Loafing around Eastport

The temperature this morning was a relatively mild 55° F. With the catalytic heater I was able to get it up to 65° within about twenty minutes—no need to use the furnace. That's good for two reasons, both having to do with the furnace blower: it's fairly noisy, and it uses electricity. In fact, I hear that the blower can pretty much drain your batteries overnight, though I haven't tried it myself. But the cat heater doesn't use any electricity (and only modest amounts of propane); it's a radiant device. Oh, it doesn't put out as much heat as the furnace—but it does a mighty fine job of warming up your feet, legs and lower body when you're sitting at the breakfast table.

After breakfast with Walt, I spent a good bit of time just sitting around and swapping stories with him. Walt has had a fairly colorful past. For example, in the Fifties he was a good friend and drinking buddy of comedian Ernie Kovacs. Kovacs would bring his XKE Jaguar into the shop where Walt worked, because only Walt could keep the thing going for him. Kovacs would try out jokes and skits on the mechanics in the shop; then in the evening they'd all go out drinking and Kovacs would polish his routines on the people in the bar.

We went into town at lunchtime and ate at the New Wa-Co Diner, one of two restaurants in town. I had a club sandwich that was quite good, but the real surprise of the meal was the french fries. I'm not normally a big fan of french fries—I generally don't do more than nibble a few. But these were without a doubt the best I've ever had: fresh cut from potatoes with the skins on, perfectly cooked—absolutely delicious! I ate every one, probably the first time I've ever done so.

Afterward we walked around the town a bit. Eastport is a small fishing village (population 1,640) dating from 1763 that boasts of being the easternmost town in the US—though there are other contenders nearby. Like much of Maine, it has a run-down look about it. Many of the storefronts in the one-block business district are empty; a few are being used as "cottage industry" rental space. One of these was familiar to me as the home of a small family business I had once done some design work for.

One of the few Eastport businesses that are prospering, "Recollections" specializes in authentic recreations of Victorian and Edwardian clothes and employs a handful of local women. Walt's daughter Megan has worked there in the summertime, and also models their clothes. A few years back I designed their first website for them, and although they have expanded it since then, they're still using my templates. My photos of Megan still pop up here and there on the site, too.

Walt told me that a few years ago a television series was shot here—sorry, I don't remember the name; I'm not a TV watcher—and the crew put up this big statue of a fisherman in the middle of town...to give the place more character, I guess. Walt hates the thing, but I like it. It's in a rustic hand-carved style that could be seen as corny, I suppose, but to me it just looks like folk art in a style I've always admired. And yes, it has lots of character!

Truth is, these days most of the town's "fishing" is done in huge pens along the shore, where millions of captive fish are raised and then harvested. Although vital to the local economy, these operations have much the same problem as hog and chicken farms: an extremely high concentration of animals results in an equally high concentration of excrement. Curtailing these operations, as some have suggested, would certainly be a boon to the environment...but with unemployment already high, it would be an economic blow that the town might not survive.

Eastport did have a golden era about a hundred years ago. According to one writer, "In the late 1800s and early 1900s, when its population was over 5,000, Eastport was the cultural center for the area. Amateurs from the area, as well as professionals from Boston and New York, made plays, operas, and musical performances commonplace in Eastport. Memorial Hall was often their stage. Several bands organized to provide music for dancing and celebrations. These bands were so popular that seven music teachers and two music stores were kept busy."

Looking at Eastport today, this is frankly hard to picture—I doubt there's a music store within thirty miles. I wish I could have seen the town at its zenith. It must have been a lovely place at around the time Walt's house was built. Here's a story Walt told me when he first bought the house, which was built near the end of the nineteenth century by a sea captain for his wife and daughter. Walt was browsing around town, getting the feel of the place, and stopped into the public library, where he asked the librarian whether they had any information about "the old Newcomb place." The woman impaled Walt with a look of disapprobation normally reserved for a particularly ignorant schoolboy, and tartly corrected him: "That house isn't old—it was built in 1865!"

Tonight brought another steak dinner, this one particularly glorious: smothered in onions and mushrooms, it was served with a baked potato shell that was stuffed with mashed potatoes and cheese, with perfectly cooked asparagus on the side. It was without question the best steak dinner I'd ever had. As mentioned, I'm not a fan of steaks in general, but this meal was sheer ecstasy. Just looking at the photo makes my mouth water.

Walt is a superb cook with a beautiful and well-equipped kitchen. If he weren't losing his sight so rapidly, he could undoubtedly have a successful career as a chef. He specializes in the Victorian English style of cooking, and anybody who tells you that English food is all boiled to a uniform tastelessness has never eaten at Walt's house, I promise you.

After dinner we watched "Fantasia 2000" on DVD. (Like me, Walt is a great animation buff, and this was a film he had not been able to see since it came out.) I made the mistake of turning down the garish color and brightness on Walt's TV. He commented afterward that he had enjoyed the animation and the music, but that he objected to the low-contrast monochromatic backgrounds. He made this comment as we were watching the closing titles scroll over a background that was black, red and shocking pink with jagged geometric shapes—about as colorful as you could imagine! I realized then that the lurid, overblown display I had "corrected" was required for Walt to see any color at all. I apologized and set it back to the way it had been.

I told Walt about my friend Frank Lewin's use of strips of white tape to mark things in a high-contrast way, as well as transparent self-adhesive "bump dots" to mark pushbuttons and controls. (I use some of these myself on the low-visibility parts of my audio and video gear, so that I can hit the right button by touch instead of trying to read tiny pale tan lettering on a black background.) I'll send a bunch of them to Walt when I get back. Because his vision is rapidly being lost to macular degeneration, he uses several magnifiers, plus flashlights and powerful quartz-iodine lamps to read.

Comfortably full and feeling at peace with the world, I headed out to Gertie for a good night's sleep in preparation for our trip to the Owl's Head Museum tomorrow.