she ached for the sound…

Though happy to have moved back to the Island, she ached for the Sound, for the cottage that she lived in two winters back, for Sargent Stream lulling her to sleep. She was still thinking about moving back this winter, and some days it was all she thought about.

One morning, she thought of Sargent before anything else, and she decided to make it her morning destination. She pedaled out to Duck Brook, from Duck Brook to Eagle Lake, from Eagle Lake to Aunt Betty Pond. When the carriage path headed straight to Seven Bridges, she veered in the direction of Giant Slide, in woods that abruptly transitioned from an airy open beech-maple canopy to a darker mossy boreal landscape. She had made it, she was home. This was the part of the island that she knew the best and yet it always surprised her: the snowy owls, the four foot long snakes, the coyote den. Not as many deer, a form of wildlife that always made her feel like she was in suburban DC and made her cringe. This, more than anywhere else on the Island, was still wild.

She was not shocked that the only other person she saw was her former landlady walking her dogs. They laughed at the sight of each other, particularly since it was 630 in the morning.

“I was homesick!” she admitted. It was so true yet revealing, revealing that she wanted to return and get more use out of that Swedish wood stove, that she wanted to write in the sunniest of living rooms. Part of her wanted to have a lover or lovers there, since she never had before. She wanted solely her name on the lease, but someone else who would leave their boots at the door and break up kindling and start a broth. Yet she was also content to keep the space for herself, slip out the door and carry her skis to the carriage paths, nurse cup after cup of tea.

She looped back via the Around the Mountain loop, cresting over a flank of Parkman and then dipping down before heading up Sargent. She stopped and locked her bike when she crossed the Northwest trail to Sargent. She could not pass it up, her favorite ridge line despite having traversed it hundreds of times. From Sargent, she headed to Penobscot, and hoped she still
had enough time before work. The day before, she had joked that she would someday have to call and say she would be late because she was stuck on a mountain, but she did not want today to be the day.

Luckily, she reached both Penobscot and work in time. She flew down the carriage path from the top of Sargent to Eagle Lake, screaming with delight, a grin plastered on her face that no one could see.

Ellsworth’s Accident Waiting to Happen

In the Whites, my hiker friends and I would joke that certain trails were “accidents waiting to happen”. I have to say that Myrick Street in Ellsworth and the section of Route 1 between Myrick Street and High Street is a bike accident waiting to happen, as arguably the most bike-unfriendly section of Hancock County. I realize this is strong language. Like the rest of the state of Maine, Hancock County has an ample number of no-shoulder or broken-shoulder roads. Yet in most situations, the road remains navigable to bikers without fearing eminent death.

Myrick Street and the aforementioned section of Route 1 have created a scenario that demands more courage than the average cyclist may possess. If the lane changes are confusing to a driver, they are frightening to a cyclist who realizes she cannot cling to the right side of the road and she must cross multiple lanes of traffic to turn left The hill past the bowling alley feels similarly risky, since the biker has nowhere to go while careening down the hill in front of vehicles also gaining speed.

Bayside is a slightly friendlier route. In fact, the bike path between Birch Ave and North Street may be the best option. Why would anyone bike Myrick Street any way? Just avoid it. Yet functional bikers who have no other means of transportation need to take Myrick Street to reach Walmart. Moreover, as the crossroads of Downeast Maine, Ellsworth is the crossroads of scores of cyclists starting or finishing cross-country journeys or cross-Maine journeys or any number of journeys. If only they all knew
to go the Bayside Road…

As I see it, the Department of Transportation has two options: either include bike lanes when they re-think Myrick Street or post no-bike signs so that they will not be responsible for any accidents or deaths.

Why I Signed Up For An Online Dating Website, Again….

I have not created an online dating profile since 2009 when I was living in the Boston area. At that time, I was encouraged to sign up by my friends there who struggled to meet men until they created profiles on various websites. “It is great, all of a sudden you are going on a date every night.” Yeah, but with whom?

Despite my hesitations, I setup an account as “sweetandsmokey”, my favorite qualities of homemade maple syrup, and wrote a profile unlike any other that existed in the city at the time. That year, I was reverse commuting to a community farm outside the city to work as a farm-based educator. There I was in Boston, homesick for Maine, just wanting to meet a guy who wanted to process chickens and climb Mt. Washington and eventually move to Maine with me. In hindsight, it is comical that I expected to have any success.

I did indeed go on dates like my friends promised, fun dates as if scripted off the Bachelor or Bachelorette.  At the age of twenty-three, I still wanted to learn to fish, so one guy took me fishing in a pond on the outskirts of the city on a Saturday morning. It would have been romantic, except he took me to meet his parents immediately after and he was a little too effeminate for me. Another took me to dinner in Central Square. I brought one date a quart of strawberries that I picked from the farm. A couple days later, we made handcranked ice cream. I was rather enamored with that one for a while.

Yet, after a couple of months, I gave up. They were all perfectly nice computer programmers or the like, but I could not find any that I could see myself dating for the long-term. My therapist at the time was a former kindergarten teacher turned sex therapist (I found her through my insurance and she also took non-sex therapy patients). She pointed out that the problem with online dating is that the couple do not share the context that makes an in-person dating scenario work. When I organically meet someone, we have that common bond of farming, or the AT, or our same small town. The relationship has a reason for existence, and a security in that reason, in knowing that we share a common ethic or culture. Yet I could never feel that bond with my Boston experiment. I soon became an online dating cynic.

