Category Archives: Sense of place

Meadow

Met dad at the Monsen Road unit of Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. We brought binoculars and spent some time looking for birds, but we spent far more time talking.

The Refuge staff continue to tweak their management practices in Great Meadows. This year again, both the upper and the lower impoundments have almost no water in them.

The lower impoundment (northerly, or downstream relative to the Concord River) is substantially drier right now, with the only water visible being in the ditch that leads north from the central dike. Many of the familiar plants remain despite the lack of water. The surface of the water in the ditch is covered with duckweed; cattails continue to flourish along the central dike and the east and west sides of the lower impoundment; and some purple loosestrife continues to flourish even though the water levels have been managed at least in part to try to do away with this invasive exotic. More remarkable to me was what appeared to be quite a fair amount of wild rice plants. I am not secure enough in my identification abilities to be sure it is wild rice without actually tasting the grains when they are mature. Nevertheless, I don’t remember seeing this plant before at all in the lower impoundment, and it covers a good proportion of what used to be open water in the lower impoundment. Presumably when the impoundment is flooded again, the seeds of this plant will provide another food source for migratory waterfowl. In the mean time, the growth of the wild rice (or whatever it is) makes the area look far more like a meadow than a drained pool.

The upper impoundment still looks like a drained pool. The cattails fringing the central dike and the east and west borders, and the mass of cattails in the southern half (or upstream half relative to the Concord River) retain their familiar boundaries. A few scraggly loosestrife have sprung up in the middle of the open area, the now-dry pool. We could see the leaves of pond lilies far out in the middle of the open area, where there was still a sheen of water on the mudflats — along with scores of shorebirds and a flock of Cedar Waxwings just visible in the binoculars. I saw some water chestnut floating in the central ditch — an invasive pest on which the current water management practices seem to have made substantial impact. A Great Blue Heron stalked the margins of the central ditch, thus provingsome small fish still haunted its waters.

We walked up the dike between the river and the upper impoundment, towards Borden’s Ponds, and saw pond lilies in beautiful butter-yellow bloom in the mud flats of the impoundment. Along the river, we saw lots of cardinal flowers, now in their glory. Dad took a number of photographs of cardinal flowers, and of the Great Blue Heron when we were returning. To be honest, though, we didn’t spend much time looking at either plants or birds; mostly we had a good long talk.

On August 22, 1854, Henry Thoreau took a walk in Great Meadows. This was 3 days after Ticknor and Fields published his book Walden. He wrote in his journal:

Pm. to Great Meadows on foot along bank….

This was a prairial walk. I went along the river & meadows from the first–crossing the red bridge road to the Battle Ground…. There are 3 or 4 haymakers still at work in the great meadows–though but very few acres are left uncut. Was suprised to hear a phoebe’s pewet-pewee & see it. I perceive a dead mole in the path halfway down the meadow. At the lower end of these meadows–between the river & the firm land are a number of shallow muddy pools or pond holes where the yellow lily and pontederia–Lysimachia stricta–Ludwigia spaerocarpa &c. &c. grow where apparently the surface of the meadow was floated off some srping–& so a permanent pond hole was formed in which even in this dry season [there was a serious drought in the summer of 1854] there is considerable water left…. In one little muddy basin where there was hardly a quart of water caught hald a dozen little breams and pickerel only an inch long as perfectly distinct as full grown….

Saw a blue heron–(apparently a young bird–of a brownish blue) fly up from one of these pools–and a stake driver [bittern?] from another–& also saw their great tracks on the mud & the feathers they had shed. Some of the long narrow white neck feathers of the heron. The tracks of the heron were about six inches long.

Here was a rare chance for the herons to transfix the imprisoned fish. It is a wonder that any have escaped. I was surprised that any dead were left on the mud but I judge from what the book says that they do not touch dead fish. To these remote shallow & muddy pools–usually surrounded by reeds & sedge–far amid the wet meadows–to these then the blue heron resorts for its food.

This is a description of the results of landscape management in 1854, a century and a half ago. There were no dikes in Great Meadows then, and no attempt to provide open water as resting places for migratory waterfowl in spring and fall; instead the land was managed to produce hay for livestock. In 1854, there was no need to manage the landscape in order to minimize the incursions of invasive exotic plants such as purple loosestrife and water chestnut — those plants have only come to the Great Meadows in destructive numbers within the past thirty or forty years. The Great Blue Heron and the yellow pond lilies and the shallow pools filled with small fish remain constant.

And human beings continue to spend time in the Great Meadows. Dad and I didn’t see any hay makers, of course, but we passed four young people, summer employees of the Refuge, and their pickup truck on the central dike. One of them scanned the upper impoundment with binoculars while the other three talked, and today I found myself more in sympathy with the conversation than the observation.

Downtown summer evening

As I walk across the street towards the art museum, three people, two men and a woman, walk across the street in the opposite direction. I can’t quite make out what they are saying, but their voices have slurred rhythm of people who are finishing up a day of drinking.

There’s a cicada singing loudly somewhere near the old Standard Times building.

A woman inside Cafe Arpeggio walks from behind the counter carrying a bucket and a rag. There is no one else inside.

Outside “Solstice Skateboards” on William Street, four people stand around a Piaggio motor scooter. They all look to be in their early twenties. One man and one woman stand smoking and watching the other two, who are bent over the scooter pumping at the kick starter.
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“It should be starting by now,” says the one pumping at the kick starter.
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As I walk past, I smell gas, and I bet to myself the engine’s flooded. All the way down William Street, I never hear the scooter’s engine actually start.

Three teenagers stand by the fountain behind the Customs House, doing nothing. Talking. They look at me furtively, and lower their voices a little.

Three people stand outside the back door to Dunkin Donuts. “Look, I can’t talk right now,” says one woman. “I’m at work, so call me back, OK?” I think I see a mop in a mop bucket inside the door, and I guess they’re getting ready to clean up. One of them, a man, is sitting on the step, smoking, relaxed.

As I walk back towards the church, across Union Street outside The Main Event there’s a man sitting on some steps. He’s talking loudly, but he’s the only one there. It’s dark, so I can’t tell if he’s talking into a cell phone, or if he’s just crazy.

Up on Maple Street, a woman walks her dog, a sedate-looking Golden Retriever. I hear crickets.

Robert Pirsig says, “The Buddha resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha — which is to demean oneself.” That’s a little too pat, and it makes me want to respond, “Yeah, but if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” Don’t waste time on either explanation. Take a walk downtown on a weeknight at ten p.m.

Permit

Our belongings arrive in New Bedford on Sunday in a “PODS” moving container. On Wednesday, I checked to make sure everything was set up so the container could be dropped off. Everything most definitely was not set.

We don’t have a driveway at our new place, so the container will have to be placed on the street. The PODS company had said there were no restrictions on placing the container in New Bedford. As it turns out, the city of New Bedford requires a “Permit for Street Obstruction” to legally place the container on the street. The City Council office told me that I need to have the PODS company fax a letter to City Hall saying I was authorized to sign such a permit. Well, it took the PODS people three days to do that, but finally they faxed that letter over just before noon today. And forgot to tell me they had done so. The local PODS franchise is not what you’d call organized.

So I walked over to City Hall to get the permit. City Hall is a big brick building with Corinthian columns right in the downtown historic district. I walked in and tried to figure out where the City Council office was.

“Can I help you?” said the woman in a blue uniform standing in the elevator. I told her I was looking for the City Council office. “Get in, and I’ll give you a ride up.”

I got into the elevator. It was a big elevator, a half circle with a radius of a good eight feet, with open iron grates for walls and an upholstered bench along the circular wall — a grand elevator from a different era. The woman pulled the door shut, and took me up one floor saying, “They’re in room 215, to the left and over there –” pointing in the correct direction. She sounded efficient, pleasant, and helpful all at the same time.

Marble floors and oak doors, all very business-like but grand. The building belied its age only by the lack of air conditioning in the hallways, though gentle breezes blew through keeping it cool. I turned the ornate dull brass handle on the door of room 215, and stepped into a fairly ordinary air-conditioned office.

A pleasant and efficient woman took down the information, collected the fee of thirty dollars, and filled out the form. I could have been back in the Town Hall of Concord, Massachusetts, where I grew up. But as soon as I left their office (to head up to get signatures from Engineering and Building), I was back in those broad, grand, business-like hallways, built no doubt during the hey-day of the textilemills, whem money was still pouring into the city, and when no doubt City Hall was dominated by the Yankee elite who were, I’m sure, grand and very business-like.

I skipped the elevator on the way out of the building. I need the exercise of climbing the stairs. And it would be too easy to be seduced by that big old elevator. Once out of the building, I crossed the street past the huge SUV parked in the Mayor’s special parking place with “City of New Bedford” painted on the doors.

It’s going to be a little busy the next four or five days as we move into our apartment, during which this blog may not see many (or any) entries. Back soon, though!

Sales call

The heat and humidity broke on Monday, finally. On Tuesday we opened the windows to the office to let in a little dry air. Our congregation’s office is in the basement, and it gets pretty damp, so the dry air felt good. It felt so good that Claudette, the administrator, opened the door, too.

We were sitting in the office working at computers, fielding phone calls, I was muttering to myself as I tried to make sense out of some files left by the interim minister. OUt of the corner of my eye, I saw two people walk into our office. I don’t yet know everyone in the congregation, but I was pretty sure these two people weren’t members of the congregation. They looked like salespeople to me. They smiled too readily for real New Englanders. He was dressed in a dark blue three piece suit with a faint pin stripe. Not even the lawyers who go in and out of the court house wear a three piece suit in the summer. And they don’t show off their suits as this fellow did; for lawyers it’s just a uniform. As for the woman, she wore business-like black slacks, but her top was cut just a little too low for an ordinary person.

They both made far too much eye contact. Yup, salespeople. I said hello.

“How are you? said the woman brightly.

“Very very busy,” I said, hoping she would get the hint. I smiled (I’m very good at forcing smiles since I used to be a salesman myself), and deliberately turned back to my work. I hoped Claudette could extract us from this.

“Hello,” said Claudette. Claudette managed to stay polite, but she injected a huge dose of scepticism in that one word.

“Hi, we’re from Quill Office Products,” began the woman. She did not have a New Bedford accent.

“You were just over here,” said Claudette. “Not you, but someone from your office.”

“Yes, well, we sent…” began the woman. Her smile did not falter one iota when Claudette interrupted her again.

“I’ll tell you what I told her,” said Claudette. “We’re very small, and we don’t order much at any one time. We don’t use more than a few reams of paper a month. It’s a small office, and we just don’t order much.” She paused to take a breath.

“That’s OK, we…” the woman tried to interject, but Claudette kept right on.

“And we get everything from Staples, right across the river,” said Claudette. “We like to buy from a place that’s local. Not that Staples is exactly local, they’re owned by a big conglomerate, but they employ local people, and they bring jobs into the city.”

As Claudette stopped to take a breath, the woman tried to start in again, but Claudette just talked right over her. This went on for two or three minutes. Caludette is very very good, but I could see that Claudette was not wearing them down. The woman’s smile was still just as bright as when she came in. The man stood absolutely silent and stock still, and I guessed that his role was to take over should the woman ever falter. It seemed unlikely that she would ever falter.

So I butted in. “I’m Claudette’s boss,” I said. “We’re not going to buy anything. We really don’t have time to talk right now. We’re very busy.” I smiled again, very politely, but I bared my teeth.

Unbelievably, they left. I think they were already intimidated by Claudette, and quailed at the thought of having to take on some strange man with a pony tail whose role wasn’t very clear except that he was Claudette’s boss. Or was he?

We agreed that they would be back next month. A few minutes later, Claudette said, “I think I’m going to close the door now. There are too many flies coming in.” Big black lazy flies buzzing around and around driving us crazy.

Adventures in rentals

I’m glad to say that in the end we wound up having to choose between two great apartments — both brand-new, both with nice landlords who care about their properties, both within walking distance of all the major cultural attractions of New Bedford — but getting to that point led us in some interesting directions.

Like the landlord who didn’t show up to open up the apartment, even though I talked to him just ten minutes before. It was OK, though — after seeing the condition of the outside of the building (towering weeds, loose trash in the driveway, peeling paint), I wasn’t exactly eager to see the inside.

Like the apartment with spacious rooms beautifully redone, a gorgeous new kitchen — and puddles on the new kitchen appliances from the leaking roof. Given the smell of mold, that leak in the roof wasn’t exactly new, either.

Like the apartment with the kitchen in the middle of the dining room. I mean right in the middle. You know what a thrust stage is? Well, this was a thrust kitchen.

Like the many people who didn’t answer our phone calls, even though they had an ad in the paper, or a sign in the window saying “For Rent.” (Funny thing, too — many of those ads are still running, and many of those signs are still in the windows.)

It still wasn’t nearly as bad as searching for an apartment in the greater Boston area, or the Bay area. And it wasn’t nearly as easy as finding an apartment in Geneva, Illinois, last year. It’s just a part of the distinctive flavor of this place, from the old buildings that have been reconfigured with greater or lesser sensitivity, to the general wariness of New Englanders when it comes to returning phone calls from people they don’t know.

It’s a fascinating place. Frustrating at times, but fascinating.

Farmers market

Downtown New Bedford has a farmer’s market on Wing Court off Union Street (down from Pleasant), Thursdays starting at 2:30 p.m. I decided to go check it out today.

Now I have a theory that you can tell something about a community by its farmer’s market. The Berkeley (California) farmer’s market is huge, with musicians, bakers, and lots and lots of organic farmers represented. You see people of every shade of skin color, dressed in everything from tie-dye to button-down shirts. The farmer’s market in Geneva, Illinois, had three farmers, two bakers, and a few craftspeople. Everyone is lily white except the one Hispanic farmer, there are no organic growers, and everyone is extremely nice. The farmer’s market in Davis Square, Somerville, was smaller than the Berkeley market, but otherwise looked pretty much the same — another bit of evidence that Berkeley has a direct connection via a space/time warp to Cambridge and environs. The New Bedford farmer’s market is small, but it manages to offer a good cross-section of Massachusetts farms.

At the far end of Wing’s Court was the lone organic grower, a woman with curly gray hair, skin burnt brown from the sun, and ice-blue eyes. She was straight-forward and no-nonsense, but also pleasant and polite. Her organic blueberries looked extraordinary, so I bought a quart. She also had jam and jelly, labeled “Tripp Farm, Horseneck Road, Westport.” The ingredients in the rhubarb jelly: rhubarb and sugar. Nothing else. For the wild grape jam: wild grapes and sugar. No weird sweeteners or additives, just fruit and sugar. And when I picked up the jars, the jelly inside slid around a little bit but not too much — just the right texture.

She watched me peer at all the labels. “What are you looking for?” she said. “Is there some kind of jelly you especially like?”

“I’m just looking to see what you have,” I said. Rhubarb sounded interesting, but I really don’t eat jelly any more. I was mostly curious.

“I have some other jelly, I just haven’t put it out yet,” she said. “I’ve got beach plum…”

“Beach plum!” I said. The last time I had had beach plum jelly was probably twenty years ago when my mother got us some from down on the Cape or islands. “I haven’t had that in maybe fifteen, twenty years.” Or maybe more like thirty years — I remembered a wild, spicy taste, not as tart as currant jelly….

She got some out, and I said I’d take it. “I have to put a label on it first,” she said. “We don’t putthe labels on until we have to, because if it gets foggy the ink on the labels runs. It’s five dollars, it’s more than the others.” Of course it is — picking wild beach plums is hard work.

The next stop was two pick-up trucks, back-to-back, with a gray-haired man at each one, one leg up on the truck bed, arms folded over the knee. They both wore neat and trim shirts and work pants. Their vegetables were unbelievably inexpensive — I bought a lot, but only spnet a dollar ninety.

I went to the one who was selling the vegetables (since I already had blueberries). He had nice tender young yellow summer squash, and curly head lettuce — how he grows lettuce in this heat is beyond me.

The last truck stood right by the Union Street sidewalk — there were only the four trucks, it’s a small farmer’s market — and it was run by a brisk, friendly woman a little younger than I. She had by far the widest selection of vegetables, along with fresh eggs, peaches, plums, and a few New Jersey apples she had gotten somewhere. She was both a farmer and a saleswoman, pleasant and efficient, the kind of person for whom the chickens probably lay bigger eggs. I bought wax beans, a dozen eggs, and a gorgeous sunflower from her. She must have known that no one can resist a small, perfect sunflower.

As I said, it’s Massachusetts farming in miniature, lacking only two kinds of farmers: the Southeast Asian farmer, often Hmong, with incredible vegetables, and the dreadlocked hippy farmer whose organic bok choy has holes in its leaves from cabbage moths. I thought about this as I walked home, and as soon as I got in the kitchen I tried the beach plum jam. The texture was absolutely perfect, and it tasted just as good as I remembered. The problem is, I no longer care for sweets. Carol will probably wind up finishing it off, and next time I’ll get curious and try the rhubarb jam.

Turtle

This evening, I went down to Allen’s Pond Audubon sanctuary in Dartmouth. At dusk, I was walking back along the beach when I heard someone shouting something over the sounds of the ocean. It was a fisherman I had seen fishing earlier.

“What?” I said, cupping my ear.

All I could hear in response was something-something-turtle.

I looked all around, but didn’t see anything. “Where?” I said.

He beckoned me over towards him, and when I got close enough he pointed to the ground in front of him. “It’s a leatherback,” he said.

A dead leatherback turtle lay at the edge of the water, mostly out of it. I would have said head first, but most of the head had been eaten away by something, leaving only the skull. If you weren’t looking, it could have been just another dark rock with seaweed hanging on it.

“I almost didn’t see it, but then I kicked this,” pointing at a piece of the flipper. “A boat or something must have hit him in the water,” he continued. “He must have come up here to die. Then probably one of the coyotes ate his head.” He paused, and we looked at the turtle for a bit. “I didn’t think they came this close in.”

“He hasn’t been here long,” I said. “He doesn’t stink yet.”

We looked over the body: almost black, sleek and streamlined, phenomenally beautiful even lacking the head. We thunked the shell. It was resilient, and sounded and felt much like a ripe watermelon when we tapped it with our knuckles. Ridges ran the length of the shell. The flippers were tapered and graceful. The whole body was big, a good five or six feet long, probably weighing a few hundred pounds. Even the blue-green curl of intestine spilling out from between the shells was beautiful. A senseless death.

“Well, now we can say we saw one,” said the fisherman, “even if it was dead.”

We started walking back to the road, and I asked him if the blues were running. He said they had been, but they had been feeding voraciously on some smaller fish and weren’t interested in what he threw at them. It was getting dark enough that the colors were fading, and as I got in the car I heard a few last terns screeching as they dove for prey into the ocean.

New Bedford

New Bedford, Mass.

Carol and I left Cambridge at about 10:30 this morning. We had to take separate cars since Carol will return to Cambridge on Sunday. She has to commute to Watertown, which could be a two-hour drive from here at rush hour, and she’s still trying to work on her next book while working full time.

I arrived here in New Bedford at about twenty past noon, twenty minutes late to pick up the key from Nancy C., who has kindly loaned us her house in downtown New Bedford until we can find our own apartment. The drive down here was bad. I had a hair-raising ride through Somerville and the Central Artery, and I learned that the driving directions you get on the Internet are pretty useless in the Boston area — in greater Boston, you don’t just need to know when to take a right and when to take a left, you need to know which lane to get into well before you have to make the turn, and you have to know that to stay on Somerville Ave. you have to take what looks like a sharp left. Of course being Boston, the drivers are insane, the roads are still a mess with the Big Dig construction, and Interstate 93 was all backed up south of the city. I sat in traffic for twenty minutes on I-93, and saw two accidents, and three cars pulled over by the State Police. It was just a nasty drive from Cambridge until traffic eased out close to New Bedford.

But at last we made it to New Bedford.

And at about one o’clock, my two sisters, Abby and Jean, my father, and Jim, Abby’s husband, arrived to spend the afternoon in New Bedford. We had lunch and walked over to the National Park visitors’ center. They wanted to see the waterfront, so we crossed the pedestrian footbridge over Route 18. Dad and my sister Jean had to stop every hundred feet to take photographs. Jean took 64 photographs yesterday. I don’t know how many Dad took. Downtown New Bedford is photogenic, with most of the houses and commercial buildings from the 19th C., and a few from the late 18th C.

“Seagulls,” said Jean, as several circled and cried overhead. “I could work in a town that has seagulls.”

We walked over to the waterfront, looking at the fishing boats tied up there, going into the Wharfinger’s Office which now houses exhibits for the National Park, and wandered over to look at the Ernestina, a wood-hulled schooner built in 1894, and originally christened the Effie M. Morrissey. She was a fishing schooner on the Grand Banks, sailed to the Arctic as an exploratory vessel, and is now a national landmark, currently being restored. As we were looking her over (as Dad and Jean were taking lots of photographs), a three-masted vessel, a barkentine, came into port and tied up just down the wharf from Ernestina. Carol being who she is, she immediately struck up a conversation with the crew, and learned they sailed from Philadelphia headed for Booth Bay Harbor, to go into drydock there. “If we stayed another half hour,” said Carol, “I would have gotten us an invitation to go on board.” She would have, too, but we had to head back to the cars, so Dad and my sisters and Jim could get back to Concord.

After we ate dinner, Carol and I went to Baker Books in Dartmouth, the town just west of New Bedford. Going to a bookstore is our usual weekend date. That we went on our usual weekend date says more than anything that we are here, we are settling in.

I’ve arrived now. The journey from Illinois is over.

Travel

I am reading a translation of travel writing and other prose by Basho, 17th C. Japanese writer. He writes:

Now, for those who set their heart on the spiritual arts and follow the four seasons, writing is as inexhaustible as the sands on the beach.

He wrote this in a haibun about a painting, and he decides that the writers of his day do not measure up to the master poets of the past:

The joy of continuing their truth is difficult for those today.