Category: American Affairs

Hey, Zuckerbug, you there?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Looking at Facebook, too many ads. Getting harder to file through to the posts by people I know or sites I follow.

In the past, I had largely ignored FB, returning sporadically, but after moving up here, where it’s like a telephone party line, back when people had landline phones, I’m finding more reasons to check in.

But not everyone, by a long shot, is hanging on to hear the gossip.

Too many ads. And maybe too much chatter.

The return was also prompted in the past year by an opportunity to catch up on a host of classmates I’d lost contact with in my moves across the continent.

That part’s been helpful.

But I’m also encountering too many folks who haven’t posted anything in three or more years. Likely haven’t checked in since then, either.

Hello! Anyone home there?

Can’t tell. Too many ads.

What’s your take?

 

Is there a dry cleaner in the county?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Geographically, Sunrise County is one of the largest in New England – the county line is an hour-and-a-half drive away from where I live, unless you’re going to Canada – but there are a lot of things we don’t have.

There are only three traffic lights, for instance – all in Calais en route to the busy international border crossing.

So I was wondering, just in case, where the closest dry cleaner is. We have two laundromats, but say, what if I wanted to send my dress shirts out to be washed and pressed, as I did back when working in an office?

The answer, it turns out, is forget it.

This really is a do-it-yourself kind of place.

If you’re planning on visiting, be prepared.

 

Has our drinking water quality really improved?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Eastport’s tap water last summer took on a greenish color and a definite off-taste. It got to the point that we started running everything we’d be drinking or using for cooking through an activated charcoal filter.

The explanation was that the supply came from a large but shallow lake a dozen miles away and that every summer the algae bloomed. The private company that provides water to the city then had to heighten its use of chemicals for treatment, resulting in the offensive character.

Water to the Sipayik reservation also came from the same source but was delivered via a different pipeline and was, by reports, much more troubling.

In its attempts to redress the issue, the company announced it would be using an alternative to treat the water, and I have to say we haven’t noticed the off-taste or discoloration this year. We haven’t yet seen a chemical analysis yet, however, or heard about the current situation on the reservation.

Still, public water quality is something most Americans take for granted.

Funny how often we overlook a problem, even when it has, as I hope, been clearing up.

 

Quoddy Village is almost an island of its own

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Most of Eastport’s small population resides in a semicircle around the Breakwater downtown. Quoddy Village stands apart, separated by a narrow neck around Carrying Place Cove. It also fronts Half Moon Cove, with a dead-end road to the former toll-bridge to the mainland. The place feels like an island of its own and is easily overlooked when you drive into town. The highway skirts it, and what you see is mostly former industrial, rusty, and all that.

A former factory looking for new uses gives no clue to passers-by of the residential neighborhood behind it.
Chimneys are all that remain of the administrative headquarters and even a school that supported a federal project in the 1930s.

Until 1935, this was farmland, but then an ambitious but ecologically disastrous public works project took off, one to dam up most of Passamaquoddy and Cobscook bays to transform their vast tidal energy into electricity. A large but confusing working model of the engineering proposal can be viewed at the historical society’s gift shop in downtown Eastport. (The room-size three-dimensional map is water in and water out, mostly. If you don’t already know the area, it’s baffling – and the presentation is aimed at today’s tourists. I still think it would make for a really interesting model railroad layout.) The short-lived boondoggle’s most lasting contribution, apparently, was the causeway connecting Eastport to the mainland by filling in a former railroad line. No more toll bridge and longer loop. Oh, yes, and it also had a noticeable negative impact on the Old Sow, the world’s second-largest whirlpool, perhaps even pushing it more into Canada.

Significantly, the project needed housing for its estimated 5,000 workers, and that led to the construction of Quoddy Village.

Even though the plug was pulled a year later on what would have been the world’s largest tidal dam – it did require Canadian cooperation, among other things – 128 single-family, two-family, and four-family houses had been constructed, along with three large dormitories with dining rooms for single workers, plus a fire station, a hospital, a heating plant, a school, a large mess hall, and a large administration building that included a theatre, library, and sub post office. In other words, a small city unto itself. Even though the homes had been designed as temporary, many of them are still occupied today. Still, for a brief time, the village was home to a thousand people.

