Rolling On One

On the 12th we all went to the Maine Wildlife Park in Gray for a native american powwow. It was much smaller than the Fort Hall Shoshone-Bannock festival — my mom said, “Do you think ours is ten times this big?” I do think there are more than ten times as many people dancing at the Sho-Ban festival as there were in Gray, but more like five times as many vendor booths. Of course, this was Eastern woodlands culture, not intermountain west, so the overall scene was very different from Fort Hall. Maybe because the area was smaller, maybe because the fire danger was low, there was lots of sage smudge in the air. We bought some deerskin from a vendor, but no completed craft items.

Three people, wildlife park staff and volunteers were walking around with birds on their shoulders — an eagle, a young great horned owl, and a raven.

This woman had raised the raven (its name is Hagrid, but she doesn’t really know if it’s male or female) herself. You don’t want to see the back of her T-shirt; it would constitute too much information about raven hygiene.

The Passamaquoddy tribe, People of the Dawn, from the easternmost part of the U.S., were pretty much in charge. I don’t know how much Abenaki presence there was. I haven’t been studying either of those languages lately, so I wouldn’t have been able to say anything.

That’s Charley in black with a camera to the right of the man with the eagle, Nicole in a black dress next to him, and Emma in front of Nicole (she’s not the kid in the tank top). Charley got a much better picture of the eagle than I did. You’d hope so — firstly, he’s a pro; secondly, he has a better camera than I do; thirdly, he takes twenty pictures to my one.

Emma joined a candy dance for kids, something like musical chairs but the idea was on some cue you could pick up as much candy as you wanted so long as you got out of the ring by the next cue, else you had to put the candy back. She didn’t get any, and was in danger of being run over by more experienced kids who were in a hurry to get out of the ring in time.

One of the things I wanted in a vacation place was plenty of dark sky. Andy’s house on Moose Pond in Denmark was a little too much in the trees, without much sky. Our house in Casco has a good amount of sky, not a clear view horizon to horizon by any means, but a pretty good compromise if you want any woods around. It’s not nearly as dark as the sky we had at the bed and breakfast in Harrison when we were first looking at property in Maine, but dark enough to just barely see the Milky Way on a clear moonless night.

The perseid meteor shower is sometime in August. I was thinking more like the 16th or so, but when I looked on spaceweather on Friday the 11th I found that it was the next evening, but also worth looking right then. Some meteor showers only last for a few hours, but the perseids go on, at least a little, for a couple of days before and after the peak. I got everyone suitably psyched up and we all went outside to look. Soon after we started most of us saw a very bright meteor go rightwards through Cassiopea. After that the meteors were few and far between. It’s a very random thing, just one meteor every couple of minutes and if you’re not looking in the right direction you miss it while other people say, “There’s one!”. When the weather is comfortable and there aren’t mosquitos people tend to say, “Just one more and then I’m going in”, and then nothing happens for five minutes. Everyone, including Emma, saw at least a couple. Shooting stars! Enough reason for a kid to be enthusiastic about the trip.

My mom was at our house from August 7 to yesterday, or in Newton from the 7th to the 10th, in Casco from the 10th to 13th, back in Newton the night of the 13th, and flew home on the 14th.

We pretty much relaxed around the house on Friday the 11th. The apples looked red enough to see if they were ripe. I picked about ten small apples (that’s all there are, small apples) from the Cortland tree. The previous weekend Arlene had noticed a stenciled sign someone had set out at the corner of Mayberry Hill Road and Heath Road advertising blackberries, $4 a quart. We had looked for them on the way home on the 6th, driving two houses down North Pine Hill Road and not seeing anything, but this time we tried harder. I looked closely at the first house along the road, the one with all the fruit-laden blackberry bushes in front of it, and saw a sign on the porch. We pulled up and didn’t see anyone. On a picnic table on the porch was a little net umbrella with one quart of blackberries and a can saying “money”. I took the berries, left four dollar bills in the can, and went on. We went on up to the Casco AG and got a gallon of gasoline for the chainsaw which I still haven’t used and some disposable aluminum pie plates. I have one 9 inch pyrex pie plate, but there were blackberries AND apples to deal with.

Charley and Nicole and Nicole’s 4-year-old daughter Emma came up on the 11th after supper but before I had time to bake blackberry and apple pies. Emma was bouncing up and down with joy and excitement about being there. Nicole had been talking up the trip all week.

David and Rachel (and Jared) were at the house in Casco from about August 1 through, I think it was, 5. Millie and Joel joined them there on the 3rd, I think, and we went up on Friday the 4th.

