The Great Annual Vacation

Yes, we had a holiday. This is the place we stayed in on Deer Isle, Maine (pictures here ). The little cabin is what we stayed in. The big house next door is what we would have liked to have stayed in. Anyway, we haven't had a vacation in several years. Last year, we just lived on Long Island. The year before that, we went to Wimberley for 5 days. Oh, joy. The year before that, we went to Maine, which we all loved, though Jesse possibly loved it less, as nature is not really her thing. This year, we resolved to go again to Maine, grateful that we could drive somewhere nice from our new home. From Austin Texas, if you're driving, you can suffer for many, many hours while trying to flee the big unshielded nuclear reactor in the sky. Or you can go a short way and tell yourself that you really do like Port Aransas. I had grown to dislike both options.

So we packed the wagon and headed out. I’m sure our next-door neighbor regrets the arrival of Texans on her street. Leaving for our trip to Maine involved lots of shouting in outside voices from the back-door to the garage. At 5.30 AM. On a Saturday morning. In Texas, on any morning of the year practically, you can be confident of closed windows and the buzzing air-conditioners to drown out every sound of nature. Not so in New York. I belatedly tried to quiet us down when I noticed our neighbor’s cracked windows. I expect a lynching upon our return.

Fortunately, Mike the Half-Scot did most of the driving on what became an eleven hour day given all the stops. I say this is fortunate, because I was coming off some evil drug that my indifferent oncologist had put me on, saying that it might help with hot-flashes. The drug is in fact an anti-depressant and as is my luck with at least half of the drugs I take, it just made me sleepy and dopey and incapable of finishing a sentence. I hated myself on it. Withdrawal made me sleepier still. So I pretty much stayed passed out for the most of the journey, alert enough to listen to a reading of “The Code of the Woosters” over the stereo. The P.G. Wodehouse dialog has infected our speech somewhat, a fact that Jesse despises, eh, what?

Due to the fact that freeways are a decent distance from towns in the Northeast, we had to stop at roadway services several times, to eat whatever bilge was on offer. A true foodie would, I guess, pack a plastic container with a salad of smoked mussels and some slices of Pepperidge Farm at least. But I eat the bilge: powdered sugar doughnuts, Popeye’s biscuits. The memories of family holidays when I was a kid, when my mother was determined to wring every last dime out of every last meal, are not ones I treasure. My mum is probably the only woman on record who actually tried to vacations revenue neutral. Drop your standard of living far enough, she reasoned, and you can almost make money on the deal. Her own mother was no different and was always advocating we stay in whatever Crack Den Motel she could spot from the highway, the kind that always have cards left in the lobby from the local 'massage therapists', who would have

the oddest names: Busty Swallow and Purdy Haught.

Once we got across the Maine border, I took over the drive for most of the rest of the way, to a cabin I’d rented on Deer Isle, a wee island, accessible by causeway, that John Steinbeck wrote about in Charley and Me. The cabin was the only place in our price range that had a view of Frenchman’s Bay. I fancied hearing the waves at night.

But I had heard some whisperings of doom. The New York Times had only recently featured an article about great vacation rentals rip-offs. One family found their rental to be over-run with mice and mice droppings. Another family found their picturesque Maine lake to be infested with leeches. To organize a rental, I’ve always gone through agencies that specialize in holiday lets. Such agencies ensure that the cabin or house is cleaned once a week and is stocked with linens and the other basics. The last place we’d rented in Maine, three years ago, was lovely and comfortable. But the NYT article made me wonder if my luck was about to change.

We dutifully followed the instructions for finding the place, admiring the view of Deer Isle’s woods and coastline. I was gratified to find that ‘the yacht club’ our cabin was said to be near looked more like "the sloop and dinghy club". After passing this very modest harbor, the instructions for finding the cabin went a little haywire. We could see woods, trees, unpaved tracks and the main-road itself. Few actual houses were visible in the forest. There were few signs or helpful numbers. We checked for cell-phone service, so we could call the agency, but all our phones were dead. Finally, Mike parked at the marina, and advised Jesse and I to walk out on the dock, glance back to the shoreline and see if we could see our intended rental from there. We did this, and got a nice view of more rocks and birds and a house that was clearly not the one we’d paid for. I could think of nothing else to do but to walk back along the road and hope to see a helpful sign, stuck somewhere in the trees.

