Changes
26 - 28 July, Ian
On our way through Boston on our way here (almost
a month ago!) it seemed a shame to be leaving the city immediately and we
resolved to spend a little time there on our way back. So tomorrow morning
we're getting up early and driving down to Boston for the afternoon and evening
before heading out to Alaska on Sunday. Now we have chores: getting the girls
to finish their newsletters, packing and so forth. We also have admin issues
from home to deal with (our gardener quit, my tax guy seems to be losing
information, the car hire company is after us for data that we already sent them
and no longer have...). It's a beautiful day, though, and the lake is blue and
so clear that you can see fish underwater at some distance.
The canoe people, out of kindness I believe, still haven't collected the kayaks whose rental ran out on Wednesday, though it's unlikely that we'll have time to use them more now. On Tuesday we had our longest kayak ride, paddling all the way to the far end of the lake to the jumping-off rock that our neighbour told us about. It's like a 5 metre cube of granite sitting on top of the lake. Zoe and I canoed up to it, climbed up and jumped off, which was refreshing. I can see why people choose to spend the summer in a lake house.
On Wednesday we were back in Bar Harbour and I made my first clothes purchases since we've been away at the Patagonia shop (a t-shirt swap and a shirt upgrade, intending to keep to a one-for-one policy to avoid luggage bloat). For logistical reasons we fortunately decided after that to have a very early dinner at a restaurant looking out over the Bar Harbour green. We'd finished and requested the bill by 6:30 when the lights went out, not just in the restaurant but all across town. Many shops closed and people were milling around distractedly, with a sense that a storm seemed to be about to break. We drove off and had a round of crazy golf (which stayed open with pencil and paper replacing till receipts), and we finished before barely any rain had fallen, although we could hear the distant rumble of thunder as we played. On the drive home a storm warning came on the radio. These are so frequent and so urgent here that there is no subtlety to how they play them. A very loud modem-like tone sequence blithely interrupts normal programming (we were listening to a classical concert) and after about 10 seconds an automated voice reads the just-in "doppler" thunderstorm (or "thunnerstorm") warning. Then it cuts straight back to your show. This one wasn't centred on our area and our drive back was only moderately rainy. What was surprising was how far-reaching the power cut was. Everywhere was dark. I expected that Wal-Mart would have back-up power, but it was dark too, and I was sure that McDonald's, with rat-like survival qualities, would still be pumping out the poison. I was wrong. One lobster pound in Trenton Maine and one seedy-looking pizza-shack near Ellsworth were, judging from the full car lots by the still-bright lights, reaping the benefits of investment in an uninterrupted power supply but everywhere else was down. The only other place where we saw lights and action was a Mobil station with a forecourt full of cars and queues backed up down the road both ways. Paula, being prudent, was inclined to join them, but we didn't.
The power cut reached (at least) all the way back to our place, which is 30 miles from Bar Harbour. For us, no power also meant no cooking facilities and no water pumped into the kitchen or bathroom. Judging from the number of homes around the lake that were still running an extravagant amount of lighting, these power cuts must happen reasonably often. Paula pointed out that we've now had power cuts everywhere we've been (apart from southern Africa where we rarely had power to cut). We also get them at home from time to time. (Any of you know about installing your own back-up generator? I may look into it when we return.)
As night set in the storm broke overhead. Once more, we had lightning right over the lake and theatrically-loud thunder rattling the cabin. The sheer amount of lighting provided by the lightning was impressive, throwing trees and branches into crystal-sharp relief. I wish I could have recorded it satisfactorily somehow for a side-by-side contrast with the much softer Northern Lights. It continued after we turned in and we could all see the lightning through the bedroom windows until the storm moved away. After this strong rain continued for some while. The rain made a very comforting sound. It was multi-layered: there was a constant, soft, fast backdrop of the rain falling onto the lake and the canopy of high leaves. Underneath this were a number of slower discrete layers of the sound of the rain spilling over the guttering, or coursing out of the drain or running off the sills. They could use this instead of whale songs for massage music.
After the rain stopped the stillness of the night was contaminated by the sound of next door's generator, which apart from being intrinsically unpleasant served as a reminder that we still had no electricity or running water. Unable to sleep, I turned to my IPod for some feel-good music. What would you listen to? I kicked off with Duke Ellington's Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue from the live recording he did at Newport. This has a great sax solo by Paul Gonzales, who just goes on and on and on, getting cheered on by the crowd - it always gives me a lift. The power finally came back on at 6 a.m. - almost twelve hours after it went out.
