Iggy and the last of the loons
14 - 15 July, Ian
At 4 a.m. on Wednesday morning I drove my Mom and
Neil to Bangor airport for their return home. There was no one in line and it
seemed an easy way to check in for a transatlantic flight (they transferred at
Boston but were checked all the way through). It was nice to see them and their
time here went both quickly and slowly. (As the poet said, The hours are
thistledown, the days are swallows.) Their departure is another indicator, like
our last routing through London a couple of weeks ago, that our year is really
only getting underway: we now wont see any more family or UK-based friends until
next Spring.
There were lots of troops, male and female, kicking around the airport looking leaderless and lost, hanging around outside in knots for a smoke. They now wear that uniform that looks like mufty - powder blue pyjamas with yellow Timberland-style books. The guys from the Parachute regiment of the Foreign Legion who we saw so many of strutting around the streets of Corsica have a uniform that ought to look sillier (funny white hat, Christmas cracker parachute-picture badge etc) but somehow they seemed smarter and fitter and more purposeful and, well, more soldierly. These US troops aren't helped by the fact that many people will now associate them with the disgraceful Geneva-convention-violators at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. For many of us outside the States these were among the first troops we saw (when they appeared on TV and in the papers) kitted out in the new pyjama strip. I feel sorry for the troops like those at the airport and hope that they don't feel any of the softness, vague guilt or absurdity that I see in them; it's not their fault.
On the drive back to the cabin I tuned in to a Handel harpsichord concerto. When it was over the BBC World Service came on, which was a happy slice of luck. There was a report from Thailand that the government has made an anti-retroviral cocktail available for people infected with HIV for only 70 cents per treatment. This is great. Since 23 of the 24 countries with the highest HIV infection are in Africa (Haiti being the odd one out) you have to wonder why nothing like this has been forthcoming from there - Cambodia will have it before Africa! It supports Paul Theroux's miserable view of Africa as the basket-case continent, whose utter hopelessness springs from the torpor of its citizens, compounded by the misguided and self-serving aid industry, which only serves to erode whatever self-reliance its people have. There were two news stories from Africa on the World Service. The first reported a skirmish on the border of Ethiopia in which numerous people were brutally massacred in a raid for goats and cattle. The second reported on the complete internal collapse of Somalia. I hope that Theroux is wrong (though his analysis of the aid industry sounds convincing) and that there more optimistic prognoses for more places in Africa.
The majority of coverage on the World Service was given over to the aftermath of the London bombings. Dreadful as it was, I was very heartened to hear how many ordinary Muslim voices featured in the report, and how genuinely out of sympathy they were with indiscriminate civilian murders. Rationally, you know that most Muslims in the UK feel this way, but it doesn't hurt to hear them saying it on the radio. It's the same with the uniformed criminals of Guantanamo. I know a lot of Americans and I know that they are as appalled by these horrible crimes as most people elsewhere. But if you took your view directly from the media - and the reaction from the administration and the Pentagon - you'd have to think that they just don't care enough. There is an irony here. Most people from all communities in the countries affected feel that it's really bad to bomb tube trains and that it's really bad to humiliate prisoners (or to hold people for extended periods without detailing specific charges). Yet there is small group of people in the Muslim community that is so incensed by the evils of the West that they think terrorism is somewhere between understandable and laudable. And there is a small group of people in the West, which unfortunately seems to include some of the Bush administration, that thinks that "fundementalists" are so evil that it's okay to chain 'em up and treat them despicably. It's like a mental fault in these little cabals, each of which feeds off its mirror on the other side. How do we tell them both that they are stoking the evil that they revile?
Back at the cabin we're all lumpy and itchy with mozzy bites. I've stopped worrying about them, and I think everyone else has, too. I stopped using the mozzy-repellent quite a while ago, not so much because it is, in fact, repellent but because I suspect that it's counterproductive. I notice that I seem to get more bites when I wear it than when I don't, which jives with what I read about the surprisingly rapid nature of natural adaption in The Beak of the Finch. As well as the mosquitos we have a rich wealth of other insects. Walking along the lane here you routinely see flies that would take a proud place in any fisherman's collection. They're large enough to be attractive: looking out of the window the other day I momentarily thought I saw a humming bird, but quickly realised it must be a beetle, which it was (though even after figuring this out I still thought it looked like a humming bird).
The weather remains very changeable. We were driving along the other day in bright sunshine when a local storm warning came on the radio, pretty much identifying just where we were and warning of hailstones the size of nickels. In the time it took for the warning to air the temperature dropped by 10 degrees. Metereologically, it's not so much New England as Hyper-England. And last night we had an electrical storm pass right overhead. The thunder rumbled through the cabin, the rain drummed on the walls and windows, and the lightning backlit razor-sharp silhouettes of the trees.
