Bay States

Bay Circuit Trail. Duxbury Doorway.

2011-10-23T15:12:00.017-05:00

Duxbury marks the spot where the southern end of the Bay Circuit Trail meets the sea. Humans began gathering here not long after the glacier receded and it was an early settlement reward for Pilgrims who had fulfilled their obligations to the initial collective that formed in Plymouth.

Myles Standish was among those who obtained this coveted real estate.

In our time, Duxbury has allocated substantial acreage for preservation with enthusiastic support. The Cushman Preserve and the Bay Farm are two tracts that begin at waters edge. Cow Tent Hill lies just a bit inland from Cushman.

The beach and littoral zones are defining facets of the place with all the glories and complications wild popularity brings.

Piping Plover (male) on nest at Duxbury Beach, MA from scott hecker on Vimeo.

Powder Point marks the bridge way to the long barrier strand that anchors the Gurnet.

The Bay Circuit Trail heads inland from waters edge at Bay Farm with two options, south toward Kingston and north toward Pembroke. Both meet in west Pembroke.

The northern option runs through Duxbury and meets a cranberry bog melange at the Duxbury Bogs , a 1971 gift from the Loring Family. The North Hill Sanctuary and related tracts lie to the Northeast. The trail then passes through the Lansing Bennett Forest tracts before it crosses to Pembroke.

The French Atlantic Cable landed in the town in 1869 making it an early communications hub. It was also the launch pad for a small ship building empire. Various maritime mercantilists cashed in over the years and made their way to greater glory in Boston.

Now the movement runs just as well back the other way with soaring options unimaginable to that long ago Mayflower wave.

Note For the Urban Carless. Kingston is handily on the Old Colony commuter rail line 2.3 miles Southwest of Bay Farm.

The Bay Circuit Trail: Ancient Framingham Crossroads.

2011-10-15T19:03:00.007-05:00

The Bay Circuit Trail enters north Framingham along the Sudbury edge near the height of land for the entire trail, Nobscot Hill. Garden in the Woods, lies a bit to the southeast.

A Walk through Garden in the Woods from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

The trailhead begins at Weissblatt Conservation Land and passes south through the Boy Scout Reservation and Wittenborg Woods. This part of the town is also home to a number of farms.

Callahan State Park is the next major area along the trail before it passes into Marlborough to follow the Sudbury Reservoir.

The Commonwealth's park system here and elsewhere is particularly well suited for mountain bikes...

... and dog walks.

I first encountered Rattlesnake Plantain in some corner of that park back in the 80s drawn by the silvery variegation lacing its leaves in the shadow dappled understory.

From there, the trail heads south to reenter Framingham briefly where it crosses the Sudbury River below the dam and then passes over Route 9 before turning toward Ashland.

One of the earliest trade trails sleeps beneath a section of route 9. The Old Connecticut Path indicated an area for confluence and exchange.

And now it is a rail junction of some complexity with Amtrack, Conrail and Commuter rail all converging.

Note For the Urban Carless. The Ashland stop is fairly close to the trail where it runs to the west of Framingham. It is a fairly vast area so plan on an entire day should you choose a commuter rail option.

Bay Circuit Trail: Ipswich Inroads.

2011-10-02T11:02:00.027-05:00

Cottages at Little Neck and Crane's Hill, Ipswich, MA; from a c. 1920 postcard.

Ipswich is home to a host of land conservation support efforts and has made substantial contributions to the Bay Circuit Trail within its boundaries with more work ongoing to meet the Atlantic at Crane Beach.

Walking to Crane Beach, Ipswich MA from Sarah Coyne on Vimeo.

Ipswich might be expressed as having several facets. The dunes and drumlin of the Crane Estate complex front and protect an intricate estuary world edged a with salt marsh fringe.

Beyond the shore lies a fabric of wetlands and uplands, farms and forests with a river at its core.

Among the organizations focused on this venerable place are the Ipswich River Watershed Association and the Essex County Trails Association. The town core has a history trail and an Essex County National Heritage Area center.

There is even a special Ipswich Bay Circuit Archive. The Essex County Greenbelt Association is located in nearby Essex and has a significant role in the ongoing acquisition and management of protected green spaces.

Willowdale is a superb place for basic bicycle touring as many of its trails are Bradley Palmer's old system of bridle paths.

Note For the Urban Carless. Ipswich is very well served by what may be one of the most scenic commuter rail lines with loop potential between Ipswich and Hamilton/Wenham.

Bay Circuit Trail: Moose Hill Convergence.

2011-09-25T10:09:00.003-05:00

Sharon, Massachusetts, along what I call the Southern Arc of the Bay Circuit Trail system is a counterpart activity hub to Andover. It has a number of protected lands including a cluster at Moose Hill consisting of the Massachusetts Audubon Society Sanctuary and Moose Hill Farm, owned by the Trustees of Reservations.

Moose Hill itself is also the height of land point for the southern arc and the swath of Southeastern Massachusetts rolling toward Providence.

Here is a handy summary.

"“A nice place to live because it’s naturally beautiful,” says a welcome sign in Post Office Square, and Sharon lives up to this motto. “Lake Massapoag--the treasure of Sharon for its fun, beauty, and peacefulness,” writes a student. “The Lake is about 400 acres of water. When the sun sets, beautiful, vibrant colors reflect off the Lake.” Lake Massapoag is known for its concerts, fireworks, fishing, and good swimming on Memorial Beach. From the 1800s until the 1940s, Sharon was a summer resort to which people would come to stay at inns and hotels to enjoy the clean air and the Lake. The Town proudly holds the 2,250-acre Massachusetts Audubon Moose Hill Wildlife Sanctuary, and has 60% of Borderland State Park comprising 1,260 acres within its borders, as well as the Warner, Massapoag Brook, and King Philip’s Rock nature trails. In addition, the Town has been successful in preserving an additional 1,500 acres of its area of 24 square miles as public conservation land, totaling more than 5,000 acres of protected open space in Sharon."

Rick Ripley (above) has prepared a valuable series for his public access cable show.

It has it's own grassroots community organization, Sharon Friends of Conservation with an impressive content mix that includes a great overview.

The unifying element here is an array of trails. The Warner Trail leads of to the south all the way to Cumberland, Rhode Island. It parts company with the Bay Circuit Trail to the southwest near the borders of Foxborough and Walpole.

The eastward leg of the Bay Circuit Trail dips south along Lake Massapoag to meet Easton at Borderland State Park.

(Image Courtesy of Boston Public Library Photo Collection.)

This intrepid crew caught the annual rites of toad mating at Borderland.

Note For the Urban Carless. The wonders of Sharon are yours to discover through the capacities of commuter rail.

Bay Circuit Trail: Andover Village Improvements.

2011-09-11T11:46:00.003-05:00

Courtesy of the Norman P. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library.

Andover is a microcosm of the entire Bay Circuit Trail System. It began to think about land preservation in 1894 when the Andover Village Improvement Society, (AVIS), was born. Since then, it has put 1100 acres under protection with a fairly comprehensive run of ecotones, glacial terrain traces and spots touched by the long history of the place.

And the spirit of volunteerism couldn't be more lively. Participation in the Bay Circuit system varies by town and Andover could be considered a hub if not the hub because the Bay Circuit Alliance has long had its home there and its Conservation Commission is comparably exemplary.

It even has an organization given to weaving all the protected jurisdiction strands into a handy mosaic, the Andover Trails Committee.

I identified five areas of the town to provide a sense of its relationship to the Bay Circuit Trail and the other features that have shaped it over time.

1. Bay Circuit East.
This part is defined by the highest point in the area, Holt Hill, in the Charles W. Ward Reservation. The other anchor is the venerable Harold Parker State Forest. Between these two lies a string of gems including the Skug River/Hammond Reservations and the Mary French Reservation.

2.The Main Street Corridor.
Route 28 was cobbled together from a north to south patchwork of old turnpikes that began with a road from the market town, Medford, to the farm settlements along the Merrimack Valley edge.

Foster's Pond, at the southern edge with North Reading, has its own organization in addition to The Peggy Keck and Goldsmith Reservations. Heading north the Pustell Reservation follows.

3. The Shawsheen Watershed Corridor.
This is also joined by the offspring of the Andover and Wilmington Railroad. It runs along the eastern edge of the river.

This may well be a defining feature of the town and considerable effort has been expended to make it shine. Following the river from south to north, the Sanborn Reservation is the first of these efforts followed down stream by Pole Hill, site of a ghost resort long gone to nature. Further downstream lies Pomp's Pond, home to a freed slave in Thoreau's time.

The Vale Reservation and the Shawsheen River Reservation form a centerpiece cluster that ties the Ballardvale neighborhood to Andover Center. And, at the point of confluence with the Merrimack, Den Rock Park is a collaboration with the city of Lawrence.

All these and other preserved lands are part of an ongoing creation, the Shawsheen River Greenway.

4. Bay Circuit West.
The trail continues to Tewksbury and beyond until it's eventual terminus in Duxbury.

As the trail rises from the Shawsheen river heading west, it immediately meets another cluster of parcels beginning with Indian Ridge Reservation and followed by Bakers Meadow and West Parish Meadow and the nearby cemetery,which has a thoughtfully designed walking tour.

There is a second cluster further westward built around the Harold Rafton Reservation, the largest property protected by AVIS. From there the Bay Circuit Trail heads toward the Merrimack. One additional parcel in this area lies at the edge of Tewksbury, the Nat Smith Reservation.

5. The Merrimack River.

The river's southern side is shaped by the bluffs of a kame terrace draped with white pine and returning oak forests. The principle parcel given to its southern side is the Deer Jump Reservation, a long and sinuous thing of beauty.

This is but a handy overview. These areas will get more detailed visits in future posts. As it is, we just finished several hours of video shoots to augment Andover's inventory.

Note For the Urban Carless. The wonders of Andover are yours to discover through the capacities of commuter rail.

Bay Circuit Trail: The Sudbury Arc, Carlisle to Concord.

2011-08-16T21:13:00.009-05:00

The section of the Bay Circuit that lies to the west of Boston has the Sudbury watershed as a primary core thread intertwined to the south with the upper Charles River watershed.

It makes a great day hike for car-less residents of urban core Boston and Cambridge thanks to the proximity of commuter rail stations in North Billerica and Concord.

Towpath Reenactment.

My preference is to take the Lowell run out of North Station to start and it follows the traces of an earlier freightway, the Old Middlesex Canal. The North Billerica station is very close to the old turning pond where the canal met the Concord River and is described by Mr. Thoreau in his "A Week on the Concord and Merrimac."

The first leg from North Billerica Station to Great Brook Farm is a little over 5 miles. It is an interesting walk as you are essentially in one of the more motor choked versions of suburbia where pedestrians are generally seen as pariahs.

The Commuter Rail system allows you to bring a bike on off peak hours and week ends and that may be preferable.

The Rangeway Rd route is the most direct at 5.1 mi or a 1 hour and 42 minute walk.

Walking directions to N Rd begin at Letchworth Ave and you head south on Letchworth Ave toward Station St for 381 ft,turn right onto Faulkner St for 0.2 mi, then turn left onto Wilson St for 0.4 mi before you turn left onto Talbot Ave for a mere 82 ft.

You then turn right onto Twombley Ave for 0.2 mi hang a right onto Sprague St for 0.2 mi and you have escaped the central Billerica maze and it's now a straight shot.

Continue onto Rangeway Rd for 2.7 mi before heading onto Rutland St for 0.3 mi at which point you turn right onto N Rd for 1.1 mi and you are well into Great Brook Farm State Park.

There are a few minor state forest properties along the way before Rangeway crosses Route 3 but they seem to have been eliminated from any listings. I recall them as forlorn things.

The tract is a fine mix of Oak/Maple forest with uplands, wetlands and a well made trail system. It has the added advantage of being a working Dairy Farm.

The existing Bay Circuit trails weren't able to align to this 1000 acre centerpiece of the area. A Billerica rail trail segment to Bedford is incomplete and runs too far east and the other segment lies to the west through Acton although it does include the Carlisle Pines.

With that in mind, the second hike leg from Great Brook to Punkatasset and Great Meadows is another work around walk but it is less freakish in quieter Carlisle than the run from North Billerica. It includes an old road that the Carlisle Militia used to slip down to the Concord Battlefield on that day of legend.

Walking directions to MA-225 E/Bedford Rd 3.4 mi, 1 hour 6 mins.

Head southwest on N Rd toward Lowell St for 0.5 mi and turn left onto Lowell St for 1.8 mi with a slight left to stay on Lowell St for 112 ft. At the traffic circle, take the 1st exit onto MA-225 W/Bedford Rd for 1.1 mi to meet old Two Rod road through Estabrook just before Brook St. meets 225 on the left.

"Approximately. 112 acres, purchased 1974-79, ties to the Two Rod Road Trail which goes into Harvard University's Estabrook Woods. Two Rod Road dates from 1744, and is named for its width - there are two rods, or 33 feet, between the stone walls that border much of the trail. Estabrook Woods is a 675-acre forest located partly in Carlisle and partly in Concord. Two Rod Road leads in about two miles to the Punkatasset Hill conservation area in Concord. Davis Corridor and Malcolm Lands can be viewed at the Carlisle Trails web page and at conservation web page for nearby Concord ."

Courtesy of the Carlisle.org.

