Right around the corner from us
Tag: Downeast
As I’m finding
The end of the road
is not the end of the world.
~*~
This could even be a book title.
On the other hand:
~*~
If this is an escape,
it’s a place of no escaping.
She was born to run
Once again, we’ll catch up
Those (real, postal carrier delivered) cards and letters are a fading tradition, but some of us cling on. Hearing on paper from old friends and some special family members each year is quite different, and warmer, than anything we’d receive online.
Even if it is from the governor or our U.S. senator. In a small state, we’ve usually met them face-to-face.
As seen through a window close to the sidewalk on the east side of the street
Gull with a chimney pedestal
How different today’s downtown Eastport looks from even the 1950s
Stroll through Eastport’s downtown – rebuilt within a year or two of the disastrous 1886 fire and now in the National Register of Historic Places – and you’d think it was always like this, only with all of the storefronts bustling.
Not so, as I’ve been hearing, and that’s confirmed by a closer look at the undated aerial photograph on the cover of Joe Clabby’s two history books.
So as an idea of how things have changed.
- The waterfront is still full of sardine canneries set out on wharfs just behind the storefronts downtown, but many of the operations are now abandoned. There had been 21 at the prime around the turn of the century, but only one is still operating after 1975 and that ceases in the early ‘80s. As one local told me, you could watch the town fall into the water. Only the shell of the American Can factory still stands today.
- In fact, you would have a hard time seeing the water. The Waterfront Redevelopment Project, launched in 1978 and completed in 1983, cleaned up much of the scene and installed the popular walkway.
- The railway station, successor to the steamboat pier sits, beside the American Can factory. There’s a large apron in front of it, possibly for parking.
- A big movie theater occupies the space where the parking lot and the fisherman statue are now. And another big building fills the now-open space of the amphitheater. Today both are big gaps in the row of storefronts but allow more sunlight into the district.
- No Breakwater pier. That won’t come until 1961, with extensions later. It’s the focal point today.
- And no Fish Pier, which further defines the harbor.
- A rail line still runs into town. Service will end in 1978 and the tracks, removed.
- The Hotel East sits where the Motel East now is – at a 90-degree angle to the original.
- A row of houses is perched at the water’s edge of Shackford Cove. Long gone.
- There’s no Coast Guard station.
Here’s how the waterfront looked even earlier, from two photographs taken by Lewis Wickes Hine in August 1911, now in the Library of Congress collection.
There’s nothing “quaint” about the place in these, is there?
Bunchberry or, if you prefer, creeping dogwood, I still love seeing it
We’ve become fond of this groundcover along many of our trails, with its white blossoms in the spring and red berries well into summer. Here the foliage is fringed with red, set here against moss and a touch of snow in a stretch of what may be a peat bog.
For the record, Cornus canadensis is also known as Canadian dwarf cornel, quatre-temps, even crackerberry,
Wonder how it would work in our home garden.
Yes, I live just a mile or so from New Brunswick
Have to admit “New Brunswick” sounds more exotic than simply “Canada.” Most Americans know where Canada is, after all, but have to think twice when the province is mentioned.
Equally exotic for this Ohio boy is living on one of the Fundy Bay islands, even if we don’t have to take a ferry to get to or from the mainland.
If I’m counting right in the satellite images, mine is one of the one hundred most easternmost houses in the continental U.S. It’s likely I’m even the most easternmost Quaker in the country.
Been here two years now, too, and it’s still amazing me.
Just when you’d think I’ve run out of examples
Jnana's Red Barn 