Maine is a land of seemingly endless pine forests and pristine, but harsh, ocean and coastline. Maine elicits a feeling, a sense garnered from being in it, which is hard to explain. There is something in Maine, something in its people and in its land, which is raw and pure. The Summers are crisp and have strong breezes infused with pelagic scents emanating off of the sea. The Fall is portentous and cool with a great medley of colors emerging from the plethora of trees not of the coniferous variety. The winters are generally, but not always, frigid and powerful: There is snow, there are great and mighty rivers choked with jagged blocks of ice. The Spring is short and potent – and I feel that this is fitting for Maine- for what need is there of Spring in a land that seems to detest, to a degree, the pleasant bedizenment most associated with this season. Maine is an old land with a stolid core. Yet it is also a land that is continuously altered, and that is also continuously evolving.
This being so, I feel the most adequate attempt that can be made to define Maine, or to poetically interpret it, would have to be made from the perspective of being in time: To look at Maine as it lives and breathes through all of its seasons. For Maine is a mutable person, and the people bred and reared upon its land are the voice by which it communicates with the rest of the world – in both actions and words, but mostly in way.
The Maine way is the rustic, simple and strong way. It is a way of calm abiding and deliberate action. It is somewhat stoic and apathetic, but retaining a Northern sort of patience and kindness. It is cold, deep-blue waters - rough and filled with salt and almost appearing like amorphous rock - constantly lapping at ridged blankets, and towers of lichen-crusted stone: Stone reaching down into the water’s depths and retaining all manner of darkened tidal life: Life revealed when this lower portion of stone is stripped naked by the powerful pull of the vicissitudinous moon. The prodigious range of the tide is a paradigm of Maine itself; a metaphor of an epitomizing quality: Grandness.
I know a beach that extends for at least the length of a football field at low tide and then is swallowed up like a small candy at high tide; leaving only a minute kernel of what was existent before. This is part of the grandness of Maine. At this same beach a cliff face rises straight out of the sand like some fantastic, burrowing snake emerging for air. It flings itself at least 100 feet into the sky and extends itself at least twice that distance forward. If one looks the other way, south or southeast, they see the daunting globe of the Atlantic Ocean. And when I say globe, I mean it. For one sees the ocean like a vast, extensive hill or hummock – I still cannot figure out how anyone could ever conceive of the Earth as not being round, at least anyone that lived near an ocean. It rises before one and fills them with a slight sense of apprehension and dread, like as if they were looking out on the back of some fantastic, poised sea giant: Rock and barnacles for a face and great, thick locks of seaweed for hair. The wind blows with raw, archaic fury there, like the battle drums of nature herself: It whistles, it howls, it tears, it wrenches and it cools. It sweeps off the ocean like a tremendous breath; carrying upon its back all the cadaverous remnants of its origin. It smells like pure power as it grabs your hair and flings it; unaffectedly sweeping past you with all the indifference of a man walking through malleable grasses: Grandness.
This beach is Maine in the Summer time. It is the symbol of Maine’s collected and cognizant warmth. There is nothing gaudy or ostentatious about it. There is only a feeling of tested balance, harmony and beauty: Robust beauty; beauty like an august Caribou; not like an exorbitantly ornamented jungle bird, or a dank alligator or crocodile.
Traveling more westerly and inland, an omnipresence of forest confronts one. There is a mountain nearby that I like to climb called the Bumper. It is a rather short hike with a steep and bedraggled incline. Upon reaching the summit one finds a great and massive boulder - like the shoulder of some lackadaisical colossus - that provides the surmounting individual with a phenomenal view of the surrounding landscape. And what does one find? Forest. In the Autumn, if you hike up this mountain, you see a great menagerie of colors sparkling below you through a crisp and cool atmosphere. It is like a Jackson Pollack masterpiece has been proliferated upon the wings of all the brilliantly fading trees. And, in the midst of this colorful siege, meandering throughout the whole canvass like a thread, is the stark, eternal green of the pines. It is a splendid sensory accretion, witnessed from a temporarily kaleidoscopic bastion. The dusty detritus from the falling leaves fills the air. This autumnal scent intertwines with the constancy of the sappy pine being exuded. It rubs up against your nostrils as you breathe it in, becoming exhilarated and catalyzed. It is pure and untouched, glimmering and chilled.
