Author: Jnana Hodson

In downsizing to a remote fishing village in Downeast Maine, this eclectic writer feels everything's coming together.

Up for a reinvented youth?

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Meeting a dark-haired girl at an Orthodox affair, there’s mutual attraction in our conversation, and soon I’m at her house, or more accurately, her parents’. Her mother rather encourages our interaction, and soon we’re dating or some such, despite the age difference. I make clear the limits in our relationship, but the companionship is enjoyable. At least she’s getting out into circulation.

Second part, leaving a church event, I’m swept away into a car with her family. Crushed into the back seat with her mother on my right, a brother on my left and another, facing me, in front. She’s to my far left. At one point, the driver, presumably her father, shifts from driving forward to extended reverse – and then quite fast – leaving the streets for rolling meadows and the like. It’s all exhilarating, we’re laughing wildly, happily – so this is a warm family and I’m part of it.

Somehow, it’s all back in my high-school years.

 

Marrying one of several sisters, but don’t know until the ceremony which one. Am pleased, though: attractive, tender, smart. Hardest part is going to be telling my parents, after the fact. Especially since we haven’t known each other long or well.

How old are you in your dreams?

How long did wooden ships last?

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In one recent historical society presentation looking at locally constructed ships, we learned that a working span of 50 years or so “was a long time” for such vessels.

Many went down at sea, of course, and captains routinely expected to lose a proportion of their crew to death on each extended voyage.

I suspect hard numbers are hard to find, though I’m curious.

Besides, are there really as many retired boats propped up in yards and boatyards around here as there are people? Sometimes it seems that way.

And I can think of the remains of three sailing vessels that are visible at low tide.

So here I am, out on the waters for the better part of the week on a 152-year-old schooner, assuming that the odds are in our favor.

Wealth and fine housing along Midcoast Maine

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So much of what you see driving along is picture-perfect New England, reminding me of Cape Cod, if you’ve ever been there. Or maybe looked at a coffee-table photography book or colorful regional wall calendar.

As admirable as I find it, the landscape also stirs up a tinge of depression when I consider all the wealth this represents along the Seacoast well up into Maine these days. No home in neighboring Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for example sells for under a million, no matter how modest. And then there’s all the new construction, too. Even a half-million for a new condo in what looks to me more like fancy tenements. What a leap from the $13,000 waterfront home one friend bought there 35 years ago!

Moreover, as I think about all of the poverty and decay in much of Maine up my own way, I’m stuck wondering:

Who can afford this?

Just what’s their secret to living?

The Pine Tree State was a shipbuilding mecca

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You wouldn’t believe how many incredible seagoing vessels were built in the Pine Tree State. Maybe it’s because we have thousands of miles of coastline and tons of trees.

Just consider:

  1. The first ship built in Maine was at the failing Popham colony in the winter of 1607-1608. Where did they even get the sails? Yet the pinnace, the Virginia of Sagadhoc, was not only the first ocean-going ship built by English in the New World, but it returned to Jamestown the following year.
  2. In colonial days, the tallest, straightest trees were set aside as King’s Pines, reserved for the masts of the Royal Navy. Conflicts with the French kept many of them from being harvested before the American Revolution.
  3. From the 1830s to 1890s, Maine built more ships than any other state. More than 20,000 ships were launched from Maine shores, many from impromptu shipyards built along tidal rivers.
  4. Bath, with more than 22 shipyards at one time, was arguably the center of action. The town isn’t far from the former Popham colony, where the first ship had been built.
  5. During the Civil War, Confederate cruisers captured more than 100 Maine-built or Maine-owned vessels.  Coastal forts built during the war included Gorges at Portland, Popham at Phippsburg, and Knox near Bucksport.
  6. In 1862 the screw sloop-of-war U.S.S. Kearsarge built at Kittery sank the C.S.S. Alabama in a crucial naval battle.
  7. Maine accounted for 70 percent of the ships, barks, and barkentines built in the U.S. between 1870 and 1899. On the East Coast it also could claim to have built half of the three-mast schooners, 71 percent of the four-mast schooners, 95 percent of the five-mast schooners, and 90 percent of the six-mast schooners. I’m guessing a lot of those tall, straight pines could still be found.
  8. At one time, tiny Shackford Cove here in Eastport had four boatyards. And nearby Pembroke was also prolific.
  9. The shift to steel vessels largely decimated the yards building wooden ships, which capitalized on the state’s deep forests. Unlike most of the state, the shipyards at Bath, Kittery, South Portland, Woolwich, and East Boothbay successfully converted to metal at the end of the 1800s. 
  10. Today the state has an estimated 200 boatbuilding firms, most of the small and working with composites like fiberglass, laminated wood, and resin-based composites.

 

What’s wrong with being elite?

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As an editor on newspapers where, in an attempt for excellence everyone was giving of themselves totally (many unpaid hours of overtime, etc.), I was always appalled by the charge of “elitism,” which comes to mean “give me mediocrity – not the truth, but pleasantry” – from the same people who would not accept such standards in their professional football quarterback or automobile.

In many religions, however, the “world” of common subservience and society or what some today are more accurately seeing as “empire” is ultimately a mortal trap. In spiritual practice, then, only total effort is acceptable in seeking a holy transformation of this life. If only we can rise to even a portion of it.

As an ancient New England hymn reminded, “Broad is the way that leads to death / and many trod thereupon / but Wisdom shows a narrow way / with here and there a traveler.”

I see that lyric, by the way, as the root of Robert Frost’s road less traveled.

When I ask what’s wrong with being elite, I’m not talking about social status or wealth but something more elusive – something much more humble and loving.