From Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay

July 18 to July 24, 2016—Flight out of Canada

This week was a series of long drives and short stays. We had an appointment in Ann Arbor and a lot of ground to cover to get there in time. First was a fiasco in Quebec—I had directions to a campground that sounded good, just north of the city, but had not made a reservation. When we got there they had a site to rent but didn’t allow pets. They gave us a number for a place that allowed pets but had no vacancies. That place suggested another campground which allowed pets, had vacancy, but that’s as far as my French and their English went and I couldn’t understand their directions. We did eventually find it—a strange rv park filled almost entirely with year-round quebecois residents. They had their trailers tricked out with lights and statuary, everyone seemed to have a golf cart, also tricked out, and the evening air was filled with the scent of lighter fluid. At sunset the owner of the campground, Jack, drove a golfcart through his domain with another man in the passenger seat playing various tunes on a flugelhorn, including The Lonely Bull—an endearing tradition. I heard thunder at 6 am the next morning and we beat a hasty retreat out of there just ahead of a downpour. Found a nice old campground four hours south, run by a pretty French girl. When she opened the door to the campground office the strong wind blew her dress up just about over her head—I  saw England, I saw France. The camp had a nice pool, a washing machine, a billiard table, and we had a relaxing stay for one day.

 

Charleston Lake Provincial Park was next, in the country. We stayed three days and it was a great place. Many hiking trails, each with a theme and a little booklet explaining things of interest. There was a geology trail that explained the unusual land forms of the area, a tree trail and a wildlife trail. The park was located in a transition zone in many different ways—the northernmost stand of red cedars and hemlocks, the easternmost habitat of some flowering plants, and one of the only places where the sandstone layer on top of the Canadian shield is intact and exposed, making for noteworthy geological formations. I liked this park a lot.

We had been without internet connection at this point for almost a week, gaining access for a few minutes at this restaurant.

 

We declined to dine there but bought enough odds and ends to justify poaching their wi-fi for a while.

 

A Toronto city park I had reserved for one night. A Toronto native I had talked to at Charleston Lake told me this park was in a rough neighborhood right in Toronto. I was disappointed to find that it was a normal park far-removed from the city. I had looked forward to an inner-city campground.

Then we stayed three nights in a marina campground on Lake Erie. I booked this place over the phone without knowing anything about it; they did not have a website and I had been avoiding places without websites. It turned out to be a really pleasant place—a shady, slightly elevated spot that caught a nice breeze all day and night. The little town of Port Burwell was a short walk away and we went into each night for a drink or an ice cream. The owner of a restaurant took a fancy to us and bought us drinks at the end of each evening after he closed the restaurant at 8PM. The whole town shut down then. It was one of those towns that used to see a lot of summer business from people coming to the lake but time has passed it by and half the town is shuttered or for sale as vacationers seek some higher thrill. The restaurateur who befriended us was loopy, with ideas about who runs the world and who ought to, an odd obsession with Churchill’s son having been captured by the Germans in WWII, and a disturbing fascination with the Hutu slaughter of the Tutsi , but he laughed at my jokes and bought the drinks, so I didn’t mind if he was a little batshit. He was the only Canadian we met who used the interjection “eh?” with great frequency, at the ends of sentences, eh.

Crossed back into the good old USA over the Ambassador Bridge at Windsor/Detroit. Trailers like ours are diverted into a separate area with tractor trailers and the inspection went fairly easily. I know better than to try and make a joke during a border interrogation in these perilous times but it seems to me that the interrogators could lighten up a bit, make a fella feel welcome back to the land of his birth after such a long absence. Took a short drive through Detroit before heading to Ann Arbor; nothing like it in Canada, or probably the US for that matter..

Like I said, the week was something of a forced march through an increasingly hotter and more humid environment.

July 12 to 18, North Shore of St. Lawrence, or Beguine the Baleine

 

From the ferry landing at Les Ecoumins we drove a short ways to find somewhere to have a quick picnic lunch. Drove down a seashore road to the headquarters of the St. Lawrence River Pilots, the guys who board all commercial ships entering the upper river and take over the helm to guide the ships to port. There was nice bluff and a pile of flat rocks high above the river. There was a sign in front of the bluff that said, in French, roughly, that the property was the private property of the Pilots organization and that if you chose to enter it you did so at your own risk. I mention this because it is the closest thing to a “no trespassing” sign we had seen since entering Canada. Over the past weeks we have encountered very few signs saying that you were on or about to enter private property and the few we did see just said that, “this is private property”—not “no trespassing” or anything prohibitive. In all of Canada so far I have seen only one sign that explicitly prohibited entry.

(The other day we pulled off the side of the road because the environment looked interesting, hiked into an expansive dune-like area with scrub pine forest and found ourselves on a treeless, sandy plateau hundreds of feet above the St. Lawrence. We sat for an hour or more enjoying the view, looking for whales and watching the ships go by. Also on the plateau were a couple of impromptu campsites, one involving a trailer. A beautiful spot that belonged to someone who could have monetized or restricted it, but there it was for the enjoyment of all, no prohibitions on use and no trash in sight.)

We had reserved four nights at Camping Bon Desir, near the cape of the same name, in the town of Grande Bergeronne. A pleasant spot in an open field by the river with lots of attractions nearby—a maritime museum, a couple of high perches from which to watch for whales, a resort town. It’s all about the whales here. The west side of the St Lawrence is a famous whale road,  owing to its underwater geography—there is a 300 meter deep trench in the St Lawrence just offshore here, that extends from the Gulf of St Lawrence to  the fjiord at Tadoussac. Tides bring in salt water from the Gulf into the St Lawrence river  which drains one-fourth of the world’s  fresh water (mostly from the Great Lakes). The nutrient-rich fresh water feeds phytoplankton and zooplankton, particularly krill, whose numbers explode in the deep water canyon. Whales of all types cruise the canyon from May to September—pilot whales, minke whales and beluga whales are present year round. Sperm whales, fin whales, and humpback whales come and go. We spotted some whales from shore, and big fat gray seals, but goddamit we came here to see whales, so we signed onto a zodiac boat tour.

Two hour tour with about a dozen people on board a 500HP inflatable boat (80$ C, each), we raced down the coast to Tadoussac, where the underwater canyon rises at the point where the Sanguenay river dumps in a bunch of cold freshwater. Soon we were among minke and fin whales, twenty feet away, blowing their air tanks through their topholes the second you see their heads rise above the water, then arching their endless backs and disappearing, leaving little whirlpools that linger. Sometimes they rise higher in the water, ploughing forward sideways with one side of their mouth in the water and the other turned up to the sky. At one point we were surrounded by several whales surfacing at once, hearing their exhalations and seeing the accompanying sprays of water. They were busy feeding on the krill which we could see filling the water, and to my mind they were oblivious to our presence.

 

 

A blue whale had been reported in the area. We did not see him. The captain of our boat said blue whales were boring anyway. And they were bad for business because regulations required him to keep his boat a certain distance from all whales (a regulation universally ignored), but if he encounters a blue whale he has to back off 400 meters and the local marine police take that one seriously.

In the museum we learned about Beluga whales among other things. In the 1920s Canadian fishermen and government believed that the salmon fishery was declining because the beluga population was growing fat on them. They declared war on the beluga, a whale which is bright white. The government paid a bounty for every dead beluga. They enlisted the nascent Canadian air force to drop bombs on beluga pods. They kept this up until scientists determined that mistakes had been made and that beluga don’t really eat all that much salmon. (The next day I read (in Mark Trail weekend edition) that the Australian government was going to release thousands of gallons of herpes virus into a huge watershed to kill an invasive carp species. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose)

When we left camp we took the ferry across the spectacular Saguenay fjiord and just before we docked we spotted a lone beluga surface several times not far off at the mouth of the river. No mistaking that fish.

 

Some random observations about the Canada and Canadians  (being mostly drawn from the Quebecois and mostly from Gaspesians at that)

Either people don’t trespass on one another’s property or land owners don’t care if someone crosses onto their property.

Canadians are not overly worried about unlikely catastrophes, and/or they think people are smarter than they are. We paid to camp on the edges of cliffs at sites that, had we been in the U.S. , would have been either condemned by some branch of government or plastered with warnings. A rickety fence tacked to some fenceposts that are already leaning out over a ninety foot drop; a 75 step stairway down a cliff face to the beach, made by a good carpenter but not somebody specializing in cliff face stairway construction, I can tell you. Maybe it has something to do with universal health care—if something happens to you it doesn’t matter who caused it you will get fixed up.

 

The coastline of the Gaspe Peninsula is more dramatic and beautiful than that of northern California. There, I’ve said it out loud. It is.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Any town large enough to have a stoplight will have some major roadwork being done, with passage through town restricted to one lane for at least a block or as much as a half mile.

Chardonnay might be a French word but there is no wine by that name to be had, which is okay by me but offends Brenda’s sensibilities.

One is constantly reminded, along roadways, that many moose are lurking nearby. Experience suggests that whatever their number they are not nearby, lurking or otherwise.

French Canadian men, especially older men, prefer to be unencumbered by a shirt. I think there is a photograph of an older Pablo Picasso that is to blame.

In every Canadian family there will be at least one member with a dry, unproductive cough.

In the U.S. we can buy Cadbury mini-eggs at Easter. In Canada they are on sale year-round and say that right on the bag, “Available for your enjoyment all year.”

Canada has a more bowling alleys than the U.S. They call it “Quilles.”

Nothing good is made in Canada. That’s not my observation but a comment by a Canadian who was admiring our camp chairs and other gear.

Canada is expensive. Even tho the exchange rate was working in our favor things were still priced 10 to 20% higher than home. Except wine, cheese from France (I enjoyed making acquaintance with a creamy blue cheese from France called St Agur), and locally-smoked fish, which were a bargain.

The Quebecois for the most part don’t really care whether or not you understand. Even if it means foregoing a sale. It’s your problem.

There is at least one man in Canada who blows his nose, strenuously, into his open palm. What he does after that I do not know as I looked away out of a sense of decency and a desire not to know.

July 11 to July 12, 2016

We left our camp on the bluff above the Gulf of St. Lawrence as a cold fog enshrouded the site amidst allegations that I was going native. Incroyable, non?

 

I have been having fun dredging up my one semester of French in college. When I engage someone I prepare a sentence of introduction, anticipate their response, and have another sentence ready. After that my correspondent usually starts firing something in French and I have to come clean, meaning the conversation is pretty much over.

