Rolling On One

Today was the Bridgton art co-operative’s annual outdoor crafts fair. We went over but didn’t buy anything except a couple of cookies, which the Lakes Environmental Association was selling. It seemed as though there were fewer booths than last time we went, which was two years ago. Iron Man wasn’t there, nor was woodworker Eve Abreu, who one year was wearing a wooden name badge with a nail driven most of the way through it that looked as though it was nailed onto her until you realized that the nail was sawed off at the back of the badge. I was much taken with it and went home and made myself a similar one. But anyway, there was little woodworking or ceramics, and a lot of photography and jewelry.

We particularly liked the work of these jewelry makers:

Cararabassett Valley Jewelry, nice saw work in sheet sterling, with a poetic explanation of the nature-based inspiration for each piece,  Laura Guptill Jewelry, and Tracy Mastro’s enamel work.

I was wearing a somewhat strange T-shirt that has pictures of a circle of snakes on the front and a Frank Lloyd Wright building on the back. I bought it because it was cheap and I liked the snakes, and hadn’t even noticed the picture on the back until the first time I went to wear it — where did this one come from? A woman at the show looked at it and said, “I know exactly where you got that T-shirt — the Common Ground Fair.” “Right,” I said, “the Unity Graphics bargain bin.”

Last Sunday (July 11) we went fishing with, now wait, can it be, all five of the little boys who were staying here. That’s Gena’s three kids and David & Rachel’s two, Millie’s five grandsons, my grandnephews. Arlene is good about putting worms on hooks but refuses to touch the fish if any are caught, so that falls to me.

We set off mid-morning for our association’s boat dock. The deal with our property is that we’re part of an association that owns two lakefront lots and maintains the private road the house is on. People who live on the lake side of the road own their own lakefront, and people who live on the opposite side of the street, the back lots, like us, are entitled to use the two communally owned lots. One of those is a swimming beach, with buoys to keep boats out and a float to swim out to. It’s a five minute walk from our house. The other is half as wide, has a dock but no beach, and is almost directly across the road from the end of our driveway. That’s what we set off for, a parade of Arlene and me, five small boys, and small boys’ mothers. We got four fishing rods rigged up with bobbers (go away, wiggly underline, that is so a word), hooks, and worms, but there was not the least bit of evidence of fish activity. After ten minutes or so of nothing happening, we decided on a change of venue. We figured out how to set up car seats and headed off to plan B, Parker Pond, two miles away, close to downtown Casco. I cast everyone’s worms out into the pond. Pretty soon Mason, the oldest of the kids, started reeling in a fish! It ran under a log to a point where he couldn’t pull it in any farther. I took the rod and directed the fish to open water, from which we (and by now I forget if it was me, or if Mason finished the reeling in) got it to shore. I’m waiting for Rachel to send me the pictures she took of Mason and the fish, but it was a decent-sized largemouth bass, not as big as the one Arlene got a couple of weeks ago, but at least close to legal size. Not clearly legal size, though, and we didn’t want to keep it anyway. I unhooked it with little difficulty and let it go. Mason got two more fish, small (I mean more like five inches long than ten) bass that also were easy to release, but too small to be worthy of pictures. We must have prepared the kids enough with “sometimes you catch some, a lot of the time you don’t” that there was no real grumbling from the other kids. We’re still looking for a place that you can catch lots of sunfish, or perch, or even horned pout.

On July 3 we went to a double feature at the Bridgton Drive-In,Toy Story 3 and Grownups.

The Bridgton Drive-in is sort of an outdoor event. People bring lawn chairs and watch from next to their car, or put blankets on the roof of the car and have kids sit up there. Or of course you can watch from inside the car. The audio is on an FM channel, so if you remember the frequency you can listen to the movie as you drive past if you’re not driving in.

I watch so few movies that my critical faculties relative to movies are underdeveloped. In other words, you shouldn’t pay much attention to my reviews. But I do have a few comments:

Best line in Toy Story 3: Barbie’s speech on political philosophy.

