Thanksgiving

We arrived at Kent Island on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay on Tuesday, beginning to settle into the house we rented for the holiday. A strong wind blew across the water for the next few days, but it was no matter as Ingrid, Geoff, Haile, Tom, Jose, Jens, Ben, Teddy, Margaret, Tony, Christian, Kendall, Rink, Rob, Dan, Vanessa, Chase, Drew, Claudia, and MJ showed up over the next few days. But we in turn traveled back to the western shore of the bay for Thanksgiving Day with Margaret and Tony...enjoying the fresh oysters, the company, the back deck.



Though, of course, this is a holiday of food, wine, and hanging out. Time for catching up and expanding the sense of family. Christian Werge, a cousin from Mexico working now as an architect in Alexandria, joined us (we share the same great-great grandfather) and later again with his girlfriend, MJ. Ingrid and Geoff brought bikes to try out the trails on the island. Teddy was preparing for a trip to the Gambia to do photojournalism for a nonprofit "Riders for Health," combining his interests in motocycles, photography, and exploring the world. So we catch time with one another...no other agenda than to enjoy one another...well and the pies.





So the days slip along like waves across the bayfront. We held a final feast of crabs, oysters and shrimp on Sunday afternoon after the winds had died down and the sun had broken through. A truck had parked down the street with "fresh crabs, fresh oysters" posted on cardboard signs in the morning. And a neighbor lent us a huge kettle for steaming the crabs. So it was a classic Maryland afternoon meal on the deck overlooking the bay.



Before sunset and folks beginning to make their way home.

Riding the east coast line

Charlotte and I caught a mid-morning train in Providence, heading down along the coast to Maryland. The sky was lead-gray, light drizzle against the Amtrak windows. The train was full with folks getting an early start on Thanksgiving, with businessmen on their cell phones "I meeting next week with the European head of Coke in London and I need those reports by noon....", with students working their laptops.



The train runs close to the shore along the Sound. Wetlands stretch out to the flat, gray sea. Houses line some of the coves. Towns come into view where rivers run down to the sea. And, moving west, the towns come closer together, converge, and factories, warehouses, offices, apartments move upwards, towards each other and towards the gray sky. We ride to, through, and down under the City, stop briefly at Pennsylvania Station and then are out onto the Jersey meadowlands, moving south toward Thanksgiving.

Family even cats

But Thanksgiving is about family and eating together and hanging out. So that is what we were doing in Providence, hanging out and helping to paint the living room of Ingrid and Geoff's new house. And after painting, reading on the sunporch ((I kjølvannet or In the Wake, learning Norwegian by reading in translation). And heading out to the local beach restaurant for chowder ("chawda").







And going for bike rides. And even coming home again after the bikeride to find that one of the cats, Hops, had climbed a tree at the end of the block and Ingrid, because she weighed less, had to climb the wobbly ladder to bring her back to earth and the comfort of the new home. All in the order of "hanging out."

Pawtuxet

But then you arrive in a different world. Walking to the village coffee shop in the morning, you pass Dr. Carpenter's house (1720) and other reminders that Rodger Williams and his followers settled the area in the 1660s. They had been thrown out of Puritanical Boston...the descendents of those moral guardians now rule in Colorado Springs. The town celebrates an annual festival when the local militia burned "the hated English revenue schooner," HMS Gaspree in 1772...I guess the British must of thought of them as terrorists.

So there is this depth of time along the East Coast...from a period long before Colorado was picked up as part of the Louisian Purchase (at least the part that was north of the Arkansas River)...and that time is reflected in the architecture, the way of life. Though the way of life has changed: Pawtuxet was a small harbour, then a mill town, then a resort, now a small collection of wine bars, restaurants, and occasional farmer's markets placed wedged by the river between two younger suburban towns. But what is impressive, so impressive for someone from the West is water, water, water everywhere. I have as much guilt about letting the water run when I brush my teeth as do the swans, gathering in the lee of a jetty, enjoying the late fall sunshine and picking at the water weeds.

The Airport

I had never really studied the people at Denver International Airport before...they had always seemed mere bodies in motion. Or bodies in non-motion, waiting, mildly anxious or relieved after going through screening and waiting now to see if their plane shows up on time. Introspective, focused on an arrival or departure, they now seem participants in some global form of alienation, neither here nor there, simply in transition, refugees caught between places, at the whim of weather, mechanical breakdowns, and fellow passangers. Tedium plays a large part in the traveller's experience...it is written on faces, on bodies slumped into chairs, on half drunk cardboard cups of coffee left in the food court.