An April summer in New England

WE HAD summer too soon last week. Temps on Thursday were in the low 80’s when the iron piggy and I trekked north to Vermont, only to find it as warm there as here.

The same on Friday, summer in April. The snow at Jenna and Jonny’s place was disappearing fast.

We interrupt this report… I just heard that Mike Smith, an old newspaper pal of mine, ran the Boston Marathon today! He’ll spend the day with us tomorrow, stay over till Wednesday, then catch a train back to Boston for his flight home to New Orleans.

Of all the reporters I knew and worked with over the years, of the ones that went on to the big time, Mike’s the one who has the career I’d take if you put a gun to my head and made me get back into journalism. He didn’t sit in press galleries; he reported from the field, followed his own interests, not some cubicle-dwelling editor’s. Reported from Europe, Africa, was based in Lagos for a number of years, in Jerusalem, wrote a book on Boko Haram…

Mike’s regular people and so much fun to be around. About a dozen years ago I rode down to New Orleans when he was home for a month from Nigeria, got the tour from a native, the only way to go. He knows all the great hole-in-the-wall hideaways in Nola and Treme, for food, music… see the road report here. The format’s a little wonky. A dozen years of WordPress updates can do that to old content.

Anyway, Cajun Mike’s on his way! That makes my April.

Back to Vermont…

I set up camp in the lean-to, made the usual road fare, beans and brown rice.

Washed the cook pot in a drainage ditch…

Then I must have needed sleep, ’cause it was daylight when I turned in and light again when I woke up.

Got my day started with whole oats sweetened with dried cranberries…

I was reading a book on the top step of the lean-to when Jonny pulled up in the travel van. Our plan, over the next several days, was to install the shower in the little studio apartment over the garage, a pine ceiling in the bathroom, finish closing up the walls with sheetrock and tape the joints throughout, in the living room, bathroom, kitchen nook, coat closet, and the storage alcove under the eaves.

By Sunday noon we had it done. I’m thinking I might ride back up in a few days to put a coat of paint on the walls.

Life is more civilized with the travel van here at camp. The refrigerator’s handy.

On his drive up Friday, Jonny stopped at the corner beer store, or maybe it was the corny beer store. Not a memorable brew but it did meet minimum standards: had beer in it.

And it was light enough for an April summer. I prefer a more robust lager or a stout, but not in beach weather.

The sunshine was so relentless we put up the portable solar collectors.

Connect them in series and they charge that stackable battery bank/inverter gizmo in the background.

Then comes dinner. I wait for Jonny to take a big bite of burger before I say something funny, see if he has to spit it out. This was the beginning of a close call.

Time to grab a bucket of snow melt, carry it up to the lean-to and scrub off the day’s grime.

You could sit on this dirt road for three days and not see a car go by. There’s a house nearby, but even so, if you wanted to wait for dark you could probably strip down and scrub right at the culvert.

Of course, that would be the signal for the Universe to match you up with a motorist, and your winning smile probably wouldn’t be the first thing she’d report to the state police.

Reading in my tent that night…

This was Here I Stand, by Paul Robeson. A short volume. People call it his autobiography but it’s nowhere near a full picture of the man’s life and times. It’s mainly his account of being labeled subversive during the red scare, matching wits with the witless HUAC, with segregationist lawmakers, with State Department types who took away his livelihood by denying him a passport. Thus, for many years, Robeson was unable to act or sing in stage productions overseas, where his talents were much in demand.

I had just finished this one…

Burns was a good writer, or had a good editor, or both. It’s an interesting, easy read. There’s no writerly text to be discerned by your cognoscente self. It’s all one smooth surface. A reporting job. An adventure story.

Or misadventure, as it were, though somehow the question never even arises.

There’s no saying what’s not in the book, but, left to judge solely by what is in it, you get a picture of a soldier who led a remarkably unexamined life. In this tale of hunting one’s fellow man, he appears simply to have been plying his trade. He was in it because the war was thrilling! You could do dangerous things and be awarded cool new patches to wear.

There are no moral questions asked let alone answered. After 27 years in the Army, he had nothing to say about the alternate course rejected by Eisenhower through Nixon, the one where instead of killing them we skip to the part where we just buy all our shirts from them.

The easy reads are a change of pace after a long winter of engaging with Barthes, Sartre, Eco…. Eco, what a mind that man had. I’m still thinking about The Name of the Rose, a 600-pager I’ll happily read a second and third time, no doubt.

I had expected to have a riding video for you but I messed up, pressed the wrong button, ended up with nothing but unwatchable time-lapse footage. A mile of twisty road goes by every 6 seconds.

Here’s 30 seconds to give you the idea. Any more and you’d want Dramamine.

If I ride back up to Vermont this week I’ll bring the camera along and try again.

Cheers to all.

Tony DePaul, April 17, 2023, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA