Post 773 - June 19, 2025

The ferry from Cape Breton to Newfoundland has no WIFI. It’s foggy enough over the water that I can’t see further away from the ship than about a hundred yards. The sea is, however, flat as a pancake.

Newfoundland is a half hour ahead of Cape Breton, which is confusing enough that I have lost track of how much longer we have until we dock. Today was meant to be a work catch-up day. Oh well. I’ve done what I can. In the immortal words of David Mamet, “It’s what it is, Bob.”

I could never understand how the German people could turn a blind eye to what the Third Reich was doing. Now that America is heading down the same path, however, I can clearly see how that could happen. I’m not experiencing anything that’s going on firsthand. If I weren’t reading about it every day, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea what our government is doing. Most everything is happening hundreds of miles away. I have the time to read the news. Many working people do not.

If you’re up before the sun to go out fishing to support your family and you’re out on the water all day hauling the catch up on the deck, the last thing you’re likely to do when you chug back into port is turn on MSNBC.

My mother told me I should apologize to people up here in Canada for what’s going on in our country, so I have been. It always gets a laugh, but I also think that it makes a difference in how people interact with us. People up north are much nicer than we are in New York. Even the gruffest folks we’ve met up here are quick to crack a smile if we let them.

The weird thing about being off the grid out on the ocean is that I know something truly messed up is happening as I write this in Washington. I have no idea what it is, but I know it’s awful. I’d like to be able to forget about it all and just enjoy the intermittent sound of the foghorn and the gray expanse of shallow waves and mist. Sadly, I’ve already read too much. My imagination is running wild.

When we were fighting to gain our independence two hundred and fifty years ago, somebody had the job of town crier. The news would arrive by a courier on horseback or in a stagecoach, and some loudmouth would stand in the town square and scream it out. As people went about their days and met up with their neighbors, those who heard him would pass the information forward. Most of the stories being bandied about were already weeks or months old, and, my guess is, that after a few people had put their spin on what they’d heard, likely unrecognizable.

With all the advances in technology and the miracle of the internet, not much, quite frankly, has really changed. Depending upon whom we are listening to, none of us is getting the same story.

I think that’s what I appreciated the most about the June 14^th protests. However, and from wherever people heard about them, they all came. Not only did they show up, but they arrived with a common purpose. Paul Revere couldn’t have rounded up the American people any better.

The memory Ι have from that day of a woman in a beat-up red car driving past our little flag-waving gang in Machias, Maine, last Saturday and giving us the finger has stuck with me. Later, when she was sitting quietly somewhere by herself, did she think about what she’d seen that day? Did she wonder why so many of us were out there?

Not everyone who protested on Saturday had come to the other earlier events. They must have been aware of them, though, and tuned in enough to the news that it made an impression. Here’s hoping that these marches registered with many more than the first ones did. The next one should be a doozy.

So many people turned up on Saturday that the news stories often led with us rather than leaving us buried further down the page. Even the horrific assassination of the Hortmans in Minnesota got knocked down to the second position in many of the outlets I read. For the first time in recent memory, the President’s latest debacle, in this case his idiotic parade, was several stories down below the fold. Up until now, anything he’d done wiped the rest of the news off the front page.

Michael and I could be anywhere right about now. I can’t tell. Trips like this are always a geography lesson. Up until a few days ago, I could never have picked out Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, or Prince Edward Island off a map. I had the general idea, but which provinces are connected, and which are separated by water was beyond me. Nothing beats driving or sailing, for teaching you where you are.

While there is a First Nation’s presence up here, most all the place names seem to be Scottish or Irish. Some road signs we passed were even in Gaelic.

When Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote Anne of Green Gables over a century ago, not only did she leave an empowering story behind, but she also guaranteed that her hometown’s tourism industry would thrive.

In Charlottetown, on Prince Edward Island, Michael and I saw a performance of Anne and Gilbert, the Musical, which has been running there for the past twenty summers. In the audience were young girls dressed as Anne. Straw hats with red pigtails are available in almost every souvenir store on the island.

At the house where L.M. Montgomery had lived for a spell following the death of her mother, a Japanese mom and her two daughters were taking pictures of each other in full Anne drag. They didn’t speak English at all. I took a picture of them all together in their plaid dresses, straw hats, and copper braids and marveled at how that story has spread around the world.

The stories of Anne of Green Gables, Jo March and her sisters from Little Women, and the Ingalls girls from the Little House on the Prairie books are followed by more young women, and young men, I should add, in 2025 than they were when they were first published. Each new generation seems to discover them anew and needs to hear what they have to say. Parents pass the books down to their kids or else someone discovers one of the stories and shares it with their friends.

That women can be strong, independent, smart, and opinionated is something we, as a society, still need to be taught.

They’ve just announced that we are going to dock in forty-five minutes. You’d never know it from looking outside. We are still in the middle of a cloud bank. Even though I can’t see any sign of the shore, I believe the disembodied voice. There may not be any land in sight, but I am counting on the fact that someone on the bridge knows where we are.

We take a lot of what we believe on faith. If enough people tell us that something is good, we are more apt than not to give it a chance. If everyone tells us that something is bad, there might be something to what they are saying.

I hadn’t read Anne of Green Gables until now. It’s a wonderful book. All those millions of people who have been saying so for years were right. I should have picked it up years ago. While it follows the same basic formula of the other books in its genre, it has its own quirky, unique charm.

The more we read and the more we see, the more apt we are to be able to recognize when what we are hearing has an edge of truth to it and when it’s just bunk. Nothing we get is ever without any bias; the trick, though, is being able to spot what that might be.

One if by land, two if by sea is as clear a news story as one could possibly hope for. It was easy to deliver and easy to understand. After that, it was up to us.

We just passed by the entrance to the harbor, so the disembodied announcer voice was telling the truth. We’ve arrived in Newfoundland.