Rolling On One

I was saying, every so often during November, “The hunters must be bummed out that there’s no snow. They like an inch or so to see the deer tracks.”

Well, there was snow on Friday, and there were tracks in it on Sunday. We walked around our trail system (by now we’re beginning to think of it as that) and I wished I had brought my camera, so I got it and went back out.

These are the sharpest ones I photographed. Wish I knew what they are! I think they’re too big to be squirrel, but maybe that’s all.

These are tiny and cute. Some very small animal has been along here, dragging its tail in the snow. Maybe it’s some sort of shrew.

Here’s another shot of that same trail. That big bare spot is my boot print, to give you an idea how small the critter that made the trail is.

No bear, mountain lion, nor sasquatch tracks today. Just as well.

So, here’s (most of) what we came home from Orono with.

Apple basket, ash, made by Eldon Hanning, the man who was demonstrating splitting ash. He’s Micmac, from fairly far north in Maine. He set one of these baskets on the floor behind me and told me to sit down. The basket handle supports my weight. This style of basket has a double floor; it’s started with four splints, and then there are another four right on top of them. When you get out far enough from the center you start weaving around all sixteen ends. The people who make them think of them as potato baskets, (Maine potatoes? Aroostook County, remember?) but we’re thinking apples.

Bottom of apple basket:

Birchbark basket. The red color is a cambium layer that adheres to the outer bark in some seasons. The bark must be gathered at the correct time of the year to have that color. Then the artist etches the red layer away with a knife. This basket was made by Barry Dana.

Other side of the same basket:

Pincushion basket, ash and sweetgrass. That’s a big darning needle, suitable for weaving in the ends of knitting (which I was just doing with a pair of mittens, the gray and maroon Maplewood mittens from Favorite Mittens that I made at the end of last winter), for scale.

I ran my attempt at crabapple liqueur through some cheesecloth. Arlene had just had a bottle of orangina yesterday, so we fished the empty out of the recycle bin, washed it out, funnelled the liqueur in, and put a wine cork in the top. It just fits. To the left is my progress on limoncello. It smells pretty good, but needs to sit a lot longer. All it is so far is lemon peel sitting in vodka for two weeks.

The basket sale was right among the exhibits in the Hudson Museum at U. Maine Orono. We were very impressed with the museum. It’s bigger than the Idaho State U. Museum, we thought, and seems more concentrated on just a few topics, mostly in ethnology.

One of the exhibits I liked most, though I didn’t get a chance to read through it all (I was talking to the Dine, maybe that’s Navajo to you, basketmaker sitting in front of it), was about Northwest coast native art — have you seen a killer whale? It explained what all the different motifs that show up in that Haida, etc., art mean and why they all make sense. Though those paintings don’t look to me like killer whales, I was convinced that if I studied all the words, pictures, and artifacts in that exhibit, I would understand what the artists were doing.

Another exhibit upstairs had a Navajo (I think the exhibit said that, whether or not the people nowadays would rather be called Dine) rug loom with a weaving in progress, with a big swastika motif in the middle. There was a label next to it, possibly not large enough to be sure to catch your attention, about swastikas, saying that the motif had been around for a long time before the Nazis used it, and that you had to look at in context. If you see the symbol in a Hindu or Navajo context, you have to fight off your impulse to think it belongs to the Nazis. The “here it is, deal with it, if you’re offended that’s your problem, not the symbol’s problem” attitude reminds me of the Maine Public Broadcasting system’s disclaimer before “This American Life” that says “some of our listeners may find the following program very offensive, discretion is advised” (but we’re broadcasting it.)

The Hudson Museum has a huge collection of molas. They’re a kind of applique fabric art from islands off the coast of Panama. It seems that a woman who was one of the world’s authorities on them was a benefactor of the museum and donated her collection. Here are two of the most colorful:

There was a lot more on Panama, too.

One hands-on kid-friendly exhibit was about bead weaving. You know those indian beadcraft looms? I had one when I was a kid, but only had the patience to ever make one thing with it. It seemed like really slow work to me then, and took all the manual dexterity that I had and maybe a little more. This one works with wooden beads an inch in diameter instead of those tiny glass beads and light nylon rope instead of sewing thread. What a good idea! You can really understand what the structure is.

The last thing I want to show you is from an exhibit of art by Penobscot kids. The art was displayed in good quality frames and mattes, which of course helps. Arlene was most impressed by the whole thing — the presence in the museum, the care in preparing the exhibit, and the quality of the art. Since the eraser carvers were recently talking about how kids all learn about printing with styrofoam plates, I thought I’d give you this one. Kindergarten! I was blown away. I photoshopped it just to move the label over the matte so you could see the picture and read the label in a reasonable-sized file.