David and Rachel were impressed with how much Jared remembered about the place. When it was time to eat, he said, “Want fish! Fish!!” There was no fish on the menu, but there were goldfish pictures on the placemats, which was what he was talking about.

They had brought a fabric playhouse which took up a significant fraction of the living room, a Thomas the Tank Engine that you (if you were Jared) could sit in and pretend to drive. It turned out to be big enough for me to crawl into. At some point you could find me inside it.

On Saturday afternoon we went over to the association beach. I took the kayak over rather than walk, and kayaked around the little islands to the north of the beach. Past the first island was one farther out which I headed for. There was a couple sitting on their dock who greeted me, so I chatted for a while. A family of ducks, I thought common mergansers but now I think more likely red-breasted mergs, was puttering around a little ways down the shore from them. They (the humans, I mean!) come from Ohio, but used to live in Connecticut and at that time came up to the lake most weekends.

On Sunday we put the canoe on the car and headed out to Parker Pond, where Millie and Joel took the canoe out and Arlene and I tried fishing. I caught a small bass, then another one. The second wasn’t really hooked — I don’t know if the line got caught in its gill, or what. In any event, when I tried to get it off the line the hook was swinging around on four inches of line above the back of the fish. In flopping around, the fish slapped the hook into the side of my thumb. Ouch, and rats! Joel (as driver) and I spent the rest of the afternoon in the Bridgton Hospital emergency room. It was nowhere near as spectacular as three years ago when I had a hook through my ear, and didn’t really hurt much at all, but I couldn’t get the barb out by myself, and didn’t think I could hold anything with the shank of the hook sticking out of my thumb.

The same doctor who had taken the hook out of my ear in 2003 treated me. This is the Bridgton emergency room — he brought in a little plastic bin labeled “Fish hook removal stuff”. “All set. That was less challenging than I expected. See you in three years,” he said.

I started (probably around the first of August, but I’m not sure) another sock, using some old self-patterning stash yarn. In fact, it’s yarn I bought a year or two before I started knitting (I mean, before I started knitting this time, not before I learned the second time), from Fabric Place in Framingham, just because it was nifty yarn. It’s blue, navy, and chestnut, with gray-and-white stretches in between, with a short pattern repeat. The color changes about every two rounds, which means the colors repeat about every twelve rounds. That’s a round of 64 stitches on #2s.

I’m using the magic loop method, toe-up, starting with a figure-8 cast on. So far (before anything to do with heel shaping!) I like the magic loop better than two circulars because there’s no problem of which needle end to use next. There is a problem getting the yarn tangled with the loop, but it hasn’t really slowed me down yet.

Arlene and I normally are going through Connecticut quickly on our way between Newton and New Jersey. We usually say something like, “it’s too bad we never have time to see anything in Connecticut.” We did have time on our way back from Mimi’s on July 31.

We stopped at the Danbury rest area off I-84 and picked up a thickish booklet about Connecticut attractions. The one that sounded most interesting, of the things that would still be open when we got there and that weren’t too far off the highway, was the National Audubon Society’s Bent of the River sanctuary in Southbury.

It felt good to be back to New England woods and architecture. Even more, it felt good to be back to colonial era, Revolutionary War history rather than Civil War history!

Bent of the River (and we don’t really know why it’s “benT” rather than “benD”, but it seems to have something to do with spelling and diction in the Colonial era) is known for butterflies. We already saw lots of them in the fields of wildflowers near the start of the trail. I remember lots and lots of butterflies at the national monument in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, but there were just about as many at Bent of the River.

We walked along the trail to the barn and visitor center. In the gardens behind the barn were bushes covered with tiger swallowtails. All right, not covered the way the butterfly trees that the monarchs migrate to get covered, but a half-dozen tiger swallowtails in one bush is pretty impressive.

It’s not just that we saw a lot of butterflies. The sanctuary has a brochure with a checklist of the butterflies that can be seen there. They consider themselves to be a prime location for butterflies. One species that’s seen there is Milbert’s Tortoiseshell, which is found in very few other locations in Connecticut (said the woman in the office).

We saw a couple of hummingbirds, which are no longer an event for us, but it’s always nice seeing them in flowers or trees rather than just at feeders, and a female rose-breasted grosbeak.
So, as you can see, we were pretty enthusiastic about that stop. I don’t know if we’ll get there again, but I hope so.

We got to Mimi’s late in the afternoon (back on Sunday 7/30) after crawling through heavy traffic in northern Maryland, most of Delaware, and just a little of New Jersey. Although we were worried about how it would be near the George Washington Bridge, we made good time through northern New Jersey and NYC.

When Mimi offered me a drink, I asked for a gin & tonic. I like ’em, on hot days. Bert had fixed me one last year, and this one was just as strong. “Bert doesn’t stint on the gin,” I said. “No, Bert’s not a stinter,” said Mimi.

We left Virginia after a big breakfast with Lara and Elyse’s family at the inn. There wasn’t much traffic northbound. We made good time around Washington. By a little way onto the Baltimore-Washington parkway we were ready for a pit stop. I got off at an exit that turned out to be going to Fort Meade. That’s the NSA headquarters, which we didn’t want to even have to turn around at. We pulled into what we hoped was a restaurant parking lot, but it turned out to be just a crab market (this is Maryland, remember). The woman at the counter said there were gas stations etc on the other side of the parkway. It wasn’t really at all far. We went into a McDonald’s to use the restrooms and get a little to eat.

Now I know it’s just me, but I was very impressed to see an interracial couple come in to McDonalds, walk up to the counter, and be treated just like anyone else. I still notice interracial couples, even though I really think, “well, why not, after all”.

The thing is, in the spring of 1962, my freshman year in college, I spent a week at Howard University in Washington on a student exchange program. There was a civil rights lunch counter demonstration the Saturday at the end of that week that I went on. In those days the law in Maryland was that the restaurant owner could come over and read a statement, with wording prescribed by the law, something like “Of my own free will I choose not to serve you and I request that you leave my premises.” So one day 44 years ago several busloads of college kids descended on that same town of Laurel, Maryland on the opening day of the horse racing season to make as much of a nuisance of ourselves as we could. The group I was with, two black women from Howard, a white guy from U Maryland at College Park, and I were “read out” of four eateries. Nowadays I think anyone under 40 years old would say, “Yeah, I’ve heard about those days. Wierd, man. What were they thinking?” But I was impressed by the scene at McDs.

Rats, my browser ate my homework.

This was one of those times I had written a lot and not saved it, and my browser hung up, so I lost that part of the post. I kind of think I typed faster than the browser wanted to input.

The interesting part (to me) is that there was live music in the little pub downstairs in the Inn at Kelly’s Ford, one guy with an ampified semiacoustic guitar doing sort of folk-rock songs, “requests from the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s?” he said. He was encouraging people to sing along, which I am always delighted to do. I started up on a bar stool, but when other people moved out of the room (and it took a long time to get our supper! The barkeeper was overwhelmed with the crowd, 18 in our party alone, but that was over half the capacity of the place) Arlene and I moved to a table.

I have to say, it feels different singing “Country roads, take me home, West Virginia…”, when you’re in Virginia, and “The night they drove old Dixie down (… I took the train to Richmond, it fell…)” when you’re within 100 miles of Richmond. We were belting ’em out. A pint of the house red ale didn’t hurt.
The guitarist said he used to perform on Skyline Drive in the Shennandoah National Park, and people would request “Rocky Top” every time. That, he said, was one of two Tennessee state songs, and the other was Tennessee Waltz. He called a woman who was sitting at the back of the room up to the mike to sing that. Wow! She was terriffic, with a beautiful soprano voice, perfectly on key, with some accidentals in that song that I didn’t know belonged but were perfect. It turned out that she, Donna Lynn Rector, had cut a CD with the guitarist as part of the backup group. When we were about to leave (after last call; our group pretty much closed the pub) I asked how I could get a copy of the CD. She said maybe there were some in the car, got the keys from the guitarist, and returned with my CD. It’s good. My favorite track on it is still Tennessee Waltz.

– pictures to follow –

The reception was at the Inn at Kelly’s Ford, which was also where Elyse’s family was staying. It’s in the country, on the far side of a one-lane bridge, with a stable and a riding ring setting up for a horse show a hundred yards away.

The room, like the Fredricksburg Colonial Inn, was full of Civil War decor. As a yankee I found that a little off-putting, but thinking of all the Civil War history in the area — that link goes to SeeAmerica.org, not the National Park Service — I can understand it. Besides the big battles of Chancellorsville and Wilderness within a dozen miles, there was a small cavalry fight right at Kelly’s Ford quite close to the inn. There’s a page from an 1863 edition of the New York Times with news of that battle posted up in the main building of the inn.

Maybe it’s standard at places like that, but in contrast to the Civil War firearms on the walls, there was a video projector hanging on the ceiling projecting a laptop-controlled slideshow of photos of the bride and groom. They had met as park rangers at Cave of the Winds National Park in South Dakota.