Coastal Maine

"Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise"
Day 1209 July 6, 2017
Prompt: "In language gentle as thine own: whispering in enamored tone sweet oracles of woods and dells and summer winds in sylvan cells." Percy Bysshe Shelly. Let this quote inspire your Blog Writing today.

This quote immediately evokes the sensations I experienced as a child vacationing in coastal Maine. In the early years of my father's business, we spent several weeks visiting his business partner's family compound in the offshore community of Vinalhaven, Maine. We had to take a boat to get out to the island where the main house and cottage were situated. It seemed a very isolated and rare experience for me back then.

The first morning there, I wandered away from the green expanse of the main house lawn and into the silent, coastal forest. I found myself in a place of enchantment. The pine woods smelled sweet and clean. The beds of moss covering the ground and rock were soft enough to sink to my ankles in. It was eerily quiet and the light filtered down from the canopy and pooled in golden patches of light. The forest seemed to swallow me, and I felt strangely at peace in its dark, dense folds.

Years later, I lived for a time just outside Bar Harbor, Maine when my company purchased a business in Ellsworth, Maine. My commute each morning would take me past postcard scenery with lush rolling hills and glimpses of the deep blue water of Somes Sound. On my free days I would wander into Acadia national park. The loop rode delivered me to breathtaking vistas of the rustically beautiful Maine coast and beaches where the water was clear and still like a mirror. There was a special connection for me in all the places where the stoic pine trees met with rocky coastline. I would stand in the ankle deep tide pools, in water that was numbing cold, and just gaze out and the stunning landscape painted with the rich, warm light of the early morning sun. It isn't hard to believe that coastal Maine in the sweet months of summer is truly crafted by the hands of God.

Niagara Falling and Cyber Thoughts

"Blogging Circle of Friends "
Day 1367 August 12, 2016
Title Prompt: The Cyber- Thoughts

The Cyber isn't something I've given much thought to as an entity. I'd consider myself reasonable adapted to technology but not overly curious or enthusiastic about it in real way. I own a smart phone because of work. I don't own an e-reader of any kind. I have only a marginal understanding of web language, the importance of SEO and a working knowledge of social media and digital media marketing. I still feel a lot like a sci-fi novice when it comes to the cyber world. It even sounds too sci-fi for me. I didn't get the Matrix movies and I didn't care that I didn't really get them either. My daughter at age 6 is going up with daily exposure to technology and the cyber world. She's adept at using all the tools at her disposal to find what she needs and wants online, even if it is only watching other kids open blind bags and giant playdoh egg surprises on youtube, which is also something I simply don't get!


"Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise"
Day 887 August 12, 2016
Tell me about a road trip you've taken? Would you do it again?

In 2011, my cousin and I took my Grandmother to Niagara Falls. She had always wanted to go and my grandfather had never taken her. We rented a car and drove, taking turns on the long trip to the border. We crossed over at Niagara, checking into a nice hotel directly across from the falls. It was magical. We did the Maid of the Mist, smiling broadly in our ponchos with those powerful torrents roaring behind us. We visited butterflies and got a little tipsy in the casino. Later after a bad slip and fall, my cousin and I debated whether to call my Uncle and chain-smoked, outside while my grandmother iced her knee. The knee was fine and the crisis had been averted. As a bonus we had a great story to tell about the now legendary fall and how an entire city has seemed to rush to our rescue. We laughed a lot. Especially after a very tired and a little buzzed, my grandmother accused one of us as having left the water running.

She insisted she could hear it until my cousin had flown out of bed asking sarcastically, "Gramma, I don't know, could you it be this?"

In one exasperated movement, she tugged open the wide curtain covering the wall of windows revealing the whole of Niagara Falls, the rushing water lite up and glowing in a rainbow of colors. We laughed about it for days. It is still one of those favorite family stories that gets told and retold, each time evoking the same peals of laughter and embarrassed giggles from Gramma.

After we had thoroughly done Niagara Falls, its butterflies and novelty museums, we continued on toward Toronto via the "wine route". We stopped along the Queens highway, hitting up a wine tasting or three before hitting the city. We did the CN Tower, the glass floor, even a high-end adult shop. Gramma was a good sport. After nearly thirty minutes, she came rushing up to my cousin and I as we were perusing a shelf of novelty sex toys. She whispered conspiratorially, "Girls, I think we are in one of those sex shop places." We fained innocence and quickly left, laughing behind our hands and chiding each other for having dragged our grandmother into such an establishment!

The ride home passed quickly. We slipped back through the border, tired but content. It had been a great time, we had built wonderful memories. My grandmother had enjoyed every minute. I'm grateful we had that chance, that experience with her.

Tasting Life

"Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise"
Day 801 May 17th, 2016
Prompt: How strong is your taste imagination? Have you ever felt the taste of any food inside your mouth just by thinking about it? Write about this.

  I've had the opportunity to travel. One of the best part of going anywhere is to sample the local cuisine, especially if its another country. International travel becomes some what of a food odyssey with certain dishes and tastes become as much as part of the memory of a place as the sights and sounds.

I spent a lot of time in Mexico and my favorite tastes have been from all corners of that country. I had been warned about eating "street food" but the best things I've ever eaten where prepared on the streets Mexico City, in the zucalos of Oaxaca and sold from vendors at aromatic, if questionable, open markets.

There is nothing in the world like the taste of tacos al pastor at 2am in the heart of the zona rosa after a night of dancing and tequila. The meat is savory and a bit briny, the spices staining it a terracotta red. The vendors cut it off from the vertical machine that slowing spins, cooking the mass of dripping meat, slowly, crisping the edges to perfection. They wrap the chunks of greasy pastor in fresh, warm corn tortillas that are topped with fresh cut cilantro, onion and lime. The combinations are so well balanced, and the taste sensation explodes on your tongue and settles in your stomach with a deeply satisfying heat.

It was during the La noche de los rábanos (Festival of Radishes) in Oaxaca that I first tasted blue corn tortillas stuffed with the bright orange pumpkin squash flowers and Oaxacan string cheese. It was an exotic combination, sweet and savory on the tongue. The colors contrasting, beautifully vibrant. Washed down with lukewarm coca cola in those little glass bottles, these quesadillas would rival any gourmet creation anywhere. The old woman grilling the tortilla crisp on her wide iron skillet was as much a part of the night as the oddly beautiful sculptures of radishes lined up around the town center. The sights, sounds and tastes of that evening in Oaxaca will stay with me always.

If I had to pick one dish from Mexico that stood out as my favorite among so many, it would easily be Elotes. Elotes are great ears of large kernel corn, about a long as a human forearm. They are sold in alleys, from carts in village streets, from vendors outside busy nightclubs and ruta stations. They are speared on wooden sticks, roasted to perfection and covered with crema, cilantro, chili pepper, lime juice and spices. They are messy and visually chaotic but they are in a word...spectacular. The first time you bite into one, the kernels pop from the cob and fill your mouth with flavors of the culture around you. The taste is all at once buttery, spicy and sweet. You can taste every element on your tongue, uniquely blended, somewhat familiar, but amplified somehow in their combination. Elotes are simply the best thing I've ever tasted, ever. 

I did do a lot more than just eat in my travels but clearly eating was as much a part of my experience abroad as visiting the ancient historical sites, touring the towns and villages of coastal Mexico and dancing in the streets of Veracruz.

The building was hard to miss, looming high above the colorful landscape of the theme park. Even if you managed to overlook the nearly electric pink paint or the cleverly constructed façade, you would be hard pressed to ignore the screaming. Even thirteen terrific stories above the ground, the screams emanating from the Tower of Terror seemed somehow amplified in the gloomy afternoon rain.

“Jen, that doesn’t look like too much fun.” I said.

My friend tugged on my arm. “No, it’s great! You’ll love it.” she assured me.

We reached the gate. The screaming was more muffled here. From this new vantage point, I could make out the large holes in the side of the edifice. Through these holes, I caught glimpses of horrified faces as they hurtled straight down, thirteen stories in a dark freefall.

“Jen…” I started, but she cut me off.

“It goes so fast. You will LOVE it,” she insisted.

Before I could protest, the line surged forward. Excited riders weaved around partitions and were deposited in front of what appeared to be a massive elevator doors. I stared for a long time at the “last chance” exit ramp on my right. A few steps in that direction and I’d be back on the outside, safe…

Jen must have anticipated my plan. She grabbed me by my shoulders. “Melissa, remember why you are here? You are celebrating the start of your new life. This trip is about new experiences, facing fears and doing things you’ve never done before and you made me promise not to let you back out.”

Jen was right. After three long years, my divorce had been final just a week. This trip not just a vacation, it was a rebirth. I just hadn’t expected freedom to come in the form of abject terror.

“Its not going to be as horrible as you imagine.” Jen assured me. The door opened and we were ushered inside.

My hands shook as I belted myself in. I turned to Jen and threatened to kill her if it all went badly. She laughed. Doors opened and we lurched forward. We traveled along a hallway, passing the hotel scenery while the ride’s story line was narrated over our heads. The voice stopped and the carriage began to shake. The lights when out.

Until that moment, “pitch black” was an expression I had used but its meaning had never been pressed upon me with such clarity. There was nothing in front of my eyes except an expanse of black so deep and thick, it was as if I had been blindfolded with velvet. There was a sensation of being suspended and then we plummeted. The carriage came briefly to rest in front of one of those gaping holes. I caught a glimpse of a blue sky and a few passing birds, before we plunged again. I could feel the unforgiving displacement of my internal organs as we dropped. This time our descent was interrupted for mere seconds before becoming a harrowing ascent, at the rate of several floors per second.

I think I must have been raving in terror though the speed at which we were now being dropped, stopped, shot upward and dropped again, made it difficult to catch my breath. We moved fast but I was conscious of everything. My body, and worse, my mind, knew every fraction of gravity we cheated, faked and fumbled. Every movement in our jagged and horrific progression registered in painful, conscious vibrations across my heart, my stomach, and knotted intestines. Each time we came to rest, my chest fluttered with hope that the horror trek was finally over, until we jerked into movement again. The relief faded as quickly as the light.

Then it was over. How long had it lasted? My throat felt raw and my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. My legs began to convulse. Jen waited while I composed myself and rose unstably.

“That was the worst thing I’ve ever done.” I croaked.

“Seriously? You hated it?” I marveled at the surprise in her voice. I started to respond but we were already on the move, herded out through the exit gates and through the gift shop.

“We should get you a tee-shirt.” Jen exclaimed.

How could I wear something on my chest that said, “I survived the Tower of Terror”, when I obviously had not? I was convinced that I had left some small, virtually insignificant organ back there on the carriage that had been shaken, shocked and forced lose.

We filtered past a bank of screens, each displaying a digital picture taken at a specific point in the ride. I found our section of the carriage and we broke into wild peals of laughter. In the shot, I am not scared straight into my seat with my eyes screwed tight in fear. Instead, I am pivoted toward Jen, facing her with my eyes open, shouting at her. I didn’t look terrified, I looked pissed off. The camera flash had illuminated my features. My cheeks were flushed and my eyes so bright, they seemed to spark in the darkness that surrounded me. I was entirely animated. I looked, I realized, with a sudden rush of gratitude, free and alive.

Suddenly, I knew two things with certainty; I would NEVER go on that ride again for any reason known to God or man. And most importantly, I would never treasure something more than those few minutes when I had surrendered all my troubles and completely gave into the fear and the freedom of freefall. Everything I had sought to free myself from, had fallen away. For the first time in a long time, my heart had ached from sheer rush of adrenaline rather than the pain of heartbreak.

“Ready for the Aerosmith’s Rock and Roller Coaster now?” Jen asked, a little warily.

The stream of curse words I had planned to hurl at her died on my tongue.

 “I’m gonna need a few minutes.” I said instead.

The summer before I started college, I had the amazing opportunity to travel to Australia and New Zealand as part of a People to People youth science exchange program. The trip consisted of roughly eighty science students spending three weeks overseas participating in a variety of biological and cultural activities from bird tagging and sea lion research on the remote Kangaroo Island to visiting a Maori village for a ceremonial feast. The itinerary would take us many places and expose us to many rich and wonderful experiences. The highlight for me, and really the entire reason for my signing on, was a true once in a lifetime chance to dive on the great barrier reef off the Queensland coast of Australia.

The night before the dive, I remember I could not fall asleep. My body felt charged with an almost electrical excitement. From as early as I could remember, I had been enchanted with the underwater world. My bookshelves teemed with books on marine biology, thick volumes with colorful images of fish and aquatic wildlife. I was particularly intrigued by the great barrier reef, home to thousands of species, a living laboratory where I could see first-hand the creatures from my books. I had gotten my scuba license at fifteen, the youngest member of my dive class. I took my certification dive in the frigid, dark waters of Long Island Sound, a far cry from the clear, tropical waters that were my inspiration.

The morning of the dive, I sat with about a dozen of my traveling companions on the metal bench of a bobbing pontoon boat as the dive master gave us our instructions and advisories. There were a few nervous snickers when he described a shark drill that involved us forming a circle around him. It was hard to pay close attention, distracted by the combination of turquoise water all around us and the dive master's hot pink speedo. Before I knew it, he was inviting us to chose our dive buddies and suit up. My partner was a girl named Nicole. She was a loud and outgoing girl from somewhere in Oklahoma. She had spent the entire time making lewd comments to me about the pink speedo and I doubted she had heard a word of the dive master's speech. We helped each other into our neoprene suits and fins, double checked our hoses and air supplies. The one word of advice I had taken to heart was to stay with our buddies at all times. I was determined not to lose Nicole down there in all that blue.

I stood, waiting for my turn to step off the boat. The tank and vest felt awkward and heavy, it was steaming hot in the bright sun. I shuffled forward until at last my fins were in line with the edge. The surface of the water looked a little rough and I had my first and only twinge of fear. After only a moment's hesitation, I took a wide step off the pontoon. The moment I hit the water, I felt myself drawn back to the surface by my buoyancy. I let some air out of my dive vest and felt myself sink back down, the ocean surface disappearing in my bubbles. My heart was pounding so hard it hurt. Nicole had entered the water before me, I began to look around frantically for her, breathing in what felt like harsh gasps, sucking down my air supply. All of a sudden, Nicole was beside me, her black hair flowing around her head, her eyes wide inside her dive mask. She made the "ok" sign, and waited for me to return it. I did. She turned and began to swim off, I followed trailing just behind her fins. It took me a few more minutes to regulate my breathing and begin to take in my surroundings.

Until that moment, my diving experience had been all based in cold waters off New England. I had often had to battle tough currents and limited visibility. The world I found myself in could not have been more different. The sea here was clear. I could see all the way to the sandy floor, it had to be over thirty feet down. The sand looked soft and white, punctuated here and there by large, free standing corals covered with pink, purple and blue anemones, some as big around as truck tires. As we moved on, the reef became more dense and populated. Schools of reef fish darted past. There were large Parrot fish and deep blue Surgeon fish, bright yellow Butterfly fish with their long, tapered snouts. Bright purple sea fans swayed in the current and there were places were colonies of spiny black sea urchins covered the sea floor like a black carpet. Nicole stopped short and pointed to coral outcropping where a large parrot fish was gnawing away. You could hear the grinding noise as he worked at it with his file-like teeth, turning the water around him murky with dust and debris.

The more I looked around me, the more I saw. It was as if the pages I poured over suddenly all came to life in an amazing parade of color and movement. Nicole was trying to talk to me, her excited jumbles making no sense as I pointed to a sea turtle coasting by about six yards from us. I swam slowly, watching the life thriving below me silently naming each species I saw and trying to memorize a few I'd never seen before. There were thousands of nudibranchs and marine worms in every possible color combination imaginable, with large crabs and rays dotting the sea's floor. I got lost among them, hovering just a few meters above them. I swam into pockets of fish. I extended my hand, feeling the vibrations as they shot past my fingers. Suddenly, just below me, closer than I had anticipated, a large ray extracted itself from the sea bed and launched up inches from me. It startled me into a kind of consciousness and I realized I had wandered away from Nicole. With a bolt of panic, I began searching the waters around me and saw a speck of black in the blue beyond that I prayed was my partner. I took off after her in powerful strokes, trying not to think about the dangers of being left behind. Nicole was moving quickly, probably thinking that she had lost me. I reached out and grasp the end of one her her flipper, giving it a big tug. She swirled around, and was momentarily masked by a cloud of bubbles. I gave her the okay sign, and she returned it. Her eyes were smiling, she looked as relieved as I felt. We turned together to make our way back to the pontoon and came face to face with a giant grouper.

Nicole squealed into her regulator. This fish was enormous. It was just hanging there, barely moving, twirling its fins in lazy circles, watching us with great round eyes. The mouth gaped, thick-lipped and dark. It's body was greenish brown mottled with white spots. Looking back, I'm certain it appeared larger than it really was, given the fact that the ocean seems to magnify most things. It had looked to be at least the size of my bedroom's double dresser and the sheer size of it was alarming even if I knew groupers to be largely docile. I could see the dark shadow of the boat on the surface and was suddenly eager to be back on it. After a few more moments of reflection, the grouper seemed to become uninterested and shot off rather suddenly into the depths. Nicole and I finished our ascent.

After shedding my tank and vest, and dropping back down on the benches, a strange euphoria set in. I was filled with the knowledge that I had just done something few people have the opportunity to do. Filled with a powerful gratitude, I turned my face to the sun, smiling and feeling as if I was glowing. The happy chatter all around me died off and for a brief second, it was just me and the sound of the waves lapping against the pontoon.