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A few prime strolls around here

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Visitors on the street sometimes ask me about good places to hike around here, and looking at them, I don’t always want to recommend anything too strenuous. On my part, I do miss the old carriage road up Garrison Hill back in Dover, New Hampshire, but you can’t beat some of these.

  1. Quoddy Head State Park in Lubec. The parking lot is close to an iconic lighthouse, spectacular bluffs, and an Arctic peat bog. Not a bad combo as an introduction.
  2. Shackford State Park in Eastport. It almost became an oil refinery. The central trail leads to an incredible panorama of Cobscook Bay and a high probability of seeing bald eagles.
  3. Matthews Island. Also in Eastport, this Maine Coastal Heritage Trust site can be reached only at low tide. Getting there will give definitely give you a sense of mudflats. MCHT also has nearby Treat Island, which we intend to explore by renting a water taxi to get us there and back.
  4. MCHT includes other personal favorites, starting with Boot Cove in Lubec. If you like Acadia National Park, you’ll love these lesser known opportunities. Nose around in this Red Barn blog, you’ll find photographic evidence why.
  5. The Bold Coast public lands in Cutler. This is for the serious hiker, one willing to walk 1½ miles to get to the rugged ocean. From there, though, there’s a six-mile breathtaking clifftop trail along the restless ocean, and even primitive camping on a limited first-come, first-served basis at the end. The trailhead parking lot can be overflowing in prime season.
  6. Cobscook Shores. Thanks to a newer family trust, 15 small waterfront sites provide public opportunities for investigation. Most have outhouse or indoor plumbing facilities as well as picnicking, sometimes in screened-in pavilions around a single table. My favorite to date is Morang Cove.
  7. Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge. So far, I’ve sampled trails at its Baring and Calais district but there is more in Edmunds township. Former roads, now used only for ranger access, make for broad, easy pathways through a variety of ecosystems. My big caveat for inland trails is to be prepared for black flies from late April into July. They can definitely spoil and outing.
  8. Downeast Sunrise Trail, atop an abandoned rail line. I see it primarily as ATV and snowmobiling in season, but it does offer insights in inland ecologies. Again, note the black fly warning.
  9. Mowry Beach in Lubec and Roque Bluffs State Park south of Machias. Sandy beaches in Downeast Maine are rare. Here are two wonderful exceptions for those who want to indulge in a long barefoot walk.
  10. Back in Eastport, the Hillside Cemetery is worth nosing about. It’s newer than many classic New England burial grounds, but the engraved stones add up to some fascinating stories.

With the Canadian border now reopened, I’m looking forward to some treks on Campobello Island, both at the Roosevelt international park and a few other sites.

 

Department of misinformation, continued

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment
Pausing in the swift current, these alewives are working their way up a series of small waterfalls.

From Britannica: “alewife, also called sawbelly, grayback, gaspereau, or branch herring.”

Not so, sez my fish-scientist buddy. The wonderful voice next to me in Quoddy Voices as we sang a chant to the varieties of herring in Maine.

After talking to others, I’m siding with him.

They are a beautiful fish, usually less than a foot long. And amazingly strong and fast, migrating from the ocean to their freshwater breeding waters.

Now, to nail down the older pronunciation, as one former Cape Codder informed me was pronounced more like “el-wif.”

We have had an incredible spring run here, with 30,000 a day zipping up the small river where I photographed these..

I hope this one nails it

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I’ve discussed in previous posts, book cover design is a challenging art form. It needs to convey a sense of what the volume is about, of course. Or, as one observer has said, it needs to make a promise to the reader. Or, as shaded by others, offer a mystery. But it also has to “read” accurately for a curious buyer, rather than leaving them scratching their head in bafflement.

Quite simply, it can’t be too subtle and must clearly state the title and author.

A memorable cover is a joy to have in your hands or even the screen in front of you, but I find that few meet up to that measure. I like clean, with a striking visual image and tasteful typography. I find most are cluttered and often fussy, trying to work some cliché genre clue into the background.

Frankly, I’m proud of many of the covers I’ve designed for my own books.

One of the problematic ones, though, has been for my novel What’s Left. The story spans nearly 20 years in Cassia’s life, from the time her father vanishes in a Himalayan avalanche into her thirties. She’s Greek-American in a Midwestern college town. And it’s about emotional recovery and growth. Beyond that, extended family is a major ongoing theme. How do you encapsulate all that in a two-dimensional object?

In the first cover, I went for a striking egg yolk being poured from a broken shell. I was reaching for the idea of being broken open to newness but despite its strong graphic impact wound up failing to convey the book’s contents. (Egg? Her family did run a restaurant. Too much of a reach, though.)

Turning instead for the sense of grief, I found hands covering tearful faces, but none of those wound up hitting the age right. Her real work comes about in her teen years, not the preteen who was openly tearful in the available images.

There’s the argument of whether to show a face at all. I generally side with the view that a face limits the reader’s imagination. Apart from an earlier cover of What’s Left, the only face on my novels is the blissful yogi on Nearly Canaan, and there the emphasis is on the aerial pose she’s manifesting. The face has to match any description in the text, of course. No curly blondes for a long-haired raven, for example.

