Relishing The Cool Of The Morning

Like much of the rest of the country, Maine generally, and Stonington specifically, is experiencing a heat wave, with temperatures in the 80s in the coastal areas and 90s inland. But unlike the rest of the country, Maine isn’t really equipped to deal with high heat. None of the houses in our area are equipped with central air conditioning, for example, because there is absolutely no need for it during a typical summer, when you expect highs in the 70s during the day and lows in the 50s at night.

That means Mainers deal with the heat using the techniques many of us remember from our pre-air conditioning childhood. A heat wave is a time for wide open windows and ceiling fans, and wishful hopes for a hint of a cool breeze to sweep through the room. It’s a time to stay outside a bit later as the sun goes down, until the mosquitoes drive you indoors. It’s also a time to savor the early morning moments of cooler air before the sun rises and the heat is cranked up again. And the views just before 5 a.m. aren’t bad, either.

Heat waves are a challenge up here, but eventually they end. In the meantime, the ice cream shop downtown is making a killing.

Being The Bat City

There is a bridge in Austin that is home to hundreds of thousands of bats, which roost in the rafters of the underpass. During certain times of year, at sunset, the bats emerge as a huge group, execute a kind of collective swirl maneuver, and fly off into the sunset, heading down the Colorado River. The bats then return to their home sometime before sunrise.

It is apparently quite a sight, and large crowds gather to watch the bats take off. (We haven’t witnessed it yet, but we’ll catch the Bat Emergence on a future trip to Austin.) For this reason, Austin is also known as the Bat City, and it has embraced that moniker and become . . . well, a bit batty about it. You see paintings of bats on walls, Bat City t-shirts, bat graffiti, and other bat-related items everywhere around the city. It’s fair to say that Batman would feel right at home in Austin.

My favorite bat-themed feature is these bat-shaped bicycle racks on a downtown street.

On The Trail At Mary Moore Searight Metropolitan Park

Yesterday morning we enjoyed a hike at Mary Moore Searight Metropolitan Park, an enormous, sprawling park on the outskirts of Austin. It had rained early in the morning and rain was forecast for the early afternoon, so our plan was to dodge the raindrops and do our hike when the air was cooled by the rain that had just passed through.

The Searight Park encompasses lots of different kinds of habitats. There are wooded areas, meadows, and even a shallow canyon that was carved out of the native limestone by a small creek. There are dozens of different trails, one of which follows the rim of the canyon and features some impressive drops, as shown above. No guardrails or fencing, of course!

The creek bed itself is a very pretty area. The creek has formed small pools that feature lots of small fish and some colorful algae. Richard and Julianne’s dog Pretty enjoyed a refreshing dip in the water, as did another dog. The limestone was still wet after the rain, and in some algae-covered areas it was slick and you really had to watch your step.

The park includes an area where the creek has been dammed, creating a deeper, wider stream. This area is popular with kayakers, although none were out on the water when we passed by.

Much of the park consists of large unmoved meadows that are designated wildflower areas, as shown below. In some areas the native grasses are nearly shoulder high, and give you a sense of what the prairies must have looked like long ago. There were still some wildflowers in bloom, but we apparently had just missed the prime time to visit, when the whole area was bursting with color.

Still, there were some flowers to appreciate. One variety I had never seen before, shown below, is the Castilleja plant, colloquially known as “Indian paintbrush” or “prairie fire.” The plant is native to the western part of the Western Hemisphere and is found from Alaska to all the way down to the Andes in South America. It’s a pretty and distinctive flower with bright petals that look like a paintbrush, which explains its nickname.

The Mary Moore Searight Park is a great park to have nearby, and our hike yesterday barely scratched the surface. We’ll be looking forward to heading to other parts of the park on a future visit.

Music Gives You Wings

Most hotel artwork is pretty generic, but this piece by artist Paul Villinski in the lobby of the Van Zandt Hotel in Austin is pretty cool. Those birds flying from the old Victoria are made of all kinds of old, reshaped records—including one by Townes Van Zandt.

