Category Archives: Sense of place

Three unrelated conversations

The drive up from New Bedford north towards Boston took me through the flat south coastal plain of Massachusetts. Along the highway through the plain, red maples seem to be the dominant trees where the ground is a little lower than the surrounding terrain; white and red oaks, and white and red pines, where the ground is a little higher. The red maples were bright with reds and yellows and oranges; in the lowest ground where I could see there was a swamp many of the trees were already bare. The oaks were still mostly green, although here and there a branch with brilliant red leaves stuck out of the dark green of the oak and pine woods; and here and there I saw a white oak fringed with brownish gold leaves.

I had lunch with dad, and we talked mostly about photography. Dad, who is an avid photographer, has been using digital cameras for the past three or four years. But recently, he said, he’s turned back to using his old single lens reflex film camera, a classic Pentax K-1000. He stood in the window of his condo in West Concord and used four different cameras to shoot the same picture of a sugar maple in full autumn color: three different digital cameras, and the K-1000. He got the film processed commerically, and he printed the shots from the digital camera using the same paper and printer. Then he compared the images all four sources. His conclusion: the images from the film camera had better color saturation and richer reds than any of the digital images.

Photo buffs would probably say that images from a professional-quality digital camera printed on a top-notch printer could surpass the images from commercially-processed film. But that’s not the point; dad was comparing images from cameras he had access to and that he could afford. Forget the photography buffs; dad and I agreed that film cameras are superior. We got into a satisfying discussion of which color film is best, and how both of us would kind of like to get back into a darkroom to print black-and-white film.

Dad had to go off to teach a computer class, so I went birding at Great Meadows. I worked my way down the central dike, stopping now and then to scan the water for ducks. Another birder, a man carrying a high-end telescope, was making his way down the dike at roughly the same pace as I. Somewhere in the middle of the dike, I said to him that I had got some sparrows, and he came down to see. We wound up talking while we waited for sparrows to break cover and come out where we could see them.

He asked where I lived, and I said New Bedford, and he told me about a house that his grandparents had had on Hawthorne Street in New Bedford. I said I hadn’t seen any ducks yet this year on New Bedford harbor, and he said that the wintering ducks had already started moving in to the Barnstable area. He lived down on the Cape during the warm months, and had just moved back up to his house in Weston on Tuesday. He asked how it happened that I was in Concord that day, and I said I grew up in town, and it turned out that his daughter had married a man who was best friends with Steve S—- who had lived down the street from us when I was young.

We finally saw Swamp Sparrows and Savannah Sparrows (and I was pretty sure I had also seen an immature White Throated Sparrow). But most of the ducks we saw were Mallards. “It’s so quiet out here,” he said. “Listen to those geese. I can even hear that tika-tika-tika sound they make when they’re feeding.” He scanned the ducks with his binoculars. “Twenty years ago, you’d see ninety percent Black Ducks and only a few Mallards. Now it’s the other way around. I used to shoot ducks,” he continued. “What I liked was using the calls to bring the ducks, and working with dogs, and being outdoors. I ate everything I shot. But I stopped in 1982, and haven’t been duck-hunting since.” He put his binoculars up to his eyes for one last scan of the lower pool, hoping to see the Pintails he had thought he had seen earlier; and then he headed back to Weston.

I spent another two hours at Great Meadows. I walked way around to the other end of the lower pool, where I did see eight or a dozen Pintails half obscured in the middle of some wild rice. An hour later, up at the sewage treatment plant, I did see a flock of White-Throated Sparrows, along with a Palm Warbler bobbing its tail, and some other sparrows that I couldn’t be sure of because it was getting dark by then.

It was still too early to brave the traffic on the drive into Cambridge. I decided to stop at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. They had moved Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s body back to Concord, to rest beside her husband Nathaniel Hawthorne, from where she had been buried in England, and I wanted to visit the new grave. Across the path, a man was crouched down, taking a picture of Henry David Thoreau’s grave in the dim light; a woman stood next to him watching. I asked if he was a fan of Thoreau, and he allowed that he was. I told them why I was there. The man asked where Louisa May Alcott’s grave was, and I pointed it out.

They said they had driven ten hours to get here today, and I asked where they were from. “London, Ontario,” said the man. And now as I listened for it I could hear the faint accent of central and prairie Canada: the slight differences in the vowels, especially “o” sounds, and the more precise consonants. “We already have snow on the ground up there,” said the woman. “What’s the climate like here?” I said that we used to have snow on the ground for most of three months, but it was definitely getting warmer. “What with global climate change, you’re probably living in the right place,” I said. “Soon your climate will be temperate.”

As we walked back towards town, we wound up talking about North American politics, particularly the way that both Steven Harper and George Bush have strong ties to the religious right. “But it’s a minority government,” said the man. “Canada is still pretty much liberal,” he continued in his soft Canadian accent. “Harper’s going to have to moderate his views or he could wind up facing an election.” The woman added, in what was not quite a non sequitur: “After all, Elton John came to Canada to get married.” I told them I was counting on the Canadians to hold out against the influence from the south. What I didn’t say was that as a religious liberal, I actually do worry about the United States turning into a theocracy of the religious right, and it would be nice to have a place to flee to.

Duck

Carol and I were coming back from an evening walk down to the waterfront, walking across the pedestrian overpass that gets you over Route 18. Car horns blared below us, a couple of cars swerved. Carol said, “Oh, no, watch out, little duck!”

A duck was trying waddle its way across the four lanes of hectic Route 18 traffic. It made it, barely, without being hit. The human beings driving the cars may have been cursing the duck, but they had enough sympathy to avoid running it over.

“Let’s go down and see what’s up with that duck,” I said. I couldn’t understand why it didn’t fly up out of the way. Was it hurt?

We hurried down the other side of the overpass. There was the duck, waddling up the cobblestone street. “That’s a Wood Duck!” I said. I couldn’t imagine what a young female Wood Duck, a wary and secretive bird, would be doing in densely-populated downtown New Bedford.

It did not appear to be hurt. It just looked very scared. When it saw us, it headed back towards Route 18. We herded it the other direction, towards a patch of weeds. It almost flew towards the weeds, so we knew its wings weren’t broken. By the time we got up to the weeds, it was no longer visible. I suspect it was hatched this summer, making its first trip south, confused and scared.

“Poor little duck,” said Carol.

“Maybe a little rest and it will be ready to fly,” I said.

Carol started telling me about the movie “Winged Migration,” which depicts the death of more than a few birds during migration. Downtown New Bedford is not a good place for Wood Ducks; I hope the one we saw tonight makes it out alive.

Buttonwood Park

My laundry was in the dryer, and I decided the evening was too pleasant to waste sitting in the laundromat staring at my clothes going around and round. I walked down to Buttonwood Park.

Plenty of people were out walking on the broad sidewalk at the west end of the park: two middle-aged women out for a fitness walk, a tall exceedingly fit-looking man jogging, a little boy riding a little bicycle with training wheels and his father close behind. Two young people stood in the middle of a gaggle of Mallards and domestic ducks at the edge of the pond, and even though they were right next to a sign that said “Don’t Feed the Ducks/ Por Favor….”, they were feeding the ducks. A pleasant-looking woman striding by looked over at them and said (pleasantly), “Don’t feed the ducks, now.” The two young people guiltily said, “We’re not. They’re eating something else.” The latter sentence was true: the ducks were snapping at big, slow, fat insects rising up from the edge of the pond. “They’re eating the bugs,” said the pleasant-looking woman matter-of-factly, and strode on.

I turned left down the road that bisects the north half of the park, ambling along, feeling logy. Two small girls, who looked to be twins, came tearing down a side path towards the road. “Don’t run out into the road!” shouted an adult voice from far behind them. Laughing, the two girls stopped one another, which involved one girl pulling the other girl’s shirt off her shoulder, and the second girl pushing away the face of the first girl. They got disentangled, still laughing, and resumed tearing along the path, coming to a dead halt at the very edge of the roadway (disconcerting the driver of a huge SUV that had fortunately come to a complete stop at the “Stop” sign at the crosswalk). They turned around in order to look back at the woman walking towards them pushing a stroller, and put on their best angelic faces as if to say, “See? We came to a stop before the road!” The angelic effect was spoiled when one poked the other, and the other whispered something back that made them both giggle.

A hoard of Ring-billed Gulls swirled around the edges of a soccer game, screaming and trying to steal scraps of food from each other, but now I am bored by the gulls that scream all night from the rooftops around our apartment, so I walked on by. Besides, I realized that my laundry would be done soon, and it was time for me to hurry back to the laundromat.

Dead gull season

The many flat roofs of downtown New Bedford host a nesting colony of Herring Gulls. By this time in the summer, the young birds have been out of the nest for some time, and they’re trying to figure out how to make a living. Some of them still cry at the adult Herring Gulls, trying to coax an adult into regurgitating up some nice fish. Herring Gulls are not particularly social, and the adults want nothing to do with the young gulls once they’re out of the nest. The young gulls turn to foraging for garbage. I was driving up Acushnet Avenue the other day. A young gull stood in the middle of the intersection with William Street, trying to tear open what looked like one of those brightly colored bags fast food comes in. I tooted my horn and slowed down, expecting the bird to fly, or at least hop, out of the way. It didn’t, and I narrowly avoiding running it down. The young gulls haven’t yet learned to avoid cars and trucks. On my walk today, I saw two corpses of young Herring Gulls, one in the middle of the swing-span bridge with one broken wing pointing up, and another one completely flattened in the middle of Route 6. From what I’ve seen along the sides of the roads, this year’s crop of Herring Gulls will suffer its highest mortality rate over the next few months; the ones that survive will have learned to hop out of the way of cars, no matter how enticing the smell that comes from the brightly colored paper bag.

That’s New England for you

Carol and I went to a wonderful wedding this afternoon. Two friends of Carol’s, whom she had introduced, were married in a classic wood-frame New England church, painted white and surrounded by lush green grass and trees. The liberal religious minister managed to balance tradition and innovations like asking everyone gathered to hold the rings for a moment during the service to bless them, before passing them to the next person. The reception was held in a barn that smelled of hay. Of course there was contra dancing. At the reception, we talked to people who came from very different walks of life including a financial managers, a farmer, a builder, and a yoga instructor. Even though it’s still August, it was one of those grey rainy days where the temperature hovered around 60 degrees, which meant it got cold sitting in that barn for the reception. That’s New England for you.

Conversation

The subway car emptied out after Central Square. A man moved to take one of the many empty seats next to me, and started talking to his friend across the aisle. This short unhurried exchange caught my ear:

“Hey. Thanks for [unintelligible]. I’ll do the same for you next weekend.”

“Next weekend…. Next weekend I could be in jail.”

“Yah, but if I don’t drink….” [pause]

“Yah but I been busted sober.”

“But if ya don’t drink….”

“Yah. OK.”

Day trip: Concord River from Carlisle to Old North Bridge

It was one thirty when I parked the car where the old bridge stretched across the Concord River from Bedford to Carlisle. The Bedford has been turned into a broad boat ramp suitable for larger boats on trailers, but I parked on the Carlisle side, which consists of a rutted road surrounded by poison ivy, a bit of a scramble down to the water, and quite a few of the old stone from the old bridge abutment. I put the fishing tackle in the canoe, the binoculars around my neck, and I started paddling upstream.

You could see little or no current along the Carlisle Reach, a broad straight stretch of the river just up from the bridge. But when the southwest breeze caught me, I had to paddle pretty hard to keep heading upstream. I concentrated on hugging the lee shore to keep out of the wind. Not that there was much to look at or any particular reason to linger:– the trees are low and scrubby, the surrounding land mostly flat and boring. It was hot in the sun, and I didn’t do much more than just paddle.

Half a mile upstream, the river begins to narrow, and wind around eskers and other harder, glacially-deposited soils. The land on the left bank of the river is mostly protected as a national wildlife refuge; on the right bank, you see a few huge houses but mostly just trees. In a few of the narrower stretches, I could really feel the effects of the current; but the river was narrow enough that I rarely felt the wind. I paddled on, moving through sun and shade.

Through a line of trees on my left, I could see I was passing a large open area, the lower impoundment of the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. The Dike Trail between the two impoundments comes right down to the river, and just as I was passing that point, four people with binoculars and telescopes strolled down to the river. I called over to them: “Still a lot of shorebirds out?” “Yes,” said one woman, “but the Glossy Ibis isn’t around today.” I beached the canoe and spent twenty minutes walking the dike between the two impoundments looking at herons, egrets, sandpipers, and plovers.

Still paddling upstream, I passed a small sandy beach, perhaps thirty feet wide, where a tiny brook trickled down over rocks and sand into the river. I stopped there to eat some carrots, drink from my canteen, and listen to the sound of the brook. Further upstream, I saw a man fishing from the bank, but he was gone by the time I got that far, so I couldn’t ask him what luck he’d been having. I decided to go upstream as far as the Old North Bridge, where was fired “the shot heard ’round the world,” some four miles from where I started. Tourists walked back and forth over the bridge, taking pictures, some of them wearing little tri-con hats, looking at the markers and monuments. Just beyond the Old North Bridge, you used to be able to paddle up into Saw Mill Brook. Now beavers have have put a dam there, and they have built two new outlets for the brook, spaced far apart. You can hear the water rolling and babbling from the beaver pond, through the brush, and into the river.

The sun was getting lower than I liked; it sets so much earlier now that it’s mid-August. I turned around, letting the wind and current push me when I could. I saw a man fishing from a john-boat. “Any luck” I asked. “Just a couple of small ones,” he said. “But they’ll be coming out soon. Get their snack just before bedtime.” I paddled around a bend in the river, then let the canoe drift and tried a few casts under the trees at the side of the river. Nothing. I drifted some more, switched to fishing off the bottom. Nothing. I looked at my watch, decide that if I wanted to be off the river before dark I had better keep paddling.

The last stretch, the Carlisle Reach, was monotonous. But by now the sun was low enough to send long slanting shadows across the river. It lit up the trees on the far side with its golden light. The sun made everything look beautiful, warm, welcoming, and even the leaves on the silver maples that are already turning yellow and pale pink with the coming of autumn lost their sad poignancy. I was growing tired from paddling. My arms and shoulders weren’t tired, it was my thighs that were starting to tremble.

The sun was below the trees by the time I beached the canoe, picked it up, and tied it on the car.

Eight miles of paddling.

Classic car night in New Bedford

On summer Thursday nights, the classic cars roll into downtown New Bedford. The city blocks off parts of Acushnet Ave. for some of the cars, and there are more parked in the Customs House parking lot. Most of the cars are from the 1950’s and 1960’s Of course there are DJs playing rock and roll songs from the 1950’s and early 1960’s.

“One o’clock two o’clock…” “…my loooove will…”

From our apartment window, I can watch as people walk back and forth from where they parked their cars, to where they can see the classic cars. Lots of families with children. Lots of people a decade or two older than I am, which means they are going to look at cars from their childhood. For our apartment window, I can hear two different DJs about equally well, which leads to some odd combinations of lyrics…

“…hey Mickey…” “…under the Boardwalk…”

If you want, you can walk around, look at the cars and talk with their owners, and buy fried dough and hot dogs and lemonade, and wander past the booths where you can buy all kinds of tchotchkes. Now it’s starting to get dark, and you can hear the DJs winding it down over there. Maybe I should have gone over and checked out the scene, but I decided to eat dinner at home instead of having hot dogs and fired dough.

“bah-bah-bah-bah-bahbahbahm….” “…whoa-oa-oa oooh…”

There’s always next Thursday.

Day hike: Across the Middlesex Fells

Yesterday was another perfect summer day in New England: low temperatures in the 50’s, dry air, perfectly clear, and a forecast for a high temperature below 80. What better way to spend a perfect day than to go canoeing with Abby and Jim. Except that my car wouldn’t start. The rest of the morning was spent getting the car towed to the garage. After lunch, I finally cleared my head enough to decide that I was going to up to the Middlesex Fells to go hiking.

You can take the subway to the Middlesex Fells reservation — the Orange Line all the way to the last stop, Oak Grove. The subway comes out of the ground at the Charles River, and you ride through a stark landscape of heavy industry, a major railroad corridor, and highway ramps leading to the Central Artery. When you get past that, light industry and unrelieved inner suburbia stretches along the Orange Line the rest of the way to Oak Grove. The train emptied out, and I could hear the African American man several seats away as he answered his cell phone: “Yo, what up.” Except that there was a soft New England flair to his words, so they came out: “Yo, wha ‘tup” — the “t” sound moving to the next syllable in just the same way that older New Englanders still say, “Ih ’tis” instead of “It is.”

There’s a half mile walk past suburban houses and renovated brick mill buildings, and then suddenly you’re on the Cross Fells Trail in the green trees of the Middlesex Fells. The occasional broken liquor bottle testifies to the fact that you’re not in the wilderness. But as I climbed up a rocky ridge, what I really noticed was how loud the cicadas were.

From one rocky prominence, I could see the skyline of Boston, the Hancock Tower with Great Blue Hill beyond it, and elsewhere the trees of suburbia with an occasional building showing through the leaves. The low-bush blueberries were bare of fruit, except for one last shriveled blueberry. A few leaves on some of the bushes had turned bright red. Across the paved Fellsway East road, I did see quite a few huckleberries still on the bushes, but they, too, were shriveled and past being edible. In one little open spot, Goldenrod and Purple Loosestrife bloomed right next to each other, with nodding Queen Anne’s Lace in front of them, all flowers of mid-August.

It was a shock to reach Highland Avenue, a four-lane highway. I lost the Cross Fells Trail here. The trail is poorly marked:– the old blue paint blazes are badly faded, and several of the new blue plastic blazes have been torn off trees. So I wound up taking an unintended detour to the shores of Winchester Reservoir, shining in the afternoon sun. I saw a few sailboats, some kayaks, and even one skinny-dipper slipping illegally into the water.

I managed to rejoin the Cross Fells Trail, following it along the paved Fellsway West under Interstate 93, but then I lost the trail again — the blazes were completely missing. I realized I should have brought a map. AFter another unintended detour, I managed to rejoin the Cross Fells Trail, but the sun was getting lower and lower and I knew I would probably not be able to get to the far end of the trail. I made it across South Border Road and up to the top of Ramshead Hill when I decided to turn around — I didn’t want to be looking for faded blue paint blazes after the sun had gone down.

The trip back was much faster — I didn’t stray off the trail for any unintended detours. It was after seven o’clock by the time I got back to the start of the trail, and since it is mid-August the sun had already slipped close to the horizon. During the whole of my walk in the Fells, I saw only half a dozen people who were more than a couple hundred feet from a paved road.

Nine or ten miles, depending on how far off the trail I actually got.