Blue Highways (55 page)

“It’s a beautiful mountain,” I said.

“I lived under it all my life and just found out a year ago it’s an old volcano—a broken-down volcano. Nobody knew. We been climbin’ it to picnic for years, up to a place where you can shake blueberries off the bush. What a place up there! I like to look down and see all our land. The fields we cleared, the trees we sap. Each generation of us has added a little more land and now we hold six hundred
connected
acres. That house up the road is my mother’s. Been there since eighteen fifteen. From where we’re standin’ now, I can look up or down the road and see only our property. Nothin’ I like better than to stand here and just look. But I used to look at these hills when you could buy them for almost nothin’ and wonder who besides me would want them. Now, I couldn’t afford to buy my own land.”

“Would you sell it?”

“I could sell off pieces for house lots, and I wouldn’t have to work anymore. But I’d lose more than just our land. The old families of the township are pretty well gone and dispersed, and the old homesteads keep disappearin’. Younger people almost have to go away to find proper work. ’Tis a beautiful place, but not a good one for an intelligent young person. I took the college preparatory course at Tilton School and went to the University of New Hampshire for two years. But I came back. Didn’t seem like anything special returnin’ home then. Now it looks like somethin’ you may not see happen again.”

We had been almost sauntering, but Hunter began walking fast. Then he stopped. “When I’m up on the peak lookin’ down, sometimes I try to imagine the orchards and pastures a generation from now. Or in five generations. I imagine different ways it’ll turn out, but the thing I always end up with is those fields I raked hay on when I was a boy. We’re takin’ timber off them now. People—outlanders—get upset because we cut trees. They don’t see that those trees are growin’ in an old field. I know this, what you think comes down to your point of view. Don’t know where theirs is, but mine’s from up on that old volcano.”

B
LUE
highway 109 ran out of Melvin Village, out from under the Ossipee Mountains, down toward the sea, all the way twisting like snarled fishline as it unreeled through an eerie spruce forest. I crossed into Maine, where evergreens absorbed the heat and the sky darkened. Lakes glowed luminescent in the last light, the water sending wisps of condensation into the cool air.

Although I was still miles from the ocean, a heavy sea fog came in to muffle the obscure woods and lie over the land like a sheet of dirty muslin. I saw no cars or people, few lights in the houses. The windshield wipers, brushing at the fog, switched back and forth like cats’ tails. I lost myself to the monotonous rhythm and darkness as past and present fused and dim things came and went in a staccato of moments separated by miles of darkness. On the road, where change is continuous and visible, time is not; rather it is something the rider only infers. Time is not the traveler’s fourth dimension—change is.

The towns—Springvale, Sanford, Kennebunk—watery globs of blue light, washed across the windows in the cold downpour that came on. I pushed the wipers to high speed, but the rain had its way.

I drove on until the road crossed a small drawbridge over an estuary at Kennebunkport, the fifth oldest village in Maine. Just above the sea reach, I stopped for the night. I’d come again to the Atlantic.

K
ENNEBUNKPORT
was a town coming and going, a place in that way like any other. A quarter of a mile up the estuary from the ocean, the citizens once built large wooden ships on the north side of the river and unloaded fish downstream on the south. At Government Wharf they still unloaded fish and lobsters, and the boat-building continued too but on a smaller scale.

In that earlier time, the Baptists constructed a fine wood-frame church that looks down the estuary, and on the steeple they put a weathervane in the form of a golden fish. I asked four people what kind of fish it was. One said, “What fish?” One said it was merely a generalized Christian symbol; two others said cod. I don’t suppose the Baptists prayed to fish, yet it did look that way. But cod giveth and cod taketh away, and cod fishing is no longer what it was. Were the Baptists to put up a weathervane today, they might erect a great golden traveler’s check.

The storm passed inland, and by morning the sky was clear and warm and squealing with gulls scratching themselves in flight. In 1830, some of the townspeople sighted a sea monster, but things now were quieter, except during the summer, and that was the way it had been for almost a century. I did what you do in Kennebunkport: walk the odd angles and sudden turns of alleyways and cul-de-sacs among the bleached shingled buildings, climb the exterior stairs to the old lofts, step around lobster pots and upturned dinghies.

The summer season was coming on, and already middle matrons in nonskid-soled shoes and wraparound skirts were leading middle-level husbands into shops rigged out in macramé and down counters of perfumed candles, stained-glass mobiles, Snoopy beach towels, brass trivets, ceramic coffee mugs from Japan, music box cheeseboards, ladybug jewelry. Clerks, a generation younger, watched with expressions stuck on like decals.

Most of those visitors stayed on the north side of the river with the gift shops and galleries selling paintings by artistes, with the motels, restaurants, and tour-boat docks; but a few found the southside eateries, small and slanty, the ones on pilings out over the river; and some people even wandered into the boatyards where winches and cranes clanked out the old music of the harbor.

I went down to the shore. People lay in the sand of a narrow beach blocked at both ends by big broken mounds of glaciated rocks. Children dug holes, mothers read fat novels by women with three names, and fathers read the coeds’ damp T-shirts. Later the women would stretch out on towels, the men doze off under
The Wall Street Journal,
and the children look for something to do away from the blowing sand, cold water, and six hundred yards of salted humanity.

I drove a hilly back road a couple of miles up the coast to Cape Porpoise, a white picket-fence village bent around a little balloon of an inlet off the Atlantic. Here, in 1629, Englishmen made the first so-called permanent settlement in Kennebunkport. Sixty years later, Indians “depopulated” Cape Porpoise. That first settlement was on Stage Island, now an overgrown rise that loons and gulls rallied on.

At the edge of the town pier sat a lobster house. Lobsters were beyond my means, but I bought two pounds of steamed quahogs (also called “littlenecks” and “cherrystones” when small), walked to Bradbury Brothers grocery for a stick of butter and two bottles of Molson Ale. I packed up my dented aluminum pot and Swedish stove and headed down through the sumac and wild beach roses to a rocky coign of vantage just above a tidal cove Vikings likely saw. While the tide went out, I melted the butter and warmed the clam broth, dipped the steamers into the broth and hot butter, and ate, sitting against the granite, drinking the Molsons, watching the water.

The tide drained the flats with their sea-worn things that once belonged in the air now returned to it for a short space: sunken punts, busted lobster pots, barnacled timbers, pop bottles. And there were banks of shining, steely blue mussels closed tighter than the lips of God. At one time, only gulls harvested the black mussel, but when tidal-flat clams and lobsters became harder to find, people began gathering mussels for steaming, and now they, too, were not so plentiful.

Herring gulls, flashing white in the sun, circled down and let loose their usual hullabaloo, picked over the flats, and cocked a careful eye at little tidal pools full of orange rockweed and iridescent froth washing gently back and forth. They stitched the rank, black ooze with an embroidery of gull feet.

I went again to the pier. Old men had come down in Valiants and Dodge Darts and stood watching the fishing boats. Somebody said they came every day just like the gulls. Always when one died off, another took his place to do the watching.

A westerly had blown in strong, and the little Cape Porpoise fleet was returning early, each boat carrying into the pier an attendant flapdoodle of gulls circling as sternmen gutted the catch, then swooping the water for the pitched entrails. Trucks from Boston fish houses waited under the hoist as the fish tubs came up. Gill netters tore mackerel loose from nets and threw them into baskets. The mackerel is a beautiful piece of design: a sleek body of silver touched with indigo. An old watcher said, “A mack looks better than it eats, unless you’re a cat.”

The trawler
Allison E
tied up to unload her catch of flounder, cod, haddock, and hake. The skipper climbed the pier ladder and said, “It’s steak and potatoes for me, boys.” He kept an eye on the trawler as his crew cut the last of the catch, and he counted the baskets of fish coming up to the truck. The whole time, I stood at his side and asked questions.

Finally he said, “If you really want to see how a flounder gets from twenty leagues down to the A and P, be on the pier tomorrow morning at three-thirty. If you won’t get seasick, you can go out with us.”

The
Allison E
was the last to unload. When she moved off to tie up in the little basin, the pier emptied. In late afternoon, schoolboys came down with their Zebcos to fish for pollock. They filched chunks of cod and flounder from the foul shed where lobster bait festered in barrels; the stronger the bait, the better to lure a lobster. One small boy struggled out with a massive codfish head, its jagged maw, a good fourteen inches across, gaping wide enough to swallow him. In the harbor, red-throated loons paddled and dived and gulped, but the boys had no luck and went home when the eastern sky and sea turned inky in the dusk.

I parked Ghost Dancing on a flat outcropping of rock just above the pier; circles of yellow lichens lay over the stone like doilies, and broken mussel and crab shells, dropped by gulls, were all about. From my bunk, I could see out the back window the blinking light on Goat Island, a rocky ribbon once fought over by the British and colonists. On beyond, from deep water, the sorrowing drone of a sonobuoy.

To be able to get up at three, I went to bed early but couldn’t fall asleep. I kept hearing music, an old kind of music, coming over the harbor from the village. The melody sounded so much like another time, I thought I imagined it, but it kept drifting softly across the basin like a dream. I got up and followed the sound along the road to Atlantic Hall, a last-century clapboard building that was the town meetinghouse, library, and dancehall. Parked around were Volkswagens, Saabs, Peugeots, Renaults, and an old camouflaged truck with a canoe rack. Each bumper carried a message:
SPLIT WOOD NOT ATOMS, SAVE THE WHALE, EXTINCT IS FOREVER, VIVA LA BICICLETTA!

From the second floor of the hall, music and the thump of feet. Under the roof timbers, a band—upright piano, fiddle, flute, and banjo of immense size—was letting go with a barndance piece while dancers went up and down, stopping only to drink water from enamelware pitchers. The cool sea wind blew through the loft and pushed the sweaty air into the night.

Resting on the stairs was a student from Boston University who had come to Kennebunkport to do research on tide mill design. “I’m studying the old gristmill on the Kennebunk River,” he said. “It’s a restaurant now, but up until a few years ago, it was still milling. Same family ran it for two hundred years. Simple engineering, but ingenious. Yankee all the way.”

He explained how it worked: a rising tide entered the pond through a gate in the mill dam. At high tide, the miller closed the gate to trap the water. As the tide ebbed, the pond drained through a turbine connected to the millstone.

“It worked only twice every twenty-four hours—once at night—but the energy was free, endless, and nonpolluting. I’m interested in a model that would operate with the tide coming
and
going so there’s ready power most any time. The Bay of Fundy, maybe you know, is not far north of here. Twice a day there you have a hundred billion tons of water rising and falling fifty feet. Two hundred million horsepower every day.”

He drew a sketch of the old mill turbine with his modifications.

“People think hydropower is a Grand Coulee Dam—big. But little is valuable too, especially in New England where heating oil is expensive and falling water is cheap. A lot of tide and streams get wasted now. And you wouldn’t believe the number of little hydroplants on town dams that have been abandoned in the last thirty years. If we developed only ten percent of the small existing dams in the country, we could save a couple hundred million barrels of oil a year. As I see it, that gristmill may be the oldest thing in Kennebunkport, but it’s also the most futuristic.”

Three-thirty
A.M.
: Sky black, sea blacker. Goat Island light blinking every five seconds through a quiet rain. Tide full. Wind off the sea and into the beach roses and sumac. Smell of blossoms and brine. Squeak of a hull against the pier, the far clang of a bell buoy.