Maine's Dark Little Secrets

I arrived in Maine last Saturday on a snowy day.  My taxi driver who hailed from Africa told me that he couldn't wait to go on vacation to his country, something he had been looking forward to for several years.  Then, the girl whose apartment I was renting, and who was moving her stuff out as I was coming in, made the same confession to me: She was moving to New Orleans to "change things up" because she was bored of her life here. My downstair neighbor, David, stuttered when he met me at the front door and told me that he was thinking of moving to Florida because he was sick and tired of the winters. The following day, I met a young man on the street who was confused about where he wanted to move to next. He came to Maine a year ago to help a buddy get a boat ready to sail the Caribbean, a project his friend dismissed after falling in love recently. In a conversation with the bus driver, he admitted to me that he was about to retire and was considering either Arizona or Florida for his new home. Today, I overhead the bartender at the restaurant where I ate lunch saying that he was getting ready to film a pilot for a reality show about loggers or invasive species, and if it got picked up, he was "out of here."

I can understand the general uneasiness of the place and the desire to get away from it. There is only so much you can do with its beauty; that is unless you work as a fisherman, or a logger, or run one of its lighthouses.    Even the city of Portland, with its pretty civility - restaurants, boutiques, pubs and museums - doesn't have enough range or energy to keep you interested in it for that long (for a U.S. city Maine has no diversity. In the week that I have been here, I can count of my fingers the blacks, Asians and Hispanics, etc. I have seen on its streets, and, of course, I include myself as one of those minorities).  Even so, its people are sweet and rural, and they have always made me feel welcomed.  I think that it is also important to note that Portland is an expensive city and most of the people who live here are blue collar workers.

I understand from some Mainers that in the summer months tourism both invigorates the city and annoys its residents.  And, unless you work for the hospital system, which is the largest employer in this part of town, you are pretty much disadvantaged as to working opportunities.  I have sensed the lack of hope and optimism in the men I have seen staggering in the streets in the mornings from being drunk or smelling of pot.  I met a guy who told me that on Monday through Friday he drinks at a bar in the harbor that sells his favorite beer for $2.50. On Saturdays, he takes the bus out of town early in the afternoon to drink that same beer for $2.75. Last night, on television I saw an community alert for domestic violence, which according to the police officer who spoke in the advisory, constitutes the highest number of homicides in the state.

Knowing Maine's dark little secrets so soon would have been disconcerting if I did not figure out why I moved here.  It has to do what I learned in my recent stay in NYC about the importance of focusing.  It was also confirmed to me in an interview I saw last night with Jerry York, the most "winningest" coach in college hockey, who told his interviewer that the great hockey players of today are the same as those he knew when he first started coaching.  He said distractions - the ones in the 60s as contrasted with today's technological ones - have always abounded, but the great players have always wanted and needed structure and discipline.  Hence, the root of my lesson: That even when life doesn't provide me an automatic sense of structure, like that ones I have been handed thus far, e.g., wife, mother, teacher, etc I must search for and apply them myself.   And, lately, this search to put into place a structure has been grueling and soul-searching and has led me to Maine, which I now know is about writing. Specifically, about rewriting my manuscript. I have put this task of for years because I had excuses not to write, and I was tired from work and tired from raising children. But, now my new life/Maine schedule is as follows:

Wake up at 8:00: bathe, eat breakfast and dress
9-11am: work on online classes
11-3 pm : write
3-5 pm: read, cook and eat dinner
5-6 pm: walk
7-8 pm: relax
8-10 pm: watch some television
10 pm: sleep