Tag: Life

Let’s put Moose Island in perspective

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Since relocating to Eastport at the close of 2020, I’ve been posting about the place where I now live, but this may be the time to present a slightly broader perspective.

Officially, Eastport is both a small city and an archipelago. It comprises 3.63 square miles of land, mostly on Moose Island, and 8.7 square miles of water. Moose Island is extremely irregular in shape, with multiple inlets, or coves, and corresponding points, or heads, largely lined with a shore of rock walls and scattered pocket beaches. The island is 4½ miles long and no more than a mile and a quarter wide, depending.

You don’t catch much of that from land, even with the zig-zag state highway into town. That is, emphatically, the only route to or from the mainland. Viewed from the water, of course, a much different picture emerges.

Today, the island is connected to the mainland via a causeway. The roadway passes through the tribal reservation at Pleasant Point, or Sipayik. They, too, are a presence.

In an unusual twist, the Passamaquoddy name, Muselenk, is derived from the English “moose island,” so we glean no ancient nuances there. The waters, on the other hand, are varied and rich, as the Native names reveal.

As you’ll see when we peel away the layers of our old Cape, its orientation – like those of the community’s European descendants over the years – gravitates increasingly to the waters, especially the sheltered, ice-free harbor a block from the house.

Moose Island is described as being on Passamaquoddy Bay, which technically borders the island on one side while Cobscook Bay hugs the other, though both are extensions of the famed Bay of Fundy and its extreme tides. Thanks to Fundy Bay, our tides are the largest in the continental United States, as you’ve seen in some of my posts here. We do face Campobello Island, Deer Island, and a few others only a mile or two away in New Brunswick, Canada, and they shelter us from the open Atlantic. Again, you’ve met them here at the Red Barn.

Campobello, in fact, is a mere mile or two away, across the deep channel, and can be seen from our house.

Legalistically, the border between the United States and Canada slash Britain remained somewhat fluid through many of the early years. Earlier conflicts between France and England precluded permanent settlement before the end of the French and Indian wars in 1763 and few others came in until the end of the American Revolution in 1783. There were also four years from the War of 1812 when Eastport was under British jurisdiction – making the city the last location in the continental U.S. to be under foreign rule.

Perhaps that was a factor in making the harbor the second busiest in the U.S. in 1833, much of it smuggling with New Brunswick.

The line between the U.S. (meaning Eastport) and Canada wasn’t fixed until 1842. Canada and Canadian-born people play a significant role in the evolution of the town.

All of this, as I discovered, plays into the history of our house and its inhabitants, too.

Who are they kidding?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’m thinking of those ridiculous online ads that purport to be something about Maine but show us images of urban Arizona or maybe Miami, the furthest opposites to where I live yet purporting to be local for here. You know, most affordable housing or food delivery or the ten best restaurants or plumbers in Eastport. We don’t have nearly that many. Got it?

Many of them somehow zero in on tiny East Machias or, for our weather almanac, as St. John, New Brunswick, or Halifax, Nova Scotia. Do note that East Machias is not Eastport. They’re an hour apart.

There’s also the Microsoft ab that proclaims “Eastport light traffic,” which is truly baffling. There are only three or four traffic lights in the entire county, OK? Heavy traffic, apart from road construction, is usually three or four vehicles.

These are even worse than the late-night TV commercials that couldn’t come close to properly pronouncing where we lived in the Pacific Northwest.

Retrofitting Jaya into the ashram led to a chain reaction

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I had expected that the deep revisions to my previously published novels in reaction to the appearance What’s Left would apply only to the ones related to Cassia’s father.

I was wrong, once again. I blame Cassia, by the way.

She had led me to present a more unified set of hippie novels and bring them more into the present. Now she wanted me to do something similar to my remaining works.

I could connect two more books through the character of Jaya. She was the center of my book that leads into the Pacific Northwest. By shifting her spiritual identity from Sufi to yogi, I could then weave her into the yoga novel, in effect creating a two-part series.

How would that work?

It all depended, I sensed, on the yoga novel. She would have to become one of the eight resident followers of the guru.

The obvious one, Swami’s right-hand disciple, was male. That shift would throw off the balance of having half of the followers being male and the other half, female. In addition, the interaction with Jaya and the guru, a female, would lack a basic tension.

Having Swami be a woman, as mine was, had presented a hurdle for many of my potential readers. The ashram was rogue enough as it was.

The gender change allowed for a more credible – and colorful – character. It also had a ripple effect through the rest of the cast.

