42 - 3/10/11 - Marshside Storytime VI

Initial Impressions

Christopher Setterlund

42 – 3/10/11

Marshside Storytime VI – Not Without My Glasses

This edition of Marshside Storytime at Initial Impressions is a classic tale of love and loss, not knowing what you have until it’s gone.  Nobody likes to feel like they are getting older, the signs start to come with occasional wrinkles or gray hairs.  Getting glasses is one of those things as well.  For some people it is just another stage of life, for others the glasses become like an arch enemy.  For Maui they became an arch enemy.

            He would talk non-stop about how much he hated his glasses from the moment he got them even though they did help him to see better.  It was what the represented that made him hate them.  In time he began to wear them less and less, leaving them in his truck, or at home conveniently.  I was set up as the middle man, to read the orders to him so that he would not have to use his glasses.

            His worked well when I was there but on days off he was forced to swallow his pride and wear the glasses.  One day he had them on while he was doing some prep for lunch and dinner; this was back when we did breakfast as well.  He had been working for a few hours when he realized that he was not wearing his glasses anymore.

            First off, I don’t know how you can be wearing your glasses on your face and then not be but not noticed it for hours.  That’s another story though.  So Maui took to looking all over the prep room, in the walk-in fridge, in the freezer, there was no sign of his glasses.  He went out to his truck, nothing, he checked in the bathrooms and out by the coffee makers just in the off chance he had dropped them there.  The glasses were gone.

            He checked the little nook where the phone and our time cards were, nothing.  He looked underneath all of the counters, tables, over the river and through the woods but there was no sign.  His frantic search surprised me since he always said how much he hated his glasses, but he said it was more of the fact that they were prescription and expensive not because he liked them.  Finally he decided that if he stopped looking for them they would suddenly appear.

            The timer went off and Maui realized that the chickens he had put in the huge pizza oven were done so he opened the middle door and slid the sheet pan of steaming chicken out.  It was then that I heard a groan of shock and disbelief.  There on the sheet pan among the chicken sat Maui’s glasses!  They were almost totally melted to the metal and covered in chicken juice.

            He had taken them off and put them in the front pocket of his chef’s coat and while he was working on it they had slipped out and landed silently on the sheet pan among the raw chicken.  Maui had cooked his own glasses.  Sadly they had to be tossed and he had to rummage through a few pairs in the lost and found to find something suitable until he was able to go and get a new pair from the eye doctor.  I think he had worn a pair with tiger stripes on them for a moment before we all suggested they looked really stupid.

            So there you have it another classic story of love and loss.  You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone and Maui didn’t appreciate his glasses until he cooked them and had to wear terrible tiger striped ones afterward.  That was several years ago and to this day he still hates his glasses, but anytime I bring up laser eye surgery he gets angrier.  I said it is safe but he will not hear of it; maybe he secretly loves his glasses and doesn’t want to get rid of them?  Who knows?  Cheers!

41 - 3/9/11

Initial Impressions

Christopher Setterlund

41 – 3/9/11 – In My Footsteps Trip

Made a trip today up to Georgetown, Mass., and back to Ipswich to shoot it right.  270 total miles, $30 in gas thanks to the Middle East again.  Why only 2 towns?  That will become clearer as you read.

            I was cruising along Rt. 3 making great time until WHAM!  Traffic.  No, not at the Braintree Split where it usually happens, but around Exit 12 for those who know the area.  Ended up spending 45 minutes there crawling along and learning as many license plates of those around me.

            As we sat in traffic I decided to make the best of it and blasted Billy Ocean’s ‘Suddenly’ and sang it for all of those around me.  There was also some old man smoking in his car which was not a big thing except for the fact that he had all of his windows rolled up.  Slowly but surely there was more smoke in his car.  I guess just driving old was not challenging enough.

            I arrived in Georgetown an hour later than I wanted to.  I had never even heard of this town until a few months ago.  The first place I stopped at was the site of the Goodrich Massacre.  It is where a family was killed by angry Native Americans in 1692.  The problem I had with this was that it said that the site was ‘Ten rods east’ of the sign.  Rods?  What the hell are rods?  Who uses that unit of measurement?  So I snapped photos in that general direction but rods, really?

            I parked at an abandoned antiques shop so that I could cross the street to shoot the Samuel Brocklebank House, the town’s historical society.  Once I stepped out I heard what sounded like someone banging on the windows inside the antique shop.  I looked and saw nobody which creeped me out.  After shooting I came back to my car and waited and then heard the banging again.  Have to check and see if that building is haunted because there was nobody else there but me.  Nice.

            The Georgetown Town Hall is the first one I have seen that used to be something else.  It was originally a school a hundred years ago.

            I need to get a bumper sticker that warns people behind me that I make frequent stops like a mail truck.  That would have come into major use when I hit Ipswich.

            I stopped at Pentucket Pond, there was a woman and her daughter there as well, she gave me some really dirty stares.  Do I really look like one of those guys like you see in the horror movies?   Wait, don’t answer that.  It also snowed a little there too which helped me forget that lady who hated me.

            My GPS decided it would be funny to send me up a steep barely paved hill and down a similarly awful section of road in the Great Neck village of Ipswich.  Sure, it was technically the quickest route but one slip would have sent me off a cliff to my grave with the GPS’s British voice laughing.

            Ipswich has the most historic homes of any town I have ever seen thus far.  There was no way to photograph all, or even most of them, so I decided to focus on the 17^th century ones.  I counted eight of them in my travels, pretty impressive.  This is where I could have used the ‘frequent stops’ bumper sticker again.

            Went back and reshot the Whipple House c.1677, this time I actually spent the extra time to walk down to the really old Choate Bridge from 1764, there were so many cool spots.  I loved the Riverwalk which crossed over the Ipswich River.  The falls were great but not as great as the history of Ipswich and America mural painted on the side of the EBSCO Publishing building.  Amazing.

            Was psyched to stop at Dunkin’ D’s for a quick lunch until the lady alerted me that they had no hash browns, the essential part of any meal there.  What a rip off, although the lady asked me not to tell anyone that the boss there was so stupid that they didn’t order hash browns.  I agree.

            Castle Hill was the crown jewel of my trip.  Almost didn’t get in since they needed cash which I didn’t have, the guard didn't accept cards, yay.  I had to drive all the way back into town to find cash, no ATMs so I had to go into Shaw’s, bought me a 5-Hour Energy so it wasn't all bad.  Oh yeah and I didn’t eat my Dunkin’ D’s food for like an hour thanks to that craziness.

            The mansion at Castle Hill was featured in The Witches of Eastwick, the lady there last summer said The Next Karate Kid, I had to look it up to be sure but yes it was filmed there too.  Never saw either movie and seeing the grounds is as close as I will get.

            It ended up being so cold on top of Castle Hill that my hands were too numb to shoot any more photos.  In the end my battery was almost dead from Ipswich alone.  I figured that with it being late I should quit while ahead and save my last stop for another time.  See, the stupid traffic cost me an hour so it’s the traffic’s fault I stopped early.  Also, it was so obvious that nothing was going to top Castle Hill so why even bother.

            Still managed to get stuck in more traffic, this time going through Boston, and the damn GPS tried to make me drive in the Carpool Lane again, idiot.  You’ll see by the photos below that it was all worth it.  Ipswich was even better this time despite it being freaking cold.  Cheers!

The possibly haunted antiques shop.

Spotted this on my drive through Georgetown.

Part of the amazing mural along the Ipswich Riverwalk.

The incredible mansion atop Castle Hill.

40 - 3/3/11 - Marconi Site

Initial Impressions

Christopher Setterlund

40 – 3/3/11

Marconi Site - Walking on History 

            When I was in college I did a research paper all about the effects that erosion had been having on Cape Cod throughout history.  I wrote about Stellwagen Bank located just north of Provincetown and how it used to be dry land where mammoths used to roam.  I wrote about Billingsgate Island, now known as Billingsgate Shoal.  Located at the end of Jeremy’s Point a mile off of Wellfleet’s coast there once was a thriving community spanning sixty acres.  Erosion tore through the unprotected island forcing the families onto the mainland; it was gone by the early 1940’s.  Only at low tide are the remnants of the island visible, you can even see the remains of the base of Billingsgate Lighthouse.

            I also wrote about the Marconi Wireless Station in Wellfleet as well.  It was here that the first wireless transmission took place in 1903 between President Theodore Roosevelt and England’s King Edward VII.  Guglielmo Marconi’s station, a precursor to RCA, once had four 210-foot tall wooden towers.  It was here that the first distress signals from the Titanic came but the signal was intermittent at best. 

            Erosion claimed much of the station, it was shut down in 1920 and the towers taken down as the two closest to the ocean were only fifteen feet from the cliff at the time they were removed.  The station was moved down to Chatham, there are still concrete pillars located behind Forest Street Beach that once held the radio tower up.

            The Marconi Site was always a fun place to visit with the White Cedar Swamp close by.  It was neat to look at the model of what the station looked like while it was in use and look out toward the ocean and imagine what used to be.  It was something to be imagined but never seen or touched.  That was until a few weeks ago.

            After another major storm ripped through the area the remains of the base of one of the towers resurfaced as the sand was washed away.  Sure, every winter parts of the towers may be seen but it was never like this as far as I remember.  For me, after all of the research I did in college and all of the childhood and adulthood memories, having a chance to touch a piece of the Marconi Station was something I could not pass up.

            I parked at Marconi Beach on Wednesday and walked the mile and a half to where the remains of the tower sat.  It was extremely windy with sand blowing everywhere but once the concrete, wood, and steel came into view I knew it was worth it.  I came up at low tide which meant I was able to walk around the three separate collections of debris and keep my feet dry.  There were some collections of bricks, some wooden pieces still bolted to the steel, and big chunks of concrete. 

            I was in awe of the whole scene realizing what I was seeing and standing on.  The silence surrounding me, only broken by the lapping waves, only added to the surreal scene.  After snapping a ton of photos I stopped, put the camera away, and stood in the middle of the largest section of the resurfaced tower.  Never had I imagined I’d be doing what I was doing on that day.  I wanted to enjoy it a bit more but ominous rain clouds began to move in and with a mile and half walk in the sand still to go I took one last look and left the remains of the Marconi Site in the rearview.  It was a great afternoon, one that I would recommend to anybody who likes history, or hikes, or both.  Make sure it’s low tide though or you won’t see too much.  Cheers! 

Photos: 

How it used to look.

39 - 3/1/11 - Marshside Storytime V

Initial Impressions

Christopher Setterlund

39 – 3/01/11

Marshside Storytime V – A Forbidden Kiss

          Every work place has secret romances, hookups, and real relationships.  The Marshside is no different.  However, what I am about to share with you is none of those things.  What this story entails is a moment that changed the course of two lives forever.  I understand that everybody has a different view of what love is, and a different idea of their perfect mate.  I repeat, this is not about love, it’s about carnal lust.  Enjoy.

            We start on a warm and sunny afternoon.  Our dear friend Bento had gone next door to the prep area to mix a fresh batch of mashed potatoes.  He was always one to take pride in his work, at least when he wanted to have photos of his work taken and sent home to Brazil.  Bento had specifically put me in charge of taking a few photos of him ‘hard at work’ to show his family back home just how great he was.

            Now after you get over laughing at Bento and ‘hard at work’ in the same sentence we’ll move on.  I got Bento’s camera and waited for him on the deck as he walked across the parking lot carrying the mixing bowl of mashed potatoes in one hand like he was carrying a trophy.  He was so into looking cool that he was not aware of the life altering moment soon to come.

            As he stopped at the bottom of the deck steps to pose for a photo and new waiter named Nick headed outside to head across the parking lot and into the barn for some paper goods.  Nick had only been at the Marsh for a few days and his backstory was not known by any of us.  However, within a few seconds his legacy would have been made, and a legendary story told.

            I held the camera up to my eye and waited expecting Nick to pass on by and head across the parking lot.  Rather than do that he stopped next to Bento.  I figured he wanted to be in the shot so I went along with it.  Then Nick did something unexpected, he kissed Bento on the cheek.  For anyone who has seen ‘All In the Family’ the episode where Sammy Davis Jr. kisses Archie, and the face that Archie makes is essentially what happened here.  Bento’s proud smile disappeared and was replaced with a horrified blank stare as he realized that I had indeed taken the photo. 

            Naturally Bento was angry, I mean unless you’re into that who wants to be kissed by another man, especially a total stranger.  Nick, after realizing that the ‘joke’ was not going over well, insisted he was not gay.  Bento cussed him out in Portuguese and insisted he was going to destroy that photo.  I suggested that he send it along to Brazil to show his family his new lifestyle in America.  He did not agree.

            Nick did not stick around for more than another few days but the image of that forbidden kiss has lasted for now about eight years.  Bento has never lived it down.  Anytime Nick’s name was mentioned it was met with a barrage of Portuguese swears and a lot of laughter from the rest of us.  It was one of the classic moments in Marsh history.

            So there you have it.  I told you this was not a love story.  It was pure carnal lust.  Nick needed a piece of that Brazilian Drew Carey look alike and who could blame him.  Bento’s magnetism drew Nick in and he needed to quench his desires.  Too bad they could not carry that moment with them forever but it will live on here.  Cheers!