Industrial Arts

Thu, 03/13/2014 - 10:30

Eva Murray

“Asteroid misses earth; no baby bunnies were harmed.” Yes, I know. It’s illegal to incorrectly placard a truck, unlawful to misrepresent one’s credentials, dangerous to inaccurately list ingredients on a food label, and just plain cheesy to write a satirical headline when it isn’t yet April Fool’s Day — but really: It does seem that most readers will turn first to news about big wrecks, axe murderers, lawsuits, fires (particularly fires in barns,) local chicken sacrificers, tragic accidents, investigations following tragic accidents, rabid revenge-seeking yahoos yelling “Heads will roll!” following the investigation of tragic accidents, and the routine bullying at a school board meeting than happy news about the beginning of maple syrup season or anything else that doesn’t curdle one’s chowder. Yet over and over people comment that there is too much bad news in “the” news, too much politics and disaster, not enough about the good guys. Make up your minds.

To be surrounded with art — even if you don’t really need to see a summer neighbor’s wife completely starkers on Main Street again and again — cannot be a bad thing.

Yes, I’ve been on a school board. It’s rough duty.

Why are we drawn to this stuff? “We need to pay attention to the real news,” I am told, and everybody knows that it ain’t real news unless somebody gets hurt. I for one think you could get pretty badly hurt serving on a school board. The idea is that we “need” the high crimes and misdemeanors in our consciousness in order to be responsible citizens, whereas reading about a historic boat or rare bird or a much-beloved local character — well, that’s “human interest,” and only deserving of mind space if the line for lunch is moving a little slower than usual.

Bah. If all the reports of crime and destruction can do is make us clench our teeth — and likely that is all we will manage to do about the problems in our communities — why are we attracted so? Let’s exert a little more control over what we want rattling around in our brains all day. It is March, and in March we are often deep in mud, out of money, and short on patience with the cold.

Here’s my rant: let’s not make things any worse. Most of us in Rockland and Camden and Damariscotta and Appleton and Belfast have a heap to be thankful for, and we ought to celebrate it. It isn’t ugly around here, and it isn’t scary, and even where it is gentrified or overpriced or absurdly earnest, the excess isn’t half so bad as it might be.

We of Midcoast Maine are astonishingly fortunate in a great many ways, and even if you or your uncle or anybody else is suffering one or more of life’s troubles, I’ll argue that we still have it better than most. We live in a drop-dead gorgeous part of the world. You can smell the water, for heaven’s sake, and half the country would give an awful lot for that.

This area strikes a pleasing balance of civilization and countryside. We have good restaurants, good doctors, and good lumberyards , and we have stretches of road with nothing but trees in sight (hardly wilderness, we all know, but reassuring nonetheless that this is not that endless strip-mall called Eastern Massachusetts.) We are up to our pale pasty necks in art. I tend to make fun of the surplus of new art galleries in Rockland these days, but if that’s the price we must pay to get a meal after 7:30 p.m. in the Lime City, I guess we’ll manage. To be surrounded with art — even if you don’t really need to see a summer neighbor’s wife completely starkers on Main Street again and again — cannot be a bad thing.

There is, by the way, also a hell of a pile of knowledge around here. Without going far you can learn to build any number of kinds of boat, fix your Model T, fly an airplane, do a hockey stop, ride a snowboard, milk a dairy goat, play an instrument, speak another language, cook like an Italian grandmother, keep bees, take expert photographs both old-style and new, improve your singing, your barbecue, and your backhand, build a house, fight a fire, paint a masterpiece, drive an 18-wheeler, and grow your St. Johnswort. (They say that’s good for mild depression, perhaps the sort endemic in March, or when we watch too much news, or we serve on a school board.)

While we’re making lists of reasons to stop bellyaching, I might add that we don’t tend to get the worst of the weather. Oh, sure, it may have dunked below zero more than a few nights and we feel as though we have single-handedly purchased a brand new oil truck for the company this year, but we don’t get the annual wildfires, tornadoes, mudslides, the regular, roof-ripping hurricanes or the highway breaking in two when the earth moves. Maine has had some bad spells of river flooding in the past, and obviously we don’t know what the future holds as weather seems to be getting worse, but I’d say on balance we won the draw, climate-wise.

The crocuses are starting to appear, as are reservations on the State Ferry for the returning Part-Timers, so we do have proof that spring will arrive. It may take a few more months as they are calling for temperatures in the teens again as I write, but the folks who run the ferry terminal are already busy worrying about the eventual parking problems.

Summer will come, and we will complain, because there will be idiots on the road and in line for coffee and taking photographs in the middle of the street, and there will likely be ticks, and mosquitoes, and earwigs, and obnoxious tourists, and bad drivers, and countless questions beginning with “Why don’t you people…?” and there will be an occasional day perhaps just a tad warmer than we’d like. But we won’t have weeks of 100-degree heat, and we won’t have plagues of locusts, and it is very unlikely that we will have any serious trouble with golf ball-sized hail, or rattlesnakes, or motorcycle gangs, or pestilence of any kind, or any shortages of food, water, or yard sales. Let those who have plenty remain grateful.

To be sure, there are some who are hungry around here, and some who are ailing, and some who have been ill-used. If the worst thing in your life is some piece of necessary utility infrastructure interfering with your “view,” you do not have a real problem. This is an opinion column, and that is my opinion. It is March, and we’re getting another snowstorm, and everybody is complaining.

As for that headline, I’ll admit to being curious about whether tempting readers with such language might bump this small bit of rumination into the “popular” list alongside those favorite articles about road accidents. You must have known better than to think this column would contain hard news.

Eva Murray lives on Matinicus