? ? ?
Minutes later we pulled over at a rest stop and tourist-information area. Bored middle-aged and older women in green vests milled around with too much information to give and not enough travelers to give it to, so they loaded us down with all manner of maps and brochures. Sandra and I couldn’t tear ourselves away from a floor-to-ceiling map of Maine on one wall that showed all the collisions with moose over the past year. Each red dot a crash. There were so many on our route—straight up into the Allagash—it looked as if someone had splashed blood from Portland to Canada.
Sandra stared at the red dots as she gnawed on the black licorice she’d bought at the gift shop. “This can’t be real.”
“Afraid it is,” said one of the women in green. “My best friend’s sister and her new husband died on their wedding day in 1973, right after the ceremony on their way to the reception. Boom, like that. Gone. But it was fall, you know, rutting season. Moose are crazy then.” She let go a creepy laugh. “One whiff of something good, and they just tear across the road, don’t look both ways!”
“Jesus Christ,” Rachel said under her breath as she walked around a nine-foot monster plastic moose in the middle of the room, its antlers grazing the twelve-foot ceiling.
“You’ll be fine,” the woman said. “It’s summer. Just keep your eyes out.”
I trailed behind as Sandra, Pia, and Rachel burst out of the building, howling and wisecracking about rutting season and two-ton mammals hurtling across highways for hot moose action. As we settled back into the car, it occurred to me that we were already dressed for this new world. Rachel in her red fleece vest, multipocketed hiking shorts, and ankle-high boots; Sandra in her purple Patagonia jacket; Pia outfitted head to toe in REI’s finest. Already I sensed a profound separation from the normal, even from the people we had been that very morning in my cozy apartment in Boston.
A thought came to me that I couldn’t force away: What we are wearing is how we’ll be identified out in the wilderness. This middle-aged woman in this blue jacket, these nylon pants, these Timberland boots. I noticed for the first time a small zipper on my new hiking shirt and counted three cunningly hidden pockets, one on either side of my waist and one on my sleeve, where I could put things like keys, or maybe a note telling someone what had happened to us. I imagined what I might say, if I’d be able to conjure anything profound. All I knew was that no one expected us home for five days, and no one I knew expected to hear from me at all.
5
After Portland, where the rocks in the bay at low tide looked like slumped-over bodies, the miles seemed to fall away more quickly behind us. Green became the rule, man-made structures the exception. Trees shot up taller somehow, sprouted thickly even in the median strip, creating a forest there just as lush as the one rushing by on our right. Trucks roared past us groaning with the incomprehensible weight of hundreds of massive logs. I thought longingly of the outlets in Kittery we’d blown by, all the charming B&Bs in the Yorks and Ogunquit. Rachel googled “northernmost Starbucks in Maine,” mumbling something about stopping there for “one last latte.” Sandra did her best to hold on to NPR, but we lost even that around Lewiston.