Category: Postcards

A little more heaven on earth

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

The day I shot these, I encountered only one other person in two hours … and that was just as I was leaving. Admittedly, I arrived around 7 as a foggy dawn lifted and then listened to a mournful foghorn in the neighboring Bailey’s Mistake cove much of the morning. How could I not be elated?

In 1988, the Maine Coastal Heritage Trust secured the property now known as Boot Head Preserve, saving it from a planned 35-lot subdivision and instead opening it to public enjoyment. It’s a gem that includes coastal hiking, a cove with a cobble beach, and an arctic peat bog.

Promise me you won’t tell anyone else.

Just six-tenths of a mile from the parking lot, the trail opens out on this.

 

And this.

 

And passes beside wild iris.

 

To this.

 

And this.

 

And then this.

 

It really does need a soundtrack of the ocean’s endless crests striking the rocks below.

The lighthouses around Eastport are rather modest

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 18 Comments

Unlike the two most photographed and visited lighthouses around here – East Quoddy on Campobello Island, New Brunswick, and West Quoddy in Lubec, Maine, both of which have been featured here at the Barn – the remaining lighthouses I encounter locally are small-scale. They’re beacons, all right, but to call them houses may push the definition.

You be the judge. Here they are.

Cherry Island Light, New Brunswick, is the one we see most clearly. It’s an 18-foot-tall tower with a white flash every five seconds. As a lighthouse, it was first built in 1824.
And at night it does this.
Deer Point, New Brunswick, is a 20-foot tall tower with a two-second red flash every 10 seconds. The famed Old Sow, the largest whirlpool in the Western Hemisphere and second largest in the world, is just off its shore.
Facing Deer Island, the Dog Island Light in Eastport flashes white/red every five seconds. As you can see, it’s no longer a house, much less manned.
The Pendleberry Lighthouse, or St. Andrews North Point Light, in New Brunswick is glimpsed here from Robbinston, just up the Maine shoreline from Eastport.
A “sparkplug” or “wedding cake” design, the Lubec Channel Light  can be seen framed by the bridge from Lubec to Campobello Island from points in Eastport, though never this distinctly. I shot this in South Lubec, where it stands 53 feet above Mean High Tide and emits a flashing white signal every six seconds.
Whitlock Mills Light on the St. Croix River in Calais is the northernmost light in Maine. It’s on private property, and I’m grateful to the owner who allowed me access. The second tower has both a bell and a foghorn. I find this 25-foot tower, despite its small size, particularly charming.

Lupine island

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Officially, Eastport sits on Moose Island, though I have yet to see one here.

This time of year, though, it’s covered with flowering lupine, gloriously so. You’d never imagine the kind of winter we’d had.

With the sea in the distance.

 

Against our house, with Dame’s Rocket.

 

Behind the IGA.

It may be a stool but it’s not for sitting

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When I’m working at the laptop on my real desktop, having the stool to my right comes in pretty handy. It’s the right height for papers I need at the moment or even something to sip. Not that I planned this shot, which accidentally exposes a bit more of how I really live. The lower milk crate, by the way, serves as a cell phone recharging station while keeping the bunnies away from the sensitive wires plugged in behind it.

Not just any old daisies

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My wife is quite fond of wild Ox-Eye Daisies – not the bigger and, to her view, coarser Shastas. But she’s usually saddened each year when the Black-Eyed Susans arrive about this time, announcing the end of the Ox-Eyes’ blooming. Not so in Eastport, where, to her delight, some continue through August.

Our city even has a forested state park

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Eastport may be a city, but much of it is still forest.

Shackford Head, between Broad Cove and Deep Cove, has one of those. And it’s a state park. Mercifully, it even escaped becoming an oil refinery in the 1970s and ’80s, thanks to some dedicated citizen action.

This is all that remains of five Civil War ships that were burned between 1901 and 1920 at Cony Beach at today’s Shackford Head State Park. The vessels were brought close to shore and set aflame to release metal for scavengers to collect at low tide. This is Cony Beach with Shackford Head beyond.

I should note that the Shackford family, so prominent in the settling of Eastport, had roots in Dover, New Hampshire, before spreading into Newburyport, Massachusetts, and then shooting up here. It seems that our house was built in the 1830s by one of them.

Apart from that, the 90-acre state park allows for some delightful hiking and vistas without having to drive miles from home. You know,  needed a quick fix of more nature.

The shoreline can be quite rugged but have a pocket beach below.
Deep Cove flanks one side of the park.
Sometimes a trail takes to a plank walk over muddy stretches.