Sun's out
19 - 20 July, Ian
Around lunchtime on Tuesday the sun emerged, both
actually and metaphorically, from the clouds of recent days. I drove down to
the pretty town of Blue Hill (named for the colour of the surrounding fields
during the blueberry season) and rented a couple of kayaks. The woman at the
rental place was extremely helpful, both with the kayaks and with various
nuggets of useful local knowledge. One that I put to immediate use was the fact
that the local library offers free wifi. The library is in a red brick building
on the edge of town and is in every way the picture book image of how a
traditional library should be: locals, with a distribution slightly slanted to
the elderly, sat around in comfy chairs reading Dewey-labelled books, with those
who had come in pairs occasionally whispering self-consciously to each other. I
half expected to come across Miss Marple in a wing chair - and I'm sure that
this is where she would come if she needed to fire off a few email inquiries in
the course of a New England investigation. It was such civilised place to relax
into a sofa with my mac.
The kayak lady also gave me a strong recommendation for a restaurant in Ellsworth, where I made a reservation to dine this evening when Steve, Helen and family arrive. Ellsworth is our nearest town and its strip, which runs a couple of miles from the Drive Thru Dunkin Donuts to the Drive Thru McDonalds, erodes its charm as a destination in its own rights; however, the Main Street, which can be overshadowed by the strip, is actually very pleasant and if the restaurant turns out to be as good as the lady said it will be very useful to have the town rehab'ed.
The arrival of the kayaks that afternoon was a happy moment. I did quite a bit of canoeing in my youth - the terminology is ambigusous, especially going transatlantic, but if you're English you probably know that I mean the stuff you do in fibreglass kayaks with spray decks on rivers with rapids, or occasionally on the sea. The kayaks we have here are also fibreglass level-with-the-water boats, though with a big open central area, each with two seats rather than openings for a spray deck. They really open the lake up for us: we can scoot around for ages out there. At one end of the lake is a sand beach that we've paddled down to - the girls had already been there with my Mom and Neil. Mike from next door tells me that if we paddle out for a couple of hours in the other direction there's a large rock with iron ladder rungs set into the back that you can climb up and jump from into the lake. Yesterday when we were out there were a couple of sea planes taking off, circling round, banking steeply and landing on the lake, and I can hear them out there now as I write. Other people from the houses around the lake have an assortment of craft, with kayaks and small motor boats being the most popular. When we first went out there was a speedboat noisily trying to run implausibly close to the vertical, and there are also quite a few jet skis.
Despite all of this activity the lake seems like a secret that we were lucky to uncover. You could drive up and down the roads here with no clue that the lake exists: it's only when you turn off to the rough roads leading to the surrounding houses that you start to get glimpses of water through the trees. And all of the tourist books and newspapers for the region steer everyone to the popular attractions of Bar Harbour and Penobscot Bay. The people we've met here either live here all the time or spend the summer here or (like Mike next door, who usually lives about 20 minutes away) are visiting family. As a young child I have vague memories of swimming in a lake at Sutton Park - typically an attraction such as this in England would pull in people from at least 15 miles away, like us, and couldn't remain the silent secret of a few nearby householders.
Streaming your fingers in the lake from the side of the kayak, the water seems pleasantly cool and has a surprisingly strong current. Swimming in it, though, it seems even more surprisingly warm and tranquil. Around the margins of the lake the bed is sandy, with exotic vegetation and fish and plenty of freshwater mussels. A few metres away from the shore the lake quickly becomes black deep. Having the kayaks, which we've rented for a just over a week with an option to keep to the end of the month, makes us feel much more like staying in all day. Paula wants to have a home by a lake now, though as a recreational retreat rather than as a swap for Hill Farm House.
