Author: Jnana Hodson

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

This is the big day for pyrotechnic displays

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Unabashedly, I am a snob when it comes to putting big fireworks together in an aesthetic whole, rather than something that resembles an action movie big car smashup.

A smart design team can use the entire sky as a canvas of evolving colors, combined with the timing of a sharp comedian.

That said, here’s some perspective.

  1. A show like Boston’s on the Charles River Esplanade fires off 5,000 pounds of explosives in its half-hour glory. That performance requires a computerized launch system for five barges floating on the water.
  2. Macy’s, the nation’s biggest, goes for an average 1,600 shells a minute – more than three times as many as a typical town display uses for the entire night. That show has more than 40,000 shells fired from six barges in the Hudson River.
  3. China produces 85 percent of the world’s fireworks.
  4. Many of the styles are named for flowers such as peony, chrysanthemum, or dahlia. Others, after trees, as in willow and palm tree.
  5. Prices vary wildly, especially when you’re looking for some serious color intensity and blending rather than honky-tonk garish.
  6. Shells are sold by tube diameter, commonly six-, eight-, and ten-inches, with each additional inch typically adding another 100 feet of elevation to the shot. Are some of those bursts really a thousand feet overhead?
  7. An aerial shell contains six parts. Or more, depending on what bells and whistles are added on.
  8. Larger shells cost average around $336 apiece and may require an 840-foot display radius.
  9. Even a small-town show will run between $7,500 to $15,000 to produce, just for the fireworks. Add to that set-up and clean-up labor, sanitation, musicians, and public safety expenses. The average municipal show costs $25,000. In contrast, a wedding show is tabbed for $1,500 to $3,000. But don’t hold me to those figures. Other estimates I’ve seen simply soar.
  10. Injuries send about 10,000 Americans to the emergency room every year, two-thirds of them males, and many of the injuries are to children. That’s in addition to 7.9 fatalities. As another safety consideration, more fires are reported on July 4 than any other day of the year – some 19,000.

By the dawn’s early fog

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For the first time since the outbreak of Covid, Eastport is being graced by the presence of a U.S. naval vessel at the Breakwater for the city’s big Fourth of July festivities.

The USS Oscar Austin arrived in heavy fog Friday morning and will depart for Norfolk on the 5th.

The community rolls out a big small-town welcome mat for the crewmen, especially when the landing gives them their first taste of American soil in many months. (Not so, this time; they instead sailed up the coast.) The arrival is rather quaint, actually, even if their focus sometimes seems to be on the local bars. There is a basketball game between the sailors and the high school alum, too, though I doubt the stakes are high.

Eastport does claim to have the biggest Independence Day bash in the state, and the Navy’s destroyer is just part of it. .

Many of the sailors are being joined by their families, who will then continue with them on the final leg of this voyage.

Bringing such a vessel to dock is no small venture. The skipper of such a ship doesn’t just spin the compass to see where he’s going next. Rather, the itinerary is planned months in advance, with many protocols to be observed. In our case, that includes both U.S. and Canadian officials. The pilot’s plan document reads like a small phone book, minute by minute, and it’s not just about tides and currents at the expected time of arrival.

Heavy fog was a complicating factor, and we could hear the ship’s bold horn booming long before we could see the massive vessel emerge nearly alongside the Breakwater.

It materialized out of the fog and a very loud booming horn.
Details, including the crew, slowly came into view.
The ship was pushed to the dock by tugboats.

Now, for the latest installment of our island garden venture

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Few of our nights until late as June have stayed above 50 degrees, a detail that will likely surprise fellow gardeners across the rest of the U.S. That’s meant bringing flats of basil and other temperature-sensitive plants indoors overnight, in addition to the plastic tunnels my wife devised to warm the soil and protect our tomato and pepper seedlings outdoors until now.

Our new raised beds, as previously noted here at the Red Barn, are an attempt to work around extremely high lead levels in our soil. Beyond that, the chicken-wire fencing is an attempt to deter Moose Island’s ravenous urban deer. That barrier will be further reinforced in the coming days.

The first night our fencing was up on the first bed, though, a wayward critter wound up bending – not just pulling over – one of the corner posts. The steel post was the stronger, pricier variety. I couldn’t bend it, I’ll tell you – not without an anvil and heavy hammer or maybe some heavy jumping. (Sorry I didn’t get a photo. We were too busy getting that corner repaired against a possible second attack.)

So here’s where we are now, in the midst of about three inches of rain in a week or so.

With a garden, there’s always more to do. Sometimes it even involves eating.

Massachusetts was primed for Revolution long before Paul Revere’s midnight ride

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Quite simply, Britain betrayed the settlers in her colonies, from Ireland onward. The American plaint, “Taxation without representation,” reflected that all too succinctly. Where were the colonies’ representatives in Parliament or the House of Lords? What voice did they have?

The colonists identified as English but must have seen they were definitely second-class citizens. Or maybe third.

As I note in my book Quaking Dover, the Massachusetts Bay colony’s Calvinist intransigence had been at odds with the Crown from its inception. The first shot heard ‘round the world could have erupted at any point.

My pivotal question is just what turned the Loyalists in Virginia so far as to reject the monarchy as well and then join in taking up arms in the revolutionary cause by 1776?

The other colonies moved somewhere in between.

Not that all of this falls much within the scope of my little 400-year history volume as I try to keep a focus.

Echoes, sometimes with music

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

SITTING IN AN AUDIENCE, AWAITING the speaker, when a woman comes out to introduce the guest lecturer, I hear the name but get up and leave.

Hearing of my move, my therapist shouts his approval.

 

AT A CONTRADANCE BEING HELD IN A HOME … a place with multiple rooms … everyone knows me as a friend, at least the regulars. I hear that she’s also there, in another room. But this time, she’s trying to catch up with me as I circulate – and she never succeeds. A role reversal.

 

SHE COMES TO ME TO RECONCILE, but when we’re naked abed, I put my head into her loose essence – and push her away with such force it awakens me at 5 a.m.

Head? Not hand?

 

BECAUSE OF SOME ACCIDENT, has a porcelain face but her own lips. We must swim to the cove to get my car (somehow, the vital papers in my wallet do not get wet).

 

A SHADOW BRUNETTE IN HER DWELLING – very sexy, serious, freckled, long hair and a white peasant blouse – fleets through. She informs me the goddess had a ride lined up to Dallas (presumably her regular lover) but backed out when she heard I was coming, would be there … cancelled because she wanted to “square things off with you.”

Facing each other again, her kisses are conflicted, broken off as if she might want to return. Even so, a distance and brooding.

Of course, I was the one who was driving to her place.

 

A FIGURE – LONG FLAXEN HAIR – walks past the clump of people I’m hanging out with.

“Who was that?” a young woman says to me.

“Oh, just somebody I used to love. Used to love very much.”