Within a daughter’s own living Greek drama

Recently, while passing through one collection for another project, I chanced upon a portrait I feel captures much of what I’ve been seeking for What’s Left, so much so I’ve decided to run with it for the ebook at Smashwords.com and its affiliates like the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, and Sony’s Kobo.

For technical reasons, I’m leaving the more troubled goth-girl image on the print and ebook editions at Amazon. It will be interesting to compare reactions to the two versions.

Having a very low budget, naturally, means that I’m not commissioning artwork but instead selecting from affordable stock collections. While that can mean going through thousands of images, finding the right one remains a challenge. Although I generally lean toward photographs, I still love the paintings I found for The Secret Side of Jaya, Daffodil Uprising, Subway Visions, and Yoga Bootcamp.

 

After an Easter brunch

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

We marked Western Easter last Sunday with a crab, spinach, mushroom, baked egg, and hollandaise dish, followed by strawberry mousse.

And today, for Orthodox Easter, we’re having grilled lamb, after a face-to-face Quaker Meeting. (We’re alternating weeks of worship online at home and in-person at the meetinghouse in Whiting.)

My wife created the centerpiece from blown shells from our daughter’s chickens, plus a few quail eggs. The tiny homemade candles are a special touch.

Do I look contented? Spring’s definitely in the air.

Ahoy, oh boy, what a surprise

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Popped into the Chamber of Commerce the other afternoon, thanks to the Public Restroom Inside board set up out on the street, and immediately found myself awash in pirates.

They were assembled for some kind of banquet, which I later learned was one of the fundraising murder mystery dinners in advance of our pirate festival.

I can report it was well attended.

This was once the sardine capital of the world

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

Don’t laugh. Sardines were once big business.

The first sardine canning in America happened in Eastport in 1876, and at its peak, 18 canneries were packed in against the waterfront downtown, along with the fishermen’s dories and fishing boats at the docks.

One of the few surviving cannery buildings. This one was small in comparison to others right downtown. 

The largest of them, the L.D. Clark and Son factory, extended far into the water from the north end of Shackford Cove only a block where I now live. It was the world’s largest sardine cannery, employing 500 men and women who packed 4,000 cases of 100 cans daily when the small Atlantic herring were available.

Heads and other parts were cut from the fish and dumped into the harbor, where they were devoured by bottom-feeders that then attracted whales close to shore.

Over the years, though, the fishery was depleted, though whales can still be seen in season.

And then the market and American tastes changed.

Does anyone eat sardines anymore?

Few signs remain of the city’s once flourishing industry.

The 1908 Seacoast Canning Co. plant, which made sardine cans.

 

 

Like brother monks on the road to nirvana

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Cassia’s conversations with Rinpoche lead her to crucial new understandings of her father.

In earlier drafts of my novel What’s Left, I considered these possibilities, but rejected them as, well, too wordy, esoteric, or preachy:

Your Baba was on the cusp of some original thinking about Christ as Light, Rinpoche tells me. He was connecting that with an ancient line of Greek philosophy about a term known as Logos. It was all very, very exciting. He was seeing Christ as much more than the historic person of Jesus, much as we see Buddha as something much more than a historic person — you know, Gautama — too.

Well, that happens to be a hobbyhorse I ride. Let’s give her father a break!

Rimpoche continues. Your Baba had scorn for those who claim a personal spirituality without any disciplined tradition. He wanted to encourage people to delve into a practice — not that they’re all equal, but they have their own unique wisdom to impart — and that led to his organizing some fascinating ecumenical dialogues, ones that included your Orthodox priest, plus a rabbi, a Sufi or yogi, an evangelical, and so on.

Maybe we’d better leave all that for a later discussion? Cassia has more pressing questions, many of them regarding his photographs and family.

Throughout his monastic studies and labors, he’s pressed to concentrate totally on what’s happening in the moment. Even while sleeping. Looking through a lens would, according to Manoula, place a filter between full experience of that timeless breath and himself. It would place a mask across his face when he most needs to be fully naked, as it were. Who knows what he wears in the monastery, for that matter. We can guess from the photos he took later, on his return visits — and his portraits of his teacher and fellow practitioners. For now, he needs to see not just with his eyes — and his Third Eye — but also with his nose, tongue, lips, ears, and especially his fingers and extended skin. And from there, to embrace the eternal realities rather than the ephemeral illusions flickering and dashing around him. Through this stretch, he heeds fellow monks who create beautiful colored-sand mandalas and then scatter them to the wind rather than preserve their work. This emphasis on the present while pursuing eternal truth may seem to be a paradox, but he submits to the instruction and its flowing current.

So that, too, was filtered out of the final revisions. As was this:

Baba and Rinpoche had grown close when they were both residents in the monastery. Rinpoche was then just another of the aspirants, albeit a Tibetan refuge with a lineage. Their teacher blessed their venturing into the Heartland to establish the institute here, and Rinpoche, with his mastery of Himalayan languages, took up an offer to teach academic courses at the university while leading a spiritual community from the house.

~*~

Like Rinpoche, Cassia’s father was in many ways a teacher. In their case, they were dealing with ancient Buddhist lore. Good teachers, as you know, are rare.

Tell us about your favorite teacher.

~*~

Orthodox Christian iconography can be out of this world. Just look at this church ceiling!