I did not start again out of desperation. I did not sign up because I am in capable of meeting men elsewhere. I signed up because I have not been meeting guys who share my common interests. I have not been meeting men who are financially stable, who are as single as they say they are, who can climb to a top of a mountain with me. That is what I wanted more than anything else, to be in the woods or on the water with someone. I keep meeting men who say, “I like to hike, I walk the Shore Path,” or “I think about finding the trail up Cadillac and then decide to go to the bar like I usually do”. At a certain point, I begin to believe that non-lame men are figments of my imagination.

I needed a way to attempt to seek and screen them out, and suddenly I returned to the concept that I abandoned long ago. On the one hand, I do not expect anything to come from it. On the other hand, if anything comes from it, I only want quality.  As I said before, I have no trouble meeting men who are not good enough for me. My hope is that I will feel more in control in this online setting this time, especially with a better sense of what I want.

Besides, this time I can hope for more context than I experienced in Boston.  Anyone I meet will share a common landscape. That alone is not enough to create chemistry, but it is a start.

the limits of my gratitude

thank you for replacing the carnations with chinese lanterns from your friend’s farm, and hanging them up all over the house.

thank you for bringing me breakfast in bed morning after morning, eggs exactly the way i wanted them, cheesy and filled with kale and sprinkled with nutritional yeast.

thank you for barreling through the snow up the driveway, you ever fearless and confident and sexy.

i want to know that i noticed, that i so appreciated every sweet gesture, every cup of tea, every time you tickled me, and i wish that were enough.

i wish that were enough to buy land, and have chickens and babies, and still be madly in love like your parents are.

having found everything i thought i wanted, i need more. i need what i hate most in the world, and i need someone who is going to work for it as hard as i do.

i will not demand that you acknowledge that i helped you through the winter, but i will say thank you, i know you made the season shorter and more tolerable for me.

yet now it is spring, time for growth.

Why I Am Still Running the MDI Marathon

Over the past month or so, I had started to feel like running the MDI marathon was a bad idea. Sure, I am registered, but I have fallen off my training wagon. I am the heaviest that I have been in my life. Maybe next year…., I was thinking.

Now, in the wake of yesterday, I have to say, “No, silly pants, this year.” Life is too precious, and I have no way of knowing when it will be over. I do not care if I have to walk or crawl to the finish line. I do not care if I feel mortified in front of the more experienced runners. I need to “carpe diem it up”, as I used to say in college.

Wish me luck, but send all your prayers to those in greater need…

My Most Irrational Love Affair

I think about leaving. I think about the insanity of waking up in the middle of the night to drive forty-five minutes from the northernmost tip of the county to the southernmost. I think about the ridiculousness of sleeping pinned between a wall on one side, my lover on the other, and a bookshelf at my feet, so that whenever I enter or exit, I must roll over a enormous pair of feet. I think that I am inconsiderate to peel out of the long driveway, and leave that lover stranded at the cabin in a landscape that I love, half mile from the pond, a mile from the general store, and nowhere near his friends.

To most, these are not minor inconveniences. These are deal-breakers, and a saner person would have found somewhere else long ago. Yet I have been too in love to look, and I am in love for the worse reasons, in love because of moments that do not happen often or last long.

I am in love with sneaking into the blackberry patch in the overgrown field across the street, a patch where I follow paths trampled by critters and humans. There, I have as much self-control as I did at the age of five in deciding whether to put them in my mouth or the basket.

I am in love with stepping out of my car and looking up at a clear sky of stars. It is the same sky under which my father would carry my sister and me, roused out of sleep and wearing coats thrown over our pajamas, to admire a meteor shower or aurora borealis or a constellation that he and my mother found for the first time.

I am in love with waking up to heavy rain pounding on the metal roof. For an instant, I still think I am in a lean-to, happy I did not camp out, wondering what the trail will be like in the morning.

I am in love with lifting up the carpet in my first deep cleaning of the winter, and finding sand that I tracked in from swims in the pond, and not regretting my carelessness.

I am thinking about leaving, but I am not ready.

Fit but Obese…

I was weighed twice during a long-overdue physical, once by the nurse and again by the doctor. After the doctor weighed me, she told me that my body-mass index (BMI) fell in the overweight category. Then she corrected herself: actually my BMI was considered obese.

“You know, obesity is more inheritable than height.” She launched into a well-rehearsed weight-loss spiel. “Even if you can just walk a little bit every day and reduce your portions…”

Perhaps her advice would be helpful to a sedentary person, but I tried to explain to her that I go through periods of exercising every day, day after day, for months at a time, and then tire of it. I tried to tell her that I thru-hiked the AT, but not even all doctors know what this entails. I tried to mention that I was a binge eater, but this was a new doctor in my life. She was not as interested in listening to the complexities of my situation as she was in lecturing me.

Yet thankfully the numbers acknowledge the complexities. After she preached to me based on my weight and BMI, she finally looked at my other vitals. I am most proud of my pulse: 52. Granted it has been lower when I was in better shape, but even 52 is considered a “runner’s pulse”. I have the blood pressure of a normal person, and despite my junk food habit, my blood sugar level is not even at pre-diabetic levels.

After looking at this, the doctor said, “Wow, you’re fit.” She sounded as surprised as day hikers were when I was overweight and told them I was thru-hiking. At the time, I hated this. I wanted people to know how far I had come just by looking at me. Yet I have spent my entire life concealing an exceptional core within an ordinary shell. Why should my health be any different?