Maine Guide Tip

Every week I'll offer some wood wisdom gleaned from Registered Maine Guides I've known.

The King of Knots

When I was a Boy Scout, I never got my knot-tying merit badge. Something about ropes and strings befuddled me. I could barely tie my shoelaces, which was strange because I was otherwise a pretty smart and dextrous kid. 

It was only as I got older that I learned the value of tying strong knots (I think it was after a mattress went flying off the roof of my car after a haphazard knot I'd tied gave way). And the reality is that you don't really need to know all that many knots to handle most situations in life. But the one knot you absolutely do need to learn is the bowline (pronounced bowlin'). Back when I learned how to tie it, there was no YouTube to help teach me. I had to use a book. These days, though, there are lots of great how-to videos available. The one below is fine. My only complaint — beyond the University of Phoenix ad — is that it doesn't use the old "bunny goes in the hole and around the tree" teaching model.

Bowlines are fun and easy to tie once you get the hang of them. Impress your landlubber friends!

Maine Guide Tip

Every week I'll offer some wood wisdom gleaned from Registered Maine Guides I've known.

The 30/30 Rule

I'm fascinated with lightning for certain personal reasons. On average 58 Americans die a year from being struck, and I think many of those deaths could be prevented if we were better at educating people about the real danger lightning poses and how to act during a thunderstorm. For instance, here's a practical tip: You can gauge your distance from an approaching electrical storm by calculating the interval between a lightning flash and the following thunder. Count the number of seconds between "flash and bang," and then divide by 5. (Sound travels at a rate of roughly one-fifth of a mile per second.) So if you hear thunder 30 seconds after seeing a flash you are within 6 miles of the strike — and that's a very dangerous place to be. Get indoors immediately.

The other part of the 30/30 rule is that you should wait 30 minutes after you last heard thunder before you continue your round of golf or venture back out on the lake.

The National Weather Service has some useful and interesting information about lightning here.

Battle of the eBooks

At the New York Times, David Pogue has a smart column comparing and contrasting Amazon's Kindle and BN.com's new eBook store. While Amazon wants customers to buy and read everything via its own proprietary channels (built around the Kindle), Barnes & Noble is going the open-format route, making its titles available to be read on everything from PCs to BlackBerries. For the moment, Pogue is giving Amazon the higher grade, despite its recent missteps. But this era we're living through reminds me a hell of a lot of the caged death match epoch of the 1980s when the VHS trounced the Betamax for video recording supremacy. There can be only one!

North Woods for Sale

Over at my day job the environmental writer Robert Kimber has a provocative essay about the changes sweeping through the Maine North Woods: an area larger than the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. Over the past two decades, the paper companies who once controlled these millions of acres (and generally took a custodial approach to them) sold their sizable holdings to investment banks and real estate developers focused on turning short-term profits. Kimber laments what these changes have already meant for a place he calls:

A place of exquisite beauty, complexity, and variety, of headwater streams and mountain vistas, of gray jays and winter wrens, of huge old yellow birches too big for two men to wrap their arms around, of ravens quorking, moose swimming across Attean Pond, of rhodora and Labrador tea, and on and on. If you can’t thrill to this place, you’re dead on your feet. It’s not a “resource,” it’s not “the environment,” it’s a ten-million-acre miracle, one with plenty of nicks, scrapes, and deep wounds in it, but a miracle nonetheless....

Bob's essay is a barbed piece of writing that echoes some of my own preoccupations in The Poacher's Son.

Moose on the Loose

In my monthly column for Down East I once observed that, "Every interesting place in the world seems to exist at a nexus between reality and some Looney Tunes version of itself. So the price you pay for living there — or here — is that outsiders form half-baked ideas about your state that are, alas, not altogether incorrect."

Today was one of those days in Camden.