I remember hiking Mt. Kathadin at the beginning of the Fall a few years ago. It was a great spire pluming out of the land like a synechdechoche of some indeterminable power; unabashedly raising and tossing the Earth about with ease. Rivers spilled down the sides of this behemoth like spindle threads of aqueous crystal. They danced over the rocks lithely, raising no issue with any abrupt absence of land, as they cast themselves off the sides of cliffs in continuous veins and crashed in a drum rolling fury to resume their journey down the face. There was something about the placement of the rocks - the water curling lucidly around any impediment – that just inspired tremendous felicity and awe. You’d reach your hands into the turbulent effluence and feel the kind pulse of the land wash through you: cold, refreshing. You’d take a drink and it was like engulfing the pure heart of Maine. The only word that comes to mind in recollection is mesmerizing.
The actual hike up the mountain was a strenuous endeavor that involved the ascendency of a steep face of ancient stone. It taught respect and awe, if nothing else, and showed that nothing worth achieving can come easily. This, again, is part of the total circumference of quality that one finds in Maine. Poignant autumnal beauty, though, is but the fine carpet laid down for the coming of Maine’s utmost patron: Winter.
When Maine’s winter comes rumbling down, it is like the onslaught of a tempestuous Goddess - if Winter indeed finds Maine. When it truly does, it forcibly exacts from anyone, or anything, any complacency that has formed during the Summer and Fall. Maine’s winters are part of its legacy. The qualities elicited by surviving through a staunch and powerful Maine Winter are the touchstones that determine if something, or someone, is strong enough to be from and of Maine. For Maine is a northern land - governed more by the parameters of what is cold and desolate then anything else – and so exhibits “Maineness” most entirely in, and by, anything that can forge its way through the epitome of coldness: Winter. Pine trees embody this winter bred “Maineness”, as do Maine’s eminent mountains. These elements exude toughness and fortitude. The pine tree is built of rough and ragged armor: It is pliant as a scrawny, struggling youth, but becomes rigid, thick and strong as it grows older. The mountains live in an almost indeterminate winter; shielding themselves against voluminous winds in thick blankets of hardy trees and great bones of aged, well wrought stone.
Whoever has skied at Sugarloaf during the apex of winter knows the harsh and cold indifference that periodically finds birth within Maine. A new Strength and terror ride within the wind; like it has transitioned to become fueled by the same furnaces that clang out the ice. It ceases to be the kind, mellow and fragrant breeze that one can find in the Summer and Fall, and becomes something heinous and magnified. It screeches and tears, becomes built of claws and howls like a timber wolf; running ubiquitously over and through the mountains in an unrelenting fury. It brings pain and seeks tenderness. It forces strength. You find a way to courageously and steadfastly confront it, or are forced to hobble and shrivel away, defeated.
Sugarloaf, at this time, is a coalescence of Coldness. Besides the wind, there are other blustery intrusions of Winter. Sharp pinnacles of ice hang inverted from gutters like fine marble statues. Their presence conveys and algetic, pitiless essence. They are metaphors of winter: Warning signs cast out, exhorting all wise enough to heed them that the presence of some stringent and dangerous force is nigh. Throughout this numinous freezing process the snow falls upon the world like a ferocious beast. Blizzards catapult upon the land in vast pelletings of snow that swill out all vision in white, discretely amalgamated dominances of the airs. They cause density and disruption, and are thick expostulations against movement; desiring to make all still and dead.
It is interesting to note that this test of Winter does not only apply to humans, but to all animate and inanimate objects that reside within the state. The state itself must survive itself; must prove its worthiness to be. All the rocks, trees, rivers, waters and coastline are tested at this time. They are seasoned; cast into Maine from the blazing forges of winter. Failure, while to a typical Maine tourist can simply mean expulsion and return to the land from whence they came, to many a thing will mean death. Victory results in the becoming and encompassment of “Maineness”: What is Maine survives, while what isn’t passes on. The test can sometimes last for quite a long time, succeeding well into and past the vernal equinox. I know that I, and can only imagine many other persons or things, am almost always ready for the return of the warmer climes; the period when one takes a breath, and when Winter begins to capitulate: The Spring.
Maine’s Spring arrives laggardly. It trails on Winter slowly and dully, almost pitifully, like a runt in a family of dogs trying to gain dominance over the alpha. The bully of Winter refuses to depart. It remains like some bombastic body builder refusing to grant ascendency to another. And when it finally does leave, it is by the hair and nails, amidst echoes of screeches and howls.
When I think of Spring in Maine, one particular element casts itself forthwith in mind: Mud. It is humorously ironic that the one thing that should bloom most profusely in Maine’s Spring is mud. All of the frostbitten, and snow ridden ground slowly begins to transition from the hard, unforgiving constrictures of winter into the mellow and viscous elevation of Spring. The forest is relaxing its shoulders. Throughout the whole winter, clenched and poised like a human-being hunched over in the wind, the forest waited, and now, upon Spring’s arrival, it is able to drop its subzero posture and resume a more languid and easy disposition. For Spring is in fact the time of relaxation, enjoyment and revelry. The coldly exiled animals and birds return home from their southern journey. The air is exemplary: A fine reminder of the fortitude and indestructible presence of life. The sun begins to redefine itself; shakily rising higher into the sky and traversing a greater distance. It casts out its golden branches with a new found vigor; bending its luscious boughs lower in a generative and fertile desire. It heralds the beginning of something pleasant and warm.
But, as before, this something does not come without a cost. The mud elicited by Maine’s Spring takes on the character of an amorphous Hollywood creature: An assiduous, animate and ubiquitous blob. One cannot escape it. Clothes become covered, and cleaning habits must be elevated to a higher, more intense level if anything is to remain free of the stuff. This is likewise fitting for Maine: Spring is a hassle; something that has to be dealt with as much as it is enjoyed. This applies most aptly to the people of Maine. Though the Winter is often times struggled through, it construes a sort of macabre cleanliness that is not found in other, more lively seasons. This is because of Winter’s close relationship to Death. Death is, in one way, a creator of sterility – a quality allocated to things that are not of life. Life is a raw and muddy mess: Life is blood and bones and sweat and tears, the organic fundament of being. All of this is encompassed by the mud of the Spring. It is water and Earth, (The same things, many will argue, that Man is made of), combining to form a viscous trough from which plentitude can emerge.
Spring is fecund and lascivious in this way, and can become ostentatious - though Maine avoids this latter effect. Instead of the infatuation and rhapsody that Spring instigates in other, warmer areas, Maine exudes a more prideful, humorous and indolent scorn. It greets Spring graciously, but also with a quiet sort of indifference. What need does a pine tree have for the return of something that it has not lost? Here is another way in which Spring is camouflaged and brushed aside by Maine: In other, less coniferous areas, Spring returns to a deadened and gray landscape of the ragged, winter-torn bones of trees, but in Maine, Spring returns to instill green life in only a fraction of the forest’s population. The vast preponderance of Maine’s pine trees look at Spring and laugh, saying, “What need do I have for such a fleeting adornment?” They, like Maine itself, are too cold-hardened, strong and old to be amazed by the return of the transient flocks of Spring’s finery.
The muddy buoyancy of Spring eventually passes, though, to once more allow the fruition of summer, and so on and so forth, like a strange eternal merry-go-round. Maine accepts its allocation with perseverance and dignity. It is a state that is made of the stuff of struggle itself: A wise and weather worn grandfather, still retaining a spritely spring in his bones. It is a blended texture of the vast integument of the sea and the stolid meditation of pine robed mountains; a land like few others: A complete individual unto itself. I have only lived here, full time, for a few years now, but have been coming to this state for the entirety of every summer since I can remember. I like to think that some of the rugged perseverance, stoically balanced and grand beauty intrinsic to this state have permeated into my blood. I like to think that I am, or have become, in some way, an atom of Maine, a piece of its being, a permutation of its gprimordial being. Few people can really lay claim to this – in terms of the Earth entire – and so the quality of “Maineness” should be held onto, by those who possess it, as something special. The people of Maine are the emanations of the forests, rocks, and waters of Maine. They are the animated blood of the state: The proliferation of a grand way of being. I can only hope that this grandness may continue to carve a passageway through time. For it has certainly earned the right.
Posted on January 21st, 2008 by admin
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