The headline in The Guardian today was Hagel says US will continue to lead but admits: ‘We must listen more’. I thought that was what got us in trouble with Angela Merkel.
All posts by Steve Stern
Day two: leaving New England and going Down East
Back in Maine, we got to the Damariscotta River area in the dark, stumbling into the Newcastle Publick House – featuring organic, natural, wild and local produce and seafood, including local oysters – where we had, surprise, oysters and, actual surprise, duck pizza. The oysters were great, the pizza a disappointment. One of the problems with traveling the way we do is that we don’t know, exactly, where we are going to end up so we are often looking for a place to stay after dinner, at the dinner table. Smartphoning around, we found the nearby Brannon Bunker Inn where we spent the night. It turned out to be a good choice.
The next morning was bright and clear after a night, we were told, that had dropped to 22°F. The Inn Mistress gave us lots of good, free, tourist advice along with our free continental breakfast, and we were off. In the dark, we had snuck into an almost archetypically picturesque part of Maine. Little villages, narrow lanes – lanes sounds more accurate than roads, but they were really roads going somewhere – rocky coastlines, and perfect cemeteries. OK, every place in New England has perfect cemeteries but one of these dated back to a shipwreck in 1815 (Halloween so fits here).
One of the suggestions made by the Brannon Bunker Mistress was to drive down to South Bristol, It is a real working town, not a tourist town and it has the biggest swing bridge in Maine. We really didn’t know what the biggest swing bridge in Maine would be like, so it seemed a no brainer to make that our first real destination. South Bristol was as picturesque as promised and the largest swing bridge in Maine was winsomely small. I took lots of pictures, including a portrait of the Bridge Master,
But the best shot was a video taken by Michele as the bridge opened.
[pb_vidembed title=”Swing Bridge – South Bristol, Maine” caption=”” url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zndy_eS4rc” type=”yt” w=”680″ h=”383″]
We thought South Bristol and its inhabitants were charming but I am not so sure that the feeling was reciprocal.
When we first started talking about going to Maine, we thought lighthouses along with lobster, but we kinda forgot about it until we wandered down to the tip of the Pemaquid Peninsula and there was the Pemaquid Point Light Station in its austere elegance.
The building I liked even better was the bell tower built before the days of the fog horn (which I think of as an iconic sound of San Francisco).
About this time, Michele said, Enough dilly dallying around, it is lunch time, we’ve got to go to the oyster place we saw last night. Last night, we had passed what we suspected would be the holy grail of oysters. A barn, an oyster place – the sign said Oysters Wine – within a 100 yards, or so, of Wiley Cove, itself, in the Damariscotta River Estuary. Presumably this would be the home of the Wiley Point oyster (Crassotrea virginica). When we got there, I’m pretty sure that the car hadn’t even stopped rolling before Michele lunged for the door.
But the sitting-in-the-backyard, eating oysters freshly-plucked-from-the-water season was over. This was the kind of place that sold high-end, locally-made, souvenirs – I am sure that is not the right word – like hand woven blankets for $660.00(US), but no oysters… after Columbus Day. All we – when I say we here, I really mean Michele – could do was talk about oysters which Michele and Warren did for what seemed like an hour.
We did find out that The New York Times had gone on an oyster quest some time ago and the winner was a Damariscotta River Estuary oyster that, for some strange reason, they ate at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore. We also got some pointers on good local restaurants. The best one which had entrees for only $95.00 and would have cost $400.00 in Manhattan, we skipped, but we did go to a local, picturesque pub for a late lunch of oysters with a beer (to drown our sorrows).
Then it was north – really mostly east – towards Acadia, passing one picturesque town after another. Most of these were working towns or working small cities where acual people lived (actual people that ate alot of potatoe chips, in some cases).
Every time we crossed a river on a bridge, or an estuary on a high bridge, we would both go Oh! Look, and keep driving into the fading light thinking OK, we’ve got to come back.
When we rounded a corner and saw the Penobscot Narrows Bridge, we were both stunned. It was totally unexpected. Scrambling to find out what it was, we read, probably on Michele’s iPhone, that it was the highest bridge observatory in the world. Later, on the interwebs, I read that, as a homage to the Washington Monument which is partially built with granite from nearby, the towers are built in the same shape. But, for me – as a Californian who had, only weeks before, driven across the new Bay Bridge that took twenty four years to design and build – the biggest shock was that this bridge was planned, funded, designed, permitted and built in only 42 months. Amazing!
We ran for a short while in the twilight
and then a long while in the dark. I was surprised that it was getting dark so soon, thinking that the days would be longer this far north. Michele reminded me that that was only the case in the summer and we were far from summer at two days before Halloween. We had no idea where we were going to stay, I was thinking maybe a cheap motel in Ellsworth but Michele thought it was too far from our – hoped for – final destination. She suggested Hancock but, when we got there, it didn’t seem to really exist. There was, however a Bed and Breakfast, The Bluff House Inn, on the Schoodic Peninsula which was our destination in the morning.
It was inexpensive and very cute so we felt we had done well. The Inn Mistress said that there were only two restaurants nearby – nearby being a thirty mile radius – one, not very memorable diner, and a local pub which was where she would go. Driving by the diner, it looked less than memorable, so we choose the pub and had our first truly mediocre meal of the trip. We were in bed early, ready to get up early on our last day.
A long weekend – or short week – trip to New England and Down East
A couple of months ago, Michele was invited, along with several other women, to see the fall color at Gail Cousins’ new home in New Hampshire. Then, a couple of weeks ago, she had the brilliant idea that I should join her in Boston for our anniversary. A couple of days ago, we started thinking it would be fun to go to Acadia National Park, instead, and that is where the trip finalized.
I flew to Boston Saturday, October 26th, to join Michele. All day Saturday, it turned out, when the flight, with a stop in Denver, was added to the time shift. Michele had booked me into a hotel in Winthrop, theoretically near the airport, but pretty far away in a cab whose driver didn’t know the way. The next morning, however, I could get up, walk about 200 feet to see the boats in the cove and, behind them, the planes taking off from Logan.
After a walk on the beach,
I caught a bus to New Hampshire where Michele was going to meet me. It was the first time I had taken a bus in, probably, fifty years and I don’t think much has changed. When I say bus, I don’t mean a city bus around San Francisco or Rome. I mean an interstate type bus; a bus where you buy a ticket at a counter and then stand in line, a bus where they put your luggage underneath in a special compartment, the kind of bus Patricia Neal got on in Hud.
Michele met me with Karen Amy and we had lunch in Nashua, New Hampshire, my first picturesque New England City but far from my last one.
That night, we had an excellent lobster dinner a Gail Cousins’ home and watched the Red Sox beat the Cardinals 4-2. It was a great start to New England and I forgot to take any pictures.
In the morning, we got serious on the trip part of our Trip driving to the coast. Michele was driving and I was navigating because I hadn’t yet been added to the drivers’ list on our rent-a-car. Michele driving and my navigating is not our best combination. I suck at navigating with a smartphone, primarily because I have no idea of the scale, what with the pinching and un-pinching the map back and forth, from an overview of the western hemisphere to one mile to the inch. Looking out the window didn’t help much either, everything looked pretty much the same.
We did finally reach the coast and then drove about 150 feet north into Maine for a planning lunch.
In the mid 70’s, I went with a friend to Death Valley for the first time as an adult. I had a long list of things I wanted to see and the friend said something like, I don’t care what we see, but I want to really see it. I don’t want to not see a whole bunch of stuff. That advice has informed all of Michele and my trips. We might not see much, but we take our time and do see what we see. We decided to take our time driving north along the coast, stopping often.
Michele also like to base a trip on a theme to give it coherence. At the restaurant where we had lunch, it was oysters-on-sale day and they had a list of featured oysters, with handy descriptions, many from Maine. We did not know that, in some circles, Maine is as famous for oysters as lobster but we were learning. Michele’s mom loved raw oysters and the quest for great oysters screamed Me, me, you won’t regret it! We decide to get to the Damariscotta River Estuary that night, the home of the famous Wiley Point oyster (firm shell, large, light in texture, high salinity).
Immediately, we began to see the actuality of what we were doing. First off, the coast of Maine is long, a little over 200 miles as the crow flies, but about 3500 miles if you walk the tideline. Then it is dense, very dense in the south. And populated; and picturesque, except picturesque with powerlines every where. And urban – especially in the south – with, by and large, wall to wall houses on most of the shoreline. The best views were when we crossed bridges but those were the hardest places to stop; they were often narrow with no place to walk.
The good thing about all the urbanity was that we ran into an Enterprise Rent-a-car place pretty quickly and I was able to get authorized. Then I could drive and Michele could tell us where we actually were. We got to Kennebunk – The only place so named. the sign says – as the light got good. Then it was on to Kennebunkport, the home of the Bush Families Museum which we didn’t have time to take in, but we did stop at the local Heretic House.
In the fading light, Michele took a couple of pictures of the local flock – probably Republicans – and I took some bridge and beach photos.
We made it to Wiley Cove – near Hog Island – in the dark.
El Paso and El Paso
We saw The Councilor yesterday. It was, for me, incomprehensible much of the time, nihilistic, unrealistic, and gorgeous.
Not incomprehensible in that I didn’t know what was happening on the screen or who was doing what, but incomprehensible in that I didn’t know why. I finally gave up and decided that much of what happened was just there to look good. I could have lived with the incomprehensibleness, but the nihilism finally got me. The script was by Cormac McCarthy, so I should have expected the cynicism but I didn’t and it pretty much blindsided me.
Much of The Councilor – it is hard to tell how much, much of the time – supposedly takes place in and around El Paso Texas. I was stationed in El Paso and I recognized the landscape but it was different from any El Paso that I knew or, I am sure, even exists.
This movie El Paso is an El Paso where everybody calls a lawyer, Counselor, and the lawyer, a sometimes court appointed defense-council, drives a Bentley; this is an El Paso where the bad guy, played by Cameron Diaz, has pet cheetahs and lives in a staggeringly stunning house – and, by the way, has the most gorgeous, silver, fingernails I have ever seen on a human being and a cheetah pattern tattoo on her back and shoulder – this is an El Paso where people drive Ferraris and nobody seems to notice.
The El Paso that I knew was a dry desert town where the military was a major employer and was so out-of-the-way that it bragged about being the headquarters of one Fortune 500 company. The El Paso I knew is the in the excellent TV program The Bridge. The Bridge El Paso is a place where people drive two-year old SUVs and pickup trucks, where people would stop and gawk at a Ferrari.
The irony here is that The Bridge is shot mostly in L.A. County – it is a landscape that Michele and I know as very Californian – but feels very El Paso-ish.
The second irony is that I walked out of The Councilor feeling assaulted, needlessly confused, and a little angry but I am still thinking about it the next day. Michele and I are still googling reviews and discussions. I wanted to see it because I like Ridley Scott as a director, I don’t always like his movies – although I usually do – but I always love the pictures he puts on the screen. In the end, the movie is alot like Cameron Diaz’s character, Malkina, unbelievable, breathtaking, and more memorable than she should be.
The horrific things we do to each other
I brought a biography of Clarence Darrow – Attorney for the Damned – with me for the flight to Boston. I am not so sure that it was a great idea: I was still in Dayton, Tennessee – at the Monkey Trial – when the plane landed in Boston. And still in Tennessee on the bus ride to New Hampshire.
Darrow was in my family’s pantheon of civil heroes – or, at least, my dad’s pantheon, and by extension, mine – and I was enjoying reading about him in more detail than the stories that had been pretty much fixed in my DNA as a child. Darrow was a free-love-bohemian and I was a little taken back by how much free love and bohemianism there was back in the 1890s. He defended so many people that nobody else would touch, like Loeb and Leopold, the Western Federation of Miners who were in an industrial war with the Mine Owner’s Association in Idaho, or a black family that moved into a white neighborhood in Detroit.
The Mine Owner’s Association had the politicians backing them, and the police, and the Pinkerton’s who beat strikers to death under the banner of law and order. The miners struck back, bombing mines and buildings. The black family had everybody against them also, with the police protecting a crowd of whites who were trying to force the family out. It was a time of brutality and it was a time that resonates today, both financially and racially, although in a milder form.
A couple of years later, William Jennings Bryan ran for president as a populist hero against the powerful, the police that protected them, the Pinkertons, and even President Cleveland, of his own party, who sent Federal troops in to back the rich. Much of what Bryan said then is still germane now: There are two great theories of government. One claimed that if you would only legislate to make the well to do prosperous, their prosperity would leak through to those below. But the Democratic idea is if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity would find its way up through every class that rests upon them.
The book was about the Darrow I had been taught, the defender of the powerless, but there was a Darrow I didn’t know. A Darrow who also defended people because he wanted money, people like a white bigot who brutally killed a Hawaiian and who Darrow knew was guilty. My dad was a defense lawyer for a while and he constantly pitched that a person is innocent until proven guilty. In the same manner as Darrow, my dad defended people like a bartender who killed his wife. Daddy knew he was guilty – even I knew he was guilty hearing the stories over the dinner table – but that didn’t seem to matter to Darrow or my dad. But sitting on the airplane,above it all, it mattered to me and left me in a melancholy funk.
I had brought a New Yorker book review of a couple of books about the partition of Pakistan into two countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh. I put down my Darrow book and read the book review to improve my mood. That was even worse. Nixon was a prick and while he and Kissinger congratulated themselves on their masculinity and pragmatism, the Pakistani generals, our allies, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Bengalis who were – as Nixon said – just a bunch of brown goddamn Moslems.
I thought of Obama and our drones and how our government seems to find killing people OK as long as it suits our political needs and my melancholy grew. I went back to Darrow, and, fortunately, I was able to cheer myself up with the Monkey Trail, The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, in Dayton, Tennessee, where the Courthouse had a banner that said Read your Bible.
Today, it is easy to laugh at Dayton and the trial but it was no laughing matter then and it still isn’t. Like the Capital vs.Labor fight, Ignorance vs. Science is a conflict that is still with us.
On the bus to New Hampshire, in Dayton, it was Darrow against Bryan and Darrow was at his best. You can close your eyes, Darrow said, But your life and my life and the life of every American citizen depends, after all, on tolerance and forbearance….If men are not tolerant, if men can not respect each other’s opinions, if men can not live and let live, then no man’s life is safe. If today you can take a thing, like evolution, and make it a crime to teach it in public schools….At the next session you can ban books and newspapers.
Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one, you can do another. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding…After awhile, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man, and creed against creed until – with flying banners and beating drums – we are marching backwards to the glorious age of the 16th century, where bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.
Getting off the bus in New Hampshire, the sun was out and people were taking family pictures.
