Songwriters: Marshall Sehorn, Elmore James
Original Release: Eat a Peach
Year: 1972
Definitive Version: None, but I love the guitar work that Dickey Betts
did with Warren Haynes at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductions in 1995.
The rest of that version is pretty poor due to Gregg’s “tiredness.”
The favorite part of me and
Debbie’s trip to New England in 1996 by far was Maine, so in 1998, we decided
to take a vacation just there. Debbie was in Boston for a work conference in
August, so I flew in on the last day, picked her up at the airport hotel where they
stayed and headed north in our rental car.
So much of the Maine trip
was more of the same as before, but that’s just what we wanted. We stayed in
the same town at the same inn—in the same room, as a matter of fact. We even
had our first dinner at the same place as before—the Rocktide Inn. (We’re not
going to pass up twin pound lobsters for $15.)
But because we would be
there longer, we did some different things, too. The first big thing was a
whale-watching trip. Debbie loved whales, and I had never seen one before aside
from pilot or killer whales at Marineland or Sea World, which don’t really
count. Debbie had made the arrangements ahead of time, and we showed up early
on a sunny but jacket-cool morning for what would be much more than a
three-hour tour.
It seemed like forever
before we finally left Boothbay Harbor and made our way out to the open ocean.
The course was set for the usual summer whale feeding grounds, and as we made
our way along, we were inundated by seals and then farther out basking sharks.
Have you ever seen a basking
shark? They were cool—and huge! We’re talking 20 to 25 feet. They’re plankton-eaters,
of course, like most of your big whales, and they were all over the place,
lazily swimming—sometimes even on their sides—at the surface of the water with
their huge mouths hanging open to catch their prey.
Finally, as the land started
to drop away, we spotted our first whale—a finback off in the distance. There
wasn’t much to see, but we kept going out until we could see nothing but water
everywhere. That’s intimidating—when you’re in the water and you can’t see land
in any direction—and it’s the only time in my life that I’ve encountered that
sensation.
It was only then that we
spotted our first humpback whale. He was about 30 feet in length and swimming
not too far from where we were. The boat slowly maneuvered its way over to
where it was swimming about, and I snapped pictures nonstop. The boat at one
point pulled alongside it as it swam. It didn’t seem too afraid—or bothered—by
our presence and continued to go beside us, no more than 100 yards away.
After a while, we finally
broke away and started on the two-hour-plus cruise back to the harbor as a
second tour boat came over to where we had seen our whale (too late, suckers).
We had been out on the ocean almost all day.
In hindsight, of course, it
was nothing compared to that day in Alaska two years alter, but it was the
first time I ever saw a real whale in the wild, and it was amazing. I got a
great picture that day. I anticipated the whale’s movements and timed them
perfectly so at one point when it broke the water’s surface, I snapped a
picture where you can see its entire head, its eye and its whale smile.
Even as close as we got to the whales in
Alaska, we weren’t able to get a picture that matched that one.
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