Monthly Archives: November 2007

Farewell party

Carol has rented an office space on Fish Island here in New Bedford, so she has a place to show the composting toilets she imports from Sweden. The office is in a small building that sits just a few feet from the water, so Carol has a phenomenal view of the working waterfront: barges, tugboats, and other boats are often moored right outside her windows, and she has an amazing view of the waterfront from Kelley’s boatyard on the Fairhaven side, to Palmer Island lighthouse, to the ferry terminal on the New Bedford side. Because of the fantastic view, we’ve taken to calling the office the Fish Island Yacht Club.

Tonight, the Fish Island Yacht Club (FIYC) hosted the farewell party for Tugboat Captain John, who will be heading back to Haiti on Tuesday at the helm of the tugboat Chicopee. As the official chaplain of FIYC, I blessed Captain John’s journey, calling for smooth waters and fair winds all the way through the Caribbean. There were toasts, of course — another member of the Chicopee’s crew offered a toast, and one or two of John’s landlocked friends in New Bedford offered toasts.

After the toasts, John said in his singsong cadence, “I’ve been here four — no! four and a half months. I walked up today into New Bedford, and looked at how beautiful it was — the trees, all yellow.” Conrad from the salvage yard, who moved up here from the islands twenty years ago, said, “If you stayed for winter, mon, you wouldn’t think it was so pretty!” We all told John that he was leaving at the best time of year, when New England is at its prettiest, before it gets cold and miserable. “No,” he said, “I wish I came up here now, and stayed for four and a half months over the winter.” We all got kind of quiet at that; we’re going to miss Captain John.

Anyway, Annie, who owns the building up the street from us, gave John a big hug. Davison cooked up grilled vegetables and salmon and sausages on the grill. Mystic, who works on a swordfish boat, said he wished he had brought over some swordfish, but there was too much food as it was. John got in a long conversation with Dave, who works at the sewage treatment plant, while the rest of us stood outside on the deck watching the harbor change color as the sun set and the sky grew dark.

Farewell, Captain John; and I mean it about the smooth waters and fair winds.

Hurricane season

The weather wasn’t nearly as wild as it could have been. The National Weather Service had warned that Hurricane Noel could bring winds gusting up to 70 miles per hour, but here in New Bedford the wind gusts never got above 39 miles per hour — enough to bring down small branches and tear some flags to shreds, but really not all that bad. And the National Weather Service had warned of the possibility of thunderstorms with heavy rains and a total accumulation of two to four inches, but so far we haven’t even gotten an inch of rain since yesterday.

I stayed in most of the day because of the severe weather warnings. I didn’t take my usual hour-long walk. The barometer kept dropping, down to 992 millibars, and my bones ached. By the end of the day I was feeling so cranky and antsy that this evening I actually lifted weights. I hate lifting weights, but after I was done I felt much better. But oh, how I wished I had taken a walk this afternoon, instead of believing the weather forecasters and their dire predictions.

I was still cursing myself for being stupid enough to listen to the weather forecasts when I checked the weather observations for Nantucket, just fifty miles east of here. The weather station on Nantucket recorded wind gusts of over 70 miles per hour (that’s hurricane force) with steady winds above 50 miles per hour, and they’ve had over three inches of rain so far. It wouldn’t have taken much — just a little twitch in the hurricane’s track — for that wind and rain to have hit here.

Friday video: Peace rally

Last Saturday (27 October), I went to the New England Mobilization To End the War in Iraq. It felt — strange. Very 1960’s, and not necessarily in a good way. Ranting through megaphones, hippies, people curiously dressed. Blah.

There was at least one speaker who inspired me, however…. (2:32)

The fellow who inspired me, who is featured at the end of the videoblog post above, is actually from the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. Unfortunately, I didn’t catch his name. His positive, humane vision stood out among all the shrill-voiced “We’ve got to stop the killing now!” and “No more blood for oil!”

