Old Devil Moon
11 - 13 July, Ian
I don't know how many of you read the occasional
comments that are posted to the blogs - I loved the one to the
Lake
Eerie entry left by Shaun. It's interesting
that seeing ghostly white figures on awakening is a classifiable phenomenon;
it's to be expected (since it's a repeating human experience) that it has a
neurological correlate; but the point that I especially enjoyed was the
hypothesis that it's extrinsically induced by meteorological or geo-magnetic
conditions, which both potentially apply here. Isn't this indicative of how we
look for so much to be explained by gross characteristics of the visible
landscape, while it's these subtle, ancient, visceral experiences that really
rattle our bones. Emotion, smell, instinct - limbic system activity - trump
cognition much more often than we credit. Which is why Hydra isn't the ghost in
the machine.
On Monday we did the whale watching thing that you have to do here and it was fun. We lucked out with the weather, enjoying the first day of unbroken sunshine and flat seas for a while. The day before they'd run the tour but with zero visibility and a large swell. As well as three juvenile bald eagles, two or three flocks (and what is the carpet equivalent group noun here?) of eiders, several razorbills and innumerable terns, petrels, puffins, seals and porpoise, we saw a couple of humpback whales and a fin whale. Unfortunately, the photographic record doesn't match the actual experience. Many years ago Paula and I saw whales in Maui - I was then using a Pentax film camera, which had the useful characteristic that when I hit the shutter it took a photo. The whales then were doing their showing off breaching routine and I was able to get a shot of one whale that was completely clear of the water. My digital cameras, especially my (10x zooming) Olympus don't work this way. Accordingly I have lots of shots of the sea recently dived in by a whale. I didn't even waste my battery trying to capture a puffin flying across the bow. But it was all cool. I also learned some stuff. For example, if you look at most of the lighthouses round here they have sheds next to them - this is to store the whale blubber that they used to use to fuel the lights. So there is an interesting conjunction between two of the major Maine romances: that of the whale and that of the lighthouse. (These days solar panels have superseded whale fat.)
And did you know that whales can get to around 200 years old? I didn't. I knew that whales were the largest animals that have ever lived on earth, with the blue whale being the biggest. But I didn't know that the fin whale was the second biggest (ours was about 65 feet long, and they get up to about 90 feet), or that a whale aorta (presumably of a blue) is about wide enough for Heidi to walk upright in it.
We've seen more of the local area too. Last night we had dinner at a fancy restaurant set up by a couple who've decamped to Maine from Martha's Vineyard. It was very friendly and all competently done, although their escargots weren't as good as Reynald's. Very respectably, they were trying to serve good food in the Big City style - sorbets after the starter type of thing - which is fine, though I haven't yet had enough lobster roll and blueberry pie to be bored by it. I booked a table for the earliest time I thought was almost decent - 7 p.m. We were surprised, then, to find that that they'd already sold out virtually all of the day's specials: apparently even upscale restaurants round here start to get very busy at 5.
Maybe that's because of how long it takes to drive around. While I'm surprisingly chilled about the very low speed limits here, my passengers grumble and moan. Paula even reminisced yesterday about how quickly we were belting around in Africa, and it's true: the normal, acceptable driving speed on rough unsealed roads in Africa was higher than it is on smooth wide tarmac here. But what's the rush? One of the David Lynch movies that I haven't seen (yet) is Mulholland Drive, in which I believe an old timer drives across the States on a lawn mower. That idea doesn't seem so crazy any more.
Besides, it gives us an opportunity to listen to the excellent local radio. The past couple of nights we've caught the Democracy Now show with Amy Goodman, which seems better than most UK-based news shows. The administration may well be lying disgracefully and trying to evade public scrutiny for their hypocritical actions (the Karl Rove story is currently in the news) but at least some of the news media are giving them a tougher time than our lot seem to when our leaders succumb to mendacity. This afternoon the same station was playing Frank Zappa as we drove across Maine, which seemed especially apt. I also learned something interesting about US radio. Yesterday on Democracy Now a right winger made an eloquent case for why public service broadcasting (which the right here believe to be "liberal") should be abolished. After he'd had his say someone asked him whether Voice of America should be banned by the same logic. His reply was that VOA, which he supports, is an instrument of foreign policy and is forbidden by statute from broadcasting within the US for fear of subjecting US citizens to State propaganda! I'd like to say something pithy about this but all I can find to write is: !! It reminds me of when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel prize for peace and someone christened it The Night That Irony Died. I never listen to VOA myself, but I do like its UK equivalent, the BBC's World Service (radio station), which is also funded by our Foreign Office. Despite being designed for propaganda, if you want to see it this way, the World Service provides news coverage that's far superior to that from the other BBC channels, and we are allowed to listen to it.
This afternoon we went to Castine, which is the prettiest town we've found so far. I've been to places that have more conspicuous levels of high affluence (though not very many) but Castine is incredibly posh. They even have a refined class of dog. There is a harbour and a quaint bookshop with a cafe offering free wifi (only the second place knowingly offering free internet access that I've found since we've been away) and a corner store that seems simultaneously working class (if I can use that phrase here) and self-consciously aware of its superiority (it displays accolades for serving the best lobster rolls in Maine). About half of the people I chatted to mentioned some personal connection with Edinburgh (or Edinboro), which hits the spot well. In the cafe we met a couple whose son is doing so well as a gaming guru for Sony that they're blowing their life's riches on an indefinite cruise. When we discovered that Polynesia lies on both of our itineraries they apologised that we wouldn't meet as they don't plan to get there for a year and a half.
Castine also boasts a quaint little museum, which, alongside a few cases of cultural artefacts from around the world collected personally by local benefactors in the traditional patrician manner, features a traditional kitchen and parlour room. Like most other things in Castine, the museum seems to serve primarily as a distraction for the people who run it, all of whom had plenty of time to chat fondly about its contents and what they reveal of the locale. Opening hours are only from 2 to 5, and even in July it was virtually empty. Next to the museum, and forming a continuation of it in many senses, is the reconstructed home of one of the first people to inhabit the town after the Brits hauled out. We (and only we) were shown round most of the house by an enthusiastic guy in 1800's gear. He lovingly told us the story of most of the furniture in the house, and it was only today that I learned what a weasel is (from the children's rhyme) and heard it pop - it's for winding yarn or flax and I have a photo of it, which I had to promise not to display on the internet. After we'd passed through most of the house the guy, who seemed very friendly but not quite real, passed us on to a tableau vivant in the kitchen led by a woman, who, along with her two daughters, was in period cook gear and actually cooking: we were treated to fresh bread and syllabub. I was beginning to wonder whether I wasn't experiencing another episode of freak temporal lobe activity.
The museum and its house are pretty superfluous when you can enjoy the exceptionally well-preserved town itself. The house that I want has this covered walkway between its major and secondary wings:
You can see the bay in back.
Another plus from Castine is that I was able to pick up The Boston Globe, which has been surprisingly elusive hereabouts. I want to have an alternative to The Telegraph or The Independent and feel that I ought to be trying out the local papers, but I can't get enthusiastic about The Ellsworth Whatever. I also want to get into the swing of The Globe's crossword. When we were in Corsica (and sometimes in Fes) I was getting The Telegraph every day (The Independent doesn't seem to reach to the Med) and doing the crossword in that, which I enjoy. The Globe's crossword is a completely different beast. It's not cryptic and it's very word-dense with very few black squares. It's interesting to switch context to US references. I notice that today's Globe also carries a sudoku. I had a period around the time when we left England when I was enjoying doing these, and they're fun to do with Heidi, who likes them more than Zoe. However I do prefer the Telegraph crossword. Even the harder sudokus are amenable to a programmatic approach and while some take longer than others if you don't scrawl the wrong numbers in there's never any possibility that you wont be able to finish them - they're distracting in the same way that a word search is. But with a crossword you can't rely on doing them by rote and I like the sense that you just might not solve them - you sometimes need that spark. For example, there's a clue in an old Telegraph crossword:
" !" (4,3,3,1,4)
Solution to be given in future - let me know if you think you have it.
Finally, I did say that I'd try to give you a loon photograph. I have one but I'm still after a better, closer, sharper snap. Loons are like a duck only bigger, with distinctive patterning. And they make an incredible howling sound. I've been unable to get the Sinatra song Old Devil Moon out of my head. It has the line in it about "to laugh like a loon"; until we came here I had no idea what that really meant.
Ian
On Monday we did the whale watching thing that you have to do here and it was fun. We lucked out with the weather, enjoying the first day of unbroken sunshine and flat seas for a while. The day before they'd run the tour but with zero visibility and a large swell. As well as three juvenile bald eagles, two or three flocks (and what is the carpet equivalent group noun here?) of eiders, several razorbills and innumerable terns, petrels, puffins, seals and porpoise, we saw a couple of humpback whales and a fin whale. Unfortunately, the photographic record doesn't match the actual experience. Many years ago Paula and I saw whales in Maui - I was then using a Pentax film camera, which had the useful characteristic that when I hit the shutter it took a photo. The whales then were doing their showing off breaching routine and I was able to get a shot of one whale that was completely clear of the water. My digital cameras, especially my (10x zooming) Olympus don't work this way. Accordingly I have lots of shots of the sea recently dived in by a whale. I didn't even waste my battery trying to capture a puffin flying across the bow. But it was all cool. I also learned some stuff. For example, if you look at most of the lighthouses round here they have sheds next to them - this is to store the whale blubber that they used to use to fuel the lights. So there is an interesting conjunction between two of the major Maine romances: that of the whale and that of the lighthouse. (These days solar panels have superseded whale fat.)
And did you know that whales can get to around 200 years old? I didn't. I knew that whales were the largest animals that have ever lived on earth, with the blue whale being the biggest. But I didn't know that the fin whale was the second biggest (ours was about 65 feet long, and they get up to about 90 feet), or that a whale aorta (presumably of a blue) is about wide enough for Heidi to walk upright in it.
We've seen more of the local area too. Last night we had dinner at a fancy restaurant set up by a couple who've decamped to Maine from Martha's Vineyard. It was very friendly and all competently done, although their escargots weren't as good as Reynald's. Very respectably, they were trying to serve good food in the Big City style - sorbets after the starter type of thing - which is fine, though I haven't yet had enough lobster roll and blueberry pie to be bored by it. I booked a table for the earliest time I thought was almost decent - 7 p.m. We were surprised, then, to find that that they'd already sold out virtually all of the day's specials: apparently even upscale restaurants round here start to get very busy at 5.
Maybe that's because of how long it takes to drive around. While I'm surprisingly chilled about the very low speed limits here, my passengers grumble and moan. Paula even reminisced yesterday about how quickly we were belting around in Africa, and it's true: the normal, acceptable driving speed on rough unsealed roads in Africa was higher than it is on smooth wide tarmac here. But what's the rush? One of the David Lynch movies that I haven't seen (yet) is Mulholland Drive, in which I believe an old timer drives across the States on a lawn mower. That idea doesn't seem so crazy any more.
Besides, it gives us an opportunity to listen to the excellent local radio. The past couple of nights we've caught the Democracy Now show with Amy Goodman, which seems better than most UK-based news shows. The administration may well be lying disgracefully and trying to evade public scrutiny for their hypocritical actions (the Karl Rove story is currently in the news) but at least some of the news media are giving them a tougher time than our lot seem to when our leaders succumb to mendacity. This afternoon the same station was playing Frank Zappa as we drove across Maine, which seemed especially apt. I also learned something interesting about US radio. Yesterday on Democracy Now a right winger made an eloquent case for why public service broadcasting (which the right here believe to be "liberal") should be abolished. After he'd had his say someone asked him whether Voice of America should be banned by the same logic. His reply was that VOA, which he supports, is an instrument of foreign policy and is forbidden by statute from broadcasting within the US for fear of subjecting US citizens to State propaganda! I'd like to say something pithy about this but all I can find to write is: !! It reminds me of when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel prize for peace and someone christened it The Night That Irony Died. I never listen to VOA myself, but I do like its UK equivalent, the BBC's World Service (radio station), which is also funded by our Foreign Office. Despite being designed for propaganda, if you want to see it this way, the World Service provides news coverage that's far superior to that from the other BBC channels, and we are allowed to listen to it.
This afternoon we went to Castine, which is the prettiest town we've found so far. I've been to places that have more conspicuous levels of high affluence (though not very many) but Castine is incredibly posh. They even have a refined class of dog. There is a harbour and a quaint bookshop with a cafe offering free wifi (only the second place knowingly offering free internet access that I've found since we've been away) and a corner store that seems simultaneously working class (if I can use that phrase here) and self-consciously aware of its superiority (it displays accolades for serving the best lobster rolls in Maine). About half of the people I chatted to mentioned some personal connection with Edinburgh (or Edinboro), which hits the spot well. In the cafe we met a couple whose son is doing so well as a gaming guru for Sony that they're blowing their life's riches on an indefinite cruise. When we discovered that Polynesia lies on both of our itineraries they apologised that we wouldn't meet as they don't plan to get there for a year and a half.
Castine also boasts a quaint little museum, which, alongside a few cases of cultural artefacts from around the world collected personally by local benefactors in the traditional patrician manner, features a traditional kitchen and parlour room. Like most other things in Castine, the museum seems to serve primarily as a distraction for the people who run it, all of whom had plenty of time to chat fondly about its contents and what they reveal of the locale. Opening hours are only from 2 to 5, and even in July it was virtually empty. Next to the museum, and forming a continuation of it in many senses, is the reconstructed home of one of the first people to inhabit the town after the Brits hauled out. We (and only we) were shown round most of the house by an enthusiastic guy in 1800's gear. He lovingly told us the story of most of the furniture in the house, and it was only today that I learned what a weasel is (from the children's rhyme) and heard it pop - it's for winding yarn or flax and I have a photo of it, which I had to promise not to display on the internet. After we'd passed through most of the house the guy, who seemed very friendly but not quite real, passed us on to a tableau vivant in the kitchen led by a woman, who, along with her two daughters, was in period cook gear and actually cooking: we were treated to fresh bread and syllabub. I was beginning to wonder whether I wasn't experiencing another episode of freak temporal lobe activity.
The museum and its house are pretty superfluous when you can enjoy the exceptionally well-preserved town itself. The house that I want has this covered walkway between its major and secondary wings:
You can see the bay in back.
Another plus from Castine is that I was able to pick up The Boston Globe, which has been surprisingly elusive hereabouts. I want to have an alternative to The Telegraph or The Independent and feel that I ought to be trying out the local papers, but I can't get enthusiastic about The Ellsworth Whatever. I also want to get into the swing of The Globe's crossword. When we were in Corsica (and sometimes in Fes) I was getting The Telegraph every day (The Independent doesn't seem to reach to the Med) and doing the crossword in that, which I enjoy. The Globe's crossword is a completely different beast. It's not cryptic and it's very word-dense with very few black squares. It's interesting to switch context to US references. I notice that today's Globe also carries a sudoku. I had a period around the time when we left England when I was enjoying doing these, and they're fun to do with Heidi, who likes them more than Zoe. However I do prefer the Telegraph crossword. Even the harder sudokus are amenable to a programmatic approach and while some take longer than others if you don't scrawl the wrong numbers in there's never any possibility that you wont be able to finish them - they're distracting in the same way that a word search is. But with a crossword you can't rely on doing them by rote and I like the sense that you just might not solve them - you sometimes need that spark. For example, there's a clue in an old Telegraph crossword:
" !" (4,3,3,1,4)
Solution to be given in future - let me know if you think you have it.
Finally, I did say that I'd try to give you a loon photograph. I have one but I'm still after a better, closer, sharper snap. Loons are like a duck only bigger, with distinctive patterning. And they make an incredible howling sound. I've been unable to get the Sinatra song Old Devil Moon out of my head. It has the line in it about "to laugh like a loon"; until we came here I had no idea what that really meant.
Ian
Posted: Thu - July 14, 2005 at 07:43 AM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM