Yelow-bellied Sapsucker Sighted Here

For a pleasant Sunday afternoon walk, the wife and I, a favorite sister and Molly, our boxer, headed for bird-watching country. We started walking at East Stone Haven on South St. The entrance is through two swell-elegant cobblestone posts 10 feet high. The wife recalled shinnying to the top of both cairns just for the sake of being top dog for a "sec."

We saw a pleasant looking litter of fallen acorns. All we needed were some wooden matches without the brimstone and we could see ourselves in the pipe business, a joy we shared with many another growing boy a half century and more ago. It was one way of "smoking" that could never lead to emphyzema, which our dictionary describes as the "dry heaves," born in the weed.

Molly went a-snortin' and a-puffin' with her triple chin lallygaggin' on the dry sod. Then it happened. Not Molly but our sister. The wife and I and the beefy mutt usually pay little heed to the peeps of our feathered friends. But not our sister. All of a sudden she bleated, "There's a red breasted nut hatch on that tree!"

Maybe there was, but all we could see were the same green leaves, some turned rusty, that graced all the trees, the kind we have been raking and burning, and burning and raking, much to the distaste of certain of our neighbors. Not everyone fattens on the smell of smoky leaves like us.

And speaking about leaves, who should we come upon but Tucker Vye, who lives on this Rockport lane and who runs the Addison Gilbert Hospital. He seemed to be happy in his Fall harvesting of leaves and acorns. He admitted to a bumper crop of 20 wheelbarrow-loads, enough as he put it, to start a squirrel farm. His property abounds in boulders. He said his land is part of that noted terminal moraine that sprawls all over Cape Ann and helps skyrocket the cost of water and sewer system installations.

Sandy Bay was within a healthy stone's throw. The fog on the water was thick enough to cut, and we heard the Thacher's Island horn blowing its warning to passing craft. Which brought from Tucker Vye the comment that he missed the old two-tone groaner; there was a horn with character. We agree. So does another good friend, Carol Roehm, who lives just down the street and who called us in to visit. She even let the pudgy four-footer cross her threshold.

Through her picture windows looking into her garden, we really found Birdland. She is an authority on birds. The two birders pointed out a brown thrasher (we saw that one), a woodpecker, then the prize catch of the day, what they both agreed was a yellow-bellied sapsucker What amazed us was that it actually is a bird and not a standing joke.
J.P.C., Jr.

A Fall Walk on South End

It was a walk into summer-time in a winter month. The dateline read a Sunday in the last of November, but the thermometer plainly read in the high 60's, shirt sleeve clime here in Rockport town, and that's how the male was dressed. The good wife was dressed accordingly, and Molly sported her accustomed skintight garb. We were at peace with the world.

We sneaked a gas buggy ride up South Street to Briarstone Road , where we descended to stroll down the road to the ocean, only to bump up against a beautiful shepherd dog hid behind a startling white picket fence. That gave our four-footed monster a chance to bellow at fever pitch with the shepherd yawking just as feverishly, but the fence was high enough to thwart both. Whether they were swapping the Indian love call or hymns of hate we'll never know. With guilty feelings, we just kept a-going and finally our Molly surrendered and galloped up to us.

Hardly was that uproar a thing of the past but what we came upon a second walloping woofer, thist time on the Roger W. Howard estate. But all our 65-pound pooch did was to snub the home dog.

It is a street of beautiful homes, the kind that make our assessors glow and fellow townsmen proud. It is a street that charms visitors with its picturesque accents like the rustic electic lamp fronting Ernest Parsons' property, and a gateway of two huge anchors held up by huge timbers at the end of a street rushing into the sea.

Popping all around us were guns of hunters eager to crush small animal life. We hoped their ammo would go sour. We are among the weaklings who would like to see wildlife roam in safety. Then up through the lush greenery of the Locke Anderson estate, in through alleys trying to find an exit to pass a wintry cordwood pile and onto Marmion Way.

Past a home where the folks think enough of their kiddoes to have nailed crude boards at short intervals on a tree so the young Americans could climb into a tree house. Well we know how a tree can be a great factor in character building for the next generation. We love those people.

