Last time I told you about the gentle half of Maine: the deck, the blankets, the eighty-dollar seafood, the studied art of doing nothing. (Read that post here if you missed it: Maine: A Love Story – Part 1.) This is the other half. The one with the storm and the ghosts and a certain horror novelist’s front gate, and the half I most wanted to get down, because my mother is in it.
That is really what this blog is for, if I’m honest. It’s where I keep the things I don’t want to lose to a feed that scrolls them out of sight by Tuesday. Some trips you let live and die in your phone. This one I wanted on the record.
It started in Boston, a day before Maine, with a detective and my mother.
We flew into Boston and stayed the first night, and the next morning, before we pointed the car north, I made us do a Spenser tour. If you don’t know Spenser: Robert B. Parker wrote forty-odd novels about a wisecracking Boston private eye, and my mother and I both loved them. Promised Land and Early Autumn were my favorites; Judas Goat was good and sad. So we stood on Marlborough Street where his apartment was supposed to be, found his office over on Boylston (which is where Parker moves it starting in Early Autumn), and walked past the Harbor Health Club where he trained.
My mother never made it to Boston, which is a real shame, because she would have loved every minute of this. She’d have walked every block with me, taken twice as many pictures, and then steered us back to the hotel so we could each re-read a different Spenser before dinner. That’s the part I miss, if I’m honest: not anything dramatic, just having the one person who’d understand exactly why a green-painted building on a Boston corner was worth crossing the country for. She was a reader. She’d have gotten it.
Then we drove north, and Maine decided to introduce itself properly.
The drive from Boston to the cottage should have taken three hours. It took almost six, because Tropical Storm Philippe came up the coast and met us right around Portland. We turned off I-95 onto Route 1A and the back end of the storm came down on us: lashing rain, fog you could lean on, mist rolling across the road in sheets. We had rented what turned out to be an electric car, so we did the whole thing in near silence, gliding through the murk without even an engine for company, which did not help one bit. I told Zach I kept waiting for something to step out of the fog. It was very Fall of the House of Usher. It was, frankly, very chapter-one-of-a-Stephen-King-novel, which I did not yet realize was foreshadowing.
We reached the cottage an hour after dark. An hour after that, the power went out. What do you do in a strange cottage, in the dark, in a storm, on your first night? You go to bed. I lay there listening to the wind work its way around the eaves and thought, well, this is certainly atmospheric.
About that car, quickly, because I promised. I had reserved an SUV and Hertz handed me a Kia EV6, and my first instinct was to march back in and swap it. I didn’t, and I’m glad, because it was a genuinely great car and even out in rural Downeast Maine the charging was no real trouble (Portland, Freeport, Bar Harbor, plus a slow trickle off an outdoor outlet at the cottage). Would I rent an electric car again? Absolutely. Just maybe not for my first-ever midnight drive through a horror-movie fog.
The storm blew through and left the clear, cold, perfect week I already told you about. But one day we drove east instead of staying put, all the way out to Lubec and West Quoddy Head, the easternmost point in the United States. You genuinely cannot drive any farther east and remain in the country.
It was in the forties, damp, not quite raining, which is the precise weather the place seems to want. We hiked the mile down to the water, except this was not a beach in any sense I grew up with; it was big grey stones, slick and old-looking, the kind of shore that does not particularly care whether you enjoy it. And then, on the lawn behind the lighthouse, entirely unbothered, a porcupine. Just out doing porcupine business at the edge of the world. I took an absurd number of pictures. The eeriest place we went, and the thing I remember most fondly is a fat, indifferent porcupine.
We spent a full day in Bar Harbor proper, which at the very end of the season is quiet and a little melancholy in the good way. We did the Acadia loop drive (the Cadillac Mountain passes were long gone by the time we tried), poked through the shops, bought Christmas presents like responsible adults. But the part I had come for was after dark.
We booked a walking ghost tour called Haunted Bar Harbor: two hours, eight to ten at night, through downtown and the old cemetery. We heard about the theater that ran liquor through Prohibition, about the grand houses, about a woman who still walks the coast looking for the son the sea took from her. Satisfying, well-told, spooky-tour stuff, and I ate up every minute of it.
The part that stayed with me, though, came after the tour ended. Our guide was married to a Wabanaki Mi’kmaq woman, and once the group broke up he shared a few of the stories he had been told. That is where I first heard of the Skadegamutc. As it was explained to me, it is a ghost-witch: a person, often an evil magician, who dies and then rises at night to do harm, and who can only be destroyed by fire. I am not the right person to tell that story properly; it isn’t mine, and there are Wabanaki people who can. But I will tell you exactly what I thought, standing in a Maine graveyard in October: Stephen King has clearly been paying attention up here.
Which is why, on our last day, driving back down to Boston to fly home, we detoured through Bangor to stand outside Stephen King’s old house, now the home of the Stephen & Tabitha King Foundation. You know the one: the wrought-iron fence with the bat-winged, three-headed dragon and the spiders worked right into the metal. It is exactly as wonderful in person as you are hoping. A silly, happy, grinning fan stop, and also the perfect last page: a trip that opened with an House-of-Usher storm and a silent drive through the fog, ran through a porcupine at the edge of the country and a Wabanaki ghost-witch in a graveyard, and closed at the gate of the man who turned this whole damp, haunted, gorgeous state into a life’s work. Maine is Stephen King country. Spend a week there and you understand precisely why.
So that is the whole trip, both halves of it: the sunlit, do-nothing love story and the storm-lit, ghost-story one. They were the same week. That is the thing about a place that gets all the way into you. It does not bother picking a single mood.
We’ll be back; I keep saying that, and I keep meaning it. There’s a whole green-painted, fog-soaked, ghost-story state up there that I am plainly not finished with.
(One more Maine post coming after this one: just the photographs, the ones that didn’t fit either story. I took roughly four hundred and used maybe a dozen across these two posts, so consider that fair warning.)
Where’s your literary pilgrimage? Have you stood outside a writer’s house, ordered the drink from the book, made the trip somebody you love would have loved? Tell me in the comments. I refuse to believe I’m the only one.
P.S. The single most-photographed subject of the entire trip was a porcupine at Quoddy Head who could not have cared less that I existed.
P.P.S. If you have never read Parker, start with Early Autumn [Bookshop.org* | Amazon]; that’s the one I’d put in your hands first. (Promised Land [Bookshop.org* | Amazon] if you want the one that won the Edgar. Or you can start at the very beginning with The Godwulf Manuscript [Bookshop.org* | Amazon])
P.P.P.S. That video up in the storm section is the most atmospheric thing I have ever filmed, and you cannot see one single thing in it. Turn your sound up. The whistling is real.
*Bookshop.org affiliate link; buy through it and I earn a small commission at no cost to you, with a share going to independent bookstores. (I’m a Bookshop affiliate, not an Amazon one; the Amazon link earns me nothing and is just there if you’d rather.)
