Blue Back

I went to Europe for a month and lost a lot of words and sentences, but they are coming back … slowly.  I saw lots of blues, the Limmat in Zürich; the Zürichsee, Lake Zug, Lake Luzern, Lake Lugano, (it should be pointed out that Switzerland is the ‘ursprung’ of blue in Europe – the Rhine, Rhone, Aare, Inn, and Ticino all originate in Swiss mountains before descending all over Europe); the Mediterranean (Adriatic and Ligurian), the ‘Gulfi di Poeti’,  and finally, in Germany, the Leine.  In Venice, the blue was more of a sludgy green, littered with flotsam, but in Liguria, the sea was shockingly bright and blue, as if made for postcards and bathing.  I did not, like Byron, swim across the Gulf of La Spezia, but I wish I had.  

Incidentally, Shelley drowned in the Ligurian Sea, just after seeing his Doppelgänger, and just before his 30th birthday in a boat he had or had not named in honor of Byron – a gem from Wikipedia on the competition of poets: 

On 8 July 1822, less than a month before his 30th birthday, Shelley drowned in a sudden storm while sailing back from Livorno to Lerici in his schooner, Don Juan. Shelley claimed to have met his Doppelgänger, foreboding his own death. He was returning from having set up The Liberal with the newly arrived Leigh Hunt. The name “Don Juan”, a compliment to Byron, was chosen by Edward John Trelawny, a member of the Shelley-Byron Pisan circle. However, according to Mary Shelley’s testimony, Shelley changed it to “Ariel“. This annoyed Byron, who forced the painting of the words “Don Juan” on the mainsail. This offended the Shelleys, who felt that the boat was made to look much like a coal barge. The vessel, an open boat was custom-built in Genoa for Shelley. It did not capsize but sank; Mary Shelley declared in her “Note on Poems of 1822″ (1839) that the design had a defect and that the boat was never seaworthy. In fact the boat was seaworthy, the sinking was due to the storm and poor seamanship of the three on board.^[7]

Blime and Grice

The great blue was out in full force the other day, and I stopped to admire it.  Despite a February thaw, we still have white hills.  When the sun is out, and the sky is clear, you get the great blue, the light playing all over the water, and the sea gulls, moorings, and rocks gleam, transformed, discrete white points of terrific happiness.  In winter, if the sun is out, everything gleams: the white slopes and the bare white birches on the edge of the blue, the wet pavement, the beach, and roofs of cars. Even dog’s tails.  Okay, not dog’s tails, but if a dog were to run out of the ocean and whip water in an arc, as dogs do, the drops would gleam.

February has thus far been 10 degrees warmer than January, which is somewhat welcome, if only to greet the wind as ‘brisk’ instead of ‘death.’  But much of the snow no longer resembles snow, or anything frozen or white.  The plow piles on the sides of the road rise in scales of gray, blackest at the foot, gray in the middle, and gray-white at the top.  It makes you think about pollution.  Since Portland is a city of hills and brick sidewalks, all surfaces gush like creeks during the day, during the melt, and overnight, they freeze into thick rivers of ice, uneven swirls of solid sand, mud, soot, and trash that are impossible to traverse.  While it is strange to see the sidewalk again, and blades of soaked brown grass, these new elements, the polluted black snow, and the solidified city melt (which is a truly ugly color), need names.  I’ve come up with these, blime and grice, which also sound like comically evil cartoon characters.  Blime is the black rimed melting snow bank ; grice is the gray ice puddle that preserves the grit and trash in its slow-wash downhill, to see yet another day in the sun.

As the snow has melted, interesting things have risen out of the submerged depths: last week I saw an avocado on top of the sidewalk snow, several orange and banana peels, a toenail clipper, a yellow pencil, a January worth of dog poop, and many other things, unidentifiable.  The funny thing about Portland is that these these resurfaced weeks ago, and are still there, waiting for the trash fairy, or the new snow.   This is perhaps my one complaint about this city: for a small, tiny, compact place with public trash cans and a very regular trash service, Portland is the trashiest city I have ever seen.  I believe it has to do with the city service, which requires you to purchase special blue trash bags, and only those are picked up at the curb.  If the sea gulls don’t get there first….

