So, that's how much you pay attention to me, now? I thought I'd spilled my guts in technicolor there, all viscose steamy and pink, for your collective amusement, for titillation of the teeming anonymous masses? And now it seems even my friends and family weren't paying attention when I cut my own heart out and threw it throbbing onto the stage..
Ah. Well. I was amused, and told them all that I had told them very clearly on the last blog what I was going to do, and that they'd not been paying attention (Ye gods! How could they not be utterly fascinated and obsessed with me?) and may not know how to set up an RSS feed.. But that I would set them straight only if they begged me..
Not paying attention, not a big deal.
The fact that I apparently lost half my regular readership when I started this new project, and am getting no where near the number of strangers that I did at the old one (where my most popular posts had been hit thousands of times) is a good thing.
I go through occasional spats of self doubt about blogging at all, actually, wondering if it's not foolish and exhibitionist to be doing this, a species of self-absorption run amuck, where I expose things best left private to the uncaring world.. Until the world becomes interested, and then perhaps in a way that may haunt me..
But I've basically put all that aside. I'm going to continue writing here, whether anyone reads it or not. I have several dozen ideas that I want to either write out, or express in other (visual) media. There will be photo essays and short documentaries that I am am going to film. This summer, J-dawg and I are going to cut some tracks and record a bunch of songs, and I think I may post some of them (that will be lyrically pertinent to themes I'm developing on the blog) here.
It'll be a folk country punk project, which I'm sure is going amuse the two of us if nobody else.. The production values will at least be marginally better than anything we've done (jammin' at a canopied picnic table out behind the officer's club at Goodfellow half in the bag or whatever have you) before..
I need to put some things down for my own sake, and they may be things that are interesting or helpful to other people.. Maybe. I'm going to write my truth, if this prejudices anyone against me, so be it.
The last couple weeks since I returned to Vermont have clarified a whole string of things:
First, I belong here. This is my home. (je resterai ici..) I am probably going to buy or perhaps build a house here. I'm feeling my way forward slowly on this, and am going to come to a final decision this summer. I'm thinking that somewhere within 30 minutes of downtown Burlington and 30 minutes from Smuggler's Notch, Bulton Valley and Stowe. There will ideally (and I will realize my vision) be a beer and root cellar, a large garden and orchard (I'm planting all sorts of things), a study and library, probably two bedrooms, a loft, a finished basement with bunks for at least eight, and probably a kennel and apiary, both these last sooner than later.. If I decide to do this, and I am more or less now decided, I aim to either buy in the coming winter or following spring, or start building next April and May.
Then, I am going to be much more deliberative, and do all the other things I've meant and am meant to do..
(Voca me cum benedictus, Domine. Oro supplex et acclinis, cor contritum quasi cinis, gere curam mei finis..)
I made a list when I was in 5th grade of all the things I would do. I would lay in bed at night, saying my prayers dreaming about it all, and thinking about all those things. I'm now through about 2/3's of that list, as well as a good third to half way through the four to six score allotted a life, and a large percentage of the remainder (climbing Kilimanjaro, being a photographer for National Geographic, stuff like that) is now obsolete. I've begun a renewed list. Some of the new goals are more existential than discrete acts, and quite a few of them are extrapolations of goals on my old list.
I decided today to finally do something I've been thinking about for two decades: this summer I am going to make what I call the "Thoreau Trip."
I spent four summers working for the Boy Scouts as a Matagamon high adventure guide. We would take crews of 6 to 12 boys and adults on canoeing trips on the Penobscot and St. John's watersheds in Northern Maine. While I was doing this, I read and learnt as much as I could about the history (European and Native American), economy, and ecology of the area. One of the books I read was Henry David Thoreau's classic, The Maine Woods.
In 1857 Thoreau came to Maine.
He took the train to Greenville, and accompanied by an Indian guide named Joe Attean (Attean being the name of one of my hometown Jackman's two main lakes) canoed up Moosehead Lake, portaged onto the upper West Branch, canoed down and across the top of Chesuncook to Umbazooksas.
There, he portaged again to Mud Pond (and amazing an very aptly named place, by the way) which is linked by a stream to Chamberlain Lake, which along with its southern neighbor Telos (Greek for "the end" - those old Mainer lumberjacks were not illiterate, nor were the Algonquin Wabanaki tribes - the Abanaki, Passamaquoddy, Micmac and Penobscot Indians - whose language marks so many of the place names of Maine and the rest of New England - they could not write and read, but they had a rich symbolic and narrative culture that is still partially expressed in the place names, for those who learn their poetry..) Lake is the headwaters of the Allagash, which is a tributary of the Saint John River.
At this point he had a choice. He hadn't made up his mind beforehand. He could have either paddled north up the Allagash to the Saint John's and out to the sea at the city of Saint John in Nova Scotia.
Or, he could do what he did. Turn south, and canoe to Webster Dam, and then south to Bangor.
Now, Webster Dam and the stream that flows south from it is not a natural waterway. You'd never know looking at it today, but the stream is in fact a canal cut by the lumberjacks back in the early 19th century to take the lumber they cut off the Allagash south by river drive to Bangor, then the lumber capital of the whole world.
It joins - and this is a beautiful and amazing thing - the two watersheds, making possible to travel by canoe from Greenville to Bangor and then to the sea (something human beings have been doing for 10,000 or more years) making it much, much easier than ever before those crazy Europeans showed up and blasted and dug us all a hole in the rock that divided the Saint John from the East Branch of the Penobscot..
The Kennebec is the major watershed of southern Maine (flowing from headwaters just south of Jackman, west toward Greenville, then south to Skowhegan, Waterville, Augusta and the Sea)..
The Penobscot is a lover reaching in from the Gulf of Maine embracing the entire center of the state. She flows up from Belfast to Bangor, up to Medway then to Millinocket. There were the mills. The river splits there into two arms around Khatadin (kha ta ande "the greatest mountain" leaping a mile high stretching into the sky at the heart of my state) - the East and West branches.
The Allagash wells up from between them, and like the Nile or Yukon flows oddly and seraphically north.
This last map lacks the Allagash. Imagine it running due north from Chamberlain.
There are many mysteries in those woods.
One that I think is very charming is that two of the three chief head lakes of the Allagash are named Chamberlain and Churchill, this a hundred years or more before the two prime ministers who led the British Empire during World War II.
I'm a myth making, homo mythologicus sumus..
Another is that I lost a friend there at Mid Webster, sat by his corpse there in the night, leaving my scapular on his chest with the dawn.
(it is not the wilderness that howls, but the heart and imagination of man..)
I, small and silly though I be, will haunt them myself when I've gone.
(Libera nos de ore leonis, ne absorbeat eas Tartarus, ne cadant in obscurum. Sed signifer sanctus Michael repraesentet eas in lucem sanctam. Quam olim Abrahae promisisti et semini ejus..)
This afternoon on the mountain, I knew that I have to go back. I have to finally paddle it all for the first time entire, yet again.
So I called Kenny this evening and told him.
(the language of friendship is not in words but in meanings..)
I'll do it alone if I have to, but I'd rather do it with friends.
And now I tell you. This is the deal: if you want to come, we should begin the very end of June into the first week and half of July after the spring flood subsides yet while the rivers are still flush. Ten days, Greenville to Grindstone or Medway.
The precise details will be worked out over a campfire on the Bowtrip with Kenny over Memorial Day weekend.
There. Do with that what you will.
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