“I felt like I’d been misplaced in the cosmos and belonged in Maine … I had to live this long, have the experiences I’ve had, to create what I do. I knew I wanted to write for years, but I had to be ready so I wouldn’t blow it. The move to Maine was the final step. ” — Terry Goodkind

Travels With Maggie

Acadia National Park -- Photo by Pat Bean

Yesterday’s blog of a simply photograph, quote and my Bean’s Pat was a throw away, the kind of blog I write when I need a break from writing.

The comments it brought, however, got me thinking more about Maine and the nine days I spent there. The trip was part of a six-month, 23-states-and-Canada, 7,000-mile journey I made in 2006. It was my first time in New England.

I dawdled along the way, so that far too many of Maine’s birds that I wanted to see had already migrated by the time I reached Bar Harbor, Maine. I saw only eight new life birds of the twenty or so I had expected to find. And a storm blew up the day I was supposed to go whale watching.

Other than those annoyances, everything else about my Maine stay was perfect.

Bar Harbor streetscape. While I missed the birds, I caught the town's off season serenity. -- Photo by Pat Bean

One of the nicest things about my stay just outside of Bar Harbor was the free shuttle bus that stopped at my campground every half hour or so, and which took me all over Mount Desert Island, including Acadia National Park while my canine traveling compainion, Maggie, stayed behind in the RV.

The park is full of natural wonders to explore. One of these was Cadillac Mountain, the highest summit on the East Coast north of Rio de Janeiro, and the first spot in the mainland states to be hit by the morning sun in the fall and winter.

I was on its summit one dawn to catch that first ray of rosy light. I laughed, but to myself, when one guy standing nearby spotted a herring gull and got all excited because he thought he had seen a bald eagle. No reason I thought to extinguish his excitement. Later in the day I did see a bald eagle soaring over the park. I hope that guy also saw it.

As replacement for the canceled whale tour, I took a trolley tour of the island. Our guide was full of facts and trivia, such as President William Howard Taft’s 27 strokes on the Kebo Valley Golf Club’s 17^th hole back in 1910, and the fact that scenes for the Dark Shadows TV soap opera had occasionally been filmed on Mount Desert.

Hopefully the next time I’m in Maine – a revisit is definitely on my to-do list – I’ll arrive before the birds have migrated south.

Bean’s Pat: All Write: Spring and the Cigarettus Smokerus http://tinyurl.com/7ox9d76 As an avid bird watcher, I laughed my head off at this. But, warning, if you don’t have a sense of humor some among you may find this offensive and sexist.

Park at the Pier, looking out on Frenchmen's Bay -- Photo by Pat Bean

Bean’s Pat: Zottel is Back http://photobotos.com/2012/02/23/zottel-is-back I couldn’t resist this goat. Remember Doris Day in”Don’t Eat the Daisies.”

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Travels With Maggie

This award was started in 2008 by Norwegian, Hulda Husfrue, or so I've read.

Michelle Gilles at Silk Purse Productions Blog (how to make silk purses out of a sow’s ear) nominated me for a Kreative Blogger award. Thank you Michelle at: http://silkpurseproductions.wordpress.com

I’ll use my Bean’s Pat to play it back. This “Pat” on the back goes to my personal choice of the best blog of the day. My choices are eclectic and I hope my readers have been checking them out.

As part of the acceptance. I’m supposed to tell you seven things about myself that you might not already know. I’ve done this before, but this part’s actually fun, especially trying to think of things my blabber-fingers haven’t already told you. So here goes.

Miss Clairol’s Nice and Easy, No. 99 has been my friend for umpteen years. My original color was dishwater blonde. I haven’t the foggiest idea what color it is these days because I try hard to never let my roots show.

I stuck into college without ever graduating from high school, just one among many ways I’ve lived my life backwards.

OK. I admit it. I'm a tree-hugging flower child who believes that some day this planet will be a peaceful place to live. -- Photo by a stranger sharing my day at Custer State Park in South Dakota.

I’m a prolific reader of just about everything – including cereal boxes, bumper stickers, roadside signs and blogs — with the exception of horror. When much younger I watched a Vincent Price horror flick – Murders at the Wax Museum I think it was called, and spent the next year expecting a missing head to turn up in my washing machine every time I opened the lid.

I once zoomed up behind a police car doing 100 mph while driving between Salt Lake City and Wendover, Nevada. I thought I was only doing 70 until I looked down at the speedometer. I’m not sure why I didn’t get a ticket. Perhaps the officer was day-dreaming.

I was 37 years old before alcohol of any kind touched my lips, well if you don’t count my grandmother’s beer, which I’ve been told I stole and drank when I was 3 years old.

I’m speaking tonight at a Blue and Gold Banquet for my daughter’s Cub Scout Pack on Compassion for Animals. I’m going to play the wolf howl-video that I mentioned on yesterday’s blog.

I’ve been living and traveling now in a small RV with my canine traveling companion, Maggie, for over seven years. By the end of this year I should have visited all 50 states. I did Hawaii and Alaska in earlier days, just FYI.

Now I’d love it if my readers would tell me something quirky about themselves.

Bean’s Pat: 10,000 Birds http://10000birds.com Great blog for anyone who likes birds, especially if you’re passionate about them — like me.

Howling With Wolves

Wolves in Snow. Image Source: http://www.findfreegraphics.com/wallpaper

I was on my way to Maine when I read about Wolf Park, a place where people could howl with wolves.

It was shortly after I had been luckily blessed to see a wild one in Yellowstone National Park, a miracle that I never thought would happen.

The opportunity to howl with one also seemed like a miracle, and so I rerouted my driving route to take me through Battleground, Indiana, and it’s number one tourist attraction: Wolf Park. It’s a place where wolves live as they do in the wild, but were conditioned as pups not to be afraid ofhumans. It’s a research park so we humans can better understand these wild creatures with which we share the planet.

The night I howled with wolves, including Tristan, one of the pack leaders at the park, is still etched vividly on my brain.

When I found this video, I immediately wanted to share it with my readers. I hope you howl along.

Bean’s Pat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqgrfBLIcoA Howl with Tristan

Here's what my old manual Remmington looked like. Someone on e-Bay wants $299 for its memories. Mine are worth a whole lot more, but I don't need to spend $299 to recall them.

 Mark Twain, according to Wikipedia, claims that he was the first important writer to present a publisher with a typewriten manuscript. It was the 1886 manuscript for “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” Historian Darryl Rehr challenged the claim, claiming it was Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi” written in 1883, that was the first.

Once Upon A Time

I taught myself to type on an old Remington manual typewriter. I then got a job as a Western Union typist – I typed up telegraphs from people who called on the phone to send one. My biggest thrill was the day Tennessee Ernie Ford was on the other end of the line.

A familar happening when I typed on my old manual Remington

My typing speed went from 45 words a minute to 120 words a minute. But the job only lasted a few months before I quit to become barefoot and pregnant for what seemed like an eternity.

It was in the middle of my seven consecutive years of changing diapers that I decided I wanted to be a writer. For the next few years I banged out terrible fictional prose and dookie poetry on that old Remington. That’s how you began to be a writer.

Then I stuck into the back door of a small newspaper as a darkroom flunky, and over the next four years worked my way up to being the paper’s star reporter. I thought of myself as a cross between Lois Lane and Brenda Starr.

Eleven years later, when I was a reporter at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, I typed up my first story on a computer. I hated it – for all of two weeks.

At home, however, I was still typing away on that old Remington. But as the computers at work got better and better, I finally gave up my Remington for a home computer. I don’t question that the writing was easier and faster, but to this day, I still miss my old Remington.

Remember changing out typewriter ribbons, and making carbon copies. I suspect only those of us with more years behind us than ahead have such memories.

There was something extremely gratifying about manually slamming the carriage back at the end of each sentence. Then there was the ability to yank a piece of paper, containing nothing but meaningless dookie, out of the machine. The ritual then was to crumple it into a ball and toss the wad into a nearby waste basket.On especially bad writing days, the basket would be overflowing and the area around it a jungle of paper balls.

One simple does not get the same physical release of frustration from merely using a finger to hit the delete button.

The truth is however, that I don’t want to go back. Couldn’t even if I wanted, but it sure is nice to have memories. And that old Remington typewriter, which eventually was donated to a charity thrift store, created lots of them.

Too bad I didn’t keep it. I think I paid $7.50 for it at a garage sale in the early 1960s. I noted today that one similiar to it, if not the exact model, was listed for a $299 minimum bid on e-Bay.

Bean’s Pat: Wistfully Wandering http://tinyurl.com/836mqtu Ditto what she said. A blog for those with wanderlust in their souls. Be sure and check out her first 25 reasons, too.

While this tiny creek is too small to make most maps, it makes it on the list of my favorite places. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Travels With Maggie

Wyoming's Grand Teton, photographed at the end of a hike to Taggart Lake, makes my long, long list of favorite places. -- Photo by Pat Bean

I get tongue-tied when people ask me what’s my favorite place among those Maggie and I have visited in our RV travels.

How do you name one among so many?

I’ve discovered beauty and awesomeness everywhere I’ve gone, from coast to coast and border to border.

I’ve ridden to the top, in a tiny cramped ball, of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, crossed the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, stood beneath Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln at Mount Rushmore, and gazed down on New York City from the top of the Empire State Building.

All these places were awesome.

But just as grand and beautiful in the eyes of this nature-loving old broad have been all the nature refuges, lakes, mountains, rivers big and small and even the trees, especially the redwoods, that Maggie and I have visited.

Yes. Perhaps that’s the answer. My favorite place is where Mother Nature resides. 

Bean’s Pat: 20 Minutes a Day: Saturday Morning http://tinyurl.com/6w8ce3h A writing prompt that had me laughing all the way through.

“To trace the history of a river or a raindrop…is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble upon divinity, which like feeding the lake, and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself all over again.” – – From Islands, The Universe, Home, 1991 Gretel Ehrlich

Headed DOWN the Snake -- Photo by Pat Bean

Down River

White water rafting was how I got my adrenalin rush for 20 years. These days I’m mostly content to sit by a river and watch it flow past on its way to the sea.

Or take a gently canoe ride down a flat section of river and watch the scenery float by.

I like rivers. I live to hear their music, from the tinkling,, bubbling lullaby of a small mountain stream to the the bass roar of the rivers, like the Snake and Colorado, just before you come upon a man-eating white-water rapid. 

Hey! Who stole the boat? -- Photo by Pat Bean

“SothisisaRiver”

“THE River,” corrected the Rat.

“And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!”

“By it and with it and on it and in it,” said the Rat. “It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing. Lord! The times we’ve had together…”  -- From the Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahme

The Write Word

Watching a sunrise is my idea of a good ritual to start any day. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Completing the rewrite of my book, “Travels With Maggie.” was high on my list of New Year’s Resolutions, yet I procrastinated doing it for the entire month of January.

February has been better because I finally turned on the light bulb in my brain and then took some advice from a famous dancer.

It dawned on me that the way I got through NANO (writing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days) was by making it the No. 1 activity of my days, which have always been filled with many eggs to crack and enjoy. So, I decided “Travels With Maggie” would be my No. 1 priority.

Any sunset is the perfect time for the ritual of counting the day's blessings. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Then I started reading Twyla Tharp’s book “The Creative Habit,” in which she talks about the importance of ritual as a way to make sure she went to the gym daily so as to keep her body in shape for dancing. It’s the same, I thought, for writers. We must exercise our writing fingers and minds daily for the most benefits.

Twyla’s ritual was the taxi cab ride she took to the gym. She knew that once she got to the gym, she would both exercise and enjoy it.

“Some people might say,” Twyla wrote, “that simply stumbling out of bed and getting into a taxicab hardly rates the honorific ritual that anyone can perform. I disagree. First steps are hard; it’s no one’s idea of fun to wake up in the dark every day and haul one’s tired body to the gym … but the quasi–religious power I attach to this ritual keeps me from rolling over and going back to sleep.”

After reading that, I decided I needed my own ritual. I made it the simple one of  setting my alarm clock to signal the end of the writing time I had promised myself.

Believe it or not it worked yesterday when I woke up in the mood to do anything but write.  Just set the alarm clock, I told myself. And I did. And I wrote.

Bean’s Pat: Writing Though Life http://tinyurl.com/7r4wmez This is a great blog for anyone writing a memoir, keeping a journal or even just blogging regularly.

All cares drop away when I hike Zion National Park's Gateway to the Narrows trail, an easy 2-mile out -and-back roundtrip that parallels the Virgin River. -- Photo by Pat Bean

“Rivers know this: There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.” Winnie the Pooh.

Bean’s Pat: Philosopher of the Mouse Hedge: http://tinyurl.com/6mfskt4 Belly laughs and smiles. Especially if you click on the Carman Miranda link at the end. Remember her –  and her energy. I smiled all the way through the clip.

Roots, a strange painting by Frida Kahlo

Frida’s quote explains everything perfectly — at least to all of us who grew up thinking we were strange.

And if  the women I know best are examples, Frida’s feeling about being strange is pretty much a universal thing. It’s too bad that too  many of us let decades go by before we appreciate our own special strangeness.

Dr. Seuss' world at Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida. -- Photo by Pat Bean

We’re too caught up in what others expect, or what other people will think if we do something strange, like hugging a tree or riding roller coasters when we’re 70. Yes, I do both.

I also think men have problems accepting their strangeness. After all “only sissies cry” and “real men don’t eat quiche.”

Why in the dookie have we allowed others to have so much power over us?

Frida used her strangeness to produce mind-bending art. .

Dr. Seuss, whose characters you must admit are a bit strange, embraced it with his unconventional stories and verse. He also understood how difficult it was for the rest of us to accept being different. Why else would he have wrote:

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind … Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”

I say we follow Dr. Seuss’ advice.

Bean’s Pat: http://morezennow.wordpress.com This is the blog on which I found Frida’s quote. It’s a blog that makes me think, and I love it when someone does that to me.