Snow comment needed.
Tag: Photos
Just from one storm
We had generally cleaned up from earlier snowfalls, with only a light covering left in town, before last weekend’s blizzard blew in. And, oh, my, did it!
Officially, we had 19 inches, though stiff wind and wicked gusts left some patches surprisingly bare, along with most roofs, but then piled the offset precipitation in the lee.
We were also hit with a widespread electrical outage, which fortunately was repaired in about only an hour or a bit more. I was braced for two or three before getting worried. Oh, I do miss having a wood-fired stove, though one is in our plans. And we do have a generator on order, one that would have been in by now if only we weren’t trying to relocate its proposed placement to allow for a tiny future full-sunlight garden, which is, in fact, now buried by the snow plow driver. Life gets complicated.
Shoveling out the front entry allowed for lighthearted conversations with passers-by, not all of them walking dogs. One woman even showed me a phone picture of her son or son-in-law’s back door, which was floor-to-ceiling snow when they opened it. Yes, I was deeply grateful ours wasn’t anything like that theirs.
So far, according to the weather service, we’ve had about 48 inches so far this season, but this last storm was the doozy, as you can see from our digging out. But, wait, there’s more, as the cliche goes. Tomorrow and the day after are expected to deliver another foot or so, the figures are still bouncing around. Dial up, scale back. Yeah, folks around here are skeptical of the forecasts, for good reason, but not stupid, either.
Reminds me of the guy behind me at the IGA checkout before the last blast. He had baby spinach and some related healthy ingredients followed by an impressive selection of wine. And you thought it was always milk, bread, and canned soup that got cleaned out?
Now, the big question is this:
If we get hit by this much snow in the days ahead, where we will put it?
Traditionally, February and March can bring the big whammies in New England and neighboring Upstate New York. This could get interesting. Or even tedious.
Restoring a one-of-a-kind Civil War mural
Eastport’s Civil War veterans had good reason for naming their Grand Army of the Republic post after Major General George G. Meade. Not only had he commanded the successful Union troops at the Battle of Gettysburg, he was stationed in Eastport after war to curb the Fenian Rebellion, an Irish liberation attempt that had organized in the United States and conducted raids in neighboring Canada.
During his time in Eastport, he caught pneumonia and nearly died, and some residents got to know him first-hand. One – the wife of the owner of the house where he was staying – complained bitterly for years afterward about his poor aim in spitting tobacco juice all over her home. Let’s hope he was better with a firearm.
The local post wasn’t the only one named in his honor, by the way, and the organization itself became a powerful force within the Republican Party, helping to elect at least four its members to the White House and pressing for progressive legislation.
In 1881, the local post took over a two-story frame structure at 6 Green Street as its meeting hall. As its membership – limited to Union veterans of the Civil War – died off, the building passed to the local Veterans of Foreign Wars for its post. The building next door included a bowling alley, roller skating rink, and dance hall all fondly recalled by youths of the time.
The murals and ceiling were long hidden by a dropped ceiling and rediscovered only shortly before 2014, when the building was gifted to the Tides Institute and Museum of Art.
Tony Castro of New Gloucester, Maine, has been renovating the murals. Despite severe water damage, they may be the only surviving interior of their kind in the state.
The Tides Institute has also been gifted with important Civil War artifacts and documents, which may be displayed as the museum adds gallery space.
Come on down to where the town really connects
Locally, it’s known as the Breakwater, rather than the town pier or wharf or dock or safe harbor. And it’s the heart of Eastport, the centerpiece and focal point, as well as the home of the commercial fishing fleet and U.S. Coast Guard station.
It even broke down and collapsed in the winter of 2014, taking a few fishing boats with it.
Rebuilding was another matter. Officially, it reopened in September 2017, though details may have been completed later. The versions differ, up to “two winters before last.”
Eastport has the deepest natural harbor in the continental United States and is said to have rivaled New York’s in shipping at one point. I’ve seen photos of a cruise ship tied up here, and it truly overwhelmed the dock and town in its size.
