Hoarded Ordinaries

As luck would have, it rained all day yesterday. Not content to view the Mount Desert Island shoreline by car, though, I responded in my usual all-obstacles-be-damned fashion and went walking anyway.

Again, these photos don’t do Acadia justice: the rocky shoreline between Sand Beach and Otter Point is much lovelier on clear days when the sunlight glints off pink granite slabs. But given the choice between walking in rain and not walking at all, there is no choice. Ocean Trail is an easy walk, so on a clear day it would be packed with walking families. Yesterday, though, I had the path–and the rocks–virtually to myself.

Although I’m waterproof, my clothing and camera are not. Typically I don’t mind a good soaking as long as a warm car, dry clothes, and hot food (and appropriate beverages) are waiting at trail’s end. To shield my camera more than myself from the wet, yesterday I walked with an umbrella, taking all of these shots from under it. As funny as the image of me rock-hopping with an umbrella might be, keep in mind that none other than Henry David Thoreau often walked with an umbrella: when he explored Cape Cod, in fact, he used his umbrella to shelter himself from both rain and sun as he strolled the shore with an open book in hand. If walking with an umbrella was good enough for Thoreau and his books, surely it’s good enough for me and my digicam.

Yesterday I talked about Victor and Edith Turner’s notion of communitas. Another concept that found it’s way into my Ph.D. dissertation was the Turner’s notion of liminality: the way that some places inspire a threshold experience wherein seekers cross from one realm of existence to another. The liminal space between land and water, I argued, is particularly evocative, as is the liminal space between heaven and earth. When we stand poised on a shoreline or a summit–or, even more magically, on a place where heaven, earth, and ocean all three meet–we are particularly reminded of our properly liminal place on God’s green earth, balanced between the natural and the supernatural, the here and the hereafter, the now and the not-yet.

Acadia has both ocean shores and mountain summits: the geography of my dissertation made actual! The other thing that Acadia has–the other thing that shores, mountains, and my favorite earthly places share–is stone. In case you haven’t noticed from previous posts–and in case you haven’t read of how I learned to meditate from a rock–let me assure you that I have a Positively Pagan appreciation for stone, Mother Nature’s own bone.

And in case you’ve ever wondered where the Ancients got the idea to paint images on rock, I think I’ve found the answer on the shore of Acadia National Park. Is there anything prettier than the sight of yellow lichen on pink stone?

Today, at long last, we have a clear day here in Bar Harbor! So after spending a wet day yesterday walking the shore, today I’ll spend a dry (I hope!) day scaling some summits. Here’s hoping for better, brighter pictures tomorrow!

I arrived here on Mount Desert Island, Maine too late yesterday to go on a proper hike, so before I checked into my cozy B&B, I did what everyone does when they visit Acadia National Park. I drove to the top of Cadillac Mountain.

Yesterday afternoon was foggy, so these photos don’t do Cadillac justice. Not only does the summit (normally) afford stunning views of the surrounding ocean, the stones atop Cadillac are crusted with green, yellow, and blue lichens: the stones there both look and feel alive. Although the sight of fog wafting on craggy peaks and swaddling around clustered islands was gorgeous in its own right, the light wasn’t good for pictures: the fog was breathtaking in person but not particularly photogenic.

Although I love Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire as much as the next armchair environmentalist, and although I agree in theory that people should get out of their cars and walk more, I have mixed feelings about roads that lead to mountain tops. On the one hand, I felt a bit guilty about driving to the top of Cadillac. I’m able-bodied, and the hike to the summit is long (7 miles round trip) but moderate. I plan sometime this weekend to enjoy Cadillac “properly,” meaning on foot. At the same time, though, it felt wrong to be cranky and antisocial atop Cadillac: families with young children and elderly grandparents deserve to see the tiptop of Acadia as much as able-bodied folks do. Somehow I sensed that the stones atop Cadillac enjoyed the company, that although they might not like the road that’s been slapped on their back, they enjoy the travellers who use that road. I bet it’s lonely to be a mountain stone: sometimes it’s nice to have regular folks drop by.

In their work on Christian pilgrimage, anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner use the word communitas to talk about the experience pilgrims share when they arrive at their communal destination. Although each seeker might have taken a separate path, the footsteps leading to a spiritual goal being entirely one’s own, when seekers meet up at Lourdes or Canterbury or Lough Derg, they find themselves in a community of believers. After traveling separate paths, these seekers are united by a shared belief that this particular place is the sight of special spiritual power. The Turners’ concept of communitas was so personally compelling that I used it as a central motif in my Ph.D. dissertation. We each have to walk our paths alone…but at the end as well as along the way, we share our walks with other people.

I’m not going to pretend that everyone who drove (or walked) up Cadillac Mountain yesterday saw themselves as completing a sort of pilgrimage: heaven forbid I should force a religious experience on any hapless soul, my own included. But rather than chiding and deriding those who, like me, drove gas-guzzling vehicles to the top of the mountain rather than walking, biking, or shuttling there, I’d like to think that the meandering band of folks who wandered the summit of Cadillac Mountain yesterday got something more than a few pictures out of the experience. Looking at the landscape from above is typically a humbling experience: from atop a mountain, one’s mundane life seems distant and remote, the usual worries shrunken to their properly piddling size. Having had that shared experience atop Cadillac, I’d like to think we’ll all carry a lingering piece of that back home.

As I type these words in the library of the inn where I’m staying, it is pouring rain outside: a bad omen for vacationing photo-bloggers?

Today’s Photo Friday theme is “Domestic“: what better excuse for one last picture of the homefront before I head off for a long weekend in Bar Harbor? Yes, it’s absurd that I need three bags for a four day weekend: one is regular luggage, one is hiking gear, and one is work-related stuff. (The upside of teaching online courses is you can work from anywhere…but that’s also the downside.) Overpacked or not, I’m looking forward to a couple days of solitary hiking in Acadia National Park, one of the prettiest places on earth. (They don’t call Mount Desert Island “Eden” for nothing.) Since I will be taking my laptop for those aforementioned online classes, you can expect lots of photos, weather permitting. In the meantime, I hope y’all have a great Friday and an even better weekend. I know I plan to!

As cruel fate would have it, I’ve never had enough room for books. When I lived with my parents in Ohio, I was a mad collector of dust: my bookshelves were filled with, yes, books, and model horses, and knicknacks of every stripe. Under the bed, I had boxes of bones: owl pellets, scavenged rodent jaws, a whole and entire deer skull. Crammed in my closet were scrapbooks full of clippings, stamps, bottlecaps. If it could be held, captured, or scavenged, I found a way to collect it. And if it had pages that could be turned, I wanted to read it, own it, hoard it.

Book hoarding, along with stamp and model horse collecting, became my means of escape. Growing up in a neighborhood without children my own age, I spent hours in my room reading, daydreaming, or writing. I was preternaturally precocious, wanting to know the name of every flower and the habits of every bird. Even when I myself was a child, I never got along well with children; my mind was filled with adult thoughts and concerns, my interests lying on the shelves of the grown-up section of the library. I read Lolita before I was old enough to be one of Humbert Humbert’s nymphets, and I read Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf not long after most of my classmates had moved past the Big Bad Wolf. In a word, I was a wildly weird child, and books were one expression of that weirdness. When other pubescent girls were panting after the latest teen heart-throb, I was fretting over which avian field guide was the best.

I’ve recently been sorting through my books. When Chris and I sold our house in Hillsborough and moved to Keene a little more than a year ago, my library went through a massive downsizing. Previously, my books filled two full-size (floor to ceiling) bookshelves along with a shorter chest-high shelf; I had extra books tucked above, behind, and before the ones that fit on shelves. By the time we packed to move, I’d sold over half of my books, some online, others in a massive garage sale in which we nearly gave away possessions. Although I’d resigned myself to the relinquishment involved in consciously downsizing from a 3-bedroom house to a 2-bedroom apartment, there were two garage-sale transactions that broke my heart: the sale of the overstuffed chair where the dog and I would curl up to read, and the sale (to a used book dealer) of the complete set of Thomas Merton’s journals. “Try to keep them together,” I pleaded. “Other folks have wanted to buy a single volume or two, and asked which one was the best,” I explained. “But journals should be read from beginning to end, and I never had the time…” The used book dealer nodded, sympathetic, as if we were discussing a litter of kittens looking for a good home, but we both knew the truth: good homes for esoteric books are hard to find anywhere, and Thomas Merton might struggle to find a home here in New Hampshire.

When we moved to Keene, Chris and I shared a single bookshelf, with some of my books spilling over into a living room curio cabinet and others being stashed in my office at school. Slowly, though, the collecting bug crept in again: one innocent purchase there, another here. Although I’ve acquired with practice the discipline of checking the library for a book before I buy it, there’s always the allure of ownership: if it’s mine, I can keep it, and write in it, and always refer to it. If I own it, I can have it at hand at any hour when I need it or want to refer to it or need to cite it: a scholar’s occupational hazard.

Even more difficult than downsizing a library, though, is the seemingly simple act of splitting one: there’s something heartbreaking about sorting previously shared books into stacks labeled “his” and “hers,” each destined to their own separate place. When Chris and I married, we’d both recently graduated with Bachelor’s degrees in English; having taken many of the same classes, we owned many of the same books. Back then we decided whose book to keep based upon the notes therein: my copy of the Walt Whitman Handbook stayed as did his copy of the Riverside Shakespeare. Now nearly 13 years later, we’ve gone through the same process in reverse: having continued to study American Literature first as an avocation and now as a career, I got custody of our jointly-purchased first edition Leaves of Grass facsimile whereas Chris claimed the copy of the Blue Cliff Record he’d bought for me some years back. Many of the books we split are filled with notes from happier, more innocent days, but these notes don’t necessarily correspond with who got what: my copy of the Gospel Parallels contains Chris’s neo-pagan scrawl whereas his copy of the Diamond Sutra has margins crammed with my scribblings.

One book that both Chris and I had owned before we married is The Cloud of Unknowing, a primer on prayer by an anonymous fourteenth-century English monk. It seemed obvious that I’d end up with this book: over the years Chris and I have danced on every conceivable side of the Christian/Buddhist divide, but I always naturally found myself on Christian ground, my longing for a personal God leading me smack-dab back into the arms of Christ crucified. So the other day when I checked to see whose copy of The Cloud I’d inherited in the split, it was like reuniting with an old friend to discover my maiden name signed inside its cover, my multicolored notes and underlinings covering its oft-read pages. (Click here for an enlarged view.) Who was it, I wonder, who wrote these notes: who was this 13-years-younger version of myself? I’ve had this book so long, its cracked spine lightly gives up its yellowed pages, a book I literally read to pieces. So who was that Lorianne DiSabato who thought she knew a thing or two about prayer and the God those prayers are directed to? What Cloud of Unknowing did she labor under when she thought “’til death do us part” was an attainable task?

Whoever Miss DiSabato thought she was, Dr. Schaub now tries to carry on, rearranging remaining books on lightened shelves and retrieving those that hid out for a year in an office at Keene State. Whether we have enough places for our books, they presumably have places for us, holding in their leaves old hopes crushed like dried flowers. Opening an old book, who hasn’t been surprised to find an old photograph, note, or dollar bill long forgotten, a bookmark from a long-ago, hurried moment? The books we choose to own also often choose to own us, preserving in their pages a snapshot of days gone by, the youthful dreams of selves we’d forgotten, shelved.

This post in my contribution to the Ecotone biweekly topic, Places for Books. And after you’ve perused the other postings to this topic, be sure to click on over to The Coffee Sutras to wish Kurt a happy birthday. Kurt is one of the bloggers I read before I myself started blogging, so in one sense “Hoarded Ordinaries” would not exist without “The Coffee Sutras.” So even though I’m a committed tea-drinker myself, Kurt, here’s wishing you many caffeinated refills.

You know it’s foggy here in Keene when you can barely make out the Beaver Mills smokestack from the bike path leading into town.

We’ve been having thickly foggy mornings and gloriously sunny September afternoons here lately. Although the trees haven’t for the most part started turning, the leafy fringes of some of our low-lying wetlands are starting to show a tinge of color. In the meantime, though, we’re experiencing the usual bipolar and/or quasi-schizophrenic weather that occurs as summer prepares to end and autumn hasn’t yet entirely begun. Mornings and evenings are chilly enough to make me want to switch over (already!) to flannel sheets, but midmorning and afternoon are hot enough for the temperature-gauged window fans to kick on and off throughout the day. These are the days when deciding how to dress in the morning is a nearly impossible task: short-sleeves are too cold, long-sleeves too warm. Three-quarters sleeves seem the perfect compromise, as does the combination of shorts and a long-sleeved sweatshirt, the ultimate expression of “New Hampshire casual.”

Although taking photos in fog presents its own special challenges, I love any sort of odd weather that makes the usual landscape look less-than-usual. Thoreau spent an entire summer journaling about wooded walks he took at night: he enjoyed the challenge of having to navigate a suddenly unfamiliar landscape in his own backyard. Walking the same streets and sidewalks of Keene but seeing those scenes shrouded in fog achieves something of the same effect. Just when you think you know a place, she goes in for another cream-covered makeover.

For the next few days I’ll be Purely Pedestrian as I wait for my beloved 1993 Subaru Legacy wagon to get a makeover of her own. The car I long ago christened the Little Tank got rear-ended in Vermont a little over a month ago, back during the week when I was keeping blog-silence. No, no one was hurt in that accident; no, this picture doesn’t show my car, just an anonymously abandoned vehicle that looked particularly picturesque (or perhaps merely poignant) swathed in fog. Although I had the option of renting a car while Little Tank is getting a new lift gate, rear bumper, and tail-lights, something about spending the next few days on foot deeply appealed to me. Walking to and from school is entirely possible; there are no errands I need to do over the next few days that require me going beyond downtown. Sometimes embracing limitation can be a freeing thing, a way of re-seeing the scenery you’ve grown too accustomed to ignoring.

Although I’m not normally a superstitious person, I often find that my moods mirror the weather, or vice versa. These days I’m feeling a bit bipolar and/or quasi-schizophrenic myself: in the afternoon when the sun is shining, I feel happy and carefree, but in the morning and evening when fog descends, I’ve been feeling unpredictably contemplative. Saturday morning my friend A (not her real initial) and I went walking at the Massabesic Audubon Center in Auburn, NH, the place where A graciously and quite skillfully snapped the pictures which now adorn my blog sidebar and website bio, writing, and teaching pages. Sitting on the shore chatting with A while kingfishers rattled overhead and a pair of loons dueted from either direction, I felt relaxed and happy: the laughing expressions in those photos are real. And yet Sunday morning found me feeling lonely and depressed, a sense of failure and hopelessness arising as I contemplated the fact of my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary the day before: compared to the commitment of faithfully observing “for better or for worse” for 50 years, whatever of worth will I accomplish with my life?

Moods, like fog, roll in and out of their own accord: luckily a friend’s well-timed phone call saved me yesterday from an entire day of gloom. Although depressive spells can and are triggered by the elaborate orchestrations of neurochemistry, they also, I think, can be triggered by the turning of the seasons. Although I myself don’t suffer from seasonal affective disorder, for many years I lived with someone who did, with an annually predictive gloom descending in November and lasting until March. Already I can feel in my bones these weeks between my parents’ September 11th anniversary and my own November 2nd one will be a time marked by my own internal heavy weather. Even when you can predict the weather, you can’t change it: sometimes all you can do is try your best to be prepared and then sit tight as the fog rolls in and out.

This time last year I had recently begun writing my semi-monthly “Pedestrian Thoughts” essays, a discipline that pulled me out of a mid-summer slump inspired by the fact that I’d fallen out of the habit of writing. Like a well-timed phone call from a friend, the simple act of writing and then sharing that writing was surprisingly therapeutic: suddenly someone other than me cared about what birds I’d seen on my mundane strolls about town. Interestingly enough, one of my first Pedestrian essays was written on a sunny September afternoon when I was feeling inexplicably and inarticulately lonely: as I sat on my porch writing on that Sunday afternoon just over a year ago, the fact that I had a husband quietly working in the other room did absolutely nothing to mitigate the fact that I felt entirely and all but suicidally alone. Sometimes even the physical presence of another human can’t erase one’s existential apprehension, the realization that in the end we each are bone-achingly alone.

The irony of the essay that appeared out of that moment of pure loneliness, an afternoon when the sunny sky belied my own internal fog, arose only after I’d shared it: that essay more than any other led readers–folks I’d never met–to email me with words of gratitude and praise, pointing to how “grounded” and “at ease” the prose made them feel. Although I never used the word “lonely” in that essay, instead making a conscious effort to focus on the tangible, sensory details of a single lonely moment, perhaps readers subconsciously recognized the signs. Or is even fog beautiful if you contemplate it calmly, with the eyes of a poet, scientifically noting its whirls and ebbs without judgement or denial? I don’t know which if either is true, but I’ve learned one thing: the blank page (or the empty computer screen) is a friend in all weathers, dispassionately listening to whatever whines, wails, or wonders you wish to share. And sometimes, if you’re brave enough to click “send” or “save,” the page even talks back.

Thanks again to my friend A (not her real initial) for snapping my new blog & website pictures. Thanks as well to Gary for helping re-configure my comments in an attempt to foil the ever-wily foe of blog spam. And a big warm Welcome Home to Tom, who recently relocated his blog, “The Middlewesterner,” to a new URL:
http://middlewesterner.typepad.com. Even fog feels nice when you share it amongst friends.

Stone chambers, walls, and sacrificial altar at Mystery Hill (a.k.a America’s Stonehenge) in Salem, NH.

Yep, it’s that time of year again: time when the pumpkins appear in New England. Although I photographed these painted pumpkins at a farmstand in Hollis, NH after failing to scare up any ghosts at Pine Hill Cemetery, Keene is the official home for all things pumpkin. Keene’s annual Pumpkin Festival is the biggest event of the entire year: last year the Festival smashed its own World Record by assembling a jaw-dropping 28,952 lit jack-o’-lanterns. During the Pumpkin Fest, downtown streets are closed to vehicular traffic while crews set up scaffolds and shelves to display the carved pumpkins brought in by locals and tourists alike. While busses and horse-drawn wagons shuttle visitors (and their pumpkins) to and from outlying parking areas, Downtown Keene becomes a huge promenade where pedestrians admire carved gourds in the brisk New England air.

In a word, the Pumpkin Festival is a Big Deal. Keene has a population of 20,000, and last year some 70,000 people (and those 28,952 lit jack-o’-lanterns) converged for the festival. Although outsiders sometimes complain about the inconvenience of having to park and then shuttle in from outside town, the logistics of this event run like clockwork. Even though the human population of town more than tripled during last year’s festival, everyone I saw strolling the streets was having a good time. There’s something magical about turning a street into a huge sidewalk where people can mix and mingle over the oohs and ahhs inspired by some of the more imaginative pumpkin creations. (For a sampling of anonymously-submitted pumpkin pictures from last year’s festival Photo Gallery, click here or here or here.)

If nothing else, it’s wonderful to see crowds of people enjoying Keene in her autumnal glory. (For more anonymously submitted festival photos, click here or here or here. This year’s festival is on Saturday, October 23, so there’s still time to save the date and make the necessary travel arrangements. What better time for New Hampshire and New England bloggers to hit the streets for a Downtown Keene meet-up?

Although I’m from Ohio, where in 1986 the image of Jesus appeared on the side of a soybean storage tank in rural Fostoria, I’m not one to spot signs and wonders. The face of Jesus on a hot tortilla? The weeping image of Mary on a garage door? No, you won’t hear me pointing out such apparitions. But when New Hamsphire’s much-beloved Old Man of the Mountain rises from the rubble to appear on an overlooked rockface right here in Keene, you’re gonna hear about it.