Grownups: Not really as dopey as the reviews made it sound. Mostly a waste of talent, except that Rob Schneider got his talent used more than it deserved. It did have some good if trite things to say about the redemptive power of a few days in the New England woods, and I liked Sandler’s character’s ability to lose the game at the end. Funniest scene: Chris Rock’s character speaking Chinese to the au pair. Best scene: when paper cup telephones replace cell phones.

A friend at work surprised me when she said, “Oh! I want to see Grownups!” It’s because the funeral scene was filmed in Southborough MA, the next town from where she lives (also where David and Rachel live; they had a lot to say about the filming, too), and a friend of hers was an extra in it.

On Wednesday (June 16? two weeks ago already?) we took our long day trip of the visit, up to Grand Teton National Park. To get there, you drive 50 miles up I-15 to Idaho Falls, east to Swan Valley, north to Victor, over the Victor Grade to Jackson, and then to the park.

On the way to Idaho Falls there’s a highway rest area with trails around a lava flow called Hell’s Half Acre. It’s a lot more than half an acre. We’ve walked there before but it’s always worth a stop.

We saw a rabbit among the lava (just below and to the left of center here)

— and now go back and find the rabbit in the first lava picture up there! — and also a rock wren.

There was lots of construction on the road east of Idaho Falls, so it took longer than we expected to get through the farming area to the scenic part. East of Ririe, though, the road was empty and fast. It was the kind of road you see in car commercials. I mean, car commercials never show the kind of driving you really spend your time doing, with traffic and city streets and construction and congestion; they show you fantasy driving where the speed limit is probably faster than you want to drive around all those curves, with beautiful scenery beyond. But those roads do exist, and we were on one of them near Swan Valley. I don’t have a picture of the road itself, but I stopped to photograph some of the scenery:

We stopped for lunch at Timberline Bar & Grill in Victor,

I don’t really think the Timberline deserves a photo just in and of itself. Partly to give you a better idea of the trip, but more because it’s such a contrast with Bob’s Clam Shack in Kittery where we had lunch a few days later. The menu said that their chef was soon to be famous for his chili. I had a bowl of it and I’m here to say, I’ll hereby do my part to make the chef famous for it.

The last time we drove over the Victor Grade, that is, the road over the mountain pass between Victor and Jackson, we walked on a beautiful trail at a lookout area at the top of the pass. We were hoping to be able to do that again, but the weather didn’t cooperate. It was raining on the way up the grade, and it turned into a hailstorm by the time we got to the pass. It rained and hailed intermittently on the say down, and finally on the outskirts of Jackson the road had a good sprinkling of marble-sized hailstones.

We say three kinds of uncommon ducks, shoveler, gadwall, and cinnamon teal in the water by the Jackson Hole/Yellowstone Area visitors center, where a woman looked at me and said, “Your mom lives in Pocatello!” She had met us at a party a couple of years ago. I know mom knows everyone in Idaho, but I didn’t realize they know me too.

We drove up the main park road. At the first turnout we saw a young Chinese couple taking pictures of each other in front of the mountains, so I asked if they wanted me to take a picture of the two of them together. They did, and then they took a picture of us together:

There were lots of wildflowers at the Cascade Canyon turnout.

 

 

 
I didn’t notice when I took that photo, but there was another park visitor around at the time taking flower pictures the right way. He’s in the background above. The funny thing is that he turned out to live in the next town over in Massachusetts.

The weather continued rainy so we didn’t walk much. We stopped for supper at the Super Chinese Buffet in Idaho Falls and got back to Pocatello a little after dark.

One of the things mom was hoping we could do was to fix an old aluminum lawn chair that had torn webbing. Arlene did lots of internet research to try to find webbing, and tracked down a couple of sources. I thought maybe we’d be able to find some at Home Depot, or Lowe’s, or someplace like that. Several phone calls failed to turn up any. We drove out to the Chubbuck Wal-mart to look. The outdoor furniture department didn’t have any, but we found some rainbow colored olefin webbing in the fabric department. It was narrower than the original webbing on the chair, but much heavier weight, so I figured it would do. If I had known how little would be left on the roll I would have bought all they had, but as it was we had a couple of feet to spare. The repair job worked. But let’s face it, it’s an old aluminum lawn chair and not that photogenic.

