‘Tis so appalling – it exhilarates –
So over Horror, it half captivates –
…
And Terror’s free –
Gay, Ghastly, Holiday!
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #341)
ghastly
Tag: autumn
Draken Harald Hårfagre
Over time, I have come to realize that our culture has made valuable contributions to our world heritage at large. For me, it’s important to turn the spotlight on these contributions, and not just the more recent ones, but also our fantastic contributions to craftsmanship and technology. Shipbuilding was the rocket science of the Viking era.
~ Sigurd Aase
(Draken Harald Hårfagre ~ Expedition America 2016)
On a gray, misty Saturday we went over to Mystic Seaport to see the Viking longship Draken Harald Hårfagre. Draken means dragon and Harald Hårfagre refers to Norwegian King Harald Fairhair. I didn’t get to see her sail into Mystic with her red silk sail because we had been in North Carolina visiting the little one. But much to my delight, the ship will be wintering here at the Seaport. She will be covered over, though. If I keep my eye on the newsletters from Mystic Seaport, a living history museum, I hope to catch her sailing away in the spring.
Draken Harald Hårfagre is the end result of a daydream of the ship’s owner, Sigurd Aase. After our tour I bought a lovely souvenir guidebook, full of stunning pictures of the journey here from her home port in Haugesund, Norway. Stops were made at the Shetland Islands, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland and cities along the Saint Lawrence Seaway and the Great Lakes. Then it went through the New York State canals to the Hudson River and finally down the river to New York City and then Mystic.
The ship has a lovely website: Draken Harald Hårfagre
It’s a big challenge to sail a ship of this old variety, and to prove that it is possible to sail a large open Viking ship across the seas.
~ Capt. Björn Ahlander
(Draken Harald Hårfagre ~ Expedition America 2016)
And now for a pet peeve of mine. There were several visitors wearing “Viking” helmets with horns who were approached by other visitors asking them where they could get a helmet for themselves. Of course they weren’t for sale on the ship or at the museum gift shop! The guide book, if they cared to read it, debunks the myth of the horned helmet:
One of the most widespread myths in history is the one about the Vikings wearing horned helmets. Their helmets had no horns. The popular image dates back to the 1800s, when Scandinavian artists like Sweden’s Gustav Malmström included the headgear in the their portrayals of the raiders. When Wagner staged his Der Ring des Nibelungen, commonly refers to as the “Ring cycle” in the 1870s, costume designer Carl Emil Doepler created horned helmets for the Viking characters, and an enduring stereotype was born.
~ Draken Harald Hårfagre guidebook ~ Expedition America 2016
The line to tour the ship, which only took a few minutes, was very long and stretched around other exhibits at the Seaport. Fortunately we were near the beginning and were marveling at how long the line still was two hours later. In spite of the rain!
The Gokstad ship we saw in Norway last year was one of the inspirational sources for the design of this ship: Viking Ship Museum.
This is a fantastic opportunity to create history by reliving the challenges our Viking ancestors overcame. An adventure one wouldn’t miss for the world. It is thrilling to bring the Sagas to life and do something a little crazy and down to earth at the same time.
~ Arild Nilsen
(Draken Harald Hårfagre ~ Expedition America 2016)
grace
The Ecstasy to guess,
Were a receipted Bliss
If Grace could talk —
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #1680)
hanging garden of bottle gourds
As we wandered around a corn maze on a perfect autumn day, we came upon an enchanting gourd tunnel.
Gourds are natural born climbers. They seek out anything they can reach to climb closer to the sun. They grow so quickly it can become a daily task to move the vines away from some places you don’t want them to climb on. And once a tendril gets itself wound around a hold nothing short of breaking the tendril off the vine will get the little curlicue to let go. Not even the death of the vine will loosen their grip much.
~ Karen Hundt-Brown
(American Gourd Society)
While I looked, my inner self moved; my spirit shook its always-fettered wings half loose; I had a sudden feeling as if I, who never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste life: in that morning my soul grew as fast as Jonah’s gourd.
~ Charlotte Brontë
(Villette)
Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done.
~ Henry David Thoreau
(A Week on the Concord & Merrimack Rivers)
autumnal sunshine
I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.
~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
(The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne)
feeling gratitude
Happy we who can bask in this warm September sun, which illumines all creatures, as well when they rest as when they toil, not without a feeling of gratitude.
~ Henry David Thoreau
(A Week on the Concord & Merrimack Rivers)
maritime heritage festival
shooting celebratory sprays of water into the air
Last weekend we went to the Connecticut Maritime Heritage Festival. The weather was terribly hot and unbearably humid, but we pressed on… You can see how hazy it was in the pictures. I love tall ship parades. After the parade we went home to recuperate in our air conditioning. When you can’t cool off standing by the sea it is just too hot.
home port Panama City, Florida
home port Mystic, Connecticut
home port New London, Connecticut
home port New London, Connecticut
Later on we went over to New London to take a dinner cruise on the Mystic Whaler. I have a bit of history with this schooner. Back in the early 1980s two of my aunts signed up for a two-night cruise to Block Island. But just before they were to leave, one aunt got sick and couldn’t make it. The other aunt insisted I go with her, which I did, very reluctantly. I had three small children and didn’t want to leave them for two nights!
The cruise was a mixture of very high and very low experiences. I loved the sailing and the meals grilled outside on the deck and the captain singing and playing his guitar when we were anchored for the night. I just wished I was there with my husband! Sadly, though, my period came early and heavy and it was a struggle to use the “head” (bathroom) correctly. And in the next cabin was a teenage boy and his mother. They were up most of the night, or so it seemed, as the mother pounded his back trying to loosen the stuff in his lungs. He had cystic fibrosis and his suffering tugged at my heart.
So one day Tim surprised me with tickets for the dinner cruise. The following pictures were taken from the ship…
it looks so different from the mouth of the Thames River
the benches behind the fence with the white posts are where
Tim & I usually sit to have our supper in the summer
As it turned out this cruise had its share of negative aspects, too. It was still so hot outside that I never needed the jacket I brought, figuring it would be cool out on the water. And I wish we had been informed that most of the tickets were held by a raucous group of people celebrating a birthday. They brought their own drinks and things got lively very quickly. Someone even started choking on his food and luckily someone else was there to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him.
So much for romance at sea!
wild turkeys
You can’t be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.
~ Hal Borland
(Sundial of the Seasons)
After way too many days of miserable heat and sticky humidity the weather finally changed Sunday afternoon. We celebrated by going to our favorite gluten-free pizza place and having our supper there outside in the fresh air.
On the way home I spotted six wild turkeys in a field and insisted Tim turn around so I could get some pictures. Most of them had their heads down in the grass, feeding. But the lookout was keeping his eye open for danger or trouble. I’m glad he didn’t seem to think we posed any threat.
This field is separated from the road by a stone wall. After feeding for a while, the lookout turkey jumped up on the stone wall and started watching the cars go by. It seemed like he was looking for a good opportunity to cross the street with the rafter of turkeys in his charge.
There was just too much traffic! We grew tired of waiting and the other turkeys kept on feeding themselves so we decided to leave. When we drove past him on the road I tried to get a picture of him from that side of the wall, but it came out blurry. But still, it was fun to watch them, and a great way to end the weekend.
before the storm
Five days ago there were a lot of birds at the beach, perhaps getting ready for Tropical Storm Hermine… I had some fun trying to identify the different stages of life of the laughing gulls…
We had a few gusts of wind which ruffled some feathers…
I wondered if the cormorants would be staying out on their island during the storm…
The baby great black-backed gull wondered if we would be handing out a french fry. Tim had unintentionally dropped one recently, renewing hopes for some of the younger birds…
My friend knows better — he’s content to visit with us. 🙂
We also saw a great egret — they don’t often come this close, preferring their island in the middle of one of the salt ponds.
The swan’s pond has mostly dried up due to the drought…
Sharing the estuary by the sea wall, we were amazed to see eight snowy egrets feeding with the great egret, the swan and a flock of Canada geese!
The calm before the storm… Hermine gave us mostly gale force winds and drizzle. Several branches and many leaves and twigs came off the trees, but no trees were uprooted in our vicinity. That was more than enough excitement for us!
