First came a pickup truck that plowed out a big part of the meadow next to the forest. A skidder arrived a week later with some logging maw attached to the front of it and chains on the big-lugged tractor tires. Then the plowed yard suddenly filled with all manner of machinery for cutting, skinning, and stacking logs. Now there is a big mess of branches, stacks of logs, several parked machines, and the pervasive smell of cut trees.
It is a veritable massacre of trees back there behind the house, One day soon I shall walk up there to see what has happened and breathe in the sharp smell of sap and wood and sawdust, where I sat in the woods and waited for deer just a few months ago.
In March I came out to Maine for a new job. I had a car load of clothes, a computer, and a few books and kitchen pots. Since then, we’ve moved more substantially, but it’s July and the process goes on. Plenty of loose ends to tie up.
Maine is cool in a very L. L. Beany sort of way. It’s like northern Wisconsin but more so. Rivers, lakes, pine trees, trailer houses, junk piles, and elemental rocks. Beautiful old farmhouses – with barns attached – and moose warnings along the freeway. Instead of a great lake, Maine has the Atlantic Ocean and almost 3,500 miles of coastline with 3,000 islands and fractally complex peninsulas. Portland is one of the best cities in the US by many measures. And the seafood, oh, the seafood!
We live in Winthrop, a town named after one of the founding Puritans and Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Many folks in Maine descend from those 17th Century settlers, although newcomers like us are becoming more common. Not a lot of people come from Maine unless they already live here. With 1.2 million people, Maine is still pretty much a state of small towns spread out along rural highways and rivers.
We miss our friends and family back in Wisconsin and will return often, but for now, we’re enthralled with the Maine thing.
I am reading an astounding book right now called On the Origin of Teepees, which involves the Darwinian notion that just as genetic material is really in charge of evolution, ideas are the drivers of human evolution since we’ve become, as brains sitting atop bodies, but receptacles for ideas. Our physical evolution has been frozen now for several tens of millennia, but as a vehicle for ideas (or rather, memes), our brains have a long ways to go. We are idea machines, and human evolution now has more to do with ideas and “cultural” evolution rather than physical adaptations.
This is interesting, particularly in light of recent political events, when people seemed hyper-possessed by political ideology. It turns out, Tea Party politics is a mind virus.
This looks like a pretty big crater. The lava lake in the bottom of it is hard and relatively cool, so much so that you can hike down across it and out the other side. You might be able to see some people down inside if you look close. I didn’t hike down into it.
If you look across it to the other side you can see the steaming crater inside the even bigger Kilauea crater, which is huge.
So the picture is of a small crater, and in the background you can see an even bigger smoking crater, which is inside the really big crater of Kilauea Volcano. Iki means small, which is why the crater in this picture is called Kilauea Iki.
This morning we went to the eastern coast of the Big Island, where we’ve been staying this week. More on that later.
We arrived about 5 am because we’d heard the night before that the lava flow from Kilauea had once again come close to the old, ruined highway where it could be approached on foot with a reasonable walk. The best time for viewing is just before sunrise.
And sure enough, there it was, once again covering the already covered roadway with yet another layer of lava. Little ferns had begun popping up in the older, cooled lava flow. As this molten rock oozed and crackled across the previous layer, the little ferns burned quickly with tiny sparks shooting.
I didn’t poke it with a stick, but I could have. You could get within a few feet of the lava pouring out from under the crusty layer that formed atop the fiery red earth blood, but any closer and you risk your hair bursting into flames or your flesh cooking.
The whole island is made of this stuff, maybe the whole world. Looking at it, it made me aware that we live on a flaming ball covered with a cool crust – just cool enough for us to live here. This is the stuff of the solar system, of space, of stars, boiling up from the not so deep. What’s a couple miles when we are talking about planet sized ball of lava? We ourselves and all life on this planet, came from this hot earth life, and eventually, we’ll dissolve back into it.
Pele's fingers at work
We all live in a narrow shell of atmosphere squeezed between the vacuum of space and the magma just beneath the cooled crust.
Dust to dust, ashes to ashes? I think not. Lava runs in our veins, and to lava we shall return.
The lake froze yesterday, and this morning a light snow dusted the new ice. If you look close in the photo you can see cracks running out into the lake.
Ice is almost alive. Stand by the lake for even just a few minutes on a quiet morning, and you hear whoops, snaps, and long, weird moans as the ice shifts under the sunrise.
It’s not thick enough to walk on, but it will be with a few more cold nights. I’m looking forward to some thickness so I can put out a tip-up or two. Maybe this weekend?
The first thing John said when I saw him last weekend was “Can we go ice skating?” Then there was little more than chunky slush clinking among icy rocks along the shore. Good skating ice may be coming soon, as it looks like it froze clean. Maybe I’ll try to scrape off a rink this year and find out if old guys can skate with little kids without serious injury.
I had a week off over the past week. Today was the first day of “work” I’ve had for 9 days. Nine days off it a row! It’s enough to get away and forget for a bit what I do every day. Get a little distance, see the bigger picture, and all that.
This is common practice in European countries. Here in the good old USA, we believe in working until you drop, that it is somehow admirable to work every day of your life for at least 16 hours a day, just to show how tough you are, or perhaps how dedicated. I admit I have been a victim of this ideology.
But no more. I’ll work my butt off, and will go toe to toe with anyone for stamina at work – for a couple months. But then I’m taking off – at least a week – to get away and forget about it. It is immeasurably refreshing.
Duh. Oh, that I would have been this enlightened years ago.
The ponds across the road have a dangerously thin layer of ice, but the big lake is not yet frozen. This morning the temperature is down in the teens again, as it has been for a few days. Thin ice flows develop overnight and then break apart when the wind comes up to create waves; crusty new ice crackles and chinkles along the rocky shore.
What is it about hanging pictures that I find so consequential?
Maybe it’s choosing the pictures – evoking memories, affecting the mood of a room, creating a story with what’s on the wall, defining space with narrative and image. Every picture or photo evokes a person, a place, a feeling, a memory.
Then there is the task of hanging something on the wall so that it looks good. You pound the little, easily bent nail into the hard plaster wall in just the right spot for the hanger, otherwise the picture gets too high or too low; and if you have an arrangement of pictures, the hangers have to be placed just right so that the group looks orderly. If you get the hanger in the wrong place, even by a fraction of an inch, then you have to pull it out — now you have a hole in the wall.
