on vacation (not in Maine!) - I'll resume in a couple of weeks.

First Week of Fall

The days have been sunny and cool this week, the nights clear and cold. It's a little strange to be outside the rhythm of changes that fall usually brings, to be able to enjoy these perfect days without too many distractions. And life gets slower up here the closer we get to winter: far fewer boats in the bay, cars tooling down to Ash Point, airplanes landing, tourists window-shopping. You can see the slow natural changes, like trees changing color, people getting wiser, even as the unnatural ones (schools, jobs, 5-year plans, bail-outs) pick up the pace elsewhere.

The Japanese maple is a small reminder not to worry about the calendar too much. Some varieties, like this one at Vesper Hill, blaze even in June. To me that's comforting. A tree is free from the curse of locomotion. It doesn't have make progress to make a point; it's magnificent in its own right, in all seasons. Yet it has a spirit that transcends time, subtly in most cases, blatantly in others. The Japanese maple is particularly wonderful, for it also travels in space, the contemplative focal point of countless gardens around the world.

The Maine Atlas and Gazeteer

...is clearly one of the best books ever published, good for hours of daydreaming, armchair adventures, and general baby-boomer innocence, not to mention a pretty good companion when you're out and about in the state. I love the way all the hills are named, like the native Americans used to. I love the six different line styles for roads, from limited access highway to trail, with the ominous and exciting empty circle signifying a permanently washed-out bridge or road. I especially love the red gazeteer icons symbolizing places of interest, from proud lighthouses to humble nature preserves. I'm proud to be on the spread of maps 8 and 9 (almost entirely ocean, includes the mythical islands of Monhegan and Matinicus, also the Ragged Island of Elisabeth Ogilvie).
But (says the ex-Calvinist) there's always a dark side. The Atlas is of course published by DeLorme, in Yarmouth, home of the great globe just off Route 1. And DeLorme is David DeLorme, who founded the company in 1976 when his homemade maps found a market niche. Great story: local man loves the outdoors, sees a need, big success. The dark side is the relentless press of business. Having published Atlases for all 50 states, having pioneered the street CD-ROM for every address in the US, DeLorme is now heavily into GIS and GPS, and the irony starts to be crushing. It's now easier to find oil and minerals, easier to develop land, easier to log, easier to build malls, easier to trek into wilderness knowing you can be rescued, and the very thing the Atlas is designed for, to find places of beauty and peace, is aiding and abetting the opposite.
Having been in business and having (in effect) despoiled my own bit of Maine by owning a house here, I'm sensitive to the contradictions of such criticism. I dearly hope, however, that Maine can remain a place of some mystery and inspiration for my children and their children, that the Atlas will continue to provide inspiration for responsible souls, and that the users of GPS will every once in a while turn it off and go where they don't know where they are.

Sunrise

At about 5:30 there's a faint red blush in the sky over Vinalhaven, and then not much happens for the next hour. Each morning's dawn is slightly different. Yesterday there was a brisk breeze from the north, and streams of seagulls sailed into it. I didn't see any going south but they must have returned, perhaps out of sight over the land, flying in a grand circle, all for the show-off pleasure of maneuvering straight into wind without flapping their wings. Yesterday's sky was also mostly cloudy except for a band of clear hugging the east horizon, affording just enough room for a full concentrated red rise. This morning's sky was cloudless; I was surprised to see how much red tinted the blue unhindered.

The hour seems to go very slowly. It's not just that I'm not ready to get up; it's peaceful and quiet, this transition between night and day. The ocean is calm, the light is slowly brightening, and the only wireless transmissions are my own, exploring the coast un-Googled. I know from the map that the orientation of this view is down east, a straight line over Vinalhaven, through Stonington and Acadia, all the way to Lubec. I take the hour to fly from here to there, calmly, fixed-winged like a gull. In this lovely hiatus, it's hard to believe the earth is really spinning, that the sun will rise soon enough.

Then the red starts to turn to orange and the first piercing ray shoots across the bay. In the space of 5 minutes he's fully up, white and brilliant, the earth now spinning much faster, or so it seems. The mood is broken. Various imperatives beckon. I park my little hour of reverie on the hard tarmac of the day.