Lighthouse Quartet

Portland, ME

After our time "down east", we drove back "up west" to Portland, a small city of about 66,000.   The Greater Portland metropolitan area is home to over half a million people, more than one-third of Maine's total population.  The initial settlement in the area was established in 1623 but, just like Roanoke, this settlement disappeared without a trace while its founder was back in England trying to recruit a second wave of immigrants.  A new settlement was established in 1633 and over the next 150 years was burned to the ground by the Wampanoag indians, then by the French and again during the revolution by the Royal Navy.  Finally, it was incinerated once more by a fire started during the city's 4th of July party in 1866.  You would have thought they would have taken the hint by now, but it was the only harbor in Maine that remained reliably ice free in the winter, so they kept re-building it.

Wild (?) Ducks

We actually stayed at the Wild Duck campground just south of Portland in the small town of Scarborough.  At the park entrance is a pond with a flock of maybe 40 or 50 ducks most days.  I'm not sure how "wild" they are.

Maine was an early adopter of prohibition, outlawing the sale or manufacture of alcohol in 1851.  This lead to the Portland Rum Riots of 1855, involving primarily Irish immigrants who felt the law was an assault on their traditional culture (I swear I am not making this up).  Faced with 2000  Irishmen who hadn't had a drink in 4 years, Portland's Mayor Dow panicked and called in the local militia.  One rioter was killed and seven wounded.  When it was learned that Mayor Dow himself had a sizable stash of booze "for medicinal use" things went from bad to worse.  The Maine prohibition law was repealed in 1856.

Antique car show

The day after we arrived we went looking for a dog park.  The internet informed us that Bug Light Park in South Portland would be just the ticket.  It lied.  Although there were dogs off leashes, this was apparently by common custom rather than any attempt at compliance with park rules.  We just figured, when in Rome...  and let Julian run off a little energy.  Unbeknownst to us, there was an antique auto show going on at the park that day.  There were rows of shiny cars representing just about every decade of the last century which I browsed through with my camera in hand while Vicki and Chris walked the dogs.

More shiny cars

Bug Light with dog walkers

At the north end of the park sits the Portland Breakwater Lighthouse, an elegant little building nicknamed the Bug Light due to its diminuitive size.  It was built in 1875 and modeled on an ancient Greek monument, though it was constructed if cast iron plates, not marble.  At the opposite end of the park is a memorial to the WW II liberty ships which represented most of the wartime contribution of the Portland

Liberty ship memorial

shipyard.  The yard had a contract with Britain to build 30 "Ocean" class transport ships in 1941 and when America entered the war, rather than desiging anything new, the navy just told the shipyard "build us some more of those".  So in 4 years 30,000 workers, mostly women, turned out over 290 of the things.  There are now just 2 left.  Most of them did their jobs satisfactorily and were then left to rust.


We spent the next couple of days exploring the beach

Nice beaches

towns between Portland and the New Hampshire border... Biddeford, Kinnebunk Port, Wells Beach, York Town. They all kind of look the same.  The beaches seemed nice but access was limited and parking was by a permit you had to go get downtown, which seemed weird.  There weren't many people braving the water.  By this time of year here it's getting pretty cold.  There are still lots of lighthouses and seafood shacks.

We stopped at Fort McClary State Park at Kittery Point, almost right on the New Hampshire border.  This was one of the young United States' coastal defense forts.  First built in 1808, it was named after local hero Andrew McClary, an officer who fell at

Ft. McClary State Park

the Battle of Bunker Hill.  It protected the harbor at Portsmouth, NH.  What remains there are the old block house and a few of the stone fortifications.  Unlike Fort Knox, this Fort actually saw some action in the War of 1812 and was manned during the Civil War though it did not see any actual Rebs.  It was mostly unmanned thereafter and had largely fallen into disrepair by the start of the 20th century, so the feds gave it to the State of Maine in 1924. Across from the fort, at the mouth of the Harbor are two lighthouses.  The Portsmouth Harbor Light sits on the New Hampshire side while the Whale Back Light sits on a tiny island on the Maine side of the harbor entrance.  Both are still in operation.

Whale Back Light and keeper's house

For  those of you who aren't tired of lighthouses yet, on the way back to our motorhome we stopped by the Nubble Light at Cape Neddick for a few photos.  This is a quite good looking light that sits between York and Wells Beach.  In fact, it is so good looking that it is considered a quintessential example of lighthouseness.  The Voyager spacecraft, which carries photographs of Earth’s most prominent man made structures and natural features in case it finally fall into the hands of intelligent extraterrestrials, includes a photo of the Nubble Light along with images of the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal.  Pretty impressive.

Nubble Light

Bonus Pics

The block house at Ft. McClary

Rifle ports in the old fortifications

Portsmouth Harbor Light

Down East

We spent 10 days in "down East" Maine which, for us out of staters, means the eastern half of the Maine coast. Why "down east"?  According to Down East Magazine, "When ships sailed from Boston to ports in Maine (which were to the east of Boston), the wind was at their backs, so they were sailing downwind, hence the term 'Down East.' And it follows that when they returned to Boston they were sailing upwind; many Mainers still speak of going 'up to Boston,' despite the fact that the city lies approximately 50 miles to the south of Maine’s southern border."  Above Lubec, the rest of Maine slopes inland to the northwest and the rest of the Atlantic coast belongs to Canuckistan.  This is a very rural area with no cities, no significant museums or historical sites, few restaurants or theaters but lots of forests, rivers, blueberry fields, estuaries and fishing villages.  It's lovely but hard to make a coherent narrative out of.   So I'm going to switch into full photo-journal mode to give you my impressions of  Down East.

