Rolling On One

The roof is all done, at least on the outside. The skylights need the finish carpentry on the inside. Here’s a closeup of the part of the roof over the kitchen that had been leaking on our cookbooks the week before.

We’re getting a new roof put on the house in Casco. The contractor thinks we might have been able to go two or three years more with the old one, but Arlene was a little nervous about it. The edges of lots of the old shingles were starting to curl up, which isn’t good.

After lots of thinking about whether we wanted a metal roof or traditional shingles, we settled on shingles. Metal roofs are supposed to be better in Maine because they let the snow slide off more easily, but there’s not a long enough history with them to know how they really last. Mostly, I don’t like the way the metal roofs look compared to shingle ones, which really should last for twenty or thirty years — as long as I’m going to have to worry about this one.

Our contractor is “Porky” Proctor. He’s about my height, probably an inch taller, with a long gray ponytail and a worn forest-green baseball cap with a badge-shaped emblem on the front reading “registered Maine poacher.” He was away some of the week before Labor Day fishing around Jackman (go ahead, check on Google maps. It’s on the main route from Augusta & Waterville to Quebec City. It may not be the last town before the border, but it’s close).

At any rate, the back of the house was done by last weekend, except of course for the ridgepole, which has to wait until the front is also done.

There’s a lot of material waiting in the front yard.

Porky was going to rent a dumpster to put the trash in, but it turned out to be more expensive than he had figured. He built a plywood box on a trailer chassis he had, registered the trailer, and towed it over to the middle of our driveway. One of his guys spent most of Saturday morning picking up scrap shingles (the ones they had taken off the roof during the previous few days) and tossing them in the trailer. We were warned not to drive over the area where the pile of scrap shingles had been because there were lots of nails there and we could puncture a tire. There was about enough room to the right of the trailer to get our car through to get out of the garage and driveway. I asked if they could move the trailer a little to the other side to make more room. “Hell, no,” said Porky. “I’m not going to drive it over those nails!”

Bad weather was forecast for Saturday afternoon and Sunday. The roofers wanted to be sure the house was watertight and then leave. They covered the lower portion of the front, where they had stripped off the old shingles, with big sheets of material called Ice and Water Shield that’s a modern replacement for tarpaper (which I guess I should call ‘roofing felt’ anyway). When they thought it was OK, it looked pretty much like this:

Keep your eye on that yellow arrow!

On Sunday we did get showers, heavy at times. Early in the afternoon Arlene noticed a drip under a kitchen cabinet. Oops, right above our cookbooks. One cookbook was good and wet and a couple more had been dripped on. There was water coming through the wall as well as dripping from the bottom of the cabinet. We moved all the stuff on the counter away from the leaky area and phoned Porky. “It’s leaking,” he said as soon as he recognized Arlene’s voice. He came over right away, looked at the area inside, looked at the situation from outside, got out a ladder, and went up on the roof. I had gone outside before and seen that there was a pipe (see that yellow arrow) coming up in the area above the leak that’s the vent from the kitchen pipes. I was suspicious that it was the source of the leak. Really, big continuous areas of roof are relatively unlikely to leak. It’s places where something different happens, like around pipes, changes of angle of the roof, chimneys, that you’re likely to have problems. Porky said he doubted that it was that pipe, that it was packed well with the Ice and Water Shield. He found some shingles out of place that might have accounted for the leak. But when he looked more closely at that pipe he saw two places where the shield had come away from it. He put some more up there and pushed the boot around the pipe down to keep everything tight. By the time he was done he had made three trips up the roof in the rain. The roof was fine for the rest of the day.

I had baked half a recipe, that’s two loaves rather than the four loaves that the full recipe makes, of Red River Cereal bread that morning. I sent half a loaf home with Porky. He had spent a big chunk of his Sunday on our roof in the rain.

Matt is an avid mountain biker. He went out on Sunday to the New England Mountain Bike club’s Red Tail Trail in North Conway NH and rode it. He showed me a video of it that he made with his helmet-cam, and it was obvious that I wanted no part of that trail.

I did want to try the trail off the north end of our association road, though. It leads over to the next road along the lake. Matt had found it several weeks ago, but I had never gone out there.

I tracked down my bicycling shoes — they have special cleats on the soles to clip onto the pedals — and we set off.

That trail is a piece of cake. I had no trouble riding the whole length, which is pretty short anyway. The trail we took coming back goes through a lot more woods but is still smooth and easy, except for one fallen tree which is too high for even Matt to jump. So far so good.

I had never tried to mountain bike the trails we cut around our property, though. This seemed like a good time, since I already had my biking shoes on and Matt was there to coach me.

All I can say is, I’m much better than I used to be at getting my shoes unclipped from the pedals. I jumped one small log and avoided a lot of rocks, but I had to stop many times to walk the bike over trees and rocks. It’ll be a long time, if ever, before I can just ride around that trail.

It didn’t help my confidence that a few days after I tried our trail a good friend of ours in Newton cracked a couple of ribs and punctured her lung while bicycling on a path in a local park.

What we’ve really been wanting to do in fish printing is to print one or more T-shirts with the dye release method. That is, you print your fish on a dark T-shirt using SoftScrub with bleach instead of ink. The idea is to bleach the shirt where you printed and end up with a light print on the dark shirt. The results depend a lot on how the colorfast the particular fabric is, and how it reacts to the bleach, as well as how you print.

Long story short, we have a lot to learn still.

Here are our fish, to start:

Impressive? They look as if they came out of a sardine can, not out of a pond we hiked half a mile to find. After some internet research, I’m convinced these are golden shiners. They’re tiny fish, but big enough to try to print.

Here’s our T-shirt, with some SoftScrub in a styrofoam tray to ink the fish, and some cardboard to put inside the shirt to make a firm surface to print against and to keep the bleach off the back of the shirt.

We printed and printed, and then washed the SoftScrub off the fish and printed with some block printing ink on paper, just because we had the fish and we might as well get more printing out of them before we were done. Here are Arlene’s prints:

Here’s the shirt hanging up to dry in the sun. People at the NPS workshop told us to let the shirt sit in the sun with the SoftScrub on it, and to rinse it out after it had sat for several hours. Even so, most of the light color you see is the SoftScrub itself, not the bleached shirt. The finished shirt, or I should say the shirt after we rinsed this out, has much less intense light color on it.

And finally, here are my paper prints.

After all that learning about fish printing from the NPS workshop, we wanted to catch some small fish to print. A couple of sunfish would do, nothing monumental.

We went up to the general store in downtown Casco, bought a container of worms, and headed down to Parker Pond. We caught a few fish right away, including a small largemouth bass, (not so small, around ten or eleven inches, but not legal size) but I didn’t think we could keep them. A guy in a pickup truck came along and set up to inspect boats for milfoil, a water plant that they’re trying to keep from spreading from lake to lake. We asked him if he could recommend any place we would be able to catch sunfish. He thought for a while and said, “About a quarter of a mile off this road there’s a pond. Drive until you see two red posts with a chain between them, then walk up the snowmobile trail.” Sure enough, we found the spot and started walking. It was rocky going, a place where we would have been happy to have been wearing sturdier shoes with more ankle support. The trail looked as though at some times of the year it was a stream bed. Pretty soon we came to a fork in the trail. I figured that a pond would be at the low point, so we followed the right fork downhill. Yes! There was water, a good-sized pond. Arlene started fishing where the trail first hit the water, and I walked farther along the shore to a more open spot that turned out to be the top of a beaver dam. The water was a little deeper there than where Arlene was. Very quickly I caught two very small fish — but they definitely weren’t bass nor any other fish with game law protection, so we had something to print!

The next day (I’ll get to the printing in another post) we put the canoe on the car and, with Anne, drove over to the Heath to try fishing from the canoe there. We went out to the same section of the pond we had canoed with Judy a few weeks ago.

I held the camera down close to the water to get a dragonfly’s-eye perspective:

Arlene wasn’t confident she could fish from the canoe without hooking Anne or me, so they left the fishing to me. I got another almost-legal sized bass and a couple of smaller fish, but still no sunfish. We successfully released all the fish and went home, very satisfied that we were finally catching things.

Sunday, as it was beginning to get dark, we walked down to the association dock across the street from our driveway and tried a few casts off the dock. Arlene caught a couple of very small fish. It was the first evidence we had that we could ever catch anything from the dock.

So, although there wasn’t much to report in fish big enough to keep or eat, we finally were pulling fish out of the lakes around there. We can only hope we get better with more experience.

We were in Maine with Anne, Matt, and Dozer over Labor Day weekend. There were four main activities:

Fishing

Fish Printing

Mountain Biking

Painting the deck.

Probably I’ll delete this post when I have a post for each of the four.

If that snake had a lawyer, he’d swear out a restraining order against me.

Back in May, I think it was, I was walking around Cutler Pond when I saw a guy ahead of me looking intently at the ground near the path. He signaled to me to be quiet and pointed out a good-sized black snake. Wait! There were two snakes, curled around each other, one of them black and a smaller one having red and yellow marks, shaped sort of like bowling pins, on the side. Wait! A third snake came along and chased the second one away! We were evidently looking at some sort of snake love triangle.

