Pia drove with her steady intensity, refusing all offers to pitch in behind the wheel. We drove through tiny, eerie towns, each with its own weather-beaten church. Bradley, Old Town, -Olamon, LaGrange. Hand-scrawled signs said things like CONNECT TO GOD ANYTIME, NO BROADBAND NEEDED. Five-or six-headstone cemeteries, sometimes oblong or even triangle-shaped, perched on the crests of hills or overlooked rushing streams, providing for the dead some of the best real estate around. We passed trailer parks with no name: just half a dozen metal lumps clustered together as if for warmth or safety. Snowplows, firewood, and boats lay scattered on front lawns, apparently for sale. Real estate signs announced 30,000 ACRES AVAILABLE NOW—with no phone number—while immense barns imploded slowly on abandoned lots. One house we approached looked kempt and tidy, as though some happy person lived there and enjoyed the upkeep, but as we passed and looked back, we saw a nightmare of rotted frame and plastic sheeting, hastily duct-taped and flapping in the breeze. A woman in a housecoat and backless slippers stood on a weed-sprung driveway and stared at us, arms crossed hard.
For miles we found ourselves stuck, cursing, behind a guy driving a rust-bucket flatbed stacked high with unnamable farm machinery, tools that threshed and cut and hoed, and what looked like an exploded washing machine dangling over one side. Each time we tried to pass, he’d swerve to the left and cut us off, disgorging a clanging engine part or length of pipe that Pia masterfully navigated around. Finally he hooked a crazy fast right onto an unpaved road, fishtailing in a cloud of red dirt. The last we saw of him was his fist waving out the window before he disappeared into deep woods.
The wind picked up as the day cooled from T-shirt to long-sleeve weather. It seemed intent on muscling our car into the other lane, whipping big clouds full of personality across a bright blue sky. A wooden cross and withered roses marked a death at the side of the road. I wondered who had died there, and if anyone still thought of them.
Surrounded by the comforting presence of my friends, I let myself think about Richard; how he still haunted the apartment. Half-awake each morning I would reach for him across the bed, only to find a terrible emptiness. As I gazed out the window at all the green rushing past, I tried to picture what he might be doing at that moment. Perhaps locking up after office hours at school; he’d done his time and gotten tenure, had been able to stomach academia where I could not. Or maybe he was busy trying to get the new grad-school girlfriend pregnant. After three miscarriages, I’d given up on trying to save our marriage with kids. It seemed as if anything made of Richard and me could not take hold in my barren body. When does hope turn into masochism? We ended up getting dogs, big ones that died in a decade, less, then turned to cats, which broke our hearts only slightly less often.
Fairly early on, I went from the one he loved to the one he’d married. I felt it at holiday parties, at art openings for his students, when his faculty meetings stretched into dinner, then later and later arrivals back home. From the beginning I never felt attractive or hip enough for him, always slightly amazed he’d picked me. After a while I figured it out: not only did I put my creative goals second to his—I’ll never know why—but I was a great audience for him. Problem was, ever-lovelier fans in the form of female graduate students cycled in yearly, until he finally chose one. All I had to do was open my eyes. But it’s my Scottish stock. We’re stubborn, and when we say yes, by God, we mean it. We hold on forever, choking the life out of the thing we must have. My terror of being alone had one result: I was alone.
After Millinocket, we left the speed and efficiency of the interstate and took Route 11, the road that would take us all the way to Dickey and the lodge. English radio stations turned French. We spun the dial, fascinated. French rock and roll, French talk shows, the news in French, French easy listening. Signs welcomed us to Aroostook County, while evidence of civilization—including houses—became rare. The ones we saw looked abandoned; creepers veined across walls and nosed into windows. Bushes muscled over rooftops, joining others in a living canopy, all with the intent of digesting the structure beneath.
We drove mostly in silence, as one does when entering another world, through Grindstone, Stacyville, Knowles Corner. Here, signs of initial excitement about a new business venture appeared to be followed by the marks of a much-longer-lasting and enduring despair. A colorful placard announcing DADDY’O’S LOBSTER ROLLS! sported a grinning cartoon lobster, but the arrow pointed to a darkened trailer that tilted helter-skelter in a swampy field. Five dollars bought you a rain-soaked mattress propped up by chairs in a front yard.
By the time we reached Patten, it seemed people had even given up on naming things. A sign outside a rotted motel said MOTEL. The word GUNS painted in twenty-foot letters covered one side of a barn. On a hand-painted shingle, a restaurant announced that FOOD was available within.
But soon, even those sad enterprises faded away. The woods on either side grew dense, impenetrable, alive with their own logic and intelligence. Mile upon mile unspooled before us with nothing man-made in view, no shotgun shacks, no stores, nothing. The world of the forest dwarfed our strip of holed-out road. I sensed green-sprung life anxious to swallow it; imagined trees and plants breaking up the road as they burst through, erasing it as if it had never existed. It was beautiful and frightening to see how nature didn’t give two shits about houses, buildings, and bridges, that it would shrug us off the first chance it got. I opened the window a few inches. Afternoon blew in on a fresh, clean breeze—full of chlorophyll and wood and cold mountain water—it shocked me fully awake and almost made me high.