We came across an artesian well being drilled into the expansive estate once owned by the Radcliffes, a summer tourist home, overlooking the broad Atlantic. A short distance away was a trailer off the wheels, a type of home that worries town planners hereabouts. In the heavens, two jets were streaking heavy white scars, a sight that never loses its fascination for us.

Again Molly came upon a challenger protesting invasion. This time, we thought it had to be a "she" and that meant a hassle, so out came the leash. Oh, why can't these femmes get together?

But this "she" didn't quiver at the sight of Molly. It was a wee snip of a black-headed, white-bodied bird that peeped right back at our yapping "gal" on the beach, as the big round sun set a brilliant yellow in back of us all.

Traffic was heavy as we spotted Post Office custodian Eben Knowlton and others cruising the shore line, plastered with myriads of cat-o-nine-tails in the fens.

Yes, it was a rewarding stroll that brought reveries to us, the wife and I, and a mud-wallowing delight to our mischievous four footer. Why not try it some time, folks?
J.P.C., Jr.

A Rockport Fence Viewer Takes a Stroll

The wife and I had plans for off-islanding to Worcester last Sunday so with our decrepit cat-hazer Mollie we re-timed the usual Sunday stroll to a Saturday Shanks-mare saunter through Rockport's ways.

This time the sailing orders read the shoreline of the former Harvey development along Marmion Way, an area that a thinker named George W. Harvey did much to breathe life into land.

The sun was setting in the rich colors it can only set in Rockport town. The air was crisp and so were we. For Molly, it was like old home week for here was her neighborhood of the good old days when her tiring bones were more virile and her snorting had more oompth or "it" or whatever you below twenty call that sort of thing today.

The wife and I have always been unpaid amateur fence viewers but not in the official sense of a viewer concerned with the barrier trespassing a half inch on the other feller's land. So again we had the joy of noting several varieties of inspiring fences all gathered closely as if they were trying to fence in our sunset so it would always be around to contain happiness on this patch of earth.

First we noted a wrought iron fence bordering Paul Dow's grounds 'Rockport Hammocks.' He makes them, you know, here and in his winter home in Sarasota, Fla. What's more, he uses them to prove to you how restful they can be. Just a plug at sunset!

Right next door we collided with a formal and impressive granite fence, old Rockport as can be, and across the street is the Alice O. Tarr property with a boulder fence that also had the strength of Gibraltar. The wife and I noted that our hefty boxer (65 pounds on the paws) took an entirely opposite reaction to these fences. There was no segregation in her mind when it came to what to do upon meeting a fence -- or a post. A dog's life isn't so bad after all -- if you're a dog.

Then at 44 Marmion Way was a particularly beautiful fence of cobbles set in cement and close by a rustic wooden fence with a blue gate setting off the Tod property. We found ourselves in the land of the late Sam Williamson, the remarkable author who discovered Rockport as a precinct of his "Salt Harbor" stories that graced the pages of the New York Times Sunday magazine, the stories that put so many good Rockporters in Manhattan, like the Tucks and "Doc" Greene among others. Sam's widow Cora, who won fame as a grand opera singer, presides over their shore estate.

As the sun blazed up more and more in the riotous colors of the sun bowing out for the night, we ambled up past the one-time Harvey home later occupied by our high school classmate, Lawyer Dan Harris with its expansive grounds that we felt must have broken somebody's back trying to keep mowed but grounds which our sweet (?) li'l Molly just loved to show how fleet of foot she wasn't The way she sniffed and snorted, we felt she was trying for gophers.

Ahead of us the sea was tranquil, gentle, so different from other seas of Sandy Bay that have torn strong vessels apart and brought Coast Guardsment on their knees in rescue efforts of fishermen and yachtsmen alike. The wife and I looked with longing at the shore and recalled the days of our early courtship gone almost 30 years away when we were able to walk that coast line from the Headlands to the old Coast Guard Base at Straitsmouth. Town short-sightedness let that coastline fall into private hands.

Private or no private, didn't stop our four-footer from making one big dash for that exclusive area when she got wind of something important to her. As usual, her foray ended up with just another huff and a puff. And on that note we wound up in the family antique and off to home and TV land. It was a good soft walk, one on which you too should have been along. J.P.C., Jr.