More evidence of abandoned projects, also seen from the state highway.

From 1938 to 1943 the National Youth Administration used Quoddy to train 800 city youth a year in vocational trades. It was also a Navy Sea Bee base named Camp Lee-Stephenson during World War II.

And then? It morphed into a residential neighborhood.

Its best-known attraction today is David Oja’s colorful and eccentric Bazaar, a gift shop that includes what’s arguably the best gourmet wine and cheese selection in Washington County. Think of it as a blast of Puerto Rico, Brooklyn, and Provincetown rolled into one. Who knows what the original function of the building was, we can be sure it was not nearly anything like this.

The one-of-a-kind Bazaar, seemingly out in the middle of nowhere.
Today it’s mostly residential. I think of it as a small suburb.
Anyone else see potential here?
Yes, there’s a mix of housing, some of it from the ’30s.
Much of it is also a working neighborhood. I’m all in favor of working from home, when you can.

Is this funky? Or what?

Honoring the earlier place names

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A revival of Indigenous languages, which were long suppressed by federal policy, is gaining momentum where I live in Way Downeast Maine.

For one thing, the Passamaquoddy are now teaching it in their schools.

For another, their words are pronounced in ways that transcriptions into Latin-based letters don’t quite capture. There are simply sounds that my ears miss entirely and my tongue and lips will never manage to enunciate properly. How humbling!

“Passamaquoddy,” for instance, is pronounced more like “peskotomuhkati,” meaning “people who spear pollock,” reflecting their ocean hunting skills.

Linguistically, the Passamaquoddy language works differently than do European languages with their subject-verb-object constructions, and reflects an alternative way of comprehending the land, waters, and skies where we dwell.

Detail of the new map, with some places denoted by dual names.

The latest edition of the Tides Institute’s Artsipelago map of communities and sites around the tidal waters of our corner of Maine and neighboring New Brunswick, Canada, now includes Passamaquoddy names in addition to the more familiar English, Anglicized, and French ones.

To my eyes, this adds another dimension to our awareness of the landscape and its legacy.

How do you see it?

How about a good dose of humility instead?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

On one hand, they’re proud of having voted for the candidate and want you to know they did, but on the other hand, they want to distance themselves from any culpability for his actions.

Will somebody tell them, “You can’t have it both ways,” as a citizen?

Grow up and take responsibility for your choice, which includes the possibility of repenting in the light of reflection or otherwise being party to the vulgarity, insults, lies, and the general mess he’s left the nation and world to endure. (Reflection? We’ve never heard him admit he’s ever done anything wrong, which means he’s never even said he’s sorry for anything he’s done. Mistakes are always someone else’s fault. That would put him a bit higher than Jesus.)

There’s no denying the loser’s the king of blame, casting censure on everyone but the one-and-only he faces admiring himself alone in a mirror. I, for one, am exhausted by the gush of blame that’s been poured on what we’ve treasured and join.

So, yes, be prepared to be blamed or praised.

Voting is a serious responsibility, folks. Embracing what your candidate has done, in and out of office, ultimately reflects on your own values and character – and we’ve all had to face the ugly consequences.

Before blaming Biden for things like higher fuel prices, see instead how they stem from the Donald’s encouragement of his Russian pal, Putin. As for inflation, how about those fat checks the fed government handed out with Donald J. Trump as the signature?

Running deeper in this is the denial that the American political system is based on a multi-party dynamic, with the minority serving as a loyal opposition. There’s been nothing loyal about this GOP, not since it turned obstructionist back before Obama. Instead, it’s been trying to wreck the machinery of a just republic. That identity is anything but conservative.

If you’re proud of his true record, stand up. But face it all, not just the cherry-picked Fox version.

And don’t think you’re above blame or shame.

A good dose of humility is a virtue.

Shame on you, if you’re trying to shirk off the consequences of your vote.

When the superyachts come to town

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Each summer, a few superyachts make their way from the Bay of Fundy into Eastport and tie up for a night or two at the Breakwater pier downtown. They usually draw an envious gaggle, as well as pure curiosity and gossip.

I love the built-in love seat hidden by the pillar, although I wouldn’t mind one of those captain’s chairs for my workstation at home.
The welcome mat was more for changing shoes to keep the interior clean. Note the bikes under the tarp, too.

Some of them even blog about their travels, referring to each other first-name only and touting the “good friends” they made in port.

Uh-huh.

Charters for $130,000 a week plus expenses and fees.
It’s 130 feet long, holds ten guests in five room, takes a crew of seven, and cruises at 12 knots. The waitstaff was pretty impressive, even from a distance.
Includes his and hers bathrooms in the master suite, a jacuzzi, and a gym.

Some are flagged in the USA, while others come by way of tax havens.

An evening cruise around the bay can put on the ritz.

 

We’re rolling in wild blueberries

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments
The handheld rake was invented in 1910. I can’t imagine trying to pick large quantities of blueberries without it.

What’s harvested by the ton in Washington County is not just blueberries, but wild blueberries – lowbush, laced with small pellets of complex, concentrated flavor, rather than the big, juicy, cultivated highbush kind.

What grows here, I’ll argue, is tastier and richer than the more coddled kind I had previously known and even grown.

As you can see, traditional picking can be backbreaking work. But old-timers tell you it delivers better berries than the newer mechanized harvesters do.

Maine has a near monopoly in the production of the wild lowbush berries in the United States. Neighboring parts of Canada are also of note. Still, the output is only a fraction of what’s harvested from the domesticated highbush farmers in other states.

You can drive right past a blueberry barren like this and not know it’s loaded with ripe fruit.
Here’s what a stop to look reveals.
For a few weeks each spring, clusters of commercial honeybee hives are placed by the hundreds throughout the barrens. The electrical fencing is intended to keep bears out.

Just so you know.

What’s your favorite kind of berry? And your favorite way to eat (or drink) them?

Giving the devil his due

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In researching a project of any scope, you can’t ever read everything touching on the subject, and sometimes that can be a blessing in disguise.

For one thing, it may mean you have to examine points afresh and unguided rather than relying on another’s assumptions or conclusions.

And, for another, you may find reassurance or in seeing how another researcher has come to the same results you have independently or, in another vein, you may strengthen your disagreement.

That’s where I find myself on The Devil of Great Island: Witchcraft and Conflict in Early New England, Emerson W. Baker’s 2007 examination of a paranormal outbreak of flying rocks in an inn on an island in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, ten years before the infamous Salem witch trials just to the south. Now that I’ve finally read it, I can say he’s cleared up some questions I had on events upstream and provided backup for some of my deductions.

My new book, Quaking Dover, takes place one colonial town upriver from Great Island, today’s New Castle, and shares some of the same cultural and historic influences. While I examine a sharp divide in Dover between its English settlers from Devonshire and the Puritans from East Anglia, Baker identifies this in Portsmouth and much of the rest of New England as the Old Planters, of Anglican faith, being pushed aside by the newer Puritans, and their rigid Calvinism. Quite simply, the tensions were more prevalent and widespread than I’d assumed.

The target of the airborne mineral projectiles was innkeeper George Walton, along with his family and guests, evening after evening through an entire summer.

Baker labels Walton repeatedly as a Quaker, as he also does for the identity for Nicholas Shapleigh, continuing a widespread misconception. The prominent Shapleigh proved a valuable ally but, as his descendants point out, he was never a member of the Society of Friends (Quakers). While Major Shapleigh suffers persecution for maintaining some of the Friends positions, nothing in Walton’s life or character suggests he did so. Quite the contrary, there were many reasons he would have been disciplined and disowned, if he had been part of a Quaker Meeting, the closest one being at Hampton.

As Baker, a Salem State University history professor, lays out Walton’s family and neighbors, what becomes clear that just about everyone had good reason to target the contentious innkeeper. As for a devil on Great Island, I’d have to say it was Walton himself.

Baker sees the New Castle incident as a precursor to similar events that culminate in Salem, and he traces individuals who would have been familiar with the Walton stoning incidents to the outbreaks elsewhere. He further finds common elements that include contested land claims and political upheaval, which far outweigh theological issues.

Baker has since written much more about witchcraft, befitting his locale. The Devil of Great Island is a fun and fast read and a fine introduction to a definitive moment in the American experience.

As I’m arguing, there’s much more in New England’s past than you were ever taught. Or maybe even suspected.