Date: Fri 01-Aug-1997

Publication: Bee

Author: SHIRLE

Quick Words:

Back-Fence

Full Text:

Over The Back Fence for Aug 1, 1997

Writing August 1st at the top of this column is significant. It means that

summer is fast speeding by. Before this month is over, parents will be

fighting the crowds at shoe stores, clothing departments and barber shops,

getting their offspring ready to return to school. College students are buying

a new back pack or an umbrella, or sweatshirts with the name of their

educational institution. There is no way to estimate how many millions of

pencils will be sold: how many new notebooks, rulers, ballpoint pens and other

supplies will leave store shelves for pencil boxes and tote bags. And parents

of younger children will buy lunch boxes that fit the latest fad, be it

Hiawatha or Star Wars.

Putting the shopping aside for a couple more weeks, some families are just

beginning that final stretch of vacation time. If you haven't worked out

special plans by now, think about going to Maine. It is beautiful this time of

year and it is also where Schoodic Point is located. When we still had the

little red house in Vermont we used to manage a trip to the coast of Maine for

a few days.

Schoodic is part of Acadia National Park, but isn't nearly as well known as

the area Bar Harbor, Cadalliac Mountain and the Auto Museum at Seal Cove. You

must stay on the main highway north another 20 or 25 miles north of Ellsworth

to find the state road that loops out to Schoodic Peninsula and its coastal

vista. We always planned to be there to watch and experience the incoming

tide. Great waves pounding the high cliffs are like none we had seen elsewhere

in New England, and if you happen to be there on a stormy day, you'll take

home a real memory.

Going to Schoodic meant staying at Jasper's Motel in Ellsworth. I wonder if it

is still there! August is blueberry time in that area, and though I have no

recollection about the motel itself, the restaurant there was the very best

place to abandon diets and calorie-counting. Blueberry muffins, pies, cakes,

bowls of plain berries with cream and cobbler and.... That, along with fried

scallops and the first new potatoes and mounds of fresh-made coleslaw, created

this obsession I have always had, to go again and stop there when starting

north.

One night we stopped in the big mall across the highway nearby. It was there I

found a great wildflower book that soon became a favorite, and there that we

met up with a bus load of Maine folks, getting ready to go - yes - to the

Boston Red Sox game in Boston.

"We go every week when the Sox play at home," one man told me. "Isn't that a

long ride home?" I asked. "We play the game over several times coming back up

the pike - win or lose," the man told us.

Another reasonable trip for an August jaunt is the one to the St Lawrence

Seaway. We went one summer, unexpectedly, and stopped at Lake Placid and went

across to Clayton, N.Y., after spending a night and day at the Eisenhower

Locks on the seaway. I was amazed to see the boatloads of sunflower seeds

going east through the locks. Every time I fed the birds that winter, I

wondered whether they had come via that route!

The quote that ended last week's column was by Lee Dembart, from The New York

Times.

Who said "Light boats sail swift, though greater hulks draw deep"?