That’s the famous Rumford Falls. It ain’t much to look at, really, although they have a rest stop nearby to gull tourists into lingering a while. The falls are in the background there. Most people mistake the weir, a concrete revetment that water passes over that you see in the foreground, for the falls. There’s a tall concrete bridge about a thousand yards downstream from the weir that actually has some interesting rocky rapids to gape at, but nobody ever looks at it. It’s got a hulking, reeking paper mill alongside it. It’s not picturesque, I guess.
It’s been raining every day for as long as I can remember. We can’t complain. Our back yard looks like Cambodia, but we skipped all the Canadian wildfire smoke altogether. Interestingly, Canadian Wildfire Smoke is the name of my Bachman-Turner Overdrive tribute band. But I digress.
Normally, the river isn’t running at all this time of year. The Androscoggin never stops, exactly, but the concrete weir would be showing, and the falls themselves would be bare granite. The nearby Swift River is usually just sort of shallow and disconnected, like a teenage girl with an iPhone riding in your car. But it’s raging, too.
We never really get weather here in western Maine. We get WEATHER. C’est la vie!
Old skool jazz musicians, outside of Louis Armstrong, didn’t smile much. Miles Davis and John Coltrane looked like they were going to kill someone right after the show, for instance, or maybe halfway through it.
Jazz musicians wanted to be taken seriously. They dressed like businessmen, and meant business, generally. Even the showoff fellows like Buddy Rich seemed manic, not happy. Jo Jones was different. He was serene and smiling, and looked like he was having way more fun than the rest of the band and the audience combined. His sunny demeanor was more than a pose. He sounded just like his glowing, mischievous smile. He’s the only one of two drummers I can stand a solo from. Joe Morello and Jo Jones. Making the world safe for drum solos, one lounge at a time.
Blues bands were really popular in the late fifties and early sixties. They had a big resurgence in the eighties. If you were a guitar player in the eighties, and wanted to play the blues, there was a shifting Mount Rushmore of go-to guys to mimic. First, there was what my brother called the King family. Albert King, BB King, and Freddie King. Pick your poison. Stevie Ray Vaughan wanted to play like Albert, Clapton wanted to play like BB, and Grand Funk Railroad wanted to play poker with Freddie King:
The lyrics are about little things that were happening on the road during the Phoenix tour. All of them are true. Brewer explains the line, “Up all night with Freddie King, I’ve got to tell you, poker’s his thing”:
“Freddie King was the opening act for us, the great Blues guitar player from Texas. It always struck me as funny that he would make his band play poker with him every night. We used to sit in on some of the poker games, and that’s where that line came from. His band, he’d pay them, and then he’d go win all the money back so they were broke and they’d have to keep playing for him – it was a great deal. A lot of people don’t understand the Freddie King part because they don’t know who Freddie King is. Anybody who knows about Freddie King immediately picks it up. People who don’t say, ‘What are you saying, that Focus can’t sing?'”
Muddy Waters was like a big blues buddha, but he really didn’t have a very recognizable guitar style. But sidemen everywhere copied his sidemen. There was a handful of gutbucket guys like Buddy Guy and John Leee Hooker. Of course everyone was sitting on T-Bone Walker’s shoulders, one way or another. But if I had to point to one guy who was mostly obscure to the general public, but everyone wanted to sound like, it would have to be Otis Rush.
Well, not exactly. Rangeley, Maine is about 30 miles north of us. It’s just about the end of the earth, as far as western Maine is concerned. After Rangeley there’s nothing but fleas, trees, and disease, as they say, and Canada, which is currently on fire. There’s a lot more Maine if you head northeast, however. Aroostook, known simply as The County, goes way, way up there.
Rangeley is a popular vacation destination. There’s lot of lakes and hiking and snowmobiling and four-wheeling and skiing and hunting and fishing and so forth. On the way to Rangeley, you pass a scenic overlook called The Height of Land. Of course height of land is a generic term that could apply to the highest point in any landscape you’re tramping over, but Mainers are an insular sort, and won’t acknowledge anyone else’s. It’s understandable. The Height of Land is a interesting place to stop and look at the nothing all around. It’s high up on a mountainside, overlooking the amusingly named Mooselookmeguntic Lake. If memory serves, that’s the local Indian name for, “Man, what are we doing here?”
The Height of Land is an eerie place. There’s a great view, all the way to the horizon, which is rarer in the Northeast than elsewhere. There are just too many trees and structures most everywhere in New England to see very far. You basically have to get out on the ocean to see the horizon.
It’s a weird kind of quiet at the Height of Land. There’s nothing for noises to bounce off and come back at you. It swallows anything you might say about the place to a companion. So you just gape at the little toy boats chugging slowly across the big lake, while you swat the giant horseflies that give you the Nosferatu treatment on the back of your neck. You can go a little further on to Rangeley proper if you’re bored or need lunch or a blood transfusion or something. According to Trip Advisor, there are things to do in Rangeley, but they all seem to involve watching water, either rushing by, or just standing there minding its own business. Some people are tempted to swim in it. It’s been nice knowing these people. I hear hypothermia is a pleasant way to go.
We can’t go to Rangeley anymore, because the first time we went there, my wife says we had an argument in the car, and so she hates Rangeley. She can’t remember what the argument was about, and I can’t remember the argument at all, but Rangeley is going to have to get along without us until we both get Alzheimers and forget the whole thing.
Well, it’s time for a melange, a veritable cornucopia, borderline copious amounts of Great Moments in Maine Real Estate. A cornucopious melange, if you will.
Of course if you’re of a more staid personality, you can always go shopping for houses within a one-hour drive of Massachusetts, down York County way. You can find all the $750,000 houses you could desire, all identical. They’re big vinyl boxes stapled on the ass end of their garage, with gray floors, gray walls, gray counters, gray cabinets, and a Live Laugh Love sign over the sink, in light gray lettering. Well, they would have gray walls, if they had any interior walls. They generally don’t, anymore.
But we’re of a more adventurous sort, you and I. We want the real Maine. We want to venture forth, to where the trolley don’t go, and the sidewalks end, and the where the couches are outside the house. Well, here you go:
You better lift weights, pal. Because when that bear makes it all the way through the wall, you’re going to have the fight of your life on your hands. Bears can be ornery critters, and this one is probably still pretty angry about you building a wall around him. And I’m sure the fiberglass insulation in the wall is making his butt itch something awful. Don’t mess with an itchy bear, my grandpappy always used to say.
Hey, have you ever been to Newport, Rhode Island? It’s a great seaside resort town. All the robber barons used to “summer” there, and built big show houses that are museums now. You know you’re rich when you use “summer” as a verb. Anyway, one of them built a beautiful mansion on the ocean, and pretty much every surface in it was fashioned from marble or other sort of exotic stone.
I’m not sure, but I’m fairly certain that this is not a picture of that house. The single curlicue light bulb in the vanity mirror light fixture gave it away. The Vanderbilts were strictly incandescent folk.
Lots of talk in the news lately about UFOs. Not many people know what UFO stands for, I gather. It’s an acronym to denote a flying object that can’t be identified. This perfectly useful term for “I don’t know what that is” has completely morphed into, “I don’t know what that is, so it must be a unobtanium space cruiser filled with lizard men, looking to probe somebody.”
Look, you can get a reasonably priced colonoscopy at any of Maine’s fine local hospitals, and a free one at many highway rest areas on the Massachusetts turnpike, I hear, so there’s no need to look to the stars for one. Besides, you people have got the whole thing all wrong. You think the little green men from Alpho Cestawni evade detection with cloaking devices and spaceship hulls fashioned from pure energy or stealth titanium or something similar. You’re not thinking outside the box, the way aliens do, my friend. They escape detection from radar by building their space traveling surreys from pine boards. They land in the Maine woods all the time. Mainers aren’t that into being probed, but the little moonmen can always find a bear or something with his arse sticking out of the back of a home gym wall, and probe away.
Unlike other UFO devotees, my evidence is reproducible. Here’s another star ship that just landed. It has an escape pod attached to the back of it, with a chimney. That’s for the exhaust from the hyperdrive, I imagine. They burn coal, generally:
OK, gang, lets’ play The Floor Is Lava!
Some people remember the seventies as bell-bottom pants, turd curls on the girls, cocaine in the bathroom at the disco, and gas rationing. None of those horrors could compare with the selection of carpeting from that decade.
Honorable Mention: Vermont
Our friends from the Northeast Kingdom, as they style themselves, are no slouches when it comes to Great Moments in Real Estate. Ladies and germs, it’s my pleasure to present to you, The Steel Belted Living Room:
It’s your move, New Hampshire.
Month: July 2023
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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