For months, I watched documentaries and read books about
hermits and people who turned their backs to society to live in cabins in the
woods or on remote beaches in #Providence in #Massachusetts. The #Northeast seemed
the best place to hide out in plain sight. Specifically, #New England, with its
revolutionaries, free-thinkers, creatives, and rebels who walked away from
society, like in the writings of Thoreau and Emerson, was the place to be. As a
matter of fact, I picked up a copy of #Thoreau’s #“Walden” and started reading
it.
At first, though, I didn’t know where to move: beach towns
in islands of Massachusetts, villages in #New Hampshire, small towns in #Rhode
Island were either too expensive or didn’t grab my attention. When I caught an
internet add of a Toyota driving down the streets of Portland, Maine, with its
charming Long Wharf, museums, bars, and restaurants, I remembered my long ago
fascination with Maine and read more about its ragged coastline, mountains,
lakes, #North Woods, and #Mount Katahdin before deciding to move there.
Then I looked in Craiglist and called the first studio apartment listed in the
city limits. I told the landlady I would be there in two days to see her
place, bought a $650 plane ticket from Miami to Portland, took a taxi out to multi-level house, and rented the 250 square foot studio with small bathroom,
kitchen, cherry wood floor, window seat, and brick column in a charming
multi-level turn of the 20th century home in the city
limits Claire, my new landlady, liked me too. She asked for first
month’s rent and security, so I handed her a $1000 check and the phone number
of a reference. That afternoon she called and said I could have her apartment. It was late October, Portland, Maine was cold and bleak, not as pretty as I’d seen in pictures. The big rambling houses looked shabby, the streets deserted, the brick buildings too small to claim big city status, and dirty snow was piled on sidewalks. Fall was over and only its dry, crackling leaves flew around in the wind. The gloom of the place was further compounded by freezing temperatures, severe gusts, and overcast skies reminiscent of #Steven King’s horror stories. Still, I didn’t think too much about my new plans. Instincts drove me fast and hard. Making mistakes no longer mattered. Late that night, I returned to #Florida and the next day I continued packing. It was too late to turn back.
The two-bedroom ranch style house with green wall to wall carpeting and dead mouse found under the refrigerator had been sold, the move and change of lives inevitable for the kids and me. Their deceased grandmother’s and grandfather’s Boyd bears and golf gear, and my stilletos, designer dresses, books, and the furniture, trinkets, dishware, pots… were packed and ready for the Goodwill truck.
Two weeks later, I closed the chapter of my life in #Miami by hugging the kids, getting in my Toyota, and driving I-95 North to Maine. When I crossed #Jacksonville, the most northern and culturally Southern part of the state of Florida, tears trickled down my face, even though I needed a lot more tears to wash away the guilt, sorrow, and confusion about leaving behind a familiar life of kids, friends, work, and home, yet the tears never came. But that chapter in my life was over even though I thought it would take a little longer to arrive--maybe after my 16-year-old daughter went away to college like my son had done. Still, my ex-husband's offer and money to leave town and start again could not be refused: I was at my wits and physical end and the invitation to change it up arrived just in life-saving time--even though the time seemed a bit off. But life knew best, and I was getting my wish to move away from the exhausting and commonplace and become complex and accepting of the seemingly unorthodox.
Still, I needed a good cry. Years ago, after my brutal divorce, I learned that crying washed out the internal gunk and left more clear open mental space, at least until the next good cry. So, I grimaced my face, imagined the lump of hurt lodged in my chest softening and flowing up and out my eye ducts, yet I couldn't dig up the pain. Maybe it was too soon to let it go, so instead I allowed it to expand and overwhelm me until I got tired of that too.
I had been driving over 10 hours straight (stopping only for a cup of coffee at strip malls off the interstate) through rain, fog, darkness, and side by side semi-trucks that rattled my car when they sped by. It was my first solo road trip up North. I had driven the same roads before with my ex-husband when he was stationed at the military base at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, and we drove down to Florida for the holidays, yet I never took notice of places or signs--parks, cemeteries, and national monuments- commemorating America’s #Civil War and #Revolution. Back then, we sped by everything, like in our marriage, as if we had a to-do list and a certain amount of time to get it done.
Now, I saw a bit of what I’d never seen before and it moved me, like when I arrived at the welcome sign of the State of Georgia and stopped at the rest area to take in the cool, fresh air after driving the long, hot peninsula of Florida. #South Carolina’s beautiful pine forest, farmland, blackwater streams, and swamps, all off I-95, were juxtaposed against a disturbing amount of road kill I figured a species of chipmunk; #North Carolina felt oppressive with numerous white churches and religions signs all off the expressway; and Virginia was too civilized for speeding and monitored cars and trucks with State Troopers on the ground and police helicopters flying overhead (I even witnessed a trooper stop a speeding semi-truck the freezing cold and rainy night before).
The South had always scared me with its history of slavery and racism. Growing up, my Hispanic parents shared stories about immigrant friends in Miami who when first arriving in the country went to that South first for opportunity and quickly moved away after experiencing overt racism, including the burning of crosses on their front lawns.
My experiences of living in #Biloxi, Mississippi, during my ex-husband’s stint as an Airman First Class at Keesler Air For Base had been short-lived and colorful with its young, culturally diverse airmen and their young wives who rented in the same apartment building off Interstate 10 (many years later when we had long left #Mississippi, the apartment building and surrounding area where we lived were destroyed by #Hurricane Katrina), across the street from #Biloxi Beach, a murky salty body of water I walked when feeling down about eloping to Mississippi with a man who was barely home because he had to be on base to train and march.
During the six months I lived in Biloxi, racism was not obvious to me because the place looked and felt like a small, dynamic college town with neatly dressed Airmen/women wearing Dress Blues with sewn-on chevron rank insignias, black oxford shoes, and flight or service caps. My ex and me, and his young friends and their young wives, hung out like a pack of wolves, loyal only to each other and oblivious to the friction outside. We were too young and excited about our new lives to care about any impediments to it. Even our drives to New Orleans to eat gumbo, shrimp etouffee, beignets and drink daiquiris were rowdy and full of merriment. My only regrets about living in Biloxi was not exploring it enough, not wandering around its cemeteries, or not taking pictures of its plantations.
As I drove out of the Virginia and farther away from my life in Miami--a hybrid of the deep South with its vast cultural integration brought on by large numbers of immigrating Latinos and Caribbean peoples--I witnessed the “real” South’s woes with highway signs commemorating famous battles sites and cemeteries for young men who died in those battles, always reminding the Southerner of the weight of history and its losses--in their own backyard. Regardless, I was no Southern girl or sympathizer, never had been. As a matter of fact, I grew up in #New York City. When I was 10, my family moved to Miami, but a piece of my heart stayed behind always longing for the North--its seasons, trains, highways, noise, food, people…
Driving through #Washington, D.C., I took a deep breath of cool, Fall air. Being out of the South felt expansive and inviting-no more churches or billboards with religious texts, except in Connecticut. The leaves were brown and dry from the last days of the season. My ex and I had once lived in Maryland, where he was stationed at #Andrews Air Force Base as a communication expert. Back then when I was in my early 20’s, I worked as a word processor at a major environmental law firm in D.C. where John F. Kennedy, Jr, once worked as a law clerk.
Even my friends at work were a always a good time. For lunch, we walked over to M Street (or one of those alphabetical streets in D.C.) for #Mrs. Field’s hot chocolate chip cookies right out of the oven, or we took the train to L’Enfant Plaza to eat fried shrimp and hush puppies. On Friday after work, we drank wine at the firm’s happy hour in the board room before we tipsily walked the deserted and creepy streets of D.C.—abandoned after 5:00 p.m. rush hour—to take our trains or buses back home. On weekends, we went dancing in converted warehouse clubs in #Baltimore, and in winter, we met at my place to play boardgames and drink beer.
Back then, my best friend Mary, the willowy, blonde beautiful white girl with the pixy haircut believed every man she dated “the one,” or if not that one then the “next one”; she made me blush with talk of her sex life and hanging from chandeliers as foreplay (She said she was skinny enough to look good hanging from crystal droplets); Gayle—tall and regal with a long face like an exotic Amazonian bird--had a father who was the first Black American war pilot to fly in the #Korean War and a mother with aristocratic Italian blood; Susan was madly in love with her husband Steve and seduced him with $300 designer outfits she purchased at was is now known as the Shops at Georgetown Park that made her look dowdier than ever; Pamela was from Alabama and couldn’t wait to get to wait to get to Hawaii with her new Navy husband on his next assignment to start a family, even though he thought they were too young and too recently married to do so; Octavia, was proud, voluptuous, black feminist who added college degrees in psychology and human resources on her CV like medals of honor; Ellen was as tall and beautiful as a high-fashion model and as crude and loud-mouthed as a street hooker. She had a perfect white American family with two blonde girls and an adoring husband who worked as a Navy engineer at the Pentagon and weekly sent her the flowers she put on her secretarial desk at work. I lost track of my friends after moving to Miami, but their two-years of friendship lasted a lifetime in memories.
