Category Archives: Sense of place

Inman Square

The sun stayed out this afternoon in spite of dark puffy clouds moving by.

“You rarely see that any more,” said Carol.

She was looking across Cambridge Street. I knew what she was talking about from her tone of voice. Three young men, maybe in their late twenties, had just gotten out of a cab. The cab stopped in the middle of the traffic lane just as the light turned green. The last man out of the cab, a tall man with fuzzy blond hair, aviator-style sunglasses, tight jeans, and a funky leather jacket, did not rush.

“You don’t see men walking with such a swagger any more,” said Carol. “And look at his two friends. They’re nothing special, a little schlumpy.”

They were schlumpy, just ordinary guys with ball caps and t-shirts stretched over slightly rounded bellies. One of them lit a cigarette, but you didn’t even notice those two guys, because the guy with the swagger and the fancy leather coat drew your attention. They kept walking up a side street. We walked past a man and a woman explaining MassPirg to passersby, and went into a coffee house.

The coffee house appeared to be crowded. I grabbed a table while Carol got coffee. It wasn’t really crowded, though: there were lots of table with just one person sitting working at a laptop or writing or reading a newspaper. A man near us stood up to go. I waited to see if he’d leave his newspaper, but he picked it up and tucked it under his arm.

The tall thin barista whose blonde hair was dyed vermillion came down the aisle and cleaned off his table. She picked up trash from the other tables where people were still sitting: “Are you done with that?… I’ll take that if you want….” She squeezed her way through the tables back to the counter.

The young man at the table immediately to my right stood up. “Excuse me,” he said to the red-haired waitress, following her as she walked towards the counter. “Excuse me. Excuse me, you’re bleeding.”

She looked down at her hand. Blood was running along one finger. “Oh,” she said cheerfully, “You’re right, I am. Uh, thank you.” She walked behind the counter and showed her hand to a co-worker, a short quiet woman. “I’m bleeding,” she said, smiling.

The young man picked the key for the men’s room. The young woman who was with him stood up and walked over to the counter. “Excuse me, do you have something to clean off the table?” She had a pronounced accent, perhaps from Latin America. The short woman behind the counter looked at her inquisitively. “There’s blood on our table,” said the woman with the accent, smiling.

I watched the MassPirg woman through the front window of the coffeehouse. She peeled off the blue MassPirg t-shirt she wore over her hooded white shirt. She laughed and said something to the MassPirg man, and they walked off in separate directions — the end of the work day, I suppose.

Carol and I had finished our coffee. “Ready to go?” I said. She smiled and nodded. We went out, and walked down to Kendall Square in the warm May sunlight.

Nests

Sublimity consists, in part, of direct confrontation with unknowable mysteries of life and death. There are places in downtown New Bedford where you can stand at a window or in the open and look down on surrounding rooftops. The flat roof surfaces are always littered with shell fragments left by gulls, mostly Herring Gulls, dropping shellfish in order to break them open so they can eat the soft bits inside. The peaked roofs often show a coating of whitewash, gull guano, spreading down the peaks from where the gulls like to perch, facing into the sun. Midafternoon I was standing in a place where I could see down on half a dozen different rooftops. The sun broke through the clouds, and there was blue sky above, although the fog and low clouds wouldn’t let me see the mouth of the harbor, or even the steeples of Fairhaven across the harbor. With my binoculars I looked down on one Herring Gull, who was sitting on a pile of brown dead leaves and stalks, a pile which also included bits of green including a couple of dandelion leaves and bits of white trash or litter. It all looked too carefully piled up to be anything but a nest.

The Herring Gull casually stood up in the sun, stretched its wings out a little, and wandered off a few steps to where it was hidden from my view. The pile of leaves and litter had been hollowed out in the middle, and down inside I could see two olive-green eggs spotted with brown.

Since we moved here last August, I have been pretty sure that there’s a Herring Gull nesting colony on the rooftops of downtown New Bedford. With all the Herring Gulls in the neighborhood all year long this should not be surprising. A hundred years ago it would have been surprising; in Birds of Massachusetts, Richard Veit and Wayne Petersen write:

Before 1900, Herring Gulls were not known to breed south of eastern Maine. In the summer of 1912, the first nesting in Massachusetts was recorded by Allan Keniston on the south side of Edgartown Great Pond, Martha’s Vineyard, and, between 1919 and 1920, 20 pairs were found breeding on an ephemeral sandbar called Skiffs Island off the southern end of Chappaquidick Island. At the time, the prospects seemed so remote that Herring Gulls could ever establish themselves in Massachusetts in the face of the expanding human population that Forbush was prompted to state, “It is improbable that the Herring Gull can maintain itself anywhere on the coast of southern New England.” Defying Forbush’s prediction, the Herring gull underwent one of the most remarkable population expansions of any New England bird. The growth of the population between 1930 and 1970 was almost exponential until about 1965, when it leveled off. The slackening in the rate of increase may have been due to the refinement of garbage disposal, sewage treatment, and fish-processing practices because space for nesting sites does not seem to be a limiting factor. [p. 219; references removed for readability]

The fish processing plant off Route 6 on Fish Island regularly attracts Herring Gulls and other gulls, when the plant pumps blood and byproducts into the harbor; I’m sure they also frequent the other fish processing plants nearby. Gulls also sometimes flock after incoming fishing vessels, and they obviously eat shellfish that they find. Food sources may well be the limiting factor for the Herring Gull population in our neighborhood, since there are plenty of suitable rooftops on which to nest. As I stood watching this afternoon, I found only one other definite nest, and one possible nest, although I saw plenty of gulls in adult plumage who did not appear to be nesting. I stood looking down at those olive-green eggs for five or so minutes, and never saw the adult return to the nest.

Storm

Another period of heavy rain last night awakened me. The storm has been with us for three days now: low clouds so dark we’ve had to turn on the lights in the middle of the day; periods of heavy, even torrential rain followed by longer periods of no rain at all. Yesterday we saw the sun for a few minutes in the afternoon, but then the low clouds closed in again.

The weather service reports only five and a half inches total for this storm in New Bedford. It feels like we got more than that. It feels like it’s been raining for too long without a real break. But then I hear the reports of flooded streets and houses in Middlesex and Essex counties, where they’ve received twice as much rain as we have; at least it’s not that bad here. But it’s not the rain that’s wearing on me so much as the gloom.

Fiddleheads

It was my turn to buy the food for the youth group; each week we cook dinner together as a part of our meeting. This afternoon, the supermarket had fiddleheads on sale, so I bought some along with everything else.

Emma, the other advisor, said, “You always bring such interesting food when you buy.” Jarrod looked at the fiddleheads skeptically; they do look pretty weird, coiled up heads of ferns cut before they can grow into those tall fronds. Alyzza just chopped garlic.

“Interesting food?” I said.

“Yeah,” said Emma, “Like you brought in the parsnips a couple of months ago. I don’t think I’d ever eaten parsnips.”

I thought about it. I guess it’s true: most people in these United States don’t eat parsnips or fiddleheads. Why do I? “I guess it’s because Carol and I keep trying to eat locally grown food,” I said. “Parsnips are just about the only vegetable that you can dig all winter. And I really don’t like fiddleheads all that much, but they’re really the first green vegetable you can get in the spring that’s local.”

We sauteed the fiddleheads in olive oil with lots of garlic. “About a third of the population has mild allergic reaction to fiddleheads,” I announced as we dug in to the food.

“Great,” said Emma, who’s an R.N. “When I go into anaphylactic shock, you can drive me to the hospital.”

“Well, maybe it’s not a full-blown allergic reaction,” I said. “Sometimes I get kind of an itchy feeling inside my mouth. Besides, you’re a nurse — oh wait, guess you can’t do first aid on yourself if you’re in anaphylactic shock, can you?”

We all tried the fiddleheads. They weren’t very good. They never are.

“They taste kind of like asparagus,” said Alyzza.

“Kind of,” I said. They just taste like leaves to me.

Emma actually had seconds. We talked about it later: fiddleheads must have tasted pretty good when you hadn’t had any fresh green vegetables all winter long. I suppose now we are spoiled by having fresh produce shipped in from California at a great expenditure of jet fuel. Even so, I think the only reason I’d eat fiddleheads is because they remind me of spring; but not because they taste good.

In the cemetery

From the base of the tower, the highest point in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, you can usually see Boston. But late this afternoon all you could see was low clouds and maybe a little fog in some of the hollows of Cambridge. It was a lousy day to go looking for warblers, but this was the only free day I had.

I walked around for half an hour and the only birds I could see well enough to identify were some American Robins. The light was bad, and mostly I just saw silhouettes. I could hear birds all around me though. Good birders can identify hundreds of birds by ear. Not me; all I know is a couple dozen of the more common ones. Mewing: Catbird. Konk-a-ree: Red-Winged Blackbird. Cheeriup, cheeriee: American Robin. A few others.

After an hour I had managed to see a few birds, but no warblers. The whole reason you go to Mt. Auburn Cemetery in the spring is to see warblers; it’s nationally famous for being a spring warbler trap. I was about to leave when I heard a lazy song that sounded something “zee zee zee zee zoo zee,” the “zee”s all on one note, and the “zoo” perhaps a major second lower. I had been camping up in Maine early one July, in a campsite in a pine grove, and I used to hear that lazy song every morning right at sunrise: “zee zee zee zee zoo zee” over and over again; or sometimes “zoo zoo zee zoo zee.” I had finally tracked the bird down: Black-throated Green Warblers who had been nesting right next to my campsite. Here they were in Cambridge, lazily calling from somewhere up in one of the trees.

“Zee zee zee zee zoo zee.” I tried to figure out where the bird was sitting. I walked around in a big circle, trying to triangulate. “Zee zee zee zoo zee.” There were at least two; one of them seemed to be moving further away. Once I thought I had the nearer one spotted; I brought my binoculars up; but then I heard it from the next tree over, lazily calling “zee zee zee zee zoo zee.” At last I gave up, and went back to the car. You don’t always have to see things to know they’re there.

For my mom, who was a birder; today would have been her 82nd birthday.

Spring watch

The drive from New Bedford up to Cambridge takes you through wooded swamps in the town of Freetown on the south coastal plain of Massachusetts. At this time of year the swamps are mostly gray: gray twigs, gray branches, gray tree trunks. Just now, as leaves are just starting to come out on some trees, you’ll also see colors that are almost autumnal in hue. The brilliant crimson of the last of the Red Maple flowers almost hides the gray branches in places. A nearby maple will appear dull orange from a distance, from the reddish hue of the tiny new leaves just bursting out from buds. The hanging blossoms on a birch tree are nearly yellow, with just a tinge of green. As you drive by on the highway, winter gray still dominates; the crimson, dull orange, and bright yellow hues will last for just a few days, a brief anticipation of autumn before the swamp trees turn brilliant green.

At the dump

Work has been keeping me a little too busy, but I finally have time to describe the trip to the Nantucket dump….

It was Alyzza’s idea to go to the dump on Nantucket Island. “It’s the best dump in the world,” she said.

On Friday, two members of our youth group, Danielle and Jarrod, met Emma and me at the church; Alyzza was going to meet us on Nantucket, where she was playing in a lacrosse game with her school. We left New Bedford at 3:18, leaving, we thought, plenty of time to drive out Cape Cod and get to the ferry terminal in Hyannis. But we got lost, and the wrong turns became nightmarish. Finally we were there with only minutes to spare; Emma dropped us off so I could buy the tickets; one last late couple came after us, delaying the ferry just long enough; Emma had to run the last hundred yards. The ferry left at 4:46, a minute late.

Dani and Jarrod had never taken the ferry over to Nantucket. Jarrod said, “I’m going to stay on deck the whole time, I’m not going to waste the trip sitting inside.” We followed his lead, and all stood out in the sun and the cold wind watching Cape Cod recede and Nantucket loom closer in the haze. At last we were in the harbor, rounding Brant Point. I pointed out the gold-topped steeple of the Unitarian Universalist church where we would be spending the night.

We met the Nantucket church’s youth group, and played some games including “Evolution,” one of our youth group’s favorite games. I said playing “Evolution” was a religious matter, because it proves that we can talk about evolution in our church. (If you want to know how to play the game, instructions are here.) We ate dinner together, we all got along, and found we had plenty to talk about.

