Category: Barnaby’s Blog

These musings are contributed by Coastal Rivers Trustee Barnaby Porter. Many were written years ago. We are grateful to have them!

In trying times like these, when folks are feeling burdened with worry and seemingly unrelenting tales of woe, a bit of good news out of the blue can happily become very welcome and refreshing GOOD NEWS, no matter how tiny a tidbit it is. Well, the most recent edition of the Bow Wave News contained a short piece on an important decision made by none other than the Coastal Canine Club.

While there has been a clear consensus of opinion that the matter in question was long overdue for serious consideration, it has finally been given, and there appears to be cause for modest celebration.

It’s been a good year for acorns, phenomenal, judging from the amount of mast on ground. All day and all night I hear acorns dropping on the barn’s tin roof, on the woodshed, on the hood of my truck, on the porch deck, bouncing off tree limbs, tearing through leaves, landing in puddles and pebbling the ground – whack, clank, bonk, bop, boink. Not only have I never seen so many acorns, I’ve never heard so many either. They’ve been dropping for weeks now, and it’s not over yet. (…)

I’m a country boy, plain and simple. Except for occasional forays into the city, I’ve spent virtually all of my life surrounded by green grass and woods and water, and, for the most part, I’ve stayed within two stories of Mother Earth.

But I did live in the city once – Portland, Maine; my wife, Susan, and I did, for seven months. It was rather rustic for city living though. We had trouble finding a place to rent and so ended up on the top floor of an old townhouse, which could only be reached by a winding ascent up a rickety old stairway with wiggly banisters. (…)

My general use of the word “river” when speaking of the Damariscotta should not limit the reader’s interpretation and imagination to thinking that by that term I’m referring merely to the wide ribbon of water that courses past. For me, this river is rather a super-organism, in the same sense as the school that sees planet Earth—the sum of all its parts, plant, animal, and mineral, and the stabilizing interaction of all its natural systems—as one, large planetary organism.

Similarly, a “river,” by rights, breaches the bookish definition by encompassing all that it influences, by throbbing with the pulse of its whole, by having its character (…)

We’ve been having a little trouble out on the badminton court lately; the games have been getting a bit rowdy, and today’s equipment just doesn’t seem to stand up to our brand of badminton. The rackets are bending, the strings are snapping, and the shuttlecocks, or birdies, are either getting stuck in the racket strings or their little red rubber tips are falling off and getting walloped into the woods. It kind of breaks up the pace of the game when you have to keep stopping to fix stuff, and that’s no good when we have a ripsnorter going after supper on a mosquitoey evening. (…)

There has been a preponderance of flattened out rodents on the roads of late. Some are brown, some are gray, and some have quills, but they are all quite flat. It’s too bad. My suspicion is that, in their buck-toothed way, they are all victims of a spring wanderlust that is quite possibly connected to another kind of lust. (…)

I was talking on the phone with a book editor about a popular columnist who has written several books. “Oh, he’s good,” she said. “Everyone seems to like this his stuff, but God I wish he’d write about something else besides his damned dog!”

As I nodded stupidly in agreement, I was thinking, “You’d better overhaul your subject-selection process, Buster. Dogs aren’t a safe subject anymore.” And I wondered if that applied to kids as well. The two areas I have always thought of as “safe” were “Dogs” and “Kids.” With an idle remark, this professional shook my confidence in what had been a happily simple formula, and I have had to think it out.

There was a time when it was not at all uncommon to see kids chasing around after robins with saltshakers. At least that was the case in our yard. A lot of the kids I knew used to chase robins. All of us who did it were believers in the practice. All of us who tried threw our hearts into it on the best advice of those who presumably knew – our mothers.

Oh, they knew all right. Those were the days before anyone watched much television (if they even had one), when parents still had some influence on how kids wasted their time.

Waiting for spring to come is in many ways similar to watching a pot put on to boil. There’s the long period of finger drumming, of looking and listening for sure signs that something’s happening. But spring itself is more like the cat at the door; it’ll come in when it’s good and ready and not a minute sooner. You can stand there half your life holding the door open. Long waits can get pretty maddening though, and many’s the cat who’s had a door slammed in its face for taking too long.

About the full of the Moon, it is reported more babies are born than during the rest of the month. Dogs and werewolves have a glint in their eye and howl a lot. The tides swell to their maximum. Storms blow harder than ever, and cold weather streams down upon us with a vengeance. The full of the Moon is the time for extremes. At least on average that is what the records show. I have to agree it certainly seems so to me.
But one can wonder if what we interpret as extremes of weather and strange events are really that. Ringed as we are by “artificial” horizons, the trees and the hills and built-up skylines, I believe our perspective is foreshortened somewhat. Our lives are governed in large by our local circumstances – that old “can’t see the forest for the trees” effect. (…)