Category Archives: Sense of place

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For the first time in five days, I managed to take a long walk. Evening meetings and snow and early sundowns have kept my walks short.

I walked over the bridge to Pope’s Island. The water in the harbor looked black and gray, winter colors. One or two small gray-white chunks of ice floated near shore. I came around the tree next to the marina building, and saw four black-and-white ducks calmly swimming fifty feet from shore: Buffleheads, three males and a female. I’ve seen a dozen or so cautious Buffleheads nearly every time I’ve walked on Pope’s Island; usually swimming away from me as fast as they can. These four, howver, were not nearly as wary, so I stood and watched them for a while. I like the look of Buffleheads: the neat black-and-white males, the black female with her white cheek patch.

A lot more ducks were swimming at the far end of Pope’s Island: thirteen, no fourteen more Buffleheads; then another six; two dozen in all. I walked across the bridge to Fairhaven. A hundred or so pigeons who had been resting on the docks by the old Seaport Motel started up all at once, wheeled acorss the sky, and settled back down. There was another duck behind them. I headed down to the edge of the water to see what it was, cursing the fact that I had left the binoculars at home; but the duck, whatever it, was right in the sun. A Ruddy Duck? Another female Bufflehead? I couldn’t be sure.

On the other side of a little stone pier, just past a skin of ice, were still more Buffleheads, maybe another two dozen. Half a dozen Scaup were diving and feeding near them; perhaps Lesser Scaup. The sun was getting close to the New Bedford skyline, low enough now that the surface of the water looked almost creamy white in places. Clouds moving in from the west. Overhead, a thousand black specks of starlings wheeled in synchronized flight; they started up the hundreds of gray and white pigeons who wheeled counterclockwise below them.

Back across the harbor via the north side of the bridge. A gaggle of gulls sat at the Fairhaven end of the bridge: Ringbills, Great Black-backed, Herring, and Bonaparte’s Gulls. A few Canda Geese, too. The gulls and geese didn’t like the looks of me, and most of them sprung into the air, screaming and splashing and flapping, gray and white and black against the black water. One yearling gull didn’t move, hunkered down on the dark gray pebbled beach, nearly invisible until it swayed ever so slightly. The gulls and geese settled down out on the water near a pair of black-and-white ducks: not Buffleheads, but probably Common Goldeneye.

It was good to see the wild ducks in the harbor; mostly I just see gulls, starlings, and pigeons. By the time I got back, it was getting pretty dark: the city streets, shades of black and gray, warmed here and there with red brick.

Green Spring

On my afternoon walk today, I decided to head out and cross the harbor via Pope’s Island. Just as I got in sight of the swing bridge, it began to close: the gates came down, and pretty soon the bridge started to turn so some boat could pass. I looked to see what boat it was. It was a fair-sized ship, about a hundred yards long, helped along by a tugboat. I kept walking towards the bridge, until I could read her name in white letters on the green bow: Green Spring, a ship in the Green Reefers line; you could see “Green Reefers” in big white letters on her side, and the rakish “GR” painted on her smokestack. The black and white tugboat accompanying her through the bridge, and tied to her stern, was named Jaguar. Jaguar’s skipper gave two short toots as they went through the bridge.

Once Green Spring got through the bridge, you could see Jaguar’s propellors churning up the water, stopping Green Spring’s forward motion, starting to swing the big ship’s stern over towards the Maritime Terminal dock. Jaguar tooted her whistle now and then; presumably to signal what she was going to do next, though I thought that he two ships must have communicated mostly by radio. Once Green Spring’s forward momentum was stopped, Jaguar untied from her stern and maneuvered over to her starboard side, about a third of the way up from her stern. From there, Jaguar began to nudge Green Spring’s stern around Fish Island and towards Maritime Terminal. Tiny little Jaguar pulled her, nudged her, pushed her gently back, and back, and back. Every now and then you could see the wash from Green Spring’s propellors helping Jaguar pull her backwards towards her berth.

It was more than twenty minutes from the time Green Spring passed through the bridge until she approached the dock; I stood in the sun, watching her slow stately progress over that short distance; watching Jaguar nudge and pull and ease her into her berth. A fellow walked up, unshaven, knapsack on his back, coat open, and stood beside me, also watching. He kept up an intermittent commentary, so softly I had to keep asking him to repeat himself; I think he was talking more to himself than to me. He said something about, what if she broke away and hit the bridge we were standing on? Where we stood was a little lower than Green Spring’s after deck; I had already thought briefly about what would happen if she hit us. “You know it’s gotta happen,” said the unshaven man. He went on to say something about aircraft carriers. “What’s that?” I said. “I don’t know what the Nimitz would be doing here though,” he said.

Another man, walking purposefully, paused a little ways away, watched for a few minutes. The bright late afternoon sun shone down. The longshoremen caught the heaving line, and hauled the first stern rope up onto the wharf. Once it was looped over the massive cleat on the dock, the crew of Green Spring, clad in blaze-orange jumpsuits and white hard hats, turned on the winch and pulled the slack up out of the water. The unshaven man gave up and walked away; I didn’t see the other man leave but after awhile I noticed he was gone; I stayed to watch a little longer.

Jaguar pulled her stern out a little, swinging the bow in. After two abortive tries, the longshoremen threw the heaving line back up to the crew, who sent two more stern ropes to them. Watching this, I missed them getting the first bow line tied off to the dock. By now, I had been standing there for a good forty minutes. The sun was sinking ever lower, the cold was starting to seep in. The crew started to winch the bow in towards the dock. Good: I’d seen enough; as far as I was concerned, Green Spring was safely berthed.

On my way back a half an hour later, I saw that the gangplank ran up to Green Spring’s deck, that no crewmembers stood on her deck any longer. I imagined that one or two of the ship’s officers were up at the U.S. Customs House a block from our apartment, taking care of whatever paperwork had to be taken care of; I imagined most of the crew wandering New Bedford, maybe finding a friendly bar; I imagined one crew member, unlikely as it seems, visiting the Whaling Museum to find out how mariners of the past once fared. Tomorrow, the crew will be back on deck; the semi trucks will be backed up to the loading dock next to the Maritime Terminal building, the crew will be at the ship’s cranes swinging cargo onto the dock, the forklifts driven by longshoremen will be whizzing back and forth, they will be loading the reefer trucks and one by one sending them on their various ways.

For a picture of tugboat Jaguar, visit this tugboat fan page, and scroll down almost to the bottom of the page.

Waterfront story

Two freighters are in port today: Green Spring at the Martime International Terminal, and Sophie at the State Pier. I was walking past the vehicle exit of the State Pier, after going to look at the schooner Ernestina in the snow, when a beat-up blue van pulled up.

“Hey,” said the man driving the van, “You from that ship there?” cocking his head in the direction of Sophie.

I laughed and said, “Nope, not me.”

“Oh,” he said. He was about 60, with friendly blue eyes, and wearing a blue parka with that faintly greasy black patina that comes with hard work and long wear. “If you was from one of those ships, I was going to ask you what she’s carrying there. I used to be in the Merchant Marine, and I got curious. But now they got that up,” and he pointed to the chain link fence with the barbed wire at the top that encircles that part of the State Pier where the freight ships dock. “It’s prob’bly because of the longshoremen, they’ll steal you blind.”

He proceeded to tell me a few stories: one about longshoremen who stole from him (he showed me his state peddler’s license, which lets him sell watches and such things out of his van); another story about seeing a state cop stealing whiskey from a container that the longshoremen has broken open, “I saw him, taking it out. If I only had a camera! –I would have caught that #$%@! right there”; and then he told me one last story, saying, “You’re going to laugh your @#%$ off when you hear this.”

There used to be a Coast Guard base in New Bedford. Once in a while, at lunch time, he would stop by the Coast Guard cutters. The crews of the cutters would come out to buy their lunches from the lunch truck. “Then they would come over and buy watches and stuff off me.”

One day he pulled in and noticed there were a number of state police cars parked near the Coast Guard cutters, but he didn’t think anything of it. What he didn’t know was that there was a ship offshore dumping bales of marijuana into the ocean, and letting it drift into the harbor. The state police and the Coast Guard were watching and waiting to see who would run out and try to pick up those bales of marijuana floating out there. So he pulled up in his van, not knowing this was going on. He opened the back doors of the van, and shouted, “Hey, get your hot stuff here!”

“All of a sudden I had about a hundred guns pointed at me,” he said. “I went like this,” –he sinks down into his greasy blue parka and puts his hands up– “and I said, Whoa, whoa! They came over and a couple of them went through the whole van and saw that all I had was some things to sell, you know, all legal. When they got done I asked a trooper, What’s going on? He said, There’s this ship offshore dumping marijuana and letting it drift into the harbor. Another cop says to me, Next time, I guess you won’t say ‘Hot stuff to sell,’ will you? Jeez, I’m telling you….” He shook his head remembering it.

“The next time I came in to sell stuff to the guys in the Coast Guard, they all came out and started laughing at me,” he went on. “One of them says, ‘Ya got any hot stuff to sell?’ I said, no, no.”

Just then, the light turned green (for the third time). He put the van in gear, “Hey, nice talking with you. Take care, OK?” I told him to stay warm, and he drove off.

Snow, sort of

Yesterday, the three of us who work in the church office got to talking. “It’s going to snow tomorrow.” “How much do you think we’ll get?” “It’s supposed to be a big storm, maybe 7 to 10 inches.” Then Linda, who has lived around here most of her life, said to me, “There’s one thing you’ll find out about this little corner of the world. Half the time, the snow misses us.” Claudette, who has also lived around here pretty much all her life, nodded sagely. Linda went on, “Like Lakeville will get clobbered, and we’ll get nothing.” Lakeville is the town just north of New Bedford.

This morning when I got up, the sky was dark grey and it was snowing madly. By the time I got dressed and got out the door, the snow had mostly stopped. When I walked home for lunch, there was perhaps two or three inches of snow on the ground; the sky was blue, the sun was out.

Parking garage

There’s a fellow I chat with now and then who works nights at the parking garage where I park my car. He found out I’m a minister (don’t ask me how — for a city of 100,000 people, New Bedford feels like a small town). Turns out he’s a churchgoer. Though we don’t talk theology or narrow denominational differences, we appreciate the fact that we are each religious in our own way. The closest we have come to a theological discussion went something like this:

“So where are you pastor?” he said.

“First Unitarian,” I said.

He nodded, paused for a moment, then said, “What I like to say is:– Got God?” He tends to talk in short epigrammatic sentences.

I replied, “That about sums it up.”

As I said, we don’t talk narrow denominational differences. Anyway, tonight I had a meeting of the endowment committee. It was a good meeting, but when I got done I realized that I was exhausted. Felt like maybe I’m fighting off a cold. I drove over to the supermarket to buy some chicken broth, just in case. As I pulled into the parking garage, I was maybe feeling a little sorry for myself.

The friendly fellow from the parking garage saw me as I waved my pass in front of the sensor to let the gate up. He slid back the window in his booth. “They got you working late,” he said.

“Yup,” I said.

We sat there for a moment with our windows open to the damp November evening.

“Night meeting,” I said.

He nodded, and I slipped the clutch back in. I parked near the top, climbed down the stairs, and started to head across the street. When I was in the crosswalk, I heard the window to his booth slide open.

“Keep up the good work,” he said.

Telegraphically short, but somehow the right thing to say. I turned, stood there in the middle of the empty city street, and pointed back at him. “You, too,” I said.

It’s not exactly cold tonight, but too damp to linger, so I turned and walked home.

Saronic wave

On our walks across the bridge to Fairhaven for the past couple of days, we’ve been walking by the bow of the Saronic Wave. She’s one of the larger ships that comes into this port (7326 gross ton), and is docked over by the Maritime Terminal building. (When I first saw her name on the bow, I read it as “Sardonic Wave,” but that was too good to be true.) Today, we saw that they were unloading pallets of oranges, or rather Clementines, from her hold. It can be difficult to find shipping information on the Web, but we found Saronic Wave and learned that she passed through the Port of Gibraltar on 14 November, spending less than ten hours there on her way from Nador, Morocco, to New Bedford. She must be mostly unloaded by now: looking at her Plimsoll line, there can’t be all that much left on board.

November morning

You know when you’re driving into southeastern Massachusetts because the land flattens out as you move into the south coastal plain. The Wisconsinan glaciation ground off any protrusions from the underlying metamorphic bedrock, and when it retreated, the land it left behind always appears to me quite a bit flatter than the landscape further north and west.

You see a different mix of trees along the highway, too. This morning as I drove down to New Bedford from Watertown, once I got fairly into the coastal plain, I noticed many more red oaks along the side of the road. They stand out at this time of the year because they are still holding onto their leaves; and the red oak leaves are a particularly brilliant shade of red this year; in some of the trees I could see almost none of the usual brownish tinge to the leaves. The leaves glowed cranberry red in the early morning sun.

I saw just one or two trucks parked along the highway this morning, compared to the half a dozen two weeks ago. Maybe it was because I was driving down a little later in the morning, or maybe it’s because the most of the hunters have bagged their season limit of pheasant and quail and grouse.

You pass the sign that says, “Entering the Buzzard’s Bay watershed: Communities connected by water,” and it’s pretty much all downhill, literally, from there. The traffic is significantly lighter by that point. Even at eight in the morning, there’s plenty of traffic along interstate 93 heading south out of Boston. But by the time I got onto state route 24, around nine o’clock, there were times when I could only see one other car on the highway.

I pulled into downtown New Bedford at quarter past nine. Downtown is pretty empty on weekends at this time of year; the malls along route 6 in north Dartmouth have sucked most of the retail traffic away from here. I got a parking place right in front of the door to our apartment. Later, I walked up to the pharmacy two blocks up the hill. The trees along William Street are sheltered, and still have a few green leaves. I saw a few people. I passed one a man who looked somewhat the worse for wear; he was softly talking to himself, let out a loud belch, chuckled to himself in satisfaction. The other people I passed were just quietly going about their morning errands, headed to the newstand or the pharmacy or Cafe Arpeggio, hunched into their coats against the cold, the coldest morning yet this fall. I took care of my errand at the pharmacy, and headed back home to make a pot of hot tea.

Scenes

Carol and I were just out wandering around downtown New Bedford for AHA! Night. We stopped in at Cafe Arpeggio to check out the open mic, and then headed down to Freestone’s City Grill for dinner and a drink.

Scene at Arpeggio: the scruffy fuzzy crowd (we even saw a scruffy Mohawk), mostly young but with some gray fuzzy beards as well, lots of hooded sweatshirts and a few studded leather jackets.

Scene at Freestone’s: hip young urbanites, smoothly coiffed, lots of tailored leather jackets.

Two very different scenes a block apart.

Obsession

For the past several years, I have gone through late October and November obsessed with cranberries. I think it all started 15 years ago, when my partner Carol did the newsletter for the Northeast Organic Farmers Association in Massachusetts, and we were hanging out with Bruce Bickford who at that time managed Hutchins Farm in Concord, Massachusetts, then the largest certified organic farm in the state. Bruce said that he thought it was probably better to eat locally grown conventionally farmed produce, than it was to eat organic produce shipped in from California or some other far away place. That got me started trying to eat food that was in season. And at about that same time, Carol got interested in trying to always eat primarily produce that was in season, because it seemed like that’s what we were meant to do — it somehow didn’t seem right to eat citrus fruit from sunny Florida in the middle of a dark snowy February in New England.

Traditional New England cooking has always paid some attention to the seasons, at least with its use of fruits and vegetables. Cod might be good to eat any time of year, but in New England you eat apples and cider in the fall, squash and potatoes and root vegetables in early winter, parsnips in late winter, fiddleheads and dandelion greens in earliest spring, peas and new potatoes and salmon for the fourth of July, green beans and blueberries in mid-summer, crookneck squash and corn-on-the-cob in the summer, and then back to apples in the fall. And cranberries.

When cranberries first appear in the grocery store in October, somehow my whole being is ready to be obsessed by them. I’m ready for their deep red color, so red it’s almost black at times, like the leaves on certain October Red Maples, or on the Red Oaks in early November. I’m ready for the tart burst of flavor you get when you crunch them between your teeth, for I like best to eat them raw. The first time I found cranberries growing wild, I saw a spark of red at the edge of a swampy area, and I bent down to see what it was, that little bit of red caught in a tangle of leafless twigs and stems: a cranberry. I picked it and ate it right there, and it brightened up a dark November afternoon, and I ate another and another, all of the few I could find.

So I’ve taken to eating lots of cranberries mixed in granola in the morning, and even a small handful as a mid-day snack now and then. Sometimes when you eat them plain they’re so tart they kind of take you by surprise and pucker up your mouth and catch your breath, just a little, but I even like that. When the days are quickly getting shorter, and the sun keeps getting lower in the horizon, that burst of tartness is like seeing the burst of a last red tree in the setting sun on an otherwise gray leafless hillside. It gets you in your heart, and you might even gasp a little with the stark tart beauty of it.

For about two months, I crave and eat cranberries. They’re exactly the right food for this time of year, in this place. Fresh cranberries will probably disappear from the grocery store by early December, but that’s OK because by then I will be tired of them, and will have moved on to the soft boiled comforts of root vegetables: rutabaga, potato, kohlrabi, celery root, carrot.