losing
points as
joints of
fingers
on a blackboard
Johnny Appleseed was really a preacher
More accurately, John Chapman, who distributed Swedenborgian church tracts with those packets of seeds all along the American frontier of his time.
As was William Penn, on the Quaker side, largely still confined in old England.
It’s curious how individuals’ religious motivations get excised from the sanitized histories.
The Book, or Bible, if you prefer, is filled with a lot of revolutionary vision for those who want to reclaim and then pursue its fulfillment.
So starting with apples, which do get a bad but undeserved rap at the beginning of the epic, seems a fitting place to begin.
End of sermon. For now.
We have four principal towns in Way DownEast Maine
They’re Calais, Eastport, Lubec, and Machias. Or the other way around, depending on how you’re driving or sailing.
Like pearls on a string, one that hugs the coastline of vast Washington County.
The image of four anchors arrayed along a map makes sense, each one with its own distinctive attraction.
Their combined population comes to barely eight thousand.
The terrain around here is much more real than Acadia, for sure, if you’re the least bit interested in the Real Maine.
Gratitude to the public library
Dover’s public library has been quite proactive in developing an online presentation of the city’s historical profiles and images. I’ve found those resources to be very useful for fast checks when drafting these posts and related material, for certain.
Its dark-hued historical room upstairs is a treasure chest of local lore, as I discovered decades ago chancing upon Dover’s Quaker family records serialized in the fat volumes of the New Hampshire Genealogical Record, 1903-1909. They’ve since been keyboarded and made available online, if you Google, though I’m still relying on my photocopies.
In time, as a library cardholder, I even had online access to U.S. Census records from home in the wee hours. What a privilege!
If it weren’t for the Covid restrictions and my relocation to far eastern Maine, I’d like still be digging around on the top floor there. I certainly encourage others to do so.
Opa!
In relocating from Dover, I do miss its annual Labor Day weekend Greek festival – the food, conversations, dancing with live music, and overall happy vibe. What they call kefi.
For Greek Orthodox congregations across North America, these events have become a traditional way of celebrating their culture, welcoming the surrounding community to sample it, reenforcing the bonds of their membership, and conducting some needed fundraising, sometimes for local charities as well as the church itself. The deep commitment of the volunteers and the overall organizational skill always amaze me, and it has been fun to be part of the food-serving line some years.
Earlier in the summer, neighboring Portsmouth usually has its own, similar but also with differences, and both weekends draw big crowds, jammed parking, and partisan comparisons. Dover’s has free admission, unlike Portsmouth, which has more dance addicts.
The festivals closet to Sunrise County are in Portland and Lewiston, downstate five or so hours away. Or, for variety, Halifax, Nova Scotia, which has a four-day schedule but is a six-hour drive away – or seven if you take the shortcut ferry ride across Fundy Bay.
~*~
For the Labor Day weekend, Eastport has a much more low-key observance, the Salmon and Seafood Festival.
Things get wilder the following weekend, then the pirates invade for what’s our blowout to the summer tourist season.
What are you doing special for the holiday weekend?
Another full moon
Our annual salmon festival has me thinking of sardines
The American Can Company factory, now a hulk out over the water, had a daily output of more than a half-million cans for sardines. It employed 300 people. It was at the end of the line for the railroad, too.
In the adjacent canneries, sardine-packing women had hands moving so fast in cold water you saw only a blur, according to a friend who was a teen at the time and couldn’t begin to keep pace when he worked there.
I still have no desire to eat a sardine, though. Consider that the statement is coming from someone who’s learned to appreciate anchovies in his old age.
The Salmon Festival always takes place over the Labor Day weekend.
Lost in translation
I have to meet a Quaker representative – AFSC or FCNL or some such – at the airport. Not actually an airport, but more the sense of waiting and greeting. A sunny, springtime morning, a little before 8 a.m. She {maybe an elderly he, the two overlap} is to make a presentation before a public-school crowd. We’re running late, which becomes a problem because I have to get a second Public Friend and am caught in transporting the two. Am supposed to get the second at 10, but the first is still at the lectern.
I greeted the first using “thee,” then realized she had no idea what was happening, so I added: “I guess it’s been a while since thee’s been addressed in Plain Speech.”
The demise of AM radio
In all of today’s media upheaval, many younger users are puzzled by the term AM radio, while automakers are even considering eliminating the bandwidth from new vehicles altogether.
When I was a teen, this would have been entirely inconceivable. AM was king, period.
Dominated by clear-channel 50,000-watt stations that covered half of the country at night – and many having staffs of several hundred – they ranged down to much smaller voices that aired only during daytime hours, and even those frequencies were highly coveted by investors or niche nerds.
In contrast, FM was more limited in range and quite fringe. Many of the stations simulcast the AM sister’s programming. Others specialized in classical or jazz or “elevator music” for medical offices and retail store backgrounds.
Flash forward to today, when FM is where the audiences are. Not just for music, either, though much of the classic rock was crafted around the sound of AM top-40 formats. The shift of talk radio to FM sealed the deal.
I’m still surprised when traveling to find how little is available on AM, at least in English. More surprised, actually, to hear of station licenses being laid down and going idle, even in rural areas like the one where I’m living.
Gee, we might even begin wondering about the era of radio drama and comedy. Those really were something.
What are you listening to today?
Pemaquid wild surf
Nothing like a decaying hurricane somewhere out at sea to roil the water. This one was rough enough to cancel ferry service to neighboring Monhegan Island for days.
Jnana's Red Barn 