We went to the Reserve Faunique de Matane, a wilderness area in the middle of the peninsula. It has the largest concentration of moose in Canada, which is saying something, but we managed to avoid seeing one. After setting up camp we drove ten kilometres on a dirt road and walked a half mile on a logging road as the shadows grew long. All we saw were moose tracks for which I have yet to find a tidy metaphor—“the hoof print looked like someone had split a large russet potato and pushed it into the mud;” “The print looked like someone had pushed two biscotti into the soft dirt.” You can see that the comparisons are unwieldy, leading one to think too much, about why foodstuffs would be pushed into the mud or why you would have two biscotti in the woods and so on. We didn’t see a moose but did discover why we had seen so many Gaspesians along the roadways diligently picking something from the undergrowth—wild raspberries. Delicieux!

We had a three night reservation at the Reserve but we bailed out the next day. The campsite was in the middle what I took to be the Canadian equivalent of a State Highway Administration work depot. In the early morning the workers started pulling in, one every few minutes for half an hour, with radios blaring and trailing clouds of dust. They started ragging one another as construction workers will do, which was kind of interesting to me, and set about collecting, working on, testing, and loading various pieces of machinery. Generators, weedwhackers, air guns, jive talk and billowing dust, all before 8 in the morning. In the list of things this place was, campsite was the last on the list. After talking to two levels of Canadian bureaucracy to get a refund we split.

Found a lovely little campsite outside of Rimouski on the east coast of the St. Lawrence river. It had an American west motif, which many of the campgrounds in this region advertise with a teepee symbol.

I had made a reservation for the ferry to cross the St. Lawrence. Fortunately we arrived early; unfortunately we were told that the camper was too tall—they couldn’t accommodate anything over seven feet, a fact unmentioned on their website. I knew there was another ferry at Trois Pistoles, 45 kilometres down the road, that made its only crossing of the day sixty minutes hence, and they said it did not have a height restriction. The French personnel in the ferry office talked amongst themselves, ignoring me, until I realized they were debating whether or not we could possibly make it there in time. A  philosophical question for them that they found very interesting and they had many views on the subject. I bid them a hasty au revoir, jumped in the truck, backed a hundred feet out of the queue and beat it south. We were the last vehicle on the 3 Pistols ferry with only minutes to spare; if three other cars had showed up before us, or if I had stayed to hear the final decision of the Rimouski ferry office, we would have been left behind.

Ferry crossings are great (especially ones you barely make). You really feel like you are going somewhere.

 

 

 

It took one hour to arrive to the west shore of the St Lawrence, at Les Ecoumins, and a half later we finished setting up camp just before the storm came in. It rained all night.

 

July 5 to July 11, 2016

We have been on the Gaspé  peninsula between the villages of L’anse au Griffon and Riviere au Renard. We came here because Brenda wanted to see whales and I wanted to revisit a place I had been to in 1971. I think I was scouting an alternative to the draft, frankly, when I came here then, taking a bus to Montreal and then hitchhiking around the peninsula and back to Maryland. The geography appealed to me—almost the far north, mouth of the St. Lawrence, dramatic coastline—and just the fact that it was remote and seemed to be unknown territory.

 

We are on the edge of a steep, 90 foot cliff overlooking the gulf of St. Lawrence which from this vantage has no end—as limitless as any sea. Not the best time to be here, however. The temperature is normally in the mid  70s but has barely risen above 60 since we arrived. We have spent a couple days walking the beach. The cliffs are black, shale-like rock, emerging at all kinds of twisted earth-evolving angles, shot through with bright white crystal bands (calcite, I think) and the occasional layer of granite. The black rock is soft and once it breaks from the cliff it quickly erodes into small pieces of smooth, regular shapes—triangles, discs, rhomboids–each shot through with bright white lines. So the beach is filled with these little works of abstract art in black and white.

We have seen pilot whales (triple-size dolphins in appearance that stay under a long time) off shore below us, and a seal that shows up just after the lobster fishermen have refilled their traps. When the sun shines it is a beautiful sight, the waters clear and all kinds of blue and green, the rocks in the surf multicolored and interestingly shaped. When the sun goes behind the clouds the whole landscape becomes dismal and soul-deadening. Sun shines, all is bright with the chatter of birds and the promise of a good harvest from the sea; sun hides and you look with despair on the past and the future. Sun is out and you look forward to the Catholic feast days; sun disappears and you become a Calvinist. It’s been mostly sunny and we have taken some great hikes in the Parc National de Farillon which surrounds us. Today’s arduous hike brought us close to a bear. We paused on the trail to examine a dead porcupine and a French hiker caught up to us. We speculated that a bear had killed the porcupine. He went on ahead and soon I heard him yelling French phrases with the word “bear” in them. He told us later he had indeed made effort to shoo off a bear.

 

Few people we have encountered speak English, which surprises me. I managed to get the oil changed in the truck at a small garage (at least I think I did—maybe he just refilled the windshield wiper fluid and charged me 40 dollars Canadian.) I thought I was hitting it off with the next door neighbors until he brought up the American election and asked about Trump and I said “absolument non.” His wife laughed too hard and he kind of scowled and I got the idea he liked Trump. So I said “Hillary, comme ci, comme ca” which he found funny but he kind of gave me the cold shoulder after that.

 

Jacques Cartier made his first landfall near here in 1534, establishing France’s claim to Canada in the eyes of France. The sun must have been shining when he laid claim, otherwise I think he would have kept looking. I mentioned in a previous post the Loyalist cemetery we had seen on the St John river. The Loyalists, I’ve learned, were british-americans who supported Britain in the American revolution and had to hightail it to Canada after the war. The Gaspe received a fair number of Loyalists tho most settled in the maritime provinces.

 

As I say, it has been unseasonably cold here, tho I write this outside at 8pm sitting by the fire. I had talked to someone in the Bay of Fundy who was 150 miles (as the crow flies; 500+ road miles) northeast of here in late May and had seen icebergs offshore. I never mentioned this to the rest of the crew because morale has been sinking with the temperature.

I have a fondness for the geography and foodways of the  Gaspesie. Can’t say I know the people well, but they seem quick to laugh and evince the fatalist attitude of people who live in harsh circumstances. They paint their houses and their boats in bright colors, which is always a plus. The native people, the Micmacs, called this region, their world, “Land’s End.”

 

 

We are going to be in the region for another week. We head up to a wildlife reserve for a few days of more rustic camping then across the St Lawrence to La Bergeronne where the whale hunting is good, I’m told.

June 29 to June 30

Got frisked at the Calais/St. Stephen bridge crossing. The Canadian border authorities held us up for over an hour going through everything while we sat inside the guard station with the cats. Don’t know what set them off. During routine questioning about bringing weapons into the Commonwealth we admitted we had some pepper spray and a pocket knife. “Pepper spray is considered a lethal weapon in Canada.” (Not the pocket knife’s fault this time.) We surrendered Brenda’s little pink canister of spray without regret, after filling out some paperwork (we have a receipt) but I guess they figured that since we were there they might as well do the whole drill—feeling under seats, shining lights in corners, opening cabinets and Quaker Oats cylinders. I crossed here on foot in 1971 into US and exchanged waves with US authorities as I walked by. Oh well, these are the times, I guess.

A longer-than-it–needed-to-be drive to a remote place on the St. John River after stopping in the city of St. John to exchange some money. The drive was longer than it needed to be thanks to Google maps which I later learned routinely sends people an hour out of their way to get to Crystal Beach campground.

 

The owner was another 3^rd generation inheritor of an aging campground. He said his grandparents built the camp in the 1930s for short-length campers like ours and they haven’t upgraded to accommodate the 30 and 40 foot behemoths that many favor. “We serve campers; people come here and get upset because we don’t have hot tubs.” He teaches high school physics and only opens the camp after school lets out (and after the spring flooding of the St. John River inundates the property. He said, straightfacedly, the St. John River the “Nile of New Brunswick.” We both laughed after a beat. But he did explain that the river drains most of the province and parts of Maine.)

He had a little pub in his campground and some locals came round for a cribbage match. Prize for best score was three t-bone steaks. I declined offers to participate (but did not say that “I couldn’t afford the steaks”  or anything like that.) Talked to the campround owner for a couple hours about his marriages, his kids, fracking, (“The scientist in me doesn’t like it but the campground owner who has roughnecks for renters appreciates the trade.”) property rights (there are certain species of ash and maple tree sacred to local native peoples and they have the right to cut down any one that strikes their fancy; mineral rights are deeded separately from land rights so unless you purchase the mineral rights of your property you could wake one morining to find someone driving stakes in your front yard to mark their claim.)

Two ferries serve the peninsula this campground is on. We crossed on the Gondola ferry coming in and walked down to the Westfield ferry the next day. Rather than build a bridge they operate two boats that cross in unison, electric motor-driven cable-guided affairs, each accommodating about 30 cars. They move the traffic pretty quick. We passed this graveyard on the walk to the ferry.

 

 

The area was settled by Scottish immigrants in 18^th c. I don’t know enough Candian history to guess who the cemetery’s residents were loyal to –resistance to the French I imagine.

Down by the ferry was another campground. The owner of Crystal Beach where we stayed said that sometimes people overshoot the entrance to his camp and wind up there and the owner of that one tells them that Crystal Beach is closed or some other lie to get them to stay at his campground. And that guy was president of the provincial association of campground owners. The cutthroat world of New Brunswick campgrounds.

June 30 to July 5, 2016, Five Islands, Nova Scotia

Near the head of the Bay of Fundy, home to highest tides in the world. The bay recedes nearly a mile from the base of the cliff we are perched on, and comes rushing back again, twice daily.

 

 

 

 

 

The five islands are of different size and geology. The whole area is a mishmash of geologic epochs and famous for gems, minerals, and fossils. We haven’t found any but then we haven’t devoted a lot to it, hiking inland mostly.

We were here on July 1 which is Canada Day, or Dominion Day, celebrating the union of the provinces in the late 19^th century. We went into the nearest town, Parrsboro, 30 minutes away, to see their national day parade. The short description and the long description would be the same—first came the Royal Canadian Mounted Police SUV with all lights flashing, followed by the Parrsboro FD engine also with lights flashing, the Parrsboro Rec Team (a youth group) dressed in red and white (not uniforms or costumes, just street clothes) throwing candy to kids, five spiffy cars including this one, Preston

 

 

then the rest of the Parrsboro FD and rescue squad with lights ablaze and a siren going. Our fellow campers laughed when we told them we were going to the Parrsboro parade so when we got back and asked how it was I told them it was still going on, we left because it was going on so long—pachyderms, a troop of baton twirlers with flaming batons, precision drill teams, clowns on tiny motorcycles, the provincial governor’s wife, not one but three Justin Trudeau imitators. Had them wound up for a while.

 

This bit of sculpture from Parrsboro I send without comment.

 

The camp was completely booked for the holiday weekend and we were boxed in pretty tight with partying Canadians. Everyone is very open and generous. Given the late onset of night their fireworks and serious partying doesn’t start until ten pm. We slept through it as best we could.

I was awakened early the next morning by a loud clammer in the tidal flats.

 

 

Well, he wasn’t that loud. (In a related vein, after I was awakened by the clammer I went for a walk and saw growths of green and red spongelike matter on rocks, the lichens of which I’d never seen. Then I got hungry and went into a fish store just for the halibut which hadn’t come in yet and the noisy fishmonger gave me a haddock and a desire to drink Canada dry.) People wade into the flats when the tide withdraws with shovels and pails and harvest the local littleneck clams called Economy clams after a local port. One of our neighbors, Frank, said they were exceptional-tasting clams. Sunday morning I was looking out over the flats and thinking what gear I had to outfit a clamming expedition (I knew I had an entrenching tool buried in the truck and was debating about digging it out) when Frank took a break from packing to leave and brought me a bucket full of clams he had caught; his family couldn’t eat them all. Problem solved. Economy clams for me, anyway. I changed the water and added some cornmeal to help them clean out. They were small but sweet, cooked in a little seawater and wine, served with linguine, garlic, parmesan, lemon, local asparagus on the side. Oh Canada!

 

 

We hiked the trails of the near provincial park.

One overlook gave us a glimpse back to our home cliff.

 

With a couple of exceptions all the fellow campers we have talked to in our travels to date, US and Canada, live within an hour or, at most, two, from their homes. Strange.

In my limited experience English-speaking Canadians, at least those who stay in campgrounds, cuss a lot. Maybe a remnant of their maritime heritage. Also their roads are impossible to keep smooth, with the winters being so harsh. Like washboards, and sometimes worn down to bare earth. Even the highways in places. It beats the living shit out of the Scamp, and my nerves, traveling these roads unless I slow to a crawl, so 4 hour trips take 6 or more.

 

 

 

June 24 to 29, 2016, Acadia NP at Schoodic Woods and Mt. Desert Island

 

 

In parts of Acadia National  Park the points of land are big, solid slabs of granite with colorful inclusions cut through with bands of solid black rock called diabase. (I don’t know how that word is pronounced; made me think of a girl in school I fancied named DeeDee Diabasi.) The diabase gives way after thousands of years of the forces of nature (unlike the unerodable Ms. Diabasi) leaving channels and canyons straight down into the harder, uneroded granite.

 

(Me over an eroded channel moments before I undressed and dove off.)

The twelve foot tides and spray of the crashing waves fill pools in the gone diabase, and the pools sustain amazing varieties of colorful sea life.

 

Then you go  around a corner and there is a mile long beach of perfectly rounded cobbles of all sizes and types of stone—small discs of perfectly smoothed black and cannonballs of orange granite and white granite ovoid rocks. They make a sound like chimes when you walk on them.

Around the next corner is a perfect little pond reflecting a perfect blue and white sky and the perfect pine trees around the edge. Looks like it came from the set designer’s crate marked “Maine.” All that’s missing is the moose who is out on a cigarette break.

Then  you go around a corner and there is a vast floodplain either draining to or being filled by the gulf of Maine through a narrow opening that is rushing in one direction or another. You can walk over a bridge, in a little town in Maine, under which the water is rushing as hard as any mountain stream in one direction, have breakfast at a little store, and when you walk back over the bridge the water is rushing just as hard in the other direction. The sea is always busy here.

Then you go around a corner and find that $4 shower place that you’ve been looking for, for days, because Acadia NP doesn’t have shower facilities and the Scamp doesn’t have the storage capacity for the water needed to rinse the acreage under my authority.

Around the next corner is a sandy beach surrounded by steep rises of fir, the only sandy beach in northern Maine judging by the cars parked along the road and the crowds flowing towards it. You look down on it from a bend in the road, turn another corner and you are on a 200 foot cliff overlooking the whole of the Gulf of Maine to the Atlantic with terns and gulls wheeling around the massive columns of rock just offshore and fog creeping around the far point.

You go up and around and now you are on a ridge looking across a green valley and fog is massed on the far ridge and spilling over like the vapor from dry ice. A little further on you are on top of Cadillac Mountain and can see to the horizon in all directions, the fog moving in towards Bar Harbor and sweeping over the near islands like a demonstration of a wind tunnel, snaking up one side of a cliffed island and streaming away over the lee side.

 

Then you have to leave and just outside of the park you pull over and there are work boats tied in the harbor, in the mist, looking mystical and toy-like.

Not bad for $15/night courtesy of National Parks senior pass (which one of us was entitled to.)

June 26, 2016, Downeast Maine

Different Ways of Identifying and Doing Things

 

Downeast

There are a few practices that seem to be unique to the region, starting with the term “Downeast” which refers to the upper portion of Maine and part of the Canadian maritime provinces. (It corresponds roughly to the French holdings of the 18^th century, one-time home of the Cajun people, their name being a corruption of the French name for the region, Acadiana.) Sailing was the only real means of connecting this region to the rest of the Atlantic coast, and the prevailing winds from Boston on up are from the southwest; to sail to the Acadian area was to sail downwind. So the region, relative to the hub of Boston, was the downwind portion of the east coast, or the “down east.” Apparently some locals still say “going up to Boston.”

Bean Suppers and Mattress Sales

A frequent church event, the community gathers to share a pot of baked beans (molasses and bacon are involved), sides and, importantly, pies. We have had the opportunity to attend several in our travels but declined for fear that we would not get enough to eat and be objects of curiosity.

“Mattress sales” show up with regularity. These are fundraisers, where people buy new mattresses with the profit going to the church or the school. I go a long time between mattresses, myself. I don’t see how this can be a profitable endeavor unless, for some reason, the people of Maine have reason to replace their mattresses with great frequency. This would interest me. A thought occurs to me regarding the bean suppers but I will let it pass.

 

Ice Cream

There are lots of little ice cream stands in Maine. You are never far from one. I like ice cream but they really like it.

Pickled Wrinkles

Stopped in a bar to try a local “delicacy” (“delicacy” having come to mean something for which a small group of people have acquired a taste that others have not had the courage or opportunity to try) called pickled wrinkle. The wrinkle in question is a type of whelk, a small sea snail. Most whelks live in tidal margins but this fellow is found attached to lobster traps in deep water. Watermen here save the wrinkles and pickle them in vinegar to have a protein-rich snack in winter. I bought four for $3.95. There are the size of a small mussel, and taste mostly like pickling brine with a conch-like chew on the good side of rubbery. A better source of protein than a Cliff bar for my money.

 

Crab

The local crab is Jonah crab, another lobster pot bycatch. It is close to blue crab but stringier, not unpleasantly, and slightly fishier, also not a turn-off. But I’ll take my crab blue, thanks. Better yet, pass me another lobster.

 

Fiddlehead Ferns

We’ve eaten these several times now. Like asparagus in taste, they are in season now, attractive  bright green things, the size of a silver dollar, coiled like the top of a fiddle. Probably good for you in some way.

 

Day and Night

This is meteorological, not cultural. Bushwood is at 38 degrees latitude, roughly, and we are at 44.5 now. First light (mostly a nautical term meaning when you can first see the horizon but it has a formal military meaning, i.e. the sun is 12 degrees below the horizon) is a little after 4am. Well before 5 it is bright enough to sort beans for the church dinner. And it stays light until well after 9. The stars don’t really start to come out until 10pm. When you get to 60 degrees latitude you are in the land of perpetual daylight (in summer. The shoe is on the other foot in winter, here—long, long nights.) So the vegetation and wildlife here sprint to life—profusions of wildflowers and warblers. We are asleep before the stars come out and up before you.

June 20 to 24, Spruce Head, Maine

Haven’t written much because, frankly, the settings and days have been kind of dreamy and I didn’t think I would be doing anyone any favor by talking about how nice we had it at Lobster Buoy Campground in Spruce Head (or South Thomaston, depending on your map.)

A small, unpretentious campground that has been owned by the same family since the 40s. It used to be a junkyard until WWII made it worthwhile to haul the metal out for the war effort. After the war the current owner’s grandparents converted the now-cleared land to a campground. Many people we talked to come here year after year and at least one person I encountered, an elderly woman, has been coming here since it was started as a campground when “we used to just drive right down to the beach and set up camp in the sand.”

We were on the waterfront of a bay or large cove that contained a dozen small and large islands, close and distant, a couple with houses, most covered with towering evergreens, some just piles of boulders. The Atlantic was maybe five miles out, beyond the furthest chain of islands. The tides were ten feet so the islands at various times look like they are hovering above the water. Boulders everywhere, mats of kelp (?), and long strands of thick underwater grass flowing like hair in the rushing tides. Several large-scale commercial lobstering operations and a couple of waterfront lobster shacks along a 2 mile walk down the coast. A local surname is “Waterman” (my preferred lobster joint is Waterman’s Beach Lobster) but the fisher-folk don’t call themselves watermen. We lucked out with this place—reasonably-priced, benignly neglected, nice folks, and just a magical setting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I almost forgot the nesting loon from our camp near Naples, ME on Long Lake.

June 20, 2016, western Maine

 

I thought I was a little fool for sitting in the Annomoosuc River for hours tweezering out little flecks of gold but now realize I was a big fool. Twernt gold at all but gold-colored mica. Spent an hour yesterday with a real gold-panner, a friendly smart guy, IT professional (spends months of his working year in Oman and Kuwait) that owned the land on the far bank of the river meaning only he had prospecting rights on that side. He had an elaborate, time-consuming  five step process (“Water and time are your friends.”) that had yielded him, in two days work, a minute amount of what was, unmistakably, gold. It’s like Ray Raley told me about the bald eagle, “When you see it you know you’ve seen it.” Prospector said his haul for the weekend was probably $100 worth as just gold but worth twice that as “specimen gold,” that is, gold specifically from that river which real collectors value as items for their collection along with Klondike gold and Sutter Mill gold, etc., this river being quite famous among collectors.

Today pushed over the Kangamagus Highway over the White Mountains. I’ve never suspected the Appalachians could be so formidable. I’ve always thought of them as respectably ancient but washed out hills. No, they are something to be reckoned with. Hauling a trailer over frost-heaved roads on steep 7% decline with a swarm of Harley riders on your tail can tire you out.

In Naples, Maine, private campground by Lake Sebago. Went into town and had a proper restaurant meal for the first time since leaving, a groovy Annapolis-like setting at a marina on the lake. Too much money, too much food—went to my head.