The waterfront has – and had – other piers, with pilings that can still be seen – the old vaudevillian appearing steamship dock, for one, or the more recently gone Northeast Marina and Fuel Depot, as prominent examples. And, yes, definitely, what was once the world’s largest sardine cannery, as well as a solitary brick shell from the era still standing over the water with some folks hoping for a redevelopment before it caves in.
Significantly, there is the Cargo Terminal, our industrial shipping complex at Estes Head just around the bend. It has both high security and tractor-trailer traffic, so you don’t stroll around there.
Still, the breakwater at the end of Sullivan Street beckons us, even with its seemingly perilous heights above the water at low tide.
A forest of radio towers
Anyone else love blueberries?
We’re getting down to the bottom of our stash of local blueberries, the smaller, wild, low-bush variety.
Here are a couple of the last slices from a blueberry breakfast cake my wife created.
I’m already waiting for next year’s crop!
On relating to some special place you’ve explored in depth
Tourists may get a taste of a distinctive natural wonder in a particular landscape during their brief stay, usually in prime season, but it’s not the same as dwelling there through an entire year. A winter night or storm, for example, is a much different cosmos than a summer day.
I’ve been fortunate to have experienced some remarkable destinations through all their varying weather, thanks to my career moves, but never to the degree of living largely alone, as Henry David Thoreau did at Walden Pond or Henry Beston along the dunes on Cape Cod.
I’ve come to know both places firsthand over the rotating years, and so reading the two classic books that emerged from them evoked personal awareness of scenes that likely struck the general reader as exotic or even confounding. I never would have appreciated them the same way had I still been in the Midwest or Pacific Northwest, for certain. Quite simply, the encounters provided a stronger foundation for revelation of so much I had missed.
One of the fringe benefits of my second marriage was that my stepdaughters’ Grandpa Jim lived in Wellfleet on the Lower Cape, or what Beston more clearly calls the Outer Cape. (Understand that the Upper Cape is south of the Lower Cape, much the way Downeast Maine is really up the coast. Welcome to New England.) So we got to visit throughout the year, making me a big advocate of visiting popular travel sites in the shoulder season. There’s no way to describe walking several miles along the surf below the bluffs and having the expanse totally to myself – in perfect weather the week after the normally crowded Labor Day.
My wife used to gaze on the few remaining gray cabins atop the bluffs and voice a dream of living in one of them – the National Parks Service has been removing them piecemeal – noting that you wouldn’t want to have anything there you wouldn’t mind losing to a hurricane or nor’easter.
Beston’s 1928 The Outermost House tells of spending a year in just such a house only one town south of Grandpa Jim’s, and so I could envision and even smell much of what he describes.
At first, I was put off by the feathery, slightly Victorian language, as well as the affectatious British spellings rather than American, but once Beston presented some sharp, detailed observations of wave and wind motion and sound, I was captivated. His examination of waterfowl and other birds, especially, is admirable, but the range of shore and sea life he portrays is also encyclopedic.
He writes from a time when the Cape still retained an older character that was being overlapped by newer ways that included telephones and flashlights, both unlike today’s suburban feel, and his book is credited with inspiring the creation of the Cape Cod National Seashore to protect the wildlife and geology he treasured – as many of us do today, thanks to the protections.
My reading came a few months after moving into my own equivalent of Beston’s cabin, albeit it much further up the coast and in a fishing village – still in view of the ocean.
You’ll be hearing a great deal about it through the coming year.
Are there books you’ve especially enjoyed because they’re rooted in places you know?
Late afternoon ripples
Our glorious dawn is much more than just sunrise
Except on overcast or stormy mornings, the early light of day in Eastport is amazing. Campobello Island in Canada blocks the first rays of the rising sun from striking us directly. Instead, the beam is deflected from the ocean into the air to become an ethereal rosy radiance, sometimes against a dark bank of clouds hovering off over the neighboring Fundy islands. And then, with that doubly-illuminated sky mirrored in the two-mile-wide channel separating Eastport from Campobello, the overhead color spreads out below as well.
When the sun itself finally swells into view, the blaze is nearly blinding, winter or summer.
Note to self: Keep sunglasses at hand.
Wall crab or what?