Rime

rime: Middle English rim, from Old English hrīm; akin to Old Norse hrīm frost

Winter, the foreign season, arrived long ago and the slow cold has left me quiet, with little to say, winter has a way of stopping everything up, and as my feet travel in smaller circles so does the mind, staring mostly at the walls.  January is waist-deep in the cliché of winter, only the texture of the snow varies (flakes, grains, pebbles, sand, ice, wet) and the stuff people use to combat it – sand, salt, chemical pellets, shovels and plows and brooms.  The neighborhood establishments have a range of tolerance for the mess and the extent of snow-clearance is accordingly shaped: the fire department boasts the cleanest sidewalk, unsurprisingly, and some people shovel the storm through and others do no shoveling at all and go about in tall rubber boots or don’t go out at all until the bobcats and plows have run their course.  I have developed a sincere affection for the sidewalk plow, which builds the snow into evenly ribbed walls that reach high as the waist.  Also because I do not shovel our bit of sidewalk.  It has been deeply cold, and mysterious persons have laid the salt down so thick that the sidewalks have taken on a hoary, limed surface as if being preserved in their disappearance or beset by some gritty parasite, all moon surface under one’s boots.  I have become reacquainted with salt stains and my old leather hikers.

It is difficult to run here in winter, there’s always something slippery underfoot, and the East End is a treachery of hills and uneven ground.  Running indoors is warm but depressing.  While it will be nice to sweat again I can’t imagine there’s much poetic about the gym, which sits in a parking lot among banks of snow and looks out on other warehouses, un-built condominiums, the grocery store, and a rock gym.  What I hate about the gym is that there’s nowhere to stare, nothing to look at besides local tv and stationary machines and so you end up staring at the bodies, not wanting to brave any eye contact, you’re forced to stare and not-stare at the backs of knees, the weirdness of knees, and oddly shaped necks, blue-veined muscles, strangely white skin, sweaty shorts, stained backs, all manner of socks, and too much thigh.  The sound of rowing machines bores me. There’s awful music and people grunting, and piles of wet towels and other people’s hair in the showers.  The gym I have joined is painted purple and yellow and there are so many more machines than windows.  It is perfectly designed for madness.  

Mammals of the East End

mink

There are now but a handful of boats, working boats, moored off the East End Beach.  The boats have been steadily disappearing over the past few weeks, as fall turned into winter.  After living in California I had forgotten about the second half of fall, when the brilliance is gone — the leaves are brown and dry on the trees but the rains keep coming and the ground is waterlogged and muddy.  Almost everything in the fields and trees is a shade of brown or white, except for the fall fruits, winterberry, bittersweet, holly, crab apples, cherries and apples.  The fruit is red, and its color is defiant and bright against the canes and shrubs. The shades of brown are pretty in their own right, highlighted by yellow shrubs and white-blonde tallgrass.  But now it is cold enough, now the trees are exposed, the sun barely lights the water blue, the clouds are gray and permanent, and the wind off the bay is fierce and freezing.  I had also forgotten about winter, forgotten that your skin could freeze and that the pavement could feel so hard.  Around the way at the yacht club they pulled in the docks and stacked them in the yards and everything that was living on the underneath began to rot, mussels, barnacles, and seaweed, giving off a powerful stench of ripe sea.  I can’t yet describe the smell of the sea, but I believe you can smell the salt, or the brine, and fish, and the rotting docks smell so strongly of both it is nauseating.  If the weather warms up, you can smell this rot from up the hill, from Congress Street, and it is a huge deterrent to running by the harbor.  

So I run the other way, toward the back cove, I run past the beach along a granite wall and watch the gulls ride the silvery water of low tide.  This time of year it seems the light is always waning, and it takes hours for the sun to finally slide below the horizon.  This in-between light is elemental and sad but impressive, almost revelatory.  I am always expecting something great to come of it, especially when the sun drops and the clouds turn pink before the sky darkens, but nothing does. The other day I ran in the middle of the afternoon and met a small, long-bellied brown creature, who was loping towards me on the granite slabs.  He had very dark, shining fur and small ears.  I was the only person on the trail and stopped to stare at him in wonder.  Given my geographical displacement, at first glance I thought it was a baby sea otter, but I knew it wasn’t that, and it wasn’t a river otter either.  As I was staring – he stopped to let me – a guy rode up on his bike, and asked me what I was looking at, was it a rat.  ”A mink?” I said.  He got closer.  ”A weasel,” he said.  ”It’s a weasel.”  Unsure whether there was even a difference, I deferred to the local, and the weasel subsequently climbed down the granite wall to the water and disappeared between them while I continued.  I thought about this for weeks, without seeing the mammal again, and finally looked it up.  It’s a mink.

