A Tale of Four Photographs

This is the tale of four photographs, none of which have any connection to the other. My blog, my rules.

1. This morning I made the 35 minute drive into Rockland to play golf for the first time in nearly a year. Now that I am staring directly down the gun barrel of retirement I have been thinking that I should probably rekindle my interest in golf since soon I will have plenty of time to devote to it. So, on a perfectly dreary morning filled with drizzle and fog, I played nine holes at Rockland Golf Club. I shot a 45 which came as no surprise, after all it had been a year, the conditions were poor, I was using rental clubs and could hardly see further than 100 yards because of the fog. What was surprising was the number of really nice shots I hit, none better than this one. The ninth hole is a 220 yard par 3. I hit a 3-wood that felt great but I immediately lost it in the thick fog. When I reached the green, there it was 12 feet beyond the flag stick. The ball mark was six feet from the hole. Of course I missed the putt, but it was a great way to finish the outing.

You might be wondering why on earth I chose such a rotten, miserable weather day to play golf. It’s quite simple. If I had woken up to clear, sunny skies, there’s no way I would have left the lake. When the weather turns nasty, thats the time to plan outings. I am aware that this makes us sound pathetic, being so attached to the lake that we won’t leave it until bad weather comes, but it’s just the way it is. We can’t help ourselves.

2. Pam was having lunch a couple days ago on our beautiful screened in porch. It should be pointed out that every single meal we have had in our two and half weeks here has been eaten on this porch, even…especially…when it’s raining. Anyhow, she noticed one of the seven or eight birdhouses had a small red squirrel crawling around it. By the time she reached for her phone to take a picture, the tree rat had slipped inside, turned around and was staring back at her. Look carefully and you will see him in the door. My first reaction to this was…is there anything worse than a religious squirrel? Since we do not know what denomination this particular church belongs to, I’m guessing it’s Presbyterian. If anyone or anything has a firm grasp on the notion of total depravity, its got to be squirrels.

3. Lest any of my Virginia peeps think that Maine is some backwoods wilderness without access to modern services, this photograph should disabuse you of such ideas. Yes, we have full access to the United States Postal Service here in Maine, and I might add that the post offices up here put ours to shame. Think about that ugly monstrosity at the corner of Pump and Patterson Avenue, for example. Now, feast your eyes on the post office for West Rockport, Maine. I’m thinking that all post offices should be log cabins

4. Finally, today is July 24th, and my wife is multi tasking like a boss out on the screen porch. One lap top is playing last night’s episode of the Bachelorette, the other displays the pattern of the cross-stitching project that she has been tirelessly working on since the day we arrived. Most astonishing is the fact that she is wearing a long sleeved jacket and her legs are wrapped in a blanket. Outside the rain is softly falling on the leaves of the trees around the porch, making the kind of sounds that people pay money to play through their cellphones at night so they can fall asleep. 

Last night we came across a camp for sale on a nearby lake. It has potential. We might run by and take a tour of the place later on. Its a good day for such things.

The Antidote To Crazy

It was a delicious 54 degrees down on the dock this morning at 5:35am. I was chilly in shorts and a t-shirt. There was a mist crawling across the surface of the water. This lake seems unaware of the chaos afoot in Washington, DC. It knows nothing of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and now Kamala Harris. It only knows that it’s time for the sun to rise over its calm waters. It’s time to show off its beauty once again. Quantabacook seems to have one job and one job only—to be the antidote for crazy.

Yesterday, Ron and Paula left for home, leaving Pam and I here for another two weeks. Eventually we too will have to reenter a world where the new Democratic nominee for President is a woman best known for her word salads, cackling laugh, and somehow making it to age 59 without knowing the tune to “The Wheels on the Bus”. But in 2024 the bar of qualifications for the highest office in the land has been sufficiently lowered to accommodate such inadequacy. Moreover, President Biden’s abdication suddenly leaves Donald Trump as the only old man in the race, perhaps the most shrewd thing Joe has ever done in his life. The only drama which remains is who Kamala will name as her VP. Being a Democrat, her choice will have to be put through the vigorous gauntlet of the box-checking identity politics her party is known for. Since she has the advantage of being a two-fer—both black and female—the early betting is that she will name a man to fill this most meaningless of jobs. But it can’t be just any man. After all, men have a long history is being…well, men, with their misogynistic attitudes and appetites. She will have to tread carefully with this, the first big life-changing decision of her public life. (Well, second if you include Willy Brown). As I survey the potential VP’s in the Democratic bullpen I see one clear standout, and if Kamala agrees with me, she just might win the White House.

