And the Child Shall Lead

There's this thing that happens when you're visiting a place and a person for a short while, in which you try to maximize your time together. You try to hit all the high points, and you worry that you're not doin' it rite. Are we doing everything we can? Everything we should? Are we wasting precious hours?

Maine takes care of that for us. Phoebe does, too. We wanted to take in one of her classes. We wanted to eat quiche at Wild Oats. And then she told us she wanted to take us to the Giant Steps for sundown. She'd been there with a Bowdoin College field trip, and wanted us to see it, too. Because: Pangaea. Click the link for a Wiki page with a cool little animation that shows the bust-up of the giant continent into the shrimpy little ones we know now. 

For those unwilling to leave, and who can blame you... a Zick's notes. As far as I can tell, in the early-middle Jurassic, about 175 million years ago, Africa's northwest coast busted off of a place we would eventually name Maine and started drifting north and east, forming the beautiful Atlantic ocean, now stretched before us, shimmering in sunset colors. It blew my tiny mind to think that I was standing on a rock that finds its twin somewhere on the west coast of Africa. And that I am lucky enough to have stood on that continent, too.

This our daughter told us as we stood on uptilted rocks, tossed and immobile in a frozen paroxysm of granite, basalt and quartz. 

I didn't tell Bill and Phee to dress in harmonious colors. It just happened. 

The Giant Steps. The dark rocks in the middle are basalt from the ocean's floor, that rose up and broke through the granite in the big wrench apart. 

The sky was going wild with peach and turquoise, lavender and slate. We didn't know what to look at next. Sunsets can be like that.

 As often happens, I like the outtake better than the shot I'd planned. "Liam. Can you please move to your right? I'm trying to get Daddy and Phoebe together." And I caught his little lip hangin' out, his fist clenched; both of those things just as they were when he was four; Phoebs laughing at his truculent stomp, his desire to always be spooking around, kelly green, in a pewter and gray composition. This photo makes me smile so big.

So does this one...

Oh my gosh. He's all still there. Just stretched out, like hot taffy. Liam, big now, but all six feet of him still Liam.

He disappeared, and I called him...I saw his hat on a rock...what happened to Liam? 

LIAM?! Where did you go?

Just bein' Gollum, deep in the bowels of Gondwanaland. You'd be sorry if I never reappeared...

Yes, you goober! Get up out of Le Crevasse! (whippsnake!)

 

We looked at the power of water, written on rock.  There must have been an ancient river here, flowing to the sea for a very long time, wearing the rock down, Phoebe said. 

Oh. Yes. Yes! You must be right.

Our child is showing us things now, after so many years of our showing things to her.  (Gaff!)

When we could tear ourselves away from the rocks, the sunset was going on in a 350 degree panorama all around us.  The cottage: deserted for the winter. What a shame. 

Because in this view were a black guillemot, a razorbill (!!!!!), and a gang of common eider, all very close in. The drake eider, in full graphic tuxedoed

 glory. Of course, you can't see them. The iPhone takes a large view only.

That was the first razorbill I'd seen in full winter plumage, and the only one I'd seen well using only binoculars. Prior to this, they'd only been whitish dots on the sea, through a scope, far off Bass Rocks on the north shore of Massachusetts, sometime in the mid 1970's. And though my friends who were more experienced birders than I had assured me that was what I was seeing, I was never able to see enough through the Bushnell Spacemaster spotting scope to be sure. And now this bird, popping up like a rubber ducky holding a book of matches in its bill, so close that both Bill and I gasped and babbled, trying to call it what it was. 

RAZORBILL!!!

It's an auk, and it looks like this in winter: 

Photo by Susan Marschalk Green, Tampa Bay Times

Phoebe showed us little garnets embedded in the rocks. They were tiny and red and much harder than the surrounding granite, so they stood out like zits.  We, taking our glasses off to see better. Sigh.

All the while, the full moon was rising.  So we had to keep an eye on that, too. 

You can just pick her out below the shelf of violet clouds, to the left of the moon-child, Phoebe.

The auks and the eiders, the clouds and the rocks, the waves and the garnets. 

The moon and our beautiful kids.

This full moon photo was taken at 4:15 pm. 

Bailey Island, they say, hides her daylight away when the nights of November come early.

We Went to Maine to Get a Girl

We went to Maine to pick up a girl who wasn't quite done with her classes. 

We got there on the Monday before Thanksgiving quite late, after my bedtime, but she had people she wanted us to meet.

