Maine

More days off – August

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So August began with us hitching up the old Airstream again and heading to magical Rockland, Maine, where our friends the Sauters were renting a house for a few weeks. This was their front yard.

img_9877The Sauters are from Germany – we met them at Wooden Boat School a few years back and have gotten together several times since – mostly here in the US (where they travel a lot!) and once in Barcelona, which was super sweet too. Here in Maine, where they come so often, the shopkeepers and lobster men know their names. And they’ve made some other friends too, who joined us for an epic “bbq” featuring every fish in the sea. A blueberry snack cup, Owl’s Head Lighthouse, and Pale Ale named for a Civil War general (from Maine) were just some of the other highlights.We might have talked about US elections a bit too.

Next weekend I scooted down to DC to for a “Close Up” reunion. Close Up was my first job out of college, and these five women were some of my first friends. The amount of girl power, teaching, lawyering, journalisting, and all around awesomeness among this group is HUGE. True of all the friends I met there and through them. Here we are at my favorite breakfast burrito spot on Capitol Hill. You can tell by our glow how hot it was that weekend. img_0083

Let’s see…the following weekend, four STEELES come to visit us in Woodstock! Maxing out our guest bedrooms and more, my brother and his kids came for a fun-filled weekend of cooking, biking, hide and seek, whiffle ball, sight seeing, and most importantly rope swinging! We spent hours one day swinging into the Ottauqueechee River from a rope tied to an upper tree branch. When we’d mastered that, we moved on to jump off some rocks down river near the Simon Pearce store in Queechee. The next day the kids went back for more.

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Other highlights included giving them all a tour of the mansion and a farewell picnic lunch on the grounds.

We capped off the month with a blockbuster visit to Boston to check out a couple of (wooden) sailboats that Ben has had his eye on. Before we had an Airstream, we had a boat and we will again some day. The one on the left was on the hard, but the one on the right was anchored. Though we didn’t sail, we did take a dinghy out to see it and it felt pretty nice to be out on the water.

We stayed with my friend Amy and her awesome family who helped us plot our course to see TWO national historical parks on the way home:  first, the Adams National Historical Park in Quincy. Popular culture -HBO series, Hamilton (note my t-shirt) – have brought John Adams into prominence. In the midst of a very urban area, some geniuses and heroes have preserved these places. You can explore his early homes, and the one he shared with Abigail after they retired. There, at Plainfield, you can see the desk from which he wrote his reconciliation letters to Jefferson, and the chair in which he died (or took ill, I forget), his last words being “Thomas Jefferson still survives.” (Wrong!) I thank our awesome ranger who explained that Jefferson had been ill, so his health was on Adams’ mind.

Then we made our way north to Lowell, MA and the Lowell National Historical Site. This site tells the story of the textile mills, the industrial revolution, and the New England and immigrant women who fueled it during its boom (1820s-40s). The entire town was built based on engineering the Merrimack River to produce maximum water power. Six miles of canals were dug and they are nearly intact today (our ranger explaining it all at left below).  In the middle, you see Ben next to one of the looms at which women labored for over 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. (Inspiring the first women’s strikes and union action in the 1830s). You can see (and hear) a video of the loom at work here, and get a feel for what an awful job it must have been.

At work, I had been preparing to do the “Service Wing” tour. Understanding more about how the textile mills in New England shifted women’s opportunities (away from jobs as servants)  in the market economy  is just the kind of “days off” I like!

So that’s too serious a note to end on…so I will end with some pics of our family’s visit. Summertime! The same kiddos just celebrated (with their mom the superfan) the Cubs’ World Series victory last night! Woot!

 

How we spent my days off

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Rangering is only 8:30 – 5, five days a week. So we had 17 sets of “weekends” (my days off were Thursday/Friday) over the course of our summer in Vermont. We didn’t go away for all of them,but most involved at least a day trip, and sometimes an overnight. Here’s a map and a rundown of what we did for the first four!july-2016-map

First – Montpelier! The state capitol. Isn’t it lovely? So stunning and yet so Vermont. The previous state house burned down in 1857 and they went to work on this replacement right away. Some of the original locally quarried granite is still there!img_9442

There was a storm moving in while we were there – a bit of an anomaly as it turned out because it was a very dry summer in Vermont.

We had a fabulous YOUNG tour guide who walked us through the beautiful building, pointing out this and that. When we toured the hall with govenors’ portraits, she did NOT have to tell me who the fellow (below) on the left was. We ate dinner at a fairly forgettable establishment, but did find Vermont’s famous because it’s hard-to-find-so therefore-famous beer, Heady Topper.

The following weekend we had a date with Reverend Jack, the Presbyterian minister and WW2 vet/POW who united us in marriage lo this 13 years ago. He goes to Maine every summer to spend a few weeks in Goose Rocks Beach near Kennebunkport, where he was “stationed” at a church for many years, and where he raised his family. We drank martinis, strolled the beach, stalked the Bush family compound, and ate lobstah at Nunans. This weekend will also be remembered for the birth of our nephew Cash – a wee bit early, but all the more exciting!

The next weekend Ben was off on an adventure on his own, so I ventured out on my bike a few miles up the road to hike some of the Appalachian Trail. The AT is a big part of the community here – many locals are “trail angels” bringing food, drink and supplies to spots on the trail for thru-hikers to take as they need. You occasionally see hikers in town, looking for wifi or a laundromat, or a shower.

I really loved my bike-hike combination. I saw/smelled some hikers going south, some going north (nobo or sobo in the parlance). Many of them wisely took a short detour off the trail to get some pie at On the Edge Farm. This little visual treat was along the route for me.

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Finally, we did a big trip to New York’s Hudson River Valley – the mansion I give tours in as a ranger is filled with American landscape art. On a tour my first week, I had accidentally identified a Thomas Cole as a Thomas Moran. One of the visitors corrected me via a very polite note left at the visitor center. Ugh. It was time to get smart. Below, the view of the Catskills from Thomas Cole’s house in Hudson, NY. The Hudson River is between here and there. Isn’t it stunning?

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For those of you as ill-informed as I used to be, Thomas Cole was THE founder of the Hudson River School of artists. Not a school you go to. More like a group of people with a similar approach – elevating American art in the days when there was no such thing, with a focus on our landscapes. The house had some original furnishings, but really showcased his work habits, routines, and approach as an artist – for example look (below, left) at his notebook showing the different colors for tree bark, and (below, right) his studio. Cole died fairly suddenly, and young-ish in 1848. Respiratory ailment – all that work in studios with stoked fires, handmade paints, and toxic fumes.

We swung west, just about 20 miles toward those Catskill mountains for a short hike to Kaaterskill Falls – a fairly small, but lovely waterfall that just knocked the socks off those artists once they could steamboat their way out of New York City in the 1820s.

One of Thomas Cole’s students, Frederic Church, was born to wealth, but became an accomplished artist in his own right. Both are showcased at his home just a few miles away: Olana. Such a beautiful house, more opulant, inspired by Church’s visits to the near east.

After Cole died, Church helped his estate (cash strapped family) by selling Cole’s paintings. We have three Coles in the mansion, plus the correspondence between Church and the Billings family, negotiating the sale (this was before the days of art dealers.) And now I am proud to say I can tell a Cole from a Moran.

One proud couple spoke their truth this same weekend, the weekend of the DNC. And, because the moment involved a pocket constitution, I screen grabbed it. I just found it among the Hudson River Valley photos on my phone. So, I will leave you with one more timely work of art.

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