Pete Buttigieg, Secretary of Transportation.

Pete brings an awful lot to the table. He’s a man. He’s young. He’s a veteran. He’s Harvard to JD Vance’s Yale. He’s ten times smarter than Kamala Harris. But best of all for the Democratic faithful—he’s gay. Imagine the unbridled joy on the convention floor in Chicago as the balloons rain down on these two young, attractive people, holding hands thrusted in the air, declaring the Age of Aquarius has indeed finally come. Meanwhile, over in MAGA world, fat and old Donald Trump and his Ivy League Hillbilly won’t have Crooked-Joe to kick around anymore. Could get very interesting by Election Day.

But, where does this leave someone like me? Many years ago I considered myself a small-government, communist-hating Republican. But neither of those two things exist anymore. Donald Trump’s takeover of the GOP has rendered it permanently radioactive for me. The Democratic Party has blown their potential opening where I am concerned by their lunatic left fringe and seeming deathwish-devotion to the existence of sixteen genders and all that goes with it. So, for me it’s no longer about the “issues” or anything as silly as “policy”. Nobody actually gets things done anyway. For me it’s about two things—basic competency, and human decency. Of the four people I theorize will be the candidates mentioned above, one stands out…Pete. If Pete Buttigieg were President, I wouldn’t have to worry about his intelligence. Have you ever heard him speak? The dude would never embarrass us with some rambling non sequitur, ignorant rant, or ear-piercing cackling laugh. Sure, he would be a devoted statist, government has all the answers guy like thousands of democrats before him, but honestly, who isn’t anymore?

So, my choices are between not voting at all and maybe, maybe pulling the lever for the ticket with Pete Buttigieg on it. 

But what if she passes over Pete for someone else? Suppose she goes all-female with somebody like Elizabeth Warren? What if she picks that slicked back pretty boy governor of California? Well, I’m out at that point.

Birthday Girl

Today is Pam’s birthday. I can hardly remember a time when we have been anywhere other than Maine to celebrate it and it’s just as well. I shopped for her presents in town yesterday. Hope she likes what I bought.

She started the day the way she always does up here, with her 7:30 kayak paddle…

She slips out of our little cove and disappears around the corner and doesn’t return until around 9 or so. What she does out there every morning is anyone’s guess. When I kayak its to fish. With Pam its more like she’s surveying her kingdom, checking up on the loons or something. When she gets back this morning there will be a pancake breakfast waiting for her courtesy of Ron and Paula. Then Paula will be taking her out for a shopping trip to the little red store in Lincolnville Center. Tonight we have a reservation outside at Fresh & Company. To honor her, God has presented us with the best weather day since we arrived four weeks ago. It was 60 degrees this morning at 6:00 and the high temperature today will be 80 with no humidity and light winds—finally—from the north!

I have known her since she was 10 years old, fell in love with this stunning blue-eyed beauty over 40 years ago when she looked like this. Can you blame me? But when you fall in love with someone you take a big risk, right? You fall in love with a person at a point in time, the person they are then. But, the risk you take is —what happens if the person they become ends up being horrible? After all, people don’t just stop growing and evolving as they age. Suppose the person you fall in love with evolves into a selfish, arrogant monster. I exaggerate but only a little. I mean, all of us are essentially under construction, a process that never truly ends. But in this regard I needn’t have worried. Pam is a better human being today than she was when I fell in love with her. I hope I am too, but that jury is still out.

So, the happiest of birthdays to this incredible human being!

A Meh Day

Today was one of the rare meh days here on Quantabacook. You wake up after a restless night of fitful sleep. It’s humid outside and a bit warm, almost sticky. Yes, I’m aware that practically everywhere else in America you have it much worse than we do, still the weather forecast was calling for upper 80’s with humidity. We have been spoiled by decidedly lower humidity as well as lower temperatures. Both Pam and I were out of sorts. We put very little thought into our adhoc plan to get some breakfast at Fraternity Village. After eggs and bacon we decided to drive into Camden to see if I could pick up some cheap fishing gear at Reny’s. No such luck. Instead, I found some ridiculously overpriced fishing gear at Maine Sport. Serves me right for hooking more limbs than fish of late. Anyway, as we were walking to the parking lot Pam says to me, “Let’s go to Camden Hills State Park and walk on the Shore Trail.”