"Punkatasset is Native American for Broad Topped Hill. It is one of the highest points in Concord; from here, minutemen watched and gathered their troop strength before approaching the British at the North Bridge in 1775. A spur trail to the top ascends a sledding hill that was once used as a ski slope."

Courtesy of the Concord Natural Resources Commission.

From Punkatasset Hill, Great Meadows is a short walk stretching along the river bed.

Courtesy of the Great Meadows Blog.

I've been there in all seasons and had my one encounter with a Cuckoo in the tree canopy that lines the river bed.

Although Great Meadows is mildly vast, this particular string of preserved land gems make an easy full day hike with plenty of time to linger and explore.

The southern end of Great Meadows is in view of historic Concord Center, the commuter rail station beyond and a bust of Thoreau in every home.

Note For the Urban Carless. This particular hike is crafted for the commuter rail system for two routes, Lowell and Fitchburg.

Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary,Topsfield MA.

2011-08-13T16:17:00.003-05:00

The Ipswich River rises from diminished streams in the overbuilt and clobbered suburbs of Burlington and Wilmington with gathered tribute from Reading and Lynnfield as it passes along the southern edge of North Reading flowing east before a few step-wise meanders through Middleton to Topsfield where the Massachusetts Audubon Society maintains a crown jewel sanctuary known to me since I was a toddler.

From there it heads northeast to meet the sea at Ipswich.

The Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary was acquired by Mass Audubon in 1951 from Thomas Procter. It was first converted to property in the 1640s on behalf of Simon Bradstreet after being a popular spot for eons with the Agawam people who left clam midden traces along the river and a path to the hilltop.

This drumlin is the epicenter of the place where cars are parked, fees covered and the farmhouse and outbuildings rest.

The drumlin slopes are draped with Mr. Procter's work with a carriage trail as the first concentric ring. He was inspired by the English garden approach with adaptations shaped by Frederick Law Olmsted.

The Drumlin trail covers the introductions and experiments of the day. Osange Oranges are among the surprises in the arboretum.

The Rockery is the most prominent feature and took more than five years to build. It overlooks a pond and the top is one of the best observation spots in the sanctuary.

The outer ring runs to increasingly lighter human touches until the wetland river edge are as they have been since before the heavy euro hand fell on it all. The North and South Esker trails overlook a substantial riparian panorama.

Post Procter innovations owe more to Aldo Leopold and Art Flick. A substantial density of wood duck boxes dot the ponds. Astonishing skill and insight have been applied over the decades to maximize the potential habitat capacity and an intricate tapestry of ecotones bedeck the acreage.

This effort makes it one of the best places ever to find nearly every bird likely to roost or pass through the region across the annual run of months. There is never a bad time to be there from the bare tree minimal mists of November to the neotropical mass convergence in May.

Hand feeding Chickadees is favorite past time in the wintry season. Stand near a spot where field meets thicket with reasonably serene stillness, a hand outstretched and a small pile of sunflower seeds, preferably hulled, and you'll soon have a regular Paridae chow line going on.

The mammal contingent includes fox and eastern coyote, beaver, fairly tame deer, otter, and all the others generally found in the area.

Deer at Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary from Carl Thien on Vimeo.

And through it all, the river.

Bird Listening.

2010-10-16T14:19:00.003-05:00

While bird watching enjoys widespread popularity, I've long supplemented it with bird listening. For one thing, tracking smaller birds in the Warbler and Finch families is a handful with binoculars. I realized before long that identifying and hearing their various calls and sounds greatly improves my ability to get binoculars focused at the right spot in the usually brief instance alloted to glimpse the thing before it moves.

Over the years, the listening has become its own activity and as my capacity for it hones, I've began to notice some interesting things that wouldn't be readily revealed by observation.

The basic Robin goes silent exactly at Summer solstice. In fact the entire array of mating choruses winds down then, Mockingbirds, Cardinals, everything stops and there is this odd period of relative bird silence that runs through the first 6 weeks or so of summer, til some time in August where the main sound aspect consists of basic communications chirps, but little singing.

Then as summer winds down the sonic patterns begin to get more elaborate. It isn't like the run up to summer when singing is at its peak and the singers are all polished. It's a new tentative thing as if they are rehearsing.

And then I realized... of course.. it's this years run of fledglings figuring out how to do bird noise. And the silent period is when the stealth of hatching and feeding until the hatch figures out flight.

It's a fascinating mix of the basic song and various communication calls. It's taken me all these years to begin to understand the pattern. Of course, I probably could have looked it up but the discovery is more fun. Now as we hit mid October, I'm noticing the uptick in Woodpecker activity as the Winter cast begins to supplant the Summer crew.

The latter is getting ready for migration to the tropics. The vivid feathers of the journey up in spring give way to the subdued hues of a stealthy return to complet the molt cycle. Warblers arrive grouped by species and return as a motley of individuals.

The November phase is the heart of sonic minimalism before the winter crew settles in. The 'pik' of the Downy Woodpecker indicates sunrise now.

And as the year increasingly chills toward winter, there are already residents of the Boreal and Arctic regions heading here, their wintering ground, until we may again find Snowy Owls making a tundra version of Logan runways and soaring over cedar swamp expanses of places like the Hockomock in search of scurrying prey.

The added value of it all is how it sharpens a mainly half neglected and pummeled sense...hearing. We are just not fond of listening. We are a visual culture and seeing is believing, hearing is wondering. Consider the fast and profitable industry devoted to what are sonic firewalls to keep the world's random sounds at bay to intensify the inner and personal.

This listening habit is a useful way to take a break from the barricade.

Applesauce is Yankee Ambrosia.

2010-10-10T17:22:00.000-05:00

This is the season of road trips to back waters for the years apple options to mark the season with applesauce.

Now here's what you do.. make yankee ambrosia..AKA applesauce.

There will be orchards out there with old apple varieties descended from some trees the colonials planted. They'll sell em in old wooden boxes that rock for vinyl lp storage. There will be cider too and it will harden if left in a back stairwell. Open by Halloween.

Take apples and cut in crude chunks in an old kettle with a small bit of water just covering the bottom to make steam.Keep the peels on just get rid of the core.

Add local honey, maple syrup or a good sugar to taste.

Add cinnamon in stick form, mace and nutmeg for spices. Throw in some golden raisins for the hell of it as the steam plumps em back to grapiness.

Cook on low and cover until the whole pile reduces to the texture you like from somewhat chunky to semi fluid. Occasional stirs help. Smell fills area. And it's improv cooking as you can vary all the things to suit. Each batch is it's own thing. It takes about half an hour max when the heat hits and the prep is family entertainment.

Petit Manan, 5/87.

2009-04-17T07:02:00.008-05:00

From the point where the sun departs, Mount Cadillac, Schoodic Point, Gouldsboro. Toward the focus of Compassion, of growth, Petit Manan Lighthouse.

To the region of goals and chores, it’s Big Bubert, a distant Cape Split and a mist cloaked Great Wass with its family of islands huddled against a brink where the channel drops its floor.

And, in the direction of Resolve, Resistance and Endurance the long trowel of a point embraces the mass bearing Pigeon Hill and the heath draped backlands.

The ears meet a constant sea muted whine of an offshore gull raft. A bell buoy threads through a tinkly soprano melody and breakers mark time with hushed pedal tones..fploashhh..fploashhh...fploashhh… phwaoshshsh…phwaoshhh.

The jet stream has combed the upper day sky clouds into long feathery strands. The water made rock wall is bedecked with a flotsam riot remnant. Human debris includes lobstering gear, bleach jugs, rope of many colors, some dainty shoe from a fisherman’s wife and a melange of logs and spars, some bearing testimony to encounters with humanity and some which appear to have escaped.

And then there are dense scatters of mussel shells often intermixed with storm ripped kelps and wracks busily rotting and entertaining flies. There are even a few small boat wreck fragments and a spiked pier cradle indicating the power of prior winter storms. The rock piles form a contiguous metropolis for a spider species eternally scampering in and out of the extensive cranny matrix.

Petit Manan is a National Wildlife Refuge with a splendid blend of ecotones and habitats including a fat sphagnum bog wooded uplands, meadows and cobble shores. I bushwhacked through the bog for a while following deer trails through spruce so thick at times, you had to squeeze through.

I eventually came out near old field lanes that led to the main traverse road. I took this back to the campsite, stopping at a meadow pond for water. My feet were soaked but, instead of blistering, they pickled from the acidic bog water.

There are two trails in the refuge. One simply follows the eastside shore down to the narrow tip. The other leads through mixed forest upland to Birch Point at the north west edge. The two trails complement each other and between them, feature nearly all of the coastal ecotones from cobble tidelands to upland copses, thickets, meadows and groves.

I prefer the Birch Point trail. It offers upland woods in various states of succession from ericad shrub thickets to beech groves and tracts of fir running to the waters edge. I met my first pair of golden crowned kinglets along the way to Birch Point in the trails high slope copses of heath-carpeted hemlock, young beech and birch. Descending the slope northward are the conifer groves of balsam fir mingled with cedars, hemlock and spruce.

I found a furball scat left by a coyote and some bear tree claw marks on an older beech. Antler scrapes on branches were abundant. Mornings grim, gray beginning gave way to a warm breezy spring day, Newfie style.

The Birch point loop segment doesn’t quite get you to the tip of Birch Point, you have to bushwhack. In my case, the final ten yards were covered in a stealthy crawl in order to watch a group of red breasted mergansers joined by a few eiders. The effort was rewarded by a good long look at their placid, dive dappled rambling, always covered by one or two floating lookouts. Eventually, they noticed me and put some distance between us.

The refuge was crawling with fat, shambling porcupines. I met two on the way back. One was rummaging in the strew of marsh hay bracken left by the high water storm line. I got to within three feet of it before we noticed each other. It faced me ‘til I pulled out a penny whistle and noodled a bit. This convinced it to waddle off and join its brethren at a leisurely spruce tip buffet. The first morning here, a pair of them involved in some sort of off-season nuptial ritual serenaded me.

The song was a melismatic squawk recalling a sampled snippet of a Tuareg musette chorus. Birch Point’s ensemble of ecotones will reward repeated visits. The cove alongside the point houses extensive and fairly pristine soft-shell clam flats.

The area is liberally peppered with deer scat. One night, a small herd sought shelter from rain in the grove near my tent. The storm must have masked my smell. I woke up and coughed in the middle of the night causing them to leap, yelp and scatter.

My last sunset vespers there were conducted by a troop of raccoons searching the rocks and wrack for mussels. The sky was awash with pale bands of violet and was accompanied, for a few glowing moments, by a Big Bubert bathed in late day glimmer. Warbler group lead teams were just beginning to fan off to nest.

Chuck Snowden was my local ride mentor. He is a smart genial African American who had just turned fifty-four. He lives in Waltham Maine and brought me from Ellsworth to the Refuge parking lot. He had recently retired from his job at the Department of Defense and supplemented his income by doing free lance carpentry work.

He's made a good life in Maine, when we met, he was on his way to install Hancock Point and Tunk Lake Road to install 'For Sale ' signs for a local realtor who pays him ten bucks a pop. He's put up 19 in the past week. The way back was more challenging.

I began the hitchhike in the teeth of one of those huge slow spring nor'easters that followed me south. And, on the human side, real Maine gets diluted south of Augusta by Mall Culture. The undifferentiated terrain of the United State of Generica digs its claws in signaled by the transition from colorful old shitboxes and pickups to Saabs and Volvos. This is a more nervous crowd and rides are few and far between.

I waited in Augusta too long and ended up raising my tent at sundown on the pine-clad bluff of an interstate roadcut near Richmond. I got home the following afternoon. A common thread among those who picked me up was a reverence for the Living World in some way or another.

There was a millworker intent on monitoring the progress of the Atlantic Salmon's return. A retired naval officer ran a sea kayaking tour service along the Downeast Coast. Clammers extolled their hunter gatherer lives and auslanders sang their praises to the land.

A week or so after I got back, I noticed an article in the Globe on ground level ozone spikes in Southern Maine. The map pattern corresponded closely to the boundary of Generica's encroachment. Go Figure!

Great Wass Island, 6/86

2009-02-25T15:40:00.010-05:00

I went with Matt Walter to explore a section of coast peninsulas from Millbridge to Machias. The first campsite was at McLellan Park, a deserted Washington County amenity. It is located within the borders of Millbridge where the Narraguagus joins the ocean.

The absence of any other campers allowed us to pick the best site. Two little trails lead to the shore through a charmed understory carpet of sphagna and ericads shaded by birch and black spruce in wind and sea spume stunted scatterling clumps lining a pink granite slope of descending rounded slabs.

At night, to the south, we were treated to the spinning arc of Petit Manan Island lighthouse answered by the strobing spin of Nash Island lighthouse off to the east. Free from encroachments of urban light glare, the night sky wore an abundant array of stars.

The first day was given to a thirty-mile drive to Machias picking spots to visit on the way back. We passed a plaque marking the site of a Revolutionary War Naval engagement, just offshore, and a lot of trailer homes.

People here are often seduced from the self-reliance of their ancestors by blandishments of commerce offering low budget financing with easy monthly payments. And this is a place with abundant lumber where prior age's inhabitants mastered basic carpentry with ease. The trailers are drab, squat and shoddy. They are hard to repair and have a much shorter useful life than the frame homes that have stood a few centuries of weather extremes.

