Sagadahoc Stories #89:

Willows and Maples First

So dry it squeaks. The vernal impulse aches to leaf out and blossom, but where are the April Showers? Garden busting is a dance in dust. It clouds over. The boatbuilder covers his materials. It blows over. Another sunny day. Outdoor burning is banned statewide. There's talk about another '47, the year Bar Harbor burned.

Maple buds

Box Elder
The trees are tingeing with anticipation, just the same, and first comers are splitting their bud cases. Maples are blooming and the willows in leaf. Species of the treeline, they know how to get out into the sun early, Labrador or low water. Lilac buds are swelling and the box elder is sporting its fanciful doodangles. Beech sprouts are nudging up through the forest litter. Lettuce is peeping.

We went peeping over hill to Vermont this school vacation week, and the high country is still clenched in late winter. Washington and Adams are white mountains. Ice in the lakes, the woods stark, the beige ungreened. We didn't find Spring again until we rolled down into the Champlain Valley.

Willy and Liz were making music at a street theater performance in Burlington, so we went along for the show. A scored and choreographed recitation of the history of local urban renewal, performed in a downtown mall, in situ. A cadre of dancers with four foot tall wooden houses executed symbolic routines in a corridor next to The Gap, while shoppers trooped past with tunnel vision. Ethereal music cascaded down escalators and echoed along the glass walls.

Dancer
(After Barlach)

The tale was of wholesale condemnation, arson, and clearcutting of river housing, funded by federal largess in the 50s and 60s. A familiar story. We remember being shown around Portsmouth, Virginia, in '69 by a proud banker who bragged about removing the undesirable elements from downtown. Color that Black. And green, of course: it being very profitable to turn low income housing into prime real estate.


Exile
(After Barlach)
One elderly ex-resident of the old neighborhood in Burlington told us how it had been, as dancers deconstructed the scene. When the text touched on the destruction of visual history it nudged us. Bowdoinham is busy tearing down and improving its visual history, thanks to the same deep pocket. Familiar forces are still busy, renewing us into the bland.

One last hangover from the era of urban redevelopment continues to plague Burlington. The terminal spur of interstate was supposed to cut alongshore from South Burlington and debouch downtown. Neighborhood groups have blocked it since the 60s, but contractors and government boosters are trying again to make it happen. You might get into town two minutes earlier, at the cost of cutting off residential neighborhoods from the lake. What's the rush?

You might ask the same of this burg. We seem determined to flatten or deface our visual heritage. The old mill site now looks like a demolition dump, with the big hopper keeled over like checkmate. The dead plantings at Clearcut Landing have been relandscaped, and our grandchildren might enjoy a little shade there. Peggy and I circulated a petition to NOT uglify the Town Hall, and honor its stark simplicity. We got over a hundred signatures, but it remains to be seen what will happen at town meeting, where the plan gets voted up or down.

The other side of this grumble is the feeling of community action and goodwill which goes into civic development. This Saturday the landing was mobbed with citizens raking and planting and painting and launching docks. Up at the school another volunteer crew was building a Rec Building to sell snacks at ball games. A dozen years ago it was the hairballs at Freak Beach who fixed up the floats and moorings. No committees, no regulations, no authorities. We just went out and bought paint and lumber and did it. Now another generation of boatists is taking care of the landing, in a different style. They even say the Harbor Master has put in for an official boat.

While I've got my oar in: I wonder how much of today's regulatory imperative is self-defeating. We seem determined to legislate rules for everything, and then call the cops. As an example, waterfront conduct used to follow well-evolved standards, passed along from generation to generation. I was told as a kid not to block the front of the float, and to ship my oarlocks so they didn't gouge my neighbor's boat. One gruff comment from a fisherman taught me that lesson for life.

The idea was that intelligent behavior, once made apparent, would guide your decision-making. If you insisted on leaving your skiff on the front of the float, it might go adrift, of course. Social sanctions were direct. You were expected to internalize acceptable behavior and be responsible for your acts. Now Jimminy Cricket is dead. Instead of conscience and good sense we have ordinances and authorities. Nobody seems to want to learn what works from the old hands, or inform their own best judgment. Traditional patterns of sociable behavior are invisible, and the Bozos don't know they exist. Do what you please and watch out for the heat. Now, if I cut you adrift for being a bonehead, I'll get arrested.


Joseph
The upshot of an authoritarian mentality may be the loss of moral self-responsibility. Depend on the rod and spoil the society. Externalize social standards, call the cops, and you replace a healthy conscience with controlled paranoia. You don't do what you understand to be right, you do what you are told. In fact, what's right is what the authorities tell you. Apply a lack of conscience to violent behavior and you get high school massacres. Maybe you can't blame sociopathology on authoritarianism, but they look like mirrors to me.

Over in Vermont we also stopped at SignalZ in Mont P, to get an eyeful of spaceship earth. Dave and Anci, our Mac gurus, are out there on the digital frontier and their workplace looks like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, with G3s. It's always exciting to touch down on the cutting edge and have your head spin. Montpelier is a sleepy mountain outpost, about the size of Brunswick, spiced with government workers and lawyers. An unlikely place for high-tech hotshots, but it's a decentralized universe out there. We came away from the hub with our heads full, and some good hugs.

Descending back into Maine you feel the coastal effect soften the air. More daffs, early tulips, fresh painted lawn ornaments. This province always looks a bit seedy after the Northern Kingdom. Fewer pastures and mountain vistas, more log lots and puckerbrush. The devastation of last year's ice storm on the eastern slopes and along the Androscoggin is still obvious. Tracts of topless woodlots and acres of crippled birches look ravaged in April nakedness.


Log Yard
Soon as we lit to home I got to mold making again. Trying to pick out the oak to use for framing this frigate, figure out how to bend on the hard curves of the chines. After much plank flipping I went back over to Eric's to get more oak. Nice clear curved pieces to ease the bending. Eric's yard is piled high with logs from his winter cutting, and his skidder's home for the season. Racks of fresh-sawn pine are piling up.

A small operator can still take a living out of the woods, but between the greedy gobblers and the regulators the little guy is getting squeezed. Eric showed me pictures of feller-bunchers chewing through a clearcut, and said, "That's what's destroying the woods business." Like factory ships inhaling groundfish offshore, and destroying the fishery, the wonders of big capital and industrial ingenuity in the woods are marginalizing the independent logger. Gorging on the woods. Another abdication of personal responsibility.

Meanwhile the regulators are looking over your shoulder. You can take out five cord of firewood from your own lot each year, or flatten a houselot, but anything else requires a formal application of intent to harvest, and the oversight of a licensed forester. Cornish was horse logging down along Bunganuc Creek this winter, taking down some dead popples for a land owner, when the Codes Enforcement Officer showed up. Accused him of environmental devastation in the first degree.

River Willows
Cornish said, "The trees were dead."

"Are you a licensed forester?" the CEO asked.

"Nope. Are you?"

"No."

"Well there."
Inky rain clouds have been hide and seeking us all day. I put out some laundry to bait the sky, but it just smiled sunshine. At lunch I asked Max if he had any spoiled hay he'd part with, and we loaded Ebba with loose bedding as showers rode the western view. A sprinkle in passing. More sun.

Corner Willow

I might have known Coyote was out skylarking. Instead of off-loading the hay, I chased other wisps. Jawed with David about masts and spars. A roll of thunder went through, followed by a brief downpour. That was when I chose to pitch hay, and, of course, the loose straw stuck all over Ebba, like a spring roll in the horse pasture. You have to love a playful climate.

 

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