Blue Highways: Springvale, Sanford and Kennebunk, Maine

Unfolding the Map

We cross into Maine with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) and head toward the farthest easternmost point of our journey.  As we part the fog in Ghost Dancing, I'll reflect on fog and what it has meant to me.  To find yourself in the grayness, trudge through the mist to the map.

Book Quote

"Although I was still miles from the ocean, a heavy sea fog came in to the 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...."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 1

Sanford, Maine town hall and annex. Photo by ShazBat73 and found at archBoston.org. Click on photo to go to host site.Springvale, Sanford and Kennebunk, Maine

Carl Sandburg wrote in a famous short poem that "fog comes, on little cat feet," or something of the sort.  I am not sure that I ever saw fog as a cat, though it does slip in silently and disappear just as fast.

One of the things I miss most after living in the desert for 8 years is fog, or really, any air moisture at all.  As LHM discovers driving into Maine, fog can be intense and thick.  Growing up along the Pacific Ocean, fog was a regular part of my life.  Sometimes it lay offshore, a silent presence reminding you that your beautiful day could be fleeting.  Sometimes it enveloped the area in a cold blanket of gray, turning everything but the nearest objects into indistinct, ghostly replicas of themselves.

I used to love those times. I can very easily slip into reverie when the fog rolls in, almost as if the mists serve as a melding of time and space and everything, past, present and future, converges in that spot.  Fog can serve as a metaphor for many things.  My wife still remembers and never fails to embarrass me about how I used a fog metaphor to sum up my indecision on our budding relationship.

Within the fog, everything becomes silent.  At one and the same time, sounds nearest you become more distinct, even as sounds farther away become more muffled.  Yet even that does not become a universal law. In the midst of fog, I have heard the offshore buoys cry their mournful moaning sound, like the sound of lost souls at sea, almost as if they were right beside me, even though I might be a mile away from the ocean, and maybe two miles away from them.

The most beautiful thing to experience in fog are the forests, particularly the coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest.  Only the part of the forest right around you is apparent. If you look up, often the tops of the trees are shrouded with mist, and only the spatter of large, falling drops of water remind you that there are indeed leaves and tree crowns above condensing water and sending it earthward.

There is something about the fog that seems to calm everything.  The ocean that was raging just the day before now lies gray and placid beneath the feathery light yet implacably dense and heavy blanket of moisture.  There are barely even waves, as the mighty Pacific appears to settle into a period of quiet restfulness.

There is something about fog that alters reality.  It changes our view of time and space.  I'm not sure that I necessarily agree with LHM's assertion that change, rather than time, is the fourth dimension.  I still feel the passage of time in fog, though it seems different, perhaps slower.  I have driven, like LHM, down the fog shrouded coastline, sometimes in fog so thick that on roads that I would usually travel 40-50 miles per hour I have to slow to 20-30 miles per hour because of visibility.  The fog stretches out the length of the drive, leaving me more time to myself, to reflect, to think.  That reflection and thinking, time that I wouldn't necessarily have to engage in such activity otherwise, is a boon, for it's in that extra time that the seeds for change is laid.

It is on a foggy night, when the fog is extra thick, that one really gets a true measure of themselves.  The inky blackness gets inkier.  The lights from houses shine wanly, barely penetrating the blackness.  In driving one's headlights, especially on high, hit the wall of water in the air which might as well be bricks as far as the light is concerned.  It is at these times, especially along the coastlines, that one can feel alone, wrapped in a cocoon of cold dampness.  One might wonder if he or she is part of the world at all, or if somehow in travel one has slipped into an alternate and lonely universe of monocolor - a muted, sepia-toned world of light and dark and all measures of gray in between.

I love when the fog breaks in the daytime.  It is not a glorious infusion of sunlight, splintering the grayness and suddenly bringing color into the world.  Instead, the fog breaks slowly.  One notices, at first, a lightening of the sky above.  A hint of blue appears in what had been grayness overhead.  Around one, flowers, trees and plant hues go from muted or even drab to a hint of the glorious color that they possess.  As the fog gradually lifts, the colors emerge more brightly, until suddenly one realizes that the fog is gone.  It has slipped out like a master thief, having stolen time and reality, color and sound, but in the end leaving just a brief memory of its presence and nothing else to mark its passage save, perhaps, a few rapidly disappearing droplets on the leaves.

You'd think I'd be satisfied living in a place that gets an average of 320 days of sunshine a year.  But you can't take the coast out of the boy that has been raised there, and sometimes, I miss the fog.

Musical Interlude

I couldn't find a song that really captures what fog is to me.  There are pieces of what I want in a few things, so I will put them here.  The first is Fog by Hiroyuki Eto.  I don't know anything about this artist, but the song sort of captures the laziness and calmness which which I associate with fog.

The next is by Mnongo Neb, another artist that I don't know about but whose tune, Road in Fog, captures some of the melancholy that comes with fog.

If you want to know more about Springvale, Sanford and Kennebunk

Sanford-Springvale Chamber of Commerce
Town of Kennebunk
Town of Sanford
Wikipedia: Kennebunk
Wikipedia: Sanford
Wikipedia: Springvale

Next up: Kennebunkport, Maine

Blue Highways: Manton, California

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapIn a volcanic landscape at dusk, William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) drives through a wonderland that put him into a whimsical state of mind.  If you're willing to let your mind wander, to rip off Dr. Seuss, Oh The Places You'll Go!  To see where we are located, please click on the map thumbnail over to the right of this column.

Book Quote

"I took a road not marked on my map toward Manton. Nowhere was the way straight, but the land it traversed looked like an illustration from a child's book: a whimsy of rocky shapes, a fancy of spongy bushes, a figment of trees.  Two loping deer could have been unicorns, and the fisherman under a bridge a troll.  The only reality was that somebody owned the land.  At three-hundred-yard intervals, alternating signs hung from barbed wire:  NO TRESPASSING.  PRIVATE PROPERTY.

"Wonderland stopped at Manton..."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 11

Manton general store. Photo by David O. Harrison at City Data. Click on photo to go to site.

Manton, California

Sometimes, landscapes seem almost too mystical to believe.  LHM experiences this on a rainy, dusky evening as he drives through landscape shaped by volcanic forces.  Often, landscapes that look ordinary at certain times suddenly take on magical proportions in certain lights.

Once I was with my wife and a friend, hiking on Mount Tamalpais just north of San Francisco.  It was winter, and the huge amount of rain that had been falling at the time turned the rivers coming off the mountain into cascades down the steep slopes.  Everything was wet and looked mysteriously primeval.  Huge ferns grew by the trail and put me in the mind of pictures I had seen in books about the dinosaurs, where giant dragonflies were snapped up by dinosaur predators.  Large toadstools made me think that at some point, a gnome or leprechaun would dance out into the open, laugh at me and disappear.  The gloom under the trees, the crashing water, and the almost jungle-like quality of the scene (even though it was a forest of conifers) made it possible that I wouldn't have been surprised had I rounded a corner and found King Kong eating the bark of a cypress tree while keeping an eye out for Fay Wray, or Jessica Lange, or Naomi Watts.

The wonders of Pandora in James Cameron's Avatar touched people precisely because the world was presented as a utopia where its people, noble savages, recognized their connection to their planet and had essentially become one with it.  Those scenes, as amazing as they can be on the big screen, evoke the passion about the wonders of our world which, though under assault, still manage to surprise us, especially when viewed through a slightly different perspective.  I still remember vividly, when driving for the first time into the Yosemite Valley just after graduating from college, the jaw dropping vista that appeared as the valley opened in front of me.  I still dream of that day when I climbed Half Dome and stood upon the edge, my senses filled with the grandeur of the Valley and the Sierras beyond.  Now I read that it's wonders are under strain from budget cuts and the increasing numbers of people that visit.  However, the images in my mind still linger.

Even as a child, I was quite aware that the world we see in the daylight changes with nightfall.  Places that meant one thing to me in the daytime often took on different meanings at night.  Our barn, a place of coolness and comfort during the day became a place to be afraid of in the dark, with many corners where bad things could hide and get me.  The ocean, roaring and often blinding as it reflected sunlight during the day became docile, placid and quieter at night, and giving my soul a soothing salve.  Redwood trees, so beautifully green during the day, became tall, dark and vaguely threatening figures at night - the forest that they sheltered, so wonderfully beautiful, alive and nurturing during the day often became a place of fear at night, where one would not want to be caught else one might be eaten by a wild animal or carried away by Bigfoot.

Of course, these feelings might have simply mirrored my life, because things were very different for me personally between day and night.  I used to dread the nightfall, because at night my father would become a different person.  The masks he wore during the day came off.  On the best nights, alcohol would make him sleepy.  On the worst nights, alcohol made him more interested in me than a father should be in his son.  I learned at a very young age that as the appearance of the world changed, so too did the appearance of many of those around me.