It made us happy that she wanted anyone to meet us, so we pulled ourselves together and ran around in the freezing night with her, from building to building, meeting her friends. We kept going back to the car and our suitcases for more coats. 

The first thing Phoebe showed us was the effort made by the first year students under her care as a student advisor. They'd been working for several nights on "Fantasy Flock," and had gotten this far. They were trying to get it done before we arrived. I was impressed! The blues are ever the hardest part.

I was thrilled to pieces to see my new friend Merlin Tuttle's photograph of a lesser long-nosed bat feeding at a saguaro flower. It graces the cover of a biology textbook used at Bowdoin. What a lovely convergence of beautiful things. 

The students who'd been knocking themselves out trying to finish this puzzle paid tribute to the artist who was causing them so much agony with her dang sky washes.

It was quite humbling and very sweet. Mingo's laughing in the middle. 

When we'd finished meeting everyone, we finally got to bed at our dear friends Dede and Dave's house, about a half hour away. Bill, Liam and I were tuckered out, having flown from Ohio and driven to Maine from Boston that evening. Phoebe wanted us to accompany her to her BioGeoChem class the next morning, to get a little taste of a Bowdoin class. It was fascinating, relevant, well taught and accessible. Phoebe wants to understand what's happening to the earth, so she's planning to declare an Oceanography and Earth Sciences major, with a minor in Spanish. 

What a wonderful place to do that!

On our way to class I spied a big fatbottom campus gray squirrel and knelt to make his picture. I called my little family over and gave a short lecture on Bergmann's Rule, which says that the colder the climate, the larger and bulkier a species becomes. Bodies become burly and tanklike. Extremities may get shorter; ears, which radiate heat, will shrink; fur thickens, of course. This squirrel looks only superficially like our southern Ohio squirrels. Sort of the polar equivalent. Phoebe needled me, saying that the only genetic difference is that this squirrel lives near Moulton (a dining hall). So FAT. I begged to differ, and went all Science Chimp on her with the Bergmann's Rule stuff.

We found some cheap storm windows on a building across the alley from it reflecting most magically on an old brick wall. WOW.

Although I hadn't had much sleep, I got up early that morning (not hard in Maine, where even in late November, it's getting light at 5:30 AM). I ran for a couple of hours before we were to meet Phoebe for class, exploring some new marsh and woodland in Freeport. I have to explore when I'm in a new place, on foot, as far out as I can go in the time that I have. I'm compelled to do this, and I'm so glad that I do. I meet people and see things and get a feeling for the land under my feet, for the birds that live there, for the trees and the earth, too.

 I find that my hosts, rather than being put out by my disappearing for a couple of hours, seem to understand and appreciate this. I figure as a guest that getting out of their hair in the morning is the least I can do.

The best stuff happens then. The best light happens then.

I approached these fallen apples with high hopes for a nomad's breakfast, but subfreezing temperatures had turned them to rocksweet mush. There were apples everywhere. It was as if winter had caught the trees unawares. 

I missed my running buddy something awful, but he was back home, staying with Wally for a few nights. He was happy there, but I could feel him missing me as he woke and wondered where I was running. I felt sure he could see this sandy coastal road in my mind's eye, as I envisioned him nosing through the cold brush. I think he gets my pictures. Sometimes I get his, too.

Not far from here I heard waxwings calling, but they weren't cedar waxwings, whose every whistle, burp and ahem I know by heart, having been mama to three of them. The trill was about an octave too low-pitched and throaty to be made by a little cedar waxwing. They had to be Bohemians. I searched and searched the pine tops, but I couldn't find them. There were two, and I didn't see them. It would have been only the second time in my life to see them. Western Newfoundland, 1983, I believe, was the last time. Sigh. But I heard them, I was near them, and that is something. Better than not hearing them and being hundreds of miles away from them.

I stood dumbfounded at the light and the sky in the marsh. The mirrors were ringed with ice.

I tried to imagine seeing this every day, watching the marsh turn from green to molten gold as the ice came in. 

 And then to see it all go to white. I'm not sure I'd want to see that, color junkie that I am. Oh, Maine. You're breaking my heart. So beautiful, but so cold!

Red-headed Polar Bear, and Magic in the Air

We went north from Brunswick, Maine, to visit a piece of land I inherited from an artist friend in the mid '90's. An acre and a half of low-lying Maine coast.

I know. Me, a waterfront landowner? Read on...

I got quite a thrill photographing our spawn on this hallowed ground. We don't get up there much. More, now that Phoebe's our reason to go.

Yes, it's beautiful, and there are ravens and bald eagles flying over it, and it's got an ocean view. It seems now, with rising ocean levels, that it has a little too much of one to be buildable, unless you're very creative, or are into stilts. 

Buffleheads on the yard list, so close you could hit them with a well-thrown oar. Imagine!! But I don't really let myself imagine it, because I don't have the means to make this my yard. I am neither a visionary nor a dreamer. I'm a worker, pragmatic to a fault. I get down and deal with things.

Not sure what to do with it, other than to scratch up the shekels to pay the frankly ridiculous taxes on it every year. Because hey! Like all freelance artist/writers, of course I always have two grand I wouldn't miss just lying around at the end of the year. I pay more in property taxes on this 1.6 acre than we do on 80 acres with a durn fine house in Ohio.

 If there's one thing I've figured out in the last couple of decades, it's that a freelance artist/writer can't  even hope to build a vacation house on a little parcel of waterfront 16 hours away by car. This year, I wrote the tax collector to ask when the appraised value might possibly be brought into line with the actual value, and received no answer.  Tax collectors in coastal Maine probably start the morning fires in their Jotul woodstoves with politely querulous letters like that.

photo by Bill Thompson III

Here I am with the kids on my bit of land in Maine. So beautiful. Achingly so. But damned if I know what to do with it. Visit it every time we visit Phoebe, I guess. That's a start. Wish I could afford to erect a small hovel on it, but local zoning prohibits hovels. Yurts? What about a yurt? Nope, no yurts either.  I know they won't let me put so much as a pup tent on it, because if I put up a pup tent I will eventually need to poop. On my own land. And landowners' association rules won't let me do that, either. One of these days I'm going to sneak up there, dig a little hole, and poop. In the spruce forest, on my own land in Maine. And you'll be the first to know about it when I do. I think I'd just said something to that effect when Bill took this slightly cracked family portrait. Caption contest, anyone?

The last day we were in Maine, it rained. And poured. And poured. And it would all turn to snow by the Sunday morning after Halloween. But we'd be out by then, home, by the hair on our chinny-chin-chins. So that last Saturday, we planned to visit the awesome little Peary-Macmillan Arctic Museum and the equally awesome Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Both of which are hangouts for Phoebe, yay! We looked at a bunch of art depicting the myth of Psyche and Cupid, then watched a mesmerizing animation telling the whole story. It sticks with me to this day. Such are myths--applicable for eternity, because they are rooted in our most primitive centers.

In the Peary-Macmillan Arctic Museum, Inuit art: amongst my favorite in the world. I have a couple of pieces, a weighty soapstone walrus (from the same artist who left me her land!) and a woman's face pendant that I've been wearing since 1983. Also a gift. Riches, in simple stone.

Musk ox of soapstone. Hard to pick up without dropping it, I bet. 

Dancing polar bear. Maybe she's skating on the pack ice.

Snowy owl, saying BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA!! I love this piece but don't think I could put it where I'd look at it every day. It's too primal, too upsetting; it speaks to me of a bird laying out everything it has in self-defense, the last thing it does before it either lives on or dies, right there.

Polar bear, not dancing. Eider and puffin, considering their collective fate: standing, quietly collecting dust, atop a sofit for all eternity. No preening, no pooping allowed.

photo by Bill Thompson III

Zick, clowning. Forgot meh toga, and meh laurel, but I got meh digi. 

Call me on meh digi. 

(a billboard we saw years ago in Trinidad and still quote weekly)

Phoebe, made to stop in mid-flounce. She has only to lift her chin a bit to strike me dumb.

In July 2013, we brought Phoebe and Liam to Bowdoin to see the place and meet some people. We had a wonderful student guide named Mark who showed us all the best napping couches and alcoves. It was exactly the kind of thing that spoke to us. We don't need superlatives (though there are plenty to be had, the academics and food being two). We need napping couches and well-lit alcoves, and Mark understood that.

The two things that seemed most important in Phoebe's college selection criteria were architecture and food. A child of my heart: looking to send down roots, seeking quality and beauty in the most basic things. Excellence in both, non-negotiable. 

On that July visit, Phoebe stopped to investigate a restroom in Hubbard Hall, and upon exiting, she was wearing a polar bear mask we'd bought in the Arctic Museum's tiny gift shop. It was her way of telling us she wanted to be a Polar Bear. She'd made up her mind in Hubbard Hall.

