Maine 2019: Days 8-11

The Magnificent Cousin Hy

My mom grew up in a two-family home at 554 Montgomery Street in Brooklyn, New York. My mom's family lived on the lower floor  while her Aunt Ida (her mom's sister) lived on the upper floor with her husband and children. Mom's parents had some challenging health issues that took them away from the home for extended periods of time. In many respects, her Aunt Ida raised my mom, bringing her quite close to Ida's children, Hy and Barbara.

Cousin Hy, as he's always been known to me, parlayed an early interest in ham radio into a successful career as an electrical engineer, patent attorney and inventor. For the last 24 years, he's worked for IBM and has 15 patents to his name.

Why am I telling you all of this? Well, three reasons:
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• Cousin Hy is coming to Maine for the wedding
• He is the smartest person I know
• He is a kind and gentle soul

We need more Cousin Hy's in the world.

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Photos: Day 8

On Day 8 of our trip, we spent the afternoon hiking with Cousin Hy and his wife, Wonderful Roz. This gave us the opportunity to catch up with them both and learn about what their twin children, Diana and Phil, are up to nowadays.

Photos: Day 9

On Day 9, Alison drove to Bangor to pick up Ian at the airport. They then drove the 2-3 hours to Eastport, Maine to spend a few days with the relatives on his dad's side of the family. As for me and what I did on Day 9, I'm drawing a complete blank.

Photos: Day 10

Day 10 featured more hiking in and around the Eastport area. Whatever I did, I apparently did without a camera, as there is no photographic evidence.

Photos: Day 11

On Day 11, Alison, Ian, Cam and Nancy all returned to Bar Harbor to begin the weekend's wedding festivities. The highlight of the day was a 2-hour cruise aboard the Margaret Todd, a four-masted schooner that offers sightseeing trips in the Mount Desert Island area.

Tidbit

I finished the book Abbey's Road by Edward Abbey. The book is a collection of stories that he wrote chronicling his travels to various remote and desolate places, including:
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• The Australian Outback
• Isla de la Sombra
• Sierra Madre
• Various national parks

Abbey was quite a character, to say the least. He adored those remote and desolate places and wrote, in often scathing fashion, about the potential loss of these habitats to development. In his fictional works, it is said that he was one of the first people to promote eco-terrorism.

All of that aside, here are some memorable quotes of his from the book:

The geologists, the earth scientists, have given us a beautiful and elaborate picture of the planet's formation and development; they have constructed a time scheme with which they can diagram, as with an overlay, each evolutionary step in the long process. But all that, I maintain, is merely information. It is not knowledge; even less is it understanding. Knowledge and understanding, though based on information as an essential component, require more, namely, feeling, intuition, physical contact -- touching, and sympathy, and love.

and

​A few miles up the canyon we go ashore in a cove without a name. Others have been here before, as the human dung and toilet paper, the tinfoil, plastic plates, abandoned underwear, rusty fishhooks, tangled lines, discarded socks, empty Coors cans, and broken glass clearly attest. But on the shores of Lake Powell, Jewel of the Colorado and National Recreational Slum, you have no choice. All possible campsites look like this one. There is no lower form of life known to zoological science than the motorboat fisherman, the speedboat sightseer.

and

They look like tiny horseshoe crabs -- or like miniature trilobites from the earliest seas of all, come back to haunt us with the memory of the earth's long, strange, splendid, and meaningless history...

Over the desert and the canyons, down there in the rocks, a huge vibration of light and stillness and solitude shapes itself into the form of hovering wings spread out across the sky from the world's rim to the world's end. Not God -- the term seems insufficient -- but something unnameable, and more beautiful, and far greater, and more terrible.

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