Tag: Maine

Am I the only blogger working from Downeast Maine?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

I don’t mean broadcasters or newspapers reissuing their material online, nor do I mean Facebook or Twitter snapshots and quips. Blogging, as you know, is more varied, personal, and I’d say engaged than that. It requires a special focus.

At the moment I’m finding it difficult to locate anyone else posting anywhere in the Pine Tree State, apart from gloating visitors and a few writers sharing a site based elsewhere.

It’s not that folks hereabouts are aloof, not by any means, as I’m discovering in my new locale. I’m fascinated by the stories they tell as well as the unique landscape we share, but I’m still new on the scene.

Welcome to my workstation, for now.

Our little city stretches from heads to coves

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

When it comes to finding your way about town, you need to know more than just the names of the streets.

Eastport’s a city of islands, with Moose Island the biggest and most inhabited. It’s roughly six miles long and three wide, at the most, but that still adds up to 20 or so miles of shoreline, I’m guessing.

So people will refer to Buckman Head or Estes Head or Todd Head or Kendall Head or, for variety, Harris Point, punctuated by coves.

Harris Cove and Harris Point at low tide. Deer Island, New Brunswick, lies beyond.

So there’s Broad Cove or Deep Cove, which flank Shackford Head, or Prince Cove, for instance. As well as Carrying Place, Half Moon, and Johnson coves. Plus a few more. And that’s before we get to the neighboring towns, up and down the coast, which also name places this way.

Welcome to my new world.

Post Office and old Customs House

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Anchoring one end of Eastport’s main street downtown is the Post Office and former Customs House.

Though the Customs role has moved closer to the Breakwater but not so the mail, especially this time of year..

The building still bespeaks of a special authority and order.
From the water, it’s a landmark.
And inside, the post boxes are pure vintage.
As is the staircase up the tower.

 

As an example of the kind of excellent journalism we’re missing these days, let me offer this modest example

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My wife forwarded me a link to a Washington Post article about the ways international supply-chain problems impacted a small, family-owned, dairy north of our place in easternmost Maine and its signature product, a chocolate milk with a passionate following.

For me, it’s a great piece of journalism, or as I told her, my ideal of reporting.

In fact, it fit into the aspirations I present in my novel Hometown News.

Personally, I favor longer pieces that take a long-range view, as this one does, especially when they encapsulate a much bigger, more difficult, issue in ways that hit home.

In contrast, the trend has long been for shorter, faster, less complex dispatches that move on to the next sensational blast. You know, the 24-hour news cycle. Or less. Most of it is forgettable, puff in the air, hit-me-with-what’s-next superficiality.

Instead, what we have here is a consequence of assigning a reporter full-time to the Northeast, as the Washington Post does, in one of those expenses that might seem superfluous to the bean counters who fill too many executive positions in too many industries. In fact, we can blame them for much of the supply-side issues that plague us. Prestige, after all, is rarely seen as a quantifiable asset.

Moreover, I doubt the Post would have found this story without that marginal investment. (The nearest daily newspaper, fine as it is, finds itself way too overwhelmed by everyday issues to dig into something requiring an investment of time like this. In fact, one of the things I that drew me to working at the New Hampshire Sunday News was the opportunity to assist similar projects, where we might have a week to dig into the dimensions and then display the findings properly.)

I also love the fact that the Post hired an excellent photographer to pursue the story, too, and paid for his time to look beneath the obvious surfaces. Again, it takes time to get a feel for what’s beneath the surface and come up with something fresh and expressive. His shots tell a full, parallel, story of people dedicated to their seemingly commonplace employment. What emerges is almost like a film score underpinning a movie.

Better yet, in this case, the difficulty encountered was about chocolate – who couldn’t love that! As well as the schoolchildren who loved the dairy’s chocolate milk as part of their lunches. You can’t build a better connection than you do with kids, except maybe through the words of their parents, as this report does.

My kudus to reporter Joanna Slater and photographer Tristan Spinski – and their unnamed editors for publishing this.

If only we could see much more along this line of journalism!

Parts of Maine often resemble the Far West 

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Maine is larger than the rest of New England combined, and except for much of Vermont, it was settled much later than the rest of the six-state region. That is, the parts of the state that were ever settled at all. Half of the Pine Tree State has no year-round population at all, for good reason.

The result is that there are paved roads where you can drive for miles and see nary a utility line or a mailbox, much less a house. Often, the only human activity you detect is timbering or mining. Hunting and fishing are a way of life. It wasn’t that far out of Bangor I used to see the bear-hunt guide sign.

Those roads remind me of driving from town and out toward a mountain pass on my way to trails in the high country out West.

There are trails for hiking or ATVs just about everywhere, many of them through conifer forests like those of the Far West. Here’s one at Shackford State Park within Eastport’s city limits.

Downeast Maine’s open blueberry barrens on the ridges, meanwhile, give me a sensation of the Big Sky Country of Montana or the Horse Heaven Hills of Washington state, except that the blue overhead isn’t the same deep intensity.

I believe that the presence of Indigenous peoples is another part of the mix. Eastport is adjacent to the Passamaquoddy’s Pleasant Point Reservation, as we’re reminded every time we drive to or from our island. They’re one of the four tribes comprising the Wabanaki Alliance in the state.

Yes, there is a kind of frontier feel around here. I’d suggest calling the area the Far East, but that name’s already been taken.

Fact is, many of the old ships that sailed to the Far East were built along these shores rather than those of the Far West.

A quick take of my first year here

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Whale watches, the ferry to and from Lubec, plus the Fourth of July, salmon, and pirate festivals were all fun. I even observed a beluga that lingered just offshore my first time out on the water here.

The island’s ten degrees cooler than the mainland in summer – I wore shorts only three times, all of them when I was off to run errands elsewhere. And supposedly the temps run ten degrees warmer in winter, though this house is still cold. We really do need to replace the windows and thoroughly insulate.

We missed gardening, apart from the little fenced-in patch in the front yard, but not the weeding, though the rabbits still happily devoured anything I brought in. Rather than squirrels as a menace, we have deer – especially when the wild apple tree starts bearing. They eat nearly everything in sight, including tomatoes, as I learned before reinforcing the rim of our little garden. Still, I nearly got a doe to eat a cookie from my hand one evening. My wife wasn’t so daring. And tomatoes? They really don’t grow well around here. But the oxeye daisies, basil, and lettuce continued merrily all summer.

None of the big renovations we’d anticipated got done. Contractors are booked out a year in advance, and the one we had lined up backed out before tackling the roof that our insurance company wants replaced pronto. Well, even if we had gotten started, prices on building supplies did more than double. We’re hoping they drop – soon.