12-9-10 0550 BBA. Down to 23 on the outside thermometer, and the wind is bumping and banging around the windows. It was a cold ride to work yesterday, and yet the gear is still working…just less sweat. The cut trees are thinning out at West Oakland market..they have a very efficient setup of metal holders fastened in a grid for stability to maximize the density of their little forest.
This is what Tom, a boyhood explorer of the West Falmouth harbor wrote to me:
I remember the West Falmouth station. Can't remember when it was torn down, but recall that it was similar to the Falmouth station. The WEST FALMOUTH sign from that station moved to the WF Market, where it remained for years.
My father's family would come from Atlanta every year, by train. Atlanta to NYC, change to the Woods Hole train, get off in Falmouth. You can't do that today. Sloat would from time to time come out with a parody conductor's call from that train, which ended "Cataumet, vomit, godammit!".
You're right....West Falmouth was a busy port. Coal, cordwood, stone, and other goods came into the harbor, to be landed at various docks, the granite blocks of which are still to be seen in the various coves. I have read that when stone needed to be moved, folks would make ditches, which when flooded and frozen in winter, made low-friction icy "highways" for the cut stone.
The Cordwood Landing Road was not yet blocked off when I was a kid. You used to be able to drive over the tracks there...
From my father's "Boathouse" you could hear the Tooooot toooot toot toooooooooot of the stainless steel clad "Cape Codder" train as it went back and forth to Boston, and there were still places along the tracks where the growth was thin enough, or low enough, so you'd get a glimpse of the train as it travelled along. The Cape Codder had red velvet covered seats.
Sala and I drove to West Falmouth Harbor the other day. Several of you have used a map function to visualize the harbor (West Falmouth MA will get you there) and it does make an interesting view on satellite image. Like American Embassy employees everywhere, you can see too much of the delicate installations there…the town dock, for example. The place where Old Dock Road crosses the bike path. Nashawena Road…follow it along and it veers to the left and becomes Little Island Road. You won’t be able to make out the sign saying ‘Dead End’, which is the only clue that the road leads to a small sandy turnaround place with a bike rack. This time of year you can park, as we did. And then walk out along the soft sand between the clumps of spartina over a washed out rocky road across the narrow neck to Little Island. Or, if you are Fuji, you can run busily ahead, pouncing on suspected prey, and doing other foxlike things.
Early last summer, Robert brought by a large black plastic bag. “It’s an immature Gannet’ he informed me. “You might want to skin it”. At the time I was painting boat bottoms, but we did have the new beer and bait refrigerator in the basement, with an then un-occupied freezer. It was a very spare lobster season, but “I’m checking the pots’ is more defensible than ‘I’m pottering around being unproductive,dear’, When I cleaned out the unused lobster bait a month ago., there was the plastic bag, and so I warmed it up enough to disgorge the bird. Beautiful…twice as big as a herring gull, and far more delicate. Still speckled brown and white, without the astounding blue-green beak and black eyeshadow on white body with black wing tips of the mature bird, but gorgeous nonetheless. And wings…right up there in albatross class! Examining the one or two feathers on the leading edges at the tip, and you see how Orville and Wilbur figured out that they had to flex the wing of their flyer in order to get stability in the air. Perhaps you have watched gulls soaring along beside a boat..and noticed the tiny adjustments in the camber and attack angle of those delicate wing tip feathers. I’m remembering the introduction to that movie about New Guinea, ‘Dead Birds’, that begins something like ‘ The creation myth says that men were offered a choice; to be immortal and leave the earth to soar like birds, or to live in the world and die like animals’. Hmmm.
There were no Gannets, dead or alive when we wandered through the brushy paths and along the cold cold rocks of Little Island, but the view of Cleveland Ledge Lighthouse was great, and there was a satisfactory spray from waves breaking against the rocks set to protect the harbor entrance. Fuji was not eaten, nor did she catch to eat. We found an informal clearing in the woods with two green plastic chairs and a place for (gasp!) the very campfires that the sign told us were not allowed. Retired anarchists, perhaps.
Oh, about that Gannet. I did skin it, with the assistance of the ever interested Ursula. Her unabashed pleasure at the cleanliness of the white connective tissue inside a newly opened joint, the red of the blood, the green of the bile, and the intricacies of the nerves, arteries, and veins crossing the shoulder joint to supply the muscles of the wing were an encouragement to proceed to a full dissection (can we see the brain? Can we open the eye?) after removing the skin, applying preservative borax as we went. Later, after we had dissected the the amazingly large liver and the amazingly long larynx, located the whistle -like syrinx (birds don’t have vocal cords), and explored the air sacs (birds don’t have lungs like ours, that have to be pumped to empty), and after Ursula had gone home for a play date, I salted the skin heavily with flea powder (otherwise the mites consume the feathers in a few years) and now its spending the winter in the upper loft of Steves shop.
And we are going to California…that right, Traveling…tomorrow early morning. So I will NOT get up at 5 and will NOT make a first cup of tea, and not start up the La Pavoni ( it will be shipped, like us, by air) and I will not be writing this kind of note…until later in the day anyway.
And I will not work with Natalie for a while, after today anyhow.
Arivaderci!
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