Colorado River Cool-Off

It’s been in the 90s in Austin, and pretty humid, too. But it’s nice when there’s a river that’s handy. In Austin it’s the Colorado River —not the one that goes through the Grand Canyon—and people were taking full advantage today.

There were tons of kayaks, rafts, and floats on the water, and hardy teenage boys were jumping off a pedestrian bridge into the river. Not a bad option on a hot day!

Austin Athirst

It’s fair to say Austin has a healthy thirst for adult beverages. The downtown area features two significant drinking areas—Sixth Street and Rainey Street—where you can wet your whistle at countless bars, cocktail lounges, and saloons, many of which are blasting recorded music or featuring live music. But that doesn’t really give you a clear picture. Here are some vignettes that help to illustrate the point:

• When we checked in to our hotel, the Van Zandt, on Friday afternoon, the clerk asked if we would like a beer or a water. I’m pretty sure the beer was mentioned first.

• One of the bars on Sixth Street is evidently so popular that, as the sign above indicates, people are willing to install the “LineLeap” app and pay for the privilege of jumping to the front of the line—something I’ve heard of for amusement parks, but not bars. How do the other liquored-up people in the line like that?

• When I was taking the above photo at about 2 p.m. two guys who had gotten an early start came up to me and one, with breath that could stop a rhino, challenged me to “rock, paper, scissors, two out of three!” I politely declined.

• We walked down Rainey Street at a little after noon, where I took the picture of the sign below. The bars were already filling up, and it was clear that the cocktails would be lonely no longer.

• When we later returned to our hotel a little after 9 p.m., Rainey Street was packed with people. The music being pumped out by one nearby bar was so loud that the bass reverb was distinctly heard and vibrating the windows in our room on the 12th floor.

Saturday Morning In Scootertown

Austin is a big scooter town, even bigger than Columbus. On Friday night we saw hundreds of scooter riders, and people were zipping everywhere and completely ignoring the instruction on the base of the scooter that says you can’t ride it on the sidewalk. Pedestrians in downtown Austin on a Friday night need to maintain a state of constant vigilance to avoid collisions with newbie scooter riders.

Saturday morning is a different story. The Friday frivolity has ended, the scooters are no longer needed, and they’ve been casually abandoned everywhere, in willy-nilly fashion. Instead of worrying about collisions, the walker has to be careful not to trip over a scooter some thoughtless and likely inebriated person left right in the middle of the sidewalk. It makes it impossible to enjoy a Saturday morning walk without navigating around and between hundreds of discarded scooter carcasses. But at least the Saturday morning pedestrian has company: the scooter crews are out in force collecting their scooters and putting them back upright, in cool configurations, in position to be used by the Saturday scooter set.

Interesting Austin

We’re down in Austin for a visit, and our first day here reaffirms what I’ve believed for a while: Austin is one of the most interesting cities in America.

For one thing, it’s booming. Many tech companies have moved into the Austin area, and the skyline is dotted with construction cranes putting up some very interesting new buildings, like the one in the photo above. Many transplants from other states, particularly California, have followed the tech companies to Austin, resulting in Texas’ capital city dealing with an unprecedented influx of recent arrivals that has created perhaps the hottest–some might say completely overheated–housing market in the United States. If you’re trying to buy a house in Austin, coming from a place like Columbus, prepare yourself for egregious sticker shock and the frustration and disappointment of being routinely outbid by people paying far above the asking price because they also are desperate to buy a home of their own.

From our walk around downtown last night, it’s pretty clear that Austin has a very active population of youngish professionals and tech workers who are looking to have a raucous good on Sixth Street or Rainey Street on a Friday night. There’s an active nightlife, and we had dinner at a really good restaurant that was so busy we couldn’t get in until 9:30 Central Time. That’s like dining in New York City.

But the booming growth and sizzling housing market and partying is going on cheek by jowl with an obvious homelessness problem. Many intersections, highway underpasses, roadway sidebeds, and downtown sidewalks are the site of homeless encampments. The Austin homeless live in tents or under tarps, like the person in the photo above, with their possessions defining their own personal space. It’s hot here now, and it’s hard to imagine how the homeless survive broiling days when the temperature hits the upper 90s. The choice between being out in the blazing sun all day, or sitting in a suffocating tent, isn’t a good one. It can’t be healthy for these unfortunate people, and the encampments raise e, public health, basic sanitation, crime, and personal security issues. But how do you begin to tackle such a huge problem?

