Rolling On One

Yesterday I saw four northern water snakes, at separate locations, while I was walking around Cutler Pond on my lunch hour. Four is my personal best for one day! I was pleased that I saw them because I was looking for them; it wasn’t a case of their moving and my catching the motion out of the corner of my eye, or of their rustling the leaves and my hearing it. To some extent I’ve become tuned in to spotting them. Of course, I have no idea how many others I’m walking right past. This was the first time I’ve seen them this year, I think, though I have seen garter snakes there this year.

The first one I saw was smaller than the others, with better defined color stripes. It was the only one I took a picture of:

The others were more curled up, resting. Well, one stopped resting and slithered off when it noticed me looking at it more closely than it liked.

It’s been a good year for amphibians at Claire de Luna. We’ve seen several toads in and around our garden areas. This frog was in the raised bed that we built last year, behind the radishes and grass that’s sprouting up:

In Portland ten days ago we went a few blocks from the center of the Old Port festival hoping to find a place we could sit down and get something to eat. It wasn’t easy, because there were lines at many restaurants even several blocks away. A coffee shop we’ve been to before did have an empty table. We split a sandwich and enjoyed a blues band performing in the corner of the shop:

Back up the hill from the waterfront a steel band was performing in a big plaza

On Saturday there was a fly fishing event at Maine Wildlife Park, sponsored by Sebago Trout Unlimited. The newspaper announcement had said there would be fly casting instruction and fly tying instruction, and by George, there were both and I took advantage of both.

When I was a kid I was really into fly tying, though not much into fly fishing. I used to look through the fly thying material section of the Herters’ catalog and imagine all the things I could get if I had a whole $10 to spend. I used to use the flies I made when we went to Vermont on our summer vacations.

I hadn’t done any fly tying for decades when we got the house in Maine. With the lake so close, I’ve wanted to get back into fishing so I got out the old fly tying stuff and bought some new material, but hadn’t done much with it. I’ve had some books out of the Newton library on fly tying, and it looks as though there are lots of materials and techniques I had never heard of. The instruction at the wildlife park didn’t show me any of those, but it did give me a chance to try working with modern tools, at least, and showed me that I remember enough to have some confidence about getting going again.

I had made myself a fly rod when I was a kid, but never learned fly casting. I worked for ten minutes or so under the watchful eye of a licensed Maine guide, someone who knows enough about fishing to make a living taking people fishing, and he gave me enough pointers that I understand why I’ve never been able to cast flies before. By the time he was finished with me, I was able to get his practice fly (just a bit of yarn tied to the end of the line, really) to go far enough to be useful. Nobody had ever coached me in flycasting before, and I was just moving the rod too steadily, rather than letting the line straighten out behind me and in front of me. Now I need to see if my old fly rod will work for me, and practice.

Last night was the last meeting of the klezmer band for the spring. As has become the tradition, we had a small party at the home of one of the members, with a few guests for an audience and potluck desserts. Afterwards, as we were standing around having desserts, I noticed what appeard to be a harpsichord (“appeared to be” because a cloth covered the whole top, including the keyboard — but it looked lighter than a baby grand piano and had a straight side rather than a curved piano side) in the living room. I was getting set to ask our host if he had built it when my eye fell on another string instrument next to it, a clunky box cut from a lauan hollow-core door with three strings running down the top. I had seen that thing before. I went over to take a close look. Inside the sound hole, as I expected, was a paper label. Sure enough, my signature was on it! I had made that thing over 40 years ago and probably sold it at a yard sale before we moved to Newton in 1976.

At some time while I was a starving graduate student, I wanted to learn to play “Turkey in the straw” on the fiddle. Being, as I just said, a starving graduate student, I wasn’t going to be able to afford to buy a fiddle, but maybe I could make one. One day when I was in the Brookline Public Library (my grad school roommate’s family lived in Brookline, and for some reason we were in the library there) I found a book about violinmaking and looked through it. It said (as best I can quote 43 years later) “There is no such thing as ‘that’s near enough’ in violin making. Measurements must be exact and pieces must fit perfectly.” I knew I wasn’t that good a woodworker. I put the book back. Right next to it on the shelf was a book about dulcimers, and it said (and here I know I’m paraphrasing) “Sure, you can make yourself a dulcimer.” I got a copy of Jean Ritchie’s dulcimer book and another book plus record set (12 inch vinyl, long before CDs existed) from Folk-Legacy Records. The book had a chapter called “on making instruments out-of-doors”, by which the author didn’t mean plein air woodworking, but rather using hollow-core doors as your raw material. I built at least two dulcimers from hollow core doors, another couple using lauan plywood for the fronts and backs, and a couple from a pine board which I painstakingly resawed (means sawed into thinner boards — a lot of wood to remove — took days before I finished, a few minutes at a time) by hand. The one I saw the other night was the crudest of the bunch.

The neck of the instrument, where the tuning pegs are, is now cracked. I promised my friends I’ll fix it for them, and give them a dulciimer lesson too.

We went in to Portland for the Old Port Festival street fair today.

Our first stop was Artist and Craftsman Supply company. Back in January (!) we had been in there and asked them to get some small brayers that I like for indexing stamp mounts. We had almost despaired of ever getting them, but on Wednesday I got a phone call saying the order had finally come in. I said I couldn’t get there to pick them up until the weekend, but maybe we’d come to Portland to get them and see the show at the Portland Art Museum which was closing today. So sure enough, I have my brayers and some x-acto blades and a set of three line cutters for eraser carving, whenever I do more of that.

There was lots of traffic going into Portland (the art supply place is kind of on the outskirts of downtown) and when I hit the real downtown area I turned right, away from Old Port, and looked for on street parking. We parked about two blocks past the music venue One Longfellow Square, which is to say about four blocks away from the art museum, which is itself probably a mile from Old Port.

The museum has been displaying, through today, a biennial show of contemporary art. The first thing you see, in the big multi-story main lobby, is a piece called “Hermitage”. It’s a two-story backwoods cabin, plus an outhouse!  The sign says “No more than five people in the Hermitage at one time, please.” There’s a sink, no running water but at least a place to wash the dishes if you pump some water (pump not included). I noticed much later that the sink drains to a pipe that goes through the wall and ends an inch outside the building. The place is fully furnished, or as fully as a backwoods cabin should be, with basic kitchen utensils, a table for eating and reading and writing and playing solitaire, a wood stove with a clothesline above it with a sock hanging to dry, maps and things tacked to the wall, a journal on a writing table; upstairs, a bed and another writing table, a little cupola on top with another window above the second floor ceiling, an upstairs porch (I thought it was a balcony, but it doesn’t jut out beyond the first floor, rather the second floor interior is smaller than the first, maybe ten by twelve feet instead of twelve by twelve.) The journal notes that the occupant saw a skunk near the outhouse yesterday – maybe the two stinks are want to be together. The outhouse has an electric light, wired from the main building, and lots of pinup pictures and cartoons from Playboy on the wall and door (I guess there’s a difference between a hermitage and a monestary.) There’s a little workbench area outside – if the building is that small, you need to build the workbench outside. In an art museum, I don’t know whether it counts as sculpture, architecture, or an installation. It seemed to say a lot about materialism, what you really need to have, what you can do without, that kind of thing. Here’s what the museum’s web site said about that piece:

On entering the Museum’s Great Hall, visitors encounter a ramshackle structure reminiscent of a hermit’s wooden cabin by Ethan Hayes-Chute. This work has been made from materials scavenged from dumps, woodpiles, recycling centers, landfills, and other overlooked nooks and crannies of southern Maine. Visitors are invited to enter the cabin and voyeuristically examine all of the missing occupant’s belongings.

There were lots of other pieces in the biennial, photography, oil paintings, a big installation made of bricks made of sheetrock, a sonic piece called “Thumper”, like a geodesic sphere with subwoofers and car stereo amplifiers. There was a book for visitor comments at the end of the exhibit. We looked through it, and a guard came over and talked to us about it. He had doodled on the back of several pages, because “sometimes it gets kind of boring here.” One of the comments that we noticed and he also mentioned said, “Well, that was a big steaming pile of art.” As we were leaving I said, “I really liked the Hermitage.” The guard said, “Well tell this fellow, because the artist is his nephew. And the woman over there is the artist’s mother.” So we spoke to those people for a minute or two. Arlene asked, “Where is the Hermitage going from here?” The artist’s mother said, “I’m afraid, behind my garage.”

There was a break, with refreshments, between the first and second classes of Alumnae College. I saw someone reading the New York Times on an electronic device smaller than a laptop but much bigger than an iPhone. “Is that a Kindle?” I asked.

It was. The woman reading it was happy to tell me all about it, and how she really was happy to pay for getting the paper on it, and how convenient it was to be able to get the Times wherever she happened to be.

Maybe there’s a Kindle in my future. Right now I’d rather not have another item that small and expensive to think about not breaking and not losing, and I don’t mind carrying around a book. This annotated Sherlock Holmes is pretty heavy, though.

On the Friday of the Smith reunion my mom, Arlene, and I all went to Alumnae College classes. Most of those are intended to showcase the best teachers the college has and the most interesting courses they teach. As with all of reunion, it’s not hard to see that the college’s underlying goal is to remind the attendees of how wonderful the college is and how much it needs and deserves their donations. Of course it does, too.

At any rate, the first one I went to was “Sherlock Holmes and the Scientific Method.” I hadn’t done the recommended reading for it, the story “A Scandal in Bohemia,” but it didn’t matter. The course is a combination literature, creative writing, and introductory geology course. During the school year it has two hour-and-a-half meetings a week. On Tuesdays it concentrates on reading, discussing, and writing your own Sherlock Holmes stories. On Thursdays it goes on field trips to study geology. The final paper is the student’s own Sherlock Holmes story which must involve geology in some non-trivial way. For the last part of our class, one of the past year’s students read her story about a mysterious death on the island of Martinique that was caused not by voodoo but by a release of carbon dioxide prior to a big volcanic eruption.

The professor who teaches the class was teaching a different Alumnae College session in the afternoon, about the geology of vineyards. He consults with winemakers about locating plantings based on soil and so on. I’m told that session, which includes wine tasting, is a very popular one.

I’m catching up on the reading for the class now, from a big The Annotated Sherlock Holmes volume. You know what Sherlock Holmes is just like? Star Trek. The notes in the book I have out of the library sound just like the comments you heard last week about the new Star Trek movie, when the hardcore Trekkies had critiques of details of the costumes and how old or young Spock looked. The Sherlockians have figured out who the historical personages are upon whom the characters are based (did that make sense, or did I say it inside out?), what real church a fictional wedding was held in, and when Holmes developed a taste for what kind of beer. In other words, Trekkies are nothing new.

On Tuesday May 26 we stopped for lunch at the Lost Gull on the way from the New Balance shoe store in Oxford to the Shaker village at Sabbathday Lake. There was a very cooperative tiger swallowtail on the lilac bush right next to our picnic table.

Saturday morning May 23 was the parade and meeting of the Smith College Alumnae Association. We were hanging out with my mom and her classmates, the class of ’39, and with the oldest returning alums, the class of ’34. There were 3 ’34s at the meeting and one who showed up later in the day. Here’s ’34 in red sashes, plus the fabulous Sylvia, daughter of Laura ’34:

… and ’39. This was after the formal pictures, when people weren’t looking at the cameras, but were smiling more. That’s the current president of Smith on the far right.