Yesterday, somewhat sleep-deprived, we had half a day's rock climbing with a young guy called Victor, who was born in Poland (his surname is the Polish for button) but is now totally American. The setting was perfect: an outcrop right over the sea at a point we'd walked to previously along the Ocean Drive route. When we'd been here on our own Paula and I had been continually telling the girls not to go near the edge; now we were hopping around with barely a care. The climbs were excellent and were just the sort of pillars that I'd hoped we might do, though I'd imagined that we might begin with some confidence-building easier ones than we did. Everyone managed to complete at least one hard climb. Zoe did particularly well, getting to the top of all of them, some of which I found hard. There's actually a satisfying egalitarianism about climbing. Several times I'd be wondering how to progress with a climb, thinking that if I, at 6'2", was finding it a stretch (literally) it was amazing that the girls could do it; but balancing my ability to make long reaches the girls could more comfortably rest a higher percentage of their smaller feet on tiny ledges.
As well as climbing, the girls learned to belay each other, and Victor, like a good teacher, didn't do anything himself that we could do instead.
We ended with an abseil (or rappel) down towards the sea, followed by a challenging climb back up.
Guillemots, which look similar to puffins (both being auks) only without the colourful beaks, flitted over the sea all afternoon and a cormorant sunned itself lazily on a nearby rock.
Later we finished Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince. Compared to the weirdness of Maine, Hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry seems quite normal. For example, I have learnt how to get wifi connectivity in Ellsworth: you have to walk into the toy shop and out through an unsigned doorway at the back to a little unmarked room along a corridor, where a nice lady will sell you 10 hours of on-line time for $10. In Bar Harbour, you get online at a cafe called The Opera House, where the guy wears a Viking hat for no reason known to me, like Twin Peak's log-lady walking around clutching her log. On the subject of Vikings, I should mention that the area is full of old(er than me) guys driving around on Harley-style bikes. Unlike the Opera House Viking, the bikers don't sport helmets. In The Land of the Free they seem fickle and irrational regarding which particular freedoms the citizenry retains. While I know that some people feel strongly and differently, the ability to drive a motorbike with an unprotected head is not a precious one to me: as Steve (who has the actuarial facts) quipped, financial companies would merrily give away Harleys to 50 year olds signing up for their pensions. On the other hand, I would feel that my liberty was being meaningfully eroded if my government told me I could only protest in the street by standing in a government-designated off-camera "free speech zone". More mundanely, a couple of weeks ago a woman on the checkout at Hannaford told me in all seriousness that Zoe was not allowed to carry a bag of groceries that had a bottle of wine in it to the car. Weirder than wizardry.
We have all enjoyed the latest Harry Potter. People say, and it's true, that the actual writing may not be top quality literature. And other books more accurately capture the texture of human life. For example, our frustrations and difficulties really arise (if not from ourselves) from pettiness, incompetence and discourtesy rather than from the candid evil of a Voldemort. About a week ago I had an email from my boss telling me that his boss had just quit. These events, significant as they are in their way, don't sap the spirit as effectively as the inanity of mean small-talk woven into everyday intercourse. On the radio yesterday two jazz muso's were being critical of a saxophonist, saying that he makes noises in imitation of Coltrane without having the ability - or having done the studying - to be actually musical. This rang true as a metaphor for me: I've listened to too many such noises over the past year or so, pretending to knowledge that the noise-makers don't possess. Updike gets all of this much more sharply than J.K.Rowling. But whatever qualifications might be raised, the Harry Potter books are a real publishing landmark and the sequence of seven will, in my opinion, by a durable cultural artefact of our times. For me, they should really be called the Severus Snape books as he's the character I like most. I could be wrong of course, but I've never had any doubt that he'll end up being on the side of the angels. To me, he's a latter-day Phillp Marlowe, and whether he's ultimately good or bad he's at least colourful and interesting. I was banging on about this again yesterday when Paula had the brilliant idea that he may end up being the son of Dumbledore. While this will probably not be the actual case (but JKR could work round the obvious plot conflicts if she needed to) it has the right spirit for me, although it's maybe a bit too Biblical (and too Star Wars) to be perfect. And Alan Rickman does Snape so very well in the movies. If they can figure out how to make them quickly enough while keeping most of the cast constant, the movies will also be an unparalleled cultural phenomenon, potentially far stronger as an entire sequence than any one of them has so far been individually.
Well, this weekend we're onto new books (I'll probably keep my new Updike for later and interpolate a book I bought Paula about professional Scrabble players - I also have a promising novel given to me by Steve to read) and new places. After Boston, the journey to our place in Alaska is a bit of a drag: we have to route through Chicago, Seattle and Anchorage en route to Fairbanks. I probably wont post any Maine photo's on our homepage until the end of the Alaska segment, when I can do a US selection. Before then, this evening, we're having a double round of crazy golf at Pirate's Cove using the eight gold coins for free games that Pirate Jim gave us to thank us for our custom and wish us well.