At the Oxen Hill exit, I got off for coffee at the #Dunkin Donuts, drove by #Andrews Air Force Base and stopped at the apartment building, 6.8 miles away from my ex’s communication job at the Andrews, where we once lived. Back then, the man upstairs beat his wife every night and her screams woke us up at midnight. We never called the police even though we argued about whether or not to do so (I was against police intervention for fear the brute would come downstairs and include us in his nightly beatings) and every morning I walked down the hilly parking lot to take the bus to work in the nation’s capital.
Up North, my ex and I had been as in love as we would ever be, even though we didn’t know it then: On cold nights, we walked across the street for chicken and veal parmigiana at the cozy family Italian restaurant, Port of Italy. On colder nights, we ordered pan-fried shrimp noodle from Fat Boys up the road. Every Saturday we went for a rides in our red Ford Escort hatchback (the first car we purchased with our combined newly minted credit scores) to Annapolis for seafood or Virginia Beach for walks, but we never ventured into to the monuments, museums, galleries, memorials, or parks in the area., thinking that we would see it later. When my ex accepted an opportunity for “early separation” two years into his four-year enlistment with the Air Force, we moved back to Miami. At the time, I tried convincing him to stay in D.C., especially after one of his co-worker’s offered to get him a communications job with a higher security clearance at the White House where he worked, but my ex said he was tired of the North. He wanted to go home, so we moved back south.
I noticed now how the big road signs off the median in the
Maryland stretch of I-95 warned of tickets or jail time for drinking and
driving. The state was obsessed with drunk drivers. The tri-state
area had the worst drivers in the country-even the slightest change in weather
caused fatal accidents on the road--at least that’s what I thought when I lived
there and witnessed numerous accidents with yellow tarp strewn over dead bodies
and demolished cars on my morning commutes to work. Other co-workers arrived at
work similarly traumatized, with their own gruesome accident sightings (it became a morning ritual to share accident sightings just
to get it of our chest before starting the workday). The imposing and
congested 64 miles of Capital Beltway with arteries connecting Maryland and
Virginia to the capital and carrying the overlapping I-95 on the “loops” and
“spurs” of 495 might have contributed to the constant chaos on the road.
I waved goodbye to my memories of the Tri-State area and
sped to the monster workhorse cities of the North: Wilmington, Philadelphia,
Trenton, Newark, and, New York City with their brick buildings, quarries of
sand and concrete, and smokestacks blowing up the skies. In New York
City, I took a gulp of the whiskey I kept in my thermos for courage, especially
to speed on the expressway as if possessed like everyone else on the road. I grew up in #Queens, and came back to town when I was 18, after my father died and my mother decided to move closer to family, but I didn’t know the place anymore. By then I had been slowed and softened by living in Miami for over 10 years. The noise and chaos of NYC grated on my nerves. I didn’t know how to dress for its seasons or walk confident in its crowds. When my boyfriend asked me to marry him, I accepted; gave my two week notice at Chemical Bank on Broadway where I worked as teller; closed my savings with $300; bought a white trousseau and pink knit traveling dress; had my hair done in a French braid; waved good bye to my mother at the gate at La Guardia Airport; and eloped to Biloxi with my boyfriend from Miami, who was completing tech school at Keesler Air Force Base..
As I sped by New York City late at night, I noticed the place was lit up and glammed up like an old Hollywood movie star on the opening night of his premiere—“his” because NYC had a tough masculine spirit. The city of a billion tiny white lights, brick buildings, and bridges that held it all together reeked of getting somewhere and knowing who you were when you got there like in the fabled Oz.
I was relived to reach pretty #Connecticut, the home of the rich, with its sprawling homes, waterfronts, and sailboats; CT was the entry way into the rebellious and revolutionary New England States with their foreboding darkness and eerie silence. After the grittiness and factories of Hartford, the calm of the upper Northeast took hold. By then, no one cared to speed or get somewhere else. Like me they had arrived, even though Boston felt creepy with few highway lights and New Hampshire creepier still with even less lights and more trees of the expressway.
By the time I got to Maine, though, I knew I was
home. Driving into the Pine Tree State also known was Vacationland—as
stated in license plates--with even more silence, darkness, and less human
sprawl or habitation than any of its New England brothers and sisters, I
whispered to myself, “Fairy tale.”
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