Yesterday morning we got up early and (leaving the kayaks behind) Zoe, Heidi and I went to a session run by the Park Rangers at Sand Beach in Acadia. "Sand Beach" can afford to be so prosaically named as it is the only sandy beach on Mount Desert Island. At the start of the session I was one arrsome away from leaving: while a seemingly inane ranger had kids acting out the Sun, the Moon and the Earth to explain the tides and another kid covered in a blue sheet with a hole in it to explain rock pools (or tide pools as they're known here), Zoe stared sulkily into the distance and Heidi occupied herself with pooring sand over her legs. Fortunately, we soon split into a couple of smaller groups and had a Ranger upgrade, and the main part of the session, which was spent examining sea creatures that they'd found and stored in ice boxes, was fun and interesting. I learnt some stuff, much of which will probably feature in the girls' newsletters. One fact that I'll set down here to be going on with is that geologists specialising in the topic can identify a particular beach from a sand sample, which I guess isn't too surprising but I'd never thought of. The second and last new-to-me fact that I'll mention is that sea stars (as, like the French, we're now supposed to call star fish) eat mussels by wrapping their legs around them, pulling them open and dropping their stomach inside to digest in situ. Mind you, I could do with learning some sea-life facts. I may know that a lobster is an arthropod but earlier this month, in response to a question from Heidi, I had to consult a children's reference book in a bookstore to check whether or not a seal is a mammal (it is).
Out of the sea we have had a gently interesting month animal-wise. There are red squirrels and chipmunks all around, frequent frogs, and I saw a garter snake on my run the other day. Bird-wise, we have the American robins (about the size of a thrush with a rust-coloured breast) and yesterday we had a woodpecker hammering at a tree next to the cabin. We haven't gone to any of the moose spotting points, and I'm happy enough to have instead enjoyed the wonderful loons: I know I said that I wouldn't mention them again but they're really cool. In the kayaks we came right up on one with a chick; and I have to tell you that they can apparently dive down to 200 feet). Here's a frog:
Local radio continues to be a treat. As well as the music the (domestic) news reports are excellent. Don't know how much coverage it's getting at home but while Karl Rove ("Bush's brain") is getting grilled on his probably-illegal spinning to the press (he apparently outed a live CIA operative to a journalist, claiming that he didn't name her but only said whom she was married to), Bush has nominated a new supreme court judge - John Roberts - to replace Sandra Day O'Connor. It's really impressive how open the whole process is here, getting as much attention as our press would give to a senior Cabinet appointment. Do you know who the senior members of our judiciary are, and how and by whom they were appointed? Betya don't! Naturally, Bush has nominated a conservative and he's going to get given a thorough going over by the Senate and the media. Less loftily, perhaps, pressure groups on both sides will be spending millions of $$ to get their points of view aired - but they can afford it. Pro-choice lobbyists oppose the nomination because Roberts once opined that the Constitution does not guarantee the right to have an abortion and suggested that the case (Roe Vs Wade) that established such a right might be reviewed. Now though, he has said that he's accepted this as case law and will seek to implement the law, including established case law, such as it is. I'm no expert but this seems to be a sensible nomination by Bush. No one doubts that Roberts has the ability to do the job, and history shows that it is notoriously tricky for a President to appoint a judge who will support a political agenda (both because judges turn out to have their own minds and because no one knows what the big issues will turn out to be when choosing a judge to take the right side of them). By selecting someone who is aiming to implement existing laws rather than shape new ones Bush might be giving himself the best realistic defence against the judiciary.
One feature of the debate that I've enjoyed is how both sides agree that making a "consensus" appointment is important, even if they disagree whether Roberts is one: in the UK we are more adversarial in our bones.
One area where central government is having a few struggles here is in minting coins. As some of you know, I collect the State quarters and have acquired three more this month. These are a special, though common, edition of the 25 cent piece each of which commemorates one of the 50 States, with a distinctive picture on the obverse. A new one is being rolled out every few months (in the order of succession to the Union) in a program stretching on for the next few years. I even have one of the standard-issue gatefold board maps for mounting them in. (In the course of this collecting I also picked up a quarter from the year of my birth, which I've held in my wallet as a happy talisman for about a year.) It turns out that these quarters have been the subject of some controversy. For example, the citizens of Missouri grumble that the depiction of their Gateway Arch looks more like a partial view of a MacDonald's sign; the Kansas quarter features a buffalo which originally had its horns pointing in the (anatomically) wrong direction, though this was corrected before mass minting began; and the Maine coins were initially stamped with the wrong sort of schooner (2 masts instead of 3), which was again corrected. I dare say these early incorrect drafts will be amongst the first numismatic must-haves of the century.
I'm approaching the end of Dark Star Safari and Theroux has grumpily allowed himself to be persuaded to spend a couple of days at a park to see wildlife. By his own admission he's barely seen any of the continent's magnificent fauna and it's evidently not an area either of interest or expertise (he even mis-defines the Big Five). When he does get to the reservation he's surprised to discover that things have moved on since Hemmingway (whose accounts form Theroux's expectations) and that it's not the norm to shoot the large animals any more. Grudgingly, he's impressed. Not the finest part of the book but good to see that he spent a couple of days of his amazing journey this way.