 We understood, got her message at that psychic root level. No matter where she was admitted, and there were many colleges that wanted her, it was Bowdoin she wanted.

photo by Bill Thompson III-still has The Eye for the shot. I just copy him.

We re-staged the shot on a rainy Saturday in October 2014, when she had become a Polar Bear. Arctic Museum Ancillary Exhibit: Girl, unmasked, living her dream.

I thought about it all the way home, gazing out the window at pillowed cloud layers. Thankful for the girl we'd left behind (again), for her sweet brother, for the love that had made them both.

 Still amazed and beyond understanding at how we could lift off in a metal tube with engines powerful enough to make it go fast enough to become airborne, how a man in a snappy hat could fly that thing and set us down a little roughly in Boston an hour and a half later, so we could drive a couple more hours and end up in Maine on the same day we left Ohio, with our arms around Phoebe. And then that gaily painted jet would bring us back home again in another magical hour and a half, for far cheaper than we could drive it.

Grateful for the friend who helped us get there, for those cheap, nonstop Southwest flights from Akron to Boston, for the tiny airport where you can walk from your car to the gate if need be. CAK, you will see us often.

Part of me just doesn't understand it all. It's like the way I know there is an afterlife, but I don't quite grasp how it works.

I promised the clouds never to become blase about that. About any of it.

And I never will. Part of me, no--most of me-- will never get over dropping down into the bumpy stratocumulus--

me! up in the sky! flying!

leaving the sun and the pink pillowed sunset

and seeing Canton, Ohio, burning auburn, appear suddenly below. And with that sight, a rush of emotion I can neither explain nor contain, Celtic knots intertwining feelings of joy, loss, anticipation, sadness, and wonder. I know, because this is how it's all going, that this is how it all should go, but I keep hoping there's something more coming, a good, surprising, unexpected next. Because it can't all be just about saying goodbye now, again and again. There has to be a good hello out there somewhere, too.

Moody's Diner

We spent our time at Bowdoin well, letting Phoebe take us to all her favorite places. It was such fun to follow her as she flounced confidently across the campus like a supermodel. 

We noticed that the food, always excellent (top rated in the country, and don't think THAT didn't play into her decision to attend!!) was probably better for Parents' Weekend.

Bill's brunch on Saturday....

and Phoebe's...

poor little thing is going to starve. That is a SCONE on the fruit plate, in case you were wondering. And pancakes and green beans and hash and quiche and yogurt of many flavors...ai yi yi. I haven't sent another food care package since Parents' Weekend. My college food experience was nothing like this, and that's what I was going on. She does not suffer.

Still and all, we had a car and we wanted to get her out, and food was part of that.

So we headed north, to Waldoboro and beyond!

The Maine coast and skies smiled on us.

Moody's Diner was waiting, just like I remembered it. The framed photos all over the walls are people wearing Moody's Diner T-shirts, all around the world. 

When I Get Hungry, I Get Moody.

I hit the Moody lottery with my order of Maine Lobster Stew. This $12 bowl of chowder with a scrim of lobster-colored butter atop the milk had a tail and two claws in it!!

I know. Just looking at this is torture. Know that I am suffering along with you, typing in a high school cafeteria, waiting for poor Liam to get done with play practice. It's 9:30 PM and there is not a fresh Maine lobster, much less a bowl of lobster stew swimming in lobster-colored butter, within 100 miles of here. 

Not sure how they get their meringue so high, but it was a point of pride with the wait staff that I would photograph this unnaturally large, nay, this supernormal meringue. You can see two of them standing next to me, reflected in the back of the pie case. They insisted on opening the glass door for me. Tee hee hee. Maybe they thought I was some species of food critic/travel writer. Not sure I fit the profile...hmmm. I took the meringue picture after I got the stew, so I don't think they were trying to impress me by tossing extra lobster in it. They just make a fine, fine chowdah at Moody's.

Gawrsh, now I'm digging through my purse hoping to find a Kind bar in there. Nada. Twapped! without food! in a cafeteria!!

10:15 PM. I'm blogging about food, sitting in the high school cafeteria, while waiting for Liam to get out of play practice so I can take him home. Which is another 40 minutes away. This, um, blows. Well, Becky the janitor and I have had a lovely time talking horses, donkeys, veterinary medicine and pedometers. She's walked almost 8 miles tonight, sweeping and running the Zamboni on the floors. Come on, people. We have to be up at 6 tomorrow morning. 