It is one of our favorite and most beloved spots in the Mid-Coast area. In fact, a scene from my second novel, Saving Jack, takes place there. Like so many other spots around here it is filled with magic. We arrived at 11:00 and had the place literally to ourselves.

From the parking lot you enter into thick woods of towering pines. There is a stairway made from rocks and pine needles that you follow. In the distance you can hear the ocean and each step you take, the briny air from it becomes more dominant. Eventually through a break in the trees you see Penobscot Bay…

The first thing we noticed was the cooler temperatures the closer we got to the water. There was a great mixing and swirling of the winds above us, a fresh breeze from the direction of Mt. Battie with the powerful winds from the bay. Then we made our way down the great stone steps to the rocks below. They call the town of Camden, Where the Mountains Meet the Sea. The only other place where this happens on the Atlantic Ocean is in South America. It is quite a sight to see, especially when you’re having a meh day. 

I took the following picture once I had climbed down the rocks to the place where the waves were crashing. When I turned around I saw Pam sitting on a rock. The enormity of this place makes you feel so small…

Its hard to describe the sensation that comes over you the first time you break through those trees and see the sparkling blue waters of the bay, the massive rocks and the waves crashing against them when just a few minutes before you were walking through a forest. So, what was Pam looking at?

We sat down together on that rock. After a while I laid back and closed my eyes. After thirty minutes neither of us were ready to leave but we managed to get to our feet and head back to camp. On the way back through Camden we stopped to buy slices of Raspberry and Blueberry pie from the Camden Deli, then a bit further down the road, some sandwiches from the 207 Eats food truck.

So much for a meh day.

This Is Who We Are

We enjoyed a dinner of toasted tuna rolls and leftover side dishes from earlier in the week as the cool air from the lake whispered through the trees. It had been a very good day spent frolicking on the lake. Somebody suggested that we see if we can find the movie, On Golden Pond, that maybe it would be the perfect movie to watch after such a day. After dinner I took a shower, wondering how the old classic from 1982 would hold up after all these years. When I walked into the living room all fresh and clean shaven, Pam and Paula were huddled over their cell phones while the television screen in the corner screamed the headline about an assassination attempt on Former President Donald Trump. 

I watched the video, heard the sound of firecrackers and saw him reach for his ear then drop down behind the lectern. I watched the Secret Service storm the stage, eventually lift the man up, whisking him away to a black SUV. I saw him clinch his fist and yell at the crowd, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

And just like that…this national moment of chaos and despair just got immeasurably worse.

The photograph of Trump, face bloodied by a would-be assassin’s bullet, fist raised in defiance and anger, will become an icon. I am left with a profound sadness and memories of my parents. As a five year old child one of my very first memories of any kind was the ashen-faced reaction of Mom and Dad the day John F. Kennedy was killed. Then, almost twenty years later, I walked in the house and saw my father standing alone in front of our old black and white RCA Victor watching a breaking news report about Ronald Reagan being shot and whisked off to surgery at a nearby hospital. My dad had tears in his eyes. One a Democrat, the other a Republican, but both Presidents. Dad made a point to me about respecting the office over the man. I have never forgotten the scene, my Dad never having been much of a cryer.

We eventually settled down from all the news and watched the movie. It was transcendently beautiful. From the very first scene to watching the credits roll over the shimmering water, I was on the edge of remarkable emotion. Henry Fonda. Katherine Hepburn. A story about aging and family and a magical place that brings them together. It was a lot to process at the end of such a day.

Then, I was awakened by the morning sun filtering through the blinds. I glanced at the bedside clock…5:22. I got up, threw some clothes on and walked down to the lake. The sun had just risen…

I am at the point in my life where the sight of any politician on my tv screen makes me almost physically ill, none more so than Donald Trump. I have made my views on this man abundantly clear in this space over the past eight years. But, he was our President and very well may be again. Like my father before me, I respect the office he held, and hate seeing it diminished by violence. The only thing that feels different now is that nobody is shocked by this. Deep down, most people in America who have been paying attention expected this. I know I did. I wasn’t sure which one of them would get shot at, but I was sure one of them would before Election Day. The painful truth of the moment is—this is who we are now.

