This is how the rising moon looked from across our street last night. The reflection is in the bay between us and Campobello Island in New Brunswick, Canada. Some of those lights on the island are moving traffic.
Tag: Downeast
This is a clue to what really occupies my mind some days
Ten random notes in no particular order:
- I’m still learning to spell Katahdin.
- Was it a mama moose I hit that cold night on my commute back from the office, rather than a deer? Now that I’m getting to know deer, I think the collision involved something bigger.
- Red states? They’re where nobody really wants to live. Or at least the paying jobs.
- How dark the house is at night in an electrical power outage! There’s no ambient light from the street lamps or apparatus power-on buttons.
- Glyphs = little typographic devices.
- I dreamed I was playing violin again. In an orchestra, no less.
- How deeply backpacking as a youth shaped my values (forget efficient as a factor). It’s that travel light thing.
- After living in New Hampshire, I’m still not used to a sales tax.
- English country dance lyric, “If love were an ocean / and water was gin / I’d walk a long plank / and throw myself in.” It’s not from “Robin, Mad Robin,” is it?
- A voicemail message for today: “Let me a message or text me. I’ll get back.”
It’s called a dolphin
Our waterfront contains two sets of steel pilings each capped by a concrete structure that sits apart from the pier and above the water line.
In Eastport’s case, these are mooring dolphins, where lines from a ship exceeding the Breakwater’s 400-foot dock length can be attached to help secure the vessel in port.
Here’s one in action.
The line’s slack now but won’t be when the tide rises more.
Sloop at the pier
The Prinses Mia had been sailed across the Atlantic by one man.
It’s been a slow season for tourism, and even the summer rentals are down
From the start of our travel season, things here have felt slow. I haven’t seen as many cars as I have in the past or as many states represented in their license plates, for one thing. While there are people on the streets, they’re not crowds.
Even down on Cape Cod, summer homes are available rather than reserved long in advance.
Somehow, we’re hearing that retail sales have been holding up, but we’re also seeing more vacancies in the Airbnb options, too. (The latter hits us as good news, considering how the investment buyers have been skewering the home market away from working families we desperately need.)
Still, visitors are the key to retail businesses in our part of Maine – our version of Black Friday has already passed or soon will, unlike the day after Thanksgiving push elsewhere. Maybe the visits by cruise ships in the foliage season will provide a much needed boost.
Could much of this reflect the reality that inflation is finally pinching family budgets?
Highway humor
As seen on your side of U.S. 1 heading north in Edmunds Township. It always makes us smile.
Or on the other side of the road when you’re heading south.
Schooner style
Roseway in port
We’re stuck in fog, fog, fog
While I had heard that these stretches of a surrounding blur of dense gray could linger weeks here, I assumed folks were talking about March or maybe late November, not the height of glorious summer.
And then a friend told me of one summer in Lubec, a few miles over the water to our south, where it hit every day, often without any splash of sunshine.
It does dampen the emotional wellbeing of many.
As much of the nation – and world – suffers under recording-breaking heat, we’re having many days when the day’s high has barely reached much above 60, as in Fahrenheit. Only a few readings have even broken as far as the lower 80s. I’ve worn my beloved Hawaiian shirts only three times, and my shorts are still in the bottom drawer of the dresser. If you’re wondering, unlikely as that is, I’m not one of those guys who goes bare-knees in January, believe me.
Much of this has been accompanied by weeks of fog – morning and late afternoon through the night, especially – but sometimes without break during the day as well.
I’ve stopped reminding people that Seattle experiences something like this six-months straight every year or that San Francisco is accustomed to watching the ground-hugging clouds return every afternoon.
We do live on an island, so the temperatures just seven miles away on the mainland traditionally run ten degrees warmer, but those are still much more reasonable than the hellfire raging elsewhere.
None of the wider extremes should come as a surprise. True prophets had forecast them a half century ago, and we are running on those projections, contrary to the decades of denials and resistance of capitalist naysayers and their puppet politicians. Remember, too, it was “climactic instability” rather than mere “global warming.”
So, on a more mundane level, on those partly-cloudy to partly-sunny days in the forecast, we jump onto running the laundry early and then getting it promptly out on the line to breathe, and I attack the lawn with the mower as soon as the grass dries sufficiently. Not that I’m the only one, not by a longshot.
When I did live in the Pacific Northwest, I was in the interior desert with dreams of escaping somehow to a writing life somewhere along the coast, maybe in a cabin in British Columbia or Alaska.
Something like this, perchance.
Lobster boats unload here … and around the corner
Only a block from our house.
Adding to the memories
Sailors who visited Eastport for the Fourth of July voiced their amazement at the pilot who guided their U.S. Navy destroyer vessel at the Breakwater pier in some very dense fog.
They could hear the conversational voices of humans on the pier and shoreline but couldn’t see a thing. We could hear them but not see them, too.
And then they were landed, gently and safely.
They told us he was a magician, and from my angle of observation, it was true. Even the commanding officer was most amazed, in what became a memorable experience.
Jnana's Red Barn 