Tag: Musings

Just look at the fog

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As a child, foggy mornings frightened me, and attempts to comfort me by calling them “fallen clouds” only thickened my anxiety. It was quite simply abnormal. Get me outa here!

Where I now live, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that we have more than a hundred foggy days a year. Many of those, it burns off early, but on others, we are caught in gray for what can extend for weeks. Maybe I need to start counting.

Still, as one Navy commander exclaimed, “You don’t have your share of fog. You have everyone’s!”

That said, let’s get more specific.

  1. Technically, it is a ground-level cloud. Water vapor, which is invisible, turns into tiny droplets that hang in the air. That happens in very, very high humidity, wherever the temperature falls below the dew point. Not that it’s dew, either.
  2. In order for fog to form, dust or some kind of pollution needs to be in the air. Water vapor condenses around these microscopic solid particles. Sea fog, which shows up near bodies of salty water, is formed as water vapor condenses around bits of salt.
  3. Its hazy and ethereal atmospheric marvel has inspired artists, writers, poets, and even lovers, and has a profound impact on various aspects of nature and human emotions.
  4. It’s not the same thing as mist. Fog is denser, more massive, thicker. There are more water molecules in the same amount of space in a fog.
  5. Fog cuts visibility down to one kilometer or roughly a half-mile, meaning it prevents you from seeing further away that from where you’re standing. Mist can reduce visibility to between up to a mile.
  6. One kind of fog is identified as radiation, when heat rising from the ground into cooler air than the air above it. Another is advection, when warm air blows across a cooler surface and condenses. It’s especially common on the west coast of the U.S. Hello, San Francisco. Upslope or orographic happens when warm air blows up a slope, such as the face of a mountain, and then cools “adiabatically.” It’s also called valley fog, when warmer air is trapped by mountains and much colder air above. Typically, it’s a winter phenomenon. And evaporation occurs when warmer water evaporates into cooler air.
  7. Don’t confuse it with smoke, even if London’s famed “fog” was really industrial-era air pollution. Well, that complicates on fashion-coat label.
  8. Fog enhances acoustic experiences. I can definitely hear the fog horn better when there’s fog and it did create the eerie experience of hearing voices from a ship we couldn’t see as it came to the pier.
  9. It’s more common in coastal areas, due to temperature differences between the water, air, and land. As I was saying about our encounters here?
  10. It can help mitigate high temperatures and reduce heat stress. Or turn everything into a steam bath. But it can also freeze into delicate layers of crystal across a landscape or treacherous conditions on boats, airplanes, cars and trucks. Make for slippery walkways, too.

Wherever you are, look for the fog bow, too, like a rainbow within a cloud.

Individual life as a mosaic

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The thought hit me while scrolling through old posts on this blog.

Does anyone you know actually maintain a tightly focused life?

You know, someone who proclaims, ”These are my goals and I’m sticking to them”?

Or is it more a matter of steering between the many things that just pop up, like they do on the merry-go-round here at the Red Barn?

Or more like a pinball machine, for those of us of a certain age?

In the end you just have to patch together whatever you can from the pieces, even while trying to fit them to the other folks around you?

Lorenzo Sabine was a Yankee, all the same

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

After running across his name repeatedly while researching the history of our old house, I decided to look him up. Lorenzo Sabine turns out to have been a remarkable character. Best known today for his two-volume, provocative 1864 book Loyalists of the American Revolution, his adulthood included an influential span in Eastport.

Here are some highlights.

 

  1. He was born in 1803 in what’s now Lisbon in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, with a Methodist minister for a father and roots going back to French Huguenots who arrived in Rehoboth, Massachusetts from Wales in 1643. Lorenzo moved with his parents to Boston in 1811, and then to Hampden, Maine, in 1814, where he completed his preparatory studies. His father had been taken prisoner by the British in the War of 1812 while working in a military hospital.
  2. At age 18, following his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage, he came to Eastport not long after Maine gained statehood from being a district of Massachusetts. At first, he was employed as a clerk, then tried his hand at his own business but went bankrupt, followed by working as bookkeeper of Passamaquoddy Bank and then engaging in a series of enterprises, including stints as a mercantile partner with William and Jacob Shackford, sons of the Revolutionary War veteran who built our house and much more. He shows up as a witness on many property deeds and other court records.
  3. He was editor of the weekly Eastport Sentinel newspaper to 1834, during Benjamin Folsom’s time as publisher. He was also founder of the Eastport Lyceum, and incorporator of the Eastport Academy and Eastport Atheneum.
  4. He served as a member of the Maine House of Representatives, 1832-33, and was deputy collector of customs at Eastport, 1841-43.
  5. From early childhood, he was what he called “revolution-mad,” something that grew in other directions after his move to Eastport, abutting Canada and having many residents descending from Loyalist lines. This led to his insight that “there was more than one side to the Revolution.” Prior to this “every ‘Tory” was as bad as bad could be, every “son of Liberty” as good as possible.” During the 1840s, the results of his research appeared in the North American Review, America’s first literary magazine.
  6. Quite simply, his work was not favorably received by “patriotic” Americans though it did receive support from several important historians. Lorenzo then revised and expanded his material into an 1847 book The American Loyalists, or Biographical Sketches of Adherents to the British Crown in The War of the Revolution; Alphabetically Arranged; with a Preliminary Historical Essay, erupting a firestorm of controversy. The work received a more thorough two-volume edition for its republication in 1864. You can read it online to see why it challenged many of the conventional treatments of the Revolutionary War and the tensions leading to the War of 1812 from the British side. He did, do note, receive honorary degrees from Bowdoin College and from Harvard.
  7. He moved to Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1848 as a trial judge and was elected to Congress in 1852 to fill a seat vacated by death but did not run for reelection.
  8. Appointed secretary of the Boston Board of Trade, he relocated to Roxbury and also served as a confidential agent of the U.S. Treasury Department.
  9. He was married three times, to Matilda F. Green in 1825, Abby R.D. Deering in 1829, and 1837 to Elizabeth M. Deering, who survived him. Only one of his five children survived him.
  10. He died in Roxbury in 1877 but is buried in Eastport’s Hillside Cemetery.

Happy Canada Day – and a nod to the Loyalists who fled from the American Revolution  

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When I was growing up, we occasionally heard that not everyone in the American colonies supported the Revolutionary War, but we never, ever, got a clue of how many opponents there were or how strongly they resisted. Sometimes it went past as “a third.”

Living where I do, facing the border of New Brunswick, Canada, has been an eye-opening experience on that front.

In fact, a premiere historian of their support of the Crown was Lorenzo Sabine, a prominent figure in early Eastport and a business partner, briefly, of two of the sons of the man who first presided in our house. We’ll look at him in a Tendrils next week.

Today, in observation of Canada Day, we’ll focus on the United Empire Loyalists who were expelled from the new United States to the south. Or, where I live, it’s also east.

  1. An estimated 42,000 white settlers plus 3,500 free blacks and 2,000 enslaved blacks migrated to the remaining British North America holdings during and especially at the close of the Revolutionary War. They came from all 13 rebelling colonies, but principally from New York and New England. Many other expelled monarchists relocated to Florida, Britain, and the Caribbean.
  2. They came from every social class but often after enduring the confiscation of their property and wealth. Some did manage to dismantle their houses and erect them anew in Canada, as I learned in a neighborhood of Castine, Maine.
  3. Sir Guy Carleton – the 1st Lord Dorchester and governor of Quebec and governor general of the Canadas – created the identifying label to distinguish the English-speaking settlers from the descendants of New France inhabitants of the Province of Quebec, otherwise known as Canadians or Canadiens, possibly akin to Acadia.
  4. Growth resulting from the arrival led to the creation of new colonies. In 1784, New Brunswick was partitioned from Nova Scotia to reflect significant new settlement around the Bay of Fundy. In 1791, the Province of Quebec divided into Lower Canada (present-day Quebec), and Upper Canada (present-day Ontario).
  5. To encourage Loyalist resettlement, especially along the frontier of Upper Canada, the Crown awarded the new arrivals land grants of 200 acres a person. This added English speakers to the population and was followed by additional waves of immigration that established a predominantly Anglo-Canadian culture both west and east of the modern Quebec border.
  6. Loyalists in Upper Canada petitioned the government to be allowed to use the British legal system, which they were accustomed to in the American colonies, rather than the French system. Great Britain had maintained the French legal system and allowed freedom of religion after taking over the former French colony with the defeat of France in what we call the French and Indian War but is more widely known as the Seven Years’ War. Thus, most Loyalists in the west could live under British laws and institutions while the predominantly ethnic French population of Lower Canada, who were still French-speaking, could maintain their familiar French civil law and Roman Catholic religion. (I’m assuming that the residents of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick already functioned under the British system.)
  7. Thousands of Iroquois and other pro-British Indigenous peoples, expelled from New York and other states, resettled in Canada. One group established the Six Nations of the Grand River, the largest First Nations reserve in Canada.
  8. In laying out St. Andrews, eight miles from my home in Maine, Loyalists named the north-south streets after the 13 children of King George III. The major east-west streets include one named for Queen Charlotte and another as the Prince of Wales. The county is also named for Her Highness.
  9. Largely influenced by its Loyalist presence, Canada resisted U.S. overtures during the War of 1812 and successfully repulsed American invasion. From the Loyalist perspective, the War of 1812. Other parties viewed it as a mixed bag.
  10. Many Canadians take pride in their Loyalist ancestry. As In 1898, Henry Coyne wrote in 1898, “The Loyalists, to a considerable extent, were the very cream of the population of the Thirteen Colonies. They represented in very large measure the learning, the piety, the gentle birth, the wealth and good citizenship of the British race in America, as well its devotion to law and order, British institutions, and the unity of the Empire. This was the leaven they brought to Canada, which has leavened the entire Dominion of this day.”

