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I never figured out which cape she meant
Man, someday there will be actual content here again, but I had a splendid weekend and I am fall-over tired; this isn't it.
The New England adventure of the weekend was a success. We got a late start out of Somerville on Saturday primarily due to me and the vagaries of the MBTA (I reject Satan and all his works and all his empty promises including the bus schedule), but when we got to Halibut Point Reservation there was clear sky and ledges of stone and the broken sea-clawed coastline that always looks to me like archetypal ocean, not a warm white-sanded beach, and it didn't matter that there was snow on the ground and some of the trails were trying to grow into the Grimpen Mire, it made me hungry and happy and I am only sorry I did not bring a camera, because I have no photographs of the manuscript blue of the sky and the old cuts of granite reflecting in the flooded quarry like shirred glass or the way the waves poured in green and white over the rocks we didn't climb down to, racked and tilted with abandoned blocks and half-drilled seams, seaweed-slick. Cape Ann granite was a dying industry by the time the Babson Farm Quarry closed in 1929; there is nothing left now of the derricks or the drills or the steam engine named Nella that hauled the weight of granite to Folly Cove but the marks in the stone, bricks at right angles under a scrim of briars, an iron staple anchored deep in the quarry's face like you could lift the years off the earth like a lid.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ratatosk had me identify harlequin ducks bobbing unconcernedly over an undertow that would have smashed any one of us. derspatchel showed me the Isles of Shoals on the horizon, the tiny, glinting nick of the White Island Light. Just as we were leaving the state park, we found old, massive, rusting iron beams and flywheels and a boiler, all scattered and evidently not worth either reconstructing or moving, with sapling trees growing through the grate. I hope someone got a picture. It was a day with a lot of time in it.
Onfleurdelis28 and Judith's recommendation, we all went for dinner afterward to The Grog in Newburyport. (I ducked into the Middle Street Bookstore first and came away with a copy of Conor McPherson's The Seafarer (2006), which starred Karl Johnson in its original run at the National Theatre. Rob followed me and left with Lloyd Alexander, John Bellairs, and Donald A. Wollheim's Mike Mars in Orbit (1961), which I think takes the prize for some kind of whiz-bang with that title.) There was a lot of seafood. Also, fondue. Also, gingerbread with ice cream. We all agreed that we are going back to Halibut Point when there are more things growing than just the end-of-winter scrub weeds and it might be possible to get near the water without slipping on the ice.
Much of my night was taken up with storytelling. It was a very satisfyingly Odyssean way of doing things.
And even though the commuter rail to Leominster is ridiculous on the weekends—it seems to assume first that you don't really want to go there, and then that you really don't want to come back—I managed to catch the afternoon train in time to have dinner with Matthew and Sarah, who fed me ravioli with butternut squash and carrots (I brought brownies) and introduced me to their two cats of similar coloring and divergent personality. I showed them an episode of The Supersizers . . . They showed me E. J. Barnes' Leatherwing Bat (2001). I seem to have been lent Fata Morgana (1977) by William Kotzwinkle. I got back to Boston around midnight.
I have no idea why I am still awake. I'm going to fix that.
The New England adventure of the weekend was a success. We got a late start out of Somerville on Saturday primarily due to me and the vagaries of the MBTA (I reject Satan and all his works and all his empty promises including the bus schedule), but when we got to Halibut Point Reservation there was clear sky and ledges of stone and the broken sea-clawed coastline that always looks to me like archetypal ocean, not a warm white-sanded beach, and it didn't matter that there was snow on the ground and some of the trails were trying to grow into the Grimpen Mire, it made me hungry and happy and I am only sorry I did not bring a camera, because I have no photographs of the manuscript blue of the sky and the old cuts of granite reflecting in the flooded quarry like shirred glass or the way the waves poured in green and white over the rocks we didn't climb down to, racked and tilted with abandoned blocks and half-drilled seams, seaweed-slick. Cape Ann granite was a dying industry by the time the Babson Farm Quarry closed in 1929; there is nothing left now of the derricks or the drills or the steam engine named Nella that hauled the weight of granite to Folly Cove but the marks in the stone, bricks at right angles under a scrim of briars, an iron staple anchored deep in the quarry's face like you could lift the years off the earth like a lid.
ratatosk had me identify harlequin ducks bobbing unconcernedly over an undertow that would have smashed any one of us. derspatchel showed me the Isles of Shoals on the horizon, the tiny, glinting nick of the White Island Light. Just as we were leaving the state park, we found old, massive, rusting iron beams and flywheels and a boiler, all scattered and evidently not worth either reconstructing or moving, with sapling trees growing through the grate. I hope someone got a picture. It was a day with a lot of time in it. On
fleurdelis28 and Judith's recommendation, we all went for dinner afterward to The Grog in Newburyport. (I ducked into the Middle Street Bookstore first and came away with a copy of Conor McPherson's The Seafarer (2006), which starred Karl Johnson in its original run at the National Theatre. Rob followed me and left with Lloyd Alexander, John Bellairs, and Donald A. Wollheim's Mike Mars in Orbit (1961), which I think takes the prize for some kind of whiz-bang with that title.) There was a lot of seafood. Also, fondue. Also, gingerbread with ice cream. We all agreed that we are going back to Halibut Point when there are more things growing than just the end-of-winter scrub weeds and it might be possible to get near the water without slipping on the ice.Much of my night was taken up with storytelling. It was a very satisfyingly Odyssean way of doing things.
And even though the commuter rail to Leominster is ridiculous on the weekends—it seems to assume first that you don't really want to go there, and then that you really don't want to come back—I managed to catch the afternoon train in time to have dinner with Matthew and Sarah, who fed me ravioli with butternut squash and carrots (I brought brownies) and introduced me to their two cats of similar coloring and divergent personality. I showed them an episode of The Supersizers . . . They showed me E. J. Barnes' Leatherwing Bat (2001). I seem to have been lent Fata Morgana (1977) by William Kotzwinkle. I got back to Boston around midnight.
I have no idea why I am still awake. I'm going to fix that.
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Nine
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It's been a surprising year so far.
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I hope someone got a picture. It was a day with a lot of time in it.
Photographs tend to be quite bad at capturing time. Nor can they do the sound of the waves or the weird warm/freezing interface around melting snow or the smell of seaweed. And the blue of the skies and the SPACE of the sea are never the same in photographs, I find. I think your words do it better.
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It was such a good weekend, I forgot to complain here about losing an hour! (Which we did, and I did not appreciate it!)
I hope someone got a picture. It was a day with a lot of time in it.
And the blue of the skies and the SPACE of the sea are never the same in photographs, I find. I think your words do it better.
Thank you.
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I hope you've found soft and pleasant rest since the writing of this.
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Thanks.
I hope you've found soft and pleasant rest since the writing of this.
I could spend the day in bed, frankly, but I have work to do and I'm meeting
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Welks.
That last is a thing worth getting up for.
That's good. Hope ye have a good lunch.
I had to get up to take one of the cars in for an oil change. Ended up needing a brake job and a steering fluids-flush as well. I miss the dealership we used to use, which was further away but was at least within walking distance of a little Venezuelan place with good arepas and empañadas. There's nothing readily walkable from here.