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Town Dock Fishing
All my guests grew up in places far away from Maine. All my guests had advanced degrees and were almost successful or famous or leaning forward toward success or fame at some point in their future. The noted guest was a well-known novelist and outdoor writer. I’d become friends with him at graduate school where we’d met on the tennis court long before he became one of my writing instructors. Their successes had led my guests to know the finer things in life, though they all had a fascination with the primitive. Fishing from the town dock may have been disdained by others; for my guests it would be an adventure, like traveling in a third world country. My guests had arrived two days before Clambake. At the time we stayed in a cottage at one of the Colonies on the Maine Coast. This colony had been established by Maine’s wealthy families during the 1800’s as a place to go in the summertime to avoid the great polio epidemic. My great-grandfather, a well-known Unitarian Universalist minister from New York had purchased a cottage there around the turn of the century. His family grew and continues enjoying the Maine coast today.…
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The adventure of light, and nature
Alone with his camera, he stopped at another bend on the path around the moat. He’d left his friend rigging fishing poles to catch their supper back at their campsite. Here, he thought, would be a good place for a sunset shot. The sea-rock and limestone path he walked around defined the moat at old Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas. Fifteen paces back along the moat wall, he set up his camera on the tripod. He set the exposure for fifteen seconds and walked back to where the path turned into the sea and posed with his back to the camera, his face to the setting sun. He focused across the flat, steel-blue sea. A long grey cloud edged the horizon. As the sun set, sunlight patterned the sky and the sea, darker at his feet and above and orange and blue and white just above the cloud. He stood in the quiet lee of the fort. The sea lay flat, blocked from the wind by the fort’s high masonry wall; sixteen million bricks, and still unfinished. Above the rampart, the wind gusted twenty knots or better. The wind hummed out across the gulf. The sea changed hues as…
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The Buddy System
The two American boys did not think a whole bunch about beautiful Nicaraguan girls. Neither did they yet know that the best way to get to the heart of a Nicaraguan beauty was to memorize a line or two from the Nicaraguan poet laureate Ruben Dario. They did not care about Nicaraguan politics or ruthless rise of the Sandanista General Danial Ortega. Maybe they did notice that machine gun armed guards sat at the gated entrance of more than one of the many gated homes they passed on their way from Spanish lessons to the surf. Perhaps they also noticed that the streets were clean and that there were many fat chickens running free for San Juan Del Sur is a prosperous, clean, Catholic, town. All the two boys could think about was getting through their Spanish lessons in the morning so they could surf all afternoon. They were so excited to surf that they would stare at their teachers moving lips and hear nothing. They would skip lunch and jog with their surf boards from the rental shop down the cobblestone street to the long protected inlet of San Juan Del Sur. They both were mature and tall for…
