Chapter 1 Post # 3

Braintree might be an odd name for a town with few distinguishing characteristics. In fact Braintree was bland. Two presidents were born there, John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams – since we started numbering presidents, that would be number two and number six. Even that fleeting fame was taken from it when North Braintree ceded and became Quincy. Years later in a thirty-foot dugout canoe shooting rapids on the Caqueta River through guerilla controlled territory in Colombia, three American friends and I spotted a grove of trees on the far bank with branches in the form of brains. My gringo companions finally seeing the proverbial light said “Ah Braintrees.” I also lived part time in a Cape Cod village curiously called Buzzards Bay, named by the first European explorers not for the corpse eating turkey vultures but the hordes of ospreys that crammed the skies and fed on the fished filled bay. Fish Hawks are called buzzards in parts of Europe. Though for twenty-three years I spent most of my summers on Buzzards Bay it was not until 1986 standing on the deck of my cottage overlooking the Chesapeake Bay to the south that I spotted my first osprey. The Buzzards Bay ospreys and the abundance of fish that had given Cape Cod its name had vanished years before through over fishing and pollution. Both Braintree and Buzzards Bay are in Massachusetts, itself peculiar since I spent a good part of my life leaving the Bay State.

If I had to explain my life in a literary way, I’d say it’s cross of Robert Frost’s A Road Less Traveled and Miquel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance. Like Frost, I too have taken the road less traveled and it has cost me. I have also, like Quixote, charged against the improbable if not the impossible. It too has taken a toll.
It was love that saved me.