Stay of Execution

Cracks In The Pavement

Sometimes I despair about the way we're wrecking this planet.  Today's heat makes me feel a little bit helpless and depressed.  It's the same kind of feeling I get when I am in a bleak landscape of highway and big box stores, strip malls and chain restaurants. 

At those times, when I'm sitting stopped in traffic on a big anonymous built-up section of Connecticut freeway, or watching the heat shimmer on an endless parking lot, I have a kind of strange strategy.  I look for cracks in the pavement, and weeds in the cracks.  They're always there, if you look hard enough.  There are weeds pushing through the asphalt, squeezing their roots in and stretching and breaking the concrete.  I look for the weeds and then I imagine what the landscape will look like if humans vacate entirely.  The weeds will spread.  The pavement will crack, and pretty soon you'll have a succession of small trees, a scrappy field, crumbled blocks of asphalt and glass, like an old vacant lot.  It's not hard to imagine how the vines would cover the concrete highway dividers, crumbling the corners over time. 

For some reason thinking of this gives me hope.  I like the weeds a lot.  I like the sense they give me of resilience.  I like the idea that the ugly corporate concrete sameness we're spreading all over this country is just temporary, and would yield to fields if we left it alone. 

I thought of this because there are cracks in my driveway, and weeds have taken hold in there and in the walkway alongside my house.  The curb, where it meets the road, has vines and buttercups growing.  Even the foundation of my garage is a planter for vines and small saplings.  I noticed them today and thought, as usual, that I need to get after them.  I know I should.  But part of me is rooting for the weeds.  I want them to win, I guess.    

Summer In Maine

Today and yesterday were worth a million dollars.  It is the kind of brilliant jewel-blue-green June that makes Maine a summer delight.  There are buttercups and daisies nodding by the side of the road, lupine and roses and peonies blooming, and the trees and the grass are this lush sweet green, swaying in the summer wind.  It's spectacular.  The evening lingers until late, and the warm dusky glow is rosy-purple-orange-blue fading into a starry cornflower.  It smells like a ripe summer night, like possibility, like skinny dipping and a full moon. 

I spent today being the Principal Race Officer for a regatta my yacht club runs every year.  My grandfather actually started the regatta, way back when.  I did it last year, with my father, and I think I'll plan to do it again next year.  I was at the club for 12 hours, and came home with some homework.  I'll be there again most of the day tomorrow.  I'm wiped out and contented.

I had eight volunteers helping me on the water.  Five of us were in the big race committee boat, and I had two small motorboats, each with two people, helping me move marks around.  There were maybe 40 boats racing, in six different classes.  We were busy.  One of the things that was cool was that the people on the race committee boat were all women.  I didn't do that on purpose, but when I discovered it was possible, I thought it was kind of neat, and encouraged the guys to go on the mark boats and the women to stay on the RC boat.  I am quite certain there's never been an all-women race committee for a big regatta at my club before, and I think it's cool to be part of.   We weren't perfect, but we were close -- efficient, smooth, calm, and focused. 

Ruby shot the gun almost 50 times, and never misfired.  We did 12 starting sequences and one postponement, and we set four different courses for the PHRF classes, sending A, B, C, and D classes on different routes around the bay.  We had to move the line and the one-design's drop mark a couple of times, but the southerly breeze came in pretty steady and let us run races instead of making infinite adjustments.  I tried to set the PHRF courses so that the classes would all finish approximately at the same time, and I was perhaps a little too successful in my estimate, so we had the cruisers, the J/24s, and the A class boats all converging on the finish line from different angles at the same time.  It was challenging to track the finishes, but the classes didn't interfere with one another and I don't think the racers knew how much the committee was multitasking as we scored the different races.  I felt like I did a much better job than I did last year, and was calmer and happier while doing it. 

Tomorrow the forecast is for temperatures near 90 on land.  That means a beautiful seabreeze and another day where being on the water will feel like a luxury. 

Here's a picture of two of my team members, Mary and Ruby, taking a rare breather between one-design races. 

Today I Went For A Long Walk

It was a sunny day, warm and bright and breezy.  I saw lots of pretty things.  I brought my camera.  Here are some pictures I took.

Lady's slippers

I was roaming in the woods this morning and lost my way.  I doubled back, then figured out I'd been on the right path to begin with.  So I turned back around and this time, just off to the side of the path I'd walked twice before, I saw two dozen lady's slippers, pink ones and yellow-green ones.  I stood and counted them.  When I was a little girl someone impressed on me that lady's slippers are rare and marvelous, and I still feel that kind of reverent amazement when I happen upon one now in the woods.  I don't think they're all that rare, actually, but I feel lucky and clever when I spy one, nonetheless.   And two dozen that were invisible the first two times I passed them and showed themselves to me on my third pass, well, that feels like a good start to the day. 

Peepers

Took the dog to the dog park yesterday with Neighbor, 517, and their dog H.  We arrived in the dusky soft light of sunset, the sky powdery pink-red-orange.  We did a circuit around the woodsy park.  H went right for the mud puddles, as usual for a lab.  Lila skirted the outside of them.  She's not a water dog, it seems.  There were a couple of black shaggy dogs in the park and the four of them took to racing around.  The owners of the shaggy dogs were two slightly shaggy men having an earnest, quasi-spiritual conversation, from the bits I eavesdropped.  One of them brought up string theory, and one of them kept saying, "use your power for good, man."  Neighbor and 517 and I took our dogs around the loop once, then stood near the exit watching them romp with the shaggy black dogs in the fading light.  There was a lot of running and jumping, some attempted humping, some chasing and a fair amount of delightful mud-puddle sploshing and drinking. 

We said goodbye to the shaggy men and their shaggy dogs and took our dogs out of the park, up the path by the old landfill.  The sky was dusky purple now, most of the light gone.  We walked to the brook and threw some sticks so the dogs would run into it and rinse off.  In the distance the lights of a house were shining through the trees.  The dogs raced through the long grass, bounding along.  On our way back we passed the quarry and it was alive with the sounds of spring peepers, singing into the soft night air. 

Red Bird, Yellow Bird

The cure for exhaustion, I learn again and again, is exercise and being outside.  This morning's sunshine gave us reason to skip the gym and run across the bridge.  The water was glassy still, and the trees have that feathery yellow-green thickening that isn't quite leaves, yet.  I saw a cardinal, and when I tried to point it out to Neighbor it disappeared but a yellow goldfinch showed itself in the next tree over.  Neighbor missed that one, too, looking instead out at the water where a duck was hovering, beating its wings against the water.  H, the big yellow dog, shuffled along with us, and when I pointed to a tiny white eggshell on the ground he put his nose to it and gave it a lick. 

Old Friends

The herons are back.  Yesterday morning we were running around the far side of the island and a big heron was gliding on its huge wings inches above the surface of the water.  It was still cold but we were good and warmed up from running and the sun, just above the horizon, felt bright on my face.  The ruckus of dead bamboo on the right side of the footpath had fallen down and the unexpected green of spring shoots looked wonderful in the brown dirt and old leaves.  Neighbor said, "I feel lucky," and I said, "Me too."  The path was deserted, except for us and the heron, a couple of gulls, and the green bursting up out of the ground. 

And yesterday evening I was driving away from practice with my sunroof open, listening to Robert Earl Keen singing about the sweet smell of nighttime.  A lone wild turkey made its way, herky-jerky, across the field, yellow-brown with a little bit of the orange brightness of the setting sun.  And as I crossed the tiny bridge over the tidal inlet there was the heron I saw every day last fall, standing sentry up to his knees in the still water. 

Glamour Profession

Was offline this weekend, and spent much of it standing on a dock in sub-40s weather, squinting at a bunch of sailboats and muttering to myself.  Sometimes I muttered to the other coaches who stood beside me and muttered.  Sometimes I talked on my cell phone to my assistant coach, who was standing on a different dock in a different town squinting at a different bunch of sailboats.  Occasionally I pulled sailors over to me and pointed things out -- you see what's going on there?  You see that leftie?  We should have tacked in it.  You see how headed we are?  That's no good.  Yesterday the bonus was that it rained on me most of the day, a pelting cold half-rain, half-sleet.  Most of the time the sailors were inside a little room that was hot and humid from all the wet sailors standing around, fogging the windows, reading textbooks and talking on cell phones and making peanut butter sandwiches.  I stood out on the deck where I could see better, with my hands shoved into my coat pockets and my wet hat down around my ears.  I learned that my rainjacket is not particularly waterproof, although my Gore-tex shell pants really stand up well to this coaching work. 

In other news, I am smitten with a charming gentleman who lives in Boston. 

Spring Season

Yesterday we had our first day of practice.  It was warm, relatively, meaning in the upper 40s.  The kids wore drysuits and winter hats.  I had a winter hat, a down jacket, gloves, and waterproof pants on over my jeans. 

The tide was at a spring low and we couldn't launch our Larks, but a troop of sailors carried six FJs down over the seaweed and the rocks to our muddy beach, with a line tied to their bows.  When the tide trickled in enough to lift them we hauled in the bowlines and pulled them out to the floats.  I was excited when I got in the motorboat, a cold breeze on my face.  With only 6 boats not everyone got to sail, and the motorboat had only a few ounces in the gas tank.  A rookie move.  So it wasn't an ideal practice.  But we ran a bunch of team races, and it was beautiful to be back on the water in our harbor, with our rocky shores and our herons and our gulls and our sun dipping slowly down over the trees on Harpswell Neck, leaving us chilly but satisfied.

Spring in My Step

Yesterday afternoon we got to the boathouse and discovered that the facilities crew had put the docks in, ahead of schedule.  We tromped around in the mud and moved our boats to the launching ramp, pulling masts out of the racks and putting them in the boats, one by one.  The mud was messy and there was a chill underneath the sun, but everyone was in high spirits.  We'll be sailing soon, here at home.

And this morning Neighbor and I ran to the island and around it.  As we crossed the causeway the water on both sides was glassy still.  The sun, already 15 degrees above the horizon, felt warm on my neck.  We ran around the wooded trail on the perimeter of the island, twisting and turning into small inlets and coming around to new views.  There was a flock of black and white ducks drifting in the blue on the northern side of the island and we both gasped.  We are so lucky, Neighbor said.  The place we run each morning is extraordinarily beautiful.  And we have it all to ourselves, I said.