Rolling On One

Sometimes we think the principal industry in Maine is publishing giveaway newspapers filled with ads for local businesses, human interest stories, and columns about local gardening, hunting, fishing, and hiking. I envision people who worked for the Boston Globe and the New York Times retiring to Maine, saying, “I always really wanted to run my own newspaper,” and starting one. At any rate, Arlene picks up as many of those papers as she can find at Hannaford’s and flips through all of them. This time she noticed an outdoors column that described a hike not far from us, up Rattlesnake Mountain.

Arlene’s cousin Neil and his wife Olga were visiting. Neil had surgery for a detached retina within the past week. He was pretty much running on one eye at this point, but he felt that some walking would do him good. The description of that hike sounded about like what he wanted.

Olga asked me if I would like to drive their car to the start. Since I knew roughly where we were going, that made pretty good sense. It turned out to be a special treat, though, because they have a Prius. It’s quite a bit different from anything I’ve driven before. Firstly, the key is entirely electronic. You plug the remote door control gizmo into the dashboard rather than turning a starter switch. Secondly, the instrument panel is not on the dashboard but rather way up in front under the bottom of the window. It’s entirely electronic, also. Third, the gear selector is a little bitty joystick rather than a selector lever. You just move it to “drive” or “reverse” and let it pop back to its resting position, and the car remembers which way you wanted to go. If you stand still for more than a few seconds, the engine shuts off — it just figures, why should I waste gasoline not going anywhere?

The trailhead was surprisingly easy to find. There were several cars parked in a grassy lot exactly where the newspaper described it. It’s on privately owned land that the owners have marked off for hikers to use. The owners have named it the Bri-Mar trail after people with whom they hiked in the 1960s. There’s a very professional looking sign at the parking area with a few rules, mostly along the lines of “please don’t litter” and “no fires anywhere on the trail.” No motorized vehicles are allowed beyond the parking area, nor are bicycles. This time of year there weren’t a lot of wildflowers in bloom in the meadow at the start of the trail, but there were monarch butterflies flying around the milkweed.

After a couple of hundred yards on a logging road through a fairly level stretch of forest (which Neil said was already enough to make them feel as though they were far from New York City) the trail started steeply up a rocky hillside.

We met several groups of hikers on the way up, at the view overlook area, and on the way down. We seemed to be out of step with the rest of them in that we didn’t have any Labrador retrievers with us. Most of the walk was in pretty dense woods, but there were two open spots with impressive views. This is looking over Crescent Lake —

… and this is a view of the more distant Panther Pond, with a little of Lake Sebago beyond. There’s supposed to be more of a view over Sebago further along the trail. but this is as far as we went.

and Neil and Olga at the top.

I was scouting around the woods behind our house to see where there were blackberries worth taking Emma out to pick when I heard a noise of something big crashing through the trees and bushes nearby. It seemed to be getting farther away. I didn’t see anything. I guess I startled a deer that saw me and  decamped before I saw it. At least, I hope it was a deer and not a bear.

A couple of weeks ago Millie phoned to talk Arlene into having a house guest for a few days. Many years ago Joel had gone to Russia on a teacher exchange program. A woman he had met on that program, who teaches English language and English and American history and literature in the city of Kirov was going to be in the US and wanted to see the Boston area.

Marina, here —

arrived by bus on Tuesday and took the subway to Central Square where Arlene was waiting for her. They looked around Harvard Yard and some of the Harvard museums that afternoon. On Wednesday Marina took the T to Boston to go on a trolley tour.

During supper Wednesday Arlene said, “Maybe we should take Marina out to Lexington and Concord this evening.” We hustled the remains of dinner away so as to make the most of the waning daylight, but it was pretty dark by the time we got to Lexington. We walked around the battle green, which is lit by enough streetlights to be worth a little in the dark–

That’s Buckman Tavern, where the minutemen gathered (and probably had a few beers) between the time Paul Revere woke them all up and the time the Redcoats showed up.

and of course the statue of the minuteman at the corner of the battle green:

Then we proceeded out to Concord. It was good and dark by the time we got there. We drove past some of the literary landmarks, the houses where Hawthorne and the Alcotts had lived. It seemed a shame to be out there and not at least drive past the Old North Bridge. The parking lot for the bridge had a “Closed after dark” sign which I decided to respect, but there was a wide shoulder on the road across the street that looked safe for parking one car.

I’m not going to say that we walked out to the bridge in the pitch dark, because I’m not sure you’re really supposed to be there after sunset, but ya know, by then we were right there, and I’ve been there enough times that I was pretty sure I could find my way in the dark. If you want to believe that this picture was taken from — aw shucks, I’ll quote it —

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
and fired the shot heard ’round the world.

I won’t contradict you.

Arlene’s college and grad school roommate Judy finally had a weekend free to come up to our place in Maine. I neglected to get any pictures of Judy herself. We hung around our place most of Saturday, going down to the association beach for a while around noon and taking our canoe out for a lovely paddle down a nice part of the Heath that’s filled with lily pads and pickerel weed, just right for canoe water.

On Sunday we drove up Bell Hill to see the meeting house there

and look around the graveyard.

A flock of turkeys was walking past a house just down the road.