 

He rode out of Old Vermont and crossed the Connecticut River and stepped for the first time into the New Hampshire Territory. First time for him and his horse, Old Scamp. “The Connecticut ain’t much of a river,” he thought to his self; “maybe the folks in Connecticut think it is…or maybe it is by the time it gets there.”  He rode a few miles upstream to the junction with the Ammonoosuc River, noted that the sun was starting to reach the tops of the mountains and would soon disappear behind them and decided to make camp on the banks of the Ammonoosuc. He unloaded his gear and unsaddled the horse, took off his leather boots and he and the horse cooled their hooves in the shallow, stony river. He sat on a rock and rolled some ‘bacca and was savoring his smoke when a bright glint of something in the water caught his eye. He leaned over, picked it up between thumb and forefinger, and snorted, ‘Well I’ll  be damned.’ Back in Old Vermont he’d heard some fellers sayin’ they found gold along the Ammonoosuc. Always struck him as a tiresome and a fool way to chase after riches but he respected men with ambition, not possessing much of it himself. Now danged if he hadn’t found himself a flake right off. Weren’t much of a thing, small enough to balance on the point of a 22 caliber bullet if there was no wind, small enough to pass through the eyelet of his boot, but gold just the same. “I’ll be damned,” he said again. He went back to his campsite, built a fire, and sat on a flat rock to eat some warmed-up beans, the fleck of gold next to him, and he stared at it the whole time he was eating. “Gold,” he said aloud.

Next morning he brewed up a cup of  chicory and walked back into the gold-bearing river. He looked around to see if there were any more shiny flakes. After a time he saw them—much smaller than the first one, too small to trifle with, but plentiful. He started moving rocks around to see what was under them. The swift flow of the river carried away the silt and after a period of looking he found another little flake of gold he could pick up. He sat down on a rock in the shallows and started sifting through the sandy river bottom. Pretty soon he found another little flake. He could see the tiniest particles of gold swirl in the water as he moved it around, impossible to capture by hand. He devised different methods of searching—digging little depressions in the river bottom and combing the sides, creating little whirlpools with his hand. He got a stick and excavated trenches and overturned rocks. The miniscule flashes of gold tantalized and seem to taunt him, “You can’t catch me!”

Finger-size fishes came to feed in the areas he disturbed. At first he thought this was a good omen, but then he began to think that maybe gold was their food and he started shooing them away and building dams around the little sites he was working.

The sun rose higher in the sky and he kept looking. He tried to capture smaller and smaller flecks of metal, most being forced away by the action of squeezing his fingers together. It frustrated him to see so much of it drifting away, ungraspable. He piled his treasures in a cavity in a rock and kept looking as the sun rose higher. He looked around occasionally to see if anyone was watching that might jump his claim when he left. He was determined to work it dry before he would let that happen, or sit watch all night. Occasionally he got excited by a big piece flashing in the bottom only to find it was a piece of mica. “All that glitters…” he was reminded of the old chestnut, but rather than striking him as wise insight he found it annoying. A long time passed, of which he was unaware. Finally hunger and the ache of bending over reminded him. He gathered his collection and was disappointed to find that it hadn’t amounted to much more than enough than would cover his little fingernail. “I’ll be damned,” he said aloud. “Tain’t much. How long I been out here?”

 

When he got back to camp Old Scamp had run off from hunger and chipmunks had broken into his saddlebags and eaten all his stores and a squirrel was gnawing a hole in his leather boots. He admitted that having gold was likely a good situation to be sittin’ in but collecting it this way was a fine waste of time. “Sure is pretty, though,” he allowed and he stared at it while he rolled a cigarette and the sun disappeared behind the White Mountains.

Sort of a true story. I did find a noteworthy fleck of gold within minutes of arriving, and I did get a small case of gold fever. We did not know, coming here, that the Annomoosuc River, just above its union with the Connecticut River, is the goldpanning destination of NH if not all of New England. There was a goldrush here in the 1840s. The source of the gold is upriver a good ways and worked out, but bits of gold are bound dup in the granite and other rocks and get washed downstream.  There were several teams of guys digging up the river bed and the banks over the past couple days, running the sediments through various contraptions (nothing mechanized, all hand), slowly accumulating their reward. Disturb the sediments of the river in bright sunshine and the water is aswarm with gold pinpoints. Brenda found a nice piece of green quartz. After many hours poking around in the shallows for a couple days I realize I’m more of a nugget man, myself. You can keep your placer gold.

Today is sunday and the other campers at this family campground have mostly left. We have the pool (a saltwater-system versus chlorine) to ourselves on this blazing hot New Hampshire afternoon. Not much to report–we’ve been lounging.

June 15-17, 2016, Groton State Forest, Vermont, Ricker Pond

 

This is what I was imagining—a site on the little lake, birch trees swaying in the breeze. Arrived late yesterday, the 15^th, without a reservation. The park manager made a big show of doubting whether he could squeeze us in but in fact he was a kidder and the place is nearly deserted. Still early in the season I guess, but what a fine place. We were a little concerned at first because the site is amidst the forest and Soulie kept darting off and getting misplaced but she seems to have settled down. Pheniobelle has been content to stay in the trailer throughout the trip and I am content that she is. When we took the Scamp and the cats on a shakedown cruise in February Pheenie took off the first opportunity “like  a shot off a shovel” and it took me two hours and close to a half-mile of walking in the woods of the Northern Neck to track her down. But the cats are being well-behaved and I don’t have any complaints.

Hiked around a neighboring lake and walked the last few hundred feet up Owl Head Mountain to 2100 feet and a spectacular view.