On foot, I spotted a tiny, well-concealed sign that had the numbers 303, at the head of one of the unpaved driveways. I walked the several hundred feet down the driveway and saw a red house the same as the picture we were given, a picture of the house next to the cabin we would rent, and the cabin itself. I groaned a little. The house was awfully close to the cabin, and clearly someone was staying in it. We would have neighbors, something the brochure had failed to mention. But I had even greater concern regarding the condition of the driveway where we’d have to bring our car. Recent, heavy rain had turned the drive into a mud wallow suitable for hippos. Or Honda Accords. The good news was the view of the sea, evident from the track where I was standing. It was everything the agency had promised. It was classic Maine coastline, rocky, with a tree-line meeting the shore-line, complete with mists and islets in the distance.

I trudged back to the marina and to Mike and Jesse, still waiting in the car. Of course, I told Mike to park the car near the mouth of the drive-way, well up above the car-eating mud-wallow. He pished and toshed, saying that he could get past that mud easily. Which he did. Only to discover that what looked like solid ground a few feet further on was just more mud deceptively covered in grass and heather. About twenty feet from the house, we were well and truly stuck, our wheels spinning like roulette-tables.

We got out and knocked on the door of the main house, hoping that we could be directed to some planks that we might be able to use make a tractable surface underneath the wheels. The lady who answered our knock was in fact the owner of the property and she looked mortified at the sight of our car. Her own car was parked a few feet away, but seemed to be on more solid ground. It had been, she explained, an awful summer thus far. Alison, as her name was, explained that she would shortly be joined by another woman, a local who was abandoning her own house, because recent rains had merged the septic with the well. She told Mike where to find the kind of planks he was looking for and while he busied himself with what I was sure would be the impossible task of getting our car out of the mud, Alison showed me around the cabin.

The log cabin turned out to be charming though not excessively maintained. You could see tiny shards of daylight between some of the logs, suggesting it might be wise to pray for higher temperatures. The place was cheerful, somehow: rustic but sturdy. The furniture did not look as firm or as comforting at the house: rickety wicker and Indian prints like you haven't seen since 1970 were the theme (I had few hopes for a soft bed and later that night I found I was over-optimistic). The house came with quirks that Alison listed off as she showed me around, chief among them a fireplace that, she promised, was a bit smoky until it gets going.

Downstairs the cabin had 3 rooms: a tiny bathroom, a small kitchen and a sitting room with the hearth and a view of the sea. A flight of stairs, the kind of hand-crafted, uneven stairs that weekend-carpenters throw together without a ruler, took us up to the sleeping loft above. The loft was all one room, with twin

beds overlooking the sea at one end and the marital bed at the other. Later, I would stress to Mike how important a life of the mind is.

I went back out to the car, certain that we would now have an hours’ long wait for a wrecking service to come tow us out of the mud. Mike had managed to cram a number of planks under the front wheels and was ready to make an attempt to spin out of the muck. He got in and with little hope I watched him gun the engine. But incredibly, the car budged an inch and with Alison and I pushing against the front hood, it came free. Mike parked our car a little closer to the solid ground that Alison’s was sitting on.

We got our stuff -- too much -- admiring the view from the window as we moved in.

Once moved in, I turned on the tap, ready to start the water for pasta. The water was murky, with a strange grassy color. It smelled like mold. I had forgotten the cardinal rule of all self-catering holidays: bring bottled water! And so while Jesse and Mike stayed in the cabin, I trudged back to the car and set the GPS to take me to Stonington, Deer Isle’s only burg. There, I found a fairly crummy market. I bought water and returned to make pasta with scallops in a gorgonzola sauce (recipe: boil pasta; simmer cream plus gorgo plus scallops; toss and serve!). We built a fire and chatted, enchanted, as logs turned to coals, then embers.

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On Day Two, we spent the morning on the beach outside the cabin, skipping stones and poring over the sea life in tide pools. Jesse, though a little put out at the lack of cell phone service (and don’t even think about a wireless), accepted various lessons from her dad without much grumbling. She worked on her stone skipping technique. With the seaside ramblings and the prolonged breakfast and having to take showers or cat-baths one at a time (given the water quality, I wasn’t confident about whole-body exposure to a shower) , it was noon before we got into the car and drove to Stonington.

I wasn’t sure what to expect with Deer Isle’s one burg. I’d heard that it wasn’t nearly as touristy as Bar Harbor, and this indeed was a fact. But I can't shake some expectations that Britain cursed me with. I still expect even a semi-touristy place to have a green grocer, a butcher, a bakery, a pub. Certainly, in a town where the harbor is choked with real fishing boats, I expect a fish-monger on the main drag, instead of a short drive out of town. Stonington's focus was art galleries: fine if you can afford any, but even if I did have 5K just sloshing around, I'd buy a painting or two from this amazing painter: Dan Thibodeau. Still, the town was very pretty, with many 19^th century houses on the hillside overlooking the harbor. We wondered around, bought sweaters and lobster rolls and ice-cream. Every twenty paces, we’d stop and check for cell-phone service, never finding any. But you do see sweet and homey sights like the one that follows

The best part of Day One was the final goodnight from Jesse. We’ve had our difficulties in the last few weeks. Being resentful and sulky has been the one way she’s had of paying us back for breaking her heart by taking her from the close and very high-quality friends she had in Austin. At first, my own heart broken by her hostility, I responded with my own resentments towards her. Eventually, at Mike’s suggestion, we tried a conscious approach of extreme kindness and negotiation. Everything that she proposed, we decided, we would start treating as if it came from an adult who had legitimate concerns. This may sound like a fancy way of saying that we caved, giving in to her every whim, but that’s not quite what went on. We started treating her like a sweetly reasonable person. Slowly, she became a little nicer towards us, a little more inclined to accept a hug.

The reward last night was when she visited as me I was reading in bed, about to fall asleep. I guess it’s been months since she stopped insisting on being formally put to bed each night, a ritual I’ve sorely missed. It was lovely to have her come visit, accept a long back rub, and just show that she wanted to be in my physical presence still. Whatever happens, I’m still her mom.

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In my quest to avoid becoming too much like my mother, and because I desperately need the rest after a year or turmoil and a month of hard-labor, schlepping boxes until my hands were chapped, I’ve pretty much boycotted cleaning up or tidying up the cabin. Which means that it stays in a state of chaos. We do barely manage to get the dishes washed after what meals we do cook, but clothes are strewn everywhere. Books are hither and thither. Ipods and Iphones mingle in a heap of charging cables.

You’d think this would just cause mass confusion, but the cabin is small enough that the logistics of sloppiness are not too troublesome. If object A is not in Spot B, then Spot C is never far away. Clearly, tidying up as a life strategy is over-rated.

We’ve taken what walks we could around Deer Isle. These are short and not very demanding, which suits Jesse fine. We also found ourselves drawn back to Bar Harbor and the excellent free busses that shuttle tourists around Mt. Desert Island, the large island where the Acadia National Forest is mainly located. The coast of Maine is spectacular here: craggy gray cliffs and tall pines hug the shoreline. The breezes keep the mosquitoes at bay and various sailing craft zig-zag across Frenchman’s Bay.

Possibly the best afternoon we’ve had was on a 70-year-old sailing ship, the Mary C. Lore. She’d been fitted out with limited engines to get her to and from the dock, but her sails and other equipment -- she’s a two-masted schooner -- are unchanged from the day she was built. The 3-hour voyage gave us landlubbers a chance to watch the basics of getting a ship under-sail.

And since it really takes a fair number of hands to raise those heavy sails, we were enlisted in working with the deck-hands. This involved one of the crew setting a rhythm -- “Now One, Now Two!” -- while the assembled neophytes tugged away at ropes as ordered. In about 15 minutes, all three sails were raised. As I told Jesse, such physically demanding action really increases your respect for Jack Sparrow.

After the sailing excursion, we went to dinner at the Pilgrim’s Inn, an 19^th century building on Deer Island that I failed to photograph because, like so many fine buildings in New England, you can’t photograph it without the picture being cut to pieces by the criss-crossing power and phone cables that line every street here. It’s maddening.

But the food was terrific both times we’ve been there. I always find in Maine that nothing beats boiled lobster: succulent and warm, it slides down your throat. The other great joy in Maine, I’ve discovered, is a locally distilled vodka, infused with blueberries. The blueberry edge was perfect. And the Pilgrim’s Inn makes the best Sticky Toffee Pudding I’ve had outside of England. Thank god for the hot-flashes or I’d be gaining five pounds this vacation.

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After the rest, the restlessness. On Day Four we laid around the cabin and read books and played Scramble and skipped stones. On Day Five, a thick pea souper settled in. You could see the bench out in the front yard, but that was about it. So we could lay around another day or we could cut our 9 hour journey in half and perhaps sleep in a bed that was comfortable and was next to a shower that actually dispensed clean hot water. Maybe a bath would be possible! I wondered aloud if we should head back a day early. I wondered aloud about this several times, then when challenged by Mike to explain myself, I said that I was, you know, just kidding. "I want, want to stay another day," I insisted. Mike confessed that he'd like to go a day early. His books were calling.

So we packed up and parted company with Alison, the owner. She asked what could be done to make the place more comfortable, hoping, obviously, to be given a list where no item required more than thirty bob to be addressed. I'd glimpsed into the 'big house' a few times (nosiness is in the blood, I'm afraid) and noted that despite the house's bigger windows and more capacious deck, the furniture was the same lump-pillowed wicker that we'd been trying to get comfortable in. Clearly, unless you have real money in these parts, you shut the cottages down in the winter. This means you either ship your good furniture into dehumidified storage, or you only keep furnishings that you can afford to sacrifice to mold and damp. Too many more experiences like that and I'll start to understand why some people just give up and rent a camper. At least the bed will be something they can sleep on.

On the way back, we stayed in a Holiday Inn in Woburn, MA. The water was not a grassy color, but it was sort of reddish. What is going on in the northeast? But I assumed there were no health risks, so I happily wallowed in a long, hot bath, mentally planning the next year's holiday, which we're hoping will be in Britain if the money goes right. If we do that, I need to start working, now, on loosing the seven pounds I will surely gain back.

More pickies below, for those who don't want to go over to the website.

The Double-Chinned Devil and Me

Actually, I'd planned to talk about Yankees, and how nice they've been to us, but before I do that, let me wander off into the weeds a bit, the weeds of last week. It was both horribly busy and a time for reflection.

First, the busy part. Last week started with me in an enormous fabric warehouse where I excitedly bought bolt after bolt for the drapes I intend to make. What's truly horrible is that I've had no time to make even one cut into all this fabric. All that yardage is still waiting, hungry to be cut and sewn and hung well (no jokes, please). For a whole month, we've had only drop cloths strewn from the windows. I don't know how much longer I can stand it.

And what fabric I have bought is only enough for a couple of rooms. It seems we're in this New House Death Spiral, where we can't settle on fabric and paint colors until we have a clearer idea of the furniture we have to buy (Seven Layers of Design and all that) and we can't be sure how much furniture is required until we can determine how much stuff can be squared away into the attic and basement. And we can't put stuff away until the handyman nails down more sub-flooring in the attic and the dehumidifier guy makes the basement safe for stuff. Supposedly, those guys start tomorrow but they've thus far displayed a very casual attitude towards returning my phone calls.

So that was the busy part of the week. The reflective part began when I went to the oncologist's for my quarterly check-up and saw that I'd lost another pound. I wanted to pat myself on the back but really it's just the tamoxifen sparking all those hot-flashes. All that burning heat has to cost the body something. If the truth were known, I'm now eating like a horse, because my estrogen levels are dropping far faster than my testosterone levels. More male hormone. More hunger. More lunch!

But my weight keeps dropping and that latest pound to fall off is just one more in the downward trajectory from the 177 pounds I weighed seven years ago and the 140 pounds I weigh now. The picture at left is one of me at my fattest (memo to Universal Heart-Mind: I want that cute little four-year-old back).

I used to attribute this downward slide in weight to the fact that I was getting on my bike and riding more. Some weeks, I rode a lot. And there can be no doubt that all that exercise earned me a few pounds, here and there. But while I was applauding my hard work and self control, I was forgetting that the same weight drop had happened to my dad. Over twenty years, but beginning with a big push in his early 40s, he went from being a big, schlubby guy to a spry, slender fellow, resembling his own father in late middle age. Looked at another way, my weight drop simply happened right on schedule.

