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In August, we packed the Civic, already battered as a highschooler’s steed and a college commuter, scar down one side from an icy day on RT17 headed south from Binghamton. The mission: rock climb and adventure our way up New England, to Maine, where I had land. There, we would build a cabin.
Three young men, only one of them responsible enough to be in college, and all of our camping gear, tents, cookware, climbing gear. Add to all that our work ropes, winches, chainsaw, bar oil, hand tools.
The Civic positively wallowed. A bicycle rack had a giant tote tied onto it, a mad automotive pannier barring access to the trunk. Piles of gear fit around Dan like the seat of a Soyuz capsule and billowed against the back windows. Off we went, as Mike slipped the clutch and we headed North.
Today, looking back, the memory which most comes up from that whole trip was well after the wild college parties and epic Adirondack multi-pitch. It was after hundreds of miles on the road and camping in creekside nooks of the White Mountains.
Most vivid is the first night we arrived in Prospect, trying to find land in the darkness, peering between houses and trying divination with Garmin navigation in the days before smartphones, or at least before any of us could afford one. We were searching for a dream which predated my conception. In 1974, my mom was offered purchase of a parcel in Maine, from a guy who worked in the mailroom at American Express, where she was a graphic designer and art director for a magazine.
She talked my dad into it too, the neurotic electrical engineer with a clandestine job for the military and a deep passion for photography. My mom was a California girl, a transplant. My dad grew up Jewish in Rockaway Beach. They both liked the idea of an escape, and for a time kept a house in the Catskills. New York was an apocalyptic place, then (and maybe always).
Dog shit littered the sidewalks, trash piled into foul-smelling glaciers when the sanitation crews went on strike. Cars were fuming toxic lead and carbon monoxide, gridlocked as far as the eye could see. The communists were still hell bent on nuking Capitalism back to the stone age.
Maine was a place of the Maritimes, the Down East, the lobster and the pine tree. It was glamorous but also wild. So they bought 12 acres, no banks involved with the mailroom guy holding a 0% mortgage. and they eventually convinced my aunt and her then husband, as well as their dear friends Steve and Joan, to gho in with them the way you and I might share a Spotify account or Disney+ today.
It turned out to be closer to 50 acres, not 12, and by the time I learned of this hilltop property in the middle of nowhere, (My side Of The Mountain!) my 12-year-old heart leaped with joy! Sell? I will disown you, parents, if you even dream of selling my paradise.
I did get to visit the property once, at age 13, with the whole nuclear family on vacation, using a Trimble flight GPS to find our way. That summer, there were amazing shooting stars and my sister and I laid out on a blanket in Acadia watching them.
I may have gone one other time but to be honest my memory that far back is shrouded in the fog of time.
But, clear as if it was last week, I remember the state highway. How could I not? I’ve walked it a thousand times. It’s my home now. I remember the Civic, turn signal blinking in the eternal evening light of Maine summer.
Unloading our camping gear, crossing a ditch and hacking our way through the understory brush, meandering back from the houses into pine forest, every kind of moss expanding off rocks and dripping off boughs. Finding a clearing under a massive pine and declaring it camp, home, land-of-ownership. (It turned out to be well on the neighbor’s side of the lot, and since then the huge pine came down in a storm and the woodlot was logged.)
We could not find small rocks anywhere in twilight, in this primordial landscape. I scrounged in the detritus and came up with several empty malt liquor bottles. “These will work as a fire ring.” my 19-year-old self declared, with confidence.
We gathered firewood, lit it off, pitched camp, and sat around our blaze. We began to heat our food and chatter about the magic we had come into, the excitement of the unknown as we were to find the boundaries of my new kingdom, choose a permanent camp and a site for the cabin build, and begin our work.
BANG
POP!
Glass flew past Mike’s ear. I had, apparently, failed to consider that some of the ancient bottles had their lids, sealed. The heat of the fire turned them into pressure bombs, and shrapnel had come close to blinding my friend. Stupid.
We scattered, and eventually I had the nerve to return and poke the remaining bottles away from the fire. At least nobody was maimed. An auspicious start in Prospect.