Maine: something done

Waking up on the deck of a dry-docked yacht in Ellsworth, Maine, thinking it's a good thing I'm doing this now. In five years I won't want to sleep boatyards on the edge of thoroughfares anymore. Hell, I don't even want to sleep in boatyards now. Any future rambles should include either nothing but earth under my bedroll and quiet all around, or else a bed.

The light was just enough to let me drop off port-side of the stern and slink away to get breakfast. A man on a bicycle was doing laps on the pavement till his car got out of the shop. He asked me where I was going, but the answer was no longer unusual. Half an hour later, drinking tea on a rock, he cycled back and asked where I started. I said where.

- You ought to stop in at the newspaper in Bar Harbor. They like to keep tabs on things like that.

A few times on this walk I met doubters who said that if I had actually walked as far as I said, then they would have heard about me. I protested this judgement since the staff writer for the news in Little Rock, Iowa (pop. 447) had come out personally for an interview. So, I said I'd keep it in mind to stop by.

I crossed the bridge and onto Mount Desert Island. The water was now salt, but the air was not. The tide was very well out, and I went down to tideline to see what may have gotten trapped in pools or else washed up as wrack. Gulls were hovering, kicking legs like on bicycle, and dropping mussels onto rocks, often having to drop the same one again and again. Letting go from a greater height would do it one go, but then some interloper might steal their work before they could descend. It worked as a technique. I was not able to beat any of the gulls. But I was more interested in what lay at my feet anyway. Mostly broken and dull stone, and a few pieces of well-weathered beach glass. Having gone glass hunting on the other coast, I pocketed a bit of may have been bottle neck. Then, for a packrat's exchange, withdrew the rough telegraph glass I'd carried for some miles and threw it. It will need time to ripen.

It was then about time for lunch. Seeing Hull's Cove not far away, and the country grocer's that sold food plastic-wrapped or out of steel crocks, I bought a cup of macaroni with my last twenty. The clerk placed the change in my hand and I looked at the mint on the singles. B & L. B - New York - was fairly common in this part of the country. L I hadn't seen an L for months. San Francisco. All these miles away and both of us started from the same place to meet here. The shopkeeper gave a concerned look.

- It's nothing about you, I said. It's something else.

- Glad to hear that, he nodded. You take care.

Right about there was the moment where my mind reversed thru records till it came back to the beginning. Not the very beginning, I don't think. Not where the longing started. But the beginning that came up baptized in strawberry-rhubarb jam over pancakes in May of the previous year, then unrolled over every kind of earth - shore, mountain, desert, prairie, forest - to here, to me holding a one dollar bill with an 'L' stamped on it. Trying to think of every place I slept along the way - every tree, coulee, culvert, truck, couch, bed, barn, bridge - to make a sense of it. And then I was in Bar Harbor, walking into the newsroom, and still not making any sense but thinking someone might stop my rambling legs and mind.

A middle-aged man looked away from his computer as I came thru the door.

- Can I help you?

- A fella in Ellsworth told me you like to keep tabs on folks traveling thru.

- Sometimes, yes.

- Well, I walked here.

- Alright, what's your story?

Anything I could say, everything I had come upon, were the elements, maybe, of story. But they emerged separately without narrative. Sleeping inside a redwood. Watching fumaroles rise from St. Helens. Wild horses on the prairie. Memories like bricks in a walk, or like the photographs I had taken, black and white and hazed, all image and feeling, but in themselves... the shapes of clouds and crows' wings.

- I don't think I have one.

The newsman adjusted his glasses.

- We did have a man come thru on a bicycle last year. He had just retired and was cycling around the world. Is your story like that?

- No, it's not. I don't think my story would sell any papers.

- Well, then best of luck on the rest of your trip.

The rest of my trip took several minutes and a few blocks over to a grassy park overlooking the harbor. Lobsterboats came in from the Atlantic. There was no joy, nor pride, just the great sadness of a long journey come to its end. It was no longer something wished, but something done. Not even the ending I had imagined: a sandy beach with the wind, and me walking into the surf, a continent at my back. Instead, I was sitting on a bench, with the sunset hidden - this being the East - listening to traffic and alone. A block away, a car alarm went off.

Behind me now were nothing but moments. Moments which were never stories in themselves, yet collectively were the story:


The Yang Ming freighter gliding under the Golden Gate.

Sidestepping elk in Olympic

Breaking trail down the Bighorn Mountains

Watching goats with Wade

Chasing a calf thru the corn while lightning crept the sky

Moonrise over the prairie

A raindrop dragging itself out over my lower lip

Fires of sagebrush and buffalo dung

Crater Lake blue-goodgod-blue


And somewhere in there the name of God and me listening the whole way thru but only ever hearing the same thing over and over again: I am. I am. I am. I can't regret any one thing without regretting the succession. And so I could condense it all to this. I went many places, met many beautiful people, they changed my life.

Night rose up from the sea and swept westward. A loon called out from the harbor. A hollow and mournful sound. It was winter.

I opened the front of my journal to these words:

This being the second journal of my walk across North America, begun April 1st, 2011 from Seattle, Washington.

Below them, I wrote:

Ended December 5th, 2011, Bar Harbor, Maine.

And with those words, the trip was over. Done at the end of a pen.

The loon went on crying and howling and I rose to make a phone call and find a bed.