Category Archives: New Bedford, Mass.

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.

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.

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.

Anecdote

A couple of nights ago, we went over to Freestone’s at six. The bar was pretty full, and a courteous older man moved over so we could sit in two contiguous seats. I ordered scallops, and Carol drank orange juice and tonic water (she had eaten earlier, so she stole from my plate instead of ordering). We chatted about this and that, the bar emptied out, and eventually we wound up chatting with the courteous man who had moved over for us. He was from Boston, “an old Boston Brahmin family,” he said. We agreed that the world view of Bostonians ends at the Connecticut River. He told us that when he had gone to UCLA to do doctoral work, an elderly relative of his had exclaimed: Poor boy, you’ll be so far from the ocean out there. “She didn’t realize that there’s another whole ocean out there! It’s even bigger than the ocean here!” he said. Now I have heard this exact same anecdote told any number of times, but never with the level of detail he brought to it: he gave the name of the person who had said it and when she had said it, and he claimed to be a direct witness because she had said it to him. Perhaps he had worked this old anecdote into his own memories of leaving New England; perhaps the incident as he told it was actually the original of that now-widespread anecdote; perhaps his elderly relative had heard the anecdote and used it knowingly, with that extremely dry humor of some elder New Englanders which young people take too literally. So I just had to tell him the anecdote about Mrs. Cabot of Boston, who had to entertain Mrs. Smith of Ohio while Mr. Cabot did business with Mr. Smith; Mrs. Cabot said, “And where did you say you come from, Mrs. Smith?”; “Ohio,” said Mrs. Smith; whereupon Mrs. Cabot said, “Mrs. Smith, here in Boston we pronounce it ‘Iowa’.” He did not particularly care for my anecdote, perhaps because it was all too evidently made up.

Molluscs and clean water

Long walk today up to Riverside Cemetery in Fairhaven; from there, I walked out on the point for views of the upper New Bedford harbor. Found some of the older gravestones in the cemetery, dating from the late 18th C.

On the walk back, I went down one of the side streets that terminates at the edge of the water. The tide was low, and I was able to walk out onto the shore, mostly sand but with an admixture of mud. A greater diversity of seashells than I had expected: people say that New Bedford harbor is essentially dead, that only killifish and quahogs live in its waters, but that was certainly not true this far up into the harbor. I first noticed some long meandering tracks through the sand of some small gastropod, which proved to be Common European Periwinkles (Littorina littorea). I picked one up by its shell: the mollusc clenched its body into the shell, but after I held it still for fifteen seconds, it relaxed, letting its foot come out, and then its two delicate black tentacles, which it wriggled gently; if the tentacles are where its chemoreceptor cells are located, and if its eyes are at the base of its tentacles, perhaps it was exhibiting a kind of molluskan curiosity. I placed it back on the sand, and it resumed its course down towards the verge of the water.

There was a small patch of salt marsh hay growing from the muck, which, when I got close to it, proved to support a large number of Atlantic Ribbed Mussels (Geukensia demissa), packed in so tightly that their shells touched and it was only in the interstices between the shells that the salt marsh hay could grow. All these living mussels pointed upwards; with the tide so low, they were all closed tightly. In addition to these living molluscs, I saw quite a few shells and shell fragments, of course including Northern Quahog (Mercenaria mercenaria) which is well-known to grow in the most polluted waters of the harbor, but also Atlantic Jackknife Clam (Ensis directus) which we always called “razor clams” when we were children, and Eastern Oyster (Crassostrea virginica).

It was getting late when I stopped at this little beach, and I suspect if I had had more time I could have found a few more species. Given this diversity of species, it may be that the water quality towards the upper end of the harbor (that is, nearer to the Interstate 195 bridge) may be fairly good; and this is the only place in the harbor thus far where I have seen living molluscs.

(Reference: Seashells of North America: A guide to field identification, R. Tucker Abbot (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1968, 1986, 1996); in the “Golden Field Guide Series”.)

April is gray

April is gray this year, the way it should be. I was worried after such a sunny March. Years ago when I worked in a lumberyard there was an April when the sun did not shine once; at least not that I can remember; and it rained and rained until the river backed up into the millbrook which backed up into the lumberyard, forcing the foreman to move piles of vulnerable plywood and drywall. By the end of the month, we all became irritable from lack of sun. April can be that way: gray, now cold and now warm, showers, drizzle, rain, too much wind, the time of sunset too rapidly changing; a month that tries patience and fortitude. Because of the grayness I often find myself staying inside, even though it’s pleasant outside; or when I go outside I keep my head down, and only with difficulty do I look up to see masses of white blossoms covering a tree; only with difficulty do I hear and listen to a House Finch singing its amazingly liquid song. I notice the dandelions’ first yellow blooms only to think, Now that they’ve bloomed they’ll be too bitter to eat. On Sunday, I saw a two-year-old in his mother’s arms, clutching a dandelion bloom and grinning, but he was also clutching a piece of crumpled paper and a piece of candy in the same hand and I couldn’t say which he grinned at. I suppose if I lifted my head more, or paid more attention to what I hear, April would feel less gray; but I happen to like gray, and for that reason I like April.

Parking

A friend came in to downtown New Bedford to meet us for dinner at Freestone’s restaurant, just up the street from our apartment. She said:

“I drove up and saw all these empty parking places. I kept looking for signs that said ‘No Parking.’ There was parking right in front of the restaurant, but I wound up driving down a block because I just couldn’t believe there would be all this parking in downtown New Bedford. Finally, I rolled down my window and asked this man about all the empty spaces. He looked at me and said, ‘Lady, this isn’t Paris, France.'”

City critters

Went to park my car in the Elm St. garage at about ten last night, and wound up getting into a long conversation with the evening parking lot attendant about what mammals might live in the downtown neighborhood. He’s in the parking garage five evenings a week until eleven at night, and from his perch in the entrance booth he regularly sees skunks and possums. We have both seen gray squirrels, of course. And he said there’s a feral cat that lives nearby, appropriately named “Downtown” — a woman who lives nearby feeds “Downtown” every night just across Elm St. on North Second St.

We talked about whether coyotes have made it to the downtown neighborhood yet. He has talked to several people who claim to have seen coyotes in other parts of New Bedford. We agreed that one of the sure signs of a coyote living in the neighborhood is a distinct drop in the cat population. I argued that the presence of “Downtown” the cat indicated that there are no coyotes nearby, but he argued that “Downtown” is tough enough to lick most coyotes.

What other mammals in this center-city neighborhood? Well, I’ve seen harbor seals swim right up to the downtown waterfront. He saw a cottontail rabbit in the garage once. There are doubtless rats and mice. I’ve seen a big brown bat in the church. But shouldn’t there also be raccoons? — can we confirm the presence of coyotes downtown? — any other mammals? We decided this topic calls for more investigation. He’s going to talk to the people who come into the garage and pump them for information; I’m going to start watching for road kill along Route 18 to see what turns up.