INTERMISSION: Random Moments of Beauty

I am at last about to make the Big Announcement.  And after that I even have a few new posts---the sort that keep some of you coming back---lined up in the queue.  But for the moment, I'm finishing an article for New York Social Diary, and organizing the drum roll for the B.A.  So, in the meantime, (or is it meanwhile?), I offer a scenic intermission.

Last week up here was nothing short of astonishing.  Summer weather, in the seventies, in Maine, in March.  It was shirtsleeves and shorts weather, yet there were no leaves on the trees, no boats--save a few lobster boats--in the bays and harbors.  No tourists or summer folk on the street, no lines at the Restaurants, no gallery openings.  Nothing but sublime weather.  But appearances can be deceiving.  On another such fluke day in March some thirty years back,  I was deceived by the weather and swam in the ocean, off a beautiful pebble beach. It was, um, bracing.  I'm older and wiser now. Mostly older.

On Thursday, I chanced to find myself on the tip of Naskeag Point in Brooklin.  It is a small peninsula separating Blue Hill Bay from Eggemoggin Reach, one of the country's finest sailing waters.

The very tip of Naskeag point, a pink gravel beach, looking West, give or take

And from the same spot, looking in the other direction, East to Blue Hill bay

The next day, a little later in the afternoon on remote Petit Manan Point, further Down East, in a more spartan Maine.  This part of New England was once part of New France, and the names bestowed by Champlain, before Jamestown or the Mayflower, survive.

Lobster is the big industry on Petit Manan Point.  Here, lobster traps at the ready on a dock.  Left, to the East, is Bois Bubert Island, over the horizon, Portugal. 

And a little while later on the way home, a detour to Grindstone Neck.  This is the view East from Grindstone

And the view West across Frenchman's Bay, with Mt. Desert Island in the distance

Years ago, Mel Gibson filmed a movie up here---Man Without a Face.  A friend went to see it, and mentioned how extraordinary it was to look at the landscapes we see every day, perhaps even take for granted,  on the big screen, and how world class, they really are.  The distance by car between Naskeag and Petit Manan is only slightly over an hour, yet between those two points, I could have taken photographs of a thousand spots of astonishing beauty---many of scenes far more dramatic and spectacular than these.  And I never take them for granted.

To all those who ask how we survive the winters up here, this is your answer.  But remind me next February.