Aroostook County, Maine

Last days in Massachusetts, summer at Mary's Pond

It's probably not obvious that I've been slowly posting my log from my Appalachian Trail hike, which lasted three weeks and took me to about the mid-point of New York state on the AT.  Then Big County (K.) and I took a dory trip around Buzzard’s Bay—a week of camping and rowing and chilling out in the sun and on the water.  Then a week at camp with his brother and family, and then a week camping up the coast of Maine with some of our friends—one couple we know from the Appalachian Trail in 2004 and other County friends.

I believe I’ve spent more time in a tent than in a bed in the last two months—which is exactly as summer should be, in my opinion.  But we finally pulled into the two-year overgrown driveway on Snow Road, early and unexpected, and our neighbor called the state trooper because we hadn’t been there in so long.  Now we’re figuring out what to do with two years of burdock and goldenrod and fallen trees.  K. is hand-scything the lawn and I’m piling it in the compost bin.  I’d like to pretend I’m hand-baling hay, but I am not that skilled.

We are back in Aroostook itself.  Which means no internet, except at the super-slow library.  Last time we were here I eventually relented to $60 a month satellite internet, but I’m trying to resist this time.  There’s a peculiar kind of silence in an internet-free zone.  More and more I find that when I have it I can escape into the internet as into a kind of void.  And now that I don’t have it, I actually want to make use of it for things like pictures, words.

If that’s what it takes.  Franzen allegedly disables his wireless cards so that they can’t access the internet, going so far as to stick an ethernet cable into its port and cut it off, then sanding down the port so the computer can never again access the internet.  I have that stillness here.  Silence and stillness.  As if the County is a time capsule, or a time machine, taking me back into the past.  The house, other than accumulated mouse crap, is as it was.

I’ll continue to email in posts as I have internet access, maybe filling in some gaps in the past few months, maybe not.  I think of this as a literal world-wide-web log, a ‘blog, for myself in the future as much as for anyone else, and I want at least my anniversary hike to be preserved.  I’ve been adding links to my 2004 hike, too—again, for myself as much as for anyone else—it’s been so fun for me to go back and read those posts, to remember who I was then.  So much of it I remembered, and so much I forgot.