Quite often on our trip there's something that we're looking forward to in the next place. When we were camping we looked forward to a proper bed and a shower. When we then had these we looking forward to getting back into the tents. I had my first "looking forward to" moment here the other day; nothing much: just a shower that doesn't smell of lake water.
The kayak lady also gave me a strong recommendation for a restaurant in Ellsworth, where I made a reservation to dine this evening when Steve, Helen and family arrive. Ellsworth is our nearest town and its strip, which runs a couple of miles from the Drive Thru Dunkin Donuts to the Drive Thru McDonalds, erodes its charm as a destination in its own rights; however, the Main Street, which can be overshadowed by the strip, is actually very pleasant and if the restaurant turns out to be as good as the lady said it will be very useful to have the town rehab'ed.
The arrival of the kayaks that afternoon was a happy moment. I did quite a bit of canoeing in my youth - the terminology is ambigusous, especially going transatlantic, but if you're English you probably know that I mean the stuff you do in fibreglass kayaks with spray decks on rivers with rapids, or occasionally on the sea. The kayaks we have here are also fibreglass level-with-the-water boats, though with a big open central area, each with two seats rather than openings for a spray deck. They really open the lake up for us: we can scoot around for ages out there. At one end of the lake is a sand beach that we've paddled down to - the girls had already been there with my Mom and Neil. Mike from next door tells me that if we paddle out for a couple of hours in the other direction there's a large rock with iron ladder rungs set into the back that you can climb up and jump from into the lake. Yesterday when we were out there were a couple of sea planes taking off, circling round, banking steeply and landing on the lake, and I can hear them out there now as I write. Other people from the houses around the lake have an assortment of craft, with kayaks and small motor boats being the most popular. When we first went out there was a speedboat noisily trying to run implausibly close to the vertical, and there are also quite a few jet skis.
Despite all of this activity the lake seems like a secret that we were lucky to uncover. You could drive up and down the roads here with no clue that the lake exists: it's only when you turn off to the rough roads leading to the surrounding houses that you start to get glimpses of water through the trees. And all of the tourist books and newspapers for the region steer everyone to the popular attractions of Bar Harbour and Penobscot Bay. The people we've met here either live here all the time or spend the summer here or (like Mike next door, who usually lives about 20 minutes away) are visiting family. As a young child I have vague memories of swimming in a lake at Sutton Park - typically an attraction such as this in England would pull in people from at least 15 miles away, like us, and couldn't remain the silent secret of a few nearby householders.
Streaming your fingers in the lake from the side of the kayak, the water seems pleasantly cool and has a surprisingly strong current. Swimming in it, though, it seems even more surprisingly warm and tranquil. Around the margins of the lake the bed is sandy, with exotic vegetation and fish and plenty of freshwater mussels. A few metres away from the shore the lake quickly becomes black deep. Having the kayaks, which we've rented for a just over a week with an option to keep to the end of the month, makes us feel much more like staying in all day. Paula wants to have a home by a lake now, though as a recreational retreat rather than as a swap for Hill Farm House.
Yesterday morning we got up early and (leaving the kayaks behind) Zoe, Heidi and I went to a session run by the Park Rangers at Sand Beach in Acadia. "Sand Beach" can afford to be so prosaically named as it is the only sandy beach on Mount Desert Island. At the start of the session I was one arrsome away from leaving: while a seemingly inane ranger had kids acting out the Sun, the Moon and the Earth to explain the tides and another kid covered in a blue sheet with a hole in it to explain rock pools (or tide pools as they're known here), Zoe stared sulkily into the distance and Heidi occupied herself with pooring sand over her legs. Fortunately, we soon split into a couple of smaller groups and had a Ranger upgrade, and the main part of the session, which was spent examining sea creatures that they'd found and stored in ice boxes, was fun and interesting. I learnt some stuff, much of which will probably feature in the girls' newsletters. One fact that I'll set down here to be going on with is that geologists specialising in the topic can identify a particular beach from a sand sample, which I guess isn't too surprising but I'd never thought of. The second and last new-to-me fact that I'll mention is that sea stars (as, like the French, we're now supposed to call star fish) eat mussels by wrapping their legs around them, pulling them open and dropping their stomach inside to digest in situ. Mind you, I could do with learning some sea-life facts. I may know that a lobster is an arthropod but earlier this month, in response to a question from Heidi, I had to consult a children's reference book in a bookstore to check whether or not a seal is a mammal (it is).
