Hummer Returns

[Above photo: Awkward looking? Amateur construction? All true but a durable platform for a splendid outdoor solar shower.]

24 July 2022

Summer is half done: medium rare, I guess. I zipped to Buck’s Harbor this morning to retrieve Ari and Jon. The Seaway skiff with a 70hp Yamaha outboard makes for a short trip. It’s hard for me to imagine this wonderful, reliable, and quiet engine is manufactured by the same company that produced our resonant, melodious upright piano. The water was calm for the trips in and out; there is a breeze now and it would have been a wetter, rougher ride even 2 hours later.

I’m reading a collection of short stories by Nadine Gordimer, the remarkable Booker and Nobel Prize- winning S. African writer.  Burger’s Daughter is a novel we read in our colonial/post-colonial reading group. I was not captivated at first but by the end was swept away by the power of her writing. These are similarly impressive, so finely nuanced and revealing of the currents of human nature (frailty, really).

She expresses our strengths, weaknesses, our courage and lack thereof almost offhandedly, so naturally are they revealed. She has no need to tie up characters or stories with a bow. It is so different from reading, say, Midnight’s Children by Salmon Rushdie. His characters are often quite monolithic, caricatures really, unless he wants to surprise you when they switch passions abruptly.  Gordimer infuses complexity, indecision, and quiet surprise, nothing flashy or glittering.  Her writing ultimately provides many more moving moments.

I want to spend a couple of the Maine winter months this year in Thailand where I plan to teach my students in person. Fulbright no longer lists Burma (The US State Department doesn’t recognize ‘Myanmar’; the name was coined by the former ong-term military dictator, General Ne Win.) as a Fulbright site because of the the military coup and subsequent civil war. The universities have mostly reopened but are staffed by military sympathizers. No Scholars will be sent to the country. I made a plea that they consider my application as special, since I continue to work there virtually, I have a strong positive history and many connections there, and there is great need to train practitioners to help with the newly traumatized population. We’ll see. I expect I’ll go on my own dime if I don’t get a grant.

It is drier than I have ever seen it here. The well is hardly filling. When I pumped this morning the well had been untouched for 16 hours and I still had only a foot or so of water to pump.  Usually it would be 4 feet to pump and would fill instantly after completion. The trees all look fine and the 3 blueberry bushes I planted are burdened with fruit. There appear to be many fewer itchy caterpillars than last year and almost no mosquitos, which may cause trouble for some bird species.  Our caretaker saw a family of 5 mink cavorting in the meadow. They eat the [monogamous] prairie voles and when that population drops, the mink swim off to another island to exercise their particular form of family planning.

As a sign of Nature’s resilience and intelligence, the mother hummingbird I fed last summer has returned. She hatched 4 or 5 little ones who sparred in child-like hummingbird ways around my feeder in late August and September. Ari visited on several weekends before my arrival and the mother kept stopping by and checking for the feeder. “What’s up? Where is it?” Now that it is filled and hung, she is feeding like crazy from it. I hope to see another brood late in August. Imagine, they all leave North America at the end of summer for Central America. They winter from Mexico to Panama, depending. Their mass exodus is unrelated to distaste for the current group of Republican cowards, fearful of speaking truth to lies.  Tiny, pugnacious snips of iridescent beauty.  My brother and his wife feed them religiously each summer when they are on the island.

The sound of her flight as she approaches and leaves the feeder reminds me that as we returned from S. Brooksville, we saw a motor yacht, “Miss Molly” from Orrington ME, anchored off of Round Beach.  There were 4 or 5 people on the beach who we assumed were picnicking. Then we heard a buzzing overhead, clearly a drone. We quickly took the boat around and I announced that they were welcome to enjoy the beach but that they shouldn’t use drones over our property. Drones are magical fun and allow us to indulge in our universal curiosity about what others of the species are doing.  But they feel incredibly invasive to this object. Most likely it was an unthinking teenager, but it is not a nice thing to do, invading someone’s privacy. I had fantasies of lining one up in a telescopic sight and making it vanish, if I had such a weapon.

It is hard to grasp that our then-President chose not to intervene, in any positive way, with the attack on Democracy. He only further incited the mob with his tweet about the VP lacking “courage to do the right thing” but otherwise planted his fat butt in the [presidential] dining room [most likely with burgers, chips, and Coke] to watch the mayhem on TV for over 3 hours.  If that isn’t treasonous collusion, defining the latter is impossible.  “Only the good die young.”

Jon and Ari are fishing for mackerel at the moment.  Jon made a divine dish with fileted fresh-caught mackerel last weekend. I can only hope for the same tonight. I’m sleepy, mid-afternoon. A nap sounds good. I’ve vowed to circle the island daily, unless the weather is foul. I’ll generally do it in a kayak but possibly in a dory or on foot. I want to build some upper body strength before asking Jon to teach me to roll in my kayak. He can do it all day, remarkably. I once took a course to learn it, using small white-water kayaks in the Richmond Plunge. I was successful but it wasn’t easy. And the water was warm.  And I was 30 years younger!