A few lost souls even abandoned old, beautiful homes to live in new shabby trailers parked on the lawn. Many of the older trailers wear rows of tires on the roofs to secure them from leakage.

We ended up at Beals Island by midday after exploring the Bucks Harbor side of Machias Bay. Beals is an island village consisting of itself and the larger Great Wass Island linked by a short causeway. We checked it out casually and found it to be delightful.

Beals is unique linguistic anomaly due to its long isolation from the adjacent mainland. A bridge linked it to Jonesport in the 1960's. It's a version of Maine English that is difficult for other Mainers to follow, let alone flatlanders from Boston. One of these islanders sold us a few lobsters at the Jonesport co-op while telling us about Great Wass.

It once belonged to a lobster gear seller named 'Okie'. When the tax burden for owning it exceeded his resources, he decided to donate it to the Nature Conservancy with a proviso allowing deer hunting.

Our informant drew some trail lines on our DeLorme guide. What a find! He also indicated the location of a cabin used by Okie's son Gordy and lobstermen in need of a safe storm moorage on the islands east side and told us it was okay to stay in the shack if we were considerate. We brought the lobsters back to camp at McLellan for a campfire supper.

The next dawning day was given to more detailed exploration. We drove the length of Ray's Point where locals of the most modest means still live on waterfront land that would be unaffordable in places closer to the convenience of tourists. Ripley Neck was our next stop. It's an old vacation home hamlet from the late 19^th century featuring Victorian homes and a community well with exceptional water.

It's most charming feature is at the and of a dirt road that descends the necks east shoulder through a black spruce forest at the mid point. The road ends at a secluded stretch of cobble beach shore facing Pleasant Bay. A river made spit connects a small dory shaped islet to the shore that aligns a northward tip into the sea bound flow of the Pleasant. It's a perfect small tombolo and is favored by cormorants, gulls, ravens and roving ospreys.

Addison is the gateway hamlet to Cape Split, a two pronged point that carries South Addison on its eastern prong. This consists of a cluster of small old fisher cottages housing a mix of locals and artsy summer folks.

The Wass archipelago lies to the southeast. It includes Great Wass, Roque, Head Harbor and Steels Harbor Islands. Odd little island shacks can be found on all of them in varying states of repair. Shack etiquette throughout the region allows use of the structures if a nail or rope secures the doors. If they are padlocked, leave them alone.

Roque Island is owned by the Gardiner family and has a substantial family compound as well as an amazing beach. Its shape resembles a capitol H with the beach facing the Atlantic along the south midsection. The family allows day use of the beach and is active in state land conservation. It's reputed to be one of the finest pocket beaches in Maine.

We followed the road south from Beals and found the small Nature Conservancy parking lot for Little Cape trail. The trail winds through two and a half miles of the island's bog and ledge interior before arriving at Cape Cove on the uninhabited east side. Boardwalks and puncheons keep hikers dry through the wetter sections which support dense ericad thickets of sheep laurel and labrador tea.

The trail ends at a rare jack pine copse along the shore. Sure enough, the shack lay concealed by a thick spruce screen a few yards from the shore. It has bunk beds and other essentials for living through storms and cold winters.

A long ledge that drops four feet to the strand ledge of rose hued granite marks the trail end. The inland side wears lichens and sphagnum. The shoreward side displays the banding segments that define the Atlantic boreal littoral.

Tide ranges up here run to twenty feet making fairly wide zones for habitat. The beach also blends from sand to gravel to cobble along all bands to make a concentration of littoral niches for nearly every form of tide life common to this biome.

From the black algae spray zone one descends through barnacle worlds, wrack and periwinkle thickets, the dip and hump region of clam flat and tide pool to the immersed homes of blue mussels and kelp.

Matt decided to head back early while I opted to stay and hitch back later. Of course, I had a primeval ball. A seal visited at dawn's high tide when waves press to the ledge at the trails end. It frolicked like a happy sea pooch in search of shellfish. Eiders hovered warily over wave tips at the edge of visibility.

I made a foraged sea stew on my last day, a Saturday. Gordy and his wife came by for the weekend. I hiked out by the road to Addison 'til a clam digger gave me a ride and an invitation to his girlfriend's house in Harrington. She worked for a fish drying business. We sat up sipping whiskey 'til dawn and I made for the long hitch home after a short nap.

The Break up on The North Coast.

2008-11-02T12:03:00.016-05:00

Late March: The journey in mud season met the crack of spring with its onrush of sun shattered ice floes hastening to their Atlantic end. Great Heath looked like a mercury lake. Blueberry fields were getting their commencement burnover. Overhead canada goose vees pointed north to the line of ice retreat.

We went to the colony's edge with the whole westerly widening continent to our backs. Cobscook Bay provided a park campsite months before its actual opening. Lubec has been abandoned by the present after its sardine industry collapsed. Houses cost less than thirty thousand dollars with acreage. The land is Scot-coast beautiful.

We reached ‘Penobscot Meadows’, Belfast, late on a Friday night. The Innkeepers conducted us to room #5, a small cozy room with bath facing the meadow draped east. Beyond the pensive, wine dark night, a breakfast of insipid ugliness burst surreal upon a warm spring morning. There we were, marooned amidst a nuked muffin breakfast with well-dressed gaggle of Awful White People. The Innkeepers were nice enough. Applied politeness and a skittish nature are occupational acquisitions of a life so encumbered. Nerves tend to fray from the cycles of stranger parades. The nuked muffins were okay, the coffee was real and butter came in little porcelain pat-a-cups.

Entertainment came from two horrid couples and a faded ingenue. One couple had a two year old girl who they tormented with vigorous stinginess and arbitrary denial, ‘No More MUFFINS!’. The other couple, Polyester Quebecois, bristled at any wistful attributions of humanity to Soviets and viewed the world with scared jaundiced rabbit eyes. Ingenue boasted of lobbying for Audubon while still making time to loathe her teenage daughters. Blech! After a quick pay up and pack we were rolling east. We made a choice to travel aimlessly along the coast and let discoveries determine which fork of the road we’d take.

Just beyond the Belfast-Searsport line is a small state park, (Moose Point), that touches Belfast Bay. It’s an oversized rest area that provided a welcoming spot to digest impressions and touch the Sea. It’s a low grassy slope rolling down to the shore. A west edge line of white pines is joined by clumps of benches and grills. The park was ‘closed’.
The next stop was Fort Knox, guarding the Penobscot approach ways. The shoulders of this old river soul impress. The fort, for all it attempts is squat and bleak blocked granite in a neo Vauban style. It has far more charm than the hulking manufactory belching pulp steam on the Searsport side of the river. The Fort remnants, along the coasts, are military industrial fossils of bygone doctrine.

A Saturday drill rehearsal of a Twentieth Maine reenactment was beginning. We walked through the catacombs and over parapets soaking up the sunlight and broad river and bay view. A stop at Ellsworth to buy some picnic food preceded the last leg up the Down East Coast. The route along 182 gave me a chance to touch the distant shore of the previous falls walk along Hog Bay. We even visited Egypt.

The original plan was to cover prior ground only on the return trip but we had to visit The Great Heath and its cabin. I found my campsite from the previous year and picked up some trash. The poncho I left found a home. The Pineo Ridge road net was at its earliest edge of mud season. There were imposing ruts. Nancy managed to plod through bringing us at last near the ridge crest facing the Heath.

It was late March. Melt water fattened with rain turned the placid Pleasant into a respectable torrent. The Great Heath lay beneath the waters shimmering silvery from a rippling spring breeze. Fringed with forest blends of balsam fir, larch, aspen and red maples laden with buds laced with mist, it enchanted with its stillness as seen afar. Up close, it sang its fluvial water swelling song welling its way from distant branch brooks to swaying bay waves. It sang of vernal renewal moving to season of births and sprouting. Daylights clear vivacity was complemented by a star swarmed indigo night far from the noisome reach of urban quartz halogens or mercury vapors.

It was too early for mosquitoes, too early even for black fly simooms. The Blueberry Barrens fields were getting their early burnovers. We left with sunrise, hoping to fish tail out of the Barrens roads before thaw turned them into soup. Beyond one brief push from a ditch lay fairly stable roads. We followed the ridge east until we took a southeast turn near the hamlet of Epping to rejoin route 1.

The ‘White House’ straddles a shoulder of a crossroad between Route 1 and the way down the point capped by Roque Bluffs. The head of the inlet is just to the west. There is a small huddle of old yankee buildings to serve the road and mark the epicenter of Jonesboro. The focus sharpens beyond the dooryard of the White House revealing the teeming water drop microcosm of coastal village life. We had large toothsome piles of scratch made hot cakes crowded with fat local blueberries with quality drip coffee to wash them down. The gentle murmur flow of old Maine voices at pre-church breakfast provided a perfect aubade.

Following feeding, we made a first attempt to find Roque Bluffs. A wrong turn brought us to Kilton Point where we heard distant gull clamor at distant clammers competing for soft-shell meals at low tide. On another wrong side road as
midden testified on behalf of the clam rakes efficacy. This pause preceded a decision to return to route 1eastward. We would find Roque on the way back. The Down East Coast of Maine is laden stunning points and inlets from Ellsworth to Calais.Every one is worth a visit. Petit Manan, Great Wass Island, Roque Bluffs, Quoddy Head and Moosehorn are the main public lands along this wild rural stretch of Atlantic Coast. Our plan was to visit as many as possible.
At Machias, we made a memorable first meeting with a spring rivers roar. The Machias was bowling a tempestuous flow of ice slabs toward their dissolution in the bay. All strained through sluices in a frenzied rush of bashing, scraping and skittering end over kettle. We stared into the whirl awhile listening to the rivers boisterous expulsion of winters decaying fetters. Past the elderly abandoned railhead and the Middle Machias estuary is an archaic concrete bridge to cross the East Machias and link Route 1 with 191, an old coast road.

It’s the main coastal thoroughfare for the huge wing of granite that now carries Whiting, Cutler, Trescott and Lubec. It’s the easternmost, wildest stretch of the coast, a land of little leprechaun hills and hollows riotously festooned with boulder erratics rising from blueberry moor carpets. To give it a bit of spookliness, one soon meets a thicket of antennae belonging to a Navy Communications station on Little Machias Neck near Cutler. It’s hard to hide but, thankfully, off limits.

The region has other DOD oddities tucked into its backwaters including an Air Force Winter Survival Camp and a weird little officers club on Schoodic Point. 191 heads north to West Lubec near Bailey’s Mistake, a cove providing harborage for South Trescott. A dirt coast road continues east.

We stopped a quarter mile beyond and climbed a small granite nubble overlooking the coast. There is a sparse pebbled beach nearby and traces of a long abandoned attempt at improvement. This consisted of a graded driveway long overgrown with heath shrubs. The nubble provided a great observation point for Grand Manan Island with its steep granite cliffs just across the channel. It ran along an east-west alignment and screened the road from the shore should the road ever be busy.

The tract was a charming micro biome with a few mini marshes, alder and yellow birch groves and a seaside stand of black spruce. There is a thirty-foot slope to the strand and a score of miles of ocean to separate Grand Manan. Within the same distance offshore as the walk to the road, there is a sharp drop in depth to sixty, then ninety feet and deeper into the channel.

Following this pause was the final stretch to West Quoddy Head, the eastern edge of the US and the boundary of the Eastern and Atlantic Time zones. Within five minutes, we were parked near the candy-striped lighthouse at the head. We looked out to sea from cliffside and descended steps to the shore. A large marine granite erratic edging the channel was the eastern tip of our journey. The rest of the US was behind us.

Along the shore, brawny waves tumble cobbles noisily with the highest tides along the US Atlantic coast like an oversized maraca chorus. After gathering a few attractive stones, we went landward to explore the mossy forest. It was June warm in late March, blatant lamb weather. Lubec is a sardine ghost town. The fishery collapsed and left a sardine museum full of rusty gear as a keepsake. We weren’t able to scare up food more complex than corn chips.

The newspaper, ‘Quoddy Tides’, (easternmost paper in the US), listed ridiculously low prices for homes and land along with charming gossip columns by elderly ladies about the neighbors dahlias or who visited who. Following a swing through Lubec, we visited Cobscook State Forest. It was technically closed but the gate padlock was left open. We let ourselves in and drove around the forest roads through groups of campsites.

The food search continued at Dennysville. It ended at the Dennys River where a combination store/diner fed us the best scallops and clams I’ve ever had. They were fried to perfection and coated with a thin tempura like batter. All you can eat cost around seven dollars. There were also a number of homemade cream pies. This place, by itself, justifies the eleven-hour drive from Boston.

After this food wallow, we returned to Cobscook and picked a campsite on a thumb of land next to the mouth of Burnt Cove. A small, tree clad islet sat in an inlet before us to the east. Beyond lay Whiting Bay. A wide broad picnic meadow lay to the northeast. Moosehorn guards the west. Canada goose vees and eider lines crossed the sky following opening waters northward. The soil was semi-frozen, plastic and studded with frost heaves. Sleep was serene.

Whiting Bay at dawn was a sheet of glass in the mid point of its cycle of between surging and receding. The morning eider chorus used indefinite temperament to voice an intricate staccato melody in a lower register.

We found Roque Bluffs on the way home after another transcendent breakfast at the White House. It’s a remnant summer colony from the turn of the twentieth century. There is even an octagon house that had weathered brick red paint trimmed with dark forest green.

