Category Archives: Sense of place

Eagle Island

The weather hadn’t cooperated all week: fog, wind, rain storm. Some of us had hoped to paddle out to Eagle Island, but the weather had made it impossible.

Tonight at dinner, I realized that finally the weather was perfect: calm, no big swells coming into Saco Bay from the Atlantic, no chance of fog. I asked around, and Rebecca, who is from Arizona, said she’d be willing to paddle out with me. Just as we were about to carry the canoe down to the beach, Jon came walking along. He’s been waiting for the weather to break all week.

“We’re going out on the bay,” I said to him. He looked at his wife. “Go,” she said, “if you don’t, you’ll be miserable.” He ran and grabbed his kayak, and walked down with us.

We walked way down the beach to meet the low tide. We waded out, floating the canoe until the water was up over our ankles, then jumped in and started paddling.

About halfway out, a big fish jumped completely out of the water, and fell back in with a splash. It must have been four to six feet long. As we paddled along, Jon laughed and said, “I needed this.”

The water started getting darker. The sand ended, and the bottom dropped away to deep rocks. We passed a few lobster buoys. The island was getting closer: dark jagged rocks, long points or spurs exposed by the low tide, little specks of birds perched here and there, the highest part of the island covered with green (nettles and grasses) above the reach of the highest tides.

We got close enough to see rafts of eider swimming and diving around the island. They flew away when we got too close. Jon saw a seal slip into the water from off one of the rocky points.

Great Black-backed Gulls seemed to control most of the island, with a few Herring Gulls and Double-crested Cormorants. We could hear the keening cries of the baby gulls, saying, Feed us.

We slipped around one of the points of the island, out from the lee side. Low swells from the Atlantic slowly raised and lowered our boats. It’s a lonely, rugged little island.

The sun was getting low. We didn’t have time to go all the way around the island, so we turned around. “What a magical place,” I said.

On the way back, a Common Tern dove down close to our boats, pulled back four feet above the water, hovered for thirty seconds, and flew low over our heads. “Wow,” said Jon. “Amazing. Imagine being able to see that.”

The setting sun was off our starboard bow. Further to the right, thunderheads were building up over Casco Bay, the next bay to the north. We talked about other outdoor trips we had gone on, until at last we rode some waves in to the beach.

Rebecca and I put the canoe on my car, and Jon dumped the water out of his kayak. We looked at each other. “That was great.”

A hazy blue sky

Sitting on a porch gazing out over dune grass at the Atlantic Ocean with a brisk southerly breeze to blow the mosquitos away. I’m at Ferry Beach Conference Center for a religious education conference, and yes I’m doing lots of professional development (workshop on theologies of religious education in half an hour). But I’m also managing to sit here on the porch gazing off into a hazy blue sky. Something about hazy blue skies in New England — I can never make up your mind whether they look farther away or closer than a regular blue sky. So I keep gazing at that haze until I fall asleep.

Reading beside the window

By midnight the sounds from Rindge Avenue have died away: the shouts of the children coming home from their summer school, the roar of the city buses, rush hour traffic, people returning from wherever they went for the evening. The church bells on the Catholic church chime, then stillness. I can hear a faint nasal sound from the sky — peent peent — a nighthawk flying somwhere over the city in darkness.

On the train, 6/26-27

From notebook and memory:

Still dark when I get on the train at 4:30 a.m. As we roll across the Mississippi River, the sky has lightened, and the Gateway Arch catches glints from the east.

North of Springfield. Young man behind me answers his cell phone. Drowsily, I hear the end of the conversation, which to my New England ears sounds like this: “Yahp. Bea raw nair. Bah.” He’s saying: “Yeah. Be right there. ‘Bye.”

Downtown Chicago, 65 degrees, cool and cloudy, the locals wear windbreakers or light jackets. In the Art Institute, two young men look at a painting: “I like that. I don’t know why I like that, but I like that.” They walk away from me, still talking about the painting. They burst into laughter for some reason.

The train is late coming out of the yard. While we wait, Robert and I joke about waiting. He’s on the same sleeper as I, except when we get to the train our sleeper is gone (toilets don’t work), they give us a coach instead. We talk and figure out how to make the best of it. The sleeping car attendant gives us blankets: “Brand new,” he says; they’re still in plastic wrappers. “Keep them, you deserve something for this.”

Robert’s a rail fan and a model railroader. In the dining car, we talk about trains and model railroads.

The sun awakens me somewhere in Pennsylvania. Six hours of sleep.

At lunch, Robert and I eat together for the third time. The two other people at our table talk about being in St. Louis, and I figure out we’re coming from the same event, but I’m tired of talking about religion and move the conversation in other directions. Later: “Look at that,” I say, pointing to a beautifully restored locomotive. Robert looks and says, “An F-7. Nice job on the New York Central colors.” The couple is only politely interested.

I doze some more.

At Rochester, the train is stopped by federal agents from the Department of Immigration and Naturalization Service. We sit and wait. Robert and I and some others get out to stretch our legs. At the end of the platform, everyone from the last car is off the train, with their bags. They start herding people back on the train. As we pull out, I see a police car driving down the platform. Later I overhear: “They arrested two guys.”

The whole way through the Berkshires, I sit in the cafe car and talk with Bob from Chicago. We look at the scenery. We talk about snowmobiles, we talk a lot about how much we like Chicago, I point out a beaver lodge next to the track, we talk about Geneva, Illinois, where I lived last year, he mentions his wife who died a decade ago and his Navy buddy who has cancer, we talk about our favorite fishing expeditions. After an hour: “Nice talking.” “See you.”

It gets dark after Worcester. I doze. At last we make it to Boston.

Radisson Hotel, St. Louis

Another crummy hotel. I say this to Carol when I call her, and she replies, “Good, then you know you’ve got the cheapest room in town.”

This place is much the worse for wear: chipped paint here and there, the shelf in the closet coming down, permanent stains on the bathroom floor. Hotel chains tend to treat their customers like cattle in a CAFO. My room stinks of cigarette smoke, even though it’s allegedly a non-smoking room. But obviously space must be tight, because they’ve given me a huge room with two beds (I’m paying for one), and a balcony. I can put up with the smell of cigarette smoke for the sake of the balcony. I had the sliding glass door open all night, and right now I’m sitting out on the balcony watching the traffic on I-70 at the base of the hotel, looking out over the green trees in the park on the other side of the interstate, and the bridges across the Mississippi River. I could complain about the cigarette smell, but if they moved me I’d lose the balcony.

In a short while I’ll head over to the conference center; for the moment I’m enjoying a moment of peace, sitting outside on this day of the solstice, before the craziness begins.

From Ohio to St. Louis

The alarm went off at six. Indiana is outside the train windows. Sun just touching the fields outside the window, a play of gold light on green shoots. We’re in flat country now.

I got to the dining car right when it opened at 6:30. Two Amish couples in plain dress came in just after I did. I was seated with a long-haul trucker, a woman who didn’t say much at all, and a retired man. The retired man asked the trucker to pass the sugar, then started to put sugar on his Frosted Flakes.

“You sure you want to do that?” said the trucker. “Those already got plenty of sugar on em.”

“Oh, yes.” The retired man smiled. “I’d put more on if I was at home. It’s just habit by now.”

When the trucker got off at Elkhart, the retired man told me about his hobby: visiting every major league ball park in North America. “I was just in Boston, but I couldn’t get seats at Fenway Park.”

“No,” I told him, “they sell out just about every game. You want decent seats, you have to buy them in March.”

He’s visited twenty parks so far. I asked him which he thought were the best.

“San Francisco and Toronto.” What about Baltimore, which everyone raves about? “Oh, that’s a good one too.” He was able to describe the park in satisfying detail: the old B&O warehouse that was integrated into the park; the plaques set into the ground showing where home run balls hit.

“The worst was Tampa Bay. It’s a domed stadium. The dome doesn’t open, though. And it’s so low that sometimes a pop fly will go ‘thunk’ off the ceiling. When you hear the crack of the bat, you don’t want to hear ‘thunk.’ ‘Crack, thunk.'”

On one of his first trips, to Cincinnati, he shared a taxi from the airport with someone. It turned out this other fellow was also visiting all the major league ball parks; he had two left: Cincinnati, and then Toronto. “I asked him how long it took him to do it, and he said five years. But I didn’t want to hear that. I don’t have five years.”

On this trip, he’s going to see Milwaukee, and the Chicago White Sox. But he couldn’t get a ticket to see the Cubs.

*****

A four hour layover in Chicago. I check my pack and my uke, and head out onto the streets of Chicago.

Across the Chicago River, and it starts to sink in: buildings, people, vitality of the streets. The people are the best part: I like watching the people hurrying by — in Chicago, they manage to hurry while still maintaining that relaxed Midwestern attitude; and everyone is so much more polite than in New England.

I walk to the Art Institute. It’s worth twelve bucks just to see Georgia O’Keefe’s huge painting Sky above the Clouds IV. I look at a few other familiar art works, see a few fine paintings by Ren Yi, a Chinese painter whom I am not familiar with, and head out.

Down Michigan Avenue to the Fine Arts Building. The elevator operator is sitting on his stool looking out into the lobby. “Performer’s?” he asks. “Yup, 904,” I say. He nods, and closes the outer door, but doesn’t bother with the inner door. We stop with the wood deck of the elevator just a few inches above the floor. He leans forward, opens the door, and lets me out. I buy some Renaissance-era sheet music, and decide to walk back down to the lobby. I pass three architect’s offices, three art galleries, a psychotherapist’s office; on one floor I can hear a violinist practicing; I pass offices with obscure titles on the doors, pass a piano store, through an open gate that says “Do Not Open Alarm Will Sound” (but the alarm isn’t sounding), the steps are now marble, down another flight and out.

Last stop: Prairie Avenue Bookshop, where I buy some books including one on the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on Frank Lloyd Wright’s design of Unity Temple.

It’s time to head back to Union Station. I walk slowly, admiring the city.

*****

On the train from Chicago to St. Louis, I wound up sitting next to Rob. Rob lives in Tewksbury, was heading to Arkansas to see some friends. He asked me where I’ was going, and to save lengthy explanations I said, “To a conference in St. Louis.” The young woman across the aisle leaned over and asked me, “GA? That’s where I’m going, too.” Her name was Heather, she was from Nashua, New Hampshire, and the three of us wound up talking for the rest of the six hour ride.

As night was beginning to fall, we came around a bend. “There it is,” I said, and pointed out Rob’s window. The Gateway Arch was still visible against the pale blue-green sky, beautiful against the handful of skyscrapers that make up downtown St. Louis. “Wow,” said Rob. “It looks like a good place to visit. You see a place like this and you think, I’m going to come back here someday. but you never know if you’re going to see it again.”

Aboard Amtrak 449/49

Train no. 449: a coach class car, a cafe car with tables and bench seats, a business class car, and that’s all.

We sit just out of Back Bay station waiting for a signal. The conductor announces there will be 40 mph speed limit after one o’clock; CSX owns the track and has this speed restriction when temperatures go up over 90.

Winding in among the hills of central mass, we follow the courses of streams and rivers. Sometimes there’s a highway too, but seems like there’s almost always a river or stream nearby. The rivers are not the rivers I grew up on: these are swift and shallow, with rocky bottoms, class one and two rapids at least; a few flat millponds behind dams; not the flatwater, navigable rivers I learned to canoe.

In some tight (but not very deep) valleys, we pass flat ground beside the river with agricultural fields: corn not quite up to your knee; hay fields with bales of hay; markers of the season.

The man who was talking on his cell phone about “alternative radio” gets off at Springfield. quite a few more people get on, and now the train is nearly full.

We get into the Berkshires. The hills get higher and steeper; they stand out against the sky now. Going through one rock cut, the small wild pink rhododendrons in full bloom cling to the top of the rock face right where the soil starts. Some trees are not yet in full leaf. The streams keep getting smaller until what we’re following is nothing more than a brook flowing back the way we’ve come.

At the high point in the road, we pass along the side of an extensive swamp. Newly dead trees mark where beavers have recently come; then sure enough the beaver lodge, then their long dam. Blue flags blooming in clumps in the midst of the swamp. Red-wing blackbirds perced on cattails about to bloom. The beginnings of a stream winding convolutedly through the marsh. The marsh passes out of view. We go through a village, then the stream returns, bigger now, and flowing in our direction.

A line of blue mountains glimpsed through the trees, barely visible. Now I can see them over the buildings, over a lumberyard, over houses spread down the slope beside the tracks. Then trees hide that blue line of mountains.

The pittsfield station has been rebuilt since I last rode through here, in winter of 2003. Now there is what looks like a big parking garage labeled “Joseph Scelsi Intermodal Transportation Center.” It’s ugly.

After Pittsfield, pockets of decayed industrial landscape, woodlands, a shopping strip, more woods, glimpse of a big house, more woods. Always hills around us. The sky gets dark, darker, wind bending over trees (we whiz through a tunnel), the sky even darker, almost as if it’s night out, no rain yet, then I see dimples in a stream (the stream looks black in the gloom), a trip of bright sky for a moment between the lowering clouds and a line of dark hills, then all is dark. Drops on the window, steady rain now, dark enough that I can watch the computer monitor of the person sitting in front of me reflected in the window (he’s playing a video game). A strip of lightning. Thunder. Behind me the young man says: “Hey babe, you dropped out of service… yeah… there’s a big storm overhead…can you hear me?… hello?… ok. I’m about to switch trains in Albany, I’ll call you… I – I love you.”

Another hour to Albany, where we transfer onto train number 49, the Lakeshore Limited out of New York. The hills get smaller and smaller as we head west.

Swan

Carol and I stopped in at “Swan,” a new store on Union Street just across from First Unitarian. A woman said hello to us as we walked in.

“Are you the owner?” said Carol to the woman.

“No,” she said, laughing, “but we’ve known each other for years Our sons grew up together. Starting with T-ball, and now they’re in high school. I’m Lisa.”

We introduced ourselves. Lisa told me she appreciates the Wayside Pulpit sign in front of the church, with its changing sayings and proverbs.

“It makes my week,” she said. “I look forward to seeing the new one.”

“I’ll tell Arthur, the sexton, that you like it,” I said, “tell him to pick out good ones for you.”

Lisa said she has talked to the owner about opening the store on Sunday. That led us into a discussion on why downtown New Bedford is so empty on Sundays. Carol and I see people wandering around the downtown on Sunday, having finished with the museums and the national park, looking for something to do. If all the store owners decided to open up, eventually the downtown would probably generate enough additional pedestrian traffic to make it worthwhile to open up. But only a few stores stay open, and when they don’t make a success of it, everyone says that downtown New Bedford is dead on Sunday. And so Carol and I see those people wandering around the downtown, looking for something to do.

Which took us into a discussion of downtown rents.

“One downtown landlord is charging $14 to $17 a square foot,” said Carol.

Lisa shook her head disgustedly.

“I know,” said Carol. “You can charge those kind of rents in Cambridge, maybe, but not here.”

“My grandmother owned a triple-decker in Boston,” said Lisa. “Her philosophy was you don’t need to get top dollar for rent. It’s better that you find good tenants that you can trust. She’d say, I’d rather have a good tenant who takes care of the place, someone that I can depend on, than get a high rent.”

“Some New Bedford landlords should pay attention to that,” said Carol darkly.

We spent some time looking around Swan. They have some great things — funky furniture, collectibles, prints, odds and ends. Carol almost bought a bowl, and I was eyeing a framed print, but in the end we didn’t buy anything. I suspect we’ll go back soon though….

Update: As of August, 2006, Swan is gone…. closed for good.

Pym in Cambridge

Perhaps you missed the announcement, but the Barbara Pym Society of North America will host a “Barbara Pym Garden Fête” on Sunday, June 25, 3 to 5 p.m. at 10 Chester Street, Cambridge. Pym fans who are in the area should send e-mail to Tom Sopko at jtsopko@speakeasy.net

I love the way Pym illuminates human character in very few words — as in this passage from An Academic Question, her novel from 1970. The narrator Caro is chatting with Iris, whom Caro suspects of having an affair with her husband Alan:

‘Tell me about Coco Jeffreys,’ said Iris. ‘I believe you and he are great friends.’

‘Yes, we are friends,’ I began.

‘But not lovers, I imagine. No, not that, obviously! What is Coco exactly?– I mean, sexually.’

‘Well, nothing, really,’ I said, embarrassed.

‘But he must be something.’ A note of irritation had now come into Iris’s voice — irritation and impatience of my ignorant stupidity.

‘You mean hetero or homosexual?’

‘Of course that’s what I mean,’ she mocked. ‘Surely you must know.’

‘We’ve never talked about it. In any case, are people to be classified as simply that? Some people just love themselves.’

Iris frowned into her empty glass. I could see my vagueness worried her….

Those who attend the Barbara Pym Garden Fête “are asked to bring finger food á la Pym, or suitable beverages.” I imagine this means there will be sherry. But I have a hard time imagining the kind of people who would attend such an event. Unfortunately, I am committed to attending my denomination’s annual General Assembly; otherwise, I would go myself to the Pym Garden Fête to see what kinds of people turn up.

If you go, please write and tell me who is there.