Fuzzy seeing

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

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

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

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.