Back from Maine

          
          The short season of adding ice to tall glasses of water has ended, it seems.  We are in mid-September, and my recent trip to southern Maine has punched up the view toward fall.

**Photo of Saco River, by Carter Brown, Flickr Creative Commons.

            Of my four days there, two were gray, two were glowing. They included pancakes, a house tour by a charismatic six-year-old, and dark, tannic river swimming. Also a meeting; local cheese and beer in an Edwardian neighborhood; and a Saturday farmers’ market that is everything organic-farm and progressive and LGBT and collective in culture in southern Maine, at an Olmsted-ian downtown park.These crunchy views are less visible where I live, in Staten Island. 

**Photo of carrots at Deering Oaks Farmers' Market by Mebrett, Flickr Creative Commons. 

         That said, Portland’s overlay of organic and tech and foodie culture is only an overlay, it seems. For a city of 40,000 to have a Whole Foods and a Trader Joe’s is surprising--but it clearly has a hard-bitten side as well. It might be part Burlington, part Boston working-class suburb in a natural setting.

My last afternoon in Portland was spent near the bus station, hearing about a non-working EBT machine at the convenience store across the street, about coffee house offerings being too expensive and too strong in flavor, about how much money is left on food-stamp cards this month, and a long bus trip to Corpus Christi, Texas for a job and a return to Maine after finding only overnight heat and contaminated beach water.

**Hilltop Superette, Munjoy Hill, Portland, by Kate, Flickr Creative Commons. 

People are friendly. At the bus-station convenience store, the counter-women at the pizza/Italian sandwich counter peer toward me as I choose a drink and call, “How are ya?” in a kind, harsh-voiced way that sounds close to a Boston accent to me, but different. I hear that only tourists eat lobster rolls, although I can’t tell, because they seem only to be sold on the coast and in rural areas, not in Portland.

At a coffee shop, people smile to be in one another’s company in the line for espresso. In some regions, smiling appears to be more of an obligation—but here, people seem glad to be with one another, happy to be in a natural place.

**Photo toward Mackworth Island, from Portland, Maine, by Jeff Dunn, Flickr Creative Commons. 

            Outside of town, the rural roads have a kinship with small-town anywhere: mountain-side burgs in Washington state; wooded East Texas. 

Leaving Portland, my bus passes pine woods and rocky areas blasted for the highway.Two retired women behind me are discussing Mount Holyoke and whether Devil in the White City is indeed based on a true story.

As we near Boston, we cross from woods and a certain amount of dereliction into the Northeast Metropolitan Complex--there is a palpable feeling of emerging into the swift click of the cities. With surprise, I realize that I have spent four days outside of the metro area between Boston and Baltimore, which seems to be pulling us in. Now we're in the Tip O’Neill Memorial Tunnel, then passing a farmer’s market on a busy square. City dwellers in business suits shop for dinner, not looking up to make eye contact--they can't show a reaction to every passing Greyhound bus, after all.

At Boston’s South Street Station, a young man asks me to watch his trail backpack while he fetches food. Noticing an Appalachian Trail patch ironed onto his pack, I mention it when he returns. 

He completed the trail the day before, he says—he and others drank champagne and made toasts after fog cleared at the Katahdin summit. It seems magnificent and unusual and world-breaking--I have the urge to give him five, but I refrain from some sense of big-city decorum that I’m not sure is even necessary. He is a laid-back trail kid, a recent NYU graduate with a green-careers degree. I grin and say it’s amazing, how exciting that he did the trail.

After Boston, we drive in darkness past conifers and across waterways. The passengers who boarded in Boston are visibly more diverse and more prosperous: Back in the urban areas, middle-class people use public-transit, and ride long-distance buses between metro centers. In Portland, Somalian and other African refugees were most of the non-white residents, but middle-class African-Americans live near and south of Boston. The passengers around me seem buoyed by suburban security and education. Because only a few of the electrical outlets are working, people allow others to plug smartphones into their outlets. They assure each other that this is fine:“Thank you very much!” and “You’re welcome." This feels like kindness, but also like the urban politeness of strangers.

**Photo of woods in Maine, by Bryan Alexander, Flickr Creative Commons. 

In the four hours between Boston and New York, we pass land, land, the insurance buildings of Hartford, rivers, then more land. I drowse, then wake to realize that buildings are on all sides, and this must be the Bronx. On one side, a stacked garage like a cruise-ship has an outlet mall's name in Roman letters that shine into the night. We whoosh past innumerable buildings, glimpse the tiny red spire of the Empire State Building far ahead, cross a river, then land on Amsterdam or Lexington and head south past the small shops and cafes of Harlem.