In the end, the book had a new title and some renamed and otherwise altered characters while now leading organically into a series. Just where does she go when she leaves the ashram? You got it.

~*~

Finding the artwork that now graces the cover was a boost. Maybe it even prompted another sweep through the story to enhance the humor.

Much had happened in the yoga world in the time since I drafted the story and eventually published it. Many of the new religion organizations in America – and I’ll include yoga, despite the usual protests – had suffered serious scandals, either monetary or sexual. At least I had avoided that by keeping my story to a single day.

Bit by bit, I learned some of what happened after I had moved on. A chance encounter in a central Pennsylvania diner with one of the figures, who was waitressing on a very busy day, revealed one disturbing schism. Later, through the Internet, I heard from several key players from my residency and learned I hadn’t been ostracized, after all, but the operation had undergone a serious upheaval shortly before Swami’s death. And then I had some long phone calls with the figure who had been in the role Jaya subsumed in the revised novel. The relationship wasn’t exactly as I had assumed – or anyone else, as far as I can see. On top of that, a former girlfriend finally told me of her mistreatment when she visited. There were other dark sides I hadn’t suspected.

Repeatedly, they agreed that I was at the ashram during its glorious apogee. I missed later conflicts that erupted when the locals decided the place was a cult or events I see as fatal changes in direction, especially in terms of guru worship.

~*~

With the focus on Jaya and what she gained from her experiences on the yoga farm, I’m spared from going into an expose of a marginal spiritual community. For me, the time was a major turning point in my life, leading me to the Society of Friends, or Quakers, which to my surprise had been the faith of my ancestors.

I still believe as a nation, we could be doing much, much better. Something more like what I see in the Biblical Kingdom of God on earth.

Yoga had been a stretch for me. My preference would have been for Zen Buddhist, had a teacher appeared. Instead, this American woman in a pink jump suit came across my path. It still seems surreal.  In my hippie novels, it’s Tibetan Buddhist.

A good friend who had been an Episcopal nun had her own insights on monastic life, with many overlaps to what I had experienced. I’ve long been fascinated by American Shakers, too. More recently I’ve added Greek Orthodox examples and mysticism to the mix. And, curiously, my most “hippie” identity or fullness came during those years on the yoga farm.

There are lessons I’ve carried through life, but I should also acknowledge potentially damaging instances, including things that came up in therapy years later. My denial of emotions, especially.

Novels about yoga are surprisingly few. As touchstones for his book, I’ll instead cite non-fiction: Anagarika Govinda’s The Way of the White Clouds, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, collected writings of Swami Sivananda. Ram Dass’ Be Here Now, and stray bits by and about Murshid Samuel Lewis, and Kathleen Norris’ Cloister Walk, for a Christian parallel. Surprisingly, Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha left me cold.

 

Not to be confused, geographically speaking

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Living in Down East (aka Downeast) Maine is confusing enough, considering that it’s mostly north. How about some other place locations?

  1. Upper Cape versus Lower Cape Cod as well as the Inner Cape and Outer Cape, meaning Cape Cod, Massachusetts, not what you’d usually think
  2. Deer Isle (Penobscot Bay, Maine) versus Deer Island (Passamaquoddy Bay, New Brunswick)
  3. Swan’s Island, off the coast, versus Swan Island in the Kennebec River
  4. Saint John (New Brunswick) versus Saint Johns (Newfoundland)
  5. Round Pond versus Round Lake, both in Washington County, Maine
  6. Salem, New Hampshire, 28 miles from Salem, Massachusetts
  7. Portland (Maine) versus the newer one out west
  8. Washington, the state, versus the District of Columbia
  9. Columbia, as in the river, and Colombia, the nation
  10. Missouree, as it’s pronounced in Saint Louis, and Missourah, in the rest of the state

Woodville is its own contentious issue, at least in the renamed Baileyville in Washington County, south of the one in Aroostook. Blame the U.S. Postal Service for trying to end the confusion.

What do you know of the history of your home?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When our planned substantial renovations finally began last autumn, our contractor began uncovering particulars that indicated the house might be even older than we had reckoned.

It was enough to prompt me to follow up on friendly banter by more than one person who asked if I’d ever gone to the county courthouse to “run the deeds” back to the original owner.

Quite simply, no, not here or in the previous two homes I’d purchased and later sold as I moved on.

While I’ve done a great deal of genealogy, courthouse records were one line of research I’d never pursued. I had encountered other researchers who specialized in family properties and last wills and testaments, and I was grateful for what those legal documents added to the family picture.

