full fathom five

First Day at the Beach

This weekend, W. (my husband) and I had a to-do list a mile long.  When we woke up Sat. morning, instead of our usual morning walk, we dutifully went to the cellar and started cleaning out all the moldy canvas luggage-bags that we no longer used, loading them all into trash-bags or Goodwill boxes.  After a couple of hours of this between loads of laundry, we came upstairs to find sun shining through billowing steamy dew evaporating off the fields. 

   As we stood there looking out the window over a sink full of breakfast dishes, we talked about the sudden reprieve we seemed to be getting from the morning's expected showers, and how this was probably the last snow- or frost-free weekend of the year.  We watched toast-colored beech leaves floating down over the stone walls, pretty much the last leaves of autumn to fall.  I shut off the water on half a sinkful of dishes, said let's take Cody (our new dog) to the beach. 

   There was no discussion, no time for talk.  We dried our hands, grabbed hats and sunglasses and the dog-leash, ran past the to-do list dead on the counter, and piled into the car.  We drove through leaf-covered backroads to Brunswick, Bath, and then down past the Hyde School on Rt. 209 and out into the marshland, buoyed by the sight of water.  It freed our minds from the tangle of chores at home, and we talked about the likelihood of our Cody - only two month's sprung from an animal shelter in the midwest - never having seen anything like where we were headed. 

And here he is, agog at Popham Beach.

    

   

Unlike our old golden retriever, Toby, Cody stayed away from the water, preferring to nose around in the tall grasses at the back of the beach, then race in mad figure-eights through the sand.  But finally, on the walk back to the car, he started to get curious about the water.  And while peering at the seafoam, he spied a sandpiper running into the waves.  He leaped into the water after it and was pulled under; he popped back up, turned and dog-paddled back to shore.  After running out and shaking off, he retreated to the back of the beach.

On the way home, we stopped for the world's best brownies at the former Kristina's - now Mae's - bakery in Bath.  We also got a Kong ball for Cody, which we stuffed with kibble and peanut-butter for him when we got home.

 

The outing gave the rest of the day a feeling of privilege, even though we were schlepping more moldy canvas from the cellar and hauling heavy brush out of mucky places in our meadow.  I kept thinking, where else could we just take off for the beach like that, and drive fifty minutes to a place so unlike anywhere else that it was like being in a fairy-tale, and have it completely to ourselves on a beautiful Saturday in November? 

Nowhere but Maine.         

Bustins Island

Here's a picture from our latest boat ride on Casco Bay.  This perfect little gazebo-type house sits on its own rock off Bustin's Island.  At its left, you can see a windmill, giving the house its own source of power. The red item just to the right of the stairs is a shiny new grill. 

I want to rave about how beautiful these days are for being out on the water or in the garden or just looking out the window.  I search and search for words to convey the sharp edges of sails or trees against the deeper blue of fall skies, the way distant shapes seem closer in the clear air.  But I've learned from Amy's wise and striking weblog, over at http://everyday.blogs.com/humble/, that beauty speaks (or shouts!) for itself.  There's nothing we can add (although she comes close).  Amy quotes Somerset Maugham, who puts it succinctly: Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.   

Inner accent

I've just gotten back from London, and waiting for me was an interlibrary-loan book I'd ordered, based on a positive review by Tom C. of Brightfield weblog (http://www.brightfield.org.uk/.)  Tom and I met for lunch at Covent Garden last week, and it was a delightful first meeting with another blogger.  (More about that in my next post).

But first, I wanted to report a small, serendipitous effect of travelling I never could have predicted.  While reading the new library book, Philip Roth's The Human Stain, yesterday - my first day home, I noticed that there was a voice inside my head saying the words aloud as I read, and it had an English accent.  In fact, it was the very voice of my sister's daughter K., whom I saw a lot of while I was there.  I think that the only reason I noticed this voice was that it was different from my own, which I must internalize so deeply that I've never noticed it before as an accompaniment to my reading.  But yesterday, I was charmed to be hearing Philip Roth as read by K.  It struck me that this inner voice could be a real help in learning languages.  Reading French or Spanish with the sound of one's teacher's or other native-speaker's voice in one's head, could be a short-cut to good pronounciation.  The trick is learning to listen to it.

Unfortunately, by today, my English accented voice had worn off, and I'm back to reading with the sound of my own imagined voice running through my mind.  But at least now I notice it, so this is an interesting benefit of travel I never would have anticipated.

      

To London

I'm going to London tonight to visit my sister for a week. I've only visited her three or four times in the thirty-plus years she's lived there. 

Last post I talked about travel and how I've tried to overcome the elitist assumptions I was brought up with, that it's inherently broadening, making the traveler more sophisticated or enlightened than the non-traveler.  So now, packing for the flight, I'm in a balance of positive and negative.  Positive about all I've gotten done (I met my deadline of getting a book proposal out in this morning's mail) and the reward of a week off from the project; plus the adventure of navigating my way from Gatwick Airport, on a few hours of sleep, by tube and bus to Hempstead Heath in North London where my sister lives; plus the anticipation of seeing my sister and brother-in-law, and the beautiful parks and gardens we'll visit.

And negative about leaving my husband, daughter, dog, home, and friends; plus the risk of flying, the crowded conditions of a big city, etc. 

But overall, the heightened sense of awareness that I have now - looking at the amaryllis and knowing it won't be there in the window when I come back, helping our creaky dog trying to climb stairs that he might not be able to negotiate a week from now, working muscles this morning at the gym that I probably won't feel again for a week, and scrutinizing every item of clothing to pack light - is a blast.  Like Ann Tyler's Accidental Tourist, who covered strictly the arrival part of travel (for people stuck in the wrong destination), I'm zeroing in on a single aspect of travel (preparing for departure).  And finding that this part of travel does have something inherently positive about it: you have to pay attention. 

I'd be interested to hear from people who travel frequently.  Does this heightened awareness stay?  Or do departures become ritualized and habitual so that you no longer take notice?

                

Rivers and Minds

In scouting around for my next bookgroup's read, I took up a book that's been on my night-table for over a year.  The night-table is stacked with recommendations from friends and family, so I feel they're safe investments of time.  And time was of the essence for this choice, because I had already assigned Tony Hendron's "Father Joe" to the bookgroup for next month, but it's not yet out in paperback.  That's our one rule: that we only read affordable books, so they have to have come out in paper.

In scurrying to make up for my error, I've whipped through about half of Peter Hessler's "River Town," and it's enough to know I have a winner.  I assigned it to my book group last night, saying it's one of the few books, besides Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi," that makes me really want to travel.  And being a person who's neutral about travel, who rather tries to cultivate and sustain interest in my own backyard, this new inspiration makes the book special.

And that's because the narrator isn't just a traveler; he's a teacher, assigned by the Peace Corps to a rural river town at the junction of the Yangtze and Wu rivers in China.  He teaches English in a small teacher's college to sons and daughters of rural peasants and workers in the town's several factories. 

So he stays in one place long enough to get asthma from the polluted air, as well as a sense of his students' and fellow-citizens' minds.  This insight into how the Chinese learn and what they value, shaped by the intense collectivism of the Cultural Revolution, clashes with the narrator's regard for the individual, shaped by Democracy.  His biggest challenge is getting his students to think for themselves, and the freshest ideas he encounters are on his long hikes into the countryside.  The fishermen and farmers he encounters there, because they are not being groomed - as his students are - to shape the minds of coming generations along party-lines, can let their ideas flow freely. 

So nature has a redeeming effect in this book, and yet nature has a much bigger meaning than the usual travelogue's descriptions of wild and beautiful landscapes.  This book's focus is on the human mind, and there is a constant interplay between what we Americans would see as a more natural, free-flowing mind, and minds that are paralyzed or dammed-up by political repression.  The fact that Hessler is there in the late nineties, when construction has just begun on an enormous dam that will alter the rivers and their surrounding countryside forever, drowning hundreds of acres under an enormous, state-sponsored lake that will collect and intensify the area's pollution, makes a perfect metaphor.

Hessler shows whole minds, so he includes many positives in the Chinese mind that I haven't touched on here, such as the fact that Chinese students are more sensitive to poetry than American students.  He is admiring and compassionate enough about what he observes to show us the true suffering political repression can cause. 

Having grown up in a family with an elitist bias towards travel, judging those who didn't travel as "provincial," I've overcompensated by regarding travel as neutral: simply getting one's body from one place to the other. A little-known guy I found in my Word Lover's Boook of Unfamiliar Quotations, Thomas Fuller, got it right in 1732 when he wrote: "If an ass goes traveling, he will not come home a horse."

But this book, "River Town," shows that travel can illuminate how culture shapes the mind. Yes, we can achieve the same effect by staying home and reading, but doing it through travel is more vivid, compelling, and - especially if accompanied by pictures - indelible. 

         

Florida weekend

After missing our early morning flight to our long-planned Florida weekend with our Marriage Encounter group because the town hadn't plowed our roads, we were able to get out on a later flight.  We aqrrived late Friday night, and it was great to wake up on Saturday morning to a houseful of friends, and to walk outside in the silky sixty-degree air.  I felt the usual mourning for lost and vanishing species as I looked at east-coast Florida's landscape: occasional blocks of vegetation hemmed in by strip-malls and housing developments.  Most of these blocks had signs on them announcing coming office-parks or housing developments, and I tried to keep from wondering where all the remaining wildlife would go once the backhoes arrived. 

We went to the beach, where W. and I got in our hour of fast-walking.  This beach, about 80 miles south of Orlando, had long undeveloped stretches, which was wonderful.  We walked past middle-aged, paunchy men surf-fishing, most of them drawing flocks of seagulls when they rebaited their lines from big white plastic buckets.  Occasionally, we'd see pelicans, usually in twos or threes, standing by the buckets, and one guy had a big grey heron standing stock still nearby.  W. and I thought it was a lawn ornament from afar, but as we grew nearer, we saw the wind ruffle its feathers.  It stood majestically still as we passed, as if not deigning to notice us.

As usual in Florida, all my impressions were conflicted: mostly humor mixed with irony or absurdity with cynicism.  The roads were full of fresh-permed, elderly women sitting high in new SUV's, most of them with "fatwheels" flashing extra chrome on their hubcaps.  Gone are the long, unwieldy buicks, lincolns, and cadillacs; now the elderly all drive SUV's, as if fitting out to safari through swamps in their four-wheel drive.  Even when W. was out before dawn on his morning walks, he reported streams of traffic snaking around our housing development, and we only saw one bike-rider the whole three days we were there.  Despite the great weather, people drive everywhere.

A trendy new word among developers seems to be "Pointe."  To and from the beach we passed big signs announcing "Pelican Pointe," "Lake Pointe," "Palm Pointe," "Orlando Pointe," and many others.  Most of these developments had long roads into them, so that all you could see from the road were identical tile rooves above the palmettos.  So I gathered that the additional e signalled exclusivity or a step up from the dry, dusty developments right on the road.  I'll expect an accent grave over the "e" the next time I go down.    

When we were saying goodbye, our hostess complimented W. and me on our fitness, saying that she noticed our cute little butts as we walked down the beach that first day. At sixty, I'm so stunned by this idea that I joked it off, saying that now we'd have to insure them. But as we drove to the airport I savored it, thinking that at last, all the early morning walks and stairmaster workouts were starting to show.  Until someone in our van commented on how the sun isn't good for our hostesses' eyes, with her condition.  I asked about it, and got the explanation that she has a hereditary eye disease, and is now legally blind.

The fact that I'd forgotten this after eight or so years of meeting with this group, brings me to the subject of the next post: why we were there, what the purpose of our meetings is.  Stay tuned.                           

Accept Delays

My husband and I are booked to go to Florida tomorrow for an extended weekend with our Marriage Encounter group.  One of the couples has a place down there, and - hard as it is to get eight couples together for a whole weekend - we started planning for it seven months ago.   