Not long after I joined a breast cancer survivor's group, I found myself helplessly drawn to Gina Kolata's book, Rethinking Thin. The women in my group were all wonderful but when they talked about eating blueberries and broccoli and drinking herbal teas, I had images of a kid at the batter's plate, nervously rubbing his lucky rabbit's foot. Sure, you want to make healthy substitutions in your diet. Sure, you want to live by Michael Pollan's brilliant eight words: "Eat Food. Not too Much. Mostly Plants." But a tumor, like your body, has genes, and will largely do what it was programmed to do.

But we all want that magic bullet, that tablespoon of bran that will make the cancer or the fat or the bad skin go away. Kolata shows that the strongest determinant of your weight is your biological parent's weight. Take the infant of obese parents and raise him/her in a family of normal-weight people and the chances are he'll still be a well-upholstered man. Even adoption by the Schwarzeneggers won't re-write his basic genetic script.

So if it's all in the genes, why are Americans getting fatter? Kolata argues that what few good studies we have on the subject of the nation's weight gain show that Americans are getting larger by an average of 5-7 pounds. That's not much. And it's anyone's guess as to what the causes may be. You could just as easily claim, she would argue, that the gain is attributable to the same forces that has caused us to gain height and IQ points in the last 70 years. Some researchers think that our biology is responding to vastly improved maternal health with a slight increase in a number of markers, weight being one of them. Every time researchers set out to prove that the national girth has some distinct cause in food or exercise habits, they've come up bust. Americans are, on average, eating more healthily than they did 30 years ago. And still they get fatter. The cause could be too large portions, or too much exposure to the same, simple molecule that makes up corn syrup, or too much desk-work -- but no one really knows.

Meanwhile, as Kolata forcefully demonstrates, few endeavors are less successful than dieting. But that doesn't stop billions from being made in the fitness and supplement industry. Academic institutes and back-street charlatans alike all make a fat pile of cash off of their respective projects, be it institute-based research or the concoction of snake oil. Despite all the self-denial and micro-measuring, fewer than a handful of people out of a hundred will make any lasting changes in their weight because of a diet.

Why is dieting so fruitless? Maybe if we thought about the problem in terms of the inherited condition of height, the answer would be easier to see. Let us imagine that our species had taken a slightly different path way back in evolutionary time. Let us imagine that our heights can be modified and that we value tallness. And so an industry has developed in this alternate history, one we'll call Torture, Inc. Everyday, you can go to one of Torture's plushly appointed salons and rack up some time on the rack. Some people, a tiny handful, would have a high pain threshold and they can spend hours getting stretched. Most others can only manage a few minutes. In this alternate history, perhaps we'd be inclined to understand height and pain thresholds as biological features you're simply stuck with. We would perhaps be less likely to praise the tiny number of giants and disparage the great majority of hobbits. Both groups would be understood as simply the inheritors of a cluster of chemical processes that determine an individual's pain threshold.

The weight range you're stuck with really isn't so different from the height you're stuck with. Every human comes complete with a set of biochemical processes that indicate satiety, that burn fat, that ramp metabolic rate down or up. There isn't much you can do to affect these processes. One of the great lies of the fitness industry is the lie that if you were leaner, you'd burn more calories. In fact, if you take a fit 150 lb chap and have him gain a kilo of muscle by working like the devil in the gym for six weeks, he will burn -- wait for it -- 20 more calories per day. Your muscles at rest burn less than your brain and liver combined. That weight-training fiend, if all he was after was an increased burn rate, would have been better off just taking a brisk walk around the block every evening.

The ability to modify an inherited condition, like one's natural weight range, is simply going to vary across the population. As someone who lost 30 plus pounds and has kept it off, I don't want to be pointed to as an example of what profound self-control can do for you. Sure, the cycling and the moderation in diet helped, but without those two measures, the chances are I still would have dropped 20 pounds, right on schedule.

Now, was I going to say something about Yankees? It has to be noted that in this neighborhood we've been visited 3 or 4 times, invited over for dinner twice, and are frequently flagged down for a bit of a chat. If they're any unfriendlier than Texans, I've yet to notice it. It's true that their style of speech can be off-putting to a southerner. They think that by interrupting you, that they're just urging on the conversation. Or perhaps I just ramble on too much, and they can be forgiven for getting impatient?

Possibly. I'm going to munch on a cup of blueberries while I think about it.