Battening Down the Hatches

Normally, the last full day in Maine is divided into two parts, the part where you get as much last minute fun in as is humanly possible, and the part where you pack everything up and clean up the cabin. Tomorrow is that day. Only, we have been thrown a curveball by Mother Nature. Somewhere in the next couple of hours, we are due to be hit with a fall storm that will last all the way through until Saturday morning. The current forecast calls for up to 3 inches of rain and sustained 20 mph winds with gusts up to 45 mph. The possibility of power outages are also in the forecast. If you are thinking to yourself, “what a horrible way to end a vacation,” nothing could be further from the truth. Unless you have sat inside a warm and dry Maine cabin while watching a fierce rain storm pummel a lake, lashing it with sheets of water while white caps dance across the surface, you can’t possibly know how incredible cool it is to watch. Tomorrow will be amazing.

However, all is NOT well. Pam took her paddle board out this morning when the lake was still as glass. As she was passing a smaller cabin she noticed at least a dozen empty beer cans at the bottom of the lake at the end of their dock. Pam, of course, was mortified. This is Maine, for God’s sake. Why, in the name of all that is holy, would anyone throw empty beer cans into a beautiful lake when their trash can is literally ten steps away? It felt like a unspeakable violation of the laws of nature, some kind of unforgivable sin. It reminded me of the time we were at Loon Landing and one day when I went for a run I saw that some cretin had thrown at least 30 empty cans of BudLite into the woods on both side of Brierly Road. I ended up filling a tall kitchen bag with them, took a picture of my work and wrote a blog about what I considered an outrage. This seemed worse somehow, because they had been thrown in the water. If the water wasn’t 60 degrees, I would have done a dive, collected them all and deposited them on the moron’s front door. But…enough negativity.

Here are a few pics from the last couple of days…

My sister, the new retiree.

So very, very, Maine.

Camden’s town square awash in fallen leaves.

Living the high life…