Now it looks like the big storm swirling outside our windows will cancel it.  It doesn't matter.  There's so much to do here, and - as I've written before - such great contrasts to enjoy during a storm, that life seems intensified.  Nature's saying "Look at me!  I'm bigger than all your plans."

I wish I could feel that this kind of equanimity is a result of Buddhist meditation or achieving the ripe old age of 60.  But it's nothing special around here.  When there's a big storm brewing in New England, everyone stops and takes notice.  They give nature her due, and that's why I've come to love winter.  The birds are clinging to the feeders, stocking up for the next two days, when everything else will be covered.  And we're following their lead.  It seems a more ancient, wiser order has been restored.      

Vermont vistas

After Montana, New England landscape is no longer big enough. The fields of inland Maine and New Hampshire seem choked off by their bordering trees. These used to feel like outdoor rooms, with possibilities of beautiful walled gardens. Now they feel claustrophobic.

Except for Vermont. Because of its dairy farms, there's enough cleared land to give long sight-lines whereever you go. From valleys, you can look to distant mountains; from mountains, there are clearings enough for ample viewpoints. The distances aren't as far as Montana's; mountain ranges are closer together, more intimate, in Vermont. But the sky is vast.

Last week I visited my brother in Vermont's beautiful Northeast Kingdom. My brother and his wife built a house that sits on a knoll looking out over woods to Burke Mountain in the distance. On one of the foothills running up to the mountain is a single row of lone pine trees left by loggers. When banks of fog obscure the mountain behind them, these trees stand out in silhouette against the mist, their long bare trunks and high tufts of foliage looking like palm trees. When the fog inches inland and covers the valley in front of them, the trees look like they're floating in a white sea. My brother's wife calls it her desert island.

Elaborating that theme from paradise, their house is a pale gray double-cape with extra-thick, white, greek-revival trim. A slate patio surrounds one of its ends, and running around the whole house are exhuberant beds of daylilies, poppies, delphinium, and calendula.

Inside, the house is a bubble of light. There are double sets of windows on all sides of the open floor-plan, all of them - plus the doorframes - trimmed in cherry. Its natural reddish brown contrasts with pale oak window sashes and yellow spruce floors. Even the shower in the downstairs bathroom has a window in it, where hanging plants thrive in the steam. All windows are unshuttered, there being no one in the surrounding 140 acres to look in.

Like all New England states, Vermont's harsh winters make every day of summer precious. This house catches and accentuates the essence of summer: long sightlines, silvery light, pale gray granite, yellow and red woods, and profusion of meadow flowers. All adding up to paradise.

Montana Wedding V

After driving out the Northeast entrance of Yellowstone, we cruised through dusty, shabby Cooke City and then started climbing up to Colter Pass on the Beartooth Highway. Off to our right were enormous mountains, their snowy peaks standing out from purple layers of more distant ranges. The air above the peaks was gray, making them more dramatic, even slightly threatening in their immensity. Wisps of cloud scudded past, and peaks were lost for a moment as we curved away from them, then faced into them again as the road switched back. Suddenly, the Beartooth Mountains loomed up on our left, and for a long stretch we curved back and forth between Beartooth to the north, the Sawtooth Mountains to the South. The white peaks against blue and purple layers of more distant ranges, all topped with dark gray sky, was beautifully strange, devoid of any sign of humans - like something on the moon. It evokes the feeling that you're profoundly alone, the only human on the planet, and you feel vulnerable. When we stopped at the first turnout to stand there and gawk, my husband and I both inadvertently stepped back from the edge of the pavement overlooking the valley far below, the height and grandeur just dizzying. It made getting back in the car like coming into a ski-lodge to a hot cup of cocoa and a warm fireplace after a sub-zero day on the slopes. We settled gratefully into the soft seats and resumed the ascent.