 

 

The Civilian Conservation Corps had built a neat little castle-like shelter at the top of Owl Head in the 1930s. I can’t count the times I’ve had occasion to use and enjoy the labors of the CCC in my life—Camp Misty Mount above Thurmont, trails and overlooks in Monongahela and George Washington Forests, many places.

We wanted to walk around Kettle Pond but the trail was closed because a nesting goshawk has been attacking hikers, taking one guys hat off and up into a tree and sinking a talon into a ranger’s shoulder. I thought, “Let’s risk it—how often do you get a chance to get attacked by a goshawk?” but a wound from such a bird requires aggressive antibiotic treatment ‘cause who knows where those talons have been.

 

Brenda saw a moose, thank god. She’s been talking about nothing else since we got here then we came around a corner, driving back from a trailhead, and lo, there it was, like an upright piano on spindly legs.

There are loons on the lake by our camp at night. The normal cry of the loon is a plaintive note like a lonesome train whistle, but the other cry is a maniacal yodeling that lets you know why their name is associated with madness. Which came first, the moon, the loon, or the madman? Lunacy comes from luna, the moon, but loony comes from the loon. Another latin joke lurking in there somewhere.

We have pretty much been going on two meals a day. A good breakfast (buckwheat pancakes last two mornings) and a late dinner. A few nights ago we had some vegetables (asparagus, sweet peppers, green onions, arugula) mixed with thai curry paste, a couple of eggs and some flour, fried up like fritters. The same mix of veggies and flavoring sautéed the next night with rice noodles. We brought a toaster oven and have toast and peanut butter many mornings.

This campsite, Ricker Pond in Groton State Forest VT, was the first time we relied solely on battery power and  I was disappointed to discover that our battery electric supply only lasted a little over 24 hours. I was hoping to get at least two day’s worth. The refrigerator is the heavy user so next time we are off-grid for a while I will get a bag of ice. But  I also have a suspicion that something is sapping juice in a passive mode. I suspect the electric pump that brings water into the sink and to the toilet. Next time we’ll turn off the water pump when not in use and see if the batteries last longer. Hope so.

Yester evening, our last in Vermont, I drove to the little country store outside the state forest to get some necessaries. A local man was telling the others that he saw a catamount in his yard, the first one he’d seen in the thirty-some years he’d lived “on the mountain.” Catamount is a term I thought had disappeared in the 19^th century but I have seen it used occasionally from upstate New York, where it was the mascot of a HS team in Hosmer Valley, to here. We would say mountain lion. Go, Catamounts, Go! ‘Course this guy said he immediately went inside to get his deer rifle; fortunately the panther had gone back into the woods. He knew killing the cat would be a crime and said, “I’d rather have my three year old boy than my hunting license.” I think he would have lost more than his hunting license. I would hope so.

June 13-15, Rutland, Vermont

Staying in a private campground that we have all to ourselves. An open field in the middle of the Green Mountains. No mistaking how they got that name. Arrived yesterday late, ate some salted pecans, dug some winter clothes out of the truck because it was rather cold. Today though is bright and warm and we went to the Vermont Marble Museum. Brenda thought it was going to be a museum about little round marbles. She was glad it was not but wasn’t particularly elated about its real subject matter. The fortunes of the marble industry of Vermont, of which the Rutland area is the center, have risen and fallen since 1840. They rose spectacularly under the ownership of a man named Proctor. Among other accomplishments he was US Senator and during his tenure much of imperial Washington was built, and much of it was built with, coincidentally, Vermont marble. In 1900 the Vermont Marble Company was the largest commercial enterprise in the US, with quarries and operations across the country. Now the quarries are owned by a Japanese firm Omya that grinds up the marble into powder which is calcium carbonate and used in everything. We were stopped at two railroad crossings for the same long train hauling limestone slurry which is their product.

Vermont Marble supplied the block that is the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery. It is solid marble, in case you were wondering–I always wondered. At the museum we watched a short film just about the creation of that memorial. Having run out of anything else to say the film went on at length about the exceptional qualities of the soldiers who are given the privilege to stand guard at the monument 24/7. I mean it laid it on thick about the guards, at one point claiming they were “bearing the eternal flame of American manhood.” It really was convincing that these members of the Old Guard are a special breed, but there must have been an old stonemasons trowel laying around when they wrote the script.

 

Also stopped at the New England Maple Syrup museum which is daft—some dummies that move almost imperceptibly while they tell you nothing of interest, some artifacts of syrup making, a short film. It is possible to leave the museum knowing nothing about maple syrup that you didn’t already know or suspect. They did have a little tasting room that I was taking advantage of until Brenda said, “They didn’t advertise lunch.” Mostly it is a shop, and out of politeness we bought  smallest quantities of the product available, packaged in miniature liquor bottles.

When we got back from the museums we were sitting outside the Scamp when an unexpected  gust of wind lifted our awning completely off the ground and over the camper. Took a while to wrestle it back to normal position and the ends of a couple of the aluminum struts were bent or broken. I went into town and bought some bits of bracket metal and screws and might have cobbled it back together; won’t know until we unfurl it again which might be next week. Our first real mishap.

 

We have crossed the Appalachian Trail, or the Long Trail as the locals here call it, probably a half-dozen times on our trip. This morning from our campsite on a near mountainside where the trail goes I saw a little column of smoke rise from the forest that I imagine was from a hiker making a hearty breakfast. What a brilliant contribution to our nation, the Long Trail.