‘Let’s move here after I finish med school,’ I said, seeing us living in some adobe house (with a swimming pool) out in the mesa that surrounded the city, me having a thriving pediatrics practice in town, my patients the children of artists and New Age types who ate macrobiotically and wrote music for the gamelan and drank green tea with Georgia O’Keeffe and.
‘As long as you don’t make me drink green tea or only eat lentils,’ Dan said.
‘No — we’d be the weirdos out here. Meat-eaters, smokers —’ (Dan was a two-pack a day man back then) ‘and decidedly not into crystals or the zodiac. But I bet we’d meet a lot of young types like us. Santa Fe strikes me as one of those places that attracts refugees from everywhere else in the country — people who want to escape from all the pressures of big-city life, big-city success. We could live really well here — and, hey, it’s the West. Wide open spaces. Big skies. No traffic.’
Of course Dan agreed with me. Of course, within twelve months, all these pipe-dreamy plans were finished. And that big wonderful coast-to-coast drive — in which I truly fell in love with the scope and possibility and sheer insane vastness of my country — was to be our one and only romance of the road.
The road.
We all have our little patch of earth, don’t we? Especially those of us who do the nine-to-five thing and rarely venture further than our home and our place of work. And this morning, on the way south, I was passing through my usual parameters.
Main Street Damariscotta. Tourists come here in the summer. An archetypal Maine fishing town. Lots of white clapboard. Austere historic churches. A few decent restaurants (we don’t do fancy around here). A couple of places where you can buy three types of goat’s cheese and the sort of fancy English biscuits that are way out of my budget. And small-town lawyers and insurers and doctors and our hospital and three schools and six houses of worship and one supermarket and a decent bookshop and a funky little cinema where they show the live relays from the Metropolitan Opera once a month (I always go with Lucy — even if it is $25 a ticket) and water everywhere you look. Then there’s that ingrained Maine sense of independence that pervades so much of our life here, an attitude which can best be described as: ‘You stay out of my business, I stay out of yours, and we’ll treat each other with courtesy and unspoken respect, and we won’t pass judgment out loud.’ What I like about life here is that, though we all know so much about each other, we still maintain the veneer of outward disinterest. It’s the curious Maine dichotomy: we’re as nosy about other people’s mess as anyone else, but we also pride ourselves on keeping our own counsel.
From Damariscotta through the township of Newcastle then onto Route 1 and into Wiscasset. I hate that damn sign they put at their southern boundary: Wiscasset: The Prettiest Village in Maine. I suppose what annoys me most about it — once you sidestep the smugness of that claim — is the fact that it is the prettiest village in Maine. A virtually intact throwback to the colonial past, grouped around a sweeping Atlantic cove, the town’s white clapboard angularity is so authentic, so visually striking — especially as the water too is everywhere. Outside the absurd vacation traffic that backs up the town every weekend during July and August, this is coastal Maine at its most ravishing. Yet like everything else to do with the state, Wiscasset is so low-key about its wondrousness. outside, that is, of that damn sign.
South of Wiscasset there are a couple of depressing strip malls and a supermarket and the requisite McDonald’s which they only opened around a year ago. Then woods which eventually give way to encroaching water and the bridge into Bath. That bridge — across the wide expanse of the Kennebec River — always strikes me as spectacular. I must make two round-trips across it every week (that’s over two thousand single trips in the last decade — have I ever considered that huge number before now?). Heading south, if you look to the left you see the shipyard of Bath Iron Works — one of the last true industrial centers in the state — with at least two half-finished battleships for the US Navy always under construction. But it only takes up a small lip of a shoreline otherwise pristine and expansive. Besides being such a key economic force in our region, I love the fact that ships are still built in our corner of the state. Just as I love looking right while crossing the bridge and seeing the sweep of the Kennebec, especially at this time of the year, the aptly named fall, when the foliage is a hallucinatory palette of crimsons and golds.
Were I a cartographer of the fifteenth century, the map of my flat earth would terminate at the town of Brunswick, as I so rarely venture beyond its boundaries. Brunswick is a college town. Bowdoin is there. It was also, until recently, the home of a naval air station. There used to be a paper mill on the banks of its river. It’s now long closed. But as a kid passing through the town I can always remember the strange toxic whiff of glue that seemed to permeate the place. We were in Brunswick two or three times a year, as Dad’s closest childhood friend — Arnold Soule — was a professor of mathematics at Bowdoin. Dad and Arnold grew up in the same small town and bonded at school over advanced calculus. But whereas Dad chose U Maine and a high-school teaching career, Soule got a full scholarship to MIT and followed that with a doctorate from Harvard. He was a tenured professor at Bowdoin by the time he was twenty-eight and wrote wildly theoretical books about binary number theory (his specialty) that, according to Dad, were hugely acclaimed ‘in the theoretical mathematics community’. Arnold also happened to be gay — something he confided to my father when they were much younger, and at a time when such a revelation could have destroyed his life. Dad, for his part, kept Arnold’s secret just that — something that Arnold told me many years later when I was supposed to be coming down to the college with Lucy to hear a chamber music concert. When Lucy was flattened with flu and had to cancel at the last minute I called this great family friend and asked him if he’d like to join me. That was just over five years ago. Arnold had finally come out in the early nineties and was living with a graphics designer twenty years his junior named Andrew. When we met up that night Arnold was seventy and had just retired. He was a little rueful about giving up teaching, even though he was engaged in a massive ten-year writing project that was (as he told me) an accessible history of mathematical theory from Euclid onwards. I always liked Arnold, always felt that he was the interesting, understanding uncle I never had (I had rather judgmental aunts on both sides of the family). That evening five years ago — when we talked over a dinner in an Italian restaurant on Maine Street before hearing a visiting pianist from New York play a sublime program of Scarlatti, Ravel and Brahms at the college recital hall — he asked me a direct question:
‘Happy with your life, Laura?’
The question immediately unsettled me. Arnold saw that.
‘My life is fine,’ I said, hearing the defensiveness behind my response.
‘Then why did you flinch when I posed the question?’
‘Because it took me by surprise, that’s all.’
‘Your father tells me you’re highly regarded in your field.’
‘My father is being far too kind. As you know I run scanning machinery in a small local hospital. It’s hardly a great accomplishment.’