George Washington, we may note, did not view them so favorably. As he remarked in a 1776 letter, “One or two have done what a great number ought to have done long ago, committed suicide. By all accounts, there never existed a more miserable set of beings than these wretched creatures now are. Taught to believe that the power of Great Britain was superior to all opposition, and, if not, that foreign aid was at hand, they were even higher and more insulting in their opposition than the regulars.”

Now, for tonight’s fireworks from an island on the other side of the international border.

Mackerel by the bucket

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Yes, I’ve long known the explicative, “Holy mackerel!” but have never gone beyond that until moving to Eastport, where it’s commonly fished from the Breakwater pier. Previous postings here at the Barn reflect that.

That said.

  1. It’s a small fish (around here, less than a foot long), oily like salmon, and to my eyes quite pretty.
  2. For those casting with a rod and reel, it’s caught with four to six hooks on a line, on a good day all of them emerging from the water fully loaded.
  3. Much of the haul here is either thrown back, as sport, or kept as bait for lobsters, or eaten smoked, pickled, or cooked fresh. Otherwise, mackerel don’t keep long. They’re bony, FYI, so they need to be fileted expertly.
  4. Oily? They’re rich in healthy omega-3 fatty oils, a plus when it comes to cholesterol control. And, thanks to that oil, their beautiful scales do stick to the human touch. Oh, and the fish are low in dreaded mercury.
  5. They exist in many species around the globe and are high on the menu of larger fishes.
  6. They breed near the surface of the water, with a female releasing between 300,000 and a million-and-a-half eggs that float free in the open sea.
  7. Ours travel in dense schools, roiling the water above.
  8. They’re fun and easy to catch, from what I’ve seen, and a great target for young and new anglers. There is no size limit, harvest limit is 20 a day per person, no license required except in interior waters, however that’s defined.
  9. They’re related to tuna and bonito. (Now we’re talking.)
  10. There’s an art in the cast and in the jigging of the line while reeling it in.

Looking for the pearls

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When I first began reading contemporary poetry (for pleasure, independent of classroom assignment), I often sensed the poem existed as a single line or two, with the rest of the work as window dressing.

Now I read the Psalms much the same way, for the poem within the poem, or at least the nugget I’m to wrestle with on this occasion. Psalm 81, for instance, has both the “voice in thunder” and “honey from rock.” What exactly are those in my own experience?

Add to my once idealistic expectations, there was this

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My goal of having our family operating on a Quaker Meeting decision-making process.

Yes, trying to find concesus with young children in the house. We’re all on board, right?

Let’s just say I failed here. My, was a naïve when I jumped in as a stepdad in my mid-50s!

Not just because of a rebellious younger member, whom I deeply adore. But also because of the parent/adult dynamics and tensions.

No doubt, I pictured myself as the clerk, that is moderator. The mother, however, is what the one in the movie My Fat Greek Wedding Declared, the throat, ultimately rules.

Saint Paul should stand fully corrected regarding the head of the household. The mother’s is great theology.

Just how are decisions really made in families? I’d love to listen in on the discussions.