From there we went out to Oxford for fish & chips at the Lost Gull,

over to a couple of antique stores (the one across the street from the Lost Gull was set up to look almost like several rooms in an old house, except for the laptop computer on the otherwise 1940s dining room table), and finally over to Poland Springs.

It was pretty late by the time we got to Poland Springs. The little museum of bottled water was closed (and more seriously, the restrooms were closed). There was a water vending machine outside the museum. I guess when you have one product, you set all ten buttons of the vending machine to sell that.

Last time Arlene was over at Poland Springs she found where to go to see the view. It’s by the parking lot for the golf course. I’ve never taken an impressive picture of a view of mountains in the East. Here’s at least a look at the bandstand at the Poland Springs Inn. Oh, and the restrooms at the golf course clubhouse were still open. We were in much better moods on the way home from there.

A group of artists that Arlene hangs out with was invited to exhibit their work in the Citizens Bank in Newtonville. Arlene had something like eight or a dozen pieces up there for July, plus or minus. I went with her on July 31 to take her show down. It looked very professional and totally as though it belonged there. Here’s one view, with three of her prints plus an artist’s statement.

On July 21 we went to the “Art in the Park” art and crafts sale in Bridgton. Aside from a T-shirt (the one from that event last year, not exciting but a good light-colored T-shirt (light-colored makes it easy to find ticks on it, so it’s good for out in the woods) we got, well, sort of a piece of sculpture. On the way to Bridgton there’s a sign for Iron Man, a guy who does welding and some iron sculpture, mostly welding together scrap iron pieces. We’ve passed his sign a zillion times but weren’t really sure what his stuff was like. Well, he had brought (among other things) a whole slew of faces, sort of jack-o-lantern faces cut into old shovels. We came home with one and installed it in the garden.

I did a little more on my sweater, just to keep it in the WIP rather than UFO category.

On the drive up we had heard lots of talk about the impending release of the last Harry Potter book. We didn’t go to any midnight event, but we did at least stop in the Bridgton bookstore and got one of their last 14 copies. Here it is on Sunday, along with the jigsaw puzzle we did the previous evening and that morning.

I installed Apache, PHP, MySQL, and Mediawiki on my MacBookPro laptop, on the PC side. I’m not sure what good it does to have a wiki on it, but at least it will give me a chance to learn what you can do to administer a wiki. Don’t come looking for it; it’s not on RollingOnOne, just my home machine. But that’s more serious software than I’ve much had on that computer, after having it for almost a year.

We went up to the Lowell Folk Festival today. Arlene wore her T-shirt from the 1988 festival, one of the first years it was held. I kept saying to people that we hoped there was a contest for the oldest Lowell Folk Festival T-shirt, but there didn’t seem to be.

Almost as soon as we got there we saw Ilona Fried , the former treasurer of Koleinu, at the booth for her crafts business Beadventurous. She said she had done well with the booth yesterday and that the weather hadn’t been bad there. We had had a violent thundershower in Newton just about when we were driving home from the anniversary parth, and there were a couple of lightning bolts that sounded extremely close here.

We looked at the contemporary crafts booths, had a sample of a Starbucks raspberry mocha — I can’t remember those names, maybe it was a raspberry mocha frappucino extravaganza, who knows — went over to the traditional crafts and had a long talk with a woman demonstrating tapestry weaving, and went back to hear a set by a klezmer violinist and his group Moldovish. They were doing, of course, Moldavian tunes. I didn’t really know any of them, but sections sounded a lot like some songs I’ve played. They did one song from the Gyerman Goldensteyn collection. I guess he’s going to be a name I hear a lot of in the future.

We walked around the block again and came back to hear a couple of long numbers by an Armenian band from Philadelphia. When we got there four women were doing a line dance off to the side of the front. As the song went on more and more people joined in. By the time the song was over there were 20 people dancing.

Well by now I’m 10% of the way through Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (are people calling it “DH” the way they used to write “OOTP” for “Order of the Phoenix”? or was “DH” in too common use already?) For me, that’s not bad, especially considering that Arlene was reading the book most of last week so I didn’t get much chance at it.

Katherine organized a surprise 40th anniversary party for her parents Sue & Richard for yesterday. She asked us to meet her at the Wellesley Community Center at 10 to help set up. Our timing was perfect; we had parked, taken one load of stuff out of our car, set it down by the door, and tried the door and found that the building was open, when she and Tim pulled up.

The Wellesley Community Center is a very nice little hall on route 16 in Wellesley Hills. There were about thirty people at the party. The room could have held twice as many people, but thirty was enough that we weren’t rattling around in it. There was a town art association show on the walls and a couple of pieces of antique furniture in the room (with a sign, “Please don’t put anything on the credenza.”) We put up a half-dozen boards with pictues of Sue, Richard, Katherine, April, and assorted friends and relatives. Food included appetizers from Costco, lasagna from Russo’s, home-baked desserts, and a cake from The Icing On The Cake.

The cake had of course “happy anniversary Sue and Richard”, with a flawlessly executed copy of two interlocking Escher lizards. Charley showed up to take photos of the guests and started by getting a couple of shots of the cake. I’ll have to hope he posts one somewhere.

Arlene had a wonderful time talking to former Newton teachers who had worked with her and Sue years ago.