South Berwick, just across the Salmon River from us, has a downtown block that retains an iconic appearance. The town is also home to Berwick Academy, a private prep school.
A MAIN STREET IN MAINE
Tag: Travel
ALONG WITH THE REZ
When you drive, details pile up.
Where mat-house villages once stood, Highway 21 now runs along a large irrigation canal. Because the roadway goes nearly straight, a few subtle curves become especially treacherous.
Illegal aliens buy cars but have no driver’s license or training. No insurance, either. There’s a headlamp out, few repairs, or brakes gone bad. Talk about trouble.
In the dark, a big white furry wing sweeps in front of my windshield. An owl. An omen, nearly colliding. It’s hard to say who’s more startled.
It might have told me the Pom Pom or feather religion, Washat, remains the most practiced old religion on the reservation.
Kokopelli was a member.
Twenty cars park in a hollow point toward what appears to be a white frame meetinghouse. Inside is a congregation of dove hunters.
There isn’t a cloud in the sky, only one jet contrail as crows circle some relentless screeching. As they flap up, slaughter moves out of the shadows and coyote pursue the only antelope in these parts, the ones on the Army reservation.
On the bright side, the State Fair is a three-hundred-pound pumpkin multiplied. Its doe-goats are judged by measuring and weighing their teats in a beauty pageant stripped to essentials.
Back home, her moodiness could be impossible.
Downtown, about nine at night, a wino-cowboy walks into the office. “Where’s the city desk?” He has no place to stay. “It’s a long story.” A quarter in his pocket, stub of a cigarette, and scabies — mites that are highly contagious. “I don’t want to spread them the way some bastard did to me.” So he went to the hospital from the Gospel Mission, received medicine (how’d he know to do all this?). Didn’t get back in. (“He refused to stay for the service,” they explained.) Angry, turns to ask: “Where does a stranger go for help in this town?”
How should I know? I’m just filling in for somebody else.
“Well, if anybody whizzes you,” the stranger says, “it was a matter of amphetamines. Maybe you heard about ‘The Duke’ in Traders? The trial dismissed on procedural grounds?”
He buried $67,000, but when he returned, the money was gone. So he says, far too articulate for the typical migrant.
Later, Kokopelli tells me that guy’s trouble.
Details pile up as I stay downtown at night and taste the psychic toll of economic theories in wasted, untapped talents. The stench stirs tears. Lonely men at counters stretch cups. Icy evenings of waitresses, cowboys, GIs, prostitutes drive from many towns, a migrant worker family whose car broke down, out-of-work loggers, midnight mechanics and nurses. Add to them an assortment of skinny wannabe rich bitches or real estate and insurance brokers. Clerks trying to live on earnings from clothing stores. A few lumpy bag ladies. Walk in, and all look up from their coffee with vacant eyes. It could be Dickens.
I see another hunger, but my own faith isn’t strong enough — I’d yield to despair.
Later, I sing to Kokopelli, “All of man’s good resolutions turn sang froid in the seasons of samsara.” Noticing his quizzed expression, I translate: “Our good intentions turn cold-blooded in the web of life’s illusions.”
It’s the spider again. Coyote’s cousin. Their damned net.
“Sometimes, Bozo, I wonder about you,” Kokopelli says, exhaling blue curlicues.
“There’s no Dedicated Laborious Quest, no magic without the strength of sitting or dancing.”
I dare not be entrapped in any desire to move freely through the vertical and horizontal dimensions of wherever I simply am. So far I’ve surveyed past and present. The future must wait. First, I need to map the emotional and sensual planes of this realm. Every dance has distinctive rhythms and expressions, as Kokopelli reminds me.
For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.
ONE SIGN OF AMERICA’S CHANGING TASTES
Yes, you expect a range of ethnic foods in any big city, and many smaller ones, including the place I call home, now feature a range of international dining options. But when you’re driving mile after mile inhabited mostly by cows, you’re surprised to find anywhere to eat, apart from the occasional convenience store gas station. You know, hot dogs accompanied by potato chips and soda.
This, though, was enough to make me swing around for a second look. As it turned out, they weren’t serving breakfast.
STAY FOR THE SERVICE
I’m invited to photograph an Indian funeral for a 109-year-old woman. It’s a traditional affair, with a Pendleton trapper’s blanket on a casket lowered by hand. Even so, young punks surround me: “Don’t you think you’re crazy,” they ask, implying?
I look around for Kokopelli, who might intercede on my behalf. He’s nowhere in sight.
Later, with a Styrofoam cross and dozens of American flags, the casket rides the back of a pickup, viewed by faces in Cool-Ray sunglasses — ancient traditions side-by-side with the cheapest, most honky-tonk trinkets of the New American Way.
I wasn’t permitted to enter the house, either.
For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.
TEN THINGS I LIKE ABOUT THE NEW HENRY LAW PARK PLAYGROUND
Dover has long played second fiddle to neighboring Portsmouth, but that’s changing. Back in 2008, after being repeatedly rebuffed it its efforts to relocate in its own city, the Portsmouth Children’s Museum packed up, moved north into a larger site beside the Cocheco River in downtown Dover, and changed its name to the New Hampshire Children’s Museum. We offered them an old gym for a dollar a year – what a deal! And it’s been a popular draw ever since, putting the town on the map for many families throughout New England.
The museum sits at one end of Henry Law Park, a long lawn and esplanade following the curve of the tidal river. While the museum shares part of its building with the Dover Indoor Pool where I swim, for years the park has been rather nondescript. Then, a few years ago, a hurricane fence went up beside the pool’s parking lot, the old playground was ripped out, and designs for an innovative new playground were posted.
Some of that blueprint had to be modified – the stream meandering through it, for one, simply became too problematic. And the opening, set for summer of 2016, was delayed by a full year. But, oh my, it’s worth it.
Created in a collaboration of the museum and the city, what’s officially called the Dover Adventure Playground is a magnet for kids and their parents and grandparents from all over New Hampshire and neighboring Maine.
Here are 10 of my favorite things about it:
- A gundalow: A kind of flat-bottom barge unique to our region, these boats hauled heavy-duty goods and products from town landings and over inland tidal flats, linking settlements to each other and the ocean. Each vessel had a large sail that could be dropped to pass under bridges, when needed. After new Coast Guard regulations prevented the existing replica from continuing to offer tours on Portsmouth Harbor, Dover officials snapped up the opportunity to bring it to town. After being stored forlornly for several years in the weeds of the public works parking lot, it now sits up in full display at one end of the playground, where children can run along its deck, climb over its cabin, and, best of all, man the wheel. Visually, it defines the playground from the rest of the park.
- A big green tower: The vertical centerpiece of our new playground pays homage to the city’s 76-foot-tall observation tower atop Garrison Hill, a Dover landmark that presents great views in all directions – including the White Mountains to the north. Now the kids have one of their own – it’s the right color and shape, but it’s shorter and safer, with places where they can slide down poles or take other routes beside the stairs.
- Two hand pumps for water: I remember having to use these to get drinking water when we went camping or visited our cousins at the farm. The ones in the park, though, are proportioned for kids – shorter handles, for one thing – and they’re intended as a source for water that flows into hollowed-out logs used as troughs for playing before flowing on to the ground. Go ahead, get as wet as you want.
- The magnificent splash pad: When it comes to playing in water, though, nothing beats this. It looks like nothing more than a cement circle until someone presses the button on a stand at its edge. And then? Hard to predict exactly where or when, but jets of water will start dancing. Maybe one spray over here, and then another over there. Maybe all of them all over the place. Sometimes they’re big and tall, and sometimes, short. And then? Everyone’s surprised when they stop.
- Chimes and drums: Kids like to make noise, and here’s one place they’re encouraged. As a musician friend remarked, all of the notes harmonized. You can’t hit a wrong note. And they send such beautiful sounds wafting over the entire playground.
- An innovative swing set: Forget the old ones. This set has a few of those plus one that allows a little one (perhaps a baby, if you wish) to sit facing a larger person seated below. Another one has something resembling a living room chair, which is good for people with physical challenges. And two swings don’t have seats at all – they’re like big drumheads, where kids can sprawl out, if they like – and these are especially popular.
- A giant granite fish: Personally, my favorite touch. Seems the city had a big block of granite and a local sculptor said if you give it to me I’ll carve something for the park – and that’s how we got this alewife, a much larger version of the little fish that migrate up the river in vast numbers every spring. I love the eye and smile, especially.
- The serpentine brick walkways and related landscaping: Simply nice design.
- The 18-foot-tall brushed stainless-steel humpback whale tail sculpture that’s going to be erected on the roof of the indoor pool. Somehow, I love the sense of humor here … I just wish we can come up with the rest of the whale inside, somehow. A mural maybe, as the aquatics director suggests?
- And, yes, Portsmouth has nothing like this. Nothing at all. In fact, Dover’s becoming the family-friendly alternative in the seacoast region.
OVERLOOKING DOWNTOWN
Here’s a bit of scale for the town I call home.
INVITATION TO FLIGHT
On one of my solitary walks with Kokopelli, I admire the fullness of purple-tipped grasses along the canal bank. Some offer bunched, short seeds in clusters. Others have long-shafted seeds in plumes. Or oblong, spiked seeds suspended like bells. “There must be a thousand golden variations,” I tell him. Oats. Wheat. Barley. Bread and beer. Silk-enshrouded ears of corn for sweet butter. Fat tender steaks. Sour whiskey mash. Like some people I knew. The many named needles and strands of whips and brushes reach skyward, flaying the wind, inviting birds to flight.
For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.
ALONG THE SALMON FALLS
The Salmon Falls, a river separating a section of Maine and New Hampshire, once powered mills along its way.
My fondness for old mills, by the way, did prompt a novel, Big Inca.
ANCIENT VIBRATIONS
Instead, I looked in another direction and discovered that the Yakama people once occupied 17,000 square miles and had three distinct language stocks. So, even back then one tongue was insufficient to articulate the vibrations of this place, even as an open desert. To try relating the qualities of a simple thing, a pane of hundred-year-old glass, perhaps; the interaction of clouds and sun, alkali and volcanic ash is far more complex. You start by learning the names of flora and fauna. Watch, listen, wait. I open a window and consider the current research, which places the first people here about 14,000 years before my arrival. These nomads made tools from bone and mineral. Hunted large and small game. Fished salmon. Collected river mussels. Gathered wild food plants. Given a guide and sufficient time, maybe I could learn to do these things. (Don’t look at me, Kokopelli shrugs. I’m not from around here.) Maybe I shouldn’t feel so strange about being here, either, even though such long perspective makes me feel incredibly insignificant. The Anglo civilization embodied here is only veneer concealing much deeper systems. The ancient climate was cooler and moister. The land was dotted by many lakes and small streams. Grasslands scattered with pine stands and willow flourished where there’s only sagebrush now. Food sources included bison, antelope, deer, foxes, muskrats, rabbits, ducks and geese (their eggs, too), and turtles.
I want to leap through time to join them, dressing the hides of their game, or making rattles and tools. These people used red and yellow pigments, and valued birds for their feathers as well as their flesh — cormorants, geese, condors, turkey vultures, and eagles all had clothing functions. Maybe I need some ceremonial garb. (Come, now! Kokopelli is hooting with laughter. He loves to taunt and mock me.) Tiny bone needles were used as far back as 10,000 years. I have enough trouble with steel needles today. So what do I make of their earliest burials, cremations that send the body back into spirit?
It’s obvious my own difficulties won’t end overnight.
This is a time of sparrows.
For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.
GRAY SEAL PARADISE
The deck of the Chatham Fish Pier is ideal for viewing gray seals in motion.
The town at the elbow of Cape Cod also includes Monomoy Island, an 8-mile-long sand spit that is home to thousands of the seals, as well as great white sharks feeding on them in recent years.
