Fog

[Above photo: From the ferry to Peaks Island: A lovely schooner on the Portland waterfront.]

9 July 2023

The continuing revelations about Clarence Thomas and his relationships with, and pleasures received from, the rich and famous continue to flash across the screen. It is completely understandable that being born Black in a dirt-floor shack in a swamp gathering of former slaves in the South could easily engender a limitless hunger for money and power. But to leverage his position as a Justice of the Supreme Court to pursue the same ends is disgusting, favoritism being just one source of the revulsion.  It is unbelievable to me that in the case of the woman who refused to develop websites for LGBTQ persons, when it was discovered that she lied about the case and that the gay man to whom she referred turned out to be straight, married for 15 years, and never sought her services, the court didn’t nullify its judgment. Talk about legislating from the bench. There was no case, no injured party seeking redress. Something is rotten in [Washington, DC], methinks.  Clarence’s modus operandi, formerly shrouded, is increasingly clear. What a travesty, Anita. I’m sure Joe deeply regrets his central role in the very rushed appointment.

Lindsey and I met at the Dolphin Marina at the tip of the Harpswell Peninsula yesterday at 8AM. It was moist and foggy and we wanted to sit inside the restaurant to look at charts and see if the fog would lift. The management was reluctant to allow it as the restaurant was closed and the service people would be cleaning in a few minutes. I felt irritated with them; it seemed pretty unfriendly. But in retrospect, I get their point. They were at work, anticipating a long and busy weekend day while we were at play and our presence would be just one more thing about which they had to think.

Although I love fog and its eerie softening of reality, it poses dangers. We stuck to the shoreline, paddling well away from the lobster boats whose diesels and gurneys we could hear growling in the channel. Fairly soon, the fog lifted somewhat and we paddled to, and around, Whalebone Island. The coast of Maine is so beautiful! It was dead-low tide so the rockweed clinging to the granite was exposed, then the upended slate, followed by low green meadow or brush, and backed at the top with dark Spruce trees. There were two nesting pair of osprey, one at each end of the island. They fretted as we approached their nests, from which we could hear loud and demanding “Peeps!”. One nest was atop a navigation beacon tower, the other in a dead tree. We also surprised two Great Blue Heron.  The island is part of the Maine Coast Heritage Trust and there are three campgrounds on it, only one of which was occupied.

My kayak is terrific. Its paddler, however, needs to keep doing planks, stretches, and sit-ups as he was in misery part of the way. I don’t know what happened to my hip flexors in the past few years but a month’s work has strengthened them some and I’ll continue to torture myself with exercise.  Once I have the fundamentals of a roll down and practice it repeatedly so it is dependable, I can begin to undertake increasingly challenging trips with others. It is often true that the more discomfort/danger one is willing to accept, the more interesting and amazing places one can see. I don’t want to die in a kayak mishap, so I’m not going to take great risks. However, there are so many lovely islands to visit and on which to camp along this coast.

I went to a party on the 4^th—she is a child psychiatrist, he is a retired IT man with a gift for design and build. He bought a tear-down three blocks from me and built a beautiful modern 3 level home with a roof deck garden, a backyard, and  a basement workshop. A number of their friends came from Waterville; her ex was a physics professor there. One couple, a psychologist and a social worker, volunteered to teach some classes in social work and psychology at a university in Haiti 10 years ago. Now they run, mostly for free, an entire BA curriculum in Social Welfare as a department within the university. We had lots to talk about and shared the thrills of teaching eager students in a developing country.

I have been sluggish to start the process of getting a business license in Thailand. If I were 70yo, I’d be on it. I am aware of the passage of time and my lessened vitality. Do I really want to do regular workshops in SE Asia?  While I enjoy my current work with students online and cannot imagine breaking our regular connection during this hideous time in their lives, whatever I do there is something less I’ll do here.  I do love my experiences there—shorts and flip flops, casual eating out, always new discoveries, and the feeling of doing something vital to help others—, yet I want to form close relationships here and being gone makes that tougher.  It’s a nice dilemma, though!

I leave today to see the Hokusai exhibit in Boston tomorrow morning.  Next weekend I’ll visit the island with Ari and Jon. He has volunteered to give us a rolling clinic, so my skills will improve. And I get my hearing aids this Tuesday. This certainly has turned into a “Dear Diary”.

The economic facts of the Biden Administration are astounding in terms of job growth, containment of inflation without, so far, a recession, and the engagement of hundred of billions of $ of private investment in infrastructure and manufacturing.  DT continues to lie every other sentence, still claiming that he won in 2020, despite having no solid evidence to support the conclusion and a vast amount disproving it.  He’s on a short tether and it is getting shorter; sentiment has turned, except with his Base, and he is increasingly desperate. His legal troubles are within nipping distance.  Bret Baier’s Fox News interview with the Donald deftly demonstrates the latter’s style of evasion when asked a difficult question.  What a terrible distraction and waste of time his entire narcissistic enterprise, from 2016 until now, has been! Maybe the experience will end up strengthening Democracy and alerting us to a large and unhappy segment of the population. Nevertheless, I feel for his children.