Ian
The canoe people, out of kindness I believe, still haven't collected the kayaks whose rental ran out on Wednesday, though it's unlikely that we'll have time to use them more now. On Tuesday we had our longest kayak ride, paddling all the way to the far end of the lake to the jumping-off rock that our neighbour told us about. It's like a 5 metre cube of granite sitting on top of the lake. Zoe and I canoed up to it, climbed up and jumped off, which was refreshing. I can see why people choose to spend the summer in a lake house.
On Wednesday we were back in Bar Harbour and I made my first clothes purchases since we've been away at the Patagonia shop (a t-shirt swap and a shirt upgrade, intending to keep to a one-for-one policy to avoid luggage bloat). For logistical reasons we fortunately decided after that to have a very early dinner at a restaurant looking out over the Bar Harbour green. We'd finished and requested the bill by 6:30 when the lights went out, not just in the restaurant but all across town. Many shops closed and people were milling around distractedly, with a sense that a storm seemed to be about to break. We drove off and had a round of crazy golf (which stayed open with pencil and paper replacing till receipts), and we finished before barely any rain had fallen, although we could hear the distant rumble of thunder as we played. On the drive home a storm warning came on the radio. These are so frequent and so urgent here that there is no subtlety to how they play them. A very loud modem-like tone sequence blithely interrupts normal programming (we were listening to a classical concert) and after about 10 seconds an automated voice reads the just-in "doppler" thunderstorm (or "thunnerstorm") warning. Then it cuts straight back to your show. This one wasn't centred on our area and our drive back was only moderately rainy. What was surprising was how far-reaching the power cut was. Everywhere was dark. I expected that Wal-Mart would have back-up power, but it was dark too, and I was sure that McDonald's, with rat-like survival qualities, would still be pumping out the poison. I was wrong. One lobster pound in Trenton Maine and one seedy-looking pizza-shack near Ellsworth were, judging from the full car lots by the still-bright lights, reaping the benefits of investment in an uninterrupted power supply but everywhere else was down. The only other place where we saw lights and action was a Mobil station with a forecourt full of cars and queues backed up down the road both ways. Paula, being prudent, was inclined to join them, but we didn't.
The power cut reached (at least) all the way back to our place, which is 30 miles from Bar Harbour. For us, no power also meant no cooking facilities and no water pumped into the kitchen or bathroom. Judging from the number of homes around the lake that were still running an extravagant amount of lighting, these power cuts must happen reasonably often. Paula pointed out that we've now had power cuts everywhere we've been (apart from southern Africa where we rarely had power to cut). We also get them at home from time to time. (Any of you know about installing your own back-up generator? I may look into it when we return.)
As night set in the storm broke overhead. Once more, we had lightning right over the lake and theatrically-loud thunder rattling the cabin. The sheer amount of lighting provided by the lightning was impressive, throwing trees and branches into crystal-sharp relief. I wish I could have recorded it satisfactorily somehow for a side-by-side contrast with the much softer Northern Lights. It continued after we turned in and we could all see the lightning through the bedroom windows until the storm moved away. After this strong rain continued for some while. The rain made a very comforting sound. It was multi-layered: there was a constant, soft, fast backdrop of the rain falling onto the lake and the canopy of high leaves. Underneath this were a number of slower discrete layers of the sound of the rain spilling over the guttering, or coursing out of the drain or running off the sills. They could use this instead of whale songs for massage music.
After the rain stopped the stillness of the night was contaminated by the sound of next door's generator, which apart from being intrinsically unpleasant served as a reminder that we still had no electricity or running water. Unable to sleep, I turned to my IPod for some feel-good music. What would you listen to? I kicked off with Duke Ellington's Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue from the live recording he did at Newport. This has a great sax solo by Paul Gonzales, who just goes on and on and on, getting cheered on by the crowd - it always gives me a lift. The power finally came back on at 6 a.m. - almost twelve hours after it went out.
Yesterday, somewhat sleep-deprived, we had half a day's rock climbing with a young guy called Victor, who was born in Poland (his surname is the Polish for button) but is now totally American. The setting was perfect: an outcrop right over the sea at a point we'd walked to previously along the Ocean Drive route. When we'd been here on our own Paula and I had been continually telling the girls not to go near the edge; now we were hopping around with barely a care. The climbs were excellent and were just the sort of pillars that I'd hoped we might do, though I'd imagined that we might begin with some confidence-building easier ones than we did. Everyone managed to complete at least one hard climb. Zoe did particularly well, getting to the top of all of them, some of which I found hard. There's actually a satisfying egalitarianism about climbing. Several times I'd be wondering how to progress with a climb, thinking that if I, at 6'2", was finding it a stretch (literally) it was amazing that the girls could do it; but balancing my ability to make long reaches the girls could more comfortably rest a higher percentage of their smaller feet on tiny ledges.
