We belted a parting pint at a Provincetown pub while waiting for the fast ferry to depart. At sunset, on the dock, I had an interesting conversation with someone from the Schooner Hindu, an old wooden ship from East Boothsbay, Maine – same as Adventuress. In fact, right as dusk enveloped the scene, Hindu approached the dock under full sail like some beautiful ghost. Next it was my turn to board the fast ferry, and I hopped on – the vessel pulled out around the corner of the Cape, and off we went into the watery night. I stood alone on the top deck outside, feeling the waves in my feet and peering across dark water and into the bright stars. When the moon emerged I was startled, as at first I mistook it for some glowing gelatinous pumpkin emerging from the sea. We finally rolled into Boston Harbor at night; I headed straight down to the T metro, bound for Cambridge on the Crimson Line. I was going to visit some students at Harvard. The train was possibly the most homogeneous assemblage I’d ever stepped into: literaly everyone on that train was college-aged. Feeling a bit out of place, I simply imagined myself a visiting professor, like some Indiana Jones en route to give a lecture. This helped immensely. Emerging at the busy, bustling square, HH met me – we took a sneak peek at Harvard Yard, and she introduced me to some of the local superstition and lore. We ended up going on a sweeping tour which covered the Charles River, including examples of proper rowing technique provided by the crew and kayak teams. This armada was followed by some historic steam riverboats, a perfect accent to our conversation about the Steampunk genre. From there we continued to the exact spot where Taxation without representation is tyranny was declared, crossing over bridges and back to Harvard Yard. The Library, it seems, was dedicated to a wealthy gentleman who perished in the Titanic disaster: after being put out in a lifeboat, he attempted to swim back to the ship to recover a precious book, and was lost. We then went to the steeple of Veritas, or Truth, and on to the old secular college dining hall, which seemed fit for Harry Potter and his classmates. It was a brilliant tour, fascinating and condensed, which culminated in a stop at Veggie P where we met my cousin HG, also a Harvard student. Good times. Finally, I was collecting my bags and preparing to travel to Montreal. I chuckled, thinking of Thoreau, a Bostonian living off the grid at Walden Pond. Criticized by some as an underachiever, actually he essentially created political activism and environmentalism in his country. When he traveled from Boston to Montreal to protest slavery, he wrote the essay A Yankee in Canada. I liked the ring of that.