The Loping Journalist: South Freeport, Maine

On one of the mornings we were visiting, Phoebe would be in class until 1 pm. Bill had work to do so I took off on a long lope through South Freeport, Maine. The first thing I did was put some brand new birds on my Running List. How's about hooded merganser, greater yellowlegs, herring gull and Bonaparte's gull?

Those are hard to get on a run list in Ohio. 

The little silver vee in this pond is a fleeing female hooded merganser.

In this beautiful gut, a foraging greater yellowlegs left its work and flew directly at me.  Which was weird, because I was standing inland, on a road. Why would a yellowlegs want to fly toward a road and a person standing alone? We made eye contact, and it turned right around and went back to the mudbank. It was uncanny. It flew purposefully, as if it had something to say to me. It was the kind of thing a territorial breeding bird might do if it was concerned for wandering youngsters, but it's almost November.  And they breed in Canada, anyway. 

I wondered if Dear Old Dad was having trouble scaring up a hawk that morning, so he sent a yellowlegs. Gratefully accepted, DOD.

Boathouses here aren't for luxury vehicles. This is a fishing village, and there were boats being worked on, winches grinding. There is always work to do on boats. 

I was delighted to find my way to the Freeport Town Wharf

where some lobstermen were loading up on bait: redfish heads in sloppyjuice.

The younger guy on the pier warned the fisherman below because this barrel has only one suspension point, ergo it slopped redfish juice all the way down to the deck. Splat! Splat! Sploosh!

The lobsterman said to me, "Might wanna step back. You don' wanna get this stuff on yuh sawks!"

He had some beautiful lobsters in the bin already. I just rolled around in his Maine accent. I asked him a few more questions actually, just to hear him talk, but he was busy and pretty taciturn to start with. Friendly, though.  Everyone I met was so friendly. 

I told this man to turn his sign around for me, because that's what I am. SLOW.

I found the free breakfast they were serving in the village of Old South Freeport. Tart, winy, only a little wormy. Mmm. Sure beats nothing!

A Farmall Cub for sale. I love those spindly little machines. Nice house it went with, too. I could live in a house like that, as long as it was in the middle of nowhere. I wonder if I'm going to be the same way when I'm really old. As opposed to merely old, which is what I am now. Probably. That could be a problem.

I started a conversation with Susan by asking if her beautiful dog was part Newfoundland. Yes indeed. We fell into conversation and couldn't get out. She was awesome.

Rugby stole my heart. 

Really, what a grand dog he is. A superb animal. And a rescue. Rugby was left on the doorstep of a humane society after he'd been hit by a car. All busted up. Owner didn't want to pay for putting him back together, so she surrendered him. He's perfectly trained. And he seems to understand that he's gotten the granddaddy of all second chances. Happy to be alive, and well-loved. He wouldn't need a leash, but there's a law in town. I could happily have taken him home, but the 27-pound faux Newfoundland back in Ohio probably would object.  Wouldn't they make a matched pair, though?

The whole time Susan and I talked, and it was a long time, Rugby leaned on me. Then I started messing with him and I got him play-bowing and frisking and mouthing my hands. And you want to see a dog like that frisking. It's like elephants dancing. He'd run away, ears flapping, then charge me, veering off at the last second. I was laughing my head off.

Finally, I took reluctant leave of my new friends and jogged on. Came around a corner and saw a castle with a crenulated top sticking up out of the woods. What in the Sam hill....?

I had to find out about that! 

I mulled it over while photographing some stunning viburnum and maple leaves

and some rain-spangled Rosa rugosa blossoms.

This Asian import is probably the only one that's naturalized in the U.S. that I kind of like. It smells like classic attar of rose, and provides wildlife shelter and food in the form of vitamin C-rich hips. Just a hearty, good, salt tolerant plant, part of the dune scene from the Carolinas to Canada. Most people probably assume it's native, it's so integral to dune vegetation.

But that castle...hmmm. A big No Trespassing sign stopped the Loping Journalist. Derr. I hate those signs. All I wanna do is poke around.

Thank goodness my guide had circled around on her morning Rugby walk. I caught her emerging from a secret passageway carrying a startlingly large blue bag of hot Rugby poo and started peppering her with questions again. Susan also had the poop on that tower. I knew she would. 

Castle story anon.  The Loping Journalist cannot be hurried.

Hey! It's 11/11! Do something over the top today and tell me about it. I may let the 7.7 mile run I did today (the 10th) stand for my over the top deed.