Out of the sea we have had a gently interesting month animal-wise. There are red squirrels and chipmunks all around, frequent frogs, and I saw a garter snake on my run the other day. Bird-wise, we have the American robins (about the size of a thrush with a rust-coloured breast) and yesterday we had a woodpecker hammering at a tree next to the cabin. We haven't gone to any of the moose spotting points, and I'm happy enough to have instead enjoyed the wonderful loons: I know I said that I wouldn't mention them again but they're really cool. In the kayaks we came right up on one with a chick; and I have to tell you that they can apparently dive down to 200 feet). Here's a frog:
Local radio continues to be a treat. As well as the music the (domestic) news reports are excellent. Don't know how much coverage it's getting at home but while Karl Rove ("Bush's brain") is getting grilled on his probably-illegal spinning to the press (he apparently outed a live CIA operative to a journalist, claiming that he didn't name her but only said whom she was married to), Bush has nominated a new supreme court judge - John Roberts - to replace Sandra Day O'Connor. It's really impressive how open the whole process is here, getting as much attention as our press would give to a senior Cabinet appointment. Do you know who the senior members of our judiciary are, and how and by whom they were appointed? Betya don't! Naturally, Bush has nominated a conservative and he's going to get given a thorough going over by the Senate and the media. Less loftily, perhaps, pressure groups on both sides will be spending millions of $$ to get their points of view aired - but they can afford it. Pro-choice lobbyists oppose the nomination because Roberts once opined that the Constitution does not guarantee the right to have an abortion and suggested that the case (Roe Vs Wade) that established such a right might be reviewed. Now though, he has said that he's accepted this as case law and will seek to implement the law, including established case law, such as it is. I'm no expert but this seems to be a sensible nomination by Bush. No one doubts that Roberts has the ability to do the job, and history shows that it is notoriously tricky for a President to appoint a judge who will support a political agenda (both because judges turn out to have their own minds and because no one knows what the big issues will turn out to be when choosing a judge to take the right side of them). By selecting someone who is aiming to implement existing laws rather than shape new ones Bush might be giving himself the best realistic defence against the judiciary.
One feature of the debate that I've enjoyed is how both sides agree that making a "consensus" appointment is important, even if they disagree whether Roberts is one: in the UK we are more adversarial in our bones.
One area where central government is having a few struggles here is in minting coins. As some of you know, I collect the State quarters and have acquired three more this month. These are a special, though common, edition of the 25 cent piece each of which commemorates one of the 50 States, with a distinctive picture on the obverse. A new one is being rolled out every few months (in the order of succession to the Union) in a program stretching on for the next few years. I even have one of the standard-issue gatefold board maps for mounting them in. (In the course of this collecting I also picked up a quarter from the year of my birth, which I've held in my wallet as a happy talisman for about a year.) It turns out that these quarters have been the subject of some controversy. For example, the citizens of Missouri grumble that the depiction of their Gateway Arch looks more like a partial view of a MacDonald's sign; the Kansas quarter features a buffalo which originally had its horns pointing in the (anatomically) wrong direction, though this was corrected before mass minting began; and the Maine coins were initially stamped with the wrong sort of schooner (2 masts instead of 3), which was again corrected. I dare say these early incorrect drafts will be amongst the first numismatic must-haves of the century.
I'm approaching the end of Dark Star Safari and Theroux has grumpily allowed himself to be persuaded to spend a couple of days at a park to see wildlife. By his own admission he's barely seen any of the continent's magnificent fauna and it's evidently not an area either of interest or expertise (he even mis-defines the Big Five). When he does get to the reservation he's surprised to discover that things have moved on since Hemmingway (whose accounts form Theroux's expectations) and that it's not the norm to shoot the large animals any more. Grudgingly, he's impressed. Not the finest part of the book but good to see that he spent a couple of days of his amazing journey this way.
Quite often on our trip there's something that we're looking forward to in the next place. When we were camping we looked forward to a proper bed and a shower. When we then had these we looking forward to getting back into the tents. I had my first "looking forward to" moment here the other day; nothing much: just a shower that doesn't smell of lake water.
Posted: Fri - July 22, 2005 at 12:24 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