Roque Bluffs State Park overlooks Roque Island on the eastern side of Englishman Bay. It’s a cobble beach sliver of crushed granite micro pebbles enroute to sand with a wide tide range near 24 feet. At the crest of the bluffs separated by the road, is a freshwater pond inhabited by trout below with a flotilla of great black backed gulls. The ecotone mix puts fresh waterfowl and shorebirds in close proximity. It’s a perfect spot for a picnic lunch.

We began the long return to Boston stopping at Schoodic Point at midday. We climbed around the Points’ broad slabs of cubist granite sheets divided here and there by tar black basalt filling ancient fissures deep pocked by wind and waves. Beyond Schoodics’ tip, low flying eider lines skimmed the rising wave tops. The oceans’ tumbling tumult blasts the rock, punctuating its’ pulse with roaring crashes to leave a lingering glimmer of mist. One last visit brought us to spring snowmelt waters sliding over sphagnum jeweled rocks beneath the beeches girding Maiden Cliffs, north of Camden. The sturdy beeches hug the steep slopes and were at earliest burst of the season’s chartreuse bright bud tips. All that remained was the long tedious haul along Route One to the highway.

Downeast Sojourn Part 4: Going Home.

2008-10-11T11:56:00.009-05:00

Late Sunday--sunset.

Ha Ha Ha! Boy did I fuck up! I'm just past the Stueben-Millbridge line. I completely forgot how far East I am. A look at the map reminds me I'm only forty miles from New Brunswick! I'm at least six hours drive from Portland! Oh well. Dum de dum dum.

When I get back, I'll have to calculate the total distance I walked. It could've been sixty miles.

So far.

Roosts

9/30 Westfield Hotel, Portland (fleabag).

10/1 Crocker House, Hancock Point.

10/2 Schoodic Bog.

10/3 Barrens I, Cherryfield.

10/4,5 Barrens II, Cherryfield.

10/6 Route 1 pond overlook, Steuben.

So now I'm back to everyday life wearing clothing and using abstractions like time instead of watching the sun. I'm back on paved and numbered roads.

It's a days hitch to Portland. At least, now, I'm at a jump off consisting of a five or ten yard walk to the highway at dawn. Hopefully, someone with business in Portland will get me there in one ride. Whatever. I'll be back tomorrow. Still on map 25. Over and out.

Monday: Yay. I'm at the bus stop, waiting on a 4:00 southbound. As far as I'm concerned, I'm ahead at this point, Steuben to Portland in about six hours, give or take a few minutes.

Ms Sparrow, of Lubec enroute to Bangor, led the charitable with a stated fondness for folkies and other coffee house strummers. Jim Lynch, Hood Sails rep enroute to Thomaston, pointed out his favorite features of Penobscot Bay. Donny Houchin, Cherokee folk singer with war wounds from Khe San, got me to Damariscotta.

The leg from Damariscotta to Wiscassett was covered by a huge comical ironworker headed to Augusta for a vote on a weak contract with Bath Iron Works. "If it's a tie vote and it's up to me, we ain't workin' tomorrow".

A small business consultant who enjoyed classical music got me to Bath. A silent fellow got me to Falmouth and a coupla' cokehead hot shits brought me to the Congress St. exit ramp.

Jim Lynch makes a good living from little boats; yachts and such always need sails. He's built a few of his own and was building a house. He told me a lot about emerging entertainment needs as more people who don't need to be near a city move to Bar Harbor and environs. They want to return to land less stifled by encroaching mechanism choke. He mentioned an auditorium and an imaginative jazz club in Bangor.

I was invited to visit several homes, Charlie Hutchins place in Cherryfield, Jim's at Bluefields and Donny's place in Damariscotta.

Donny needs a hand. He wants to die cause his back is a wreck thanks to a combat stint in Vietnam with the Marine Corps. His mother was one of the remnant Cherokees missed by Jackson's agents during the death march called the Trail of Tears. They lived in their cove cabin home over the years to watch their ancestors grave land drown beneath rising waters from Howard Baker's pork tub Tellico Dam. She died cursing the Euroids and I say, "Good for her!"

He wanted to die. Three discs removed and now they want to take out another. With inspired stinginess, the service only allows him partial disability status even though he can't lift more than twenty pounds. Before the war, he could make a forty-yard dash in 4.7 seconds. He even tried out for the Redskins.

He's played guitar for 21 years but now he can't stand to sing or play. His life's flame is at a low glow. I tried to encourage him to fight the Beast. Why make it easier for them by dying? I urged him to sue the Corps for full disability.

What the fuck! I know useless slobs who have chiseled five to six figure insurance fraud incomes over far more dubious mishaps. I told him about Harvard's Native American Law Project and about the encouraging number of humane Vietnam Era veterans now entering Congress.

I offered to introduce him to Gordon and Rounder in order to provide more reasons. I suggested he look up the history of the Five Civilized Nations. His response brought the house down. "I tried but it's so sad while the history of the invaders is so bright and upbeat, I couldn't stand to read anymore".

Oh well. I told him how the five nations and the northern nations refrained from significant warfare with the Continentals while the issue was in doubt. This was one of General Washington's main fears. I told him about the Mohawk Longhouse Council and how it gave Benjamin Franklin useful ideas for framing the Constitution.

This seemed to encourage him. I can hope so anyway. He gave me a feather work as an honor token and resolved to spend the day looking for turquoise to work for its healing properties. I told him about Nyah Nyah finding more reasons to write it. It'll be a fat heap of bile and spleen to climb by the time I begin, maybe in the coming year.

The steelworker and the consultant both had stories about shipbuilding.

The steelworker complained about management's attempt to introduce a two-tier wage system, reduce health coverage and cut wages by ten percent. The first two items were the worst. Tiered wages erode a union's unity and insurance coverage is vital in a calling as hazard prone as shipbuilding.

The consultant told me most federal contracts at Bath are now met on time and at cost as a result of accounting and award procedure improvements such as commissioning several ships at once, instead of one. He thought Bath was weakest at landing commercial design and building contracts.

The average commercial contract is for three ships a year and Bath is lucky to finish 2.7. This is exacerbated by fairly primitive drafting requirements. They rarely use more than six blueprints and about a three inch keel thickness overall, (that's commercial, not federal). Pretty amazing when you consider the truckload of blueprints it takes to specify an F-16.

The consultant also cared about music and had an avid interest in my description of funding programs in Massachusetts like "New Works" and "Heritage". The components for a vivacious life are certainly there.

Maine will always be one of my favorite places. If I don't abandon America, I'll try to be a geezer in a small house on some Downeast neck near the Heath. That will cover my need for contact with the world beyond shopping malls. There, "outside" is a term endowed with meaning. Even the cities are a break from stupid Boston and drab New York. People are kinder, more distinct and tend to be more in tune with the essentials.

I'd also rather wander here than merely visit another country. It's as foreign as I need a place to be without the nuisance of a passport. It's as close as New England gets to frontier with a visible, if low profile, Native American population.

And, of the outdoors... everyone should try just once to forget Time and live by sun cycles. Walk naked in thick bog underbrush for a while and you'll understand why animals are 'graceful'. One needs grace to move easily through thickets without getting scratched and cut. Clothes were on of our earliest abstractions to numb our touch of the actual world. Knowledge of woodcraft sharpens perception, especially senses of sound and smell, which become guides instead of mere entertainers.

Day Hikes: Bedford: North Segment, 11/19/2006.

2008-09-20T10:20:00.016-05:00

The leg from Great Road, north, is a well defined rail bed edged by variegated wetlands. Oak and maple swamps, alder swales, vernal pools alternate throughout a recharge aquifer. A few cattail marshes of fairly recent formation lie west of the VA Hospital and then there is the pond called Fawn Lake. White Pine groves appear to be in their decline phase of succession with a few really large specimens capable of housing owls or raptors grow along the western edge near Fawn Lake.

In this quiet lull time before winter’s onset, the “Pik” of the Downy Woodpecker makes a solitary tone nearby with a distant background wash of Blue jays and Flickers and bass tone booms of a rod and gun club firing range. It is a Sunday and a few pooch walkers are using the main trail. The York Conservation Area has a few well marked spurs to the west and a cryptic royal blue blazed one north of the VA parking lot.

This trail offered a flat lichen dappled boulder for a sit down moment and winds through the rise of returning oak land containing the percolations of the aquifer. Fawn Lake Trail. Further north lays the pond ambitiously called Fawn Lake even though it’s smaller than Walden. A spur trail toward it is larded with risk aversion signage soon after it parts from the Bay Circuit.

A discarded sign warns of a hornet nest probably abandoned several years ago. Another sign warns of an aquacide algae treatment due to be complete by 8/27 with the year unspecified but a reference to the former DEM suggests it must precede the facetious renaming of the latter by one of the corporate GOP looter administrations the commonwealth stupidly imposed on itself to dodge taxes. There is also a trail closure sign for an inundated segment along the “lake’s” west edge mounted sturdily on a post and framed in Plexiglas with credit accorded to Alex Washer and Boy Scout Troop 114.

The Fawn Lake parking lot on its NW corner marks the current end of the BCT but another segment of the rail bed is slated for use when the extension to Andover through a seemingly reluctant Billerica. Signage indicating the existence of the BCT hasn’t appeared yet. I decided to follow the rail bed a bit further north to see if the Bedford/Billerica border is noticeable or marked.

The trail passes one last conservation area, north of the Fawn Lake parking lot, Buehler Ponds. These are so tiny they are already quickly becoming marshes. Attempts to impose a Japanese garden have already failed as the upland native forest inexorably returns. There isn’t much to indicate the border between prim liberal Bedford and slovenly neocon Billerica beyond the sudden appearance of trailside yard middens mainly comprised of rusty metal stuff. I once found it unsightly but it now looks more like quaint archeology and probably shelters voles and other small critters.

The commonwealth has become a subset mirror of the nation with blue and red towns and, oddly the red towns have the same down at the heels look as the red states I passed on a cross country rail trip while the blue towns have the same glow of prosperity. The rail bed loses its coat of rock dust and a cover of the old sand serves as a replacement. Before long, the rail bed vanishes beneath a newer development road guarded by a stern ‘No Trespassing’ sign as Private Property outranks General Access. I turn back amid jealous encroachment and, later, a scolding from a red squirrel. I end up walking a northeast trending spur trail along the north edge of the Buehler Ponds site and later discover it is the likely continuation of the Bay Circuit toward Andover.

The feverish burst of real estate speculation over the past decade has left the North edge of the spur trail hemmed by a bulwark of bulky particle board palazzos of recent vintage redolent with more private property jealousy probably attended by considerable debt burden anxiety. These poor lummox homes will be horribly vulnerable to spikes in energy costs and represent the odd boomer bloat era one day to be derided or pitied as the nation inevitably rediscovers common sense.

If one mainly looks to the south with gaze respectfully averted from these overstuffed sucker traps, the aquifer mosaic of vernal pools, mini swamps and enveloping oak resurgence is its own reward. Flocklets of chickadees and their titmice cousins gambol through it all with a comforting subdued staccato of orientation chirps that will probably enhance this sturdy biome remnant long after the palazzos go the way of ghost towns.

Downeast Sojourn, Part 3, The Great Heath.

2008-09-08T13:27:00.009-05:00

Sunday a.m.:

Well... this is it. I'll take a Heath walk and be back in time to hit Route One by noon.

I walked in foul weather through the Barrens skirting the edge of Pineo. This consists of a sculpted gravel moraine interlaced and skirted with wavy edges like landform sized scalloping. You can't see into these due to tree density. This is comprised of red and white oak, aspen, sugar maple and other wt soil hardwoods. I'll check it all more thoroughly when I have USGS topo maps instead of DeLorme.

My tracking was sloppy and I wandered with no idea of direction. The overcast stole visibility so I couldn't use Schoodic or Lead Mountain as a benchmark. And by mistaking the alignment of an east-west power line, I only sank further into confusion. The wind might have an answer but I didn't get it.

I flushed a spruce grouse as soon as I stepped onto the Barrens. There were few signs of mammals. I hiked through one plateaus patchwork of side lanes sprouting clusters of portable migrant shacks. I looked into one. It's a crude plywood box frame with an average roof pitch and a stove hole, pallet frames for bedding and a few windows. The bunk frames are two tiered.

The road to Deblois looks ok on DeLorme but it's really only fit for high clearance vehicles capable of fording a stream. Four wheel drive may even be essential. A long slope section is washed out and Schoodic Brook needs a bridge. Bear and moose appear to find it more useful than people do.

It was awful and late by the time I stumbled onto 192. A twelve-mile walk in cold, grim rain dark beckoned. But, another kindly pair of old locals saved my dim bacon.

Yvonne and Wendell Otoury have a flatbed truck and are blueberry tenant pickers. Yvonne is a Mic Mac lady with a fondness for Camels. Wendell has a corresponding fondness for canned beer. He sports a small hat and a large gray beard.

They were pissed because they had leased a field from its owners and were dragooned into picking a lamer one while theirs went fallow. All of this, according to Wendell, smacked of blueberry harvest office politics.

This was a record blueberry year for the Barrens but the local blueberry barons got cold feet early and contracted to purchase cheaper blueberries from Canada as a hedge. They ended up writing off a number of their own fields. Wendell had gathered a crew and lost some due to the slimmed pickings.

