1 Boring Old Man

 
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It’s a little hard to imagine a better place to beat the Georgia midsummer heat than the Maine Coast. Like most vacation spots, it’s heavy with nostalgia,. The memorabilia under glass in the restaurants are labels from sardines, kippers, "fuzzy wuzzy" cat food, or recolored street scenes from the heyday of the canning industry in Lubec. Likewise, the top of the hill is populated with mansions from the owners of those canneries. There’s much talk of Franklin Roosevelt who tried to dam the large bays and capitalize on the height of the tides to make hydroelectric power [not a bad idea, actually].

The vacationers are mostly older – people who want to look at the whirlpools created when the tides change direction and create waves when the water’s going both ways. The waterside park is being populated with benches in memory of lost fisherman – not from back when – but recently. The peculiar ebb and flow of the tides is pretty treacherous and eats boats just like it always did.

I’m thinking that vacations are like time travel – going back to simpler times. The loud old tourist at the next table at lunch was lamenting the fall of daily papers, "the Internet … instantaneous … CNN … blah, blah" [I’ll bet he went home and got "on-line" just like we did]. For some reason, the technological advances of modern life seem to complexify things, and we long for those easier times [times when people hoped for what we have now].