We went for a walk at the Edson Fichter nature area, a part of the Portneuf Greenway project at the southern end of Pocatello.

We were there on two occasions during the trip. The first time there were western tanagers everywhere we looked, a couple of fairly easy-to-see lazuli buntings, magpies who let me take their picture, and an elusive black-headed grosbeak. This time we saw a very cooperative black-headed grosbeak, (maybe the same guy in a different mood)

got glimpses of lazuli buntings again and saw an oriole, “sp ?” as birders say, and saw cedar waxwings and a western tanager (but not quantities of them).

We had a time limit for our walk, because mom had made appointments for us with a massage therapist around the corner.

After that we went over to dinner at Habib’s. He’s a former engineering professor at Idaho State who has been in a dispute with the university administration. He’s from Iran and cooks wonderful exotic dishes. I neglected to get a picture of him, but here are mom and Habib’s girl friend Stephanie, who is a nurse on the Shoshone-Bannock reservation.

I think it was the day before we went to Chesterfield that my mom, Arlene, and I went out to breakfast at Red Hot Roasters with Keene.

Keene is an old friend of mom’s whom we’ve met before and whom she talks about all the time — mostly things like, “Keene brought me over a dozen eggs one day last week,” and “save the eggshells for Keene’s chickens.” So I had forgotten that besides keeping chickens, he’s a clinical psychologist. He also has pretty strong opinions, listens intently, and looks like an authentic weatherbeaten westerner.

Red Hot Roasters is run by a Chinese couple. They have very good food, but maybe only have one person in the kitchen and don’t seem to have figured out how to cook more than one thing at a time — so service is slow. But we were going there to talk, so it didn’t matter.

We went with mom to Chesterfield, Idaho. I’m pretty sure I blogged about it the last time we went there, but it won’t hurt to repeat.

Chesterfield was settled in the late 1800s by Mormon farmers moving out of the overcrowded (!) Salt Lake City area. Chesterfield was never overcrowded, and less so now. To folks from the East like us it looks like the middle of nowhere, but the most beautiful nowhere you could ask for:

The town was on the route of the Oregon Trail, and the founders expected that a railroad or major road would eventually go through it. That didn’t happen. The railroad went through Bancroft, ten miles south, and the through road going east and west is another ten miles south of that. That means that to drive to Chesterfield you have to drive twenty miles out of your way, passing nothing but a couple of dozen farms and Bancroft. The town was just too isolated to be economically viable. By the end of the 1950s it wasn’t really a town any more. Sometime in the last ten years or so some descendents of residents decided to restore the old houses and other buildings, places they remembered from visiting their grandparents. It’s been slow, but a labor of love.

We got a tour of several old buildings from Jack Jensen, a great-grandson of Denmark Jensen, whose cabin is in the middle distance here:

Do you understand why I love to go out to Chesterfield when we’re in Idaho? I wouldn’t put it on a list of the top ten things to see in the state, but it’s too bad that more people can’t see it. As long as you’re not looking at the road, you can pretend it’s 100 years ago.

We saw the Ira Call cabin:

Drove past the Ruger dugout:

Looked at the notions department in the Mercantile:

and saw one of the few surviving original McCormack “Daisy” reapers:

— not to mention the blacksmith shop.

The nearest place to get lunch was in Soda Springs, fifteen miles down the main road (after driving those 20 miles back to the main road.) There’s a geyser in Soda Springs, a little strange because it’s capped; there’s a timer that lets it erupt on the hour. Arlene and I saw it erupt once several years ago. Spray from it, with minerals that dissolved in the superheated water, got on our rental car. The minerals wouldn’t dissolve in normal hot water. When we left our the Geyser View Restraurant this time, I asked the waitress, “Does everyone in this town park too close to the geyser once?” She laughed and said, “It’s terrible! The only thing that seems to wash it off is a good rain!”

A day or two before we got to Pocatello someone had called my mom to ask for help with bird identification (this happens all the time to birders. Usually the callers don’t give you enough information to make an ID.) “Can you tell me what kind of birds are in my backyard? They’re goldfinches with red heads, and they’re eating my bees.” Mom figured out that they weren’t goldfinches at all, but western tanagers. Normally the tanagers don’t live in the valley here, but are found on the surrounding hills; but this spring has been so cold that they may not be finding enough insects yet on the slopes but are staying downtown.

At any rate, Arlene was looking out the kitchen window later in the day and said, “There’s one of the tanagers!” I looked, and only saw a yellow and black bird with a faintly fly away from where she was pointing, but saw another more brightly colored bird on a different branch. The yard was full of them! All right, there were three or a half-dozen of them in the trees at the back of the yard. We’ve been seeing more every now and then; they don’t stay all day, but groups will come through and forage around the trees for fifteen minutes and then move on. They aren’t really tame, but they’re not much shyer than robins. I was able to get reasonably close with a camera. Other people have been telling us they have been seeing them; so I think there are probably several hundred tanagers in Pocatello this week.

On Thursday June 10 we got up early (my alarm is normally set for 6:15. When I say early, I mean substantially earlier than that. In this case, I mean 3:15 AM) to get on a 6:30 flight to Salt Lake City on our way to Pocatello. Although the pilot (“Hi folks. I wanted to let you know that if you ever wake up in the wee hours of the morning with a desire to find yourself seven miles above the surface of the earth, jetting around at 500 miles per hour in an aluminum tube, we at Delta will be happy to accommodate you”) warned us that there would be turbulence ahead when he detoured around some thunderheads that were extending to 55000 feet and producing hail two inches in diameter, it was a pleasant flight. We got in 20 minutes early, by 10 AM Mountain time. I took the Legacy parkway, a road that Utah seems to have built to take some of the traffic off I-215 and I-15 around the northwest side of the SLC metro area; it was a excellent alternate route, fast enough and with no trucks allowed.

We stopped at the Bear River wildlife refuge visitor center. The little marshy area in front of the visitor center had a cinnamon teal, a marsh wren, and excellent views of yellow-headed blackbirds — in fact, one blackbird was sitting on the bridge railing and didn’t mind having human beings six feet away from it. The refuge’s logo features an avocet, which we haven’t seen many of; but the people at the information desk told us that if we drove a mile to where the road was closed we might be able to see some avocets in the adjoining field. We did — I mean, we did drive there, and we did see several avocets right there, as well as western kingbirds. We took a side road they recommended along the Bear River to the next freeway entrance north and saw western grebes and a pelican in the river and glossy ibises flying.

We stopped for lunch in Tremonton at our favorite cafe in Utah, JC’s Country Diner, and stayed off the freeway for most of the rest of the way. I have always wanted to take the slower route north from there, through Logan UT and Preston ID, what’s called the Cache Valley, just to see what’s over there. Preston is where the movie Napoleon Dynamite was filmed; it’s maybe 60 or 80 miles southeast of Pocatello. There’s nothing really remarkable on that route, but it’s nice to get off the freeway and see the downtowns of the small cities and tiny towns in that part of the country and to see the farms and ranches from closer up.

If this were fiction, the hailstorm that the pilot avoided would be a foreshadowing of more of our trip. There was precipitation on the road between Tremonton and Logan that made too much noise on the windshield to be plain rain. It sure sounded like hail to me, sort of like being behind a dump truck that was dripping some of its load of fine gravel on your windshield. After a couple of minutes of that we were driving on a road that looked as though a truck had spilled a load of mothballs. It didn’t ever get much bigger than pea size, I don’t think; certainly not bigger than marble size; and didn’t last long.

It was a beautiful ride. There has been a lot of rain this spring, and everything was very green. There were snowfields near the tops of the mountains all around the valley.

From Pomona, NY, we headed north on the Palisades Parkway, against the advice of the GPS which prudently thought going back to I-287 would be preferable. We crossed the Hudson on the Bear Mountain Bridge. It’s a beautiful spot, but I only recommend it if you are OK with a very winding road along a cliffs on the eastern side of the river. Eventually the GPS got us back to I-684, just one exit before the junction with 84 near Danbury.

We got to Casco at a reasonable hour of the evening.

Monday I walked out to check on my hazels (doing great! At this rate, they’ll be respectable bushes in another three or four years) and the Koosa dogwoods Matt and I planted last weekend. The dogwood we have in Newton has messy squishy red-orange fruit which sprout often enough that I dug up five flowerpots full of foot-high young trees to put around the place in Casco. We’ve tried in past years, but maybe haven’t dug up big enough root balls. At any rate, Matt and I put in two pots full, probably four trees, near Sleeping Rhino last weekend, and I put in one pot in the little clearing on the far side of the property that we call The Patio and one pot just across the driveway. Well, yesterday just as I got close to the one I had planted near Sleeping Rhino, a bird flew away from virtually underfoot and landed at waist height in the trees beyond the rock. I didn’t have my binoculars with me, so I didn’t get a real look at it. From the way it was behaving, hanging around at a minimum safe distance from me, I got the impression that it had some business where I had flushed it from — maybe it had a nest right there. I left so it could get back home, if that was indeed home.

Patsy had said she would like to get out in a boat. We have four people-powered boats; one 8 foot long aluminum rowboat, one fiberglass canoe, one two-seat kayak, and one one-seat kayak. All but the rowboat were in the sand room of our basement for the winter. Getting them out takes a little maneuvering. The one-seat kayak is no problem; the two-seat kayak isn’t hard if you watch where you’re going; but the canoe just barely fits through the door if you hold it at the correct angle and pay attention not to bump the oil tank and the water heater. The four of us got the three boats out with less trouble than I expected.

Charley and Patsy got in the canoe and Arlene and I took the two-seat kayak. We headed south near the shore, past Jack Carroll’s house and the three houses along Azwelikit Road, about to the first house in Hancock Beach. I called back, “Remember, we should turn around when we’ve had HALF as much fun as we want to have,” and Charley promptly said, “I think I’ve had half as much as I want,” so we headed back. Patsy said, “What’s that bird?” It was a loon, not very far away on the right. We all got a good look at it, and then it dove, and we didn’t see it for a while until it showed up ahead of us and on the left of our path. It dove again, and when we saw it next it was only two boat lengths away. It didn’t really seem to mind as we paddled along. It was as close as we’ve ever been to a loon.

Arlene said to Patsy, “If you want to keep canoeing, Charley and I can go home and you and Dean can stay out with the canoe,” so when we got back to our dock Charley got out, Arlene and I put the kayak on the shore, and I got in the bow of the canoe where Charley had been. We went the other way, past our association beach and more than halfway to a tiny island beyond it. At that point the wind picked up and the waves got to a disturbing size. We turned around before getting to the island and paddled back, into the wind all the way home. By the time we got back we had had all the fun we wanted.

This morning (if you’re keeping track, that’s Tuesday. I took a vacation day to stretch out the weekend, since we weren’t in Casco until Sunday night) I took binoculars back to Sleeping Rhino. I figured that if the bird I had flushed there was really nesting there, I would probably see it again in the same place. My best guess as to what it would turn out to be was based on the size, about sparrow-size, and having flushed it from the ground; the only ground-nesting bird that size I could think of was an ovenbird. Sure enough! It did flush from just about the same spot, flew to exactly the same place as before, I got a decent look at it with the binoculars, and it was an ovenbird. I took Arlene out to see it later, and again it flushed from the same place to the same place.

Also, good weekend for fish. Late in the afternoon we walked down to the association dock with fishing poles. On her second cast, Arlene got a fish. And not just any fish! It was a good black bass, definitely legal size even in Maine, a good fourteen inches long. It was hooked through the lip and I had squashed down the barb of the hook so it was easy to release. Maybe if we had caught it earlier in the weekend we would have kept it to print, but it’s swimming in the lake again now, not much the worse for the experience.