Another complaint addressed the crews' supervision. Bosses had em all fan out from the center instead moving in from the edges like a closing seine. This left boxes scattered everywhere.

Last nights rain led a minor stampede of elements, particularly wind. There, under the frail bubble of tent in waning autumn light, I felt an urge to immerse myself in it all. Reveling in my embrace of insignificance I strove to belong to this howling Living World. I battened the tent against the wind and layered a poncho over it to hedge the rain.

Then I slid into the sleeping bag and read passages of St. John Perse aloud to it all choosing excerpts from "Winds", "Rains" and "Exile". Perse lived for a while along this coast after the Nazi's drove him from France and the texts have a marvelous resonance.

"...very great winds over all the faces of this world,

Very great winds rejoicing over the world, having neither eyrie nor resting- place,"

"These were very great winds questing over all the trails of this world,"

"For a whole century was rustling in the dry sound of it's straw, amid strange terminations at the tips of husks of pods, at the tips of trembling things. Like a great tree in its rags and remnants of last winter, wearing the livery of the dead year. Like a great tree shuddering in its rattles of dead wood and its corollas of baked clay-- Very great mendicant tree, its patrimony squandered, its countenance seared by love and violence whereon desire will sing again,"

" The banyan of the rain takes hold of the City,

A hurried polyp rises to its coral wedding in all this milk of living water,

And Idea, naked like a net fighter, combs her girls mane in the people's gardens".

"Sing, poem, at the opening cry of the waters the imminence of the theme,

Sing, poem at the milling of the waters the evasion of the theme..."

" Hatching of golden ovules in the tawny night of the slime

And my bed made, O fraud! On the edge of such a dream,

Where the poem, obscene rose, quickens and grows and unfurls."

" I have chosen a place glaring and null as the bone-heap of the seasons,"

"...To desire the barest place for assembling on the wastes of exile a great poem of nothing, a great poem made from nothing..."

" I have built upon the abyss and the spindrift and the sand-smoke. I shall lie down in cistern and hollow vessel,

In all stale and empty places where lies the taste of greatness."

There it was, the distant percolation of the bog stream, the robust incessance of raindrops, branches and soaked leaves shivering in the wind to the hem and haw of a flapping tent. The lone little voice floats old words in a corresponding percolation to the stream. This is what 'to be' means. The voice fades with the light, as the pages grow dim.

When sunrise returned this morning, the birds rooted for it strenuously. It's just now rising over the trees.

Wow! Distinct shadows!

Sunday: Midday.

Made it!! I walked to the Pleasant River canoe launch. I found an inspired cabin owned by R. Lambrek about 100 feet up road from the river. It had a spring well, bunk beds, gas and stove hookups and a downhill outhouse. On one wall was a faded cartoon of a boy and a girl with the girl's hand in the boy's pants. The boy looks dismayed. The caption: "Now I know why you can run faster, you have a stick shift with two ball bearings". Clever.

The Pleasant is quiet, slim, somewhat bog tannic and obviously perfect for birding and quiet canoe drifting. There is a rickety log bridge that might bear certain kinds of vehicles, a jeep maybe. A stretch of meadowland fringed with acres of hemlock, fir, larch and birch faces westward. Upriver toward the Great Heath an alder corridor makes an awning for the river as tree tips from both banks meet in the middle.

This is the last river in the U.S. with a remnant native Atlantic Salmon population. They once ranged all the way to Chesapeake. Facing north, it's possible that the distant summits are Boarstone or even Katahdin.

The most remarkable thing about this astounding semi-wilderness vista is its provenance. The vast tracts shepherded by these silent mountains exist by default. The region has defeated a few centuries of human effort to wrest much more than comfortable subsistence from it. It punishes speculation and is too far from urban centers, too inconvenient to be wrecked for recreation.

The Pineo Delta marks a glacier's retreat. Boulder trains form eskers running all the way to Katahdin. The moor slopes are strewn with erratics up to the size of a small garage. The moraine lines are wavy and still distinct while the plain is pocked with kettleholes. It must have been a jaw dropper when the glacier first departed.

The ridge top wears aspens searing yellow with detail work provided by fir and birch. Colors elsewhere mottle, dapple, splatter and splash a counterpoint of red, straw, lime tinged evergreen and a flock of varied browns beneath a white laced azure. The pale blonde sand ribbons weave a slender trace of lanes and trails through all.

This is land overlooked. A meager and diminishing road net with a few modest scuffs from the Human Boot Heel are minor intrusions. The living world has room to stretch and express itself with a wealth of ecotones, habitats, patterns of succession and the many attending serendipitous surprises.

This is a scruffy way to hike. The complete absence of any infrastructure to accommodate the usual bloated and boisterous form of American Outdoor Recreation makes it all resemble the way Thoreau wandered through the Maine Woods rather than the RV incongruity of dragging a compact slice of suburb to the edge of Nowhere. It really is Away.

Having got what I wanted, thoughts turn to return along the long run back. I turn back to the campsite to pack it up for the highway. With luck, I'll make Boston by midnight.

The walk back to camp provides an opportunity to collect. Along with pine cones and stones, I find someone's blueberry quota book, an Innu religious pamphlet, (Christian), rules governing employment of migrant farm workers, an odd sign warning of bee swarm hazards and, in a ditch, another about pesticides applied. That completes documentation.

At camp I finish a meal of crackers, cheddar, sardines and wild mushrooms and began road stowage.

Downeast Sojourn. Part 2. Wickyup.

2008-08-30T13:36:00.012-05:00

Thursday, October 3^rd, morning:

I ended up camping alongside Schoodic Bog, south of the mountain.

At this writing, I'm on Beech Ridge. I hear loons on the lake to the Southeast a slow, rising flutter. Some rattling motor gear passed to the North, (Blueberry Harvesters). The emerald sphagnum understory exudes the charm of things tiny and vivacious. A brief strenuous downpour passed through the night to strew glistening droplets over it all.

A Schoodic Bog sunset of a windless day's stillness is a beauty of weather bleached tree skeletons rising over the reed dense marsh framed by undulating copse lines of hemlock and larch. It is bisected by a long abandoned rail fill escorted by a telegraph line long bereft of voltage. The extremes of a centuries seasons have ennobled this human imposition with patinas that slowly submerge it beneath the more robust living world. The Central Maine Railroad tracks lay rippled and rusted beyond repair and the ties beneath draw lichens to their core.

I plan to make it to Cherryfield by noon to top up my larder and get to the Great Heath by sunset. A hitchhike down 182 will squeeze time. Traffic is audible from here. It's a five mile crow fly but a nine mile man walk.

Tunk Lake Settlement: Well, I've crossed another page of the DeLorme Atlas, around the same time as yesterday (from Map 16 to Map 24). Now I'm on Map 25 where I'll spend the remainder of my journey.

This is a 'no trespassing' zone. It might be logging land or some oligarch's hideout. I listen and remain alert to the possibility of inciting property anxieties. I look for signs of recent passing.

I found an abandoned disheveled barn garage containing archaic rust crusted auto parts strewn around a Model-T chassis wearing an old moldering coat of deer shit. Yet another human thing slowly meets obliteration from the grasp of the robust living world.

The road up, (183) passes the Tunk Lake Settlement, which seems to be more prosperous than North Sullivan is. It climbs a ridge offering a long rolling vista west of small hummock mountains amid heath hollows. This forest mixes a bit of pine with the fir and beech with the birch. This is prime color season for leaves lending a soft claret hue to the heaths.

Whoa! I've found a fire wrecked lodge shell. A few stone chimney columns and a crumbled wall remain giving it a resemblance to something left by Shermans March to the Sea. The basement cavity is strewn with charred and rusted stuff. It sits near a cove at the South end of Tunk Lake. The fire was a fairly recent event and may explain why the road was gated. What party and family rituals was this ruin witness to?

It's siting is imperious, commanding a long view North up Tunk Lake's length to 182. I should be within a mile of 182. I think I can hear traffic. I head toward it, pausing to pilfer a large spatula before passing another rotting garage. This one had room for five cars, several of which were giving up their 1930s ghosts to that ravenous living world.

Tunk II: I'm sure I can hear traffic, but I've walked a painful distance since my last scribble.

Again, a red squirrel scolds, there's always one. More southbound warblers filter by. A newer lake cottage lies at the old roads end. The lakeside mantle of forests new to Somerville eyes rewards a long bumpy lope along a rutted skidder trail. A few larger mammals duck my noisy, hunter fearful approach. I've been using the sun to navigate but clouds at times obscure it. Locals would likely shit themselves laughing at the joke of some clod flatlander trying to get around the Blueberry Barrens with a Maine Atlas.

Cherryfield: I made it through the long Tunk Lake stretch. It took hours longer than I predicted and was rendered drab by a long segment beneath a dense balsam fir canopy. A lively old local bearing apples and newspapers to East Machias got me here. Maine grocery outfitted me with crackers, deviled ham and tuna in tins, chaws of smoked dried fish and peanuts.

I'm looking at a placid silvery sliver of Narraguagus framed with the vivid scarlets, oranges and yellows of leaves just turned.

This is a miniaturist's dreamscape. Everything, even Route One, exists on a tiny town scale. The homes gathered about the town center are Reconstruction era Victorians. Many have colorful paint coats with stencil thin detail trim.

Future trips will begin in Cherryfield. It's a clear dooryard for the whole wonderful Down East coast.

The ruin was a huge family lodge set afire by one of its crazier members. Locals say the money made him crazy enough to try an insurance fire. He got caught and couldn't collect but prominence kept him out of jail. So... some strange Fat American owned the whole exhausting walk along the East Side of a good-sized lake. What weird rages were those crumbled walls witness to?

Note: I discovered much later that the ruins were 'Wickyup', the retirement home of Antarctic explorer, Admiral Robert Byrd. It must have been some local scandal when his kid torched it. 183 was built by the government as the Admirals glorified driveway. I later lost his spatula along the East Swift River in Central Massachusetts.

I'm now laughing at wrothful elements while still at their mercy. It rained soon after sunset and on through the night eating sleep and launching an occasional micro-flood invasion of the tent floor. The walk up was wrapped in some confusion. DeLorme is only partially useful here. I'm left with a clouded notion of location. I may be near Pineo Ridge and the fork to the heath. I can't be more than a mile from it.

I saw a harvested blueberry field all nut brown with stubble and carpet flat. The harvest is collected with combines. Edges and terrain unsuitable for machinery are hand raked with short raked into wooden boxes. I could hear the harvesters today and realize they made the sounds I heard yesterday.

Their commencement signaled rains end though the dampness seems to have shortened their day some.

The gentle rain was hardly merciful.

Damage: Pack of papers: Totaled.

Lighter: Lost.

Binoculars: Fogged.

Bird Book: Sogged.

DeLorme: Gettin' tattered.

Flashlight bulb: Dead.

Some other shit got wet that didn't matter. I've got one serious toe blister, another minor one. A day off walking is sorta welcome. I'll just move things up a day and go home Sunday or Monday.

The first note in this crescendo of doom was the spent flashlight bulb. Fucking thing! I bought batteries but forgot to get an extra bulb.

It's good that I didn't camp at night. From that poor beginning unraveled a parade of petty disasters. My last coupla' joints got soaked. I couldn't start a fire to save my soul and dry the bird book. I hope there's sun tomorrow.

I picked a campsite along the curve of an old road that fragments into trails lacing the backside of Pineo. After last night's soaking, I moved further along the road to a more level grassy site with better drainage and a spot of bare sand for fires. A lichen, fern and heather understory merges into upland fir woods along the well drained west edge of the road. The east edge slopes down to an alder filled swale bordering a stream fed boglet. Lichen draped larch and hemlock clusters occupy the drier heath stretches while swamp maples soak up seepage along the streambed. I love this little bog stream filling my canteen! It's awash in thick bright emerald sphagnum padding undulating underfoot. More warbler flocks follow thermoclines toward the Caribbean at dusk. Geese head to Chesapeake far overhead at dawn.

There are a few vesper birds a phoebe peet-peets and some other avian melody defies identification. All is wrapped in a fluvial ambient blend of stream trickle, wind whisper and rain on stiff soaked leaves. I spotted moose tracks near Tunk and late season black bear scat spotted with blueberry remnants.

Downeast Sojourn. 10/3-10/7, 1985. Hancock To Cherryfield.

2008-06-05T20:57:00.010-05:00

I’m at Sullivan Falls, a reverser, due to the meeting of constricted inlet and a fat tidal bore. I just walked the east shore of Crabtree Point. Dawns allotment of lobsterers and schoolkids are on their way.

One latter is in the spin now fishing out a few traps to the gathering of gulls drawn by the chum. A mid inlet ledge wears a thicket of cormorants and gulls.

The ‘falls’ are near a lobster pound and rise twice a day at tidal boundaries. Schoodic Point is south, Hog Bay north. The Crocker House is great. A spiff menu offers snails and peppercorned tenderloin at a single malted bar. There’s antique white furniture and relict wallpaper immaculate and cheery.

A coupla’ kindly local cops got me here sparing a murky walk down Hancock Point. I haven’t seen an eagle yet. Ellsworth is the last blast of Mall before an older world border. Hancock is quietly arty with strains of cello practice leaking from a vacation cottage along an old coastal road. The west shore road begins at a tiny triangle park dedicated to Veterans of the War to Preserve the Union.

O Danny Boy, it’s a long way to Gettysburg and The Wilderness from here. Something croaks now and then..yup.. it’s a raven. It sounds little like ‘nevermore’. The forests are balsam fir and birch with scatterling clumps of pine, maple and oak. The smell is one of the more wonderful breaths my Somerville nostrils have wafted. The orchestra of fragrances amid the olfactory purity of sea washed air far from the ozone zone allows vivid distinctness for each part. The balsamic resin of fir legions provides the foundation threaded with scents of brine, mist, gravel, moist earth and occasional cars.

Penobscot Bay has drawn back its draped mist now with a rising suns encouragement. The local children paint praise graffiti for various kinds of rural vehicles, usually 4-wheel drive and ATV’s, on stretches of pavement on the main road back to route one. I followed a dirt trail along the east shoreline for a while and was allowed a round of glimpse tag with a great blue heron foraging in a fresh water pond laying a stone’s throw from the inlet.

Great Cormorants mingle with smaller Double Crested. ‘Birds of North America’ provides a clear basis for comparison. The Greats have a yellow bill and a white throat patch. Greats tend to be more northa’ here, up in Fundy or Newfie with summers on the southwest coast of Greenland. All cormorants spend a lot of time perched above water on reefs or piers with wings spread to dry and warm in the sun. They are a crafty nightmare for hapless fish.

Soon, I’m to walk across a truss bridge over the narrows to Sullivan and then walk north to Hog Bay and Franklin. Made it over!! Locals call it ‘the Singing Bridge’ cause of tread whistle caused by the metal grid cleats comprising the bridge surface. There isn’t a pedestrian walkway. It is, after all, route one. You can see the water below through the metal web of grillwork. I flushed some kinda’ nester from a piling below.

Simultaneous passage of ten wheelers in the two narrow lanes would be a major trauma for an unlucky pedestrian. The water below is cold and the current races. Weather alternates between warm and hot. The walk to Hog Bay was a gruel as I get used to the weird basket pack. I passed a hardware store and tried to steal a march by hitching, to no avail. I found a few wild apple trees. One had a particularly refreshing rosy tartness. These should cover vitamin C with help from rose hips and blueberries. I’ve got local smoked fish jerky and peanuts for protein.

I saw a grouse covey flush, (they’re in season), and a lone sandpiper on the Hog Bay tide flat. I hear something like a bobwhite in a nearby marsh and a mixed flock of warblers in fall plumage winds along the margins of the field where this is written. Later, I saw a hawk rise. I yielded to temptation to wade in thick tide flat muck. The foot cups soon filled with the incoming tide.

I then washed tired feet in a rainwater stream and collapsed on a wooded bluff overlooking the flats and West Franklin. The forest floor exceeds the thickness of any carpet. A bracken layer of moss and fir needles replaces some spun petroleum goo. It’s dotted with understory shrublets accented with mushroom clusters.

Tiny shack post offices serve these small settlements. Hancock Point and North Sullivan both have classics of the genre. An elder woman customer of these wore a weathered face full of life's epic wrinkles earned from long labors through all extremes of seasons. She recalled Sarakatsan goatherds from the mountains known to Pindar.

Homes along these woodland lanes are all demure folk works. Standardization's sterility is abandoned to more homely matters. Shelter is shaped by each inhabitant's array of solutions to problems of need and want with commendable skill at improvisation and thrift. Many have vast stockpiles of scavenged and salvaged things standing ready to serve whatever purpose their owners' imagination can invent. Avid growling mongrels often guard all this, usually tied.

I hear machinery off to the East, crows South, warblers chipping Northwest, an occasional shot due North and mutterings of motor vehicles from all corners weaving in and out of the soundscape. Six leggers of every sort have explored me haphazardly, although the season's allotment of frosty nights has already put earnest mosquitoes to flight.

A look at Schoodic Mountain convinces me I'll climb it some other day. I head instead to Tunk Lake. Schoodic is bald and a mottled dapple of yellow and orange before sunlight, more patchy green, purple- gray under clouds. Hopefully, I'll make Tunk by sundown and pitch tent. I don't expect to see a store before tomorrow in Cherryfield.

Of West Nile and Adaptations.

2007-06-16T13:25:00.001-05:00

Seattle is still happily free of West Nile Virus and enjoys a large and boisterous crow population. Here, the crows are significantly diminished but I imagine the survivors will select for West Nile resistance over a few generations.

Given that they are significant predators of small song birds, the short term impact seems to be a significant growth in song bird numbers who may either be resistant to West Nile or unappealing to mosquito's.

The environs of little Bedford are a robust symphonic splendor of twitterings that would probably thrill old Messiaen if he ever makes it back here.

It also seems to have favored the Chipmunk population as these charming ground squirrels are everywhere filling yards with their hilarious little alarm squeaks. The deer have gone nuts too in some breeding frenzy and this, in turn seems to favor coyote growth.

Eastern Massachusetts is becoming a poster place for what happens when the land is left alone beyond a bit of now hamstrung real estate speculation. Much of it has returned to an open steady state of climax oak forests and this suggests some bit of hope for the newer parts of the nations human clobbered land. The Moose are back and the Catamounts or cougers now seem to be verifiable, if rare, too.

That aside, Massachusetts is loaded with bug pests I never saw out west. Deer Flies hover avid to chew you, ticks drop quietly from white pine saplings to spread a bit of Lymes and I imagine the city probably has a bed bug problem by now.

The winter is still a saving grace. Seattle is clobbered by runaway introduced invasive plants from english ivy to scotch broom to butterfly bush. None of that shit does well here, the winter wrecks it. And Seattlite embrace of fucking bamboo, really giant crabgrass that can cause huge problems is unlikely to be an issue here.

Goddamn I love real winter.

Withering Winter.

2007-02-22T11:01:00.002-05:00

In the years away in Seattle, I forgot one of the most stirring simple pleasures, the point where winter rots.

I remember it from earliest childhood. The planet tips toward the sun far enough to cause the fat lobe of arctic air to recede and temps rise from the teens to the low 40's. The air is filled with some hint of the south and the sounds of dripping snow melt from the eaves.

It is a cool time for bird noise too as there are calls from boreal and tundra species who consider this to be their version of Miami.

I have spent much of February obsessively checking NOAA infra red Satellite data watching the continent for signs of this movement while huddled against the cold.

Now it's here and the possibilities of a sleeping year can be examined with some ardor.

The Merits of TVlessness.

2007-01-31T12:23:00.001-05:00

In addition to despising car use, I avoid TV like a plague as the web makes it even more worthless than it was before.

I'm literally crosseyed from watching it too closely as a toddler in a reversal of the Mimirs well myth regarding Odin. He gave up an eye to drink from the wisdom well. I half wrecked sight to imbibe imbecility.

And it is mildly galling to see how much time my beloved lefty blogosphere devotes to TV drivel from hacks like Billious O'Biley as it is a reactive posture rather than leapfrogging ahead to excite yearning supporters of a progressive future on how to actually build it.

There is so much education to share on sustainability, clearing house options on how to disengage corporate encroachment and how to finish off the flailing, self destructive GOP with real exciting ideas on how to get off the ratrace oil consumer debt treadmill in a way that allows people to thrive and prosper.

If we generate excitement about a better future with resources at hand people will be thrilled with the empowerment. It is what Liddle Hart would call the indirect method.

Knitting the Fabric of Community.

2007-01-22T11:49:00.002-05:00

The corporate world needs to see us as little walking profit centers and finds it convenient to herd us into isolating demographic corrals to expedite sales and quarterly earnings.

Naturally this has little to do with our actual world and long standing bent to forming community and some succumb to these pernicious promptings and fall into a stylized cartoonish solipsism.

One direct and essential way to begin a national reclamation is to turn away from these hollow promptings and toward one another.

I got started on this blogging adventure because a wise friend who is also a shrewd investor told me about a visionary market analyst who has proposed the theory of 'Little Brother' as the greatest threat to the lying sloppy content oligopoly such as ABC News.

Google's 'pipeline' business model allows nearly anyone to report news, and so on and based on my preferences, the citizen blogosphere is leaving the Rupert Murdoch model behind.

Why wait for them to figure out charming satirical whimsy wedded to thought provocation when Citizen Boo is already on it?

When I lived in Seattle, I was acquainted with employee number 5 at Amazon. He left and ended up wealthy, but we'd have these conversations about 'Internet ubiquity' based on the number of search engine citations for something.

A slimier version dreamed up by marketing shills is now called 'going viral'. The ubiquity I propose is a more ethical, deliberate and thoughtful thing that intends to unite rather than exploit by 'viral' niche compartmentalization..

I try to be conscientious about serving my constituent readers in several areas of discourse because I see potentially uniting commonalities between progressive political bloggers, anti consumerist initiatives like SF Compact, fans of Avante Garde Jazz and the alt rock night club demi monde.

I readily move in all those spheres and a few more and when I see some mosaic pattern of interrelated community cohere through my modest efforts it lends a sense of purpose to my crackpot life.

The Merits of Carlessness.

2007-01-19T10:58:00.000-05:00

I have always organized my life around a pre-fossil fuel human scale. I live in cities whenever possible as all other environs in most of America are geared to auto ownership.

I'm currently stuck in a quaint, upscale metro Boston suburb and haven't felt so isolated in decades. What with the exceptionally poor quality of public transportation, I may as well be in the North Pole.

This will improve with the end of winter as I do have a bicycle and am looking for some workable initial living space in town to resume life there.

To me, the advantages of a carless life greatly outweigh the transient inconveniences. For example, there are a suite of expenses from insurance, car loan payments, fuel and repair costs and depreciation that do not impact me at all. Then I also lose stress from attempting to drive around the area's horribly congested roadways.

It might surprise you to know how many friends I have who also opt for no car or minimal use of the things. And yet they all live fairly productive lives and will be well equipped to handle any challenges ahead as the oil era winds down.

There are a growing number of game plans to shift away from oil but none offer the elegance of simply abandoning personal motor vehicles until some significant oil less mode takes hold. The biodeisel option may not work to produce the real quantities of fuel needed to run the planetary vehicle fleet without causing even more catastrophic problems.

The utter configuration of land use patterns, such as vast car dependent suburbs may well be one of the biggest dislocation hazards staring at us if the Oil era tanks.

More efficient public transit infrastructure will eventually salvage environs like the droll little suburb that now houses me but the real remote places will be left in the lurch.

Reading Sign.

2007-01-08T09:54:00.000-05:00

Donald Stokes wrote a wonderful guide to reading the living world as if it were a book. "Animal Tracking and Behavior" reconnects a half blinded modern denizen with skills that were once common.

You learn to make sense of subtle deer antler rubs on branches, evidence of porcupine lunches or the more striking bear claw marks on beech trees bears use to demonstrate tallness.

I've had hours of fun hiking around New England green spaces and the regions National Forests applying this learning.

Over time I came to conclude it is really an exercise in honing perception, in seeing that is applicable in nearly every facet of living skillfully.

For example, you land in a new city and wonder about job prospects or housing. Craigslist becomes a wealth of statistical data on both with the number totals posted at the top of main category fields such as "jobs" or "housing".

Having landed a job, you become alert to the nuances of inevitable office politics and begin to fathom the decision basis as well as the employers role in the broader economy sector it belongs to.

As you move toward added learning about the human condition and current affairs you read sign some more and gain a potential to see ahead of the curve and foresee outcomes.

The basic sign reading skill can be further enhanced by developing some capacity to evaluate likelihoods and statistical distribution.

Of course, it is essential to have an urge to seek truth, however dissonant, rather than merely seeking reinforcement of what you want to believe.

We now live in a time where our cognitive capacities are continuously disturbed by imposed media static primarily bent on selling us something.

It reduces our once great human capacities to the level of bored crib bound infants fascinated by the shiny Mylar mobile twisting in the breeze overhead.

An essential precondition to regaining this majestic capability would be to unplug the media drivel stream to the greatest extent practible and resume the far more satisfying and challenging trajectory of maturation and understanding, one of our odd species' primary strengths.

A Caribbean Style Stew as I Imagine it.

2007-01-06T10:21:00.001-05:00

I love aromatic spices and am more fond of pork than I probably should be. These elements meet in a kind of bean stew I make served with rice.

I start with bacon to render out the fat and remove the crisped bacon to set aside. Then a base vegetable blend hits the sizzling bacon fat including fresh ginger slices, an onion, celery and a bell pepper. Once this begins to caramelize, it's time for a blend of clove powder, cumin, cardamom, paprika or pimenton la vera, cinnamon, nutmeg and a minor bit of a cayennish thing.

I have chunks of pork to one side and when the spice blend begins to react to the heat, the pork chunks go in for searing. Once that part is done, I add some canned bean thing, 2 cans. Purists would go with dried beans but canned red, black, pinto or kidney beans work very well.

After a bit of a simmer, I add some green, either spinach, collard or mustard and follow with the more delicate veggies like broccoli. A bit of barbecue sauce, Pickapeppa, or a spoonful of sauce mustard is another phase option.

Fresh garlic, lots, goes in next to last followed by the crisped bacon.

Now the rice is it's own special thing. I like long grain jasmine rice and prepare it with some fat, usually olive oil, butter or chicken fat, lots of turmeric, a bit of salt and maybe saffron.

Then, when it's done, I whisk in fresh chopped cilantro and chopped scallions. An honest cheap red wine works well as a beverage.

It is good poverty food and I hope the US pork industry moves away from its miserable husbandry practices to adopt the free range methods one finds in Spain.

Precarious Vicariousness. Part 2. Cartoon Nation.

2007-01-02T15:58:00.000-05:00

I have long pondered this Vicariousness problem. In the prior post, I covered the 'what' of it. And so now I'll try to cover the 'why'.

Once upon a time people had a compass, some inner direction to shape their destinies and navigate life for better or worse. The arrival of generic mass market trappings ushered in a time of shift to the 'radar' or a focus on what 'other's ' think as conformity extended its influence.

David Riesman covered this more skillfully than I can in his masterful work, 'The Lonely Crowd'.

But I'm beginning to wonder if the radar is falling into disrepair to give way to a dismaying abandonment of social development as it was formerly known.

It would appear that we now have an embrace of the vicarious to an extent of entire subcultures descending into little more than stylized cartoons called 'lifestyles' that resemble injection molded personalities entirely crafted of received media imposition with the distinct humanness of many becoming a thing at the margins.

On the broadest level, many women and men have become stylized cartoons of what they assume their roles to be based on cues from TV. And from there, the cartoonishness is further shaped by lifestyle affiliations from Goth to Hip Hop Gangsta to Neo Con, Fundamentalist Christian, White Supremacist and so on.

And many are soaked in a vicarious marinade of moviedom whereby a most telling outcome of 9/11 was how it seemed like a movie. Leisure activity is increasingly given to conspicuous waste at bizarre Theme Parks, wholly artificial simulacra rather than participation in the actual world.

Cues for daily conduct emanate from exhibitionist spectacles of kangaroo court Jerry Springer messes or the oddly named Reality Shows. A numbness sets in to desensitize the hapless from the consequences of many powerful hazards bearing down from eco catastrophe to Orwellian ascendancy of pitiless corporate oligarchy.

And those of us who greet the imposition of manufactured personality often find ourselves wondering what sort of tumult will finally break the spell and will it be survivable?

The Bay Circuit Trail.

2006-12-25T18:12:00.005-05:00

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts embarked on a wonderful green space preservation experiment at the behest of "Charlie Eliot" .

Now, in the decades that have rolled by this trail system involving cooperation from 50 plus bickering cities and towns is more or less done.

One of the marvels of it is simply the surprising diversity of landscape and habitat in the comparatively small land mass from the Merrimac River to the cedar swamp lands north of Cape Cod.

The Wisconsin Glacier sculpted what is now Massachusetts in a number of fascinating ways.

North of Boston its slower movement left a strew of large boulder erratics, some nearly the size of a house, long sinuous eskers that are actually raised stream beds, odd pound cake shaped hills called drumlins and beautiful kettle hole ponds, of which Walden is the most famous.

South of Boston the glacier moved faster and created sand barrens with larger particle size and faster drainage to make a plant community more suited to dryer conditions, such as scrub oaks and pitch pine. The region was also renewed by fire so many plant species selected for fire based seed release.

There are a number of vast Atlantic White Cedar Swamps such as the Hockomock, south of Stoughton, that have become de facto wilderness areas housing bobcat and deer.

There are subtle differences in coasts. The North arc that includes Newbury and Ipswich is a transition zone to rock coasts and cobble beaches of Maine.

The South arc shares sandy similarities with the great beaches that follow the Atlantic Coast to the mangrove swamp regions along the Florida/Georgia boundary.

Neil Jorgenson's Sierra Club Guide to Southern New England is extremely useful for enhanced appreciation of this diversity in such a compact area as greater Boston and Al French has created a very useful website for anyone in the area seeking to explore this trail system.

There are significant web resources among the town jurisdictions, fed entities responsible for the National Wildlife Refuges and private non profits , most notably the Trustees of Reservations and the Massachusetts Audubon Society.

Bateson Learning Theory and Metalogs.

2006-12-25T15:13:00.004-05:00

Gregory Bateson was one of the 20th centuries' great thinkers and his specialty was learning theory. He was married for a time to another great thinker, Margaret Mead, and they had a daughter who may well still teach at Harvard.

A basic explanation of learning theory turns on levels of learning. The most basic level of learning might be the way a planeria 'learns' to sense levels of heat and light and moves to the zones most useful to survival.

The next level is one we are familiar with whereby one begins to make conclusions about basic information. There are new elements such as play or pretend versions of contingent real circumstances. Squirrels do this as do we.

Level three is where we begin to derive conclusions about level two like those great 'everything I know is wrong' epiphanies that sometimes visit a life in some great break through that leads to a more dynamic participation in ones life, a shedding of baggage.

This, of course, can also be hazardous and lead to madness.

Those of you who wonder about all this are encouraged to find a copy of his "Steps Toward an Ecology of the Mind", a classic.

Now, in the winter of 2002, I ended up having a lively e mail correspondence with a brilliant Englishwoman I met through here semi scabrous naughty erotic literature web site. She is a math teacher somewhere in the midlands, an old radical who loved Gang of Four shows when she went to college in Leeds.

We became great pen pals for a time but never discussed dirty stuff. I'd explain my weird Seattle existence and share ideas so one time I told her about Bateson's meta dialogs and here is here wonderful reply. Best to you"Emily" wherever you are, (spellings are in her Brit English).

"So I was reading the Metadialogue about meta messages, and then I got it, the progression from baby to adult understanding of messaging,(and the annoying way many knuckleheaded blokes are still stuck at a child level of development)."

"1. You start off, as a child, having to be sent explicit messages - metamessages - about what your messages are going to be about:

- this is play; this is serious; this is instruction."

"2.But soon you get so reading the metamessages, that you start to play with them.

- you use teasing, irony, sarcasm, taking things literally, exaggeration, to pretend you mistook one metamessage for another."

"3. Then you get better, and you blend the message and the metamessage together,

-weaving sense and nonsense, blurring reality and fiction - is a documentary recreation documentary, or fiction?"

"4. You end up withdrawing from metamessages altogether,

-leaving just the message and letting you decide what metamessage you'd like to impose on it."

"5. Till one day you realise you don't have to impose,

- you can just let the message be and admire it from all metamessage angles."

"Soooo, what annoys me about the people who email me with that aged question, is this all real, is they haven't moved off the childish level one and I'm at level five."

"Thanks Chris, that helped a lot to answer that bug-bear."

Damn, I miss her.

Causeway Daze Part 3. Ginmill Tide Pool.

2006-12-25T14:40:00.000-05:00

Like a Pacific tide it flows, one nightly cycle through a salt marsh of Scene. Waves of moment wash vari-colored plankton of Audience past the many gin mill pools where sedentary bands extend siphons and flagella to sweep hapless scenesters into digestion tracts with enzymes of illusory significance.

As the tide ebbs, beyond last call, the scribbler crabs scuttle a sideways rummage through memory's detritus seeking fragments of decayed meaning to masticate into copy columns in which eggs of exhortation hype may hatch into the next big thing and six figure advances.

And then... the moment of stillness beyond exertions of anonymous night crews sorting spent beer bottles and emptying ash trays.

Beyond this insular petri dish of teeming nocturnes who dream away daylight lies the swirl of terrestrial cycles with traffic on the threes and news summaries on the hour and half hour.

Although the terrestrial and the marine interact at the strand line of day job, laundromat and supermarket, they are largely discrete from one another.

And, as the ripples of amplitude carry ever further from the point where the trend dropped, still other cycles, older, more familiar to denizens of a distant past, express periodicity that increasingly converge with actual daily adjustments of the revolving global axis before solar radiance.

And, believe it or not, near the point where the sine wave flattens, vestiges of village and stone age still cling, still cling.

The Advent of Eco Tech.

2006-12-25T09:45:00.002-05:00

Some years back, I read a piece in the Economist, a mixed bag rag, about the impact and time frame of technology innovations.

It began with the invention of the Steam Engine by James Watt and provided a time line for the duration of steam tech as a creator of wealth. It ran with this summary all the way up to the present with the World Wide Web introduction as the latest engine of wealth creation.

One striking feature of the piece was observation of time frame shrinkage such that the combined impact of all manner of transforming tech introductions.

For example, the impact time frame of WWW is comparatively shorter than the decades of influence the steam engine had. The essence of the time frame definition is keyed to the duration of active innovation churning before the tech becomes mundane.

I look around for the next big thing as an odd hobby, an aspect of 'reading sign' that I'll describe in another post.

I'm increasingly convinced that the next phase of transformation will be a twist on the model, a comprehensive integration of all past innovations to fix the collateral messes left by them.

I call this 'Eco Tech'. It will be marked by a drive toward a vast sustainability retrofit and adjustment of the old sprawl.

There is great excitement over its potential in the pacific coast. The city of Seattle even produced a very useful web page on its value to home builders and owners.

With a tightening market for home sales, 'green' homes are likely to buck the slow sales trend and sell more quickly than the inefficient and toxic conventional versions.

Alas, builders and contractors are a hide bound lot, particularly here in Metro Boston where there is little evidence of a scene for this. There is one out in the Connecticut River Valley.

And yet the greater Boston area is uniquely poised to be a critical Eco Tech center and recover the initiative it lost to Silicon valley in the info tech phase.

For example, a number of exciting products are coming on line often from small start ups. The advent of white LED light allows a whole new role for low energy home lighting where walls literally emit a much higher quality than conventional incandescent bulbs.

There are 'smart' thermostatic controls coming, low toxin paints, demand based water heating systems, methane capture systems to convert sewer system byproducts into usable energy, improved windmill systems, photovoltaic systems and so on.

If you project this retrofit potential across the vast, tired national infrastructure it suggests a staggering amount of work that simultaneously increases value by yielding far higher system efficiencies than the current sloppy fossil fuel model.

The blog link section now includes several important glimpses of this future. Of these, the most interesting is probably a B2B board called 'The Green Pages.

Give it a click when you tire of my drivel and look at what may well be without any help or hindrance from the reign of the Imbecile in Chief.

Elevated Meatloaf.

2006-12-20T17:25:00.004-05:00

Meatloaf is a seemingly humble thing, a relic of 50's kitchens.

But if you take it as a food concept departure point for elevation it goes from the droll to the sublime.

All meatloaves need 2 or 3 eggs and some bread crumbish thing from crushed Wheaties to mashed triscuits to ensure binding and if hamburger is used, it should be the 75% grade as the leaner stuff resists binding.

350 degrees F. is a good temperature and an hour or internal temp of 165 degrees is a good cooking guideline.

Those are the essentials. Beyond that any combination of ground beef, pork, turkey or veal for the truly heartless, will work well.

Chicken and lamb are probably out. Ground lamb is its own world, Shawarma, and chicken has a lame texture.

Beyond that, the possibilities are wonderful. Among the additions to make a fun flavor and texture mix would be shallots, leeks, garlic or scallions for the stink lily family.

Walnuts rule and almonds may as well or chopped pecans, maybe even hazelnuts.

Celery is welcome or chopped bell peppers of whatever color, hot peppers maybe if you gotta have a scoville factor and mushrooms are all great plant kingdom things. I've used dried black fungus 'shrooms from Asian markets and fresh baby portobellos.

And then, another oddly fun thing are tinned smoked oysters. Oyster flavor and beefish flavor get along swimmingly. The chinese oyster ketchup is another variant on the oyster flavor element. You can also go wild with worcestershire or A-1 Steak sauce.

For the spice element, the triumvirate of herbs, sage, rosemary and thyme clearly lead, paprika is another option or its sexy Spanish cousin, pimenton la vera, a bit of white ground pepper or coarse crushed black tellicherry peppercorns as your whim suggests, and also some coarse sea or kosher salt.

Meatloaf is a creation that embraces an informed whimsy.

Once you've dumped all this stuff in a big bowl, knead it with your washed hands and blend it all around. Meatloaf is primal. Then fashion it into a long flatish loaf maybe a few inches high and the length of the standard broiler pan, width will depend on batch size but 6 to 8 inches seems to work well.

Pimenton La Vera.

2006-12-17T18:36:00.003-05:00

It has to be my favorite form of paprika. The spanish invented it and it is "like fine carinthian leather". I usually buy the dulce or sweet form but a hot form is available too.

The Basques make a wonderful meat marinade of it using just pimenton, olive oil, garlic and sea salt.

Precarious Vicariousness. Part 1.

2006-12-17T14:46:00.000-05:00

“Shakespearean fish swim the sea far away from land. Romantic fish swim in nets coming to the hand. What are all these fish that lie gasping on the strand?” W.B. Yeats.

Two thirds of America’s GDP is tied to convincing consumers to buy some good or service. All other output shrinks by comparison. Astonishing effort is directed to corral these creatures into a purchase pen. Since very little beyond food and shelter is actually needed, much of the effort goes toward manipulating wants and whims.

In the critical ‘holiday’ quarter, desperately earnest cheerleading begins in tandem with Halloween and continues right up to Christmas Eve. This is the height of the great upstream spawning rush as predators leap to reap rewards.

The main focus of want manipulation is to create dissatisfaction with status to be solved by the possession of something. The implied premise is that target’s life is only valid when avid purchasing is steady and prodigious.

It is essential to instill a drive to emulate. In emulation there is salvation.

What is exhibited for emulation? Our time has seen a ceaseless refinement and expansion of projected postures with an attached gamut of purchase options for posture embellishment in the quest for ‘lifestyle’.