The photo below shows a homeless encampment right in front of the Austin City Hall building, at one of the major intersections bringing you into the downtown area. It’s not exactly the kind of image that a city would want to project to visitors, but there’s a lot of things on Austin’s plate right now. The city is trying to deal with the homelessness challenges, an obvious housing shortage, bursting at the seams growth that looks like it will continue indefinitely, a changing political dynamic, and assimilation of a bunch of newcomers into the proudly weird Austin way of life.

As I said: Austin is an interesting city.

The Africa Measurement

Bangor International Airport continues to encourage 20 seconds of hand-washing, but also offers helpful guidance about how to determine when you’ve hit the 20 seconds above the sink by identifying song snippets that need that time period to be properly sung. And the song options cover the generational and musical taste spectrum, with rock and pop songs from the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s and a country and what I believe to be a rap/hip-hop option. (Not being familiar with Lil Nas X, I’m guessing that is the right genre.)

There’s a risk in encouraging song singing, because someone could burst into off-key crooning in a public restroom. But I chose Toto’s Africa and sang it in my head as I lathered and rinsed, including holding the note on “had” as happened in the original version. And I learned something in the process: I always thought the lyrics were “I felt the rain down in Africa,” and “I bless the rains down in Africa” definitely gives the song a different meaning (although I’m not sure exactly what).

When I was done and had dried my hands, satisfied that I had fully complied with the 20-second instruction, I mentally sang the rest of Africa—as best I remembered it—then mentally sang Rosanna for good measure.

House Names

Many of the houses in Stonington have formal names, like “Morning Mist,” designated by signs on the house itself. That’s pretty unusual in my experience; I don’t remember seeing houses being given names in Columbus, for example. I’m not sure exactly why this house-naming tendency is so, but not surprisingly I have a theory. Many of the residents of Stonington owns boats, and the boats are always named. If you’re going to name one object or possession, why not name another? I wouldn’t be surprised if they named their cars, too.

My two favorite names are “Yonder,” shown by the sign above the barn doors above, and “The Snow Goose,” on the trim house below. “Yonder” is a great, now archaic word that dates from the Middle Ages. It indicates something in the distance that is within sight or capable of being identified by a gesture. As a house name, it has a certain mystical quality. And “The Snow Goose” is similarly evocative. It conjures up clear mental images, and it also makes you wonder what caused a prior owner to settle on that name.

First Amendment Lessons

The Supreme Court issued an interesting First Amendment decision yesterday that is worthy of note on multiple levels–both for the important lessons it teaches about our modern social media society, and also for what it says about the boundaries of what public officials and school administrators can and cannot do, under the First Amendment, when somebody says something that they really don’t like. You can read the Supreme Court opinion here.

The facts are straightforward. A high school freshman tried out for the school cheerleading squad. She didn’t make varsity, but was offered a spot on the junior varsity. She was disappointed and angry about the decision, particularly since another freshman made the varsity squad and–like so many teenagers (and adults) these days–she took to social media to vent her apparently considerable frustrations. She took a picture, at a location off school grounds, that showed her and a friend with middle fingers raised and a caption with the Queen Mother Of Curses used in connection with the school and the cheer squad, and sent it to her 250 Snapchat “friends”–which included some other students who were members of the cheer squad. They took pictures to preserve the Snapchat post, which then was shared with other students, the cheerleading coach, and eventually the school administration.

And there’s the lesson in today’s social media-saturated world: don’t post or share something that you wouldn’t want to be circulated to everyone in town or printed on the front page of the newspaper. If our kids were still in school, I’d have them read this decision about an ill-advised social media effort that had immediate consequences and eventually ended up in the United States Supreme Court, and suggest that they think about the disappointed cheer squad applicant the next time they wanted to send an edgy, racy, or profanity-laced tweet, Snapchat, or other social media posting. And adults, including me, would benefit by reading it, too, as a useful reminder about how intemperate language launched in the heat of the moment can have lasting, and unwanted, ramifications.

In this case, the student apologized for the vulgar photo and crude language, but the school administration found that she had violated team and school rules by using a profanity in connection with a school extracurricular activity, and she was suspended from the cheer squad for a year. The student and her parents sued, claiming that the school’s disciplinary action violated the right to freedom of speech under the First Amendment. The Supreme Court ruled, in an 8-1 decision, that it did.

The Court’s decision is not a license for students to flash the middle finger at teachers during class or cuss out the assistant principal in the school hallways. The Court noted that while students aren’t stripped of their First Amendment rights when they go to school, reasonable adjustments to freedom of expression must be recognized to accommodate the special school environment. A key fact in this case was that the photo was taken off school grounds, but even that fact is not dispositive; the Court recognized that, in certain circumstances, schools can still properly regulate speech and conduct off-campus–such as in dealing with bullying or responding to physical threats against teachers. On the other hand, certain kinds of speech, such as the expression of religious and political views, will merit special protection against disciplinary action. And, because circumstances can change, the Court declined to articulate a broad rule about which off-campus speech and conduct scenarios can be regulated by schools, and which cannot. Those contours will have to be established by later cases and their specific factual circumstances.

Interestingly, the Court also cautioned school districts about understanding their role in making sure that students–and school administrators themselves–truly understand what the First Amendment is all about. The majority opinion states, in language that those of us who believe strongly in the value of free speech will applaud:

“Our representative democracy only works if we protect the “marketplace of ideas.” This
free exchange facilitates an informed public opinion, which, when transmitted to lawmakers, helps produce laws that reflect the People’s will. That protection must include the protection of unpopular ideas, for popular ideas have less need for protection. Thus, schools have a strong interest in ensuring that future generations understand the workings in practice of the well-known aphorism, ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’”

In applying these concepts to the would-be cheerleader’s Snapchat post, the Justices concluded that, vulgarity aside, the student was simply criticizing the school and the cheer squad coaches–and protecting our ability to criticize our public officials is one of the core purposes of the First Amendment. She spoke off-campus, used a private communications mechanism, and didn’t target the school or any teachers or coaches by name, all factors that weighed in favor of First Amendment protection. Her right to criticize outweighed the school’s professed interests in promoting good manners among its students, in avoiding potential significant disruption of school activities (the Court noted there was no evidence of disruption caused by the Snapchat), and in protecting the morale of the cheer squad members.

The Court concluded: “It might be tempting to dismiss [the student’s] words as unworthy of the robust First Amendment protections discussed herein. But sometimes it is necessary to protect the superfluous in order to preserve the necessary.” Those are thoughts that I wholeheartedly agree with, and I hope that others–from public officials to the people who are readily offended by opinions they don’t agree with–also take that lesson to heart.

But what of the student whose ill-considered Snapchat started this kerfuffle and produced the Supreme Court’s ringing reaffirmance of the importance of the First Amendment? I bet, deep down, she wishes she had never sent that stupid, angry Snapchat in the first place.

Balsa Wood Lessons

Yesterday on my walk through town I passed one of the local gift shops and saw this classically designed balsa wood plane in the window. The store’s proprietor knew what she was doing, putting that pretty little plane in the window for old guys and young kids alike to see. If the store had been open, and I’d been carrying my wallet, I might have been tempted to make an impulse purchase–because, for those of us of a certain age, a balsa wood plane brings back a lot of memories, and life lessons, too.

When I was a kid, I got a balsa wood plane as a gift. I don’t remember who was the giver, but I do remember being fascinated with the notion that the plane was made with a kind of wood. This was wood? It wasn’t the kind of wood I was used to in, say, a baseball bat or the trunk of a neighborhood tree. This wood was ultra-light and brittle, the better to glide through the air like the Wright Brothers’ plane at Kitty Hawk. Balsa wood planes were the definition of “flimsy.” That didn’t mean they were any less fun and weren’t cool, either. After all, this little plane could fly! UJ and I spent many happy hours playing with our balsa wood planes, trying to see whose plane could glide the farthest on a warm summer day.