Given this unpredictability we were unsure whether or not to have a walk yesterday but decided that we'd chance a hike up the highest hill on Bar Harbour, which is about a 4.5 mile round trip. It's called Cadillac Mountain. The Mountain part is questionable, since it reaches an altitude of only about 1,500 feet; they ascribe the Cadillac name to a French explorer but it could equally come from the car park at the top and the traffic that you hear trundling up and down to it as you make the trail. It was a great walk, especially for the kids as there was plenty of light scrambling and the mixed woodland prevented you seeing discouragingly far ahead. As in the much longer trails in Corsica, the walks on Bar Harbour are very well signed with painted flashes and cairns. I like this system, though it initially jars for anyone like me whose formative walking experiences were with the scouts, with a very strong emphasis on orienteering skills. One of my favourite exercises from that time was when we'd be taken blindfold in groups and booted out the back of a minivan with a map and a compass: the winning group was the one that made it back to camp first. I'd still enjoy that now, if I could be bothered to travel to an English region sufficiently remote to make it interesting. But there's a different pleasure in being on a walk where you just follow the paint splashes - or ballises as they're called in Corsica - and it's certainly preferable when getting lost would impact the girls, too.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the summit of Cadillac Mountain is marked with a gift shop. I don't mind that: I'm relaxed now.
On the way home we had another local radio treat, this time an hour-long interview with Iggy Pop. Don't know if he's on your IPod but when I was young and saw a lot of live music he was one of my favourites. I saw him play a couple of times, the first when I was 14 at a seedy night club in an area of Birmingham that's since been flattened and improved (and it really is improved). Hearing him now on the radio in the middle of Maine was yet another little weirdness. (For any aficionados out there pretty much the whole show was about his time with The Stooges and they didn't mention the Bowie albums once.)
One of the reasons why this place seems so strange to me is because it's so unlike the USA I thought I knew well. The signallessness on our cell phones is one example - as I've said before, we have no reception for miles around. However, there are a couple of signal islands that we sometimes pass through (Ellsworth and Bangor airport) - but over the past couple of days even these have gone phone-blank. It's also the lack of expected services (for example, the nearest Apple store is in Manhattan). While Maine is much more populous than the African countries we visited where we could drive all day and not see a person or a house, it's still pretty quiet - for every two people living in Maine there are more than three incarcerated in a US penitentiary. (The US locks up a far higher percentage of its citizens than any other nation.)
Finally, I should make my last mention of loons, since I forgot to say (in the context of "laugh like a loon") that they really do make a loud and strange noise: my mother, very understandably, wondered if it was a coyote when she first heard one. We hear them by day and by night and Heidi has seen one walking up by the cabin. "Laugh" is a credible slant on their call. I don't have a great photo yet, but to be done with them I'll give you what I have:
Ian
There were lots of troops, male and female, kicking around the airport looking leaderless and lost, hanging around outside in knots for a smoke. They now wear that uniform that looks like mufty - powder blue pyjamas with yellow Timberland-style books. The guys from the Parachute regiment of the Foreign Legion who we saw so many of strutting around the streets of Corsica have a uniform that ought to look sillier (funny white hat, Christmas cracker parachute-picture badge etc) but somehow they seemed smarter and fitter and more purposeful and, well, more soldierly. These US troops aren't helped by the fact that many people will now associate them with the disgraceful Geneva-convention-violators at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. For many of us outside the States these were among the first troops we saw (when they appeared on TV and in the papers) kitted out in the new pyjama strip. I feel sorry for the troops like those at the airport and hope that they don't feel any of the softness, vague guilt or absurdity that I see in them; it's not their fault.
On the drive back to the cabin I tuned in to a Handel harpsichord concerto. When it was over the BBC World Service came on, which was a happy slice of luck. There was a report from Thailand that the government has made an anti-retroviral cocktail available for people infected with HIV for only 70 cents per treatment. This is great. Since 23 of the 24 countries with the highest HIV infection are in Africa (Haiti being the odd one out) you have to wonder why nothing like this has been forthcoming from there - Cambodia will have it before Africa! It supports Paul Theroux's miserable view of Africa as the basket-case continent, whose utter hopelessness springs from the torpor of its citizens, compounded by the misguided and self-serving aid industry, which only serves to erode whatever self-reliance its people have. There were two news stories from Africa on the World Service. The first reported a skirmish on the border of Ethiopia in which numerous people were brutally massacred in a raid for goats and cattle. The second reported on the complete internal collapse of Somalia. I hope that Theroux is wrong (though his analysis of the aid industry sounds convincing) and that there more optimistic prognoses for more places in Africa.