And I don’t want to trash the entire peace movement. Last year’s Christian Peace Witness for Iraq felt meaningful (and they’re already planning another one for March 8th, assuming that the United States is still in Iraq). I like some of what the Quakers are doing. But the old-fashioned 1960’s-style peace rallies have got to go.

(Happy birthdays,Abs!)

Note: video host blip.tv is defunct, so this video no longer exists.

Autumn watch

I had to go to the gum doctor again today for another check-up, and on the way back I stopped at Verrill Farm, the farmstand Carol and I used to shop at when we lived down the street from it. They still have lots of fresh local fruits and vegetables: butternut squash, Hubbard squash (big and blue and warty), acorn squash; bags of curly spinach, and bunches of lacinto kale and curly-leaf kale; a few last tomatoes; parsnips (creamy white gnarled roots tied in neat bunches with the greens still attached), carrots (long gloriously orange blunt-tipped ones, and crookedy pointed yellow ones); Jerusalem artichokes; Brussels sprouts; bright bunches of red radishes and red-and-white radishes with rounded green leaves; Yukon gold potatoes, little wooden boxes of expensive German fingerling potatoes, Green Mountain potatoes (oddly-shaped with deep eyes), red potatoes, big long Russet potatoes; big yellow rutabagas, and this year they’re growing the white Macomber turnips that originated down here in Westport; and of course there are the native apples: McIntoshes, Spencers, Empires, Macouns, and Cortlands (although they had none of the older varieties that keep better and cook better).

As I picked up a box of Jerusalem artichokes, a woman asked me if you had to peel them before she cooked them, adding, “They look like they would be difficult to peel, they’re so small.” I said that I peeled them and ate them raw, but I knew some people ate them with the skins on. “What do they taste like?” I said they tasted nutty and, well, good. She was about to ask me something else when one of the cashiers who has worked there for years overheard our conversation, ignored me, bustled up to her and said, “You’ll love them, one of my customers doesn’t peel them, she just gently scrubs them and cooks them.” “Gently scrubs — you mean like mushrooms?” “Yes, just like that,” said the officious cashier, who obviously knew nothing about Jerusalem artichokes. Jerusalem artichokes are nothing at all like mushrooms: you do not wash them like mushrooms, you do not prepare them like mushrooms, and they do not taste like mushrooms. Under the cashier’s onslaught, the other woman put the box of Jerusalem artichokes in her shopping basket, and slunk away.

That officious cashier made the sale, but I wonder how happy that woman will be with her purchase. Scrub them gently? If she doesn’t want to peel them, she’d be better off scrubbing the hell out of them, then trimming off the unappetizing bits. Mostly, we North Americans eat a very limited number of foodstuffs these days, and most of the food we eat comes out of plastic containers or cardboard boxes. It’s hard to change the habits embedded in us by all that prepared food. You can’t change those habits by telling someone Jerusalem artichokes are “like mushrooms.” Tell them that Jerusalem artichokes are a gustatory adventure, like nothing they’ve ever tried before: nutty, sweet, with a lovely crunchy texture when you eat them raw. Tell them the truth about the food they’ve never eaten, and maybe they’ll be too intimidated to buy it this time, but you will have planted a seed in their imaginations, and they will realize that there’s a whole world of food out there that they haven’t tried — a whole world of local food that they have been shut out of because, for all the immense floor space, supermarkets actually have very little variety.

As for me, I bought a big bag of Cortland apples, ten pounds of orange carrots (which taste nothing like the California carrots you get in the supermarket), Brussels sprouts, ten pounds of Green Mountain potatoes (which are firmer, whiter, and taste different than the limp potatoes you get in the supermarket), lacinto kale, and some of that late-fall spinach (which tastes different from the plastic-wrapped spinach you get in the supermarket because of the soil and the weather, and because it’s much fresher). I also got some Jerusalem artichokes. I think I’ll go eat one right now: peel it, and bite into it raw.