who, when asked if she watched television, said, "No, I'd rather sit in my big, comfortable chair and watch the memories in my head."

The last "One last time"

2011-10-15T16:35:00.003-04:00

OK, so today is absolutely, positively the last time the deck is sit-out-able. I know I said this 10 days ago, and then had the embarrassment of Columbus Day weekend when all three days were warm enough to be outside from morning till evening, even so far as to cause a little gentle perspiration. But today is it. It's a little cool, around 60, but the wind is from the south following two days of an ocean storm, and the surf is strong and sensual, and I'm reasonably comfortable in a sweater and double socks (a chorus of crows makes me look up and see a bald eagle flying just 50 feet away along the shore), suffering one last teasing hint of summer.

But I suppose there will be some kind of Indian summer later this month, and the agony of all this emotion will be repeated. With luck I'll be in Massachusetts and not succumb again to fresh air and uplifting heart. Let's just be done with this beautiful weather. Let winter come and let me sit by the wood stove in the dark and once again think clearly.

Columbus Day foliage

2011-10-11T11:24:00.015-04:00

Three lovely ladies and I took a foliage tour yesterday, up Route 1 and 1A to Bangor, and then over to the Union River watershed east of Bangor and north of Ellsworth. There were several highlights: LL1's unbridled enthusiasm for the colors, houses, and character of New England; LL2's expert pictures as seen below; and for me, sitting at a picnic table on the Bangor's urban, slightly seedy waterfront and watching two bald eagles soar over the Penobscot River. Then there was LL3. She, being a dog and having one or two genes left that at least hint at wildness, was not particularly happy being in a people mover for 6 hours, especially when her highlights including obsessive lap sitting (which she can get at home) and a few pit stops - at an Irving's gas station (I doubt she looked up to see this pretty tree gracing the parking lot),

and a short jaunt along a country lane, but note the taut leash pulling me back to the comforting laps of the LLs in the car.

She just wasn't into it like we were, oohing and aahing at hills and lakes and fields. She was cut off from her world - the world of scents, deer and dog, scat and pee, sandwich bits and rabbit hair and cigarette butts and Coke cans and emanation of squirrel. She was in a car, not knowing what would happen next.

We drove hoping what would happen next, and were rewarded. Blueberry fields are stunning at this time of year....

as are shores of rivers and lakes.

One also hoped for a moose to step out of the woods, but then one should be grateful for what wildness still remains, still so close, still so beautiful, even in the overactive nose of a dog, and the romantic tinge of human eyes.

Catwalk

2011-10-07T11:27:00.002-04:00

A first glance it looks only like some wire lobster traps, a common sight even on semi-suburban lawns in Maine. On second glance, and I do get a second glance, since I'm walking and not driving, there's an apparent configuration and order.

About 10 of the traps have been laid end-to-end in a row on the grass, and lead up some porch steps to the house. In the middle of the row, two more have been stacked vertically and contain what looks like a tree of sticks. A kind of pet run, I think as I pass by.

On the return trip up the lane, I pass the traps again and this time speculation is proved - a house cat dutifully trots from the house, down the steps, to the end of the run. Inside the traps, of course. I don't care to embarrass it in its little wilderness, so I don't stand around to see if it also jumps into its faux jungle gym, whose stick tree I now see is hung with objects to bat.

I suppose this is the owner's idea of giving his cat a taste of the great outdoors without any danger. He's knocked out the ends of the traps and lined them up for maximum length. His catwalk both confines and protects. The woods are all around, after all, and upon one's loose pet might spring a weasel, a fisher, or a marten - or a pickup. This way, our lovely can preen and strut and tease for the paparazzi outdoors as it does for the family indoors.

Clever? Yes. Sad? Yes. There's a stunted suburbanity at work here - pets need to be outside, but only under controlled conditions. They - and we - need protective equipment to take to the woods.

One last time

2011-10-04T14:18:00.004-04:00

You finish your duties for the day - reading, writing, a little arithmetic multiplying the wood pile - and hurry out to the deck. There's a soft warmth to the air that you know in your gut won't last another evening. Also, you've looked at the forecast. The nights fall fast now, and the coolness faster; there's maybe an hour and a half before even diehards must give in to shiverbumps.

You bother with no props today but your G&T and a little cheese and crackers. The clean smell of rockweed, the summer birds still flying over the water, are better than any book. You welcome the last of the mosquitoes. You drink in every sensation you can, not to store them against the winter, not to be brought out like snapshots, but in the intensity of last things that will be last things only if the world comes to an end before next summer.

Otherwise, this evening will live in emotion and feeling, and not images: the feel of warm air on bare arms and legs, and a closeness with everything around, from dragonfly to limpid bay. The retreat behind double-paned glass and bulky parkas will be fine too; I'll just have to work a little harder to be moved. But now, I truly feel cyclical tides of eternity: how an hour in a gentle evening like this one was, is, and will be.

Then again, a little eye candy for the end of summer won't hurt.

Walking on yellow-line roads

2011-09-28T15:18:00.003-04:00

The country road is a wonderful invention for walking, mostly. Your trail in the woods has no houses or cars, of course, and is delightfully quiet and peaceful. Your two-track dirt road, also usually through woods and pretty rare in these civilizing days, carries only the occasional vehicle and maybe one house at its end. Your country lane, dirt or tarred, is built for access to houses, however widely scattered, yet affords lovely woods and fields and vistas only occasionally interrupted by the automobile, and then it's usually a car belonging to a resident and therefore justified. One's problems start with those paved roads that carry traffic sufficient enough to warrant the central yellow lines.

Such a road can still be breathtakingly beautiful, with scenes of mountains or ocean or just a quiet meadow, and well worth walking. The contrast with loud, speeding, dirty cars, however, can be disconcerting. Not dangerous, mind you, not really. The yellow lines are usually double and unbroken, for these roads are typically hilly and curved, and the speed limit is on the low side, not that that limits some folks, and the vast majority of drivers do not try to pick you off as you walk the narrow shoulder.

I deal with the disturbing contrast by being grateful for most drivers' courtesy, and noting the the amount of space an oncoming car actually allows me. Some move completely over the double yellow into the opposite lane. Some more or less straddle it, still providing plenty of room. A few, just a few, make the minimum of effort, adjusting the steering wheel by a millimeter or two to give me the maximum rush of air and exhaust, perhaps even intentionally.

As I walk, I think of some kind of study to account for these varying amounts of courtesy, a study related to sex and age of driver, kind of vehicle, state of registration....But even these small numbers of variables are too much to hold in the brain at once, and while perhaps I'd like to tell you that the closest shaves are administered by young men driving pick-ups from Massachusetts, I just can't retrieve the data.

After some minutes of fruitless brain work, I shake myself and chide myself for ignoring this beautiful day. So often one retreats into numbers, or daydreams, or get-rich-quick schemes when faced with the ugly and the incongruous. How much better just to appreciate the courtesy, wave at the drivers, and take pleasure in the simple movement of the limbs. How much better to know this is the Emerald City, you've already reached it and the proof is in the stunning autumn flowers, the cool deep woods, the glimpse or two of Penobscot Bay, and even in the shining blue-and-silver can of Red Bull fallen in the ditch like a patch of sky.

Bear Killed in City

2011-09-24T10:24:00.004-04:00

This was a prominent headline in Maine today. A black bear gets herself up a tree in suburban Portland, finds herself surrounded by police, starts to act "a little strangely," takes off for the woods nearby, whereupon she's shot by a game warden. Apparently, there was menace to people and traffic (!), and no time to wait for a tranquilizer gun. Even if a tranquilizer gun had been available and the bear returned to the wild, a spokeswoman for the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife said they couldn't risk, since it's now bear season, "having a hunter harvest it and ingest the tranquilizer chemicals." The clearance rate for those chemicals was not given.

Here's an alternate scenario.

"Suburbanite Killed in Country"

A pale accountant goes on a hike, finds himself surrounded by wildlife, starts pointing his cell phone wildly about and crying for help, tries to climb a tree, whereupon he's dragged back and mauled by a moose, a black bear, and two crows. "He was a menace to the kids," said "Bull" Alces, spokesmoose for the community. "That cell phone could have been a gun. Even if it wasn't, he could have been calling hunters. There was no time to return him to the city. We had to eat him."

Progress

2011-09-20T12:05:00.000-04:00

For most of the past decade, we've been watching the very slow development of 6 acres of former mixed woods on Lucia Beach Road. I'm pleased to report excellent progress this summer, i.e., a house finally going up after all those years of fits and starts and tree cutting and brush clearing. As you can see by these pictures (I apologize for their quality - they were taken by me on my Blackberry, not by my usual expert), what we have here is a great improvement over those messy woods. Note the strong clean lines, replacing helter-skelter tree limbs. Note the square design, like nothing in nature. Note the height, better than any tree for viewing the distant ocean. Note the cleared area waiting for instant lawn. Note the concrete walls of the first floor, impregnable against marauding chipmunks. Note the remaining birches, now so artfully displayed. Note the great expanse of land cleared of pesky life, waiting for more progress.

Overnight

2011-09-16T16:01:00.001-04:00

One evening it's foggy, wet, humid, warm. The next morning it's clear, dry, cool. The on/off switch between summer and fall has flipped overnight.

Not that there won't be warm days ahead. Hurricane season isn't finished, for example. But this was the magical moment when the grasshopper starts to panic, when shorts and tees are worn not for comfort but in defiance, when one concedes to a new world by putting an extra blanket on the bed (but not turning up the thermostat, oh no, not yet allowed).

In Maine that moment used to happen in late August. It seems to get later and later; we're halfway through September now, and the end of official summer is almost here when Canada finally flips the switch, and that makes us more like Connecticut, or even New Jersey. I'm attributing this assault on our character to climate change, or more precisely and less controversially, to more hot air blowing up from the south. Any allusion to Washington, D.C. is purely geographical.

Whatever the cause or the circumstance, today one feels that overwhelming blend of excitement at the purity of the season, and of anxiety (well, not really anxiety, more annoyance) at the idea of sleet and snow and cold in the future. Silly ant, to worry about what's not here, and won't be here for a long time.

However, it is also perfect weather to go out and replenish the woodpile.

Loons

2011-09-14T09:54:00.000-04:00

The usual confederation of ducks in the cove was replaced the other afternoon by an alliance of loons. There were four of them, and in contrast to the loose chaos of their cousins, always diving and squabbling and paddling helter-skelter, the loons' formation was tight and geometrically sound, a kind of diamond shape going forward. Occasionally, one would turn up its white belly to groom, seeming to capsize in the process, and the watcher remembered again how sitting so low in the water masks their true size. Two had classic, strikingly beautiful markings in black and white. Two had markings slightly duller, and one was tempted to think that these were the females, and that the alliance was an afternoon outing of couples. The sex of loons, however, is not easily distinguishable; males do not show off . The change in markings occurs with the change of seasons, as the loons leave the inland lakes for the ocean. It did seem to be an outing, however. They moved almost imperceptibly (each animal should have its own jargon for its behavior - the words amble or paddle or meander don't quite fit here), staying together, toward the south. No other creature can be so calmly wild.

That half-hour of watching loons was a most subtle tonic at the end of summer. There's no need to panic.

Department of Environmental Peculation

2011-09-11T10:24:00.000-04:00

Here is a list of Patricia Aho's clients in 2010 when she was a lobbyist before the Maine legislature (Press Herald story 9/10).

auto companies
American Chemistry Council
American Petroleum Institute
Casella Waste Systems
Dead River Co.(heating oil)
Poland Spring
Verso Paper

Ms. Aho is Acting Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection.

I suggest that DEP changes its name at the end of September. That's when the Senate is expected to confirm Governor LePage's nomination of Ms. Aho to be Commissioner. That's when the probability increases greatly that those chosen to protect our resources become those empowered to steal them.

A tale of two women

2011-09-08T11:50:00.000-04:00

The news this week that Roxane Quimby has secured another almost 1,000 acres near Greenville and Baxter State Park is almost insanely pleasing. It's hard to describe the feeling: I don't live particularly near the area, I've visited it only once, I don't work to save like I do land closer to the coast, yet I guess you only have to visit once to understand. It's elemental to the core. The forests of hardwood and softwood; the fast, clean, rejuvenating rivers; the meadows of berries and grass; the big lakes full of mystery, the small ponds full of calm; the wildlife, so much of which is endangered; the hills and mountains rising like temples of a different time - at least to me, this landscape makes us see our place in the world, or what our place could be, more than any in the world. I love the Maine coast, but it is alternately precious and overwhelming. The woods are inspiring. Probably this feeling has a lot to do with the seven summers I spent in the Michigan north woods during a lousy time of adolescence. Did you know that a trout stream can save a teenage soul?

What a wonderful contrast to the actions of another Maine woman in the news! See Colin Woodard's piece on the sleazy tactics of the American Legislative Exchange Council and its Maine representative Ann Robinson - shameless mix of lobbyist, lawyer, and LePage's pet.

http://portland.thephoenix.com/news/126378-lepages-koch-brothers-connection-revealed/

Adventures in contentment

2011-09-03T16:31:00.000-04:00

I'm re-reading E.B.White's essay collection One Man's Meat for the umpteenth time, mostly because there's always something new to think about. This time I see that he quotes a professor and critic named Morris Bishop, who apparently said, when he heard of EB's plan to move to Maine, "I trust that you will spare the reading public your littleadventures in contentment."

Isn't this every writer's fear, to be hacked at the wrists for lowering oneself to a state of happiness? One should grieve for the world, engage in it, save it, not hie oneself to some far-off shore and write about chickens. White felt the criticism especially keenly, as the Great Depression was still killing people and events in central Europe were killing even more. But he had the satisfaction of having his book distributed to the troops, and of receiving praise therefrom, and understanding that his wonderful blend of nostalgia and savage truth meant more to them than any number of wool socks.

And today, when the Obama administration is building pipelines to encourage our addiction to oil, not to mention the ravishment of the Alberta tar sands, and is relaxing air quality standards, and is granting deep-water drilling licenses, let us re-read White's essay on Walden, specifically his address to Thoreau upon reaching the house site: "There were the remains of a fire in your ruins, but I doubt that it was yours; also two beer bottles trodden into the soil and become part of earth. A young oak had taken root in your house, and two or three ferns, unrolling like the ticklers at a banquet. The only other furnishings were a DuBarry pattern sheet, a page torn from a picture magazine, and some crusts in wax paper."

This is the kind of despairing exhilaration that great writing can produce. Adventures in contentment indeed.

Blackberries

2011-09-01T15:33:00.002-04:00

Compared to the relative scarcity of the wild raspberry in these parts this summer, there's a profusion of blackberries. They grow here along the roads, on the sunny side, in somewhat isolated groups of two or three plants that are somewhat hard to see among all the tall weeds. (I've heard tell, from my adventurous daughter, that in some glades in the real woods, they take over in masses, but the pleasure of one's gorging is sometimes blunted by the presence of bear scat.) At this time of year each branch holds all three colors of ripening, white, red and black, but not all the black ones are ready to eat. You have to pick the fattest ones to get any taste of sweetness.

Unlike its three more famous cousins, the strawberry, raspberry, and blueberry, the blackberry is mostly neglected. Its seeds are quite fearsome for its size, sticking in your teeth with great tenacity (and serving well as spitting missiles once you pry them out). It's not terribly sweet, so it doesn't cater well to John Q. Public, which is to say that huge, overgrown, monstrous varieties are not common in supermarkets. Its taste is subtle, not blending well with milk and cream, or lard and flour. Therefore, one must love it in season and treat it kindly and purely. I eat a few on my late-morning walks, a slightly exotic amuse bouche before my slightly pedestrian lunch of sandwich and yogurt and fruit. It's a gentle taste, perfect for the end of summer.

So it was a good walk, with the blackberries, and three deer strolling across in Bay View Terrace in nicely spaced succession (I started to wonder how many deer would actually come out of that phone booth) before bounding into the woods, and two ospreys perched at the top of dead trees, screeching, and a number of bright monarch butterflies to say farewell to August.

Mosquitoes

2011-08-30T15:39:00.004-04:00

Every once in a while, I think to mention the fact that it's been a mosquito-free summer on the coast, in spite of the deluges of spring. Then I forget, because how can one remember what isn't there? Well, today I remembered the mosquito. Wow.

Irene must have brought them from the south, or at least excited them out of some state of hibernation. I was doing yard work, and watched them swarm out of the grass, riled by the rake or something, out for blood and retribution. They found it. I calculate that several thousand eggs would be laid by those successful females, using my blood. Yes, it is only the females that bite; they need blood proteins not for food but to develop their eggs. For food both sexes eat nectar (how sweet).

At best, the mosquito is a completely useless animal. Not even birds and fish would miss them - mosquitoes are a minuscule part of their diets. At worst, they infect hundreds of millions of people with malaria, dengue fever, and yellow fever. It's rare that a creature of nature has no benefit. Even politicians do some good, here and there.

In effect, I've found that nothing that buzzes or whines is any good - not mosquitoes, wasps, flies, historic biplanes, or Republican presidential candidates. Don't you wonder why there are these evolutionary (or creationistic, for that matter) dead ends? Michelle Bachmann, who seems to have a direct line to God about his use of earthquakes and hurricanes for retribution, might know. Even better, let's ask Rick Perry - he was autographing Bibles recently, and one can only assume he signed as Its Author.

Storm

2011-08-29T14:15:00.004-04:00

If you're an alien just landed on Maine's midcoast this morning, you would see little evidence that a big storm has passed this way. There are a few twigs and leaves on the lawn, the surf's up and making noise, the sea's color is browned near the shore and over the ledges where the rockweed is a bit roiled up, a lobster buoy floats 10 feet from shore. On a walk to Lucia Beach, you would see a few limbs fractured, and on Bay View Terrace, a tree fallen down and cleared away from traffic. In the cities to the south, you would see a lot more, a lot of trees down, for example. Granted that Irene's winds were a little stronger down there. Yet how much of the problem results from the essential rootlessness of city species?

Irene made some of those species prepare the French Toast defense (buy scads of milk, eggs and bread). Others did windows, filled tubs with water, stored lawn furniture, pulled in boats. Some of this was actually needed, but everyone got a good scare, thanks to the incessant blare from media screens. Mainers were reported to moor a few boats a little more tightly. I like to think that the cold Atlantic protects us from many southern things, including monokinis and beach volleyball.

Being less than a Mainer, I took my scare manfully, wasting time inside like a good boy, unable to focus, but at 4:00, seizing a break in the wind and rain, I went for a fast walk, worrying only slightly about our strong-rooted trees. By 5:00, the sun came out for an hour of cocktails on the deck.

Haiku for Irene:

Storm fizzles, only drops

Pine debris in G&T

Needles seeking kin

Oh gee, I almost forgot to point out to you the best feature of a hurricane's aftermath. A warm, breezy, clear, sunny day, and the prospect of a whole week of same, to be enjoyed equally by city and country and alien folks, I'm sure, but for different reasons.

Calm

2011-08-27T16:05:00.002-04:00

It's a quiet day on the coast, foggy to start, a bit of sun at noon, fog again at 3:00, no winds, no surf, generally very calm (of course it's calm, it's the day before a hurricane).

"Calm" does not describe the media/government/grocery store frenzy, however, as Irene approaches. I succumbed a bit, having planned to stay in Massachusetts for the weekend but then imagining, just as all the media hoped I would, downed trees and power outages and storm surges and chaos and destruction. I scuttled north early this morning to protect the house as best I could (wandering around outside like Lear, cursing?). A number of signs along the highway helpfully advised me to "Make plans. Severe weather expected."

The media have us so well trained, don't they? Endless shots of boarding up windows, pulling in boats, emptying store shelves, people earnestly describing their preparations, or lack of them, and then saying, "But what can you do." When the disaster turns away, there is never any apology given, no shots of windows being unboarded up. When the disaster hits full force, the media also disappear (except for that one intrepid reporter being blown about near a sea wall or under a palm tree, possibly the same shots that were used during Bob, or Katrina), until it's safe, of course, and then the real frenzy begins, the long tracking shots of broken stuff, the awed but strangely self-congratulatory voice-overs, and the patently false sympathy.

I have somewhat more sympathy for government officials, who are just trying to do their jobs instilling panic. If they didn't over-react, over-plan, (evacuate, shut the subway, call in the Guard, invoke FEMA) they would be roundly roasted by, guess who, the media. Also, by Republicans who only like government when they need it.

We have no idea what to do with nature anymore. We ignore it, or try to control it, and when we can't, when nature proves to be too powerful, we panic. No one "rides out a storm" any more. I can't imagine old-time Mainers rushing to the general store to buy gallons of milk. They already would have had what they needed. They were prepared all the time for the whimsy and beauty and cruelty of nature, not just when the radio told them to be.

The surf should be terrific tomorrow, after a very calm and placid summer.

Ye Olde Walmarte

2011-08-20T14:44:00.002-04:00

I've previously mentioned the Super Walmart that's going to be built on Route 1 in Thomaston, and won't dwell again on the fact that there already is a Walmart, though just a regular one, in Rockland just 5 miles away. (I have this image of a huge map in Bentonville, divided into tracts and populated by battalions of flags in various colors - the map is titled Total Domination.) This week was to witness final approval of the project by the Thomaston City Council. It almost happened.

Besides kvetching about various tiddly bits like parking and run-off, the councilors in their aesthetic wisdom voted 3-2 for one more delay, this one to address a burning concern on lovely Route 1. They asked Walmart for a new exterior design that would be "more New England."

Hoo boy, is there some guilt finally surfacing? Isn't it a little late to have a conscience? What's wrong with brown?

I'm shocked this suggestion hasn't come up for all the businesses already operating on this execrable stretch of Route 1. But never fear, I have some suggestions.

1. for Lowes - re-shape the building to look like a friendship schooner.

2. for the McDonald's presently going up on the Lowe's parking lot - build a pleasant white clapboard house ala Freeport.

3. for the several car dealers - stock horses and buggies.

4. for the Hampton Inn - install some lace curtains, a widow's walk or two, maybe a turret; populate the lobby and every surface of every room with Victorian bric-a-brac.

5. for the multiplex cinema - convert to a drive-in, or at least hang a sheet on an outside wall.

6. for Appleby's - raise cows and chickens out back for the locavores.

7. for Touch of Glass Redemption Center - don't do anything at all, you're perfect.

8. Now for Walmart - make all shopping carts look like dories; devote part of the parking lot to a continuous yard sale; dress greeters in Pilgrim costumes; cut the big box up into a hundred boutiques; sell nightcrawlers.

OK? Now at least we won't look like Route 1 in Homestead, Florida.

Red sun in morning

2011-08-19T15:40:00.002-04:00

Dawn arrives today with a calm sea bearing a faint, ragged red path leading directly east. A sliver of sun peeks through the fog over Vinalhaven. The sliver is pink-red. Slowly the sun inflates out of the fog until it's round, now big because of the refraction of the atmosphere, now bright red because all the moisture in the air steers away the blue part of the spectrum. It is red like a sunset, like blood in the arteries. Maybe this is the shortest day ever, a backwards day, a warning to sailors and planners and marketeers.

For 10 minutes it could be true, for the sun takes that long to rise completely out of the fog, carving an increasingly sharp trail of light on the water, turning ever so slightly orange. Birds sail through the air, unconcerned with beauty. Boats cut through the water, concerned with commerce. Any humans watching think briefly about storm warnings, then give over to the vastness of sky, the perfectibility of ocean, the balance of a speck of rock held in thrall by 93 million miles of light. They might want to go backwards, or at least hold these minutes in hand. They turn away only when the sun escapes the fog in a violent yellow burst and becomes too bright to understand.

The fog and the humidity remain over the bay for the whole day. But there's no sign of a storm tonight, except over the wires.

Fox in the hen house, part 47

2011-08-18T15:19:00.002-04:00

It's been a slow summer for political outrage in Maine. We had the winter of our discontent, with the Governor's various outrageous actions (saying "kiss my butt" to the NAACP, getting rid of the labor mural in the dead of night, attempting to bring back BPA, wanting to open up 3 million acres in the north woods to developers). We had the spring of the lobbyist, with the Governor's special adviser and lobbyist for the fireworks industry writing successful legislation to legalize same, and the appointment of the chemical industry's chief lobbyist as acting commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection. Now the other shoe has fallen in the Department of Conservation.

I remember wondering in December when Bill Beardsley was appointed Commissioner. He had spent 23 years as President of Husson University and by all accounts had done a fine job there. The questions came from his years as head of Alaska's energy office and as a power company executive, and from vaguely remembered political positions - for offshore drilling, for more nuclear plants, for Industrial Wind, not to mention believing in creationism and paving over vernal pools - publicized when he was running for governor. But he's not been in the news, until now. Now the fox appears: he's working on an inventory of Maine's natural resources, all of it, pure drinking water, minerals like uranium (!) and gold, hydro- and tidal power, granite, wind, anything that can be exploited.

He claims it's just a tool to assure balanced use of resources. Almost worse, he calls it an "almanac." If I weren't so worried about its obvious potential mis-use, I'd rail about this insult to the English language, this cynical throwback to some Yankee state of heaven. For now I'll just say that Maine's current administration has little respect for the land or for the passion and intelligence of its inhabitants, and resolve to watch Mr. Beardsley closely.

Control

2011-08-15T16:02:00.002-04:00

News of a gyrating stock market, a wildly dysfunctional Congress, the death of a good friend's mother, disastrous storms, all the bad things that graze a privileged life, may in fact be good things. Not in themselves, as those who are not privileged know, but for the warnings they give. It's very useful to know that in the big things, humans are basically not in control.

For control freaks, for the ambitious, for CEOs, for the greedy, this is news they don't want to hear (but need to). And for those of us who live on a lesser plane, we also need to hear it. We may control much of our lives, the small and daily decisions of white or whole wheat, walk or drive, split some wood or weed the garden. We don't control the big stuff.

Some folks patch up that wound with religion, giving control to someone else (and put themselves in constant danger of hypocrisy). Others do their best with what they see and feel, taking comfort in the randomness of nature (and put themselves in constant danger of innocence).

A wild thing, whether the needle of a fir, a barnacle, a fawn imitating its mother's bounds, even a bald eagle in its majesty, has no control. It has no higher power, it adapts to chaos, it makes no plans for budget meetings or regional domination. It rests. It skitters and flows and respires. It seeks stasis in the middle of growth.

Living in the country provides such daily inspiration. Seeking a natural routine is the best answer to fear. When the news gets most depressing, think of the old joke: The easiest way to make God laugh is to show him your five-year plan.

Owls Head Transportation Museum, with Moose

2011-08-11T15:49:00.005-04:00

A banner week: for the first time ever (that's 16 years' worth of ever, and counting because I don't ever expect to again) I set foot inside the OHTM. Mind you, I don't tour it, just look in on the lobby, and walk around outside a bit where the antique-car-auction action is starting to build for next weekend. Motors aren't quite my thing, a necessary evil at best and often a curse. I'm not surprised to glimpse Model Ts and biplanes and muscle trucks. I am surprised to see a stuffed moose standing by the door just inside the lobby. One wonders who rode him around town, besides deer flies.

Walking back on Museum Road to my car, I'm equally surprised to see a path leading into the woods. It's an Owls Head exploration day so I take it, walking at least a couple of miles in those woods before finding the road again, where a sign enlightens me as to where I've been. It is the Paul Merriam Nature Park, adjunct to the OHTM. Ah, I say to myself, somewhat ashamed at having laughed at a similar sign next to the museum. There's more to this park than just a picnic table, a climbing structure and a quarter acre of trees. There's a couple hundred acres of very nice, quiet, undeveloped woods (and the trails total four miles, as I discover later).

Helluva world we live in. This largish block of preserved woods sits right next to two shrines of development, the OHTM and the airport. A museum dedicated to man's motors contains a moose, no better symbol of wilderness. (I guess there's some law mandating a moose in every Maine museum.) The walking trails, ironically, ban ATVs and snowmobiles. If I had been driving down Museum Road, I would have missed the trails. One doesn't know what exists in one's own backyard.

I applaud the conservation of this land, but is this the future of the environment, development "mitigated" by the setting aside of a few acres here and there, resulting in sterile ecological islands bounded by asphalt? Get out and walk, my friends, while you can.

Thriller

2011-08-07T15:17:00.003-04:00

A day of rain, although I'm not complaining about it as I did in June, and May, and April...

I've been thinking about why the sight of wildlife enthralls me so much. The latest was yesterday, a doe and a fawn running through the slash of those six acres being developed on Lucia Beach Road, a pair perfectly matched in color and grace and bounding jumps, one just smaller than the other.

So beautiful compared to piles of brush and rutted dirt and the ugly concrete foundation of a house on the rise.

So physical compared to the prison of mind.

So free compared to my slavery to mealtimes and TV times and the awful clang of the market-opening bell.

So full of awe compared to my mundane rounds of store and car and chair and bed.

So naked compared to my shame for warmongering and politics.

So simple compared to my self-consciousness.

So graceful compared to fumbling for glasses and toothbrush.

So hassled compared to my life of ease.

So vulnerable compared to my stronghold of walls.

So close to the divine compared to my distance from it.

So thrilling.

More raptors

2011-08-05T16:20:00.002-04:00

Little Island is a, well, little island in our cove. At high tide it's just about the size of a bus: a few rocks, bushes, and tufts of grass. At low tide it elongates into a kind of ugly, green-headed squid, proboscis pointing into the bay, tail pointing at shore (and nearly reaching it at full moon). It's not the kind of place I'd expect to see a bald eagle, what with the proximity to shore and the lobster pots all around and the airplanes overhead and the tourists in kayaks.

Yesterday, however, I wondered if I was suddenly transported to Alaska, for there were four eagles on the island. Three came in a group, possibly the same three as yesterday's fly-by, and then a fourth flew up. Almost immediately I lost track of two of them, the two adults, but watched the other two for some 20 minutes, just sitting there. Usually, the island has a dozen or so of crows, cormorants, and gulls - not today. The princes had claimed their kingdom. The only other bird around was a tern, confident of its maneuverability, I guess.

The two I watched through my binoculars were on the edge of adulthood, their heads still a little streaked with brown. One sat on a stone, the other on a piece of driftwood 10 feet away. I was of course entranced observing the birds doing absolutely nothing.

A couple of minutes before the phone rang, the two juveniles lifted off together and flew back towards the big bay. I'm afraid I was not very coherent in my conversation with the city, for the two adults - no mistaking their snow-white heads - came back, did a majestic fly-by, and disappeared.

I haven't seen the eagles today. Constant peering at the sky and keeping the binoculars close to hand hasn't produced them. The cormorants are back on Little Island.

Raptors close and far

2011-08-04T14:54:00.003-04:00

The other evening we attended a party for Coastal Mountains Land Trust, a 25th anniversary party for the land trust in fact, at a lovely seaside estate in Rockport. I could wax on about the 200-year-old house, the gorgeous gardens, the happy occasion, the people committed to such a good cause, but - you know me, I'd rather talk about the wildlife.

We didn't see the two ospreys and their nest, but the owner told us they have been there for 12 years, perhaps even the same pair. A couple of babies fledge every year. Of course, osprey are fairly common on the coast but in this case they nest in a tall spruce in the middle of the lawn, within 50 feet of the house. Clearly they tolerate the close presence of humans, and their noisy parties, including, according to the owner, a birthday do whose fireworks drove away the piano player but not the birds. The fishing must be very good off Deadman Point.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing three bald eagles above our cove. They were too high for me to get a good look, but two of the three were adults and the other a juvenile, it appeared. I imagine them scouting: no, not there, Junior, too many out-of-state plates; how about here? no, it may look good but see the house peeking out of the trees? there's some conservation land but it's not nearly enough; sorry son, I'm afraid there's just too much development of this side of the bay, let's go back to the islands and the preserves, after all we're not osprey who'll nest just anywhere.

I don't care how far an osprey lowers itself; I'm just thrilled to see one anytime, anywhere. That an eagle would come close to my house, my car, my pollutants is even more thrilling. We don't see bear or moose in this part of Maine, so raptors are our symbol for wildness. To me it's much less a matter of wildlife getting used to humans. It's that humans, through lands trusts and their benefactors, are working hard to keep wildlife wild, in all its guises.

Community

2011-07-31T15:50:00.002-04:00

I'm in Massachusetts for the weekend, after more than a month in Maine. I'm happy to say it still feels good to come "home," although one wonders if the definition is changing.

Last weekend, when we should have come back to MA (we were heat-wimps), Owls Head had its annual community potluck at the Old Homestead. I'd been thinking about going this year, but of course I wasn't going to be in Maine and the date never stuck in my head. I didn't remember until the morning of the day - a couple of people were starting to set up tables as the dog and I walked by. "OK, I'll stop in later," I told myself and proceeded home.

Needless to say, I forgot again. On our afternoon walk, Mia and I started to hear music as we walked up Canns Beach (I assume Mia heard it too - she didn't remark on it), saw the cars parked on Ash Point Drive, watched people dancing to a old-time country band and eating hot dogs and watermelon and clearly having a good time on a lovely hot day, and walked on by. Yes, we walked on by without stopping.

My excuse was the dog, of course, who would beg for food and get in the way of the dancing and be the object of gushing. The real reason was timidity. It's easier to avoid people, to shirk responsibility, at a party to stand in the corner looking at your host's book shelves. I kick myself for this behavior, so middle-school. Doesn't one ever grow up?

It's said that most people have an injury somewhere, sometime, in their childhoods that they're forever trying to heal. I expect a big one is the loss of community, either forced by circumstances or embraced by madness. My own sense of community only started to grow when we moved to Newton, some 20 years ago. I should be experienced by now, and also had those 30 years of the forced, glad-handing, screw-your-courage-to-the-sticking-point responsibilities of the business world, but I still find it difficult and intimidating to walk into a roomful (in this case, yardful) of strangers. Unless, of course, it's business, for which one puts on a different person. But slowly and surely, Maine is bringing out my real person for others to see, just as our friends and neighbors in Newton did. You have to talk to yourself, and scold yourself, to put yourself in the way, and you're always happy you did. Next year for sure I'll be dancing in a circle with strangers.

Murder on the rue Bay View

2011-07-27T15:51:00.005-04:00

The deer flies have been dreadful this year, even on cool, wet days such as yesterday. They were especially deadful (the mis-spelling is deliberate, for I have become adept at killing them) in the hot and still and humid days of last week. I'm aided in the murders by the dog, on our walks.

With her abundance of black, fragrant hair, Mia attracts the flies like, well, like flies to a honey. They are drawn to her as if she were a tiny black deer (dear?), which has the advantage that they leave the somewhat less hairy, somewhat more vindictive, character in this story for the most part alone. They circle her in squadrons, and seem especially bad where the trees overhang the rues we walk. To her credit, she mostly ignores them, or pretends to, except when they fly around her nose, whereupon she snaps her jaws and sometimes catches one.

This is not the murder part of the story. A fly buzzing in one's mouth is sufficiently disconcerting that she opens and releases.

I'm not so nonchalant. The flies' sole mission in life is to burrow under the hair and reach the skin and the blood. This is gross on several levels, not the least of which happens when a fly sneaks by all vigilance and crawls out when we're back home and flies to a window (why? trying to regain the wilderness?) and I smash it there, forgetting about the blood it's collected. So: in the first place, I hate to see my baby's blood needlessly spilled; in the second, prevention of same has become a sport to relieve the discontent of the day. I now look constantly down as we walk, waiting for a fly to alight and start to burrow. Timing and practice: move too quickly and the beast flies away. Move too slowly and the beast is gummed up in hair. My success rate for pinching out lives exceeds 50%. Next step in the game will be to try to pull off their right wings.

Can you imagine being so constructed that you'd brave anything - terrible fingers descending from above, Fox News fusillades - to achieve your purpose? You know you're going to die, or at least be terribly embarrassed, but you don't care, the blood, the prize, is so close. In this pestilential summer, is the danger worth it, ye plagues upon the body politic?

Post-post: a reader has commented offline that the description above hints at a comparison between deer flies and certain politicians. Since politicians are reptiles, any error in comparing them to biting bugs is mine.

White and Black

2011-07-24T15:49:00.002-04:00

Why is it that seagulls don't sit in trees? Something to do with their webbed feet, I suppose, although they seem to have no trouble with pilings and dumpsters and the roof line of Lowes. A tree is clean, without rotting crabs or Big Macs, so what's the point of spending time there?

I could ask, equally, why crows don't sit on water. Probably a good scientific reason there, lack of oily feathers, no diving gene, no ability to steal from ducks. No worms in the water, either.

The twain do meet on the shore, however. They seem equally adept at poking through the rockweed, cleaning up garbage, yelling at their spouses, hunting invasive crabs. And they don't seem to fight with each other, there's clearly enough food and room for all, and that's another reason to try to make the whole world an intertidal zone.

110 in the sun

2011-07-22T15:39:00.004-04:00

Everyone else in the country seems to be writing about the heat, so why not me? Of course, it's very unusual to have such temps as these in Maine, especially on the coast. It's very unusual to have almost no breeze outside. It's very unusual to have to resort to artificial breeze inside. Only now, at about 5:00 pm, is there a hint of a rise in wind and a drop in heat.

I was out with the dog this morning, when it was still tolerable, although I could have predicted just by the number of deer flies we attracted that more torture was forthcoming. When I came back, I saw that the thermometer read 110. Granted that it was in direct sun, and granted that I've suspected it of being over-excitable, but that was enough to keep us inside, with iced coffee and heroic fan, for the rest of the day. The dog got no second walk, but did get a run through water from the hose at the appropriate time. The humans got wet from mere sitting.

For a few minutes around 11:00, when the sun moved behind the spruces, Mr. Excitement fell to 90. There was hope (the house faces east, and mornings are almost always warmer than afternoons). But not today. The big fat wet muffin of air reclaimed the deck and pushed the thin red line well over 95 and even now, hours in the shade, he continues to flirt with three digits. We have taken, therefore, a leisurely afternoon, a few tropically guilt-free hours of reading and napping, as if we were on an equatorial beach. Let's set up those G&Ts, sir, and see about braving the deck, and order up some natural air-conditioning.

Pathetic fallacy

2011-07-19T15:18:00.002-04:00

My rant last week about the lack of raspberries this year is fallacious, although it remains to be seen how pathetically. There are a reasonable number now ripening and there's even the beginnings of a path through the canes, a sure sign that the experts also believe. The only question now is the sweetness and length of the season. Samples today were a touch sour.

The walk with the dog also included a display of tumbling in the middle of the lane. Out of the woods ran two juvenile squirrels (I'm assuming they were still young by their size and by the not-yet-red color of their fur), and they proceeded to roll head over heels in play right in front of us. It was a tangle and a tango, somersaults a due, a dance that might have been violent if it weren't so much fun. After a minute or so of tearing around on the tar, they chased each other back into the woods.

I see I'm wrong again. The words I used to describe that scene are humanoid, anthropocentric. Who can say if squirrels play? Have fun? Tango? I should try to use more neutral words, try to convey the excitement of this encounter sans sapiens. Do we really need humans in the middle of the raspberry patch?

Nature - and nature writing - doesn't need the human touch (or hammer, or earthmover, or stretched simile). Indeed, it seems to me that I am most human at two points anent any particular experience: during the act of watching that teenage squirrel-ness (or eating that raspberry), and while working as hard as I can to remove pathos when telling it for others.

Panic

2011-07-14T15:02:00.005-04:00

I'm starting to fret about the raspberries. The patch I walk by every day bears little resemblance to the remembrance of years past. What few red berries exist are small. The canes, which start to shrivel and die as the berries ripen, a most dramatic example of motherly sacrifice, seem more shriveled than usual. There are berries coming, still white, but they too seem fewer and smaller than normal. Some of the berries actually have blackened. Even worse, the usual pathmakers (those folks who live closer to the patch in many more ways than I do) have not yet broken the weeds and blazed the trails that allow the tyros in.

This potential disaster of a failed crop stands in contrast to the riot of growth everywhere else. Everything's so big this year. But perhaps what is good for flowers and weeds is not good for the more delicate of fruits. Perhaps weeds are choking the patch. Perhaps there was too much spring rain. Who knows the ways of wonders?

Or maybe it's just too early. Pray that's the case. I can't imagine a Maine July without that fix on my daily walks, that antidote to the deer flies, that precious handful brought back to the house like a love offering, and most of all without the sine qua non of pies, the single-crust beauty mounded with berries, simultaneously sweet and tart and the emblem of happiness. I suppose one could buy raspberries at a market. Such a pie would taste fine, but would not have essence of OFF, tinge of sweat, hint of pride, value of free, ache of back that comes with picking one's own. One might as well be in Massachusetts. As usual Thoreau, thinking about hot summers in Concord, said it best: "It is so much the more desirable at this season to breathe the raspberry air of Maine."

Fuzzy seeing

2011-07-11T15:24:00.002-04:00

No, it's not only the humidity in the air today, it's that I went for several hours without glasses. For no reason but great age, they weakened at the nose bridge and broke at the optician's and couldn't be repaired until the afternoon, leaving their owner to drive back to Owls Head without them. I did not cross any yellow lines (I think) and did not hit anyone or anything (I know), but there was a scary moment when a police car pulled into traffic directly in front of me as I was leaving the optician's, and I just knew that he knew that I was now a menace on the roads. He kindly did not stop for me.

Actually, it was rather pleasant, the rush of air on the eyebrows, the sun caressing bare temples. Things were just a little fuzzy, that's all. I could have distinguished a moose from a man coming down the lane, I could recognize cars and traffic lights and stop signs and speed limits and the latest price of gas - you know, the important stuff. So what that I couldn't tell a Silverado from an F-150, or make out the features of pretty women on the sidewalk, or read street names until practically on top of them, or on my walk see that woodpecker hammering away at a pine. Just practice for old age.

There was an odd feeling of partial nudity, a perpetual notion that I had left something important somewhere, and where was it? Not surprising for someone who's worn glasses since he was six, and not an unpleasant feeling at all, just a brief sense of discombobulation. That too is probably just practice for the hunt of magazine, slipper, watch, book, dog, wife in old age.

The second drive back from the optician's was sharpness regained, pick-ups picked out, youth resurrected, laws obeyed. Too bad. But at least the view of the islands in the bay is still fuzzy, a brief reminder of the freedom of forgetting.

Beginning

2011-07-09T20:04:00.004-04:00

We spent Friday afternoon on Deer Isle, the large island that marks the southern end of Penobscot Bay on the east side. It's only 20 or 25 miles from Owls Head as the crow flies, but given the way Maine's coast is drowned, the trip all the way up the bay, then down again is nearly 100 miles by land. Deer Isle definitely feels that far away. On the continuum of acculturation, yuppiness, gentrification, whatever you want to call this trend marching inexorably northeast up the coast of Maine, Deer Isle seems to maintain a envied position between the rapidly changing midcoast and the still-poor, still-wild, still-natural coast downeast.

It has its cultural, city tendencies. The Stonington Opera House is now a vibrant place of theater, music, dance. Stonington itself has lost much of the grit that we remembered. Haystack, the well-known arts and crafts school, is thriving. Galleries abound. The waterfront is tamed, mostly.

And it is gorgeous. Coves and inlets and harbors and islands spring willy-nilly into view. Woods are deep. Our tour courtesy of friend Kathie showed a remarkable blend of old and new, fishing and tourism, quarrying and painting. She herself is a perfect blend, from away, but living on Deer Isle for 3o years. I'm sure there is more strife than she lets on (her decade-long effort to overcome local biases and build one elementary school for the island's two villages, Stonington and Deer Isle, is an obvious example), but the evidence of one peaceful afternoon is pretty compelling.

For Cindy and me, it was also a trip into the past. Our very first vacation as a couple was to Goose Cove Lodge on Deer Isle, and it was the beginning of an love affair, for the state and for each other, now nearly 30 years old.

Kathie took us there to see what had happened to the place. It was in trouble for a while, she said, even closed briefly, but has been resurrected, and perhaps subsidized, by a very rich man with local connections, for whom a shrine of a table in the restaurant, complete with full table settings for six and fresh flowers, occupying the best view of the water, is always set in case he arrives without warning. This is a far cry from the plain, family-style dinners we remembered (corned beef, anyone?), but the cabins looked largely the same, and the view of the ocean was as tremendous as it was when it inspired two youngish Bostonians to come north. I've been infected with Maine since the age of 12, but there's nothing like the love of a good woman and a beautiful shore to make my plight one for the book of classic case studies.

To move, or not to move

2011-07-06T15:33:00.002-04:00

In any landscape, the eye is always attracted first to the things that move: birds, surf, blowing leaves, boats. You can't help noticing them. You flit from butterfly to birch. Does this mean we're innately restless? Is a perfectly calm ocean also perfectly boring? Is a hummingbird sitting motionless in a tree interesting only because we're waiting for it to resume darting and swerving? Would you rather watch TV or look at a Vermeer? Did we evolve to move, or stand still?

I'm not going to answer the questions, of course, mostly because we believe the variety of human response to be astounding, i.e., the modern man says there never is only one answer. (Also, self-incrimination is not pretty to view.) I will only mention what my mother said when I asked recently (and somewhat fatuously, considering she's 87) if she had any "fun" things planned for the next few days: "Oh, no," she laughed, pityingly, "It's so wonderful to stay right here at home."

Uh, well, OK, I can't help myself. I'm constitutionally unable to stop from also mentioning the beautiful lack of mowers, boaters, tanners, chain-sawers on a shore; and the wonder of a blueberry barren reddening in the autumn, the grace of a stand of spruce, an island poking through the fog, the other-worldliness of a page of type - all changing, to be sure, all evolving, but not moving from their blessed homes.

Birding hour, with G&T

2011-07-01T15:42:00.002-04:00

Now this is the way to bird watch:

1. Weather is finally warm enough to sit on the deck at 5:00.

2. Bring out a book and a crossword.

3. Also bring chips and G&T (no, not grackle and tanager).

4. Abandon book and crossword almost at once.

5. Watch the big birds on and over the water first - the duck armada, the crows swooping, the seagulls sailing and stealing crabs from teenage ducks. Hope for osprey.

6. Gradually get lost in the ordinary birds on the land.

7. Little wrens poke humbly in the newly mown lawn, one getting closer and closer (hold still!) until a breeze flaps the pages of the book and scares it away.

8. A robin takes its place, proud, upright, alert and not frightened by literature.

9. Friend hummingbird (I see it almost every cocktail hour in one tree or another) perches at the very top of the spindly spruce, quiet for the moment, replete with nectar (I hope).

10. A dozen goldfinches fly around like crazy, diving and chasing each other and tweeting (the good kind).

11. Have a second G&T to celebrate the little things.

12. Two mourning doves fly down the shore together.

13. Forget to listen to Maine Things Considered, forget for a while about dinner and responsibility.

14. Laugh at the faux birds coming into Knox Regional, going in such straight lines, having no imagination, boringly noisy, going to ground by computer and the need to be somewhere else.

15. Go inside only because it's getting cool.

16. Repeat tomorrow.

A question of crows, and rocks

2011-06-30T16:00:00.003-04:00

I woke, or was awakened, at 4:15 this morning, listening to crows. That's also a good time to listen to questions, and rather than do the hard work of trying to reproduce a fuzzy state of mind, I quote the following section from my book Saving Maine http://www.amazon.com/Saving-Maine-Personal-Gazetteer-ebook/dp/B0056J0PHI

"I don’t mean the questions you can look up on Google, or even those that some specialist scientist probably can answer, but the kind that might require mystery along with the facts. I also don’t mean the big questions, the meaning of life and the existence of God, for people are struggling to understand how to live in this world, and not any other. Those answers may be impossible to find, and any time put into the exercise seems wasted. We leave those questions to fanatics, and teenagers.
I do mean questions about the natural world. A crow in the spruce tree in front of my house hops up towards the top, branch by branch. Why does it do this? Why does it preen, stop, move up a notch, preen some more? Why this particular tree all the time, and why do other crows join it there? Many things about the crow are known, why it preens, what its multi-various calls signify, but do we know what makes it move, at what point it moves, why it moves, when no food or danger is in view? Things that move, like weather and wildlife and the human heart, have mystery, and are forever fascinating to the post-religious. All I want, and perhaps you, is to earn my place in a place by fitting in.
That’s where the things that don't move, like rocks and trees, provoke the deepest questions of all. They just are, and what does that mean? They belong to a place, as I now do, as the restless 21st century does not seem to. That’s the answer I know. I might understand the workings of a crow, given enough study. I might never understand the rocks of a beach, unless given eternity."

Therapy

2011-06-28T08:56:00.003-04:00

"They" say that to prevent brain rot one should be social, do crosswords, read, etc. May I add walking on Maine shore rocks to the list?

Having walked down to Crockett's Beach via roads, I'll often walk back along the shore. Sand quickly gives way to the familiar jumble of rocks and immediately all thought - worries about the family, memories of childhood, to-do-lists, joys on viewing bay and sky - disappears. What replaces it is a kind of animal consciousness of the surroundings at foot. In this business of movement, the brain starts making a thousand decisions unrelated to philosophy or politics. That rock? No, too tippy. There, a big, flat one. Then, too much slimy seaweed. OK, some green stuff on that one but looks mostly dried, won't slip. Pointed-top one, but try it anyway with right foot, ouch, teeter, wave arms for balance, find safe one for left. Small stones, gravel, avoid, makes too much noise for neighbors on bank above, foxes in den down the way. Huge boulder, too big to climb? no, stretch old muscles - yes. Go around. A thousand decisions in five minutes. Rest on granite ledge. Look out to sea, refreshed.

That's my prescription, doctor. Your feet have minds of their own. Exercise them. Walk the same shore hundreds of times on millions of rocks. Imagine trying to take the exact same route as yesterday. Give up in gratitude at the world's grace.

Little Women

2011-06-25T14:56:00.003-04:00

"So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men."

Excerpt from Wendell Berry's poem, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

It's a kind of reverse sexism, I know, but I really do think, along with Wendell Berry, that women tend to be better creatures than men. Let's just mention, for example, that companies run by female CEOs tend to be more profitable, that matriarchal societies are less violent, and that philandering is rare among female politicians. Sexual philandering, that is. Financial philandering may be another story, especially judging by the latest moves of the LePage administration in Maine, as reported by Colin Woodard

http://colinwoodard.blogspot.com/2011/06/maine-fun-with-fireworks-chemicals-and.html

First, the Maine legislature is about to legalize the sale and use of fireworks, thanks apparently to the work of Ann Robinson, chief lobbyist for the industry. Ms. Robinson also serves as the Governor's special advisor on regulatory reform even as she continues to lobby for numerous companies, and was co-chair of his transition team.

Then we have Patricia Aho, just appointed as Acting Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection (the previous appointee was a developer whose business conflicts forced him to resign). Five months ago, Ms. Aho was still principal lobbyist for the chemical industry.

I suppose women are equally entitled to lord it over, rake it in, and share the spoils of government as men have been doing for centuries. Their talents as lawyers and shadow-writers of legislation and biceps sockers and arm twisters should be equally recognized. Who am I to judge what circumstances of poverty or discrimination motivate Robinson and Aho? I just wish they would practice their testosterone in New Jersey or Florida, far away from us romantics who believe in heroic women.

Reaction (II)

2011-06-23T09:23:00.005-04:00

Back to socks, jeans, and sweatshirts: the weather page on Village Soup shows rain and cold through Sunday. I know summer is short in Maine, but this is ridiculous.

Or not. The firs and spruces on Sheep Island across the bay glow in the low-hanging clouds, nearly fog, slightly lit by a little brightness on the horizon. Flowers blaze away in the grayness, drinking in the rain. Grass looks even greener than yesterday. Air traffic is curtailed. I'm planning on being terribly productive today: no drooling on the deck, no aimless walking in the sun, no staring into nothingness. It's a soft and gentle day, and there are no wars or tornadoes or floods in the immediate vicinity.

Beauty is bought by judgement of the mind, to paraphrase Shakespeare, and while the eye has to look a little closer on the so-called gloomy days, the mind will find beauty in spite of the facts. Optimism like this may be a chemical reaction, a set of pre-determined pathways run by genes and their messengers, but it may also be a matter of will, determination, faith or any other inexplicable, non-scientific chimera. Fog is a natural home for optimism - you can imagine all kinds of wondrous beasts wading in from the sea to embrace you.

Reaction

2011-06-21T15:36:00.005-04:00

In some kind of response to the long, cold, wet winter and the short, cold, wet spring, the flora of summer are bursting with life. I can't remember such a flowering: the lupine spread lushly on meadow and roadside; the beach roses are as big as your hand; the grass and weeds and trees are deeply green; late-blooming lilac bushes are so heavy with flowers that the branches bow to the ground; the ferns are huge and sensuous; little yellow flowers teem perfectly where they should be (buttercups) and grossly where they shouldn't (dandelions); the profusion of poppies makes me drunk just looking at them; some hostas are sprouting bushy purple flowers I've never seen before; but most of all, the rhododendron bushes are so full of pink and red that you can't see a bit of green. I'm lucky enough to see them twice in glorious bloom, for a couple of weeks in MA and now a couple of weeks in ME. Every bush is a bouquet packed for a lover.

I'd like to say we deserve it. I'd like to say that nature took pity on its conscious denizens and provided some recompense for their long-suffering. I'd like to believe there's purpose to all this fecundity. But that would be a mistake. Can you imagine a world in which humans mattered so positively? Almost as scary as the one in which we matter so negatively.

I suppose the perfect growing conditions are just a chemical reaction, the flowers' colors merely a lure for pollination. I suppose, equally, that the sharp catching of breath and the warm glow enveloping the heart and chest and the eyes so full of joy that they water are also just chemical reactions. Maybe so, but not on a fecund summer solstice day when the debauchery of flowers beggars all science.

Saving Maine

2011-06-19T14:01:00.003-04:00

My nonfiction book, Saving Maine, is now published on Amazon for the Kindle. Here's the link:

http://www.amazon.com/Saving-Maine-Personal-Gazetteer-ebook/dp/B0056J0PHI/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1308505567&sr=8-2

The picture was taken by Cynthia Dockrell and shows Daicey Pond in Baxter State Park, looking at Katahdin. A glorious place and an inspiration.

Capitol for a Day

2011-06-18T16:14:00.003-04:00

The Governor was running around the Midcoast yesterday, being ferried from business to business in his Capitol for a Day program. Had I been in Maine, I could have caught him at Windjammer Cruises in Camden, Dragon Cement in Thomaston, O'Hara Corporation in Rockland, or even in Owls Head at the Breakwater Vineyards. I would not have seen him at a land trust office, a half-way house, a hospital, a homeless shelter - people there would be, well, inconvenient, and worthy not of help from the state but of as much new legislation as possible to deny help.

While he was away from Augusta, the Maine House (no debate) and Senate (31-3) passed a non-binding resolution, to be sent to the US President, Secretary of the Interior and Congress, stating opposition to the idea of a national park in the Maine woods. No explanation, little discussion, overwhelming support. I'm dumbfounded - do these legislators really represent the people of Maine? Or is it a case, once again, of special business interests influencing the process? Which group drafted the resolution? The paper companies, with their out-of-state owners? The developers, also from out-of-state? Roxane Quimby, with her stated desire to seed a national park with her 70,000 acres, must be a scary woman to inspire this resolution, more nonsense from an Administration (you just know LePage was behind it) much more interested in the negative than the positive.

Or maybe I'm just dumb, out of touch. Maybe the people really don't want it, maybe the legislature really is doing its job. I think it's more likely that a way of life - logging, hunting, independence - is doing battle with a quality of life - clean air and water, perpetual forests, mystery - and neither side admits that their ultimate goals are the same. How about Capitol for a Day at Big Niagara Falls in Baxter State Park?

Graduation

2011-06-13T16:50:00.003-04:00

My daughter Emma graduated from Union College on Sunday. The rain held off, Judy Woodruff and Marvin Bell gave inspiring speeches, and friends and relatives (including 170 years of combined grandmother-ness) made the occasion even more special. A tremendous thing, these small, liberal-arts colleges - it makes one very hopeful for the future of the world. And not a little proud of this graduate's many accomplishments.

Purple

2011-06-07T15:41:00.003-04:00

It's the time of year when passions run high, the rhododendron (purple tending to red) just starting to burst, the lupine (tending to blue) halfway exploded, the lilacs (just plain perfect purple) in full bloom and glorious scent. The morning was so brilliant I wanted to put on a purple robe and swagger about. June was made for all kinds of life-changing events, like graduations and weddings and sitting outside without a sweatshirt.

Although this being New England, with its vestiges of royal British turpitude, things change. The wind switches to the southeast off the water, high clouds at noon drop the temperatures a bit more, and optimistic shorts become practical jeans. High-born thoughts turn to lunch. The lawn suddenly needs mowing. The poppies put off their opening for another day.

But the whole hot and passionate summer lies ahead, when nobody in Maine needs a purple robe to feel like a king.

Peace and quiet

2011-05-31T16:09:00.005-04:00

Somehow I missed the announcement in April that Maine is the most peaceful state in the union ( http://www.visionofhumanity.org/info-center/us-peace-index/ ). The US Peace Index, being brand-new, must not be on the journalistic radar yet. The census, though, blinks constantly on the radar, as if its stats will tell us who we are. A recent release of data shows that Maine has held its place as the oldest state in the nation (as the journalists say) or, statisticians would say, as the state whose population has the highest average age.

These are of course related. Graybeards like us don't specialize in the violent crimes and handguns and incarceration stats whose lack is considered peace. We stand in line at Red's, not at gun shows. USPI is really talking about safety, I guess, not peace, and "safe" definitely describes Maine, where I'd bet a significant percent of the population leaves doors unlocked. (Most unlocked state in the nation....) I'm not sure about extrapolating from safety to peace. Personally, I give Maine a lot of credit for any ease of mind and belief in nature and quiet contemplation that I might feel, and it feels right (and a little jingoistic) that southern states have the least peace and northeast the most, but peace, like anger or allergies, is probably spread pretty evenly throughout the population irrespective of state lines or national statistics.

I won't argue with the US Census. What I'm having difficulty sorting out is the worth or harm of the age stats: young people leave and take their energy; old people come and bring their money. Maybe it makes no difference, as long as we don't become Fort Lauderdale.

Extraordinary

2011-05-25T15:23:00.002-04:00

One of my favorite sights is a bird resting on the tip-top spike of a fir or a spruce. Today it was a goldfinch on a spruce, an average though lively bird, a smallish, average, slightly droopy tree. The finches fly in and out of tree branches all day, and I'm trying not to impute too much poetry to those few minutes at the top of their world, but it happens more frequently than chance would assign, and I can't help but think that it is, at the very least, joyful. Hummingbirds do it too.

Two ordinary things, in a kind of heroic display. Let me insert a dash into today's title and wonder for a moment about the amazement of ordinary things. The Latinate meaning of "extra" is of course "out of" or "outside of," but I'm slightly obsessed these days with an alternate, more earthy meaning, i.e., "an additional helping" of the ordinary. You know, of course, that I mean natural ordinary things, not spoons or phones or dust bunnies or socks, although they too have a certain stolid utility, and maybe even beauty if you squint or imagine their molecules. Only natural ordinary things have the suppleness and complexity I crave, the extra-strength simplicity to stand up against wars and disasters and ennui. They are what they are, and yet they move and evolve and provide the comfort of fellow living things. Today I must say that blue sky (at last) and warm temperatures and the chance to spend most of the day on the deck or in the garden has made the ordinary things around me that much more special. But even the gray of fog and mist is a color, and a quiet and contemplative one, and is indistinguishable from blue in the eye of a sun or a moon or a god, as are that yellow finch in a tree and that pale human in a chair.

Sprung

2011-05-23T15:35:00.006-04:00

Grass loves it, was a foot high the other day before I mowed; slugs crossing the perpetually wet asphalt love it; weeds thrive, although today (50, foggy, fickle) even the dandelion flowers were closed up; dealers of fossil fuels are cackling in their counting houses; it just slides off the eiders' backs; moss is in heaven; bottlers of windshield fluid and rain gear pad their IRAs; people who blog about the weather commiserate gleefully...

Sunscreen makers hate it; Arizonans in New England on business stand amazed and cold; trees refuse to leaf out all the way; I saw flowering daffodils on my walk today (what month is it anyway?); birds seem quieter, a little indifferent, depressed, or is that my %$#@& pathetic fallacy talking; lovers of May can't believe it; even Homo Maine-iens, usually so optimistic and giddy, despairs a little...

This delayed spring, this missed spring, this we're-jumping-right-to-summer spring is one for the ages.

Here's a reminder of what blue sky looks like (we had to go to the Netherlands for our spring this year), also a couple of tulips.

Enraptured

2011-05-21T17:35:00.002-04:00

Hallelujah! May 21 arrives and at least one person is transported to heaven - me.

Back in Maine after nearly a month elsewhere, back to weeding and gardening and walking and listening to the fog horn and smelling the ocean and gazing in rapture at the pointed firs on the shore.

Netherlands

2011-05-11T14:43:00.000-04:00

Just back from 10 days in the Netherlands, and a greater contrast with Maine one could not find.

Maine is almost twice as big, but with only about 40 people per square mile. The Netherlands is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, with about 1,000 people per square mile.

From morning to night, Amsterdam was as crowded as the Rockland Lobster Festival. That may be because the temperature was in the 80s and everyone was out.

The Netherlands is heavily industrialized (but also has some 3 million cows and sheep).

There is almost no poverty, at least as we know it.

It is flat, flat, flat. In Maastricht, though, we did climb a "mountain," Sint Pietersberg, one of the highest places in the country at 300 feet.

The Dutch tame the ocean, Mainers fight it.

If there weren't dikes, two-thirds of the country would be under water.

In Maine the thrilling sights are rural. In the Netherlands, they are urban - Rembrandt's House, the Anne Frank Museum, 17th century canal houses, sitting in an outdoor cafe and watching the world, in all its variety and purpose(ful)(less)ness, go by.

The best part of the trip? We kept ourselves so cut off from newspaper, radio, TV and the Web that we didn't know that bin Laden had been found and killed until 6 days after the fact. The joys of getting away - summer in Maine, here we come.

Value chain

2011-04-27T14:54:00.003-04:00

In her lovely book The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, Elisabeth Tova Bailey mentions one of the ironies of nature: those species lowest on the food chain, the microbes and worms and molluscs and insects, not to mention plants, contribute most to the construction and maintenance of the planet and would be missed the most; those species highest on the food chain, the mammals and of course humans, contribute least and would hardly be missed if every one of us died. In fact, humans contribute most to the destruction of the planet. The acme of evolution seems to be leading to the nadir of the world.

Even more embarrassing, most species have been on earth far longer, are far more diverse and profligate than Homo sapiens. We're a bit of a blip, yet a blip with the power of a million atomic bombs. Our little Holocene epoch of geological time, our little 12,000 years or so, is killing off species at a faster rate than ever before. What makes us think we're invulnerable?

It seems to me it wouldn't take much to return humans to a position of real power. How about being impressed not by a Lexus but by a snail? How about de-gassing vanity? Just a little rebellion, perhaps, against all the traditional philosophical systems that encourage feelings of power and glory and this nonsense of the Great Chain of Being. Maybe a dash of consciousness about self-consciousness: the thing that allows me to reflect on these issues is the same thing that puffs me up and blinds me. Maybe put your watch in your pocket. Help an old species across the street. Stop and smell the prose. Love thy nuthatch as thyself.

Merely a few minor suggestions....

Or just take a walk through the woods and along the shore, imagining the incredible lives all around and below and above and behind and beyond in time and space.

Creative Economy

2011-04-24T16:23:00.002-04:00

The huge paper mills in Millinocket and East Millinocket are quiet. Once the largest in the world, they have been shuttered, to the devastation of the local community and its tax base and its work force. The devastation they themselves produced - the clear-cutting, the chemicals, the noise - has in turn devastated the lives of the town people, perhaps forever. In the world of the mining of natural resources, one apparently lives and dies by the sword.

The towns are not sitting back and capitulating. Many people are trying still to save the mills, including US Rep. Mike Michaud, who grew up working there. The high school seeks to remain open by recruiting paying students from China. But most are hoping for succor from new sources of cash, from a more creative (so-called) economy. In this part of the Great North Woods, so close to Baxter State Park, gateway to 10 million acres of the Unorganized Territories, this is code for tourism.

Unfortunately, in most people's minds, a tourist is not a person particularly interested in local flora and fauna, or hiking, or beautiful vistas, or local history, or wilderness experiences, or even local people (except as "help"). A tourist these days is someone from the city who complements an hour or two of mental or physical exertion with utter luxury for the rest of the day. He wants a hotel with spas and lobbies and soft beds, a suitable collection of restaurants, and shopping if it rains; and if he does go out into the wilderness to see a loon or a moose, he wants a guide. This sad state of affairs is the same all over the world, from Azerbaijan to Zanzibar. Every city council, every tourist organization, every government produces the same plan - a luxury resort, or two, possibly with an "eco-center."

Judging by recent news reports, Millinocket seems to be no different. I would hope that Maine might be a little more creative in this transition from exploiting the land, for example, with real eco-tourism, or support for local arts and crafts, or sustainable farming. But as with Plum Creek on Moosehead Lake, and the Modena family's wish to develop the incredibly beautiful Schoodic Peninsula, the "quiet" side of Acadia National Park, Millinocket wants a quick fix to its troubles. Say a resort does get built. After a certain hoo-ha, after a few construction jobs, how will it really benefit the people? The jobs on offer will be mostly menial; the real money stays out-of-state. The tax base may increase; the people base does not. And who's to say people will actually come, when every other destination is offering the same formula? With better weather?

Maiden Tiff

2011-04-19T16:09:00.003-04:00

I'll never be able to climb Maiden Cliff in innocence again. It was bad enough with that young maiden falling to her death in the 19th century. It was bad enough that the large white cross raised in her memory stuck in your view and reminded you on a beautiful Sunday afternoon that you hadn't been to church in ages. It was bad enough when you walked to the edge and had to imagine falling 800 feet. Now we've got a tangled murder/suicide/marital tiff/clumsy husband/weird wife story to sort out.

Every other day a new story wrinkle emerges. First the couple just fell off the mountain, the wife somehow being able to walk and flag down some help for her husband. Then she accuses him of hitting her on the head with a rock and pushing her over the edge. Then she says he's involved with another woman. Then she says her recent inheritance of $4 million from her father's estate is a motive. Then she says he's tried it before, by falling off a ladder onto her, and by employing the same rock trick on the top of Mt. Battie.

All he says is that he blacks out a lot (his name is Black, after all) and doesn't remember. All I say is, Why is she climbing mountains with this guy? and How did he manage to fall as well? and What would be a suitable monument to stupidity? Might as well put it up and ruin the view forever.

Let me count the ways

2011-04-14T14:55:00.002-04:00

Bullfrogs croaking in the marshy places and in the vernal pools

Blue wildflowers in a little wood next to a house (are they Baby Blue Eyes? I wish! What a name!)

Skunk cabbages in muck

A warmish day after yesterday's obligatory cold, hard rain off the ocean, perilously close to sleet

Clearing the gardens of their leaf duvets

The yellowish-green stubs of hosta and day lily

Turtles warming in the sun

Weeds

The robin scouting the bush next to our door for its annual nest, and periodically attacking the window above it, as if seeing a rival in the glass

The melting of the last of the snow pile at the end of the driveway

Sitting on the deck for a chilly five minutes, but sitting on the deck

Spring

It was a quiet week,

2011-04-12T16:34:00.003-04:00

for the governor of the fair state of Maine was on vacation in Jamaica. The embarrassing stories carried on, however: the US Department of Labor, which funded most of the cost of the infamous mural taken down by LePage, is suing to get its money back; Maine's attorney general says that LePage was only exercising the government's right of free speech (!) in removing it; a bunch of Republican (!) state senators penned a public letter asking the Gov to cool the rhetoric; some of those obnoxious rollbacks of environmental regulations are grinding to a halt. The continued banning of BPA, for example, looks safe, a double embarrassment, for the proposed new law was written by industry, then rejected by LePage's own party.

But these stories don't have the piquancy, the cringing fascination of the man in the flesh. Come back soon, Governor. We miss those rhetorical stink bombs, like the ones of the character sharing your initials, Pepe Le Pew.

Vulgar vibrancy

2011-04-06T15:25:00.004-04:00

I'd like to apply this phrase to our cold and slow-arriving spring and to the skunk cabbage pushing its energetic and slightly ugly way through the muck and melted snow of late winter. In the woods of Maine it's really the first sign of spring, generating its own heat to fight its way through the icy earth, from nothing to green in an explosion of cells. But the phrase does not originate that way. It was used in a recent email from the son of a dear friend, writing in the terrible weeks between the diagnosis of his father's brain tumor, and its excision.

"Vulgar," I assume, because of the base intentions of the tumor, and the crude, angry feelings spilling over everywhere; "vibrancy" because of the tremendous outpouring of help and hope from family and friends, and the chance to be with his parents and his brothers, walking on the beach, eating his father's famous stew, senses heightened and alive. Like most families this one is scattered, brought together principally by holidays, this time by an illness, scattered again after a successful operation, warmed by the blessings of this terrible curse.

The first sign of spring in Massachusetts is the crocus, fragile yet strong even under the snow of the April Fool's Day storm, clinging to color and joy. Vulgar and vibrant, hope is the thing with leaves. More power to us fools.

Sands

2011-04-02T11:03:00.005-04:00

If you look at life from the point of view of sand on a beach, high tides re-shape your surface twice a day. You are re-born.

