Meet Walter

We’re back in Connecticut and enjoying life. I accompanied son-in-law John up to the top of the mountain at the back of Kent where granddaughter Cassie was riding. She’s becoming an accomplished horsewoman and it has been our pleasure to watch her become an interesting young woman.
While Cassy moved her horse down the hill to the paddock for the night, I met up with the land owner.
Walter is O.M. That means Old Money. Generally speaking, O.M. people never flaunt their wealth. He (and they) wears the oldest clothes. Yesterday, his flannel shirt pocket was ripped and hanging down. His trousers were worn so thin you could count the threads in the knees. The zippered part was threadbare. Walter is a man of indeterminate age – except I would guess he is in his early to mid 80s.
He’s probably the most interesting man I know – and I’ve known some great men.
Walter is/was a nuclear scientist. He’s now a farmer, sitting on the top of his mountain with his old farmhouse looking a bit the worse for wear, much like his shirt and pants. His corgi dogs nuzzle and nip at his feet. His hands are badly wrinkled and the blood doesn’t circulate too well in his extremities by the looks of the dark color of his skin. But he has a mind. Oh, what a mind he has.
Every time I’ve spent time with this fine old man I come away in awe. He speaks Russian fluently, and he has taught himself to speak the Gaelic.
We spoke yesterday about Putin and he is quite clear in his thinking about the thinking of this angry Russian. “It all stems from what we did in Kosovo,” Walter said. “We took that away from the Serbs and gave it to the Albanians.” Walter explained that the Serbs, being Slavic, are much more akin to the Russians. And Putin, being an old KGB man, found that unforgivable. Now, with Russia’s new-found oil wealth, he’s game to flex his muscle by pushing into Georgia.
Walter told me about being on a U.S. team that went into Russia back in 1994 in an attempt to help the Russians with creating a safety system with all of their loose nukes. After a week of working alongside the nuclear scientists and military people, Walter attended a party at which the vodka flowed with its usual Russian gusto. He rose and gave the only toast from the western scientists in Russian. He said he spoke about how Russian naval ships and personnel had come to the aid of San Francisco during the fires of the 1890s when San Francisco was in danger of being destroyed. The navy men came ashore and helped put out the fires. He tied this mutual aid pact to their current trip.
“After the toast a short man with white, white hair came up and hugged me,” Walter said. “He had worked alongside Sakharov on Russia’s nuclear development. He said to me in Russian, ‘I love you’,” Walter said.
Our conversation floated along to Henry Kissinger, who lives in Kent. Walter knew him when he first came over from Germany in 1936. He related how Henry had an affair with a Nazi offer’s widow at the end of the war. That Henry. He’s quite a guy.
Walter has strong opinions about nuclear power for energy generation. He says the world has a much harder time tracking the pollution caused by carbon and suggests we really are quite competent to track nuclear waste and by-products. And, he says, if you coat Uranium 238 with another element which he named, it reduces the half-life of the waste to 50 years, instead of thousands of years.
If I were Barack Obama, I know I’d want Walter’s mind to play a role in my upcoming administration.

The ant and the cheese

We're at this wonderful campsite in Northwood, New Hampshire, sitting beside a little pond with loads of frogs and tadpoles in the lily-pad-covered water.

But I have just spent a wonderful half-hour watching an ant work with mighty strength to move a piece of cheese that is larger than he across the stony ground. It has been a truly super-ant struggle.

I had dropped the shredded cheese last night under the picnic table. He spotted it and decided it was worth the effort to move this half-inch-long shred of cheese out and up the hill.

This is a great lesson for all of us. He moved that shred about eight feet. This, it seems to me, is the equivalent of a human adult dragging another human for about four or five miles. It's not an easy trek. The pine needles on the ground must seem like enormous tree trunks to him. He drops the cheese when he hits these obstacles. He scouts ways around the obstacle and returns to the cheese. Over the needles he goes.