The majority of coverage on the World Service was given over to the aftermath of the London bombings. Dreadful as it was, I was very heartened to hear how many ordinary Muslim voices featured in the report, and how genuinely out of sympathy they were with indiscriminate civilian murders. Rationally, you know that most Muslims in the UK feel this way, but it doesn't hurt to hear them saying it on the radio. It's the same with the uniformed criminals of Guantanamo. I know a lot of Americans and I know that they are as appalled by these horrible crimes as most people elsewhere. But if you took your view directly from the media - and the reaction from the administration and the Pentagon - you'd have to think that they just don't care enough. There is an irony here. Most people from all communities in the countries affected feel that it's really bad to bomb tube trains and that it's really bad to humiliate prisoners (or to hold people for extended periods without detailing specific charges). Yet there is small group of people in the Muslim community that is so incensed by the evils of the West that they think terrorism is somewhere between understandable and laudable. And there is a small group of people in the West, which unfortunately seems to include some of the Bush administration, that thinks that "fundementalists" are so evil that it's okay to chain 'em up and treat them despicably. It's like a mental fault in these little cabals, each of which feeds off its mirror on the other side. How do we tell them both that they are stoking the evil that they revile?
Back at the cabin we're all lumpy and itchy with mozzy bites. I've stopped worrying about them, and I think everyone else has, too. I stopped using the mozzy-repellent quite a while ago, not so much because it is, in fact, repellent but because I suspect that it's counterproductive. I notice that I seem to get more bites when I wear it than when I don't, which jives with what I read about the surprisingly rapid nature of natural adaption in The Beak of the Finch. As well as the mosquitos we have a rich wealth of other insects. Walking along the lane here you routinely see flies that would take a proud place in any fisherman's collection. They're large enough to be attractive: looking out of the window the other day I momentarily thought I saw a humming bird, but quickly realised it must be a beetle, which it was (though even after figuring this out I still thought it looked like a humming bird).
The weather remains very changeable. We were driving along the other day in bright sunshine when a local storm warning came on the radio, pretty much identifying just where we were and warning of hailstones the size of nickels. In the time it took for the warning to air the temperature dropped by 10 degrees. Metereologically, it's not so much New England as Hyper-England. And last night we had an electrical storm pass right overhead. The thunder rumbled through the cabin, the rain drummed on the walls and windows, and the lightning backlit razor-sharp silhouettes of the trees.
Given this unpredictability we were unsure whether or not to have a walk yesterday but decided that we'd chance a hike up the highest hill on Bar Harbour, which is about a 4.5 mile round trip. It's called Cadillac Mountain. The Mountain part is questionable, since it reaches an altitude of only about 1,500 feet; they ascribe the Cadillac name to a French explorer but it could equally come from the car park at the top and the traffic that you hear trundling up and down to it as you make the trail. It was a great walk, especially for the kids as there was plenty of light scrambling and the mixed woodland prevented you seeing discouragingly far ahead. As in the much longer trails in Corsica, the walks on Bar Harbour are very well signed with painted flashes and cairns. I like this system, though it initially jars for anyone like me whose formative walking experiences were with the scouts, with a very strong emphasis on orienteering skills. One of my favourite exercises from that time was when we'd be taken blindfold in groups and booted out the back of a minivan with a map and a compass: the winning group was the one that made it back to camp first. I'd still enjoy that now, if I could be bothered to travel to an English region sufficiently remote to make it interesting. But there's a different pleasure in being on a walk where you just follow the paint splashes - or ballises as they're called in Corsica - and it's certainly preferable when getting lost would impact the girls, too.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the summit of Cadillac Mountain is marked with a gift shop. I don't mind that: I'm relaxed now.
On the way home we had another local radio treat, this time an hour-long interview with Iggy Pop. Don't know if he's on your IPod but when I was young and saw a lot of live music he was one of my favourites. I saw him play a couple of times, the first when I was 14 at a seedy night club in an area of Birmingham that's since been flattened and improved (and it really is improved). Hearing him now on the radio in the middle of Maine was yet another little weirdness. (For any aficionados out there pretty much the whole show was about his time with The Stooges and they didn't mention the Bowie albums once.)
One of the reasons why this place seems so strange to me is because it's so unlike the USA I thought I knew well. The signallessness on our cell phones is one example - as I've said before, we have no reception for miles around. However, there are a couple of signal islands that we sometimes pass through (Ellsworth and Bangor airport) - but over the past couple of days even these have gone phone-blank. It's also the lack of expected services (for example, the nearest Apple store is in Manhattan). While Maine is much more populous than the African countries we visited where we could drive all day and not see a person or a house, it's still pretty quiet - for every two people living in Maine there are more than three incarcerated in a US penitentiary. (The US locks up a far higher percentage of its citizens than any other nation.)
Finally, I should make my last mention of loons, since I forgot to say (in the context of "laugh like a loon") that they really do make a loud and strange noise: my mother, very understandably, wondered if it was a coyote when she first heard one. We hear them by day and by night and Heidi has seen one walking up by the cabin. "Laugh" is a credible slant on their call. I don't have a great photo yet, but to be done with them I'll give you what I have:
Ian
Posted: Fri - July 15, 2005 at 11:43 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM