On A Tiny Island With A Bunch Of Rowdy Drunks; or, In One Or Another Age Of Colossal Bores

On my most recent vacation, I flew nonstop from Austin to Boston and met my lady for a tour of New England’s great islands. Except Nantucket is a two-hour boat ride from the Kennedy Compound! (Note: road atlases don’t say that.) We did however motor up to Provincetown, and had a good discussion of nature-versus-nurture as it pertains to lisping. Then we went back down the Cape Cod peninsulaplex and in a shop my lady bought a hat for $79.99. And what else? We saw Hyannis. Then Falmouth, and Woods Hole. A ferry ride to Martha’s Vineyard, and I am delighted to recommend a fine little lunch place there. And not just because I recognized feijoada and happily commented on it in Portuguese. Was that the first time I ever conversed in that language in the U.S.? The owners were indeed Brazilian, though come to think of it, I did not get positive confirmation until I found that website. I’d called them a família brasileira, and they did not deny this. Oh, and did you know Chappaquiddick is a part of Martha’s Vineyard? I sure didn’t. We skipped it in any case. Back on the mainland, we drove over to the storied Rhode Island coast (I think as many U-boats were sunk there as off the Riverwalk in San Antonio) and from there we ferried to Block Island.

Which brings me at last to my title theme. Around what is called the Old Harbor, we walked, briskly because the return boat ride was in about half an hour and also because at this time of year pretty much everything is closed, and we saw a fine old statue:

I did not know that the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had ever left any physical monuments anywhere, but now I learn that there were hundreds all over the country. There may indeed have been, but they all decayed, and only this one got replaced with a copy. (The pumpkin was added later, possibly hours before we showed up.)

I like it that these things hang around, even though they commemorate fairly miserable times. I do note that temperance advocates, like abolitionists, did get what they wanted, and they did go away. True, the 18th Amendment would last less than a decade and a half, when the 21st superseded it. And the WCTU still exists, whereas I doubt anyone – or anyone fashionable – cares about slavery still in force outside American borders.

Speaking of Prohibition, I must say I found Daniel Okrent’s 2010 book Last Call hugely entertaining and informative. I read it a while ago and I am pretty sure it made little fun of teetotaling harridans, as easy a mark as those were. The fact was, people in America used to drink enormously. They really did need to cut down. I think Okrent said that in the 1800s, people drank three times as much as they do now. I drink, but could never come anywhere near tripling my intake.

Another book I read earlier in this century or maybe it was in the 1990s, was a biography of Carrie Nation. She was every bit as grim as she looked. What I remember about that story, besides her last hubby, Mr. Nation, making a long and precarious living as a newspaper editor in various small towns around Houston, was its making clear Mrs. Nation paid, to the penny, every single one of her many debts. Wikipedia says she made money from lecture-tour fees and souvenir sales. She got lucky at least once when a judge waived a large fine on condition she never come back to town. In any case, she never came close to being rich. She lived the way she wanted, and I like – albeit at a safe distance in time – just the idea of riding trains in the only-recently-invented Central Time Zone and when you’re not sharing a carriage with someone like Elisabet Ney, you’re sharing it with someone like Carrie Nation. True, you might get lucky and share it with O. Henry. Before he drank himself to death.

Which brings me to a couple more minor items. One is really a set of open questions. Do other countries have their own bores? And if so, should students of those countries study them? Does the State Department or the CIA brief its overseas personnel on such phenomena? Aren't they meaningful parts of the landscape, if not also assets to be recruited or exploited? Another item has to do with my consistent overestimation of the dissuasive power of boredom. I always do this and I am almost always wrong. I had, for example, predicted that people would simply tire of hearing how deadly Covid was. They did no such thing. They may do no such thing with lurid predictions of AI’s capabilities. At least they did stop paying attention to the Ukraine. Do you realize that war is still going on?

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As for the rest of our trip...I couldn’t interest my lady in a helicopter tour of Block Island. Had we gone on one, it would’ve been the first time I ever rode in such a craft as a passenger. Ah well. Again back on the mainland, we decided to leave the coast. Only because it was just enough of a drive after another excellent lunch, we went up to Dartmouth. And then, after an excellent breakfast the next day, we drove down to Harvard. Where, for some reason, we ate nothing. Our hotel just north of Logan Airport had a pizzeria and that would prove more than enough. Anyway, knowing how awfully the folks on Ricochet relate to Ivy Leaguers, I better drop this subject right now!

But back to that sandwich place on Martha’s Vineyard: my lady ordered something with basil in it, and I, unable to remember the Portuguese word, asked. The menu was of course in English, but I was curious, and here I had a living lexicon. The proprietress thought a bit – understandably, since I at least never had come across it in Brazil – then said it is manjericão. I’d seen that word before but couldn’t connect it to anything. Now I can!

(Forced to guess, I might have said alecrim, the only other herb whose Portuguese name I can think of, but that is rosemary...which, by the way, I’ve never seen growing in Brazil, though it is a substantial shrub where I live in Texas. Brazilian cuisine ain't much. Feijoada, by the way, is rice and beans and several parts of several animals.)