Even so, do accept my disclaimer regarding some of the dates and locations that pop up as I applied that line of inquiry to our old residence. What I’ve gleaned and present here is in an attempt to get a big picture of the lives that have intertwined with the house we purchased and renovated. Some of the connections are admittedly soft and subject to further revision. I am surprised by how many gaps remain.

Keeping that in perspective, I did finally trot off to the Washington County courthouse in Machias, an hour away. Let me say that digitalizing the archived records has made this field much easier and more accessible, and the registrar of deeds and her staff proved to be very helpful and friendly.

The fateful day my curiosity about our house finally led me to the registrar of deeds in Machias came about while I needed something to round out the day while my computer was in the repair shop a mile or so away.

To get the bigger picture, I set forth with a sense of trepidation. Armed with little more than the plot number of our lot, I anticipated technical complications, a tangle of legalese requiring translation, and dark, dusty confines. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to find the room well lighted and organized the staff both friendly and helpful. Better yet, the transactions have been digitalized in an easily navigated system. The original records were also at hand, should I desire, and I wouldn’t have to interrupt anyone to help me follow these.

Each transaction included a reference to the book and page numbers of the previous purchase, which was all you needed to trace the line of owners.

If only it were that easy.

~*~

Running the deeds means starting with the most recent transaction and working down through time, document by document.

Despite its modest appearance, our house has an unexpected significance, as you will find.

There are good reasons I’m calling my findings a genealogy of an old house. We’re surprised by some of the characters who’ve lived here.

Taking the subway to now

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Damn Cassia! She even tore apart my first published novel, Subway Hitchhikers.

A lot had happened in the nearly three decades since the book was first published – and even more since it was first conceived in 1973. Gee, that’s more than a half a century.

As I came back to the story after the release of What’s Left, my first task was to bring the tale more in line with the rest of the series, starting with the name of the lead character. Kenzie was an advance over the hippie-era Duma Luma, which rather echoed Wavy Gravy of Woodstock renown. His earlier legacy of being a lama reincarnated in Iowa was also downplayed if not entirely erased. Besides, there had been reports of such things actually happening since my book was first published. I have no idea how they turned out, either.

Another big job involved changing the original structure of short present-tense chapters flashing against past-tense ones, like subway trains passing in opposite directions. It was a creative touch but quickly confused the reader. A more conventional chronological-order storyline took its place.

That was accompanied by a new plot based on Kenzie’s monthly trips down to Manhattan to study with his Tibetan Buddhist guru in a tenement on the Lower East Side. That development added a handful of other devotees to the characters and realigned any who had previously existed.

Some of the Tibetan details now reflected tales I had heard from a more recent friend who was studying to become a Buddhist nun. Never mind that her experiences came decades after his or that there might not have been a Rinpoche residing anywhere near the Big Apple. Rival yogis, however, were plentiful.

Tibetans by the early 21st century? Our favorite dining option in Manchester, New Hampshire, was a Nepali restaurant that featured momos, a steamed dumpling staple in Tibet, too. The owners and staff were quite honored when an authentic Buddhist Rinpoche dropped in and approved of their dishes.

My, I have lived in a changing world. When’s the last time you even saw a subway token, by the way?

The freewheeling hippie-era fantasies of my book were soon followed by some creepy downsides. Hitchhiking out on the open road had turned sinister. Subway surfers, seeking the thrill of riding atop the cars in the tunnels and on the elevated lines above the street, were being decapitated and worse or worse by immovable objects in their trajectory. And the onset of homelessness during the Reagan years created whole villages surviving underground, as Jennifer Toth reported in her book The Mole People: Life in the tunnels under New York City, which was published just four years after my novel.

In addition, Long Island Newsday had assigned a columnist, Jim Dwyer, to its new subways beat, leading to a nonfiction book, Subway Lives: 24 Hours in the Life of the New York Subways, which came out only a year after mine. Now that’s some tough competition. No wonder I didn’t hear from him after sending him a comp copy for review when my book came off the press.

By that time, though, I was living an hour-plus north of Boston and entering a time of my life when I’d be riding its MBTA trains about once a week – perhaps a thousand fares one way and back with girlfriends and later family on my visits. Familiarity with underground mass transit hasn’t lessened my fascination.

Still, since Subway Hitchhikers had been about hippies, I had to admit they had largely fallen into disrepute or self-denial. But that’s not how the book stands now, something that’s reflected in its current title, Subway Visions; Along the tubes to nirvana.

As for today? Here I was, with my fascination with subway systems, asking my favorite lifeguard about her experiences in Boston during her freshman year of college. She must have been taking the cute little cars of the Green Line, right?

