October 2, 2015

Downeast Again

          I started plotting the route in May, like a child connecting the dots—on the first page of a thick bookwith a jaunty crayon. My favorite moment, memorized, was the golf course green sign for the Massachusetts Turnpike: East—N.H.Maine.
          I always began smelling pine and saltwater when I saw that sign.
          When I was 7, it was my grandmother's big house and lawn in Southern York County. In the winter and spring of 1991 it was the North End of Boston, and the lithe reflection in the small accordion mirror above his kitchen sink as Gary shaved.
          But since the age of 34 my happy place has been Mt. Desert Island. My mother had insisted I join her on a trip back to her childhood home in Ellsworth, and I simply fell in love.
          By 42 I was going up twice a year, May and September—the two months property taxes came due, as my uncle dryly informed me. A series of Scotch-taped trail maps and my uncle's beloved sandwiches of luncheon loaf and Kraft singles had been my only companions on hundreds of day-long hikes ending with a boiled lobster dinner and blueberry beer.
          A single photo captures me, a tousled Adonis with a back pack, posing at the mouth of Hadlock Brook trail, about to disappear into the erotic darkness of woods highlighted by powder blue blazes painted on the granite or wedged into the slender birches, interrupted only by necklaces of tiny, noisy streams. The scented climb to the top of the treeline—and the view out to the Atlantic at the summit—often produced tears of awe.
          Now our Ford Escape faces town, and as we turn down into State Street I begin my recitation of history and fable: the bank where my aunt worked for 50 years, her first and only job; the headquarters of the historical society my uncle founded; the blinding white Congregational church; the five-and-dime where my mother had her first job; the house that was once the hospital in which my oldest brother was born; finally, in the beautiful old residence that became the Ellsworth library, I locate my uncle's history of the town, turning the pages of photos I took for him.
          As Gary takes the stairs to the men's room I sit on a bench facing the river. I'm pleased with myself for letting the pure September light and the joy of his first visit keep me from breaking down. Today there are no hellos in a town that, once, my aunt and uncle could not drive through without stopping to roll down the windowa minefield of school buddies and board members and bowling companions. My patience used to unravel, when I was 37 and trying to make it down onto the island for some hiking before the early September sunsets, when yet another old fart would pause at our lunch table to talk about the price of gas or somebody's granddaughter's baby.
          The past feels like a sweater I want to pull over my shoulders, even at noon—its familiar smell, the coat of a beloved pet, a phantom whiff.

* * *

          At the cabin the ducks gather at the bottom of the steps like trick-or-treaters, staring us down for the cracked corn they eat from our palms. They splash back into the pond with a sort of winged dive from the pink and green lichen surface of the boulders.
          Gary said he saw one, but I only heard the loons, screaming like kids, or laughing eerily at dusk.
          I built a fire in the pit but had to leave it to go inside and cook. I watched from the kitchen window. 
          Walking the dogs, we turned off the flashlight and marveled at the stars hanging above the tops of the trees, across the pond, that looked like a piece of black velvet cut with pinking shears. 
          Sunday began with steady rain but changed, as my uncle always said Maine weather would do, into a peculiar, blinding clarity. We drove down to Acadia and walked out onto the flanks of Cadillac Mountain—its lunar spaciousness studded with cairns, wild blueberry bushes, and midget spruce.
          Did you used to hike here? was Gary's only remark, slackly delivered.
          The place was too much for one person in one day, and I thought about the years it had taken me to memorize its summits and coves. 
          Yes, over there. I pointed to Bald Peak but couldn't remember its name. I said nothing about Sargent Mountain, like an old boyfriend too complex, too sensual, to describe to anyone else.
          The boardwalk trail around Jordan Pond was closed, but the perspective of the rippled water filling the glacial basin, crowned on her northern shore by the Bubbles dotted with climbers, delivered on its much-published promise.
          Monday night we packed for the long drive home.

* * *

          But now the dashboard sports a sheath of birch bark, taken from the two acres of wooded land we bought from my uncle's estate. The tract, still within the township, is all that remains, like a fingerprint on a silver case, of my delight and history in this place. 
          Its municipal, taxable reality seems assurance enough I am still a citizen of the ground I covered, in my New Balances and skinny black jeans, with such adoration.
          The promise of returningfor good—seems enough to keep in shape for.