Notes from a place I always planned to move to (2)

Eastport, Maine is a 'city' of a few thousand people, going on a full century since its' heyday when 50,000 people crammed butts-to-nuts on the little island it's built upon to fish and cut fish and pack and ship fish. Today it's a lovely place, butt of many Maine in-crowd jokes for being the home of the 'empty building festival', as, indeed there are almost more structures than people. You can find pictures of the incredible beauty of the place from local photographer Don Dunbar at Eastern Maine Images

Here, meanwhile, are some of mine, captured, sadly, with a camera phone.

Sort of random, but hey, you be productive AND hung over.

 Oh, that's the clincher. Getting my wife to come up here is like getting the cat into a travel crate to bring it to the vet. I love this place. My wife, who absolutely does not give a shit about nature in all its glory, does not. Observe:  on her only visit up here, when we were dating, we were out on a friend's boat drift-fishing, and a pod of finback whales (among the largest creatures ever to exist) comes over to investigate. What with the whales making a beeline from 5 miles away, we chose not to start the engine and kick up a whale-fuss, and sat quietly as they came over for a good look, getting within a few feet of the boat- close enough to see them pass under and around us, and to make eye-to-eye contact. A moment that will be with me until I die. After, I look at her, ready to accept that she now wishes to bear 14 of my children in 10-month intervals, to find her somewhat disinterestedly bemused, the way I look at her today when I see her pouring over a clothes catalog like a 12-year old studying a stolen Playboy. Trying to explain to her that people pay 50 bucks a pop to see these things from a mile off once in a lifetime, and that she's one of a handful of people around the globe who has looked Leviathan in the eye. She liked that I liked it, but that was about it.

 In the meanwhile, here's a slide show of the remote field facility where i used to work. If you have a look, you might see why I get all het up for nature.http://cas.suffolk.edu/images/content/Biology/-ffs-su_1presentation_cut_down_for_web_52004PDF.pdf