But there were important lessons attached to the little balsa wood plane. The balsa wood plane may have been the first toy that I actually had to consciously take care of. It couldn’t take a beating like, say, a little rubber football. You had to be gentle in putting it together, or one of the wings would break in half or thin strips of balsa wood would chip off, interfering with performance. You couldn’t just leave the plane outside in the rain or on a chair where the plane could be crushed into smithereens by Uncle Tony’s descending posterior. And you had to be mindful of where and when you took the plane out for a glide, too. Really windy days were bad, because the wind inevitably sent the plane cartwheeling into the concrete patio or a neighboring house, and launching it anywhere near a tree was certain to result in your plane being firmly lodged in the crook of a branch or amidst the leaves and limbs, with no way to knock it down that wouldn’t bust the plane into sad little balsa wood shards.

I’m sure I went through countless balsa wood planes before these lessons really sank in–but I’m also sure that, if I bought a balsa wood plane now, all of the old careful handling reflexes and experiential knowledge would come back in a rush. The lessons that come from the disappointment and loss of a favorite toy that you could have avoided if you’d just listened to Dad and Mom and been more careful are lessons well learned.

“Sluggish”

On wet mornings, like this morning, it’s typical to find a slug or two on the asphalt of the driveway. They come out of the ground and oh-so-slowly inch along toward the flower beds, and when I see them I use a leaf to pick them up and take them to a location away from the flowers, where they can nosh away on the weeds and random bushes in the no man’s land area between our house and the house next door.

I don’t mind slugs, or snails. Nevertheless, after observing them around here I have a different perspective on the word “sluggish,” and would never want that word applied to me. But seeing this little guy this morning made me think of a classic Steve Martin appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in which the word “sluggish” figured prominently. It gave me a laugh on a misty morning and made me realize how much I miss the old Tonight Show and its legendary host. The clip is below.

Amidst The Mist

Fog is a curious phenomenon. For one thing, sounds seem to carry differently when Stonington is socked in by a heavy fog, as it is this morning. The growling sounds of the lobster boats heading out to sea seem to be amplified by the moisture in the air, so that it sounds as if the boats are very close by when it is clear they aren’t. And familiar scenes look different, too.

But the visual effects of fog can also be surprising, and varying. Sometimes it renders things, like the boats at anchor above, blurry and indistinct, like a grey aquatic dreamscape. In other places the fog acts as a kind of backdrop that frames the structures in the foreground, giving them a different cast. The old dock and green boathouse below, located next to the post office, are a good example of this effect. I’d never paid much attention to them before, but amidst the mist they look spindly and delicate and haunting.

Fog makes the morning walk more interesting for me, but makes the morning work more treacherous for the lobstermen.

Wiped Out

Every flight I’ve taken recently has a new feature in the boarding process: a flight attendant who solemnly hands you precisely one sanitizing wipes packet as you enter the plane. (I suppose it’s possible that you could get extra packets, but I’ve never asked.)

It’s not clear to me what you’re supposed to do with the one wipe, and no instruction is given—which is strange because airlines typically overinstruct you about everything, even how to fasten your seat belt. Are you supposed to use the wipe on your hands? The flimsy tray table? The arm rests? The seat belt? The seat itself, with the cushion that also helpfully serves as a flotation device? Or all of the above, which would be asking a lot of one tiny packet with one sanitizing wipe? Hey, are the airlines suggesting that they aren’t thoroughly cleaning these planes any more and asking us to pitch in?

I put the wipe packet in my pocket or use it as a bookmark and eventually add it to my home wipe collection. I haven’t seen anyone else use one, either. But on one flight yesterday, the young woman sitting next to me broke open the packet and carefully wiped down her tray table and the back of the seat in front of her, and probably wanted to wipe me down, too. Then she never touched or used the tray table in any way.

This new travel rite of passage seems very odd to me, but I suppose it’s all part of an effort to get the germophobes out there more comfortable with flying. If wipe packet distribution does the trick, so be it.