“Lord of the Manner” is a popular patrician affluence beloved by the country club neocon crowd and their imitators. This one is a classic dating back here to southern plantation owners and northern merchant princes. It had a spectacular run in the robber baron era among resource hogs of every description and showed up again in the 1920’s, 1950’s and ever since the 1980’s.

It is wildly popular and expresses widespread distaste for an actual republic and yearning for some return to feudalism.

“Rugged Pioneer” dates back to Davey Crockett myths and hit its stride when Andrew Jackson was president. It works like a charm with rurals or anti-social malcontents who imagine themselves as ‘mavericks’.

“Gold Digger/Technocrat” goes back to the forty-niners and 19^th century Mechanics Societies. It is a callow thing beloved by yuppies and the cohort of feminists who strive to be as awful as men at their worst.

“Youth and Beauty” is a classic and is applied to prey on the narcissism of the young or most women up to menopause.

“Playboy” is the fun seeking toy loving hedonist peacock counterpart to the court fops of feudal times and now has an entertaining version in the ‘Metro-Sexual’.

Pitches are often combined to make odd hybrids like Rugged Pioneer and Playboy or Technocrat with Youth and Beauty, geek chic.

I just dreamed these stereotypes with help from a few glasses of wine but later saw a PBS special on marketing manipulations that actually provided some of the real terms in circulation.

“Urban Achievers” is the euphemism for Technocrats, “Shotgun and Pickup Truck” is applied to the Rugged Individualists. The predators find cages for the prey.

The stalking really revs up when it’s time to snare the hapless and financially inept young.

First they break the kids down by gender so guys become ‘Mooks” while the women become “Midriffs”. Then this base group gets sliced and diced into “Young Influentials”, the trend setters, and “Early Adopters”, or the kids most likely to jump on these trendwagons.

This is just a short summary of how affiliation with vicarious impulses can be used to cheat people of their uniqueness by making a Haven’t-A-Heart chump trap to transform the prey into a jacklit profit center.

I wonder what Carl Jung would make of this vile co-optation of his great gift of archetype theory?

It is essentially an engineered alchemy of transform a human into a cipher part of a crowd.

Elias Cannetti describes crowd symbols in his magnificent work, “Crowds and Power”.

For example, he cited the waves of the ocean for England to reflect it’s maritime heritage or Oak forests for the Teutonic mystique embraced by Germany.

He neglected to suggest one for the USA but two good candidates might be the Treasure Trove to emphasize the hegemony of money grubbing in the collective overmind or maybe a Hall of Mirrors to cover the amplified narcissism that grips the nation.

Most anxieties attending American life have long issued from greed wrestles or the false compensations of excessive self love. Consider John Smith’s early tales of abundance in his boosterish reports back to England or the rise of Hollywood to drive droves toward dreams of being the next movie star.

The Revolution here was a Greed Argument over dry goods tariffs and the Civil war was a variant over the allowable rules regarding labor compensation. Those crazy southerners figured labor should be free as long as you could find a way to utterly dehumanize the laborers.

Most of America’s manic mass settlement waves rolled from reports of easy money from gold strikes, land grabs or stock manias in a churning cycle of boom and bust.

According to Baudrillard, a notable difference between the new world and the old is our relation to the land. Their world is rooted in an ancient given they struggle to fathom. Ours is a recent take.

We superimpose the contents of our imaginations on its obstinate surface and reshape it weirdly in our own ever changing image in a haphazard heedless rush without much thought beyond an eye to the ledger or whether it’ll make us look good.

Thus, much of our human landscape is a jumbled hodge podge of imported simulacra cast away from context. It started out as quaint folk art features and has increasingly become a corporate contraption bent on erasing distinctness of place to favor brand expedience to a point where an auto mile strip mall zone in Seattle is identical to one in Boston. Yes, the ‘there’ has lost its there with a diminishing sense of an outside.

And the contrivance is near lethal in its stupefying, numbing banality.

Janet's Hens.

2006-12-13T11:51:00.003-05:00

My neighbor Janet is sort of role model for the other young hausfrau's on the block here in the heart of august Bedford Massachusetts. She heats with wood, has an amazing old wood stove, converted to natural gas, diligently home schools her daughters and keeps two hens that range around the neighborhood.

The hens are a hoot. There is something soothing about their clucking and scratching as they browse the yards. I toss 'em various kitchen scraps and they now rush over when I appear to see what I have.

I imagine the proto-hens from long ago Asian meadows like their cousin, the jungle fowl. And I think of their local wild relatives, the native Ruffed Grouse and the introduced Golden Pheasant.

They all belong to the Galliforme family and share that odd waddle, odd wattles and the clucking thing. When I lived in Seattle, someone near the bus stop kept hens and a rooster and it was always comforting to hear the rooster crow in a blend with cawing crows and the 'shaq shaq' sound of the Stellers Jay flashing its striking metallic blue around as if pleased to out blue the twilight sky.

Larder Legwork.

2006-12-12T12:09:00.004-05:00

As 1999 wound down, I heard an interview with a food historian on NPR. He brought tidings of a shift away from the field ration, shelf life model so beloved by the industry since World War Two. In its place is a return to the values of the late 19^th century when American gastronomy was lively, inventive and avid for flavor.

I see the signs of this vivacity on my own larder stocking excursions and hasten to embrace it. While many browsers still linger in the land of TV dinner simulacra with its budget biting markup, the cohort of slow food base ingredient fans is steadily growing.

The droll shelf life fixation era was a cold war spin off. The whole nation became a garrison on eternal war footing and the civilians got to share in this by chow offerings that were a dressed up counterpart to trench food.

MFK Fisher has a wonderful segment in one of her essays from the period where she describes the essences of various cuisines, olive oil in Italian food, butter in French food or sour cream in Russian food.

For American food the best essence she could find was the flavor of the can.

Real cuisines lingered through this trench food era in backwaters, urban and rural. Urban ethnic garrisons held together well in the cities and clung to flavorful food ways with an understandable reluctance to trade the wealth for the poverty of mass market pottage.

Vivacious food folkways remained in all regions of the nations sparsely settled farm and forest lands. Country folk were often too poor or too remote from the supply chain to abandon their beloved cobblers, chowders, squirrel pies and stews.

The Supermarkets of my Cold War youth were monuments in every detail to drab industry notions of ways to belie our palate instincts for manufacturers’ expedience. The bleak cellophane pack tomatoes are a common example. Suburban supers were particularly devoid of any choices beyond the pale of imagined wasp blandness. Matzo dough or kosher salt were fairly exotic and rare, let alone endive.

Chef Boyardee and La Choy stood in as withered booby prize parodies of actual Italian and Chinese food and there were insipid red sauces from Prince.

The Supermarkets of my dotage veer wildly toward bewildering choice overload edging toward preposterous with wasabi Doritos and ‘interactive’ breakfast cereals featuring sugar crap edible jello toys that burst into the matrix when the milk is added.

At least our modern diversity based versions c an induce a sense of wonder or a touch of delight if we but allow it.

My Seattle larder management routines varied depending on whether my venue was a supermarket or a bevy of ethnic shops.

If a supermarket was involved, usually the upscale and misnamed “Thriftway” or sometimes the downscale and sloppy “Albertsons”, I’d mainly browse the outer perimeter where the real food is and steer clear of most aisles where the packaged stuff is. I avoid ‘brands’ for the most part and save on the marketing department tariff by favoring generic.

I start with the produce zones to grab Portobello or smaller version Crimini ‘shrooms, maybe some mustard or collard greens for red bean stews, broccoli heads, and the various Alea family members, garlic, shallots, leeks, scallions or onions. I’d keep an eye out for seasonal things like garlic flowers.

Then it’s a short jaunt to coffee where I’d pass on the pretentious Millstone stuff and favor that old classic, 8 O’Clock, ground to espresso fineness. Sometimes I’ll snag a chunk of Stilton en route.

The dairy zone follows where I’d get whatever butter is cheapest, sour cream, parmesan shreds and some kind of cooking cheddar or jack. Washington dairy prices are high and local practice favors coloring all cheddar with annatto to give it that unreal orange color. The Tillamook brand is terrible and acts like latex caulking compound when heated so I’d get the better, cheaper “Western Family” versions.

The meat zone beckons and I generally rummage among the economy pork and beef cuts because they have more flavor in addition to lower cost. Then I’ll check chicken quarters and see what sort of deli ends or bacon rinds are about. The west favors thicker bacon cuts and a bag of ends can be wonderfully cheap.

Steaks are now cut to reduce fat and end up tasting like beefy cardboard. The stuff now called ‘Chuck’ is actually the fat marbled form that pleased the old timers. For pork I like country ribs for the broiler, butts for the bean and rice projects and the occasional shoulder for a long roast.

This covers the periphery and then a run through a few aisles gets me pasta, usually linguini and egg noodles or whatever is on sale. The canned beans are nearby and I range through pintos, pinquito’s, cannelloni’s or turtle beans in cans

I seek out canned hash, smoked mussels and whim bits and a condiment mix that includes balsamic or cider vinegar, cheap barbecue sauces and mustard. Canned and packaged items are treated as base ingredients for ‘elevating’. The addition of fresh ingredients in many variations provides the distinctness and quality that’s missing in the off-the-shelf form.

Some gaudy pastry is added for sweet tooth appeasement and seafood selection is haphazard, usually the farmed oysters as the broader fin fish industry is an increasing eco-blight with collapsed stocks, damage from fish farming and so forth.

I also rarely bought Washington labeled products as they tend to involve a price hike without any corresponding quality.

There are a few interesting variations in selection when I visit Asian and Mexican markets. For one thing, they have a 30% price reduction on comparable items such as chicken quarters so they increasingly get the main share of my larder budget.

They also have many useful and fascinating processed goods such as unusual mushrooms or deep fried tofu and lack the aggressive brand hype of American stuff. The best Asian markets are run by Vietnamese and another part of the fun is knowing that I’m helping immigrants get ahead in their adopted home instead of contributing to the disturbing volatility and dislocation rising from shareholder value. I’m no fan of the equity markets or cost adds for marketing and advertising departments.

The Asian markets also offer unusual things like fresh turmeric roots and the ingredients for Southeast Asian pad Thai style wet curries. And they are a jolly lot who like to give me amazing calendars when Tet New Year is at hand.

They mainly lack cheese so that still brings me to supermarkets. Mexican markets have interesting indigenous cheeses like Casa Fresca and a complementary array of herbs, chilies and spices as well as unusual onions. They also have interesting ways of cutting beef, accordion style, that’s perfect for texas style barbecues.

The past decade has also seen an exponential increase in small cottage industry foodmakers of every description including heirloom food revivals. All are more appealing and probably more profitable at ttheir scale of operations than the giant ugly conglomerates.

Slob Chic.

2006-12-10T09:12:00.004-05:00

With steamrolling consumption bearing down, avid anti consumers will do well to live like Henry Thoreau. From Walden we get this gem, “I’d rather sit on a pumpkin and have it to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion”.

Of course, a bit more grace and vivacity than the priggish Concord Curmudgeon makes the run more fun but his basic premises are sound and increasingly essential to ward off encroaching affluenza.

We aren’t likely to be crowded on velvet cushions but the search for pumpkin options well rewards the effort.

.Henry is Slob Chic’s grandpa but it was a common feature of life as recently as the material starved home lives during World War Two when people just made more of their household stuff because they couldn’t buy it due to strict rationing of nearly anything needed for the war effort.

The aesthetic is grounded in enhanced utilitarianism. A free object from the nations bloated avalanche of castoff stuff is MORE valuable than a store bought object sold to serve the same purpose.

Why give Ikea a dime for shelving when the land provides milk crates, produce boxes, wine cases, boards and such in overwhelming abundance?

A wary look at curbside trash will often reward the searcher with all kinds of usable furniture up to and including a couch. Upgrades are always possible and the rejects can finally resume their trek to the landfill Valhalla or recycle rebirth.

The castaway stuff of our complex and demented material is, by itself, unimaginable wealth to impoverished peoples of the Sahel who make most of their usable stuff from sticks and baling wire.

Consider the plastic milk jug. This thing can be by turns a plant pot, a funnel, lamp shade or furnish good stock for guitar picks or any other purpose suggested by need for the plastic.

With a little imagination and appreciation for a materials intrinsic utility potential as it careens through the trash stream, one can eliminate entire categories of costly consumer clutter and its bite on the wallet.

And, when you move, you can always send it back on its journey to the landfill knowing you gave it a temporary reprieve.

And the best part is the reserve snob gloating one can apply to guests. “Hey, check it out, we just tricked this whole dump out and it did'nt cost a dime, have a glass of the great Syrah we bought with the money while we wait for the steak to come out of the broiler.”

There’s the rub. The best way to rein the heartless corporate world is to stop giving them so much money. Here’s a fun hierarchy.

When you need some consumer thing run this string. 1. Can I scrounge it? 2. Is it in a thrift shop, yard sale or second hand source? 3. Can I get it from a small family owned business or wholesaler?

A thorough Thoreau run down this chain may be the only real power of direct choice we can bring to bear on laissez faire run amok.

You may well discover that the number of things you need to feed the mega hogs maw are few and comfortably far between. That, in turn, lets you save more or work less and reduce your exposure to the other side of the merciless laissez faire coin, that shabby travesty called ‘the workplace’.

And if it catches on we may one day see the pests shrink back from their drive to make little profit centers of us all.