the Os have it

The strangest contest is finally over: Obama is the presidential authentic, the guy who is the part he looks; we can retire the word ‘fundamental’; America could go back to whatever it was doing before coverage crept into everything — my thoughts have been riddled with Os, my dreams with Jon Stewart, all of it incoherent but portentous — except that America is falling, has fallen, apart.   The news is now, officially, an inescapable let-down.  Aside from puppies and new cabinets and little girls, I suppose.  Who knew piracy would be a 21st century profession?  It’s hard to say what’s different about America now without treading in over-used words that don’t carry the emotion of the happening and don’t have any idea of what IT will be like, this new future.  I’ve never had the sense that science fiction or fantasy was entering into reality itself, I’ve never entertained the suspicion that my neighbor is actually a wizard, for example, or that my DNA was stolen from me at birth, or my cat might be speaking to my plants – instead, such fictions have always been a tool for escaping a boring reality, but if there ever was a time for counterfactual exploration, for wild fantasy, this might be it – the what if, of Mac not O, the great fork –  when will the future be such that we can never even imagine it not happening?

It’s all very strange, but it’s strange to think that the images will play for the rest of our lives – the quiet crowd, Oprah glowing, kids dancing, hands reaching, Jessie Jackson stunned, Grant Park leafy, perfect and magical – so many kinds of shock and happiness – and Obama steeling his way through a speech that must have been tough to deliver.  Or was it the easiest thing he’s done in two years?   

My emotions on this subject are even stranger – they range from a dull-eyed heaviness, a lack, an exhausted draining away of all that felt – to the feeling of having eaten too much cake too fast, the sweet mass lodged, the mild fear of tossing it, the need for water.  Will sweetness follow? 

I have these flights of fancy about the future, these never-before what ifs — I like to imagine a basketball court being installed at the White House.  I like to picture Obama taking a judo lesson from Putin.  I like to imagine Obama casually dropping ‘no doubts’ and ‘most defs’ in conversation with Sarkozy.  Obama making intelligence cool again and public affection look natural.  Obama leading our country.

how to look the part

“He looked presidential.”  I would give lots of money to understand what exactly one has to do to look presidential, or conversely, not look it.  Is it an impression formed in contrast, when one must be and one can’t be?  This descriptive is, recently, often stated by citizen voters on their choice of candidate or their impression of the debate performances.  Is the word presidential in “presidential debate” churning conveniently in our minds?  Is it that what the debate is for, a contest in appearing ‘like a president’?  Is it the darkened audience, the red and blue stages, that make a man look ready to lead?  What do we think a president should look like, and does having presidentiality amount to the same thing?  Can one look presidential before one holds the office?  Is there a point in office, after years of poor performance, that one loses the adjective?

If the debates are like job interviews, I’m pretty sure the only other profession in which this sort of judgment could work is modeling.  If people agree you look like a model, chances are you can probably become one, though there’s no convenient adjective to employ in comparison — uniquely and staggeringly pretty?

I believe the adjective is used by the confident, decided voter — it’s a self-reassurance, that’s my man, and boy, does he look, feel, walk, talk like a president to me.  But it’s just so funny …. I mean, if we talk about looks, there’s good reason Obama never wears shorts, even when playing ball — those legs, I bet, are decidedly un-presidential.  (Although, perhaps his length does increase our notice of McCain’s lack of length).  McCain’s fat, pink-striped tie at Belmont looked like something a former NFL player turned journalist would wear on Sportscenter — unpresidential.  Gov. Palin’s bedazzled flag-pin — decidedly not vice-presidential.  Sen. Biden’s teeth did not remind of us that great ur-president and his dental failures, George Washington (**!).  But I don’t feel like we get close enough to really see the rest.  Perhaps if the networks could zoom in more; let us know exactly what they are wearing and who made it.  I’m still miffed by what then, is the mark of the presidential, applied to these two: but I have a hunch it has something to do with the newly gray hairs Obama has acquired over the past two years, fuzzing around his temple, over his ears — the man now actually looks like he’s gained something.  And isn’t that the only hallmark of any president’s appearance, that they look noticeably older leaving the post than when they started? So much older, you’re often startled when early photos are shown?  They might just be the only people on TV who actually age, who wear it, who let us watch them weary, for better or worse.

