Troglodytes, zombies, and axolotls

Being Luddites, or maybe troglodytes, my husband and I still subscribe to a print newspaper. These arrive in a pile roughly once a week, accompanied by the usual ranting about the postal service, the weather (on this island we don’t get mail when under Instrument Flight Rules or, for that matter, on Saturdays,) and the Whole State of Everything These Days. Hmph, say we troglodytes.

Maintaining at least one print newspaper subscription is a complicated mental exercise involving various abstractions and a good deal of emotional baggage. This sort of thing keeps people up at night. The whole business of newspapers as iconic objects wades into ethics and history and philosophy and home-and-hearth warm-fuzzies and defiance of the robot overlords and me the writer not wishing to let down the side. Paul reads a couple of newspapers online, but I mostly find him in the obituaries, which prompts him to call his sister and ask if she remembers Old Mr. So-and-so who taught chemistry or whatever. We start the morning fire with newspaper, I wrap gifts in the color funnies, and I prefer to do the hard crosswords on inky gray paper for some damn fool reason. That hardly justifies the cost.

For all the work and expense of getting it here, you’d think I’d read the paper every day, but in my weakness I often do not. Newspapers pile up. You can learn a lot in an afternoon when you page through two weeks of newspapers and avoid all the crime, war, and basketball. I learned that scientists have “nixed” the possibility that a 4-pound rock from Antarctica contained proof of life on Mars. I would have thought that anything having to do with life on Mars would deserve better than page eight. Also, “nixing” doesn’t sound like a very scientific activity. There ought to be a more serious word for whatever it is they did.

I read how the potato crop was so good last year, and the trucker shortage so bad, they had to go back to using the railroad in Aroostook County and hurrah for that. I read how a ship captain from Searsport published a newspaper (speaking of newspapers) called the Ocean Chronicle for a couple of decades in the late 1800’s, assembling the whole thing from his ship. “Other captains took up carving scrimshaw or building models,” we read; “(Captain Nichols) had his newspaper.”

We should consider adding yaks to our farms. The big Mustard Museum in Eastport received a significant financial donation recently (that from the Associated Press). The Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association says we are encouraged to eat more monkfish despite how ugly they look. Zombie trees can be dangerous.

No, really—that was a straight-up, for-real newspaper headline. They mean trees that look healthy but aren’t, and could fall down on a moment’s notice. You know, zombie trees.

I did not notice any articles about eels. I suppose it is the wrong time of year for writing about eels.

The Westbrook Ice Disk made another effort back in January. Ice disks are not just a Westbrook thing; there have been others. The river and the weather must cooperate and, I might suggest, the people have to stay the heck off the thing. Dude! Leave it alone!

Adding to my library of scrap-iron related reference materials, I ripped out and saved a column entitled, “Now we have to worry about space junk.” Space junk is nothing new. Well; junk is nothing new. If a couple of my neighbors still toss their beverage cans out the truck windows, and they do, why should the world’s various space programs be any different? The article mentioned how China demolished one of its old weather satellites in 2007 with something called a “kinetic kill vehicle.” That expression didn’t leave me terribly reassured about junkyard technology. Cue the scary music. Unlike the Twisted Tea cans in the roadside blackberries, though, the scrap metal we’re talking about is flying by at bullet speed. Doing an “EVA” (a space walk) these days might be reminiscent of dodging drive-by shooters in the rough part of town.

From the coarsest aspect of human housekeeping to the finest, we had, back around Thanksgiving, a guest column in the Bangor paper entitled, “Bread tells the story of our family history.”  This love song to breads of the world was just what I needed. “Chop wood, carry water, slice and butter bread.”

My favorite, though, was the story about that most delightfully named creature, the axolotl. Yeah, that. It’s a kind of Mexican salamander that can regrow severed pieces of itself. They’re doing axolotl research in Bar Harbor. Very interesting, and absolutely legit science journalism: no mention of zombies, or sci-fi “kill vehicles,” or nixing things. Just axolotls.

We’ll probably keep getting the paper.

Published in the Rockland, Maine Free Press, March, 2022.