Or they wipe it clean twice a day. You are obliterated.

Depends if you look at tides as half-full or half-empty.

On the one hand it would be great to start over all the time - wipe out all your mistakes, your disappointments, your failures. On the other hand, how frustrating, how shifting to see your best work wash away.

Art has waged this battle between change and permanence for a relatively short time. Before the 20th century, the world seemed to have a plan, or at least a rational system, behind it, and a painting or a book was created with some expectation that it would last. We don't believe that anymore. Many artists have become cynical, arch, self-referential, as if only what one personally feels or thinks could possibly have any relevance. They've lost their place in nature. They believe there is no reality worth showing if man-made or natural disasters roll so regularly through our times.

I think this explains, maybe only in part, the extreme popularity of TV crime shows, sci-fi movies, detective stories, thriller novels. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, people still want shape, they want beginnings and endings, they want a battle between good and evil that ends with a satisfying bang, not an artistic whimper. It hardly matters who wins, as long as something happens, with consequences.

Nevertheless, we can capture beauty, no matter how fleeting. If there's no obvious plan, then at least we can express common goals and feelings. I find this lacking in art these days and have started to read back in the 19th century again. Oh, and of course, those detective stories that slip in and out of the mind so easily, whose morals rise and fall with such satisfying regularity.

Leg of deer

2011-03-30T16:39:00.003-04:00

Well, somebody had a good dinner anyway, coyote or crows maybe, fox probably. We woke up the other morning to the sight of a deer leg on the lawn, upper half bare and stripped and gnawed, lower half still furry, with hoof intact.

Of course, we're not sure what a lone leg was doing in front of the house. Haven't seen hide nor hair of anything deer-like lately, definitely no carcass, and certainly nothing running around with only three legs left. Have seen a fox several times though, skulking about between the bank where it lives and the houses which it ignores, hence our theory that a deer has died in the woods behind the house and the fox and family somehow pried off a leg and carried it down closer to the water for a more pleasant alfresco dining experience.

You wouldn't see a stray leg in the city, that's all I have to say, unless of course it was human, on CSI. It shouldn't be startling to see red nature here, given all the wildlife close by, but our lives even here are pretty suburban and it's good to be intrigued again, if not a little frightened. The deer in question looked to be small, not that I'm any forensic expert, possibly a yearling from last spring, which somehow makes this more of a tragedy than any dismembered body simulation seen on TV. The death, probably cruel, of something so beautiful is a fitting close to a long winter. And the sight of the turtles coming out of the pond up on Canns Beach Road to bask in the sun balances that death wonderfully.

Open for Business

2011-03-28T15:51:00.002-04:00

A couple of weeks ago Gov. LePage unveiled a new sign on the Maine Turnpike, actually an addition to an existing sign. The existing one says, a little tritely but yet inspiringly, MAINE: The Way Life Should Be. The new sign under it, thriftily fastened to the other's supports, says, OPEN FOR BUSINESS. Fittingly, it's near the Kittery exit. I'd suggest one at Freeport and one at the Maine Mall to complete the ugly trifecta.

There is no new sign that says OPEN FOR LABOR. Indeed, the Guv has had a mural in his Labor Department removed, apparently for depicting working people in their work-a-day clothes to the exclusion of managers and owners and executives in suits. (You will not be surprised that once again the national media has picked up a LePage story.) And he had it removed in the dead of the weekend, when those lazy state employees and pesky media types don't work. The mural's whereabouts are presently unknown, but it's rumored to be headed for Portland, a place with a bit more sophistication and kindness than the mean streets of Augusta.

I guess this is another indication of the open season on ordinary folk, echoes of Wisconsin and Ohio and Florida whose chief executives similarly boast tax cuts for the rich and humiliation for the poor. This one-sided decision-making by CEOs, ruled only by considerations of the bottom line, preferably one's own, is exactly why business needs to be regulated and watched. Greed and power need to be checked. It's terribly ironic that the policies of the conservatives will hurt most, in both the short- and long-term, the very people who make up its ranks. In the sea of business, a rising tide lifts mostly yachts.

It's especially discouraging in a place like Maine, known for, utterly dependent on, the beauties of its natural, undeveloped environment. I blame no one in the desire for a better life; I blame anyone whose desires are contemptuous of the common good.

Judgment Day

2011-03-21T15:04:00.002-04:00

On Saturday, as I came through the South Portland toll booth on the Maine Turnpike, I saw five brightly and identically painted RVs lined up at the far-right booth. I was driving through the automatic lane on the left and caught just enough of the messages painted on each - "The End of the World...., May 21, 2011" to look them up later on Google.

Yes, according to Harold Camping and FamilyRadio.com, Judgment Day is scheduled for May. There's a 70-page brochure (I mean, tract) on the website, full of Bible verses and an impenetrable numerology of holy numbers, to prove it. Four such RV caravans are now travelling the country to spread the news. The New England mission included stops in Portland and Freeport on Saturday and Boston on Sunday.

I imagine the urgency of the message requires working on a Sunday. I imagine the lead driver at the toll booth negotiating a discount for his retinue, or perhaps mounting an argument for free passage, since... well, you know. I imagine that the millions to die on May 21 will include me, for driving straight through the E-ZPass lane, for failure to stop and consider my life. I imagine that "Camping" is a great name for this Project Caravan. I imagine Freeport was included because people seeking bargains are particularly suggestible. I imagine that the poor bastards in Japan, for whom May 21 will be May 22, have no chance of being enraptured (as if they didn't have enough problems). I imagine that painting the number 2012 on each RV in a red circle with a red line through it is a Christian idea of humor. I imagine God laughing. Isn't imagination grand?

Supermoon

2011-03-20T11:11:00.004-04:00

The term is terribly over-used, but the moon rise last night was indeed super. I lost about a minute of its entire glory, because I was expecting a rise directly out of the east, which would have meant that Sheep Island, or possibly Vinalhaven, would have hidden it for a bit. At 7:10 I got up to look more to the south, and there it was, already risen about a fifth of the way, huge and full and yellow-orange, coming directly out of the sea.

The moon last night was at its orbital perigee and thus closer to the earth than it has been for 18 years. I could tell, have seen a number of spectacular rises over the Bay, that it appeared to be noticeably larger, 14%, the scientists say. I watched it climb for a while, its rays lighting a path to the shore, trying to communicate beauty.

When I regained my senses, I thought about the precision of the numbers that allowed me this sight: rise at 7:09 p.m.; 14% bigger; 50,000 kilometers closer to earth. The moon rise would have been there without me, of course, but I thank science for its part of the experience, and for a thousand other measurements that allow us to swoon so passionately to nature. The way we live now is fragmented, abstract, divorced from feeling; let's celebrate whatever's necessary, even cold facts, to get us back to light, especially at a time when the news around the world, much of it a perversion of science and nature, is so dark.

Ides

2011-03-16T15:24:00.003-04:00

Well, they're done and good riddance.

"Ides" was merely the Roman calendar name for a day in the middle of each month (more or less corresponding to the full moon), either the 15th or the 13th, depending on the month, and the several days preceding it were described as VI Ides, V Ides, IV Ides, etc. So Ides is plural for a reason, not least of which seems to be to allow maximum bad news for the period, especially in March - and the news this March has been bad, from the terrible hourly shocks from Japan and Libya to the brutal cancer discovered in the brain of a dear friend.

I shouldn't be surprised. March is named after the god of war; Brutus and conspirators killed Caesar in March; March weather stinks; one gets a year older in March; there seems no reason to believe that a God could possibly exist. For the Mediterranean Romans March was the first month of the year, the beginning of their spring, perhaps the beginning of another season of war. The Roman Empire was hardly known for living in harmony with nature.

An earthquake seems random, a cancer seems personal. That's the trouble I have in sorting through the evils of the world, trying to decide, or even if it's possible to decide, between Fate and God. How much are we to blame for building nuclear reactors on a coast near a fault line, how much can we blame fate for individual suffering? How much is evil and how much is bad luck? A belief in the terrible beauty and brutality of nature helps with these questions, especially in a place you love, but just barely. Rome was not burnt in a day.

Dog Days of March

2011-03-12T15:46:00.002-05:00

March is not my favorite month in Maine, this admission from a man whose devotion to the state invokes wonder and snickers among his friends and family. March is cold, yet inconstant; icy and muddy simultaneously; has maddeningly brief hints of spring; boasts rain and snow and sleet and thunder and fog often on the same day. Further south one assumes that any lapse into winter will be brief; in Maine one assumes nothing, ever.

This brings me to the dog. She spent a number of days in Owls Head this month, and hated it even more than usual. Her tenth year has featured a ever-strengthening fear of the car; so 200 miles and some 3 hours means much trembling and panting in anticipation of the horrors to come. Once arrived, she combats the usual odors of predators, i.e., other dogs; from vantage points at the French doors and the top of the couch she keeps watch for deer and UFOs; she complains about the little weird red squirrels and the territorial crows. But the ultimate horror is the twice-daily walk. Not only do fearsome dogs bark at her from inside their houses, or even affront her dignity and personal space by sometimes appearing outside. Not only does she stop and look back every 20 feet, hoping for rescue. Not only does she dislike cold and rain and the harsh north wind that blows her ears straight back like ropes. But also there is ice!

Cryophobia has been building for some years. In the past I might slip a bit on a patch and she would notice and look slightly concerned before continuing to sniff whatever minute particle of news she was currently being distracted with. (I should have understood the depth of her neurosis when she would remember with a worried look the very spot of that slip for months to come.) But now, in Maine, in March, the dirt lanes have thawed and frozen several times and the ice is thick and one stretch of our walk is at least a hundred yards of hell. She stops and cowers and her tail is so far between her legs that she could almost chew it. To make any progress at all I have to coax and simper and yell and yank.

It's both pathetic and touching, this concern for my safety, this fear for her dignity. But then she's a pure-bred, nothing startling for us royals, please, let's just do the same safe thing every day, preferably in balmy, summery Massachusetts; while I am a half-breed, insisting in spite of my official address that the wilds of Maine are good for the soul. So winter battles spring, man battles dog, country battles city, and we all hope for August.

Coastal mountains

2011-03-07T15:50:00.003-05:00

I've seen them hundreds, maybe thousands, of times by now and it's always thrilling. Whether from Route 1 in Warren, or Ash Point Drive in Owls Head, or Route 17 in Rockland, or Park Street in Rockport, or Barnstown Road in Camden, the sight of Ragged and Bald, Megunticook and Battie and Beech reminds me that the Camden Hills are a special place. I can't say they're spectacular, like the Pacific Coast Mountains. They're not outsized, larger than life, perpetually snow-capped (except maybe this year). But if you've been away from Maine, or preoccupied with the ocean, or stuck inside by furious winter or capricious summer, that first glimpse of the hills brings you to your senses. They're so close to the sometimes frantic activity on water, traffic jams on Route 1, banks and restaurants and gas stations, and yet so far away, in another world of trails and trees and views and peace. People go to the tops of mountains for all kinds of reasons but the principal one must be to reanimate a clarity of vision.

At a time when forces seem to be gathering against clarity, against peace and quiet, against the environment, the preservation of these coastal mountains and places like them is paramount. Join Coastal Mountains Land Trust ( http://www.coastalmountains.org ) like I did, contribute time and money and energy. It's impossible to be mean-spirited at the top of Beech Hill.

Squall

2011-03-03T08:00:00.002-05:00

Around 4 pm the sky darkened. A bank of clouds raced in from the north and east, hanging over the bay with that peculiar look of a storm, hanging down in frills and shards. As the wind changed directions, from south to north, and picked up speed, the foghorn started to sound. The clouds quickly overtook the shore and the temperature dropped and the precipitation fell, lightly at first, then heavily and thickly. Twenty minutes later the clouds passed and the sun came out. The day had completely changed.

Fantasy helps in March in the north. For I deliberately thought of yesterday's snow as rain, of the horn announcing fog instead of dark, of the north wind bringing cool relief, not more zero-degree readings overnight, of this March squall if it were really a August summer fling, of urges and longings as if they were right around the corner.

Laughingstock

2011-02-25T15:39:00.003-05:00

While awaiting Gov. Paul LePage's next gaffe* I thought I'd take a look at the Maine Heritage Policy Center, the think-tank that seems to be at the center of state government policy, at least philosophically.** I was somewhat relieved to find no ranting right-wingers. It's all right-wing stuff, to be sure, proposing to slay the usual bogeymen of state government, welfare, and healthcare, and if the research is skewed, misleading, and somewhat distorted, well, I expect the left-wing centers do much the same. At least there was nothing embarassing on the site, no Glen Beck/Rush Limbaugh hate and invective. Public civility is still the Maine way, as Senator Susan Collins has been saying this week.

Unfortunately, those pesky news people won't let the Center alone. Last year the media were questioning its funding sources, which it will not reveal, whereupon speculation grew that the Texas Koch brothers were behind it; and wondering at the very active role the Center seemed to be playing in the election, which is against the rules for non-profits. This week some people were complaining that the Center's CEO has used state employee email lists for fund-raising, again against the rules.

All I ask is that the Center add some polish, as well as philosophy, to the Governor's image. As much as I enjoy the gaffes, I don't like the fact that the State of Maine is becoming the laughingstock of the nation.

------------
*two gaffes this week:
1. He doesn't believe in the research that says bisphenol A should continue to be banned - if microwaved it might give off "a chemical like estrogen, so the worst case is some women may have little beards." This story is now national.
2. He's proposing to split DHHS into two departments, health and human services, apparently not realizing that each would then need a boss, sub-bosses, paperwork, etc. etc. and making government bigger.

**The Center's CEO was the LePage transition team's cochairman.

Juveniles

2011-02-21T15:07:00.002-05:00

On Saturday morning we heard a larger ruckus than usual from the seven crows who patrol this part of the shore. They were flying around a fir tree at the edge of the bank, darting in and out of the limbs; one or two perched provocatively on the outer branches. We are not so adept as to distinguish between normal crow cacophony - kvetching or gossiping or arguing politics - and the coordinated calls that means an intruder is near. I looked more closely at the fir tree, indeed stared at it for while, and eventually saw a large brown shape humped on an interior branch. If you're patient and stare at almost anything in nature, eventually something happens, and soon enough the brown shape stirred and shook and flew off, crows triumphantly following. It was a bald eagle.

I had to look in the bird books to be sure, since it had no pure white head to make the ID obvious. Both Sibley and Stokes showed 3rd year, or possibly 2nd year, juveniles that looked like our visitor: large and mottled brown and white, its head more white than brown, its body more brown than white, well on its way to striking stardom.

It came back a little later in the morning. Out of the edge of my eye I saw something swoop down behind the bank by the water, and not re-appear. For a good five minutes I fought the urge to go out and see, but gave in, and like a juvenile myself put on snowboots and coat to walk to the water's edge. I just wanted to be sure and, truth be told, to observe it fly away from much closer. (Rather like throwing a stick at ducks to hear them quack and see them scatter.) The eagle was sitting on a rock, minding its business, alone, apparently out of crowsight, and of course it flew magnificently away as soon as my head came into view above the bank.

I'm not sure what brought it (actually, it was probably a male - it seemed a little too small to be a female, which is apparently noticeably larger) to this side of the bay. We seldom see eagles over here. They tend to populate the islands, unbothered by houses and wires and people peeping over precipices, where parental instruction in fish- and gull-chick-napping is easier to accomplish. Although it is school-vacation week....

He came back yesterday as well. I was out with the dog and watched for an entranced five minutes as he wheeled along the shore, hardly moving a feather in the brisk wind, hardly bothered by the crow patrol mobbing his flight, before he suddenly soared high above the woods behind us, leaving us, mere mortal and Corvus and canine, to wonder and marvel at such indifference.

Today, Presidents' Day, the eagle hasn't been seen. It would have been good to honor him again, alongside the other heroes and villains of the day. But then my view of the shore and bay is so narrow, so restricted, that a whole pantheon of eagles, maybe even bearing arrows and olive branches, could have paraded down the bay unnoticed. The crows continue to chatter, though, which means I've been able to get very little done. Like a distractible child, with my own kind of immature plumage, I constantly look up at every caw and shadow, seeking some magnificence just outside my words, some bigger world than mine.

US National Toboggan Championships

2011-02-15T15:49:00.003-05:00

Following the 21st annual USNTC, held this past weekend at the Camden Snow Bowl, here are the winners of my Best Name contest.

Two-person teams:

Gold - Soggy Boggin Boys

Silver - Dumb and Dumber

Bronze - Fat Bloated Idiots

Honorable Mention - Chute, I'm Out of Beer

Three-person teams:

Gold - Frozen Peckerwoods

Silver - PMS

Bronze - Junior Beano

Honorable Mention - What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Four-person teams:

Gold - Faster Than a Redneck

Silver - Internal Bleeding

Bronze - Four Wingnuts

Honorable Mention - Grandma Got Run Over By More Than a Reindeer

I'm sorry to report that none of my winners were actual (speed) winners but speed winners hardly matter in a race in which a few hundredths of a second separate the top spots, and only about a second separates first from last (of more than 400 teams). Creativity is much more rewarding.

I'm happy to report that the repeat winner of the Best Costume was a team from the Netherlands, which I guess makes the event an International Championship. See http://knox.villagesoup.com/news/story/toboggan-nationals-under-way-in-camden/380636 .

A couple of my winners, however, are past champions:

On deck

2011-02-12T10:02:00.002-05:00

This is the time of year when even those of us who don't mind winter (and occasionally love it) start to dream of spring. I'm looking longingly this morning at the deck. The sun has some power to it and the temperature is approaching 40 and I'm calculating the degree of stupidity involved in shoveling off the snow and sitting for a spell. A large fraction of stupidity is the element of being seen to be so, which would not apply today, as there are no neighbors, boats or planes to witness - just a few laughing gulls and of course my own self-regard. Which is enough to quell the impulse.

There are many places in the world like the beautiful one on the Merrimack River that Thoreau described as "places where one may have many thoughts and not decide anything." Mine is a view of the Maine coast, with just a book, a brain and a bay. The book is mostly a prop, and the brain actually turns mostly off and tranforms into an organ of sense, for a precious moment or morning apprehending the present and disregarding the future. The bay is the thing, a symbol of Other, or Beauty, or Danger or whatever helps a human ignore his strategic plan. Living in the future is a constant tension of decisions, how-tos, anxieties, and what-ifs, and the achievement of goals devised under such conditions is often as hollow as it is satisfying. It seems to me that a hour by the ocean is worth two on the moon.

Which brings me back to baseball, another harbinger of spring. What is sport, and in fact most recreation and play, but an attempt to live in the moment? Unfortunately, baseball lives in the past and the future: a recent study calculated that the amount of action in a typical 3-hour game totalled about 10 minutes. (I think this explains the obsession with the statistics of the past, and the ever-lengthening games as managers and players over-think the future.) These past few days the Boston Globe website has been displaying a digital clock showing how long before spring training starts, and it counts down BY THE SECOND. I guess you could call that baseball's nod to living in the present, however stupidly.

So the hype can never live up to the reality. Even worse, far too many people don't even properly recreate anything, but get their stimulus, their passion second-hand through a screen. I happen to get my kicks out of closeness to nature, but almost anything that gets a body out of its brain will do. Even if I re-create the world more and more in a chair, on a deck, in an essay, I believe I'm engaged, more in fact than ever. And if I indulge a little obsession with soccer or hockey on a screen, at least there's constant action to drive away the need to plan the morrow.

Escarpment

2011-02-10T14:11:00.002-05:00

An escarpment runs along the front of the house these days, a sharp, 2-foot-tall ridgeline of snow. There's only a couple of inches of snow elsewhere on the lawn, and indeed directly in front of the house, between it and the escarp, there is none, just the bare grass and moss. The wind has been playing at geology, making a miniature mountain range, or a glacier, manufacturing a perfect ridgeline unbroken except by one or two crevasses, whose flanks are white and pure but for the tracks left by rabbits, chickadees, those annoying little red squirrels, and deer.

I stand by the big windows and look more closely. At the base of the escarp the bare grass bears clumps of brown pellets, the strangely small scat produced by deer. The deer must be getting enough to eat, I think, even though the snow in the woods out back is deep. Is that why they are coming down to the house, to graze for a dessert of grass and moss and use the facilities? I haven't been in Maine for a couple of weeks; they must feel emboldened to ignore this human version of a deer yard - glass and siding and propane tanks, not to mention the deck, constructed solely for a purpose unknown to them: sitting around, drinking and eating and viewing for fun. Once or twice we've seen them this close to the house, but that was on August evenings and they were eating crabapples from the tree that brushes the house.

I'd love to see them this close in the winter, to see them standing behind the little barrier of snow, pawing at the ground, defecating. I won't, of course; now that I'm back, they will be frightened off by the lights and noise coming out of the human yard - the incandescence, the computer screen, the TV, the muffled voices of NPR announcing revolutions and realities. I wouldn't see them even if they did come. At night the windows are a deep black blank barrier separating our worlds.

But this morning they came anyway, three of them, not to the front of the house but wandering in back next to the car and the garage, perhaps wondering at the freshly shoveled driveway. A surge of joy jolted me. Magical things just appear in Maine, and this is true not just for the real things of deer and surf and loons in the cove, but also for the stream of ideas and images racing by and through and around my rocking chair. The elements are so much more accessible here even though we construct our houses and our psyches to protect us from them. It's as if I can dip in and out of a stream of life and maybe even capture a bit of it every once in a while in a word or a sentence. It's a feeling of being inside and outside at the same time, and that is especially useful in winter.

I realize those deer were hungry, wary, cold, unaware and undeserving of my joy, in fact completely unconcerned with the likes of me except as a danger. They exist in no way for me, but yet they are a blessing. Seeing them this morning makes it easier to bear this thing that humans do: climb up barriers and escarpments, fall down in rejection, get back up for another try.

Cheese Doodles

2011-02-05T15:43:00.005-05:00

The town of Thomaston, Maine is considering a new business development on a large tract of land on Route 1 near the Rockland line. Some five years ago Thomaston voters approved 150,000 square-foot big-box stores for that area, and almost immediately a Lowes went up to complement the car lots and redemption centers. This new development is for half-a-dozen businesses, including a Walmart semi-Supercenter. There have started the usual sequence of public meetings on design, traffic, and environmental impact, the usual press stories on citizen approval and outcry. Only one story that I've seen gets at the huge absurdity of this Walmart.

You could argue Walmart is already absurd. All these big-boxes are, with their sterile atmospheres and cranky employees (when you can find one) and stadium sizes. Walmart adds a little frisson by claiming to demand green practices from its suppliers, which sounds good on the surface but really is an astonishing claim from a purveyor of mountains of mostly unnecessary junk. No, the absurd thing in Thomaston is that there's another Walmart just 4 miles away in Rockland.

Oh, but this will be a bigger one, with lots more stuff, choice, and variety. It will bring more customers to the area. It will be newer, slicker, brighter. It will be all the things that civilization demands. Anywhere on the East Coast, Route 1 means cheek-by-jowl development. Why should Maine be any different?

There are a couple of years of hearings and permittings and rulings from the State to get through, but I have no doubt the new Walmart will be built. The one in Rockland will close, become some other big-box or maybe just molder away. The endless pursuit of tar and concrete, knick-knacks and walnuts, plastic toys and cheap jeans, groceries and drugs and appliances and bedding and rakes and rifles and plasterboard and Cheese Doodles continues.

ZPG

2011-02-02T15:01:00.003-05:00

Census data show that Maine gained about 4% in population this past decade. This is one of the lower rates in the US. Generally, the Northeast and Midwest had low increases, or even losses; the Sun Belt had larger gains. For a lot of people, apparently, a low increase is a disaster. Loss of influence! Loss of federal funds (even though they want smaller government)! Loss of US Representatives! More is better!

With apologies to Edward Abbey (The Great American Desert) I offer a contrary view: If you're thinking about moving to Maine, don't, because:

It's very poor. You won't find a job, there are hardly any amenities, electricity and fuel is expensive, it's the worst state in the US for business (according to Forbes), taxes are high....

It's dangerous. Lobsters pinch, rogue waves wash people from the shore, black bears roam the woods, hikers have to be rescued regularly, a logging truck could crush you, you could run afoul of black flies and barnacles and mosquitos and the most dangerous animal of all, the Ye Olde Gift Shoppe, hunters abound, you could be struck speechless, maybe even dead, by a view....

It's a slow, boring life. People drive slowly, talk slowly, eat slowly, there's nothing to do except nature stuff, people enjoy splitting wood (!), you'll be shunned for several generations for being from away, you'll be caught in monumental traffic jams on Route 1, garage-sitting is a major sport....

It's cold and dark. It was 46 below in Greenville a couple of weeks ago, winter starts in September and lasts until June, whereupon cold fog blankets the coast, ice storms are legendary, in winter snowmobiling and alcohol are the major distractions in the north, shopping and alcohol in the south, cars don't start, pipes freeze, cabin fever is the state disease, there are seven hours of daylight in December....

It's scary big and remote. You'll need a car all the time, there's no public transportation, everything's an hour away (at least) from where you are, you could get lost in a vista....

The Sun Belt has much more to offer, so please move there. Visit Maine, of course, enjoy yourself and spend lots of money, but whatever you do, don't even think about making it your home. In accordance with our new policy of zero population growth, we have to eliminate someone else if you do.

The Great (and no-so-great) North Woods

2011-01-30T15:06:00.002-05:00

I'm not a particularly political person, but Paul LePage is well on his way to making me one. A few days after attending an environmental forum (at which he claimed to believe in science, that science would be his guide), the Governor released a long list of environmental regulations he wants modified or even eliminated. That's bad enough, but also on the list was the astonishing proposal to open 30% of the Great North Woods to development. That's 3 million acres (15 times the size of Baxter State Park) of potential strip malls and second homes and resorts and subdivisions.

I shouldn't be astonished at the bias - this is from the man who is holding 25 Red Tape Audit business forums around the state and 1 environmental one. I'm astonished at the crudeness of the math:

In a state having trouble attracting business at all, how in the world will LePage fill 3 million acres?
How did he determine that 30% is the right number? By adding up the holdings of his business friends?
Why not just propose the whole 10 million acres of unorganized territories open?
Who gets to develop those acres?
Which acres will be developed?
Will there be a good old-fashioned land rush, with Paul LePage as sheriff?

The proposal makes no sense, of course. It's meant simply to be an assault, a cynical political statement made for publicity, a way to undercut or eliminate the Land Use Regulatory Commission. Let's hope it turns out to be as unsuccessful as it is mendacious.

This week also saw the announcement that John Malone, of Liberty Media (cable TV) fame and wealth, is buying 980,000 acres of Maine forestland. Perhaps there is a connection, for Mr. Malone says he will continue the land's use for lumbering and recreation, i.e., not development, although he has said nothing about conservation or preservation.

With these two announcements we truly are retreating several hundred years back in Maine's history, into the era of legislative land grabs (c.f., the British, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts), and rich men founding kingdoms (c.f., the Binghams, the Pingrees) in the 17th and 18th centuries. And if we are not careful and watchful, we'll also get another devastation of woods and lakes and rivers ala the 19th and 20th centuries. If only the Republicans would remember that their party was founded by high-minded statesmen like Abraham Lincoln and William Seward, not low-minded businessmen like George Bush and Paul LePage.

Escape

2011-01-25T14:12:00.003-05:00

During my working days I saw Maine pretty much as an escape, and that was OK, if a bit insulting to the state. Our lives were busy, and accompanied by a certain amount of stress from work and school. Some respite, however temporary, was needed. And because Maine is so special, our anticipation of a holiday weekend, or a week or two of vacation, or even a short overnight, was very high, almost frighteningly so. You could have argued that something was wrong with suburbia if escape was so necessary. But we didn't. There wasn't much time to think about it.

Now there is time to think. That's what I tell myself is so wonderful about being in Maine. (Thinking apparently requires lots of time watching snow fall, waves break, boats steam up and down the channel of the Gut.) It's a slower pace of life anyway, and having minimal work and family duties helps as well. So is escape the right word any more?

There remain traditional elements of vacation: more reading, more lazing on the deck, more walks and hikes, more gardening. And when I'm alone in Owls Head, tendencies to the slovenly arise: minimal dishes-doing, practically eating out of the microwave, afternoon reading on the couch that often ends with the book on my face. If it weren't for volunteering for Coastal Mountains Land Trust, and the unceasing drive to write, my mother wouldn't be proud of her son at all. One must be productive.

And that's the second great thing about Maine. It's easier to be productive, at least for me. Words and ideas and images seem to flow through the air, begging to be captured. (Not that I always can.) When I look at the ocean, I see how it's true that the words time and tide are basically the same, “tide” coming from an old English word meaning “division of time.” Humans don't have endless time, except in what we see and feel and capture in art. That's what Maine offers, an inspiring and kindly division of time.

And the people of Maine seem committed to the land. (Although I continue to fear the new Governor - not only does he want to roll environmental regulations back into some Bush-era free-for-all, he also proposes to open 30% of the unorganized territories, i.e., the Great North Woods, to development.) So land trusts and others can be very productive in preserving it.

In other words, when you're in Maine there's nothing to escape from.

When you're not? Time is not quite so kindly, it's true, but one is productive in a different way, and we count all of our blessings these days.

The Guv

2011-01-21T15:14:00.002-05:00

On the face of it, we really should be pulling for Paul LePage, Maine's newly elected Republican Governor. He's Franco-American, and overcame a terrible childhood of poverty, abuse, homelessness, and discrimination. He's plain-spoken and a man of the people. Completely on his own, he became a successful businessman and politician, ending as General Manager for Marden's and Mayor of Waterville before running for Governor. So what if during the campaign, he was a little rough ("LePage tells Obama to go to hell"), he courted the Tea Party, he aired some weird positions on climate change and energy and creationism and healthcare. Politicians will say anything to get into office, and once they get there, they tend to moderate, right?

Maybe not right. The first few weeks of LePage's tenure have been a bit ominous.

As I wrote the other day, he's nominated a developer to run the Department of Environmental Protection.
He's appointed his 22-year-old daughter, just out of college, to assist his chief-of-staff at a salary and benefits much higher than the usual entry-level position.
He's told the NAACP, on Martin Luther King Day, that he won't be beholden to "special interests" and that the NAACP can "kiss my butt."
He wants Maine to join the national lawsuit to get out of the new healthcare law.
He wants to relax state rules that protect vernal pools from development.
He wants to get rid of the Land Use Regulation Commission, the independent body that controls development in the 10 million acres of Maine's unorganized territories.
He's attended a number of "red-tape removal audit" forums, but only one environmental forum.

Heaven knows the government gets in the way sometimes. But the effort to streamline and reduce must not damage the things that make Maine special and viable, and it must not hurt the poor and sick. Remember, Governor, that getting only 38% of the vote is hardly a mandate for change.

I don't know if he's related to the LePages who make glue or to the LePages who bake bread. Those would be good, down-to-earth roots to have. I'm worried, however, that he's already turning into an angry beast. Just re-arrange a couple of letters in his name and you get "pelage," "the hairy covering of a mammal." What is the real Paul LePage, man or monster?

Simplicity

2011-01-18T15:33:00.002-05:00

A couple of feet of snow on the ground makes the world look simple. I can't see the weeds in the yard left over from the summer, the maple and oak and ash leaves rotting their way back to nutrients, the moss on the patio that should have been scraped, the petty distractions of a life. Everything is just white and tucked in for the duration. Today nature makes no demands but shovelling.

I'm in Massachusetts this week, and it was a strange experience to drive here on Sunday and watch the snow piles get higher the farther south I came. The coast of Maine got very little from last Wednesday's storm, and it was an equally strange experience to be in Maine that day and watch heavy, wet snow coming in sideways off the ocean for 8 hours straight but melting immediately, leaving a couple of inches of slush. At the end of the day I could still see the logs waiting to be split, the garden detritus untrimmed, an essay asking to be re-written.

It's tempting to think that nature makes demands, portends omens, punishes or rewards. Weather is a particularly seductive siren (those Aussies must have done something bad to deserve all that flooding) but so is the sight of a deer or the sound of surf. But nature doesn't consider us. It's simple, really. It's humans that have the problem of self-consciousness.

Emily Dickinson said it best, in the last lines of poem 668:

Nature is what we know –
Yet have no art to say –
So impotent Our Wisdom is
To her Simplicity.

Not that we shouldn't try to say what we know, as she did every day of her life.

Architects in wood

2011-01-15T16:33:00.002-05:00

I confess to woodstack envy. A lot of people take a lot of care, or have a lot of talent, when it comes to constructing a mass of split logs for drying. One guy on Ash Point has an amazing one behind his house, three rows of logs close together, 6 feet high, 6 feet wide, and easily 100 feet long (I calculate this to be 25-30 cords and at nearly $200 a cord...). It's immense and gorgeous, perfectly stacked. The end of a row is built in a cross-hatch pattern, to prevent collapse, the body of the beast is tightly packed. He must have used a splitter, to achieve logs of such stackability.

Then there are the guys who have built little cozies for their wood, a roofed alcove along a garage or deck, or a free-standing, open-sided shed. They tend to be the summer people.

Clearly woodstacking is a guy thing.

My own piles are somewhat less artistic. The one along the garage was once rather impressive, the unsplit logs piled neatly and tidily. As I work it down, it looks bedraggled and bumpy. The other pile, near the leaching field, is the fresh one from this fall's tree work, the chunked-up logs stacked like soup cans, the longer ones still lying helter-skelter. (I tell myself it's not really my pile - the tree guys haven't finished their work.) Then there's the one in the garage, composed of split wood and definitely untidy, due to a wide variety of sizes and shapes and and an inconsistency of manual splitting ability, not to mention a certain lack of patience for esthetic achievement when your back hurts.

I play more serious architect inside the house. The log rack next to the stove has pretensions to glory, and the art of loading the stove makes me feel better about my northwoodsmanship. I claim there's a technique to placing the logs, not only to start the fire but to continue it. Place pieces athwart, not parallel. Allow room to breathe. Angle a big piece, with space underneath. Vary the pieces, large and small, spruce and birch. Celebrate in the artistic placement of each log your scorn for the merchant cartels of liquid and gaseous carbon.

Trees in the storm

2011-01-12T14:04:00.008-05:00

The day started with a chain saw. I thought after yesterday - our neighbor, having suffered a big downed birch a couple of months ago and two firs a couple of weeks ago, must have worried for her cottage and figured it was time to take down the two-and-a-half leaning spruces (one trunk had bifurcated), especially with today's northeaster forecast - that I'd be safe from chains and chippers for a while. But she must have promised the felled spruce as firewood, and a man and two boys were hard at work at 7:15, chunking up the trunks and loading them into a pickup. Even for Maine the scene was a bit surreal. All three males wore dark sweatshirts, hoods up, and they looked like hobbits on some secret mission, and the storm was starting, snow blowing, wind roaring, ocean boiling. And those two boys thought they were getting a snow day! Or maybe this is what a snow day in Maine is, just another chance to work with Dad.

Northeasters are a bit surreal themselves. You see the big swirling thing on the TV screen but you still don't quite understand how at the same time a storm can move to the northeast and the winds can come from the northeast. Yes, yes, the counterclockwise movement of the winds around the center makes some logical sense, but I like the mystery of it all, a sort of Tolkien storm.

Parts southwest and west of here are getting clobbered with two feet of snow, but the ocean keeps the temperature right at 32 degrees today, and most of the snow melts on the ground, leaving an inch or two of slush. The front of the house, however, wears a coat of white like icing on gingerbread, and the windows are mostly obscured by sticky snow that blows in horizontally, and the remaining trees are waving wildly and dangerously. I'm heartsick every time a tree has to come down, doubly so when it's a human decision, but on a blizzard day like today, even I have to admit that a spruce, even a magnificent one 75 feet high, does no one much good crashed into our living rooms.

In memoriam for the spruce, I'll grieve with the Christmas tree (fake) in the living room, unthreatened and still, unruffled and safe, and leave it up for a few more days.

Strange, even for Maine

2011-01-10T16:05:00.002-05:00

From the American Heritage Dictionary:

"protect - to keep from being damaged, attacked, stolen, or injured; guard"

"develop - to cause (a tract of land) to serve a particular purpose"

From the Main-Land Development Consultants, Inc. website:

"Bridging the Permitting and Regulatory Process"

The owner of MLDC, Inc. is Darryl Brown, who has just been nominated by Paul LePage, Maine's new Republican Governor, to be commissioner of Maine's Department of Environmental Protection. When he was a legislator, Mr. Brown received a "zero" rating from the Maine League of Conservation Voters for his environmental voting record. His company is the lead developer in the newly approved Oxford casino.

Quite remarkable. What's the saying about the fox in the chicken coop?

Country mouse, city hawk

2011-01-04T14:47:00.005-05:00

Our house in Massachusetts is in a suburb, not city but not country either (this picture, taken by a neighbor after a winter storm, might suggest otherwise). As in many American towns, appearances are deceiving (or we try to make them so), and we are abetted in our rural illusions by a variety of wildlife that approaches that of the country. All of the following have been seen in our neighborhood.

mice and chipmunks (of course)

vole or mole or whatever it was tunneling in the yard

squirrels, to the delight and anger of the dog

rabbits, but they don't appear to be breeding like...

the occasional garter snake acting nonchalant

all manner of birds, as you'd expect in a leafy suburb, including skeins of Canada geese in the fall, cardinals and chickadees and wrens at the feeders, and a hawk or two (why isn't this a hawk paradise, with our abundance of chipmunks?)

a coyote, as breathlessly reported by a daughter walking home from school

a flock of turkeys, who must live boringly in nearby Cold Spring Park, and who need the stimulation of a weekly jaunt through back yards and streets

deer (well, a deer was only seen once, but still...)

This is an evolution of sorts, I'm convinced. Something or someone is trying to tell us something, like "if you won't come to us, we'll come to you." And not just on PBS, in our living rooms. These are real, living wild things that are trying to change us. Listen up.

The list above is not all that different from a list I'd make from our neighborhood in Maine. The hawk is replaced by the osprey, deer are merely more numerous, no turkeys but grouse, no coyotes (yet) but fishers and foxes, no ducks or loons or gulls or eagles. The difference is a degree of wildness, an expectation of rarity, an illusion of wilderness. I'm much more open to wonder in Maine, my ancient hunter/gatherer molecules singing. In the city, I see those six fat turkeys in the yard of the big house on Lincoln Street and rue what is lost, not wonder about what is being gained. I'm not evolved enough to mix my drinks of inspiration.

Will the suburbs, the exurbs, and the country eventually become one big Noah's ark of coexistence? I hope not. I'm afraid it would mean that humans had become all head and no body. I'm afraid that a deer facing death would rather take her chances with a Volvo wagon than with a coyote or a Winchester. I'm afraid that hawks would eat at bird feeders.

Lichen

2010-12-31T13:19:00.004-05:00

The last day of the year is a good time to talk about lichen.

Lichen represent pretty much everything modern life isn't. They are slow-growing and long-lived. They are immensely adaptable, living almost everywhere on earth; they even survive exposure to the vacuum and radiation of space. They are beautifully symbiotic: not a single organism alone in the world, but two forms of life, two races if you will, a fungus and (usually) an alga, living in harmony.

Nature doesn't give lessons (although I'd like to think so, and it surely is fun propounding that it's a guide for human life). But it does give perspective, especially at holiday time. Many holidays have a natural beginning, related to the seasons of the year. That pagan basis took on a supernatural sheen in the religious eras, and has further evolved today to have little meaning, emotional or religious, beyond a kind of generic celebration of consumption. Imagining yourself as a lichen on the outside of the International Space Station brings things back into perspective.

New Year's Eve may be different from most holidays since it celebrates (or rues!) a purely artificial break in time. There never has been any natural or spiritual significance to it. We mostly pretend, for a couple of minutes or even a couple of days, that our reflections on the past or our avowals for the future are just something we've been meaning to do all year, should have been doing all along. Then we get drunk.

Lichen can help us here too, giving a warning at the least. Constancy is one word for what they are, but I especially like the concept, but not the fact, that lichen are rare in cities, being so sensitive to air pollution. I've nothing against cities (well, maybe a little); the point is that it's harder to live simply, purely, sensitively, sensibly, there. By definition, the human element is triumphing (although we're seeing at what cost to our lungs), and the natural element is losing. Time is no longer on our side when even lichen flee.

I'm not in Maine for this holiday - can you tell?

Assumption

2010-12-27T15:20:00.004-05:00

I've been saving this picture, taken at the Acadian Village in northern Maine, for the holiday season. The rock announces the entrance to a replica log chapel from the 18th century.

The St. John River valley is largely Catholic and one side of the river (Canada) is barely distinguisable from the other (US). The early settlers had their log churches; as the area grew more prosperous, each town built a proper cathedral. In most Catholic churches Mary is as prominent as Jesus, and that emphasis on the human seems most appropriate here in the County, in a place of gentle unpretentiousness.

Not being Catholic, I had to look up what the Assumption was all about. The key point seems to be that Mary, upon her death, was transported to heaven not only in soul but in body as well. No wonder she's venerated! She's up there in the flesh. Heaven wouldn't be nearly so boring if you could eat and sail and sweat and hike and kiss and feel an ocean breeze on your skin. (It would be like Maine.)

This brings me to Joseph. No veneration there! Indeed, he's pretty much forgotten, just a figurehead, a breadwinner, someone to have around to prevent gossip, an excuse, a means to respectability. No rosary bead hails him. He's no Father, just a Dad. No wonder we men spend Christmas watching basketball, playing with our new electronic devices, and drinking somewhat to excess. We're trying to glorify our bodies.

Not all is pious worship in Aroostook County. If you look closely at the picture above, you can see in the background, to the left of the plastic flowers, a little toy truck. Someone has editorialized on the fate of Joseph. Behind every great lady stands her Jeep.