On trashing summer boredom

Don’t ask me where the summer has gone, I don’t know. It seems as if June didn’t exist, July vanished in a flash and it won’t be long before August is poised to exit stage left.

Aside from a few short paddling outings, I haven’t spent a lot of time on the water. Has there been time to take a hike? I don’t think so. Go for a bike ride? Ditto. Go fishing? Forget it, there hasn’t been time for that for three or four years. I don’t remember which end of the pole to hold.

The weather hasn’t been cooperative, to be sure, but one would hope that even with some crummy weather there might be something to write home about. I figure I’ll just scratch this one off as a loss and hope the coming season will bring some excitement.

As you read this I’ll be beginning my vacation across the border in New Brunswick picking up trash in L’Etang Harbour and Passamaquoddy Bay with Dave Morrill of Orrington and folks from the Nature Trust of New Brunswick. It’s not everybody who can put that on his resume, eh?

Actually not everybody could. I got invited by Morrill to come along in lieu of his wife, who opted to spend Saturday with the couple’s daughter who is visiting. Morrill knew I’d volunteered on similar island cleanups with the Maine Island Trail Association, and figured that since I had such a good time on those I’d have a ball in new territory.

I’ll let you know how it goes. After looking at a picture in the Nature Trust of New Brunswick’s newsletter “Refuge” I’m a little apprehensive. The picture shows four folks carrying a box-spring mattress with a pile of trash on it across a rocky beach. On the positive side, they’re all smiling!

Becoming a trash man for the weekend might serve to lessen the criticism I got from a reader last week who chided me for not picking up a case or so of empty Budweiser cans I came across at a picnic site on Branch Lake. I bemoaned the fact they were there, and suggested that someone do us all a favor and pick them up.

The reader chided me for not doing so myself. Ouch! Point taken. I probably should have done so, but I didn’t have a plastic bag and didn’t feel like throwing a bunch of grody cans loose into my kayak and then have to throw them into the back seat of my car. The poor thing smells bad enough already, what with all that wet kayak gear hanging there. I’d have wound up having to hose out my boat and the car’s rug, too.

With my bad luck, on my way home from the lake I’d have had a close encounter with a lawman and I don’t think I’d have been able to talk my way out of a sobriety test. “No officer, those are not MY cans, I picked them up at a remote campsite down the lake… No, I don’t drink 16-ounce Buds. I prefer 12-ouncers… Walk how many steps toe to heel? My leg’s still asleep from paddling… Reeallly, it sometimes goes to sleep! Honest! The alphabet? Backward? You gotta be kiddin’! Say, could you loosen up the cuff on my right wrist, it’s my paddling control hand.”

No thanks, I’ll just leave the cans right where they are. That’s what the guys in the motorboat did just before I got there. They mentioned the fact that the site was trashed. And they had 10 times the space in their boat than I have in mine.

If you’re in the same boredom boat I’m in, here’s something to anticipate: Mars is getting really close to Earth this month. It’ll be just 34,649,589 miles away and next to the moon, it’ll be the brightest object in the night sky.

According to Russell Tweed, senior supervisor of the Public Program at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., the reason Mars will be so close is because of opposition, “which occurs when Mars is directly opposite the sun, as seen from Earth From one opposition to the next, Earth requires a little more than two years [about 26 months] to catch up with Mars and overtake it since it takes Mars a little less than two years to orbit the sun. What makes the 2003 opposition noteworthy is that when Earth overtakes Mars this year, Mars will be just two days shy of perihelion, its closest approach to the sun.”

“This year, the long-anticipated arrival and subsequent opposition of Mars on Aug. 28 has caused quite a stir. As an example of our ongoing fascination with Mars, Percival Lowell’s 24-inch Clark Telescope is reserved for private viewings for nearly four straight weeks. It is no coincidence that these reservations bracket either side of the opposition beginning approximately two weeks before Aug. 28 and ending two weeks after Aug. 28.”

Hang on another minute, stargazers. Tweed goes on to say that “this opposition of Mars, although the closest in a very long time [the latest estimates suggest 60,000 years], is only marginally closer than oppositions in recent years. The approximate distance to Mars at this year’s opposition is 34.65 million miles, just 5 percent closer than it was during the 1988 opposition, and 0.7 percent closer than the opposition in 1971. For the casual observer, this means that Mars will be extremely bright, will appear larger than usual, and will disclose its surface features to even modest telescopes.”

And here I am without my binoculars. It’s my fervent hope that it won’t cause any tidal flooding and that crime stats won’t go through the roof like they do on a full moon.

If you’re looking for the culprit for this sudden inspiration and wealth of knowledge, you can thank a certain financial analyst and former NEWS columnist, Paul Jarvis, who fled Maine for a warmer tax climate in the Midwest. He sent me an e-mail earlier this week with some information on this Mars thing that he had dredged up somewhere on the Internet.

According to that information, if you look at the planet “at a modest 75-power magnification, Mars will look as large as the full moon to he naked eye. Mars will be easy to spot. At the beginning of August Mars will rise in the east at 10 p.m. and reach its azimuth at about 3 a.m. But by the end of August when the two planets are closest, Mars will rise at nightfall and reach its highest point in the sky at 12:30 a.m.”

I’m told the planet will not be this close in several lifetimes (around 2287), so tie a string around your finger, mark the calendar and get outside and take a look – that is if we ever get rid of this cloud cover.

Jeff Strout can be reached at 990-8202 (but not this week) or by e-mail at jstrout@bangordailynews.net.