Another Time, Another Place

Leaving Maine, we hit the turnpike and quickly passed through a patchwork quilt of states – New Hampshire, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania – steeped in history. Each little town in Pennsylvania seemed to have at least one historical marker commemorating a visit by George Washington, a battle or other momentous event. We couldn’t help but be struck by just how young the West is, when towns in this part of the country date back to the early 1700s.
In Massachusetts, we spent a morning at Old Sturbridge Village, a living re-enactment of life in the 1830s, when the industrialized age had begun and New Englanders no longer had to fabricate necessities, instead purchasing factory-made items like cookware and tools.
Wood smoke wafted through the village, and the morning stillness was broken only by the clip-clopping of horses’ hooves and the clucking of chickens as we entered old houses and outbuildings to watch demonstrations of spinning, baking and forging. A young man used a pole to reach apples at the top of the 100-year-old trees in a sun-dappled orchard, where they were collected by an ox-drawn cart and hauled to the cider press.
We even received some impromptu lessons in livestock. Chatting with the affable driver of a horse-drawn coach, I noticed the team looked nearly identical to the horses pulling visitors in wagons through Acadia Park. "Are they Belgians?” I asked. “Yes,” he beamed, “the best horses for this kind of work.” Everyone knows Clydesdales from the commercials, he went on to say, adding that they’re not the brightest steeds in the barn.“They’re only good for plowing and pulling beer wagons. They don’t have the intelligence, heart and stamina of Belgians.”
It was he, it turned out, who had sold the horses to the Maine operator. As he launched into a story of pulling a circus wagon in Milwaukee, putting Vicks Vapor Rub in the horses’ nostrils so they wouldn’t bolt at the scent of lions and tigers, it was clear he could talk horses all day, so we wished him well and moved on.
Later, watching an ox walk round and round the cider press grinding apples, we learned that it was bovines who’d been the real “workhorses” of the time. Horses were a luxury, costing the farmer more in feed and care. Cows were kept for breeding and milk, but male calves usually ended up on the dinner table, the volunteer told us. But if the farmer needed a new team, the steers were neutered and trained virtually from birth until they could work and respond to voice commands.
“This guy knows about 20 words,” bragged his young handler, pulling back on the beast’s fearsome-looking horns to capture his best camera angle.
Lancaster, PA is the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, and it was there we headed next. Arriving on a late Sunday afternoon, we saw families dressed in Sunday best, walking or riding in buggies from church service. We learned that the gray wagons belonged to Amish and the black to Mennonites, although we couldn’t tell the adherents of each sect by their dress. Many children and several women used adult-size scooters for transport, pushing along with one foot. The Amish don’t ride bicycles, apparently considering them among the modern conveniences they eschew.
The next day we toured the countryside, passing through towns like Bird-in-Hand and Intercourse, both settled in the early 1700s. Residents spoke German among themselves, and English with an incongruous Irish-sounding lilt to visitors, all of whom are considered “English.” With sunny smiles and sweet dispositions, the Amish strike visitors as supremely content with their lives, despite the hoards of curious tourists who constantly sneak photos.
It was wash day, and laundry fluttered from lines like Tibetan prayer flags, the Amish ingeniously using utility poles for laundry lines, although not for electricity. We bought shoo-fly pie and homemade root beer and stopped at another farm for beautiful organic brown eggs, $1.25 a dozen on the honor system. We felt slightly uncomfortable following the sign’s directions and opening the door to the house, where we found the eggs in a cooler, but a calico cat seemed to be the only one home. We put our money in the box and headed out, finding the simple exchange oddly gratifying.
Writing this tonight without electricity atop Loft Mountain in Shenandoah National Park, where swirling fog obscures all but the nearest trees, the sense of being in a different time as well as place persists.
Next, a meet-up with friends and visit to the nation’s Capitol.
For photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/happytwo.mcwilliams/TripEast8NewEngland?authkey=Gv1sRgCIquvvG9sriv1AE&feat=directlink

The Maine Course

I suppose I could grow tired of lobster. It’s possible I could grow blasé over the brilliant display of fall color, the picture postcard towns with charming clapboard houses and downtowns both vibrant and historic, the gorgeous organic produce that outshines anything I’ve managed to grow in California. Maybe after a while I’d take for granted the sense of community in the small towns, the outdoor activities like free sailing and rowing for locals and the cultural opportunities that seem so plentiful. But I don’t think so.
Maine is wonderful. The people we’ve encountered are extraordinarily friendly. The air is clean, the scenery is beautiful and every town qualifies for “Tree City USA.” The coast goes on forever and real estate is affordable.
At this point the invariable response is: “but, the WINTERS!” Well, if you’re lucky enough to be retired you can always leave. Or you can stock up on winter apparel at the L.L. Bean outlet, make sure the house is well winterized and watch the ponds turn into ice rinks. Just muddle through it. Our friend Lisa, who lived in Hawaii and California much of her life, does.
We spent a weekend at her late-1800s house in Belfast, actually two houses joined together with a hip-roofed shed incorporating rough-hewn beams. It’s a buttercup yellow work in progress, a do-it-yourself project that’s turning out beautifully. She played local tour guide, driving us on scenic backroads, taking us to a rocky beach where we watched dogs Fritz and Moose frolic while we hunted sea glass and picked wild apples. And of course we went to the local lobster pound, where her friend Biff joined us for an alfresco feast on Penobscot Bay. It was a great weekend and renewal of a friendship going back nearly 35 years.
We began our Maine sojourn in a campground near Bar Harbor, where two visiting cruise ships brought over 5,000 passengers to town. Grand water-view homes give a sense of the beauty that drew the original vacationers to the area a century ago, while large inns dominate much of the waterfront view today.
But the rest of Mount Desert Island is lovely. We walked the carriage roads and the path rimming Jordan Pond in Acadia Park, enjoying a lunch of seafood chowder, popovers and a glass of local pear wine. We bought and cooked lobsters from a pound we’d visited five years ago, using our camp stove outdoors and a pot loaned by the proprietor, no deposit required.
One night we bought the $29.95 cooked dinner for two from the lobster man across the road from our campground: two lobsters, two peekytoe crabs, two ears of corn and a stick of butter – and free delivery – for the price of two St. Helena burgers. Another night it was sweet dayboat scallops right from the bay. It’s easy to be locavores in Maine.
We took the mail boat from Northeast Harbor to Cranberry Island, sharing the ride with locals like Carl Brooks, whose family has owned land on the island for 250 years. A chatty Ted Kennedy lookalike, Carl told us what it was like to live on the 39-resident island, showing us the little shed on the dock where UPS deliveries are made, along with the post office, a former fish cooler. “We never had a zip code and it drove Homeland Security crazy after 9/11,” he said. “We had to put names on the roads.”
We walked the island’s main road and followed a path through a boggy forest to a beach, where we added stray lobster floats and other flotsam to a driftwood totem. The land was donated for public use and the path built by volunteers, said Phil, a volunteer who opened the island’s history museum for us.
Heading back to the dock, we passed Carl’s Victorian house and he waved. “I should have offered you a ride to the far end of the island,’ he said, pointing to his golf cart. We hopped on, and he gave us the royal tour, including a bumpy ride up a dirt road to an exclusive club frequented by Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, where a gun-toting local once chased away a snooping journalist from the Wall Street Journal.
A little café/general store, subsidized by a wealthy summer resident, supplies basic needs for residents at remarkably fair prices, even in the summer when the population swells by tenfold. But everything else, from furniture to firewood, arrives by boat. We shared the ride back with a group of construction workers who drank beer on the stern deck, while the boat’s captain passed out dog biscuits to traveling canines up front. When we stopped at the next island, the boat picked up a young woman with two couches on the dock, the construction workers cheerfully helping to load the furniture onboard.
The rest of our stay was a visual feast of foggy lighthouses and salty harbors, crimson-flecked forests and pumpkin-head scarecrows celebrating fall’s bounty. We ate more lobster and haddock than I could ever imagine and discovered whoopie pies. We went through our first Nor’easter and saw a rare blue lobster. We kept extending our stay by “just one more day.” Finally, it was time to move on.
For photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/happytwo.mcwilliams/TripEast7Maine?authkey=Gv1sRgCN-ymcer9o-BkQE&feat=directlink.

Northern Exposure

Then, we were in France. The autumn foliage and abundance of water didn’t change, but the stop signs all said ARRET and the shopkeepers “bonjour.” We spent a drizzly day in Quebec, stretching out a three-course lunch of confit du canard and a bottle of Beaujolais to enjoy the mirrored Parisian ambiance of the tony restaurant and avoid going back out into the chill rain. The next day we took the ferry from Levis to the city, sharing the ride with some of the 60,000 Quebecois – couples, kids and dogs – all outfitted in blue “Nordiques” T-shirts off to a Sunday afternoon rally. The hockey-crazed Quebecois lost their team to Colorado in 1995 and think it’s time they had a team of their own again.
We walked the cobbled streets of la Ville Basse, ogled enormous cruise ships in town for fall foliage tours, had lunch in an outdoor café and bought local foie gras, cheese and maple syrup at the public market on the water. And we discovered the guilty Quebec pleasure of poutine: crisp French fries topped with cheese curds and brown gravy, better than it sounds.
We even checked out RVs at a dealership near the campground. “Ah, you speak French,” smiled the salesman, who was also an innkeeper. “Most of the Americans visiting here speak French – or try to. They’re travelers. Not the Canadians from Toronto and Ontario. Not a word, not even ‘bonjour.’”
New Brunswick was all about the Bay of Fundy, whose remarkable tides left fishing boats and beaches high and dry in the afternoon and awash the next morning. We hiked bluffside trails with tumbling streams and frequent waterfalls and walked beaches where the tides had receded 300 feet, exposing rock-anchored strands of kelp six feet long which would be underwater the next day.
Rocky spits reached like bony fingers into inlets strewn with islands, some large enough for a house and dock. The bay was never far from sight, serving as a backdrop to white clapboard houses with mountains of firewood in the front yard and lines of drying laundry in the back. Apple trees heavy with fruit grew along the roads, some planted by wildlife, others by humans. We picked fruit from 150-year-old trees at abandoned homesteads, making cinnamon-scented applesauce for the road. Travel in the north during October is truly an apple fest.
Five time zones and worlds away from California, Nova Scotia evokes the Scotland for which it’s named, all craggy bluffs and weather-worn villages and winds off the sea that knock the feet out from under you. Fishing boats bob at anchor in rocky harbors both picturesque and treacherous.
On a windswept bluff outside Peggy’s Cove, we stopped at the memorial to Swissair flight 111, which plunged into the frigid waters offshore in 1998, killing 229 onboard. The simple granite boulder remembering all those lives lost somewhere out there in that indigo sea was incredibly moving.
The weather grew colder and blustery on Cape Breton island, with moments of bright sunshine punctuating pelting rain to form rainbows that disappeared into deep offshore waters. Here was the full power of the north Atlantic, with biting winds and roiling whitecaps, especially at the end of the dirt road on the northern tip of the island, where chowder houses were already shuttered for the winter and we truly felt at the end of the earth. Thickly wooded inland valleys untouched by humans are home to bears and moose, and we walked a trail in Cape Breton Highlands park through an enchanted forest of towering sugar maples, some of them 350 years old.
The island has a distinctly split personality between Scots and French. Some settlements celebrate their heritage with Celtic song and dance and consonant-heavy names like Whycocomagh, while other French-speaking towns mark the homeland of the Acadians, the French settlers originally deported during British rule in the 1700s. Some of the outcasts made their way back to settle these inhospitable shores and make a living from sea and land, while others left for Louisiana, to become the forebears of today’s Cajuns.
Back at iconic Peggy’s Cove, we talked with Roger, a gentle soul with snow-white hair who’d been born in the tiny village and lived his life among its 50 inhabitants. “I fished for herring and mackerel for 40 years,” he said, “but the catch is down to a fraction of what it used to be.” He glanced out the window of his nautical artifacts shop as a huge tour bus roared by. “I used to go up on that hill as a boy and it was covered in wildflowers. A photographer from New York once took pictures of my sister and I picking wildflowers.” He indicated a granite hill topped with a large inn and parking lot filled with cars and busses, even on a rainy October day. The architecture was tasteful enough, but it had forever changed the view toward the lighthouse.
We talked like three old codgers of a changing world, changing climate and changing populations – down for fish and way up for humans -- while waves lapped against the pilings of the old fishing shack. Finally, we made our way to leave before the next downpour. “Give me a hug,” said Roger. And we did.
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For pictures, follow this link:
http://picasaweb.google.com/happytwo.mcwilliams/TripEast6Canada?authkey=Gv1sRgCLH2uqfc5dP9-gE&feat=directlink