 Another entry in the series of stopping and reflecting on what's wonderful in my corner of the world.
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After brainstorming a playlist for the Flying Scot Wife-Husband Championship regatta party –– Bon Jovi! The Carpenters! Sir Mix-a-Lot! Weezer! Pure Prairie League! –– well, I am not done with it, but the internal jukebox is pleading for a break. Thanks to the civilizing influence of National Public Radio, here's the music that I am listening to now:  Ah road-trips. Nothing compares to that moment when you have to stop the car, wrestle open the map and try to match the spidery black roads with reality, and knowing that you have no real idea where in the hemisphere you are located. Granted, maps are full of promise and romance. So many options! Secrets revealed! Knowledge! But how restful it is to have an authority on board. Even though I second-guess the GPS, it's a relief to have those satellites and that digital power backing up my navigation. A qualified relief, anyhow. We logged something like four thousand miles over the past three months in the Winnebago. The first leg took us north to Canada, where we discovered that Alice, our GPS (named for the naughty song) was blind north of the border. Luckily we'd been to the Buffalo Canoe Club before, so getting there was painless
Seems like we could just change chips, but alas, Alice aged out some time back. Seems like updating the GPS by computer would be simple, too, but the last time we tried it, Alice lost New York. Misplaced the entire Empire State.  Given the price of these things, Jeff went shopping. For $99 –– on clearance –– he got a new unit that covered all of North America and Puerto Rico. Only $99! On clearance. The brand-name led us to dub her Mary. I fired Mary up for the third leg of our trip (The Farm to Bar Harbor), trying to get used to the different set up (new neural pathways have never given me a bigger headache than when switching operating systems). But when Mary's target arrival time held steady at 10 hours during the first two hours of our trip –– I had to retrieve Alice. Ten hours versus seven hours. Disturbingly differing itineraries. Two insistent machine voices telling us to "Turn Left!" I shut them both down and got us across Maine the old-fashioned way. Turns out that Mary might have been on clearance for a reason. She's not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
And critically, there's no British accent option for Mary. If someone is going to demand that you make a pointless exit from the Free Way, so much the better if she has a prissy accent.
When suggesting we turn on Hwy 509, she calls it "H-West-Why 509." For $99, you don't get "highway" programmed into her vocabulary. Still, for Leg 4 (Bar Harbor –– Bay of Fundy –– Cape Breton Highlands ––Digby –– Portland, ME), Mary did her job the best she could. Bless her little iimited on-clearance brain.  We hurried the asparagus crowns into the ground last spring. A little like John Henry working against the steam-powered drill of time (minus the subtext of exploited labor and so forth) I extended the ditch, flinging stones hither and yon in a frenzy. Thirty or so beautiful crowns of asparagus and only a few hours of daylight to plant them before leaving the Farm.
Fast forward three months into the apex of summer. Mr. Linton and I make our way back to the Would-Be Farm crossing our fingers about all the spring's plantings. It's all an experiment, this absentee farming thing. So much can go wrong with growing things, even when the farmer keeps a sharp eye open for floods, dry soil, locusts, marauding goats –– never mind what can happen if the farmer dashes off into the sunset for whole chunks of the lunar year. Well, one of the things that happens is photosynthesis gone wild: waist-high weeds growing everywhere. And I do mean weeds -- not just an unintended plant, but a weed in the pejorative sense. Prickly, stout, thick, and unpleasant things: thistles, nettles, burdock, and bramble bushes. Cue montage of two solid days of weeding. Slow-mo scenes of repeated cutting, yanking, digging, burning seed-heads, and swearing at the thorns. Then, in a blink: Now, assuming that time and tide allow, we'll be finishing the planting as originally planned: more mulch and a thick layer of weed barrier fabric weighed down with (what else?) rocks.
Because the rocks are doing great. Some people need noise in order to concentrate, while others do best in silence and isolation. This, by the by, might be roughly the difference between extroverts and introverts. At school, I'd occasionally sit in on a random lecture in fluid dynamics or organic chemistry –– not to listen and learn, mind you, but because I needed a threshold level of activity around me so I could bang out a paper or two. Sometimes the library is just too quiet. This still holds true, and I'm happy to find a perch to work where people are buzzing about. But most days, I make my own buzz with playlists. With a theme. Here are a couple of selections from my current project. Sense a topic?  What makes something humorous? As to be expected, a whole field of scientific inquiry (called "gelotology," not to be confused with gelato-ology) has devoted itself to the subject. Oh, to be on those PhD boards... The Cliff-notes version of what makes funny funny suggests something like this: humor arises from transgression and surprise. We have expectations of what's normal, so humor involves challenging or overturning those expectations in a way that is mildly alarming and/or absurd. A duck is not supposed to walk into a bar, in the normal course of affairs. The duck's smart-alecky comment is usually something of a surprise or something patently absurd. <insert sound of canned laugh-track> Radiolab, the fantastic radio show, also looks at gelotology in this episode. National Poetry Month -- it's doesn't have to be serious, people. Improvements to Base Camp are so much more scenic than improvements we make to the soil of the Would-Be Farm. Last I checked, almost nobody likes to look at pictures of well-aged manure or leaf mould. And frankly, the process of lopping and shaping the old apple trees is worth about two whole sentences...not that I limit myself... So, back to Base Camp: a worn, dented, bargain-basement camper, regardless the fresh paint, is wont to crumple under the weight of snow if given the opportunity. And –– situated as it is at the business end of the Great Lakes, our Would-Be Farm provides month after month of snow opportunity. What's a sensible and interesting solution? Lacking a time-machine and a money-tree with which to re-write history, we decided to put a lid on it. A roof, to be exact. A variety of creative but perhaps over-ambitious or overly-complicated options floated by. Since I kind of sold the idea of the farm to Mr. Linton as an excellent source of new neural pathways (see also: Adventure! Fresh air! Wildlife!), Base Camp has succeeded. It has certainly given us some cool intellectual puzzles to ponder. The question of materials -- reclaimed or new, for instance, kept us busy for a chunk of time. I'd like to say we have the moral satisfaction and savings of reusing lumber, but it's obvious we did not use used. The logistical challenge of locating the square footage of metal roofing -- and getting it to the Farm? And recycling that many 2x4's? Uh, not on our schedule. I can take some small satisfaction in supporting a locally-owned business that cheerfully delivered on time. With the help of some of the best carpentering minds of our acquaintance –– including my sister Sarah, Jeff's brother John, bright North Country all-rounder Kurt –– we set our minds on a pole-barn constructed around the camper. The walls to be be left open (it's kind of a temporary building ––for now) and the sheltering metal roof to include transparent panels for light. Add a sizable wooden deck to cut down on the mud, and poof! Base Camp suddenly looks a LOT sturdier.
Of course, we had to move the fire pit, and we learned that the Empire apple-tree we planted is just a scoochy-bitty-bit too close to the camper, and who knows what the squirrels and field-mice and voles think about this little slice of heaven come snow-time, but that's a neural challenge for another season. A fresh perspective. Or an off-kilter one. 
Tip a watery landscape 90 degrees or so, and you get a Rorschach image. Is that a snapping turtle? A monster with antlers and a Celtic-patterned surplice? And are those fuzzy green faces hiding down there along the seam -- I mean along the water's edge? 
Psychological insight provided separately.
 On Perry Mason -- and countless police detective shows since -- the questioning begins with the cops frog-marching a suspect into bare room. Tilting a desk light into the perp's panicking eyes, one of the cops barks out: "Where were you on the night of June the 12th?" Even when I had volumes of storage space in my brain (many quantum chunks of trivia ago), I wondered: what if someone didn't remember where s/he was that night? It nagged at me, an inconsequential, paranoid worry about not being able to give the fuzz a sharp-edged answer. I didn't plan to need an alibi, of course, but still, I worried. It's just one result of having television provide a person's wider socialization...  Later, pondering the flight of days through my memory, I put myself into the dark blue uniforms behind the harsh light and wondered, "Where was I on the night of -- oh, any date?" And also, "Am I supposed to be someplace tomorrow?" Hence the shelf of appointment books. The year I left high school, I started keeping a datebook. I jotted down all kinds of things: tests, assignments, lunches, dates, musical happenings, friends' birthdays. Later, it was deadlines and events and meetings, confirmation and flight numbers, video conference passwords, dinner reservations, and so on. Like my antiquated Rolodex, a datebook leaves room for me NOT to think. When is the flight? I don't know, it's in the datebook. When is the dentist appointment? I don't know, it's in the datebook. Are you free tomorrow? Honest to pete, I don't know. It's in the datebook. Which is splendid until the 2014 datebook fell out of my bag when I was crossing Philadelphia International with my elderly dog...and nobody turned it into the Lost and Found bin. Or if someone did, the Lost and Found people couldn't <irony alert> find it. Since the end of September, I have been hoping for the return of my 2014. I've missed a handful of appointments. I've scattered mass confusion about upcoming events and missed birthdays. I've spoken the words, "I don't know, it was in the datebook," about four hundred times. It's a first-world problem, but I feel it like the loss of a tooth. I have 2015 in hand and am looking forward to knowing again where I was. And where I'm supposed to be. 
Depression. Ugh. Even the sunniest of us can be ambushed by the chemicals of sadness. Without reason, without season, without warning, the dark tide rushes in and leaves a person clinging to -- or maybe just reclining listlessly on -- a seaweed-covered rock.
I don't know how to recover. I don't understand why it happens or why it goes away. All I can say is, hang on. The tide's going to change. Send up a flare and hang on. |
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