Adventures in Lubec, America!

So this past weekend was a lighthouse weekend, or was supposed to be.

I read in the local paper, Machias Valley News Observer (which I excitedly got a yearly subscription to...and observations there are!) that there was going to be a celebration at the West Quoddy Head Lighthouse on this past Saturday, so I decided to head up there. Stephanie and I had gone up there for a brief stop and it was just beautiful, so I had to go back.

So, celebration there was! The event was 10-2 and I stayed the whole time hanging out with folks from Machias and "away" folks from Massachusetts (not Massholes, very kind people). Being like all new people, I explained who I was, where I moved from ("oh my!!"), and what I was going to be doing. For the Mass. folks, I ended up counseling them through some concerns they were having about their 20yr daughter and her college experience, so I even got to put the work skills to hand. We traded phone numbers and they said they'd give a call if they had other questions they wanted to talk about. Interesting.

Anyway, so there was a singer (Noel Veilleux I think his name was...videos to follow), the owner/editor of Lighthouse Digest magazine Tim Harrison was there to speak about the history of lighthouses across the coast of Maine, and Ron Peasha, who is one of the board of directors for the West Quoddy Head Light Keeepers Association, spoke about the history of the West Quoddy Light (folks around here just say light instead of lighthouse).


It turns out there is a fascinating history of the WQ Light, of which I will share a bit with you. There is a man by the name of Hopley Yeaton that very few know about, but he is in essence the father of the US Coast Guard. As you can read here, the USCG was first known as the Revenue Cutter Service, and served as more or less law enforcement concerning pirating of ships and such up in the harbors. Hopley was appointed by George Washington (yeah, you read that right) to be the first commissioned officer of the RCS and in 1808 received $5000 to get a lighthouse built at the Quoddy Pass leading into the Lubec Narrows to establish this as the northeasterly point of U.S. territory. A few years later, Yeaton died and was buried at the WQ grounds. In 1975, Yeaton's remains were exhumed by the USCG and moved to a more formal burial site in CT. This is where Ron showed me Yeaton was buried...you can still see the indentation.

It's a beautiful site, and the lighthouse and home are in pristine condition, which is more than can be said when it was still under man-operated control.

Keeper Alfred Godfrey related some not-too-pretty details of life at West Quoddy in an 1842 report Godfrey wrote:

My salary is $410 [yearly]. I have a family of seven persons. The climate here forbids the use of a garden or farm. My leisure time is occupied in boat building. I sometimes pilot vessels into Eastport, when no other pilot is at hand. Wrecks occur on the Sail rock as often as once a year... The dwelling house contains 6 rooms, kitchen, parlor and 4 chambers. The house leaks all about in rainy weather. The chimneys smoke badly . . . The tower is built of rubble stone, badly laid. In winter, the inside of the walls are coated with ice, from the effect of leakage . . .

Doesn't it sound lovely!!! Really, though, this is what it looks like on a typical Maine summer day (it was WARM....65 degrees)
(Interestingly, this is one of only two lighthouse that have the white and red horizontal stripes in the U.S....the other being, you guessed it, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina! I knew I had seen something like this before.....)

They are campaigning the government to try to get a national historical marker put on the grounds to show the significance of this spot. So, they did what every group does...have a raffle! I bought ten tickets, and I ended up winning to fantastic framed photos!!!
This is Sail Rock, where it is said to have shipwrecked dozens of ships. The current here is pretty bad, especially when the tide is moving right at the end of the in pool and out pool, and many ships have lost themselves here.


Anyway, it was just SO cool to be standing somewhere with the 201 year old WQ Head Light, knowing that were I was standing was where dozens of lightkeepers lived, died, battled storms, etc. It was SO neat to listen to stories of the operation of the lighthouse, the fresnel lens, the changing needs of foghorns (there is a steam pipe house next to the lighthouse, of course no longer in operation due to the Diaphone, and then the now electric operated foghorn), etc. Maybe when I get a few extra bucks I can get a subscription to this magazine, as it really chronicles a lot of lighthouse history around the U.S. I know when I traveled previously to the Outer Banks, I was fascinated by their lighthouse history...but these ones in Maine are OLD.

So, the USCG was there doing tours of the tower as well, which they only do once/year. SO, I decided to be brave and get in line to go up the 40 foot tower. That is until I walked into it, looked up and saw this
What you don't really see from this picture are two things: 1) the stairs are rusting something awful and 2) the "handrail" is a rotting piece of rope that is tethered to the walls. Needless to say, I got about ten stairs up and starting feeling like I was going to throw up, so I went back down. Lesson learned: Lighthouses are best observed from the outside.

Singer guy was real fun...pretty good voice, funny lighthouse stories. Had a CD for sale, but you know me, I restrict myself to iTunes...


It was a great day, even if I wasn't sporting my stylish lighthouse sweaters and cardigans like these old ladies.

I also ventured into Lubec and ran into a wonderful store, called Wags-N-Wool (no website yet!). Its two women who just opened the store in the beginning of June, and its wonderful dog products, organic treats, etc along with tons of locally produced yarn and knitting/crocheting wares! Exciting! So, I hung out there for a while, talked with the shop owner Dee, and she invited me up for Knit Night on Tuesday (last night) which I went up to and had a blast. I met Karen, who works for and attends Summer Keys in Lubec during the summer (from Cleveland for the rest of the year), which is a summer music camp for adults (don't worry, I've already been recruited to get my trumpet from my parents house and join a class next summer). I also met another woman (Dezza?) who works for Manhattan College in NYC, who summers on Campabello Island...which is my first destination once my passport comes in. Both of them were just learning to knit, so it was fun to not be the newby of the group and actually be able to help them while working on my own little project (I am working on a fun little present for Marissa, so alas, I cannot share any pictures right now).

Anyway, here are some of the sights of downtown Lubec.


So Lubec was great fun. So much fun, that I actually went to an open house to see what $150K buys you right on the bay. The way I figure, I should take everyones advice and go to a bunch of open houses in Machias and nearby towns to see what your money gets you, what people are talking about, etc before I am actually seriously thinking about buying a house.


In other news, I learned today that Passamaquoddy (the Native American tribe whose land we stole and live on now) means "pollock spearer". Cool.

The apartment is almost to a place where I feel like I can take pictures, so those should be coming sometime soon....

Zoning out in a small town...Vacationland!

My second weekend in Machias has come and gone, and its been an interesting one. This weekend I got to play tourist and meet more people again, which has been great. (In a sidenote, I am guessing this week I will meet with the PR guy from the university in which a press release will go in all the local papers...then I will never be some anonymous person from Iowa again....)

Let's get some photos up here for you all, since photos tell 1000 words!

I am not sure that I have given enough description to you all of what it is like transitioning from being someone who has lived solidly in the middle of the Central Time Zone for her entire life to living ten miles away from the Atlantic Time Zone (huh, what is that, we don't ever hear of that!?!). Washington County is known as the Sunrise Coast because in the U.S. we are the first ones to greet the sun (if it comes out here) every morning.

You will see that the sun rose this morning here at 4:56am. Yes, that's right....in the 4am hour. Now, as you'll notice if you are any person who gets up at sunrise, that the time that they "post" is different than when the sun is actually "getting up".

To give you true perspective of what that looks like in "real life", I took the following picture to illustrate what 4:32am looks like.


I'm not kidding, the clock said 4:32am.

Think that is crazy? Well, check out what December looks like for me. I will still be at work for at least an hour after the sun sets at night!

There are a few ramifications to the sun coming up this early for someone who is sloooowly adjusting to being Eastern Eastern time zoning. 1) Betty the Cat has gotten used to being fed by me when I get up in the morning, which is not too far after sunrise. This presents a problem in Maine here, when I have usually just gone to bed about 4 hours before the sun rises! 2) I constantly think I am running late to something (not sure what, since I don't have a job for another few weeks!) because the sun is up so high when I get up around 8am. 3) Betty is super sluggish in the mid morning. This shouldn't be much of a problem when I finally do get to start my job, though, as I anticipate being able to work out before going to work in the morning, thus I'll be up early in the morning. But for now...here's my temporary solution until I find actual drapes I want in my bedroom:

Needless to say, it seems to have tricked Betty the Cat and my head thus far.

In other news, I wanted to offer you some of the news up from the local paper! It's not online, so I thought I'd occasionally take some photos of clips from the paper to share with you news around here. Here's some highlights:

I think I mentioned this previously, but it POURED on 4th of July in Machias, after the lobster boat races were canceled in Jonesport. Needless to say, the local paper has a good tinge of sarcasm and "this is how it is" in their reporting. Yes, I am sure no one minded the "traffic" in Machias...because I am sure they went car to car to ask about it.


Eureka! The steeples of churches don't only get blown off in Back to the Future! This is from one of my first nights in Machias when there was that really terrible thunderstorm that was rattling my house and threw the power off for a few hours. A great way to start my first nights off campus..ever...


The towns here are SO small that everyone knows one another....and evidently knows where everyone lives....so you just throw an ad in the paper with "their place" as the address and folks will show. (Everyone that I meet asks where I am living and I tell them and they say "Oh yeah, above Donny's mom's insurance place, yeah")


I have made it a goal to meet several of my neighbors this next week, since I have failed to meet any of them when I've been out on my neighborhood nightly walks. Although, I have been lucky because two of them have introduced themselves to me already!
These two cats belong to Don's mom, who lives across the street from me (his sister lives down the road). These two kitties evidently sensed that I love kitties, because they have come by almost everyday to visit me. The small tortoise shell one (sorry for the bad quality photo, he's a tad jumpy) is the one I call Earnest, because he has six toes! I don't have a name for the black one yet. However, the other morning, I woke up and padded into the bathroom first thing in the morning without my glasses to be greeted by Earnest sitting on the outside of my window sill. Now, for those of you who don't know...I live on the second story. Little Earnest has some jumping legs in him, because he jumps from the landing on my stairs to the handrail (a 1x4) and then up to the small eave outside my bathroom windows. There he sat, just meowing at me. Interesting. Betty hasn't seemed to notice that there are neighbor cats meowing outside my door yet, or she could just be ambivalent about it like she is most everything else.

Some odd things around town that I've noticed:


Oh, and in case any of you were wondering...this is what the wheels look like these days:

And, as a shout out to my Ames folks....it was meant to be people, it was meant to be (this is the road leading up the hill to the university....I'm not kidding):