What we did on the 9th was to go to the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance sale at U. of Maine in Orono. It’s an annual event there, the second Saturday in December. Arlene spotted an article in the Boston Globe travel section last weekend and had been looking forward to going.

Orono is pretty far east in Maine, a couple of towns past Bangor. We’ve been through it before on our way to Atlantic Canada. Of course, once we’re sleeping in Casco we’re more than halfway there from Newton; it’s a long day trip, turned out to be 290 miles round trip from Casco, but almost all on I-95, on an only slightly familiar part of the highway.

Snow had fallen sometime in the last couple of days. The highway was clear and there was lots of snow on the trees, making it a lovely early winter drive. A lot of the route is through mixed hardwood, pine, and fir forest, a little through flat farming country. Near Waterville and Bangor there were highway exits full of the ordinary highway business sprawl. Ninety percent of the cars on the highway at the last Bangor exit got off on the road to the mall. It was clear that everyone who lived within fifty miles of there was going to the mall to do some Christmas shopping.

After one wrong fork in the road on the U. of ME campus we got to the Hudson Museum, where the basketry sale was. Sure enough, I had to stop at a crosswalk into the parking lot to let someone carrying a basket cross the street.

At the Fort Hall powwow in Idaho you can pretty much tell who is Native American and who is of European descent at a glance. At this event it was impossible to know who identifies as Native American just by looking. There have been so many generations of intermarriage in this part of the country that you just can’t tell. There were some blue-eyed blonde basketmakers at the event who consider themselves Penobscot or Passamaquoddy.

One person who would have looked Native American even in Idaho was demonstrating splitting ash to make splints for baskets. He was a short man, I mean about my height, 5’4″ or 5’6″ but probably half again my weight, with a barrel chest and muscular arms. He was working at a carving bench something like a low sawhorse with a seat on one end and a log carved out into a letter I shape going through a slot in the middle. You can clamp a long stick or board down when you push the bottom of the I away with your feet. He first used a drawknife (that’s a blade pointing towards you with a handle on each end) to trim a piece of split ash into a square stick about an inch on each side. I said, “I’m impressed that you’re working with that drawknife without a leather apron.” He said, “The secret is care and matter. I don’t care, and it don’t matter.” I think the secret is years of practice. At any rate, once the stick was square enough and had even enough grain showing he started pounding it with the back of a hatchet, holding it against an anvil consisting of a foot of railroad rail. He gave the wood a couple of good whacks, moved it an inch along the anvil, and pounded again, until he had pounded most of the length. Then he started at the end of the stick again, this time holding the other end well below the anvil so as to force the end to bend. I was amazed at how much it did bend. The wood split right along the growth rings. Each year’s worth of wood would normally make a single splint for basketry, or you could split it again lengthwise to make narrow splints. For the purpose of this demonstration he just split the stick three-quarters of the way, bent each separate piece back down in a long U shape, and ended up with a nice wooden decoration that looked like the NBC peacock’s tail.

I’ll show you what we came home with in another post. Meanwhile, check this license plate. It took me a while to track down the information about this specialty plate online, but here‘s the scoop.

I think this driver was thinking of a word in a native language, and is a not necessarily a Tolkien fan.

Near Bangor, on our way up to Orono on the 9th, there were some birds circling a dump to the right of the highway. I glanced over and saw one much much bigger than the rest, with long rectangular wings in a straight line. “Tell me that’s an eagle,” I said. Arlene looked for a while and said, “Yes, that’s an eagle, you can see the white head and tail.” Maybe I’ve seen enough of them by now to recognize them quickly.

And Bangor. I still say it’s the northeasternmost city in the US that people from big cities would recognize as a city. Houlton is farther north and east, but it looks, or looked the last time we were through it, which was 12 years ago, like a big town. Fort Kent is way farther north, and I’ve never been there to know how big it is or isn’t. And you probably hadn’t heard of it until now. But you’ve heard of Bangor, not just because of the song “King of the Road” — “Third boxcar, midnight train, destination: Bangor, Maine.” We went just a little bit past Bangor, to Old Town. Which you’ve possibly heard of because it’s where Old Town canoes come from.

Somewhere between Bangor and Houlton, (at least it was this way last time we were up that way, in ’94) Interstate 95 stops being a four-lane divided highway and becomes just a two lane road. It’s still as straight and level as other interstates. It’s just not a divided highway. Also in that area, you stop going through towns with names to them. It’s forest owned by the paper companies, with townships that just have numbers. Farther north you get into potato farming country and named towns again.

I’m making serious progress on Matt’s sweater. If I buckle down and keep going at the rate I’ve been this week, I have a fighting chance of getting it done by Christmas. Here’s the body up to the underarms, one sleeve done, and the other sleeve coming right along. I only cast on the second sleeve this past weekend. You can see that I increased the first sleeve too fast — increases at each end of every other round instead of maybe every sixth round. I’ll have to make the same mistake on the second sleeve, because I think baggy symmetric sleeves are better than one shaped different from the other. That’s Peer Gynt wool from Norway that Puttin On the Knitz sold me.

I was telling Heather at Village Knittiot in North Windham about a mitten kit I got at the Maine Fiber Frolic. Some kits barely make sense as kits — if you only sell instructions and enough whole hanks of yarn to make the project, why wouldn’t I buy instructions and yarn separately? This one has the right quantities of four colors of yarn (not more than a quarter of a hank of three of the colors — you definitely are better off with the kit, unless you’re making several pair) plus enough combed merino top for the project. It’s a lot like thrummed mittens, except instead of knitting in tufts of roving you knit fair isle with a continuous length of merino top behind three stitches of worsted weight yarn. I haven’t got to that yet. We’ll have to see how good I am about concentrating on the sweater. But here’s how far I’ve got on those, the “Oh, Wow!” mittens from, I think it is Miller Farm. One cuff.

The kit came with those three small balls of yarn, two of the dark blue, (I think those are all Bartlett 2-ply fisherman yarn) and several of the roving. Look at how different the colors of the white yarn and the roving are. Oh, those are Brittany needles, not my own, because I wanted size 10s and I only make 10 1/2s and 7s.
I had always thought that “kit” meant “something you buy to make a hobby project” (and the majority of them were model airplanes, when I was a kid) until I worked for an electronics company where the stockroom people used to say things like “I’m kitting up (or “I’m putting together kits for”) some clock formatter boards.” They meant just what you’d think, going over the bill of materials and filling a tray with the right set of parts, the circuit board, connectors, resistors, capacitors, integrated circuits, whatever it was, to make that particular item.

There was ice on Cutler Pond today, the first time I’ve seen that this year. It wasn’t frozen solid, but only perhaps 30% of it was open water. There was a pair of hooded mergs on the Charles, pretty far upstream. There are still lots of whitethroats around, and a couple of downy woodpeckers were very obvious.

I like walking at this temperature, just below freezing. I’d much rather have frozen or partly frozen ground underfoot than mud.

My spam filter overenthusiastically, but perhaps understandably, misfiled the latest Museum of Bad Art newsletter in my junk folder. Fortunately I looked the folder over first and found it.

It is perhaps fitting that I found the MOBA newsletter in the trash. The MOBA has had a long history of finding its acquisitions in the trash. Had I not found it, I would have missed the news of the recovery of one of their pieces:

” Long time supporters of the Museum of Bad Art know that on March 9, 1996 we suffered a tragic theft. Our iconic treasure “Eileen” was stolen from a gala MOBA opening.

” We immediately reported the theft to Boston Police, notified newspapers and art dealers, and offered a reward of $6.50 which was raised to almost $37 by generous MOBA supporters.
…”

If you don’t know the MOBA, their web site is worth looking at, and mostly tremendously funny. I’ve said this before (though not recently) but still, I find the stuff in that museum very moving. It’s obvious that the people who did the art were trying their best to express things that were important to them, even if it’s not always clear what that was. It’s the opposite of slick advertising illustration that’s well done but says nothing about the artist.

It was a seasonable day for the start of December, or maybe slightly warm, and sunny. Any time you can get to a crafts sale in December and unload without snow and ice underfoot, and without snow or rain falling on you, is good news.

This crafts sale is in the Newton South High School cafeteria, run by the city PTA council to benefit the schools.

We had the same location as last year, with plenty of space behind us and live music immediately to the right. Don’t get me wrong, the music was one amateur trio of string bass, quattro (a Puerto Rican 4-stringed guitar), and violin; a piano, clarinet, and vocalist trio from the senior center; a high school a capella group; and two jazz groups from the high school. But everyone was pretty good and fun to listen to. Charley, Nicole, and Emma showed up and hung around for a little bit of the afternoon. We kept selling stamps the whole time — business started early in the day and kept going at a fairly steady pace until fifteen minutes after the event was supposed to be over. Arlene sold two monotypes, too.

We went out to dinner at Lam’s in Newtonville afterwards. I had a big bowl of Burmese chicken curry noodle soup, just what I wanted.