We got increasingly fascinated as we climbed and the country flattened out. We stopped at each turnout and snapped pictures, giddy at the cold thin air wafting up from the valley below. At one stop, we got up our courage, walked almost to the edge of the turn-out, and leaned out to see a bowl-shaped lake far below. The water was still as soup. No shimmers or ripples there; it lay in its tight glacial pocket like a thick, slate-blue soup. Maybe blueberry bisque. Snowy walls curving up steeply on three sides protected it from the wind. One of the walls, a snow-slide running all the way up to a mountain peak, was criss-crossed with strap-like indentations. An ant-like figure with a smaller shape beside it was climbing slowly up out of the bowl towards this wall.

We walked to the safer side of the turnout, a small meadow with clumps of alpine flowers. After photographing blue forget-me-nots, and white and magenta creeping flocks on a back-drop of silver-blue leaves and lichen, we walked back to the bowl of lake. The figures had become a man and his dog, the man with skis strapped to his back, his husky scrabbling up the slope ahead of him on a rope. I realized the strap-marks were made by skiers.

We got back in the car and climbed on towards the 11,000-foot Beartooth pass. We passed a scenic turn-out where four yellow-bellied marmots looked to be having a confab - heads down, facing each other - over an empty soda-can. At the top of the pass, we slowed for a line of cars parked on the shoulder of the road. A red concession truck and what looked like a crane was up ahead. As we crept by, cowed by the height and the sudden open expanse ahead, we saw that the crane-like contraption sent a moving loop of pommel ski-tows out over the road-shoulder and down a steep snowy slope to a lake. This was a balmy July 5th, the only place I'd ever seen downhill skiing in summer.

We drove down from the summit, revelling in the green lower slopes of the mountains where bison grazed. At Red Lodge we went into a cafe and had a great late-afternoon iced latte, the Beartooth mountains imprinted on our mind's eye. As we drove home through the prairie, we knew in our short four days, we'd seen the best of Montana.

Montana Wedding IV

Dawn was breaking over the mountains as we streamed through the Paradise Valley, following Yellowstone River to the North Entrance of the Park. Wisps of cloud floated in front of green foothills, luring us on, and as we climbed out of the valley, we saw what looked like a big sign off to the left in the distance. As we got closer, we saw it was the broad side of a barn facing the road. In huge black graffitied letters across it was the message, "CLINTON DON'T INHALE; HE SUCKS!"

After soaking up steam and coffee in Mammoth Hot Springs, we drove east through prairie grass, with a darker line in the distance marking a tree-lined river curving through the land. Slate-blue layers of mountains ringed us, framing and emphasizing the sky. As we climbed towards Blacktail Deer Plateau, cliffs rose abruptly on our right. On one steep slope, a black form stood out from the silvery sagebrush and rock outcroppings. We pulled over and watched a mother black bear and her cub wind among the brush.

As the sagebrush slopes gave way to the grasslands running along the Lamar river, we could see dark shapes against the green. In groups, they were bison; alone, making their way down from the foothills to the river, they looked like grizzlies, who don't seem afraid of being exposed on open plains. We quickly learned to slow down and stare at brown or black spots against the green, and so we spotted a pronghorn - what seems like a cross between a sheep and a deer - lying down on the river plain. A herd of bison dotted a distant hillside, and we saw two bison closer up, their tiny eyes almost lost in the furry bulk of their huge heads and shoulders.

We left the valley and climbed towards the Absaroka Range enroute to the Northeast Entrance to the Park. As we got higher, the road wound among peaks, cliffs, and deep river gorges, with waterfalls making long white slashes in the dark rock walls. Pines and hemlocks clung to the sides of cliffs, and every once in awhile we'd round a hairpin turn into an alpine meadow. We stopped the car at one of these, parked and walked to the meadow's edge, the thin air making us puff in a shamefully short time. A river ran far below, and we looked down on a hawk with a reddish tail riding the currents in the gorge. When we got back in the car, we passed an occasional mule deer - always alone - grazing by the side of the road. As we came down from the mountains to river level and left the Park, a wolf skulked across the road. These animals, unlike golden retrievers or happy labs, look sullen, their heads and tails low as they trot in a determined line away from anything human.