Learning to sea kayak

     Up until Saturday, the only kayaking I had done was in a tandem kayak or an inflatable one (a toy kayak, really) but on Saturday, Rick and I and our friends Miriam and Bill joined a group at Lincoln Kayaks in Freeport, Maine for a lesson in sea kayaking, each in individual boats.

     Some immediate differences: Sea kayaks are longer (and faster), you wear a silly-looking “skirt” with an elasticized hem that fits around the lip of the opening you’re sitting in (to keep water out) and, of course, you’re on the ocean.
     This “ocean” was Casco Bay, with its many inviting islands, and for three-plus hours and 5.11 miles, we paddled in-between some of them. We watched harbor seals slither off rocks, the braver ones swimming toward us with their little doggie faces just above water. We saw a bald eagle’s nest high in a tree. We listened to the alarmed call of ospreys sitting like sentries in treetops. And, most dramatically, we watched a young cormorant struggle in the water as a seagull clutched its back and pecked it, trying to kill it for lunch.
     This last example of Harsh Nature was too much for some of us, and we kayaked over toward the conflict until the seagull took off, the cormorant dove and resurfaced, the seagull returned and tried again and was driven off again and the cormorant, we hope, survived to tell the tale. The seagull could have something else for lunch.
     Our group included young and old, men and women and I would recommend it to anyone interested in kayaking or exploring.
     For another day: The Maine Island Trail is a 375-mile chain of more than 190 coastal islands and sites along the coast of Maine, with overnight camping allowed on many of them. Kayaking to your campsite? Sounds like another blog possibility to me.

The alien in the garden

Anybody know what the heck this is? (I show it with a tomato for purposes of scale.)
Never seen one before, and it's growing in my garden (along with many others) on a huge vine.

First I thought it was a zucchini, because it has leaves much like our other zucchini plants, but the "fruit" is not long and elegant like a zucchini, but kind of football-shaped. Then I thought it might be a mutant cucumber or melon, but when I cut it open it didn't have crisp cucumber or melon flesh but was kind of soft and squashy-looking.
I Googled images of every imaginable squash and nothing looks like this, our garden alien.
I'm tempted to cook it up and see if it tastes like squash, but I don't dare risk dying of food poisoning before I finish my avowed year of blogging. So I turn to you.
Any ideas?
And while you're at it, any thoughts on how to keep the @##$%% chipmunks from eating my tomatoes?
I'll share the first canned tomato sauce with whomever can help, honest.

The lover in the sky

     It was supposed to have been a work-around-the-house-day, tackling little projects on our endless “honey do” list, but sometime just after lunch Rick got this restless look in his eyes and said, “Let’s play hookie.”
     So we went to the beach.
     Yesterday was dream-like in its beauty, sunny and nearly cloudless, with a freeze-frame clarity to every scene – “a darlin’ of a day,” my grandmother would have called it – and we went to a beach neither of us had ever visited before, Wallis Sands, near Rye, N.H.
     It is long and sandy and it was very crowded with young families building sand castles and old people nodding in lawn chairs and laughing children running around with plastic buckets in their hands. We spread out our blanket and I opened up a book about kayaking in New England and about two minutes later I did something I have also never done before – I fell dead asleep on the sand.
     What is it about the feel of the sun that is so soporific and so sensual – so personal in its touch – that you forget all around you and surrender only to it, as though it were a lover?
     I don’t have an answer, but I do know that I slept soundly and sweetly for about an hour before a little girl bumped my foot as she ran by and roused me from my reveries. And thank heavens she did, or I might be there still.
     Later, we drove to Portsmouth and sat on the deck of a restaurant and had drinks and fried zucchini and laughed about our many home projects that would still be there another day.    

Meeting a stranger for lunch

Death has a way of narrowing your circle of friends as you get older and in recent weeks, I have decided to fight back – to start enlarging that circle.
     So yesterday, I did something I have never done – I met a stranger for lunch.
     A former colleague had given her my name as a potential partner for a freelance project and we had emailed back and forth a few times before someone else was chosen for the work. But she sounded so interesting, I suggested lunch.
     Turns out, she IS interesting – a professional graphics designer, mother of an adopted Chinese teen and now, at midlife, a student in divinity school.
     We spent an hour talking about matters ranging from why Jesus is called “Lord” (for reasons that surprised me) to why low-income housing is placed in some of the least healthy places in a community (and how to find time to advocate against that) to how to balance work and home life – all over a fantastic, organic meal at a place called Life Alive in Lowell, Mass.
     We hugged goodbye. I hope we do it again.
     But whether we do or not, I feel good today for having taken a risk that paid off, and for meeting someone who has made my life seem that much larger, and richer.

Great es-scapes

Every cook worth her (Himalayan) salt knows the value of garlic in enhancing the flavor of a dish. But few are familiar with the more nuanced taste of garlic scapes,  those curly tendrils, each with its own tiny bulb, found at the top of hard-necked garlic plants as they’re maturing.
     My friends Leslie and Mike had introduced me to them a year or so ago, but I had never grown or harvested them before – until today.
     I picked maybe 20 from my nearly mature garlic plants and took out the tiny bulbs of maybe four, removing the husks to leave pea-sized cloves that taste like a milder, frisky garlic. I immediately remembered my favorite breakfast dish at a restaurant called How’s Your Onion in Derry, N.H. – an omelet made with feta cheese and FRESH (not sautéed) garlic.
     I re-created it for breakfast, using the little scape bulbs instead of the sliced fresh garlic. And OMG, I tell you, those little things surprise you with a burst of flavor when you bite one as you’re eating. (Warning: If you make this recipe, I recommend against any sort of high-profile social interaction – like a job interview of first date – immediately after eating. When I say these things are garlicky, I mean garlicky…)
     Dinner tonight will be pasta with garlic scape pesto (10 to 12 scapes, chopped into two-inch pieces, one-third cup each of shelled pistachio nuts, good olive oil and fresh parmesan or Asiago cheese, with salt and pepper, processed together and served over pasta). I can hardly wait.
     Good thing my sleeping partner will be having the same meal. After a dinner like that, there is no es-scape.

Fiding a bad code

I hab a code. A bad code in da doze. I woke ub thiz morning and feld awful and I only feel wurz as dime goes by.  Bud I have do go do work zo now udder people will get my code, doo. I’m zorry.
     Advil helpz a liddle bud nod as much as a hod toddy, which I can’d dake do work. Doo bad.
     Maybe I god id ad de ear doctor’s office yesderday where snoddy-nosed liddle kids somedimes run around. You’d thing they would spray for dose. But who knows?
     All I know iz, I’d really lige to wride zomethin clever today bud all I really wand do do is go back to sleeb. I’ll try again nexd dime.

Never would have guessed

The DNA results are in and our darling 64-pound rescue daughter is not at all what we thought. We suspected part lab, part coon dog and maybe part boxer -- all sweet, goofy doggie types.
      Turns out, good-natured Toffee is mostly Mastiff and Doberman Pinscher – both breeds known for their protectiveness and aggression. No one told her.
     Both parents are/were Doberman Pinscher/Mastiff mixes (two grandparents were full-blooded Mastiffs and the other two were Doberman mixes), according to our DNA results. Her remaining 25 percent of heritage is likely bulldog, Scottish terrier, coonhound, bullmastiff and Bouvier des Flandres, whatever that is.
      It also turns out that Mastiffs (which can weigh up to 200 pounds) probably date back to ancient Chinese and Egyptian civilizations and were introduced to England by Phoenician sailors in the sixth century. Caesar reportedly praised the Mastiff for its fighting ability and the breed was often used in blood sports.
     Caesar would have been so disappointed in Toffee, our docile little princess, who likes nothing more than sitting on “her” chair by the window and watching the chipmunks and birds go by without so much as a cocked ear.
     DNA, shmeeNA. She may have the blood of a fighter but she has the spirit of a lover.
     However, we may post those DNA results on all our doors and windows, just to discourage any intruders who might not know.

Setting time free

July 6, 2012 (posted late because I had no internet access)


     What time is it? Have I gotten enough sleep? Those were my first waking thoughts today, a day I had decided to spend entirely without consulting a watch. As if a clock could tell me what my own body could not.
     And, hours later, I'm hungry. Is it time for lunch yet? As if I needed permission from my watch to eat.
     It's hard to appreciate how much I/we let the movement of a clock set into motion the movements of our bodies, like wooden figures shuffling out on a track to dip and bow on the hour.
     When did we stop waking with the sun, eating at a hunger pang, making love in the middle of the week?
     Perhaps I am more sensitive to the demands of the clock because of my profession -- the news business. Miss a deadline and I risk holding up the newspaper delivery trucks, pushing other publications past their deadlines, postponing the increasingly urgent flow of information. I turn to the clock like children turn to their parents for structure.
     How unsettling then, how delicious, to have this week of vacation time, this day without measure -- literally. I floated on the pond today on a child's $1.88 dime-store air mattress and drifted along, half-dreaming for, well, I don't know how long. And that was part of the joy of it.
     The question is, when I return to the workaday world, will I be able to remember how timelessness feels?
     Will I be able to look up at that ticking dictator, the clock, and at least stick out my tongue before a next second strikes? Or say na-na-na and glance away when I'm so inclined?
     The clock, after all, is made up of tiny man-made parts, subject to malfunction, vulnerable to the next power outage or battery failure. I/we are made of flesh and bone -- far from immortal, certainly -- but if I had to bet on which of us would last longer, me or the clock, I'd say time is on my side.
     It's up to me what I do with it.

Kayaking alone

July 2, 2012 (posted late because I had no internet access!)
     I am alone in this nearly deserted campground, here in the lull between the weekend campers and those who will arrive tomorrow and Wednesday for the Fourth of July holiday.
     Rick and I drove separately Saturday and he left the following day to work Monday and Tuesday before returning tomorrow night, when a group of friends also starts to arrive.
     So today is mine alone at Half Moon Pond State Park in western Vermont -- a situation both exhilarating and scary. What shall I do with myself? Or, to borrow from Mary Oliver, what is it that I plan to do with my one wild and precious day?
     It's not that I'm afraid of harm. It's more like what my friend Tom, who regularly sojourns alone in the wilds of the Allagash Waterway  in Maine, says of those journeys: you have no way of escaping yourself.
     So, so far, I have slept in and had my usual exotic dreams -- which may be ways of both escaping and confronting myself. I have meditated twice. I have walked a mile, fighting flies all the way. I have read a little. And this afternoon, I did something I have never done -- I kayaked alone.
     It was a gentle paddle -- 45 minutes around the perimeter of the pond -- but I was surprised at how quickly my arms hurt after not having kayaked for a while. But oh, the things I saw: That other world beneath the surface of the water, with fallen tree branches supplicating like the arms of sunken-ship ghosts. Water lily pads shimmering on a current. A female mallard sunning. A dragonfly circling the boat and finally resting on my arm, as though he enjoyed my company.
     You know, I think I do, too.