As well as climbing, the girls learned to belay each other, and Victor, like a good teacher, didn't do anything himself that we could do instead.
We ended with an abseil (or rappel) down towards the sea, followed by a challenging climb back up.
Guillemots, which look similar to puffins (both being auks) only without the colourful beaks, flitted over the sea all afternoon and a cormorant sunned itself lazily on a nearby rock.
Later we finished Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince. Compared to the weirdness of Maine, Hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry seems quite normal. For example, I have learnt how to get wifi connectivity in Ellsworth: you have to walk into the toy shop and out through an unsigned doorway at the back to a little unmarked room along a corridor, where a nice lady will sell you 10 hours of on-line time for $10. In Bar Harbour, you get online at a cafe called The Opera House, where the guy wears a Viking hat for no reason known to me, like Twin Peak's log-lady walking around clutching her log. On the subject of Vikings, I should mention that the area is full of old(er than me) guys driving around on Harley-style bikes. Unlike the Opera House Viking, the bikers don't sport helmets. In The Land of the Free they seem fickle and irrational regarding which particular freedoms the citizenry retains. While I know that some people feel strongly and differently, the ability to drive a motorbike with an unprotected head is not a precious one to me: as Steve (who has the actuarial facts) quipped, financial companies would merrily give away Harleys to 50 year olds signing up for their pensions. On the other hand, I would feel that my liberty was being meaningfully eroded if my government told me I could only protest in the street by standing in a government-designated off-camera "free speech zone". More mundanely, a couple of weeks ago a woman on the checkout at Hannaford told me in all seriousness that Zoe was not allowed to carry a bag of groceries that had a bottle of wine in it to the car. Weirder than wizardry.
We have all enjoyed the latest Harry Potter. People say, and it's true, that the actual writing may not be top quality literature. And other books more accurately capture the texture of human life. For example, our frustrations and difficulties really arise (if not from ourselves) from pettiness, incompetence and discourtesy rather than from the candid evil of a Voldemort. About a week ago I had an email from my boss telling me that his boss had just quit. These events, significant as they are in their way, don't sap the spirit as effectively as the inanity of mean small-talk woven into everyday intercourse. On the radio yesterday two jazz muso's were being critical of a saxophonist, saying that he makes noises in imitation of Coltrane without having the ability - or having done the studying - to be actually musical. This rang true as a metaphor for me: I've listened to too many such noises over the past year or so, pretending to knowledge that the noise-makers don't possess. Updike gets all of this much more sharply than J.K.Rowling. But whatever qualifications might be raised, the Harry Potter books are a real publishing landmark and the sequence of seven will, in my opinion, by a durable cultural artefact of our times. For me, they should really be called the Severus Snape books as he's the character I like most. I could be wrong of course, but I've never had any doubt that he'll end up being on the side of the angels. To me, he's a latter-day Phillp Marlowe, and whether he's ultimately good or bad he's at least colourful and interesting. I was banging on about this again yesterday when Paula had the brilliant idea that he may end up being the son of Dumbledore. While this will probably not be the actual case (but JKR could work round the obvious plot conflicts if she needed to) it has the right spirit for me, although it's maybe a bit too Biblical (and too Star Wars) to be perfect. And Alan Rickman does Snape so very well in the movies. If they can figure out how to make them quickly enough while keeping most of the cast constant, the movies will also be an unparalleled cultural phenomenon, potentially far stronger as an entire sequence than any one of them has so far been individually.
Well, this weekend we're onto new books (I'll probably keep my new Updike for later and interpolate a book I bought Paula about professional Scrabble players - I also have a promising novel given to me by Steve to read) and new places. After Boston, the journey to our place in Alaska is a bit of a drag: we have to route through Chicago, Seattle and Anchorage en route to Fairbanks. I probably wont post any Maine photo's on our homepage until the end of the Alaska segment, when I can do a US selection. Before then, this evening, we're having a double round of crazy golf at Pirate's Cove using the eight gold coins for free games that Pirate Jim gave us to thank us for our custom and wish us well.
Ian
Posted: Fri - July 29, 2005 at 10:25 PM
Quick Links
Links
Archives
XML/RSS Feed
Calendar
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
Categories
Comments powered by
Statistics
Total entries in this blog:
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM