Allen Pond Wildlife Sanctuary, Westport, Mass.
Category: Places
Saco, Me., to Westport, Mass.
We stayed up late last night singing around the camp fire. Glenn mostly led the singing, with help from Amy, and drumming by Richard. Jon and I helped out where we could with uke and guitar. At Jean-Pierre’s urging, Milene sang us a traditional French Canadian song. Chantelle and some others went to bed at ten, but we kept going until quiet hour. It was after eleven when we got to sleep.
We had a leisurely morning. We packed up our campsite and loaded up the car. I enjoy packing up campsites and loading cars, so this proved to be a pleasurable morning for me. Then we ate an early lunch at a picnic table. Richard happened to be there, and we had a long talk, covering everything from Gilles Deleuze and the relationship between colonialism and religion on the one hand, to updating each other on the details of our personal lives on the other hand.
After lunch, I went out into the woods behind Ferry Beach Park Association, while Carol-the-extrovert went off to talk with people. I took a number of photographs of plants and other organisms which I uploaded to iNaturalist. I was sad to see that nearly all the Eastern Hemlocks (Tsuga heterophylla) were infested with Hemlock Woolly Aldegids (Adelges tsugae), an invasive insect from Asia. Many hemlocks were badly infested, and I also saw several dead hemlocks. I have also noticed that there were almost no Black-throated Green Warblers nesting in the woods this year, in contrast to past years when they were numerous. I wonder if the Black-throated Green Warbler prefers hemlocks for nesting, so that the loss of the hemlocks may mean the loss of the warblers.
On a more pleasant note, I came across a Glossy Ibis in the pond just to the north of Ferry Beach Park Association. I’ve never seen a Glossy Ibis there.
We began driving south at a quarter to four. I asked Carol if she’d mind driving because I didn’t think I was alert enough to drive. It was a good thing she drove, because I slept for most of the three hour drive.
We arrived at our summer rental at a quarter to seven. We got dinner at Lee’s Market in Westport. We met one of our neighbors, a skunk who appears to be living under the house. We feel quite settled in, and now we’re ready for bed.
Saco, Me., to Bath, Me.
This afternoon, Carol and I drove up to Bath, Maine, to sing Sacred Harp on the gazebo in the center of Bath. It turned out to be an excellent place to sing, which may show that a good singing space does not need walls if you have a wood ceiling and a wood floor. And with no walls, we were much less worried about transmitting COVID, especially with the stiff breeze that was blowing. It also turned out to be an excellent group of people to sing with. As Carol said after the singing, “It was a really tight group.”
After the Sacred Harp singing was over, we got takeout food. We ate dinner in a city park overlooking the Kennebec River. This is the furthest east we will travel on our cross-country trip.
A quick meomry from our cross-country trip that I forgot to write down earlier:
When we drove into Wyoming, a sign directed all vehicles with watercraft to pull into the Port of Entry for inspection — “including canoes and kayaks.” Signs directed us around the weigh station to a small building belonging to the Wyoming Fish and Game Department. A polite young woman carrying a clipboard and wearing a Fish and Game uniform greeted us. She was obviously checking for invasive species. She looked at the canoe on top of our car, and at our California license plates. “What was the last body of water you had the canoe it?” she asked.
I thought for a moment. We hadn’t used the canoe in the whole 13 years we’d lived in California. “The Atlantic Ocean,” I said.
She looked surprised. “Whereabouts?” she asked.
“Coast of Maine,” I said. “Saco Bay.”
She knew Saco Bay, and it turned out that she, like me, was from Massachusetts.
“Where’d you grow up?” I asked.
“Near Essex,” she said, and told me which town.
There was no one behind me waiting to have their boat checked, so we chatted for a bit. We asked what brought her out to Wyoming. She had gotten her degree in wildlife management at a university in New York state, worked for a while in the northeast, then decided she wanted to go some place completely different. So she chose Wyoming.
I told her I was glad that Wyoming was checking all watercraft for invasive species. “I’m a fisherman, and invasives have already ruined too many fisheries,” I said.
“Especially the mussels,” she replied.
So yeah. If you own a boat, remember: clean, dry, and drain.
Acton, Mass., to Saco, Me.
Abby and Jim’s back yard proved to be a very comfortable place to sleep. As we were packing up the car to leave, I noticed these charismatic European Paper Wasps (Polistes dominula) building a nest.
Native to Mediterranean Europe, P. dominula was first introduced to the United States in Massachusetts in the 1970s. Since then, it has spread to Maine, Pennsylvania, Michigan, South Dakota, Nebraska, Arkansas, Washington state, and perhaps elsewhere. Abby said she was going to kill the insects and remove the nest, which I am glad of — according to the Invasive Species Compendium website, P. dominula has been shown to displace native Polistes species.
Another dreary drive today, though only two hours long. Traffic was heavy and aggressive from Acton to southern Maine. We were glad to get off the highway, and set up our tent at Ferry Beach Conference Center, where I’ll be leading a workshop in ecological spirituality for the next week. I’ll post more about that workshop in the coming days.
Newfield, N.Y., to Acton, Mass.
We had a long breakfast with Paul and Gina this morning. After breakfast, the four of us, plus Allagash the dog, went for a walk at a nearby pond. Paul and I met in a field ornithology class, so we listened for birds: Summer Tanager, Dark-eyed Junco, Wood Thrush, Red-eyed Vireo, Hermit Thrush (maybe), and more. Gina noticed this spectacular Wood Lily:
Then Carol and I started driving east again. After a long drive, we arrived at the house of my sister Abby and Jim. Now we’re sitting outdoors in Abby and Jim’s screen house talking after dinner. What do siblings do when they get together? Talk a lot, and goof around. Here’s a photo Abby took of me:
Just now Abby asked, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m uploading to iNaturalist.” She doesn’t know I’m actually writing on my blog while we’re sitting here in the screen house.
Conneaut, Ohio, to Newfield, N.Y.
I attended a morning session of the Religious Education Association annual conference. I wanted to hear two presentations on abuse and trauma as it relates to religious education. A significant part of my career working in congregations has been devoted to addressing the after effects of religious abuse and trauma (RAT). I’ve mostly dealt with the effects of misconduct by clergy and staff, and I found it helpful to learn about the wider scope of RAT. The presentations also introduced me to additional books and academic studies that I want to read.
But attending this REA session meant we got a late start. The drive started out dreary, but as soon as we got off Interstate 90 onto Interstate 86, the driving became much more pleasant — few cars on the road, fewer big rigs, the road winding through rolling green hills. We passed into Seneca Nation, and many of the road signs were in two languages.
We soon arrived at Paul and Gina’s house in Newfield. They live on the edge of a 12,000 acre state park. As soon as we arrived, Paul, Carol, and I, along with Allagash the dog, went for a walk.
The woods were lovely…
When we got back, we set up the tent on their lawn. Then we sat on their deck and ate dinner, and sang until dark.
Roseland, Ind., to Conneaut, Ohio
I got up early to attend an online session of the Religious Education Association (REA) annual conference. The presentationby Heesung Hwang of Chicago Theological Seminary, on how religious education could address burnout, was thought-provoking, to say the least. I’ll try to summarize her presentation in a later post.
Then it was time to hit the road for another dreary drive. The roadway of Interstate 80/90 through Indiana and Ohio is dominated by tractor-trailer rigs; at times, I estimated that half the vehicles on the road were big rigs. We drove through an industrial landscape. The industrial landscape continued on either side of the highway. Weary Midwest industrial landscapes alternated with industrial agriculture of soybeans and corn. An industrial corn field is green, and at first it looks pretty, but up close it is as bleak as a mall parking lot.
We checked into our motel in Conneaut, on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, at 3:30, just in time for me to attend another online session of the REA annual conference. This session, titled Sacred Pedagogic Texts in Dialogue, looked at non-Western religious educational philosophies by means of reading non-Western sacred texts (Analects, Bhagavad Gita, Guru Granth Sahib, Dao de Jing, and a Buddhist text.
It was an interesting presentation, but at the end of it I was ready to get outside. I started walking down the road next to our motel, saw a dirt road heading off to the left — no “No Trespassing” signs — and walked into the woods.
None of the trees looked older than 50-75 years old, so presumably this land was either farmed or logged off in the mid-twentieth century. Under the older trees there was a fair amount of coppice growth, and on the ground growing in the shade were non-woody plants ranging from ferns to skunk cabbage to poison ivy to plants I wasn’t able to identify.
I wanted to stay in the woods longer, but I was scheduled to attend a session titled “Educating of Ecological Awareness” at the REA online conference. Carl Procario-Foley presented based on his paper “Good Ancestors Practicing a Holistic Vision for Ecological Conversion, and Vaughan Nelson presented on his paper “How Food Teaches and Why It Matters for Religious Education.”Again, two thought-provoking sessions — and again, I’ll try to summarize these presentations in another post.
It’s late now. There’s an REA conference session at 7 a.m. tomorrow morning. I better get to sleep.
Oshkosh, Wis., to Roseland, Ind.
After a good visit with Ed and Nancy, it was time to start heading east again. Which meant getting through Chicago. The traffic started getting heavier north of the Illinois border, then was heavy and slow through most of Chicago. Eventually the skyscrapers of downtown Chicago rose up out of the hot, humid summer air.
The traffic got even worse south of Chicago, where Interstate 80, 90, and 94 merge together. This stretch of road always has heavy traffic. Maybe half the vehicles on the road were tractor-trailer rigs. It didn’t matter that we were driving in the middle of the day on a summer weekday, the traffic was still bad.
Eventually we got free of Chicagoland, and got off the interstate to take a walk in Indiana Dunes National Park. It was about a mile and a half walk to the lakeshore. We crossed a wetland area on a boardwalk and continued through some oak savannah. Carol pointed out a Red-headed Woodpecker in an oak tree. We crossed the narrow part of a pond on a foot bridge. I saw some Bluegills swimming in the water below us.
We continued to follow the path over some dunes, and there was Lake Michigan. The clouds had burned away by this time, and it was a bright sunny day. We both began to feel the heat, so we headed back to the car. I noticed some prickly-pear cactus growing on the sand dunes. I was beginning to get a bit of a head ache from the heat. Carol walked quickly ahead, under the theory that the quicker she got back to the car the better. I walked more slowly on the theory that there was no need to overheat myself. I plucked a sassafras twig and chewed on the sweet-tasting slightly narcotic inner bark. I found two or three huckleberries that were ripe, and ate them. I stopped to photograph the small delicate pink flowers of a hedgenettle (Stachys sp.).
When I got back to the trail head, Carol was sitting in the car drinking water. The car thermometer said it was 95 degrees. My shirt was soaked through with sweat. But even with the high temperature and humidity, walking through a bio-diverse landscape was better than driving through Chicagoland traffic.
In Sawyer Creek
Carol and I wanted to get outdoors one last time before the rain came in. “Let’s go fishing,” I said. So we grabbed our fishing tackle and went down to Sawyer Creek. We didn’t catch anything except weeds.
A man walking by told us, “You’ll probably do better if…”
“If we go buy fish at the market,” I said.
“If you go downstream to the bridge,” he said good-humoredly.
“Honestly, we don’t really want to catch fish,” I said. “We just wanted to get out of the house.”
Somehow that got us in a conversation with a man who was wading in the creek. He was wearing swim goggles, the water almost up to his chin. He was pulling out flying discs lost in the creek by golfers on the disc golf course on the opposite bank.
“You probably heard about me on the radio,” he said. “I’m the homeless guy who sells the discs he pulls out of the creek.” He’s no longer homeless, he told us, but he still makes good money selling the golfing discs he recovers. “That’s my son over there,” he said, pointing to a man who’d been in the water with him earlier. A friend of theirs was helping out, too.
“What do you make, 25 or thirty dollars a disc?” I asked.
He said he’d sold some discs for more than a hundred dollars. One particular disc he sold for over two hundred dollars.
He wanted to move down into the section of creek we were fishing, so we moved upstream. We didn’t catch anything there, either. Which was still just fine with us.
“I just felt a drop of rain,” said Carol.
The sky looked threatening. “Let’s get going,” I said. I quickly broke down my rod, and we walked quickly down the creek.
We saw our friend still in the water. “I’d tell you to get out before you get wet, but that won’t work,” I said.
He laughed. “If you see lightning, you’ll see me get out of the water quick,” he said. We all agreed that a day on the creek — or in his case, in the creek — was a good way to spend a day.
The rain started coming down harder. We got pretty wet before we got back to Carol’s dad’s place. It was still a good day on the creek.
On Sawyer Creek, Oshkosh, Wis.
We’ve been carrying a canoe across the country. Here we are in Wisconsin, right on the Fox River. It was time to put the canoe in the water.
Misty and Darren lent us some life vests. We decided to start with Sawyer Creek, a tributary of the Fox River. We drove to West Algoma Park, where there’s a nice grassy put-in for canoes and kayaks.
We’ve been walking along Sawyer Creek almost every day, and I went fishing in the creek a couple of days ago. But seeing the creek from a canoe is a very different experience.
We saw Black-crowned Night Herons and Great Egrets fishing along the banks of the creek. (We saw some humans fishing along the banks, too.) I turned just in time to see a small Yellow Perch roll up to the surface of the water, then dart away into the thickly-growing aquatic plants: Milfoils (Myriophyllum sp.), Pondweed (Potamogeton sp.), and Raccoontail (Ceratophyllum demersum).
Algae choked the surface in many places; but in the center of the channel, in the deepest part of the creek, the water was clear enough that we could see the sandy bottom among the plants. At least three species of aquatic plants were blooming: American White Waterlily (Nymphaea odorata), Common Water-Crowfoot (Ranunculus aquatilis), and Yellow Pond-Lily (Nuphar sp.). Common Water-Crowfoot, to my surprise, turns out to be a close relative of ordinary buttercups. And I have never seen Yellow Pond-Lilies before.