Then, when he thinks all is well, another ant meets up with him and tries to take the cheese away. So he now has to fight for what is his. He has dissuaded three other ants from stealing his cheese.

He is up on the side of the hill now, pushing and shoving his cheese to the entrance to the anthill. It's a super-ant struggle against the odds.

And it's a lesson for all of us. Never, ever, ever surrender. When you are knocked down, get back up and fight on.

Good ant. I suppose this falls under the category of stopping and smelling the roses. Another joy of retirement.

Sold and Sailing Away

Quiet Passage, that lovely boat that has carried us into retirement, has been sold.

They say the happiest days in a sailor's life is the day he buys the boat and the day he sells her. That's true for myriad reasons. We both have loved the adventures we experienced aboard Quiet Passage. She was a great little boat and she carried us comfortably for eight years. We traveled more than 15,000 miles aboard her sturdy hull. But it became more and more physically difficult to twist and turn in her tiny space to do the endless maintenance. When I had my back problems two years ago, I knew the writing was on the wall.

So the decision to sell her was one of necessity and little regret. Her new owner is from Alabama and plans to sail her down the Connecticut River in early September. Although we were not there for the sale, I have agreed to visit with the new owner and give him in-depth guidance about her systems for a day. The entire sale was handled via the Internet, although we did have to scurry around to find a notary public when it came time to sign the bills of sale.

In the meantime, we have found a gem of a campground, hidden in the Maine woods. We are eight miles from downtown Freeport, Maine, one of the busiest commercial centers in the state. This is the home of L.L. Bean, an enormous clothing and sports equipment enterprise.

We found Recompense Shore Camp Ground by chance. It is part of a farm that raises organic beef and vegetables and lies on the shores of Casco Bay. The place is quiet, with thick trees, many birds and a certain peacefulness. We can hear sheep and cattle calling out in the background.

We have parked here for four nights and used it as a base from which we can wander the coast of Maine and down to Portland.

Dancing with Eagles

The bald eagle hung in the sky over Sebasticook Lake in the heart of Maine. He peered down and could see the mother duck and her four ducklings. Yes. The ducklings were the perfect breakfast. He swooped and glided, his enormous wingspan leaving a shadow on the smooth water of the lake. The mother duck sensed the immediate danger. In some mystical way, she communicated to her brood. "Dive, Dive, Dive." That was her simple message. They did just as the eagle touched the water. Mom ducked under at the same moment. Her brood was safe.
The eagle flapped, lifted and pulled into the sky for another attack. He did this four more times as I sat by the window of our friend's home on the side of the lake. Four more times the duckling and mom dived under the water and the eagle had to lift off the water and soar again. He tired of these wily birds and climbed to 500 feet to reconnoiter before seeking another possible breakfast. It goes down, for me, as one of those lifetime moments. Delicious to see the much less powerful duck and her family figuring out by instinct or smarts just what needs to be done to stay alive.
Jo and I now are on the coast of Maine. This is home for us. We feel at peace surrounded by the craggy rocks, the seaweed, the wheeling seabirds, the fog, the people who are without sophistication but who endlessly exhibit honesty and straight forward commonsense.
We spent time with friends Bob and Rita Norling in Concord, New Hampshire, before climbing over the hills into Maine.
We stopped in Yarmouth, the home of the DeLorme map company. We use DeLorme on our computer to find our way through the various states. We have been experiencing some strange behavior in the computer with the software and I wanted to stop in and talk with a technical support person since I had not been able to resolve the issues via the Internet.
We spent an hour with a young man who was as perplexed as we are. We decided the problem centers on the new computer we have bought. It is the latest, greatest, and uses 64-bit technology. In trolling the Internet for others who have had problems we kept seeing that the 64-bit system seems to be the hangup. They assured me they are working on a patch for this. So we asked if we could stay in the parking lot for the night. No problem, the receptionist told me. "Just park at the back of the lot." We did and had a delightful night. As the darkness fell, I wandered over to the three-story front of the DeLorme building. The glass wall allows you to view Eartha, the world's largest free-standing globe. It is the building's centerpiece.
We parked the next couple of nights on the side of Sebasticook Lake, at friends Rick and Gayle's fabulous home. This is where we saw the eagle. And this is where we gain weight because Rick loves to cook. Every meal was a treat.
We moved Downeast, which is what the coast is called. We drove over to Southwest Harbor where we had spent many memorable weeks while sailing earlier. Now we parked our rig in the back parking lot of Wilbur Yachts, when former sailing friend Dave Larson works. We stayed with him and his wife Bena for a couple of nights and Bena outdid herself - again - by performing culinary delights, including roasted chicken that was slathered in yogurt and herbs. We had a spectacular honey and yogurt parfait laced with fresh strawberries on Saturday morning. Along with that there were muffins laced with salmon with cream cheese and capers. Mmmmm. Fabulous.
Now we have come down the coast and look across the water to Islesboro, one of our favorite places, standing out in Penobscot Bay. This is perhaps our favorite place to sail. Every yard is a new vista and is more breathtaking that the one before.
We feel so fortunate to be able to enjoy this beautiful place.