When I got back to the office, I found what it was (or what they were) on the internet.

I’ve seen one or the other of those three, or something similar, several times — probably six or eight times — this summer. I haven’t had a camera with me, except for a camera phone that’s not up to the task. Mostly it’s been in just about the same place. One time one was swimming along a couple of feet from shore, going along at about the same speed I was walking. I’m pleased that I’ve learned how to look for it, or maybe for northern water snakes in general. I’ve had better luck a little before noon than later; I think all the people who walk around the pond on their lunch hour alarm the critters enough that they’re harder to find. Two days ago I decided to see if I could find a cast snake skin to print, so I looked very carefully around the area where I’ve seen them. No cast skins, but wait, is that a frog in the grass? I looked closer — no, it’s my pal the snake, standing absolutely still, hiding under a leaf and between the grass. It was hard to find again if I looked away, but there it was. The last two days I’ve found that same leaf in the same place, but no snake.

Arlene has a long-time friend named Marie, another former Newton art teacher, who lives on Deer Isle in Maine most of the time. She was working in Tucson last winter, and maybe she’s there often in the winter. At any rate, it’s pretty close to Bar Harbor — the next big island south of Mount Desert Island — and we had arranged to visit on our way home.

Deer Isle is reached by a long, narrow, high suspension bridge. There’s a sign on it, “Trucks and busses maintain 500 foot vehicle spacing.” If you have a phobia about bridges, consider visiting it by boat.

Here are Arlene and Marie:

Years ago Marie had a house in Maynard MA (on the outskirts of the Boston suburbs), a condo in Portland ME, and a summer house near a lake around Orono ME. She let us use the condo a couple of times, notably for a week right after school let out in June. That’s when we learned our way around Portland, and has a lot to do with our loving Maine.

Marie is a potter. There’s a big kiln in the white shed on the right of the picture below and pots for sale with a typical Maine “put your money in the box” honor system in the hot dog stand building with the “open” flag. I guess the hot dog stand was really built as a hot dog stand. Marie said she saw it in the front yard of the builder’s house, decided it would work fine for pottery, asked him if he would deliver it, and bought it. It was about $2000, no more than a building the same size from Home Depot, but with much more personality.

Marie’s house is tiny and packed with stuff. Here’s the kitchen. The ceiling behind the basket and blue pot is the floor of a loft area with the bed, reached by a steep ladder.

Marie has more imagination than most two other people you’ve met. After all, it takes a fair bit of imagination to see the attraction of having a hot dog stand in your front yard for selling pottery. Here are a couple of cabinets she’s built from scrap orange crates and lath:

Marie took us to lunch in downtown Stonington, the Edgartown of Deer Isle, except that it’s more like a quarter the size of Vineyard Haven. But it’s the commercial center, anyway. Maybe the Stonington Opera House is the cultural center of the island, but more likely it’s Haystack.

From lunch Marie drove us to Haystack. It’s a beautiful place, but they’d rather have you visit it on the web than in person unless you’re enrolled in a workshop there. There’s a sign with words to the effect of “You’re welcome to walk down the main stairs to our flag deck and enjoy the view, but please don’t disturb the artists. Even looking into a studio can be distracting.” And there is indeed a magnificent view from the flag deck. Since Marie has worked at Haystack and knows half the people who live on the island, she felt free to take us into the dining hall and have a long talk with the cook, and to follow one of the artists into the fabric design studio. They were working with dye release printing and were very interested to talk about nature printing and dye release fish printing.

On our way home from Bar Harbor we swung all the way around the western lobe of Mount Desert Island (for those of you who’ve never been there, most people pronounce it “de-SERT”, more like “what’s for dessert”, but the film at the visitor center said either way is OK.) We stopped for a brief look at this lighthouse, which is at the southernmost point of the island.

I was pretty busy indexing stamp mounts this evening. We got a couple of big orders while we were away, so there’s a backlog of work.

I ordered a new can of indexing ink from one of the most talkative 800-number people I’ve ever run into. He asked what I do with the ink and how I like it, which makes sense as marketing info, and then wanted to keep talking about how the weather was on this side of the country (he’s in Portland OR, if I can go by the address on the company’s invoice). He didn’t ask about the Red Sox. Maybe that’s because Portland doesn’t have a major league ball club. I also ordered some of those wax paper circles you put on the ink to keep it from drying out, and he said, “OK, skin papers.” So now I know their real name.
I bicycled to work, which I’ve been doing pretty often during the summer. I didn’t get as far out of shape as I feared from not riding for a week; I was in higher gears than usual. In fact, my chain got caught between the smallest sprocket and the frame while I was cruising along Parker Street in my highest gear on the way home.