**Washington and dental deficiency, from Wikipedia: 
Washington suffered from problems with his teeth throughout his life. He lost his first tooth when he was twenty-two and had only one left by the time he became President.^[74] According to John Adams, he lost them because he used them to crack Brazil nuts, although modern historians suggest it was probably the mercury oxide he was given to treat illnesses such as smallpox and malaria.^[74] He had several sets of false teeth made, four of them by a dentist named John Greenwood.^[74] Contrary to popular belief, none of the sets were made from wood. The set made when he became President was carved from hippopotamus and elephant ivory, held together with gold springs.^[74][75] The hippo ivory was used for the plate, into which real human teeth and also bits of horses and donkeys teeth were inserted.^[74] Dental problems left Washington in constant discomfort, for which he took laudanum, and this distress may be apparent in many of the portraits painted while he was still in office, including the one still used on the $1 bill.^[74]

limb log

On my run yesterday there was a ferocious wind.  I thought it would prevent the sailing school from learning to sail but I was wrong.  They were putting on their gear as I passed.  Brave.  

One of the nice things about proximity to the great blue is that many boats make their home in it.  If there is any wind at all, and sometimes there is none, it prefers to blow off shore in the afternoons, moving east to south east, so that as I run west, the boats point their bows accordingly, into the wind.  There’s a delightful symmetry in this, the bows white in the sun’s glare, their masts rising stick-straight, sails hidden away.  There are a few colored hulls.  Off the eastern launch, there are only small boats moored, a few fishing/lobster boats and small sailboats, and further on, by the Falmouth foreside and the old railroad truss that curves across the edge of the bay, there is one boat that might be called a small yacht, with high, tinted windows and a massive motor, I imagine.

Usually I run while the sailing school is out practicing, and I believe the local college team also sails from the same docks.  I have little sense of the sport but it seems to be practiced by sending your boat around the tightest possible triangle while people in a larger, stationary boat shout things at you and manipulate a blow horn.  I have been surprised at how these tiny boats can accelerate and lean and twist and look terribly doomed but do not, in the end, capsize.  The sails alone are something to watch, and the smallness of the boats, combined with their ability to wobble and cut and made all sorts of jerky half-moves without capsizing, makes the sport look like a precarious one, at best – only a few inches separate you and the water.  The invisibility of the keel makes a swamping look ever imminent.  The more amusing actions occur when they are ordered to all do the same thing at once, and a horn sounds, and a mess of twenty or so boats suddenly spins in a half circle or tacks, their sails tipping the other way.  At times the sails unfurl or flap, then catch wind again, or they slice towards each other, tips almost touching, like ducks settling on water.  I’ve learned not to fear for their safety, but they do generally conjure birds that cannot swim well.  Now that I’ve exhausted my nautical vocabulary…I should remark that yesterday, in the terrifying wind, I saw the leaves beginning to fall.  I saw a black and white setter trotting down the railroad tracks, his owner following on the trail.  I saw a tug boat pushing back a tanker from the pipeline pier, an implausible sight when you look at the vast difference between the two boats, like a smart car pushing a double-long tractor trailer … or something.  I saw a man with a beard down to his chest walking on the beach, and further on, two men, in green and yellow sail gear, played a game of bocce ball.

http://cascobayboaters.com/2008/10/15/the-great-blue-limb-log/

neighbors first

Area farmer makes jaded poster look cynical — I take it all back ; on Monday, our downstairs neighbor, who farms mussels in Casco Bay for a living, handed us a 3lb bag of fresh mussels, scrubbed and de-bearded and delicious.  He told us he was trying to distribute a massive surplus after harvesting was banned for about a week. Why?  We received torrents of rain 2 weekends ago, and the rain washes local chemicals and lovely pollutants into the Bay.  The shellfish need time to filter out the crap, and are brilliantly designed for it.  But if that doesn’t increase both 21st century disgust as well as your love of farmers, I’m not sure what will….

p.s. Happy farmers in the news : Vermonters here, and Mainers here (any idea why cheese-makers seem to be almost exclusively women?)

farm love

Are farmers better people, full of a common sense that stems only from regular contact with dirt?  Is producing food an inherently noble endeavor? I have recently noticed a trend: a slightly alarming 21st-century worship of farmers (read: organic lifestyles).  I have been a little slow to acknowledge this trend, and it seems obvious that the organic market is a big one ($$$$$), but I could do without the accompanying emotional swell of glowing and utopian displaced love which turns the farmer into just another product to be snatched up, purchased, and put in your pocket: he’s cute, he’s bearded, he wears canvas and soft plaids (yes, farmers are often confused with young men living in large cities such as Brooklyn, or San Francisco. you have to look under the fingernails).

