Sunday was our penultimate day in Maine and we spent it doing what we couldn’t do on Saturday because it rained all day. What we did was drive out into the countryside northwest of Camden about 40 miles to a field near the town of Unity where we experienced the final day of the 30^th annual gathering of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOGFA). We weren’t quite sure what to expect but it turned out to be a bucolic extravaganza. Rain or shine over 20,000 people turn out for this amazing event each year and it was not hard to understand why.

We staggered away after a couple of hours of lurching from one food booth to another (maple syrup donuts, fried dough, whipped cream cones, etc.) our guilty consciences assuaged somewhat by the bags of organic apples and veggies we carried back to the Mini for later consumption.

While the food was our major preoccupation this was not the case for most of the participants who attended lectures and demonstrations on organic farming methods. License plates in the parking lot suggested that the attendees came from all over New England and their enthusiasm augurs well for the future of organic farming in this region. We thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing.

Tomorrow (Monday) we head south to Hyannis, Mass. to spend the night before boarding the early ferry to Nantucket Tuesday morning. Our two weeks in Maine have been mind-bending. Uncle Jack has not been so smitten by a place since he first discovered the Outer Banks nearly 40 years ago.

There must be a zillion wonderful places to stay in the Penobscot Bay area but he doubts that they could have found one that they would have enjoyed more than their “tree house” on Hosmer Pond near Camden. For more information about it go to the website of the “lady from New Jersey” (Mrs. Margaret Buchholz of Harvey Cedars) by clicking on the link below. It has a few idiosyncrasies like the 32 steps up to the front door and the challenging spiral staircase to the loft sleeping area) but if you are reasonably agile and not excessively overweight you should be able to manage these with aplomb. If you have not yet experienced “down east” Maine Uncle Jack strongly recommends that you check it out. Warning: a visit could be life-changing experience..

Searsport is a little town of 3000 inhabitants about an hour up Route 1 from Camden. It has a long and fascinating history as a center for boat building and shipping and you can learn all about it at the Penobscot Marine Museum where we spent all day Friday. The museum consists of seven buildings---all but one of them dating to the early 19^th century---full of artifacts relating to Searsport’s history. It is surely one of the finest establishments of its kind in the country and we unequivocally recommend it to anybody who gets up to this part of the world.

Little Searsport produced over 300 masters of ships that sailed the world in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, many of whom became wealthy and built marvelous houses in the town, many of which are still standing. Two of them are included in the museum collection, fully furnished with the treasures brought back from Hong Kong, Shanghai, and other far-flung ports of call. Most of the rest of the houses in Searsport have been converted to bed and breakfast inns with fantastic views of Penobscot Bay.

Fabulous little town is Searsport.  Not even slightly reminiscent of Wanchese.

We had originally planned to stay in Camden for a week and then spend the next five days working our way down the coast to Hyannis, Mass. where we will take the ferry to Nantucket Tuesday morning. We changed those plans when we learned that our marvelous treehouse on the lake is available for another week and when we found out how much there is to see and do in the Camden-Rockland-Rockport area.

Yesterday we drove out into the countryside northwest of Camden in search of Andrews Brewery in Lincolnton whose tasty ale we had sampled at the Mainefare on Saturday. We never got there because the road in front of the brewery was closed for resurfacing but we did get to experience a few more country roads loaded with picturesque New England churches, quaint old general stores and a host of other Rockwellian delights.

This morning (Wed.) we drove to Rockland to visit the Maine Lighthouse Museum on the waterfront which turned out to be far more interesting than we expected. Without a doubt it is one of the best small museums we have visited anywhere. Highly recommended to any Outer Bankers who should come this way. Tomorrow we will return to Rockland to the Farnsworth Museum which has an excellent collection of works by Homer, Hopper and the Wyeths, all of whom have lived and worked in this area. (A couple of the Wyeths still do).

The weather has been spectacular day after day and we look forward to five more days of exploration in this incredibly beautiful part of the world. Stay tuned.

For many years people have been telling Uncle Jack and Mrs. U.J. how beautiful Maine is. To hear them talk you would think it was heaven on earth. Now that they have been up here for almost a week they are inclined to think those people were not exaggerating. The central coast of Maine, at least, is certainly one of the loveliest areas they have ever visited.

They have managed to tear themselves away from their delightful tree house on Hosmer Pond a few times in the past two days to explore the Camden vicinity and the more they see the more impressed they are. It is absolutely amazing that people have been living in this beautiful place for well over two centuries and in all that time they have hardly messed it up at all. What a contrast with the Outer Banks.

The high point for us today, literally and figuratively, was a trip to the summit of Mt. Battie in Camden Hills State Park which towers over the town and provides views that are even more spectacular than those from the crest of Cadillac Mountain which they visited a few days ago. Like the original man-made dunes on the Outer Banks the roads to Mt. Battie were built by federal government workers back in the 1930‘s. What a wonderful amenity for the people of this area.

To their very pleasant surprise their visit to Camden coincided today with an event called Mainefare which brings together in one place several dozen purveyors of fine foods which originate in Maine. Jams, jellies, cheeses, breads, wines, beers, organic vegetables and fruits, and more. All the artisans were doling out samples of their wares and we staggered away with stomachs and arms full of goodies.

Weather permitting we plan to drive a few miles south along the coast on Sunday and take the passenger ferry to Monhegan Island which is about ten miles out in the ocean off Port Clyde on the St. George peninsula. Monhegan is an artist colony in the summer with only about 75 year-round residents. There are no cars on the island with the exception of an old pick-up truck that is used for picking up trash and other mundane municipal duties. Until recently it had no electricity so there is little likelihood of wireless broadband service either.

(More pictures in another entry below)

The travel gods continue to smile upon Uncle Jack and Mrs. U.J. On Wednesday, the last day of their stay in Bar Harbor, they began to consult the internet oracle once more about a place to rent in the Camden-Rockport area where they planned to spend a week. Two hours of feverish clicking on websites and follow-up phone calls had led them to the conclusion that every desirable (or affordable) accommodation within twenty miles of Camden was already reserved and that they would probably have to stay in a motel with no cooking facilities.

Uncle Jack did, out of desperation, email a lady in New Jersey who owned what looked like a perfect house overlooking a lake on the edge of Camden telling her that we would like to rent it for a week starting the next day. He was fully prepared for another rejection but mirabile dictu! In his in-box yesterday morning was a response from the lady in New Jersey saying that she had just received a cancellation notice and that the cottage was ours if we wanted it---and at a price lower than we would have had to pay for a motel room.

As a consequence of this good fortune we are ensconced in an utterly charming lakefront house with every modern convenience one could think of except internet connectivity. From time to time Uncle Jack will carry his laptop into downtown Camden to an internet café called “Zoot” where he will post entries describing their further adventures “Down East” as they say in this part of Maine.

On their way to Camden yesterday they visited a lobster hatchery and museum where they learned about the fascinating lives of lobsters and the men who pursue them. Why anyone would want to be a lobsterman is beyond Uncle Jack’s comprehension but apparently job opportunities for the uneducated are somewhat limited on the rockbound coast of Maine.

Uncle Jack and Mrs. U.J. spent their last day in Bar Harbor by doing a circumnavigation of Mount Desert Island, home of both Acadia National Park and Bar Harbor itself. The island contains numerous picturesque villages such as Northeast Harbor, Southwest Harbor, Bass Harbor, etc. almost ad infinitum. Like the rest of the Maine coast the island is loaded with coves of various sizes and shapes and at the end of every cove is a harbor full of boats of every imaginable kind. Not surprisingly lobster boats predominate but pleasure boats are everywhere, too, including some fabulous yachts.

Mt. Desert Island is an interesting mixture of supremely upscale summer resort towns and working fishing villages existing comfortably side by side. There is so much undeveloped land available, including waterfront property, that the working fish houses and boatyards have not been priced out of existence. If it were not for the brutal winters this would be an idyllic place to live.

Tomorrow (Friday) after a visit to the local lobster hatchery and museum of lobstering, we will move down the coast a couple of hours to the Camden-Rockport area to spend a week or so. From all reports this is another beautiful part of Maine. We have been blessed with spectacular fall weather but the weatherman says we will get some rain tomorrow for the first time since we left home a week ago. Into each life some rain must fall……but we are not complaining. How could we?

                            Back to the Future

Back when he was a senior in high school Uncle Jack had to read a book called “1984” in English class. His teacher thought it was a very important book and she must have been right, too, because people are still reading it even though they don‘t have to.

If you want to know the truth, though, Uncle Jack did not think “1984” was such a great book when he read it because he was reading another great book at the same time called “God’s Little Acre” and if you ask him there is not much comparison between these two books. For one thing Uncle Jack can still remember about twelve pages of “God’s Little Acre” by heart such as p. 38 where Griselda takes a sponge bath and p. 94 where she does several things that Uncle Jack cannot even tell you about in a family newspaper.

On the other hand he cannot remember one thing about “1984” except that it was full of dire predictions about what life would be like for people in 1984. The way it sounded the whole world was going to be like Uncle Jack’s high school already was in 1948. Nobody in his English class could get too excited about what was going to happen in 1984 because that was so far in the future you did not think you would live that long anyway.

Well Uncle Jack is writing this on December 31, 1983 so unless he gets run over by an impaired driver on his way home it looks like he will live to see 1984 after all. So he has decided to read “1984” again to see if any of those awful predictions came true and while he is at it he is going to read “God’s Little Acre” again to see if it was as good as he remembers, especially p. 94.

In the meantime Uncle Jack is going to make some predictions of his own about some of the big news stories you will probably not be reading in the papers during 1984:

March 1: Peat Methanol Associates announced today that the company will abandon its plans to drain thousands of acres of swampland in eastern N.C. in order to harvest peat which would be converted into methanol gas. “We got to talking about it after that government report came out last month where the feds said they won’t give us a couple billion dollars to cover our start-up costs,”

a spokesman said..” He was referring to a government study which severely criticized the project as a boondoggle that would be a waste of taxpayers money.

“We kept thinking about all those little baby shrimp suffocating in the freshwater run-off and it got so we could hardly sleep at night,” the spokesman said. “We just decided that some things are more important than money.”

April 1: The Dare County Board of Realtors held their annual spring pig-pickin’ this week and passed a resolution urging the county commissioners to declare an immediate moratorium on all construction and development in Dare County. ”We figure there’s enough shopping centers, condos, motels, time-share units, restaurants, gift shops, convenience stores and gas stations to take care of all the tourists from now to 2020,” one realtor said. “We think we ought to get the water shortage problem solved and do something about the roads before we do any more building around here,” he added. “And don’t forget to spell Realtor with a big “R” he admonished reporters.”

November 5: Communist Worker Party candidate Delbert Clinkscales became North Carolina’s new junior U.S. Senator yesterday after both the incumbent, Jesse Helms, and his chief challenger, former Governor Jim Hunt, withdrew from the heated Senate race at the last moment.

Helms told reporters that he simply could not refuse an offer to replace Yasser Arafat as chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do some things I have always wanted to do,” Helms said, but he declined to elaborate.

Hunt said his decision to quit the race was also based on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity which the eleemosynary governor described as “a chance to do something for myself for a change.” The charismatic politician, who has demonstrated considerable skill as a fund raiser during his career, said he will become a Senior Beseecher on the staff of Charlotte TV evangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker “sometime before the Christmas begging season.”

Meanwhile the jubilant Clinkscales, an unemployed scallop shucker, told reporters that he was looking forward to having a steady job for a couple of years even though it meant leaving his comfortable double-wide near Drainfield and moving a short distance to Washington.

He seemed to lose some of his enthusiasm, however, when reporters explained that the U.S. Capital was located in Washington, D.C., not Washington, N.C. “You mean there’s another Washington somewheres?”, he asked incredulously.

                        Mosquitoes

We seem to have a lot of mosquitoes around here right now and it’s got a lot of people upset. To hear some of them talk you would think the mosquitoes are the worst natural disaster to hit the Outer Banks since the Ash Wednesday storm. Uncle Jack has heard so much complaining about mosquitoes lately that he thinks it’s about time to set the record straight.

One thing he knows is that compared to the mosquitoes up in northern Wisconsin where Uncle Jack grew up, the Dare County mosquito shouldn’t even be called a mosquito. Wisconsin mosquitoes and their first cousins, Minnesota mosquitoes, are truly a breed apart. A northern mosquito is to a Dare County mosquito as open heart surgery is to a haircut.

A bite from a local mosquito, Uncle Jack has discovered, is like a good hickey. It itches for a while, it feels good when you scratch it, and then it goes away. A bite from a Wisconsin mosquito is, to use a popular local metaphor, another kettle of fish. The Wisconsin mosquito has a stinger the size of a paring knife and a bite that could rouse a dozing hippopotamus (if one ever wandered that far north).

The life cycle of a Wisconsin mosquito bite is anywhere from seven to ten days. For the first few days and nights you scratch constantly. Scratching only makes matters worse but there’s nothing you can do about it so you scratch. You scratch and scratch until the itching stops which is right after the pain and bleeding start. After a few more days scabs form over the wounds.

Kids in northern Wisconsin keep themselves awake in school by picking their mosquito bite scabs which keeps them occupied right up to Thanksgiving vacation, after which they switch over to peeling dead skin off their frozen ears.

The best place Uncle Jack ever found to get away from mosquitoes was Pittsburgh where he lived for 17 years and never saw a mosquito that whole time. Scientists discovered a long time ago that the air in Pittsburgh in those days had the exact same chemical composition as “Off” insect repellent.

He has heard that the air in Pittsburgh is much better since they shut down all the steel plants but he is afraid to go up there and find out because the mosquitoes might be back.

              It’s Labor Day, By George

There was a time not so many years ago that Labor Day had some real significance on the Outer Banks because it meant the end of another summer season. The pace of life suddenly slowed and local merchants, store-bound since Memorial Day, would emerge, blinking, into the sunlight, seeking the healing balm of the ocean like newly hatched sea turtles. (Uncle Jack can really wax lyrical when it comes to Labor Day).

After Labor Day the tourists pretty much vanished, taking with them their wallets and credit cards, so there was little incentive to keep stores and restaurants open any longer. The late George Crocker, who 30 years ago brought modern concepts of merchandising to the Outer Banks with his futuristic Galleon Esplanade, officially signaled the end of the season with his gala “Gambler’s Sale”, for many years the premier social event of the year for tourists and locals alike.

George would don one of his most flamboyant ensembles and spend the day spinning a huge roulette wheel marked off in segments reading “20% off” up to “50% off” (and even one narrow sliver marked “FREE”). Eager customers would queue to wait for their chance to thrust a slightly shop-worn dress or bathing suit or an imported ceramic likeness of a seashell into George’s hands and watch him spin the wheel that could bring them unheard of savings on the merchandise of their dreams. Only the most cynical observers (Uncle Jack among them) would note that even at 50% off the stuff was overpriced, but who could care when the cheers of hordes of onlookers greeted every spin of the wheel?

Those glorious days are gone forever (along with George and the Galleon) and the arrival of Labor Day on the Outer Banks is about as significant as the advent of Christmas in the bazaars of Abu Dhabi. Half the work force has fled the area to return to schools that opened (against the laws of nature if you ask Uncle Jack) in mid-August forcing exhausted merchants to work even longer hours than before. In a very real sense Labor Day has come to mean “from now on you are really going to have to work”, especially now that more and more entrepreneurs are chasing fewer and fewer dollars.

For the first ten years after he discovered the Outer Banks, Labor Day had an even greater poignancy for Uncle Jack. It meant that it was time to close up the cottage, pack up the car and return to the real world of Pittsburgh where he would be forced to live in a kind of smoky limbo for nine months, struggling to breathe and pining all the while for his beloved Nags Head.

He hasn’t had to do that for over 20 years now and that is the reason why, with all the violence that has been done to the concept of Labor Day (and to the Outer Banks in general) since he moved here, he still considers himself a very lucky old dude.

As far as he is concerned there is no better place in the world to be overworked, and judging from the proliferation of businesses around here, there must be a lot of people who agree with him. Hang in there fellow merchants. With 116 shopping days left (if you stay open seven days a week) you still have a chance to break even before Christmas.

It’s still rather dark outside but he can see from the streetlights that Old Oregon Inlet Road is completely under water in places---something that hasn’t happened since Hurricane Isabel almost three years ago. Rain is still pelting down, driven by strong gusts of wind, as it has been for many hours. Sleep was hard to come by last night what with the combined noises of the wind, the rain pounding on the skylight and the occasional claps of thunder.

Charter cable, which brings him both TV and broadband internet, went out sometime during the night so he is spared the temptation of turning on the Weather Channel. Without the internet he is left in something of an information vacuum, but as the philosopher said “This too shall pass”  

He and Mrs. U.J. walked up to the beach just before dark last night during a lull in the rain. The ocean was wild but he didn’t take any pictures for fear of exposing his beloved new Sony to the elements, of which several were present, including H20 and NaCl. Perhaps later today it will calm down a bit and he can get out and record the scene for posterity. Who knows when the cable guy will get around to doing whatever it is he has to do to restore service.

9 a.m. The rain has stopped for the present so Uncle Jack waded up to the beach and took a short stroll on the narrow strip of sand still accessible at high tide. As he predicted there has been little or no additional erosion but with a brisk wind blowing straight out of the south a lot of sand is flying up the beach and making walking (at least to the south) very unpleasant. He didn’t stay long.

3:30 p.m.  Uncle Jack has awakened from his afternoon nap to find that all is right with the world.  The cable is back, the rain has stopped, the wind has died down and the sky is clearing. Adios Ernesto.

P.S.  Thanks to all who wrote with good wishes.  We appreciate them.