But, as Ernest Hemingway reminded us…the sun also rises. Today is a new day and the possibilities are endless. As I stood on the dock watching the sun peaking over the pines I said a prayer for my country.

Decisions, Decisions

Ok, some big decisions are going to need to be made today with regards to tomorrow, Saturday, July 13th, 2024. So far, the only thing that has been firmly established is the time for me to pickup our donut order at Ruckus Donuts in Rockland. That would be 7:30am. You read that right…this is a donut order, one that had to be placed on or before 7:30 this morning for pickup 24 hours later. This is a supply and demand phenomenon, this Ruckus Donuts outfit.

But, after our donuts there’s a universe of entertainment options available to us. All we have to do is prioritize them, do a cost/benefit analysis and make a command decision. Here are just a few of our options:

1. The North Atlantic Blues Festival in Rockland, Maine. This prestigious event will be headlined by Buckwheat Zydeco. I mean, how many chances are you gonna get to hear him??

2. The Moxie Festival at Beaver Park up in Lisbon, Maine. This event celebrates a truly horrible tasting soft drink indigenous to Maine…

Lest you dismiss this as not a viable option for our entertainment dollars, I probably should mention that there will be a…

3. Union Fair’s Maine Wild Blueberry Festival. How many times can I miss this?

4. Lincolnville’s Strawberry Festival and Parade. Last year we saw this parade and made the ghastly mistake of thinking we had time to head into Camden for breakfast first before attending the festival. Unfortunately, by the time we made it back to Lincolnville every single strawberry and every derivative dish featuring strawberries had been completely sold out.

5. Searsmont Library Book Fair and Sale. I love books, and Searsmont is our hometown of sorts here in Maine so shouldn’t charity begin at home?

Of course, as is nearly always the case, the weather forecast for tomorrow calls for gorgeous lake conditions. This just makes this decision all that much more difficult since it introduces a sixth viable option…

6. The “Lay around on floats on the lake all day soaking up the sun” Festival on Quantabacook Lake, or LAOFOTLADSUTS Day, as we like to call it. It features lazy white folks doing nothing productive while their dog swims in circles around them. Lunch will most likely come from Fraternity Village General store since none of the aforementioned white folks are industrious enough to actually make something.

So…what should we do? We are open to suggestions.

One-Eyed Jack

I have come to believe that historically cold and snowy places have a tendency to bake in a certain weirdness in the population. Take Maine for instance. This place is an icebox for five long months in the late fall and winter. Snow is everywhere, all the lakes freeze over, and after that the spring brings mud and lots of it. So what are a people to do when faced with this sort of dreariness? Well, for starters, they do stuff like this…

Meet One-Eyed Jack, an otherwise nondescript maple tree here at Fernwood Cottage. Someone—it would be presumptuous to assume its the owner of Fernwood—went to the trouble of adorning this tree a full twelve feet from the ground. The droopy eye, puckered lips and aristocratic nose suggest a level of sophistication. Did he/she start out with two eyes only to lose one during a particularly violent winter storm or was he born this way? It only adds to the mystery. It would be one thing if this was a one off. But in our years up here we have encountered these type of anomalies all over the Maine woods. There was one on a gravel path at Crawford Pond several years back who we fondly nicknamed Donald Trunk. You take enough hikes down random trails up here and you will meet all manner of decorated trees, weird stick men engaging in sword fights, the occasional display of gnomes decorated with outlandish beads and trinkets. It’s like a museum of oddities.

This guy here, One-Eyed Jack, is placed directly in the line of sight of whoever happens to be cooking dinner on the grill out on the back deck. At first it’s kinda cool, but after a while you start to think that he’s mocking you—“Look at this Virginian trying to cook steaks on the grill. He wouldn’t last ten minutes here in February. And how about that accent?! What a hick!” You can practically smell his attitude! 

But the snarky vibe that this guy gives off isn’t limited to dinner time. Yesterday I went for a kayak trip that was quite extensive…

 

It took over an hour and a half to paddle this 5.3 miles. As I was walking up the path to the cabin I passed One-Eyed Jack and could have sworn I heard him say…If you were a real Mainer you would have gone all the way around the lake. What a wuss!! It could have been my imagination, but honestly I wouldn’t put anything past him.