You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
From Bowen Alpern’s book, Godless for God’s Sake:
“Much of what we tend to regard as the achievement of Friends as a whole was, in fact, the work of individual Friends, or small groups of Friends, often in the face of opposition or neglect of their monthly meetings. (One of the most positive – if often tedious – aspects of Quaker culture may be its capacity to produce or attract individuals who are willing to stand up to it).”
November is the month many amateur writers set out to draft a full novel within 30 days.
My book Quaking Dover is nonfiction, but with eight published novels, I can still sympathize.
I should have been suspicious when this book seemed to write itself, producing what one beta reader then sensed as not just stream-of-consciousness but a mind-dump.
Ouch!
Revising it, aiming at a more consistent, creative non-fiction tone, was much more torturous and required much more time and attention than I can calculate. Still, I have to admit the result feels satisfying. Just don’t make me do it again.
As a history book, it wound up with no index and no footnotes but instead focused on a community of people over time.
Well, the ebook edition can be easily searched for items. Not so with the paperback.
As for footnotes? Much of my research in the Covid outbreak was conducted online, not exactly a permanent source of information.
The effort did push me far beyond my journalism discipline, pushing me into the story as an active observer, not that I was comfortable with that.
But it seems to work, all the same.
That’s what many of the autumn cruise ship passengers have noted on their arrival at the Breakwater here in Eastport. As they were told, that’s because ours is a real working fishermen’s harbor. Even in the height of summer, there are few pleasure boats.
The visitors have been largely charmed by the unspoiled nature of this place, especially in contrast to Bar Harbor, Camden, Portland, or Boston, and to the welcome they’ve received.
It did keep a festive spirit alive before winter kicks in.
Community life around here has definitely hunkered down now, at least until the scalloping season kicks in.
The architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is often credited as the origin of the quip, “God is in the details,” but the phrase actually goes back much earlier.
Still, however tedious but essential, details do extend to the minutia of building and sustaining a marriage, a family, and a wider community. You can also apply it to any number of other things, including business, sports, the fine arts, politics.
In researching Quaking Dover, I am left with many gaps in the records of Friends’ godly endeavors. When, for example, did Dover Friends cease to run their own schools?
In addition, in writing a history, the details can drive one mad.
May I suggest the devil’s at work there, too?
These shoulder elections, where nobody’s running for national office, are still important.
In small places like Eastport, getting someone to run even unopposed for local office can be a challenge. We had all the bases covered, although the surprise was when a write-in candidate won one of the two city council seats.
I can’t imagine that happening in a bigger setting, but who knows. A write-in for president? My!
Statewide, a radical proposal to take over the two widely hated electrical utilities failed. Big money is hard to comprehend, even if we’ll be paying it one way or the other. The frequent storm outages won’t be going away, nor will the continuing higher-than-national bills customers here receive. Somehow, I don’t think the issue will be going away, despite the lopsided tallies.
Just how much do those emergency home generators cost altogether, anyway, as insurance against the current setup? It’s not that many households before we’re talking billions.
Otherwise, the initiatives moved in a progressive direction, including the right-to-repair measure.
I am relieve to see opportunities for right and left to come together at a local level, however gingerly.
The Pine Tree State has a tradition, so I’m told, of placing complex issues on the statewide ballot because many of the elected state representatives and senators are afraid of negative reactions in a controversy.
Normally, public officials are expected to thoroughly investigate the issues and come to a reasoned decision. That’s why we elect them. Instead, shifting this responsibility to a general public that is rarely fully informed can be like rolling the dice.
This year, there are two issues of special note along those lines.
One is the so-call Right to Repair Act, which would prohibit manufacturers from keeping replacement parts and technology from independent repairmen. I’m still bummed by HP’s ink replacements policy – your machine shuts down if you try to use over-the-counter cartridges. Apple computer users have their own experiences. I know the list of big businesses’ proprietary efforts is growing.
The other issue is Pine Tree Power, which would have the state take over Maine’s two largest electrical utilities. Mainers have some of the highest electrical bills in the country accompanied by some of the longest and most frequent outages. Folks are still worked up over being cut off for weeks years ago after some storms before Central Maine Power got the lines working again. Despite the already high rates, CMP and Versant, the utility in our part of the state, both received permission this past summer to hike the bills another 20 percent. The utilities have lined up 15 times as much money for advertising than the grassroots effort has, no surprise there, and the campaign has a lot of emotional scare. What should be obvious is that somebody’s expecting to be repaid handsomely by staying in power (sorry for the pun). They’re not doing the customers any favors there, either.
So, when you’re checking the news reports tomorrow night or the following day, check the Maine results. They could be enlightening. Or, should we venture, shocking.
I’ve said it before and I know I’m not the only one.
Changing our clocks back an hour is the real beginning of winter. Everyone will be out of sorts for the next week and have no idea why. It really takes us that long, internally, to readjust.
Even those of us who are officially “retired.”
In my mid-30s, a decade after I started worshiping in the Society of Friends, I heard that my great-grandfather had been a Quaker who moved from North Carolina to Ohio after the Civil War.
I’d no clue and was shell-shocked, in a good way.
That soon got me into genealogical research with another, older, cousin, which in turn led me to others through correspondence. Many of the results can be found on my Orphan George blog.
Central to that research were Quaker Meeting minutes and learning to interpret those records. For family data, they can provide some of the best information before the census of 1850, the first to name everyone in a family, along with ages and some other facts.
Serving as clerk of Meeting and in other roles also deepened my understanding of the faith and practice.
While I gained some skill navigating this field, other researchers specialized in public records, such as wills, tax filings, and property maps.
Admittedly, working as a census taker in 2020, I did develop a sympathy for lapses and errors in the federal population documents.
When it came to researching Quaking Dover, I found myself returning to others’ genealogical summaries, where one version differed from another, as well as other records. I knew to treat what I saw there as tenuous but still helpful.
Somehow, though, it felt familiar.
While Eastport has the deepest natural port in the continental U.S., that’s not often led to a lot of big-ship landings.
Cargo shipments, especially, have suffered over the past decade.
Last month, though, the city saw a record number of cruise ship visits, sometimes running one every other day over two weeks.
We’re getting what’s often termed mid-sized cruises, up to a thousand passengers, in contrast to the floating cities that might deliver five times that. Frankly, mid-size fits us fine.
One factor has been Bar Harbor’s reaction to being overwhelmed, down at the edge of Acadia National Park. And Portland, further down the coast, is a big city in contrast.
As a result, Eastport is being discovered as a place that offers a taste of a quintessential Maine fishing village without the hype.
As one younger woman said while walking past our home, “Today was AMAZING!” Imagine that, in a small town seemingly so far away from anything.
So far, these arrivals during the fall foliage season have extended our tourist season. The place typically shuts down by mid-September but these arrivals have extended that into early November. They’ve even given some, but not all, of our galleries and stores their best business days of the year. That’s a huge impact on a fragile, marginal downtown.
The landings also benefit the Breakwater and its workers, and let’s not sleight the purchases of junk food snacks at the IGA and Family Dollar by ships’ crews – sometimes up to another 600 people. They do load up.
We do enjoy seeing happy couples walking around our neighborhood with cameras in hand. Our conversations with them have been upbeat. Others have enjoyed bus tours to the Roosevelt compound on Campobello Island and the West Quoddy Light in Lubec or autumn foliage.
Economically, it’s an alternative to the Airbnb purchases that have been pulling housing away from working families, the very culture that’s a big part of the draw to our city. We do need more jobs that provide benefits, too, though that’s another big issue, one basically at the national level. I’ll save that for another time.
For now, let’s acknowledge what I’m seeing as a positive step, one that might even extend our spring shoulder season.
The thought crept upon me the other morning as I was pondering simplicity and frugality.
Yeah, look at the flip side.
I remembered reading a recent New York Times piece on a Long Island boutique that catered to billionaires and noted the owner’s insight that they spent differently. I shrugged it off then but come back to it now.
Suppose your after-tax income came to $3½ million a year? That would be nearly $10,000 a day. (I did miscalculate and put that at $100k a day, a more interesting figure. Still!)
For perspective, the median pay for S&P 500 chiefs was $14.5 million last year, in contrast to an average $56,000 earnings for American workers.
The No. 10 guy on the list, Tim Cook at Apple, came in at $99 million in salary, benefits, and bonuses. More than $240,000 a day. That is, $10,000 an hour.
Ahead of him were the CEOs of companies like Alphabet, Peloton, Live Nation, Sarepta Therapeutics, and CS Disco, plus four I recognized. Please, can somebody tell me what the head of Pinterest is doing to make him pocket $123 million for the year? A tad under $337,000 a day?
As one scion of affluence told me a half century ago, there isn’t much real difference between a $20,000 car (today’s prices) and a $200,000 vehicle, as far as everyday performance goes. Let me add, today’s median family car is far superior to the luxury vehicles back then. Air conditioning? Seat warmers? Cruise control?
As I played with the $100,000-a-day figure, nearly twice the yearly earnings of real workers, I realized how little of that was needed for everyday expenses, even at inflated expectations – how many houses does one need, anyway, or how many hotel suites while traveling? What came into focus was the vanity opportunities: collections of antique cars, paintings, sexual playthings, political hobnobbing. Just name it and claim it.
And that’s where it gets scary, even when you scale back to $10,000 a day.
Conservatives like to quote Lord Acton’s “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” while they pursue the maximization of their personal wealth, which intensifies their power and, thus, corruptedness. Per the logic.
Renting a luxury yacht – $100,000 a week plus expenses, last time I looked – is peanuts in comparison. As is a private jet. They might even be business expenses, paid by the company.
Well, F. Scott Fitzgerald did quip, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”
But I am wondering what he’d make of today’s mutations.
What would you do, given that much at hand?
Jnana's Red Barn 