Long weekend
Along with several thousand other people in or close to my line of work, my three days off were clouded by the decision of our favourite Federal agency to release an important document the afternoon of July 3. I managed to keep my mind mostly off it, so spent my kind of Monday (busy as hell) doing what I had to do with the information.
What I did *not* do over the weekend was go to Beverly Fahms for their horribles parade. Ours is a kid's event. The Fahms' is typically PG as I understand it. (Beverly Farms is a very rich enclave of a more diverse city, and is practically a town in its own right.) The float mocking pregnant Gloucester girls and its accessories reached an R rating very easily, and has now reached a national audience, thanks to the blunted judgment of pack journalism.
Listen: spoiled rich kids have been ridiculing poor kids with crude, tasteless humour since the beginning of time. and that's all this was. It merits no further attention and I won't supply any links for those who don't know what I'm talking about.
What I *did* do was go kayaking on fresh water for a change. Motivated in part by a body of water filled with loud (absolutely), drunken (possibly) people in rented canoes, we took an actual, liquid, road not taken.
Marvelous. At our starting point, the boors were making so much noise that they failed to notice how they frightened all the local wildlife into silent invisibility. Within a few minutes, we had red-wing blackbirds for company, then a pair of cormorants and a great blue heron. The latter is always a treat, but that day was outshone.
We saw great white egrets: they're a rare site most places, but especially in New England, at the extreme northern end of their range. They are large birds, nearly as large as the blue herons, which stand four feet high. While discretion moved them away from people--even kayakers carefully shifting to the other side of the waterway--they were quite calm around quiet people in quiet boats. They were content to fly briefly away, then circle back to water they rightly called their own.
The canoe clowns don't come this way, perhaps because it's a dead end that leads away from the place they rent the canoes. The wildlife does, perhaps on account of the clowns. It was a pleasure to share the water with them for a couple of hours.
From what I saw of the other animals, I hope the canoe rental shop has good liability insurance.
What I did *not* do over the weekend was go to Beverly Fahms for their horribles parade. Ours is a kid's event. The Fahms' is typically PG as I understand it. (Beverly Farms is a very rich enclave of a more diverse city, and is practically a town in its own right.) The float mocking pregnant Gloucester girls and its accessories reached an R rating very easily, and has now reached a national audience, thanks to the blunted judgment of pack journalism.
Listen: spoiled rich kids have been ridiculing poor kids with crude, tasteless humour since the beginning of time. and that's all this was. It merits no further attention and I won't supply any links for those who don't know what I'm talking about.
What I *did* do was go kayaking on fresh water for a change. Motivated in part by a body of water filled with loud (absolutely), drunken (possibly) people in rented canoes, we took an actual, liquid, road not taken.
Marvelous. At our starting point, the boors were making so much noise that they failed to notice how they frightened all the local wildlife into silent invisibility. Within a few minutes, we had red-wing blackbirds for company, then a pair of cormorants and a great blue heron. The latter is always a treat, but that day was outshone.
We saw great white egrets: they're a rare site most places, but especially in New England, at the extreme northern end of their range. They are large birds, nearly as large as the blue herons, which stand four feet high. While discretion moved them away from people--even kayakers carefully shifting to the other side of the waterway--they were quite calm around quiet people in quiet boats. They were content to fly briefly away, then circle back to water they rightly called their own.
The canoe clowns don't come this way, perhaps because it's a dead end that leads away from the place they rent the canoes. The wildlife does, perhaps on account of the clowns. It was a pleasure to share the water with them for a couple of hours.
From what I saw of the other animals, I hope the canoe rental shop has good liability insurance.
Labels: July 4, kayaking, north of Boston
posted by Uncle | 23:18
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