A Short Hike

 Everything comes gradually, at its appointed hour.
—Ovid

          It was 10:30 and high tide was at 2:30. Marie said "If we're off the island by 1:00 we should be OK."
          It turns out she was wrong, and as we crossed the bar back to Bridge Street at noon there was barely a couple of yards of dry gravel and sand between a vastness of water shimmering and bleeding together like the rusty greens and blues of Raku pottery. 

          I screamed into the water eroding our path with the excitement of a boy on a roller coaster. It was a moment of complete abandonment, a pulling off of adulthood like an itchy sweater, and I think Marie approved of it.

          I kept thinking of Rhinehardt Pavilion. It was one of Deale's carefully identified pleasures, in a life of pleasures that included just about everything except reciprocated love—global travel during the young, luxurious era of jets; British spinster penpals; painting classes; cupboards full of Royal Doulton china; and the wealthy, mysterious Vera, of whom I know nothing except that she had a log cabin right on the Union River banks and a persistent, proprietary claim on my uncle that, of course, could not be resolved in any bed.

          The octagonal Madmen-era restaurant was built into the side of what, I suppose, became—further back and higher up—the foot of Cadillac Mountain. Its uninterrupted bank of east-facing windows looked down on the Porcupine Islands and the bar that gave the name to Bar Harbor.

          I can still hear the plates clatter. 

          It would be mid-September, 28 years ago, and I would have had a mattress of blueberry pancakes with—so defining in my life—extra butter. I had only an accordion-folded, Scotch-taped trail map to guide me on my hikes up Sargent Mountain when I was 35. Deale was always photographing me, and now when I look at the pictures they are a museum of my different sneakers and backpacks. Elf slim, I was still living within the envious attention of the older generation, which was to be discontinued, surreptitiously as dropping a magazine subscription, sometime in the charmless uncertainty and puffiness of my late 40s.

          At the summit, I pointed across the bay to the hill. I couldn't see anything, but I knew where it was. Marie said "Oh, I do see a round building! Want to go see it?!" But we didn't.

          I had returned to Maine at 58 to live after my family were all dead. It felt like putting on a dead person's glasses: I walked the same streets, talked to the same people, climbed the same mountains, but everything looked somehow different. I could never decide if the surprising turn of events that brought me back here was fate, or just a gathering of stars in an anonymous constellation.

          When Deale died suddenly in the summer of 2017, I thought my hiking days were through. I put my old maps away with all the brochures—one of them for the Rhinehardt Pavilion—he was constantly handing me. We cleaned out his house and I wept in the car as it headed south, the white pines and little tucked-away lakes blurring by in the passenger door window.

          Maine was a gift life gave back to me, like a benevolent refund, an acknowledgment of the pleasure I took in its coniferous, granite emptiness. Yet even the sweetest relationship diffuses in the airlessness of the present—the vicissitude of a morning after hard drinking, the tiny frowns of disapproval that aggregate in the subconscious, the daily relinquishments of age. The play, even if well-written, seems to drag on.

          We passed no one going back down, as if the small island was ours. Jack Perkins owned it in the 1980s and supposedly found God through simple living—one and a quarter miles from some of the most unaffordable seafood restaurants, day spas, and resorts in the state. The lights alone must have ruined the night sky.

          Our hair whipped as we crossed over, the pools—closer and deeper on either side than half an hour ago—like shellac over the speckled, ovoid granite. 

          And I had my scream—into the jade and cerulean, ineluctable tide.         

The Kitchen on a March Morning

           Outside, the morning sun falls across the driveway in striations of coral on the light blue snow. Inside, the cat is on high alert, staring at a cabinet door. 

          Absurdly loud in the silent house, the tsk! tsk! of the regulator clock measures the heartbeat of a brand new Friday. Everyone is asleep but me.

          And I wonder about the case of my self: was I really extraordinary? Or the opposite: impulsive and selfish—small.

          Mine is a world of superlatives: coffee in the morning and wine at night, concentration and irresponsibility, the sun's warmth on another two inches of snow that fell during the night.

          I work so hard, and then I just don't give a damn.

          So we beat on, boats against the current, and then suddenly with it—a fist clenched then slackened as the blood is drawn. I form resentments then melt them, mourning a mother I despised as a child.

          What other pottery is there to break and repair?—my life a kintsugi of abuses and profligate affections. My heart was always in it until ... it wasn't.

          The kitchen smells like coffee and sleeping dogs.

          I line up my pens and ruler and magnifying glass in a squad across the table. What shall we take the measure of this day? I never struggled with boredom—only control. I contort my handwriting into 90-degree angles and straight lines because my curves are so ugly. The brittle marks please me, marching across the paper like a navy blue hieroglyph.

          Presence and absence, fondness and disregard, the dishes form a strata on the countertop: fossilized mashed potatoes, the purple crust at the bottom of a wine glass, a wooden spoon pointing straight up from the basin like a soldier shot in a trench. 

         Everything is motionless except the sun, high above the garage now, eradicating the shadows. The neighbor's car door verifies that another day is underway.