Saturday morning was the big day: the trip to Nantucket’s dump. Most of the Nantucket youth had to leave, either to go to work or for other obligations. But Alex, Jessie, and Lynnie joined us in our trek to the dump, while Sally, one of the Nantucket adult advisors, kindly drove us all.

To get to the dump, you head down Madaket Road. You can see the mound of the landfill from a ways down the road; it’s now the highest point on the island, higher even than Altar Rock. You turn in, stopping where the bike path crosses the entry road, and then you can see a number of buildings. The recycling shed is first, with doors where you can throw in every conceivable recyclable item. Trash disposal is a serious problem on the island — it’s too expensive to ship garbage off island, and the landfill is getting bigger every day — so there are strict laws that everything possible must be recycled. A buzz of activity surrounded the recycling shed: cars and light trucks pulling up, people going back and forth with bags and boxes. Sally said she had just been to the dump with a bag of bottles and glass, and the bag had broken, and it had been quite something to clean up.

If you drive past the recycling shed to get to the landfill’s face, but we didn’t go there. Instead, we went to the left of the recycling to our true goal: the “Take It or Leave It” shack. It’s a building about thirty feet square, with some shelves around the edges and a big central table. Two rather disreputable hippy-types sat outside: scruffy facial hair and disreputable clothes that had once been expensive. Sally said, “You’re not supposed to linger but people do.” The two hippy-types waited for people to bring fresh new items into the shack, and pounced upon the good things and put them in a truck with Vermont plates. Sally said, “There’s a couple of good yard sales today. They’ll close at eleven so they can leave off whatever’s left over before the dump closes at noon.” The hippy-types were obviously waiting for something just like that.

We went in the shack. The central table was filled with clothes; true to gender stereotypes, some of the girls went for the table, while Jarrod, Emma, and I explored the shelves. The books were pretty good: along with the usual Reader’s Digest versions of everything, I saw Tolstoy, Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air,, and, strangely, Canadian author Thomas Raddall’s Roger Sudden. I grabbed the Raddall book.

The big items were left outside. Sally found a great folding screen, cloth stretched over a wood frame; and a hanging lamp; and one or two other things. She had to take it all home and come back, because we could not have fit all eight of us and her treasures in the minivan.

After a while, we had all picked everything over pretty well. We stood in a circle talking, waiting for Sally to return. Everyone showed what he or she had found. Alyzza had a pretty good sport coat and a shirt. Emma found a Nancy Drew book for Sally (who loves Nancy Drew). Jarrod had half a dozen Steven King books. He sat down in a wicker chair that someone had just dropped off and started to read. The rest of us stood around and watched a pair of Barn Swallows swoop in and out of the “Take It or Leave It” shack. The sun started to come out. You could smell the compost from the big windrows out behind the equipment shed. You could smell the ripe garbage from the open face of the landfill. Gulls circled overhead, content with life, for a gull loves nothing better than a good open dump.

At last Sally came back. The big part of our adventure was over. We spent the rest of the eating lunch (at the resturant where Janine, one of the Nantucket youth, works) and walking out to Brant Point to see the little lighthouse there. Jessie found a wing from a dead bird. “My mother works at the Maria Mitchell Association,” she said, “where she stuffs birds for scientific specimens. She’s going to teach me how this summer.” Which sounded to me like a great way to spend a summer. Jessie and I looked at the bird wing — only bones and skin and feathers were left — and Jessie pointed out the radius and humerus.

The four of them came down to the pier to see us off. We waved to them from high up on the ferry deck. “Come back soon!” they shouted up to us. Then we were out in the harbor, and rounding Brant Point. I threw a penny at the end of the jetty, because our mother said to us that that’s what you’re supposed to do when you leave Nantucket. Jarrod and I stood on the deck, taking turns looking at Common Loons and Harbor Seals through my binoculars. “This was a great trip,” said Jarrod, who is often vaguely cynical. Who would have thought a field trip to a dump could be so much fun?

Nor’easter

Carol and I went for a walk on Monday. A stiff wind coming out of the northeast hit us in our faces as we crossed the bridge to Fairhaven: a nor’easter had moved in. That evening, coming out of a church meeting, the wind caught the Endowment Committee when we stepped outside the door; once we were out, it slammed the church door shut: bang! We all hunched our heads down a little. I walked next to Ned as we headed to the parking lot. “Boy, the wind’s pretty stiff,” I said. “On the radio they said it’s up to thirty-five knots,” he said.

Rain beating on the roof awakened me sometime in the middle of the night.

Rain off and on all morning yesterday. The mailman, not our regular mailman but a fill-in, came in to the church office looking soaked. Linda said something about the rain. He said, “Yeah, but from here on the route is pretty much indoors. After this I go to a couple of the big buildings downtown, and I’ll be inside most of the rest of the morning.”

By the time I left for lunch, it had stopped raining.

More rain after dark last night. It awakened me once again: a sudden hard rain, blown by the stiff wind against the skylights. I didn’t know it, but the barometer was still dropping, and it bottomed out around two in the morning. No rain, but this time I was awakened by aching joints: the dampness and the low pressure finally got to me. I took an ibuprofen.

Finally, I got to sleep.

The clouds spit rain off and on all day today. Gloomy and damp. The big glowing numbers of the bank thermometer down at Union and Purchase never seemed to stir from 45 degrees, cold enough to make your hands ache if you walked for more than fifteen minutes. At seven o’clock this evening, I was sick of being cooped up inside. I went for a walk down along the harborfront. The wind had shifted into the north. The gloom slowly increased as somewhere behind the clouds the sun went down.

A real spring nor’easter.

The National Weather Service radar shows the storm is slowly moving off shore, big long strands curling around behind it: bringing us more clouds, more drizzle, cool temperatures, slowly rising barometric pressure. They’re predicting the storm won’t be fully past until Sunday.

Harbor watch

Late this afternoon, I stood at the pivot point of the swing-span bridge that connects New Bedford and Fairhaven, one of the best places to watch the harbor.

Out in the distance, I could see a blue fishing boat coming into the harbor  through the hurricane barrier. She kept to starboard, and a small recreational boat darted past her out into Buzzard’s Bay. The lighthouse on Palmer’s Island was stunningly white in the bright late afternoon sun.

Over at State Pier, the Kent Explorer was docked [her picture on a Dutch shipping blog]. At a little over 400 feet (123 meters) length overall, this is one of the larger ships I’ve seen in the harbor. The bridge was eight or nine stories from the deck, and so the ship towered over the ferry terminal building; even the open hatch covers were taller than the ferry terminal. The two cranes, one fore and one aft, were unloading what looked to be plywood or other sheet goods.

Next to the Kent Explorer, the fishing boats and the ferries looked tiny. New England Fast Ferry has brought in their other fast ferry and it is now docked at the State Pier; the summer schedule starts up again on May 15th, only two weeks away.

On the other side of the bridge, over at the Maritime Terminal, the Silver Fjord (320 feet/ 97.6 meters LOA) was taking on cargo. Two days ago, Carol and I tried to figure out what they were loading. It was something packed in white cardboard boxes, and I thought perhaps it was some kind of frozen seafood. MarineLink.com reported on March 20 of this year that Green Reefers shipping line has purchased Silver Fjord, and will rename it Green Tromso. Since Green Reefers ships call here regularly, there’s a chance we will be seeing Green Tromso, a.k.a. Silver Fjord, sometime again.

Over on the south end of Fish Island, I saw a boat I hadn’t seen before. Barbara Joan, out of Montauk, is sitting on one of the old piers up out of the water, and presumably she’s being stripped; a large dumpster sat on the pier beside her. She looked like she once was a small fishing boat, but once a boat gets over to that end of Fish Island, it pretty much means it’s now scrap.

I began walking back. It was a fine day, so there were a fair number of idlers like me: a man fishing off the swing-span bridge, a cocky young man strolling along the other side of Route 6; once I got back down on MacArthur Drive, three young men came out from behind Crystal Ice whooping and hollering; as I climbed up the stairs for the pedestrian overpass over Route 18, I could hear some teenaged girls laughing and giggling on the observation deck above.

Just before I started across the overpass, I glanced out and saw that blue fishing boat I had seen coming through the hurricane barrier was now waiting for the swing-span bridge to open up for it. A cloud of gulls swarmed around it, waiting for scraps of fish to hit the water.