Near Times Square, we turn down an alley and find what seems unlikely: a two-story, yawning opening into a garage, our secret entrance into Port Authority. Our bus tucks in with dozens of other buses. I ask the hiker, who is across the aisle, what it’s like to be in the woods for days and days, then here.

He grins, bending to pick up his large knapsack, and says, “It’s—scary, that’s what.” He pauses, then says with decision: “I’m not sure I like it here anymore.”

For the next couple of weeks, he’ll hide out in New Jersey. “Hopefully, I can ease back in,” he says. He plans to work as a bike mechanic in the city, then seek work in sustainability.

I wonder to myself whether I still like New York, either. I’m sure I’d dislike it if I were returning from months on a trail. I’d react against it. I reflect on how it felt to be in a smaller city, with nature not so far beyond it. 

Admittedly, there’s a security in the Mid-Atlantic that I like—it’s an established place, with jobs and culture and milder weather. The temperature is 12 degrees higher here than it was in Portland, and the air is less freighted with chilly moisture. 

As it happens, I have returned to the mega-metropolis at an optimal time, 11 p.m. on a weekday. In the 42^nd Street subway station, people move about but there's room to drag my roller bag behind me. The platform is relatively quiet until a man starts singing, his voice like James Brown with a busted voice. He wheezes and shouts, “I *need* you!” in a way that’s a little disturbing. Many performers here seem like naturals, but I wonder how long he's been at it—it’s more that we’re doing him a favor by listening. A man glances over in bemusement when I move further down the tracks, toward the front of where the R train will stop.

The Staten Island ferry, which I’ll ride to go home, stands quiet as a ghost ship. It is like a dream I might have had but didn't realize could materialize: The doors stand wide open to let a trickling stream of people onto the boat, not the usual shopping-mall size crowd. 

**Photo of Staten Island Ferry (daylight), by Rev Stan, Flickr Creative Commons.

I rest on the orange benches on the ship’s side, 10 or so seats from the next person, and gaze into clear night toward Brooklyn and Governor’s Island. 

         I have never seen the boat or the city this peaceful, and I think of the articles I've read about night workers here. Perhaps I can only go forth after 11, I think. How would that feel?

On Staten Island, I board a bus with many others, people returning in a business-like manner to their homes. It is midnight, but the evening feels benign. At my stop I debark with three others, and we walk quickly along the streets. It seems well-lit, as if the streets are quiet but alive. 

        The city is large, its boundaries unseen from here, and I reflect on how that feels around me. I'd been staying in a house with a roommate for a few days, and I wonder if I'll miss the companionship in this city. 

On the way up my block, I pass a woman walking a small dog. I don’t know her. Still, filled with Maine largesse, I wave. She calls out hello, then she continues singing a song in a strong voice. Her dog is scrappy, a Tramp-like terrier.

I don’t know whether I’ll be glad to be away from Portland's easy nature, or easy-smiling Mainers. It's possible that I will miss it. Still, I feel a certain goodwill toward New York as I walk the last incline up my street, and climb the rocky stairs to my house. 

##

Snow and ice and carbs and geese.

 Photo of Canada Geese, Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, Queens, NY, by Howard Brier, Flickr Creative Commons. **

After a sunny day by the salt marshes in Marine Park, Brooklyn, I raced home and ate a red-garnet spud as if it were the last food in the pantry.

This was all part of the “Love this cold” and “Boy, this winter my diet is best described as ‘farm-hand deluxe’” line of thinking.

Honestly, cold ranks high in my esteem. Shorter days—I’m never certain about those. But chill weather seems thrilling to me. Indeed, all winter sports seem great -- and the presence of snow, ice, and blue skies are why I like the season.

True, very little snow remains here lately. But winter is still around.

The part of me that is excited by Antarctica and ice caves and frozen-over Lake Superior’s edge and the other pole and glaciers and Greenland--all of those sled-dog locales--and Maine and the rest of New England and eastern Canada and Scandinavia and maybe even Siberia to some extent, thinks that’s cool.

One of the benefits? Winter can amp up the adventure feeling.

A few things first, though. Today at the salt marshes was mild and beautiful. A trumpeter swan arced into the sky like a massive crane (like the basis of all European child-origin tales), a flock of Canada geese flew against blue sky, and an osprey nest sat on high. We were at the breathing edge of Brooklyn, mere steps from detached row houses and basketball courts and pumped-up vehicles and deals on tanning salons. Those things, so nearby, were a little hard to forget. But the flock of geese made an image for me. They fixed in my head, and they also fixed my head a bit.

But the sun was low as I headed back to the subway, and was nearly gone when I emerged near Prospect Park. Heading up an avenue, I donned the hood on my down coat. It had seemed like too much to have along, earlier in the day.

Reaching the brownstone, I shook myself at the fast descent of cold, the chill that rises from beneath bright, sunny days once winter sun fades.

Indoors, I found pasta and red sauce in Tupperware, and looked around for more carbs. 

Yes, white-flour pastas are on my "avoid" list, because they’re sugar--and because, hey, I saw that episode of Portlandia. That's the one in which Fred Armisen asks Carrie Brownstein if he looks fat and demonstrates by standing behind a sheet and casting his shadow, a la Hitchcock. They decide, in their horror at the results, to eliminate the pasta--but later, he main-lines noodles and ziti in a seedy hotel room, in homage to Breaking Bad.

At any rate, the pasta with sauce seemed damned good. I ate it cold, too, so you know that’s, um, something.

Looking around for other scarf-able food sources, I recalled (with a really questionable degree of joy) that I had another Tupperware containing wedges of roasted sweet potato.

Fetching it, I sliced the beautiful orange wedges--and had it with sliced sausage and brown rice.

Then it became necessary to prepare and consume lots more food. 

I cooked low-fat Kielbasa. And quinoa. And steamed kale.

True, none of these ranks too highly in the "sinful food" category. But I was trying for balance--and basically, let's not give me too many points--they were around.

I have plans, too, to steam some spinach and drink a bit of whiskey.

Not sure why I’m sharing all of this, except that that’s what cold does: Makes one able to main-line calories, as long as we move around a good bit, too.

Seeing geese flying against the blue sky doesn’t hurt, in a good day, either. ## 

                                     *Photo of Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, by EdenPictures, Flickr Creative Commons. 

Vancouver: A nice break, and reason to clean out the closets

 

 

Photo of Stanley Park Sea Wall, Vancouver, B.C., by SqueakyMarmot, on Flickr Creative Commons.
**

My recent trip to Vancouver: A change in pace, and a reason to come back and clean out the closets. Good to be rousted out of the slowing habits, the routine that sometimes includes procrastination.

On a trip, we do everything we plan to do (if our expectations are reasonable) putting off nothing. What we’re doing is simple: there are no extras, no requirements, no taxes (other than for sales).

Back in life-land, it’s nice to keep an edge to things if possible.(This is said while acknowledging the benefits of electricity, Internet, warm clothes for cold weather, running water, modern hiking shoes, and other frills of the industrialized world.)

Still, there’s an excitement to living without those.

For a few days, I lived deep in woods in northwest Montana, 60 miles from a paved road. We were without electricity and the Internet (at a time of dot-com explosion), and we bathed in a river fed by snow melt.

We filled lamps with kerosene, received groceries hauled by mules (a luxury, even though we couldn’t have bananas (easily bruised) or as many green vegetables as packaged pastas), and delicately fried trout caught in the river.

We were in a national wilderness area, and this was a U.S. Forest Service station. 

Coming from New York City, I knew how rare this was -- but I didn’t want to stay.

The work involved using non-mechanized tools -- cross-cut saws and hatchets -- to clear trails of downed trees on steep hillsides, and often involved hiking nearly 12 miles a day on hills. Each "week we labored 10 days, then received four days off. Many of the other workers used weekends to hike up mountains in search of fire-observatory views.

But I was soft. I missed the Internet and my cell phone. I missed baths that were not in the river. I liked thinking, and writing, more than I liked producing change with my hands.

So, I departed. I returned to civilized outer-world Montana. Eventually I went back to another city, Chicago.

In the end, though, Chicago was a bit too far from the deep forests for me. The city was well-planned -- a bit too much, for me. Its only wildness lay in Lake Michigan and in winter winds. I could stand at the lake's edge, but not sail across its surface. There were no ferries, no boats for those who don't spend or have boat-owning friends.

These days, I am trying to keep myself less often in the overheated, overly comfortable rooms of life.

Testing ourselves, I think, is the best way to experience more of the world. If I only wanted the basic necessities, I wouldn't experience the back country of anywhere, from the U.S. and Canada to Bolivia or Russia. It’s the best way to know what others experience.

With that in mind, I’m sharing a list of things I find thrilling:

Going without a jacket until it’s truly cold

Cross-country skiing deep into quiet woods

Standing among northern spruce and other evergreens

Spending time in northern places: Alaska, upper British Columbia, the tops of all the Canadian provinces. Montana. North Dakota.

The snowiest places, and among people who move to these places. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Duluth.

When a city’s power is out from a storm and people walk and talk peacefully

The lull after a snowstorm

Bayou country and the Everglades

Diaries and books about pioneers, homesteaders, and explorers

Edward Hoagland’s books about the renegades who lived in far northern British Columbia when he was there in the early 1960s

Spending time at the edge of a continent

Swimming in cold water

What are the things that thrill you?