Instead, she emphatically told me how disgusting they are, miserable on hot days and packed at peak hours – and, especially, the fellow passenger, an utter stranger, who puked on her feet in sandals.

I didn’t dare show her my book after that.

Ten big prize winners I’ve known or at least met

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments
  1. Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize, economics
  2. Clarence Page, Pulitzer Prize, commentary
  3. Dick Locher, Pulitzer Prize, editorial cartoonist
  4. Gary Snyder, Pulitzer Prize, poetry
  5. Jeff MacNally, Pulitzer Prize, editorial cartoonist
  6. Jesse Haines, Baseball Hall of Fame, pitcher
  7. Jesse Owens, Olympic gold medalist, runner
  8. Marcy Nighswander, Pulitzer Prize, photography
  9. Ritter Collett, Baseball Hall of Fame, sportswriter
  10. Steve Curwood, Pulitzer Prize, investigative reporting

Now, for some background

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While we wait for the continuing renovations to catch up with these weekly reports, let’s change the focus to the history of this old house itself. Give us a better idea of what we’re working with, too.

When we bought our full Cape at the end of 2020, the real estate listing dated its origin in the 1860s. As we became familiar with the home’s bones, we saw details suggesting construction as early as the 1830s. While the pedigrees of a few neighboring houses have been catalogued by local historians, ours was not one of them. The dwelling did appear more modest in comparison.

We did have to wonder if the dwelling had been rebuilt after one of the catastrophic fires swept the downtown and its fringes in 1886, 1864, and 1839. Some of our stone foundation is 18 or more inches thick.

The house did appear on a widely reproduced 1879 map of Eastport, one that gave a birds-eye view of the city. The two dormers may have come later – it’s hard to tell from the map.

An earlier historic map of 1855 not only had a house fitting the footprint of ours on the lot, but with two wings, accompanied by an identifying script “Shackford Est.” The difficulty came in trying to figure out which Shackford that would have been — the family was prominent and prolific.

An earlier Plan of the Village of Eastport, 1835, by William Anson presented rough designations of the structures in town, including a house where ours is and only a few others in the blocks around.

Thus, we do know the house was here before 1886, as the charred rafters affirm, reflecting the great fire that destroyed the downtown. Local history dean Ruth “Ruthy” McInnis, owner of the Todd House bed and breakfast, had primed us to look for that detail when we were considering whether to bid on the place. Other dwellings, as we’re learning, share similar damage.

What I’ve uncovered is that this house is even older than we suspected, and more historic. In many ways, it tells the story of the town, too.

Ahoy, mates! It’s a small world, indeed

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been caught off-guard several times while wearing my gray Louis R. French historic schooner hoodie around Eastport. (Well, one of them. I now have three, but that’s another story.)

The first encounter was at the county courthouse in Machias while researching the deeds to our home. A registrar asked what I knew about the boat and I started replying with the history. She smiled and said, “My dad worked aboard it,” back when it was a sardine carrier based in Lubec, the town just south of Eastport. During that stretch, the masts were removed and the vessel was powered by an inboard motor.

The second time was when a friend, a legendary ship pilot, smiled and said he rode many times aboard it as a kid. Bob did correct me, saying the French wasn’t a sardine carrier but a freighter carrying cat food to Canada. (“Cat food to Canada?” Sounds like a title to me.) His family did own canneries in Lubec, Eastport, Portland, and a few other places. That’s yet another history to consider.

The next incident came while leaving my dentist’s office and his wife ( a.k.a. center of operations) Mary, blurted out, “Lewis R. French? That was my family’s boat.” For 50-some years, in fact, or the time it was based on our waters, when her Burpee and Vose families possessed the vessel. From her I learned that during the Prohibition, the French was an active rum-runner. Sardine carrier? Huh? The missions do get more interesting, no?

She also said something about ghosts. Well, if they could talk.

She does have the book published later, but I do suspect some of those details are missing.

The most recent account came while watching a big cruise ship come into Eastport. A woman standing nearby saw my hoodie and then told me she used to work in the office when the French belonged to Seaport Navigation. (She confirmed that my dentist’s wife’s families were among the owners). The headquarters was on the second floor of a waterfront building that she pointed to, one where friends of ours have their gallery and apartment, and said she never got tired of the view. She remembered typing up many documents regarding  deliveries of canned sardines to the railroad line in St. Andrews, New Brunswick. Shipping them from there rather than by truck from Maine was much cheaper. By this point, the French was Seaport’s backup ship.

So sardines were still part of the story.