It's a different world

We are attending a rally of motorhome owners in Vermont. There are nearly 2,000 people milling around and living in their coaches in the evenings. It's a veritable town here, with wi-fi, some coaches have paid for water and electric. Others, like us, are living as though we are anchored on a boat away from the shore. We start our generator in the evening so we can watch TV or charge our cellphone or work the laptop to connect to the Internet.
The participants mostly have their bricks and mortar homes, unlike us. When they hear we are living aboard there is still that sense of surprise that we are so adventurous.
Coaches range from $20,000 to $2.1 million (only a few here are that expensive). The expensive ones have marble (real marble) floors, fans in the ceiling, bathtubs, king-size bed. It is VERY heavy and probably costs a fortune to drive. But, if you can afford the price of the coach, it's unlikely you are bothered by $4.50-a-gallon diesel fuel.
Jo and I sometime participate in seminars together and sometimes we split up and go our separate ways. I took in the electrical seminar in my endless search for understanding the mysteries of amps and current and voltage this morning while she was off creating stained-glass. Two nights back, we took a dinner cruise on Lake Champlain. We sat with a young couple and had a wonderful time swapping stories. We endlessly hear how envious people are that we are living aboard full-time. They always claim that's their goal but they have to work another five or 10 years. And we always tell them not to wait too long. This lifestyle is not for the feeble and infirm. It's for folks who believe in living out on the edge while they can.
I found a mechanic who specializes in stabilization issues on these coaches. The more we drive, the more we are aware of being rocked pretty badly when massive trucks pass us on the interstates. They push an invisible wall of air in front of their trucks and when that wall hits the coach we are pushed to the side and do some nerve-wracking roll-n-roll. The mechanic says he has the answer to our problems: a much-strengthened anti-swaybar and bushing system. So we asked is he could add it while we attended the rally. He said he didn't have one with him that would fit our coach. However, we have arranged to meet him in a parking lot in Danbury, Connecticut, in five weeks when he heads south after another rally. He said he'll bring the swaybar and bushings and will fix us in the parking lot. I had a hard time believing this but he assures me he hauls along a complete workshop and can do everything on the run. So we'll see how this adventure plays out.
Jo and I attended a line dancing class and had a great time until my bad knee gave out. But she kept on dancing. Afterwards, we joined daughter Stephanie and the family at a Vietnamese restaurant for a wonderful meal. We took the whole gang for a drive through the rally grounds so they could get an idea of the astonishing variety of motor coaches that currently are attending.
When we leave here on Sunday morning, our plan is to head southeast and visit with old friends in Concord, New Hampshire. Then we'll head for the coast of Maine.