My wife recently showed me an old series of advertisements for the London paper The Guardian.  They made some of these very points.  In one, a skinhead is seen rushing toward a businessman from many different angles, and in conjunction with other events, it appears that he will attack the businessman.  Only from the last perspective is it revealed that the skinhead saves the businessman from getting crushed by falling bricks.  I've also read a recent article in the New Yorker by Alex Ross about Oscar Wilde and The Picture of Dorian Gray.  Wilde and his work were as much about appearances as anything else, and how we can be deceived by them if we don't question our perspective.

Yet, I love the change of appearance of the world when we see it at different times of day, or different eras, and if there is deception, I still allow myself to get lost in it.  I enjoy the wonder I feel when I step into what seems like a different world, where something has altered the perspective just enough to make it all seem new.  Perhaps that is why I like stories that present alternate realities, or fantasy worlds, or exotic places.  Maybe, it is why I like to travel, and to read, and to expose myself to different places both real and imaginary.  Ultimately, I am so small, the world is so big, and there is so much to discover.  When I can experience many different realities of the same place, it's even better.

LHM brings all of these thoughts to mind as he drives through a vista shaped by eons of violent volcanic action.  Violence can beget beauty, as twisted shapes and forms take on their own elegance and uniqueness.  Beauty can beget violence, as we endlessly have chronicled throughout human history.  The difference in how we view things may be dependent on something as simple as where we stand, and the time of day.

Musical Interlude

I heard this song by the Green Chili Jam Band the other day on The Childrens' Hour on KUNM.  The show's host, a young woman named Jena Ritchey who was hosting her last Childrens' Hour before heading off to college, played this song that really touched me.  The lyrics touch on all the things that make our world wonderful.  Thank you, Jena, for introducing me to this and other beautiful songs on your show, and have a wonderful time making new discoveries about our world in college.

If you want to know more about Manton

Monastery of St. John of San Francisco
Shasta Search: Manton
Visit Manton
Wikipeida: Manton

Next up: Viola, California

Blue Highways: Texas Canyon, Arizona

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapTexas Canyon in Arizona gives us a chance to look at our sense of wonder and what it means.  We also get a musical interlude that I picked because it once made me wonder and enchanted me.  To see where Texas Canyon lines up on our William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) Blue Highways trip map, click the thumbnail at right.

Book Quote

"The highway rose slowly for miles then dropped into wacky Texas Canyon, an abrupt and peculiar piling of boulders, which looked as if hoisted into strange angles and points of balance.  Nature in a zany mood had stacked up the rounded rocks in whimsical and impossible ways, trying out new principles of design, experimenting with old laws of gravity, putting theorems of the physicists to the test.  But beyond Texas Canyon, the terrain was once more logical and mundane right angles, everything flat or straight up."

Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 14

Texas Canyon, Arizona at sunset. Photo by LouisSaint on Panoramio. Click photo to go to site.

Texas Canyon, Arizona

Occasionally I find something that is so odd, so extremely out of place, that it makes me pause in wonder.

The Mystery Spots, those places where gravity supposedly doesn't work correctly, are not it.  If you haven't been to a Mystery Spot, you might want to pull off the road if you happen across one.  I know of two.  There is one in Santa Cruz, California and another in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  When my wife and I were driving through "da UP," as they call it in Wisconsin, we pulled off when we saw one.  It becomes clear that the "mystery" is strangely angled floors, walls, trees and other landmarks that trick your brain.  Rather than wonder at the supposed mystery, I wondered that some enterprising and entrepreneurial people thought of such an attraction, and that people such as myself pay money to see it.  That's not a natural wonder, it's a wonder of marketing.

However, once in a while Nature pulls a complete Mystery Spot on the unwary traveler right out of the blue.  One might be traveling and see a boulder perched on the end of a needle-like upthrust of rock, and wonder just how that boulder got there and why on earth doesn't it just rolll off!  Or one might pass by rocks in the strangest shapes, or come across a stone arch bridging two large rock outcroppings, perfectly framing a setting sun just as one drives up. 

Sometimes, these wonders take on humorous, sexual or even scatological overtones.  One can often see rocks that look like male genitalia from certain observational viewpoints.  Occasionally, rock formations can take on the form of female genitalia.  When driving with our friend Ann back from a camping trip in the Gila Wilderness, we went past a hill with a strange configuration.  Almost at the same time, the thought came into all of our heads - "look, it's Asshole Mountain!"  The cracks and crevices in the side of this particular hill all converged together and from the angle we saw it, truly looked like a human nether orifice.  I don't think that seeing such things in nature is the sign of a deviant - we are earthy and sexual beings that respond to certain stimuli and sometimes I think it is much harder to ignore the imagery than it is just to admit it's there, have a laugh and move on.

The places that draw this type of amazement out of me tend to be the ones that appear when I least expect it or have no idea what to expect.  I was in awe of the Grand Canyon when I visited, but given all the information on the Grand Canyon that I knew before ever going there, and all the images that I've seen of it, I expected it to be what it was.  And it was truly amazing.  But all the pre-hype robbed me, in a way, of the wonder that I could have felt had I not known.  I am envious of the people who came to the rim of the canyon and had no idea that something that enormous, that spectacular, existed.

So for me, my travel wonders have been in the out-of-the-way places of which I had little prior knowledge.  Big Bend National Park, Canyon de Chelly, New River Gorge, Sleeping Bear Dunes, Yosemite (before I went, I really did not know much about it!), the west coast of Canada, Alaska.  Even human made travel wonders qualify.  Chaco Canyon.  The temple Wat Pho in the midst of Bangkok with its giant reclining gold Buddha, the ruins of ancient Rome, Newgrange in Ireland.  On a depressing note, but also a wonder if only in testament to the worst of human nature and cruelty: Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen.

This works for literature as well.  I have read a lot of literature.  How amazing it is when you read a piece of literature that affects you, turns you on your head, makes you amazed and gives you a similar sense of wonder.  What treat to be able to read something for the first time and feel the same rush that you might when you happen across a beautiful vista, or a natural wonder.  Lately, a number of novels have served as inspiration for popular movies.  A case in point are the very popular novels written by the Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson.  I saw all three movies - The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest - and have never read the books.  Now that I have seen the movies, I have a sense that the books will not have the same effect on me as they have had on other people who read the novels first.  I will probably read them, but I have probably ruined the opportunity to really experience them as the novelist intended.

This puts me in a quandary for a trip I'm planning to make. My wife and I are spending just over two weeks in Turkey in May.  Turkey is of special interest to me because it lies at the crossroads of civilization.  The oldest human settlement that resembles a municipality may have been in Turkey.  Numerous empires sprung up there, and other empires were marched across it and disappeared.  Currently, the West's relations with the East, particularly with Muslim countries, are tempered by and may be aided by friendly relations with Turkey.  Turkey's role in the current Libyan conflict is a case in point.  So do I read to add to my knowledge in preparation for the trip?  Or do I go as an open book?  I don't want to go to Turkey without some background, but I also don't want to ruin my wonderment at seeing Hagia Sophia, or the ruins of Ephesus, or seeing Sufi whirling dervishes.

I envy LHM's experience at coming across something like Texas Canyon, which for a moment startles, amazes, and causes one to think about how the universe, nature and all that we don't understand creates such fantastic things that defy explanation.  I know I will have more of those moments, and look forward to them.  I just have to strike the right balance between how much I learn, and how much I am willing to let the universe teach and touch me.

Musical Interlude

I'm not sure why I'm picking Dan Fogelberg's Nether Lands for the musical interlude.  First of all, the song is not about the country in Europe.  In fact, it is a song about acceptance or denial of life.  His message, as Fogelberg put it, is about the:

"...two forks of existence, acceptance or denial. It comes down, that's the only choice we have when you think about it. Any other choice we have is contingent on the basic: either accept the life you're given or deny it and commit suicide. It's either one. You've got to make that decision every day."

Dan Fogelberg, as quoted on Rock Around the World, a website devoted to rock and roll radio shows and interviews from the 1970s

I think that when I heard this song for the first time, I was entranced - I was literally in wonder listening to this song.  I had heard some of Fogelberg's earlier work, and some of his later work, and I'd never heard anything like this from anyone.  When I thought of this song, and found this version on YouTube (there are two others), I thought its pictures of the ordinary world in its beauty along with the song's beautiful orchestration and Fogelberg's poetry fit this post also.  I hope you get the same sense of wonder listening to it that I did.

If you want to know more about Texas Canyon

Hub Pages: Texas Canyon
The Thing in Texas Canyon
Travel Through Texas Canyon with One Girl Trucking
Wikipedia: Texas Canyon

Next up:  Tucson, Arizona

Blue Highways: Portal, Arizona

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapAs we cross into another state, Arizona, we peruse on portals, gateways and doorways and where they may lead us.  William Least Heat-Moon hopes it might be Paradise, but we'll see.  Click on the thumbnail of the map at right to see where Portal, Arizona is located.

Book Quote

"I crossed into Arizona and followed a numberless, broken road.  A small wooden sign with an arrow pointing west:

PORTAL

PARADISE

"The pavement made yet another right-angle turn, and a deep rift in the vertical face of the Chiricahuas opened, hidden until the last moment.  How could this place be?  The desert always seems to hold something aside....

"...Portal consisted of a few rock buildings, and not a human anywhere."

Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 12

Portal Store, Portal, New Mexico. Photo by Al & Kelly Bossence at the Travel with the Bayfield Bunch blog. Click on photo to go to site.

Portal, Arizona

In an earlier post along another journey, when we were traveling through St. Louis with Jack Kerouac, I wrote about a gateway.  America is full of gateways.  In that post, I spoke of gateways being portals to someplace different.  In this quote, I like how LHM enhances the directional sign to Portal and Paradise with a passage about how the place he is entering is so different than anything he's ever experienced.  You wonder if he'll find Paradise.  Instead, he first doubts he'll find anything, then he sees an opening in the mountains, and finally encounters Portal as a small empty settlement.

Have you ever had that kind of "oh my God!" moment when you're traveling?  A moment when you turn a corner, travel through a mountain pass, or emerge from a forest or fog and experience a sense of wonder at what lies in front of you?  I have had those types of moments every so often in my journeys around the U.S. and abroad and when they come, they have stayed with me.  When I was 15, my family made our only really big family trip.  We took a cruise from Vancouver, British Columbia to Alaska.  The ship was a Soviet cruise ship, hammer and sickle proudly emblazoned on the smokestack, called the MV Odessa.  It had screws on the sides of the ship, so it could turn around in one place.  That meant that we could go into narrow fjords, right up to the sides of glaciers, and then turn around and go out.  Just being able to go between those high cliffs through still fjord waters was an amazing experience, and the wildlife - bear, eagles, orcas, seals were just the lagniappe.

My first and only trip to Yosemite National Park was also amazingly breathtaking.  I drove through a gap in the Sierras, a true portal, into the most magnificent landscape that I've ever seen.  El Capitan, Half Dome, all the landmarks made famous by Ansel Adams in black and white were there in front of me, towering over a gorgeous valley in full color.

I once drove through West Virginia.  I didn't know much about the state, but I had decided to take blue highways of my own.  Coming around a turn, I suddenly found myself at an impressive overlook.  It was the New River Gorge providing me with another magnificent travel portal.  I was inspired deeply, and wrote a poem for my girlfriend based on the fall colors of the vegetation around the gorge.

Standing on top of the Chisos Mountains in Big Bend National Park, looking out over the border into the Mexican Chihuahuan Desert, I had another moment of wonder and a feeling of joy that I was alive and able to experience such a view.

There have been many others.  Standing on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.  Looking out toward a live volcano in El Salvador, and later walking on the side of one with steam coming out of small vents along the trail.  Standing on the edge of the Jamuna River, huge in width, in Bangladesh watching a rainstorm on the river in late afternoon light during the monsoon season.  Walking through the forest to stand where Hildegard von Bingen entered the convent in the early part of the last millenium.  Standing at the edge of the Roman Colosseum.  Seeing Lake Michigan for the first time and being amazed at the immensity of this inland sea that they call a "lake."  Seeing the Mackinac Bridge - the third longest suspension bridge in the world - in the middle of nowhere in northern Michigan.  Gazing on the ruins of Chaco Canyon in the twilight.  I'm sure there are others I can think of.  I know there are others who have traveled more extensively than I, and therefore have enjoyed more wonder-filled moments, but i treasure the ones I have experienced.

However, my favorite portal is always the one closest to my heart.  When I drive Highway 20 in California west from Willits and toward my hometown, and the forest opens onto the ocean, I know that I'm back to the familiar.  The gateways we travel through to get to paradise or to places of trial are also the ones that bring us back home.  As we'll see in the next couple of posts, the portal that LHM travels through, slightly hoping for paradise, will give him cause to wonder, and worry.  But he's traveling and moving through life, he will eventually find home, and that's all that matters.

Musical Interlude

I was looking through my music and found the song that perfectly fits this post.  Tish Hinojosa is a Texas singer-songwriter who I saw many times when I lived in San Antonio.  This song, Destiny's Gate, has a lyric in the refrain that reads:

You find a road and you pave it
A long lost love and you save it
So much of the past sees tomorrow at destiny's gate

Enjoy Tish, and enjoy whatever places your portals lead you!

Share Destiny's Gate by Tish Hinojosa

If you want to know more about Portal

Arizona Sky Village
Cave Creek Ranch
DowntheRoad.org
PortalArizona.com

Next up: On the Cave Creek near Portal, Arizona