 The coast is rocky and rugged with packs of wild schnoodles and those seagulls you remember from "The Birds"

Lobster are quite big in this area

 

And hugely advertised.

Wild flowers abound...

... as do old cemeteries

Every town has a church or two...

...mostly white with pointy steeples...

... some bigger than others.

Lots of quaint houses

...and a few more impressive ones.

We took a boat tour of the Pleasant River estuary

...saw some fishing shacks in need of repair...

... and a few birds.

Canadian geese just passing through on their way south.

Quoddy Point Light sits as far east as you can go in America

The other side of the bay is Canada

Blueberry Pie by Vicki Rains

I have a new favorite pie – blueberry.  August is blueberry harvesting month and the blueberries are plentiful in down east Maine.  About 6 miles from here is Blueberryland, a store that sells fresh blueberries from their farm. 

Roger's blueberry pancake, ready for the butter and blueberry syrup

Oh boy, more blueberry pancakes!  (The Maine Blueberry Syrup was wonderful.)  They also sell freshly made blueberry pies, not like Cocos or Marie Calendar, they are made throughout the day and are still hot when you purchase them.  So why are all the blueberry pies we’ve had in Maine better than any fruit pie we’ve had before?  They are literally stuffed with blueberries.  You can stand there and watch them make pies.  Take a fresh crust, scoop in about 5 or 6 cups of fresh blueberries to make a small mountain in the pie tin, sprinkle on about a cup and a half of sugar.  Add a little cinnamon and a couple other spices I didn't recognize, lay on an upper crust, pinch the edges and toss that sucker into the oven.

Blueberry barren ready for harvest

My Fodor’s travel guide says that Maine produces about 1/3 of the commercial harvest of  "wild" blueberries, with most of  the rest coming from Canada. "Wild" has been adopted as a marketing term for harvests of managed native stands of lowbush blueberries. The bushes are only about 4 inches high and the berries are quite sweet and have a more intense indigo color than the "high bush" berries grown in most of the rest of the country.  The berries are not planted or genetically manipulated, but they are pruned or burned over every two years, and pests are "managed".  Blueberry barrens apparently stretch for miles in Washington County,

Berries on the bush.

which is the county furthest east in our country.  Now that we know what they look like we see them all over the place around here.  And they are starting the autumn color change before the trees. The blueberries are harvested by migrant workers just like in California.  Supposedly 80% of the crop is harvested by machinery but the field we saw yesterday was being harvested by hand.

Maine blueberry pie with lighthouse crust

The good news for us pie eaters is that blueberries have antioxidants so that means we can eat all we want, right?  I mean, what's a little sugar compared to antioxidants?  They must balance out.  Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. So tonight we are having lobster cooked by our campground owners for $7.00 a pound (for the whole lobster), corn on the cob from the local market and fresh blueberry pie for dessert from a shop up the road that looks like a 75 foot diameter blueberry.  Somehow that makes the pie taste better.




Last winter we spent three months working on the Navajo reservation in Arizona.  Here is the final segment of my ruminations on the subject.


The Navajo People
 
One gets a fairly interesting view of people and their culture when it is based on visits with a doctor.  They have all the usual diseases but, as Roger has mentioned, they lost the gene pool lottery when it comes to rheumatologic disorders, diabetes and alcoholism.  What I found was that many of the inhabitants of Chinle had been working somewhere else in the country until they lost their jobs in the recession and came back to the “res.” (reservation).  There are very few jobs available on the res.

Hogans on the reservation

I had a number of elderly women, who lived in hogans without electricity, plumbing or running water come in requesting a letter from a doctor for improved housing.  One of these elderly women chopped her own firewood for heating.  I admit I got a skewed view of people but my impression of what I saw is that most had little hope for improvement in their lives.  I asked one patient why there was no barber, beauty salon, movie theater or library in town.  He responded that the political situation in town made it impossible to get the approvals that were needed. 

I noticed that the only Navajo professionals I saw were school teachers.  I asked one teacher why this was.  She responded that the Navajo don’t value education or going off the reservation for additional schooling.  In fact, if someone does, that person is often not treated well.  

One thing that disturbed me was that I never had so many patients, probably one every week or two, leave my office angry with me.  I had refused to refill their prescriptions for narcotics.  One of my most rewarding situations was when a recently retired Marine sergeant came into my office for a job physical to drive a truck.  He seemed rather despondent because he had been having trouble finding a job.  I asked why and he said that the Navajo didn’t value those who leave the reservation to work.  I asked what he did in the Marines.  I forgot the term but it had something to do with installation of electrical equipment.  I suggested that he go on the internet looking for jobs in areas that are known as “high tech.” and either did not have a bad recession or else are recovering well from it.  I also said that there are a lot of short term jobs in the country and with his pension and health insurance covered he could get an RV and go where ever there is a job.  He left my office smiling.  I had given him hope.

Time Off

Monument Valley

On sunny weekends we did occasionally take off to visit tourist sites.  We like Monument Valley so one Saturday we drove there to take pictures. Canyon de Chelly National Monument (pronounced “deeshay”, is a lovely canyon carved out by a stream.  We had been there a couple of years ago but since it is right next to Chinle we

Walking the dogs along the canyon rim

would take an hour or two and see one part of the canyon rather than doing the whole thing at once.  We had intended to take a jeep tour at the bottom of the canyon, but in May, when it was greener we just didn’t care anymore.  We were just ready to leave.  There were a couple of other scenic areas that we took pictures of but much of the Navajo reservation is desolate. 

Navajo reservation - pretty to look at but hard to live in