Jumping

Maine’s heat wave broke. We were lucky that Mt. Battie, which lies northwest of Camden diverter the severe thunderstorms. There was a little rain and a lot of black clouds and distant thunder but the worst skirted by. More importantly, we did benefit from its cooling effect.

It was time for Carrie Rose, our 32’ Nordic Tug, to leave Camden. The first anchorage, Barred Island, was ruled out due to exposure to the NE winds that were to predominate for the next few days. Sir Tugley Blue, our cruising companions, suggested a well protected unnamed bay between Holbrook Island and Smith Cove, so off we went on an 18 nautical mile cruise northeast on East Penobscot Bay. 

 

The bay is approximately one mile from Castine. Castine is on the swift flowing (especially in an ebb tide) Bagaduce River, which is in reality a tidal estuary. It is a classy village and is home to the Maine Maritime Academy. Their large training ship, the State of Maine, cannot be missed.

 

Castine’s European history begins in 1604 and ends with the British leaving in 1815. Between those years, it was fought over by the French, British, Dutch, and Americans. For its remote location Castine has been the site of many battles including America’s largest loss of life in one battle before Pearl Harbor (474 men) during the ill fated Penobscot Expedition of 1779.

 

The turn from East Penobscot Bay is between the northern tip of Holbrook Island and Can “1A”, which protected Carrie Rose’s bottom from the barely submerged Nautilus Rock.

 

As an aside, cans are always green and nuns and always red. Occasionally, there are multicolored buoys, which usually demarcate a junction on the watery road of life. One such buoy, the red and white “CH” (it also has a bell) exists just north of us at the junction of the Bagaduce River and East Penobscot Bay.

 

Once past the entrance, the bay opens up, and I noticed many grey mottled black heads and noses of the local seals. They are most often solitary creatures but not here. I even saw one with a large silver fish in its mouth, a first.  

 

We motored straight in and set the anchor on the 17 foot mark on the chart. The tide eventually lifted us to 29 feet and in anticipation of this I had let out 110 feet of chain. Dave, from Sir Tugley Blue, came by on his dingy to invite us for dinner and to discuss the coming rainy days strategy. As I grabbed his line, a large bald eagle soared past us and perched onto a small shorelines tree.

 

The surface of the bay came alive with jumping fish that were no doubt being chased by the legion of seals. And then to starboard a pair of dorsal fins appeared, one smaller than the other. They surfaced several times always next to each other leading me to conjecture that they were mother and baby spending a pleasant afternoon gorging on the plentiful fish.

 

Charlotte and I took the dingy to the granite gravel beach for a walk and on the way passed close under the eye of the eagle. The beach is on an isthmus between our unnamed bay and Smith Cove. The dinghy’s varnished wood bottom scratched as we dragged it up on the beach. The flood tide is relentless and soon the dingy was floating again, so we took the hint and motored back to Carrie Rose. 

 

Now we had seen eagles, seal, osprey, porpoises collectively feeding on the jumping fish, so Charlotte named our unnamed bay, Jumping Fish Bay, a wholly appropriate name. 

July 2021   

 

               

 

Frantic

Prior to Covid I had an active social life: visits with friends and family, music venues of all types, restaurants to try, art exhibits and movies, music lessons, travel, small boat cruising, etc., etc. And then there was the tea ceremony world: lessons, demonstration, making and procuring tea ware, and always the next event or anniversary celebration and trip to Japan. When I look back at it some 18 months later, it was frantic.

 

Frantic is an odd word. It derives from the Middle English “frenetik” which means temporarily deranged, delirious. In my medical practice, I came to understand that a delirious patient was not long for this world. It is hard to put that in the context of the above activities. 

 

Chado (The Way of Tea) and the Zen Buddhism it stems from is about living in the moment. This moment will never come again. Experience it to the fullest, forget about the result of your labors and perform each gesture with mindfulness, and only then will tea be made and served to your guest with the potential of enlightenment.

 

Of course, this image of chanoyu as a quiet but intense spiritual practice belies the frantic preparation that takes place seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months before the tea is whisked and presented to the guest. New tea students, after being drawn into tea by a stirring demonstration, are often perplexed to find that much of the training entails the mizuya, the kitchen.

 

I suppose it is the same for my musical pursuit of the shakuhachi. The first introduction to playing is folk and children’s songs. They are short, just a few lines of characters long. The tempo is straightforward. The tune is recognizable and even cute as opposed to the heady repertoire later encountered.

 

There is a frantic rush, mainly on the student’s side, to progress. To discover and delve into the esoteric world of komuso monks freely wandering the countryside totally devoted to the music (with maybe a little spying on the side) and to nature. 

 

This may be fanciful, but I have heard that certain groups of shakuhachi players only play one tune in their search for the truth. I find this hard to fathom as my book of sheet music becomes thicker. 

 

The past non-frantic year gave me time to rethink the value of my chanoyu and shakuhachi practice, and more fundamentally, of how I live my life. 

 

In chanoyu, there is ryaku-bon, the simplest preparation of tea. The utensils used fit on a small tray allowing tea to be made anywhere at any time. In shakuhachi, close equivalents are the doyo, children’s songs, and the minyo, folk tunes. Both the above provide examples of how to live a simpler post pandemic life.

 

I appreciate the pie-in-the-sky aspect of this. I am not a mendicant monk living in a wilderness temple making tea and blowing sounds into an ancient forest. I am a Chicagoan who in the future will endeavor to be not quite so delirious, so frenetic. Wish me luck!

June 2021