I am living in Maine, a beautifully rural state chock full of small farms — it’s astounding, and I thought I just moved from the country’s agricultural mecca, northern California.  The high place food and farmers (and fishers) have here is evident in the number and quality of Portland’s restaurants, the vibrance of the farmer’s market, the success of several food producing non-profits, the number of fall harvest festivals, the popularity of fairs such as Common Ground, the size of the Whole Foods Grocery store (unbelievably enormous), and the rosy health on many an apple-red cheek of local inhabitants, locally fed and fattened. These are all beneficial developments both for growers and eaters, and I am not abstaining from the bounty.  Perhaps the attention to food/farmers makes me feel inferior.  Perhaps I simply resent the power of trends to control the behavior of people. (see: Ugg boots, still going strong).  Who would have thought that the word “local” could wield such power, so many sighs of contentment? 

The explanation I have been contemplating is this: as knowledge of what the future may hold in store for us increases, as the details of global warming and environmental pollution are spread and repeated, as more people make connections between the way we live and its effect on the earth’s health (as more people read Michael Pollan) — the fear of the 21st century grows, and this fear makes people turn away, it turns into an affection and nostalgia for the 19th century, when people could claim to have roots and many people were actually farmers.  In effect, a deep and desperate love of the farmer, circa 19th century.  We are all wishing the clock could move back, much further back.  And food is one thing we think we can easily control.

Sometimes I wonder if the energy being put into food, and loving food, and eating good food, and talking about food … is this the best way to combat the phobia?  Are we terrified of starving, or are we terrified of eating trans-fats?  Or do we just want to have something nice to talk about, and having something equally nice in our stomachs encourages a positive outlook?  Well, the ‘free’ market may be a total failure, but the apple haul this year was amazing!!!  I am a pretty poor psychologist.  But sometimes it seems as nonsensical as the Republican Party’s babble about ‘common sense values,’ those values that everyone is supposed to tout and live by, yet no one can define.  The conservative shorthand for earthiness, for I’m more real than you.

I suppose we cannot all be farmers; we cannot all be pure, authentic, home-loving people whose only desire is to lower childhood obesity rates and heart disease and diabetes and push back the many 21st-century plagues.  But we can love them.  I wonder wear I can buy an Amish hat …  

p.s. I did also want to have a post titled ‘arugula eaters unite’ because people should not be ashamed to eat lettuce, even certain, more highly-selected, richer kinds of lettuce.  But I didn’t want to admit that that’s what we’ve come to, resenting/shaming/decrying classes of lettuce.  What does one do, then, with mesclun, the bitter and curly-textured, multi-colored mix?  Is Alice Waters a farmer, or an elitist?

of birds, shored

For the past several days I have been failing to identify the small, rotund sandpipers that gather on the rocks near the shallow water at high tide, hopping in and out of the water in a patterned chaos, each doing its own hunting and pecking while the larger movement also appears orchestrated, led, and fore-thought. Unless they sport ridiculously long bills, all sandpipers look alike: they have whitish bellies and mottled brown backs, short bills, and black, yellow, or green-gray feet — the smallest species are called peeps, and the ones I have been eyeing are so puff-bellied they resemble baby chicks more than shorebirds.  I would like to run a finger against the downy feathers of that roundness, belly to chin.  Since they don’t make noise, the peeps are small enough to pass and not even notice, as I have probably been doing for weeks. The birds happen to collect in a corner of the Bay which is also the least attractive curve of the Eastern Prom running trail, which curls past the water treatment plant, which smells, along the plant’s concrete retention wall, which also smells, of freshly painted graffiti, and around the edge of the bay and under I-295, which pollutes the ears. There is also a baked bean plant just across the inlet that smells, but not offensively so.  In any case I was staring at the water to ignore the smells and noise and was happy to be distracted by this flock.  

When in flight, the birds are only visible against the blue water if their white undersides are flashing towards the viewer, almost like a reflective surface, the way metal glints in the sun.  When the birds curl away, exposing brown backs, the flock disappears like a mirage. This aerial dance of here, not-there, is enchanting.   

My bird book is of no help whatsoever in identifying this species –it only admits that the act of identifying sandpipers is fraught with peril, for not only do they all resemble one another, but they tend to hang out in mixed-species groups, so that semipalmated sandpipers fly around with western and least sandpipers.  For the novice, the act of consulting a bird book (mine is western birds, no less) is a sure way to fail.  I can only say which sandpiper it is most definitely not (not a godwit, not a willet, not a curlew and not a stint), yet the process of elimination can only go so far.  The book is also peppered with unhelpful pointers such as “nearly always seen running”.  This is just funny.  In any case, the bird is a small sandpiper, unless…it’s a plover.  Which it just might be.