Journal Entries: Maine, 2022-2025

Summer

My tire violently pops on the highway. I’m still sweating over the lug nuts half an hour later 一 nearly done 一 when a Maine Lobster Boys truck screeches over to the shoulder. Three guys with pistols on their belts and a hydraulic jack laugh when they see I’ve chocked my wheels with hot pink diving fins. Five minutes later, I’m good to go. Heaviest accent of the group: “Hey, no problem, hope someone would do the same for my sistah!”

Drizzly morning. There’s a fin floating in the water, way out. Shark? Maybe an overturned surfboard, someone trapped underneath? I paddle out to take a look. Just an Atlantic Sturgeon, huge, bloody, ripped apart, rolled on its side. We get out.

I finally catch the virus (from book club, of all things) and am booted to a 275-year-old farmhouse, away from my nine housemates, to recover. Old drawings label the one habitable room “Birthing Room.” The first sea captain and his wife had nine children. I have vivid dreams for two weeks. A housemate bikes over with sweet potato donuts and my boss drops off books on Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. That’s me on the back steps, halfway through my exile.

My neck snaps back onto the ocean floor, hard. I recoup on the beach, heart racing. I notice a bunch of fully clothed women shrieking in the surf, others holding hands with young men (hats, suspenders, big smiles) near the water. The ladies’ wool skirts hang to their feet, but still they manage to boogie board. The group came to the beach together in a white van. How hard did I hit my head?

The wife likes the ocean, the husband likes the wife, apparently. She tans in a lawn chair in the beach parking lot, he roasts in the passenger seat of the car, windows cracked only a little. The thermometer reads 96. I pull in next to them and they share a bit about the books she likes, the loss of their daughter, his cancer.

From the summit of Mount Katahdin: a barefoot man begins the Appalachian Trail with only emergency flip-flops in his pack. He sits right in front of me and my sandwich and sets up a long green antenna. A whole group of barefoot women in dresses passes us on our way back down.

Our neighbor struggles to install a window A/C unit while we saw at our steaks on the front steps. Crackling evening, thunderstorm imminent. “I’ll give you a lobstah if you come help me out with this!” We hold it up, but tell him that one of us is allergic to lobster. Disbelieving screech: “You ahhh?”

Fall

I look left over my handlebars near my third-favorite state park and there’s an aproned woman in front of an easel in a field of Jerseys, flowers up to her knees. The herd she paints is perfect. Everything’s golden.

My housemate, John, 50, finally finds the first sea captain’s grave. We had hunted for it all autumn, so we brave a rainstorm and the screaming dark to take a good look. Our headlamps illuminate three hundred years of veterans nestled together under wet leaves. The vivid dreams come back.

Visiting friends and I attend the annual Damariscotta Pumpkin Regatta. Adults dressed in elaborate costumes have scooped out the insides of gigantic pumpkins and are paddling them downriver in a frenzy. Capsize, capsize. Is this how boats were invented? There’s so much traffic that the town has to run shuttles to the riverbank.

I hit a bad pothole and think, I hope I don’t blow a flat again. The bottom of my car falls off.

Winter

A happy coincidence: two members of my small Search and Rescue team used to be Civil War reenactors, Union blues now all boxed up in the basement. One is married to a hobby seamstress specializing in colonial garb. Chicken or the egg.

I blink out the bedroom window through the ceaseless, driving snow to see a tow truck backing up towards my car. My parka pulled on, feet shoved in boots, politely asking what in the world he’s doing. He’s handing me a ticket, staring with his one good eye at my Maryland plates. “I don’t know where you’re from,” he says, “But you’re very nice.”

I go for a quick business meeting and stay four hours, meet their teenager, look at old postcards, eat homemade chicken salad sandwiches. They like to trade with their neighbors, their maple syrup for their pickles. They think that young people don’t have life skills anymore.

I am cowed by toilet paper options in the Hannaford when someone recommends the Charmin. I turn and it’s a Lobster Boy, minus the pistol, at least I think. “Hey,” I say, “You changed my tire on 295 two years ago.” He looks at me for a long moment. “Ah, are you the lady with the trailah and all the heifers?” The Maine Lobster Boys must regularly play the hero. ♦