Footloose in America: Dixie to New England (54 page)

About twenty-five miles from Belfast, Pam and Don invited us to spend Saturday night indoors at their farm near Palermo. Pam was a veterinarian who specialized in animal acupuncture and holistic medicine. Her clinic, “Healing Haven,” was in the barn. Don, who was a carpenter, made bio-diesel for their vehicles out of discarded vegetable oil from local restaurants. Sunday morning they invited me to use their computer to check my email.

When we first walked into Maine, we were interviewed by Maine Public Radio. During the interview, I mentioned that we hoped to find a place to put down for a couple of years on the coast around Belfast.

On my email account at Yahoo, there were four messages from people who’d heard the story. One was from Penny Altman. It read:

“Dear Bud, Pat and Della. We heard about you on Maine Public Radio and understand you are heading toward the Camden/Belfast area for the winter. We are in Prospect Harbor on the Schoodic Peninsula, about an hour and a half away (not by mule) and would like to make our house available to you for as long as you would like to stay. We have a B&B that we just got going this year. We are still renovating, but have plenty of viable room. The property consists of a farmhouse built in 1847 and three attached barns. The barns are not heated, but I’m sure we could do what would be necessary to accommodate Della. We have 31 acres with a 1/4 mile of shore on the shallow side of the harbor here. I am an artist and a writer (no reputation to speak of) and my husband, Michael, is a carpenter. We have an Old English Sheepdog and two cats. We’d love to meet you, and if you are not already set up, see whether you would enjoy staying in our house. I think we would enjoy it. Hope to hear from you. Penny Altman/Mermaid’s Purse Farm/Prospect Harbor, Maine.”

I called The Mermaid’s Purse Farm and got an answering machine. So I left a message that we were near Belfast and were interested in their proposal. Then I said to Patricia, “She sent that email two weeks ago. A lot of things can happen in that amount of time. We can’t count on this until we get a verbal yes.”

So Sunday when we left Healing Haven, we were still in search of a home.

I said, “There it is Patricia, welcome to the Atlantic Ocean.”

It was Tuesday afternoon, and we were at the crest of Park Hill on Highway 3 on the outskirts of Belfast. Overhead was a clear sky and shimmering below was Belfast Bay. It was the bluest blue I had ever seen.

“Can you believe it,” Patricia said. “We’re really here!”

When we walked down into Belfast I had a mixture of emotions. The excitement of getting to the coast was tempered with uncertainty. We hadn’t talked to Penny or Michael in Prospect Harbor–so we still didn’t know if we had a place to live. And even if they said yes, how could we know if it would work for us? On the map it looked so tiny and remote. Could we find employment there?

Originally, we picked Belfast as a place for our home on the coast. On the map it looked like it had commerce–hence, jobs. Plus, like with Madison, Indiana, we heard over and over what a great place it was. A progressive community with a thriving arts scene in a picturesque seaside setting. Downtown was mostly nineteenth century brick and stone buildings with elaborate cornices, decorative iron work and slate roofs. It looked like our kind of place.

And, like when we walked into Madison, we were more and more charmed the further we got into town. Main Street in Belfast was a steep grade that led down to the waterfront. Out in the bay, lots of colorful boats were moored to buoys. Most were for pleasure, but the bay held work boats too. Lobster boats that in the wee hours of morning would chug their way out into the ocean to bring back the catch. This was what I had always pictured a town on the Maine Coast to look like.

“Welcome to Belfast,” Mayor Michael Hurley said. He, and a reporter from the
Bangor Daily News
, had walked down to the waterfront to meet us. “I heard you folks are thinking about spending the winter here.”

“If we find a suitable place.”

The mayor said, “Let me know if I can help.”

An instructor at the Audubon Expedition Institute invited us to camp behind their office building on a ridge above downtown. It was a rough parking lot with a couple of school buses and half a dozen cars. Tall grass and weeds were growing around it, and the view of the bay was terrific.

After we set up camp, Patricia and I hiked back down into town to have dinner. Several folks told us Rollies Tavern was popular with the locals. So we went in and had lobster quesadillas with a pitcher of beer.

Two topics dominated the discussions in the tavern that evening. One was that night’s play-off game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. With the exception of one woman, everyone in the place was rooting for the Sox. They lost four to two.

The other topic was the weather. A nor’easter was in Maine’s forecast for the next day–heavy rain with near hurricane force winds. When we set up the tent, I battened it down like I never had before. Besides the stakes, I used rocks, saplings and old shipping pallets to anchor it. I had no idea how the tent would fare in seventy-mile winds.

Around six the next morning, Patricia said, “I think it’s here.”

Neither the rain nor the wind started gradually. It came with a vengeance. First the rain. It was like someone in heaven opened a fire hydrant. A few minutes later the wind began to pop and flutter the rain fly on the tent, and the poles on the leeward side bowed in. But everything held and the tent stayed dry.

Around seven, Patricia and I put on our rain gear and walked downtown to Dudley’s Diner for breakfast. The wind made it hard to walk–especially down Main Street, where it was a headwind blowing rain into our faces. Twice I saw women blown over as they tried to make their way along the sidewalk.

Dudley’s Diner was packed because electricity was out in many spots around town. While we waited for our meal, the café lost power for several minutes too.

The storm was even more intense when we got back to camp. It was like we had pitched our tent in the middle of a lake. When we opened it, we found that the lake had made its way inside, and our air-bed was floating. The rain was no longer falling down. It came at us sideways and the cart was rocking in the wind.

Patricia had just crawled inside the tent when a hefty gust ravaged it. With a loud crack, the tent collapsed on my wife as she screamed, “No!”

“Are you okay?”

I pulled the door open as she said, “I’m alright. But one of the poles broke.”

While I helped her out of the tent, my wife had to yell to be heard above the storm. “No sense going back in there until this blows over.”

Right then a gust ravaged the trees around us. Some bent all the way to the ground then popped back up and shuttered violently in the gale. Sideways, from the northeast, the rain slammed into us in torrents. The wind was so loud it nearly drowned out the thunder. Right then our world was total chaos.

Della frantically pranced at the end of her rope as the trees near her whipped and wound around in the storm. She was trying to break loose from the rope and run away from it all, but there was nowhere to go–for her or us.

I was leaning to my right, into the storm, when I felt a tug on my left arm and turned to see Patricia yelling something I could not hear. But, when she nodded toward Della and started trudging toward her, I got the gist of it and followed. When the Big Sis saw us coming, she started to calm down and seemed to welcome our arms around her neck. Patricia was on her right side and I was on the left–all three of us with our backs to the storm. It went on for two more hours.

Around noon the wind settled down, the rain stopped and it looked like the clouds might let the sun break through. That’s when Patricia said, “I have got to get our stuff to a laundry. Everything is soaked. I’ll call Lynn and see if she can help us.”

We met Lynn Karlin a week earlier at the boat ramp on Three Mile Pond. She had been testing out her new kayak. Lynn was a professional garden photographer who lived in Belfast. She was going to try to find us a place to live around there. Four times as we walked toward Belfast she drove out to check on us. Patricia called her from the offices of the Audubon Institute, and within an hour Lynn had our wet clothes and my wife in her car headed for the laundry.

For the past week we had been experiencing an Indian summer, but the storm brought it to an end. The next morning when we got up, the sun was out but there was a bite in the wind. The nor’easter had stripped much of autumn off the trees, and the forecast was for more rough weather in the days ahead.

Thursday afternoon we were visited by Lynn and two other ladies who wanted to help us find a place around Belfast. We had a couple of options, but none of them seemed to fit us. That evening I called the Mermaid’s Purse Farm again. This time Michael answered the phone and told me they had been out of the state for the past week. Then he said, “We were excited when we got your message. When do you think you’ll get here?”

“So you still want us to come?”

“We sure do. If you want, I’ll find a horse trailer and come get you.”

“No thanks. We’ll walk up.”

Michael told me they had only lived on the farm for a year and a half. “When we bought the place it was a real mess. We’re turning it into a bed and breakfast. So we’ve been working hard to make it presentable. In May I got my foot caught in a bush hog. I didn’t lose it, but it got wacked up pretty bad. That slowed things down around here. We still have lots of work to do.”

I said, “I’m a pretty fair hand with a hammer. Maybe I can help.”

“Sounds great. Come on up.”

It was sixty miles to Prospect Harbor, so we had nearly a week’s worth of walking ahead of us. Sunday morning when we left Belfast, a frigid drizzle was falling and the weatherman said it was going to get colder with a chance for snow.

Monday night in LuAnn Wasson’s barn, Patricia said, “Are you sure you don’t want Michael to haul us up there?”

LuAnn Wasson boarded and trained horses on her farm east of Bucksport, and had two empty stalls in her barn. Della was in one and we set our bed up in the stall next to her. She was peacefully chewing hay as the wind wailed around the corners of the barn. Sometimes it sounded like the blizzards we had experienced on the New York apple farm. I was crawling into my sleeping bag when I said, “Is that what you want to do? Have Michael haul us up there?”

“It sounds like the weather is really going to turn to shit.”

We had just finished watching the forecast with LuAnn’s father and it called for sleet and snow over the next few days. I told my wife, “But we know we have a dry home ahead of us.”

Patricia snuggled deeper into her sleeping bag. “Hell of a lot of good that does us now.”

“Well, personally, I wouldn’t feel right about him hauling us up there. I walked this far, I want to walk all of it. But if you want to call Michael and have him come get you–”

Patricia popped up in her bag and snapped, “Stop right there, Bud Kenny!”

She yanked her right arm out and shook that index finger at me. “We are in this together! You’re not going to walk up there without me!”

Without saying another word she snuggled back down into her sleeping bag.

While winter whipped around outside the barn, I felt this huge warm glow well up inside of me. I leaned over and kissed the only thing showing out of Patricia’s sleeping bag–the top of her head. “That’s my girl.”

The gray and silver head tipped back, and when her face appeared, Patricia was beaming. She winked at me and said, “It’s all just part of the adventure.”

In the morning the weather was lousy and got worse as the day wore on. It started out as rain, which turned to sleet, then snow and back to rain again. We wore rain gear all day. That Tuesday we didn’t walk, we trudged along Highway 1.

Patricia had arthritis. Before we started this trip she was concerned it would keep her from walking very much. It’s one of the reasons I built the seat in the cart. But once we hit the road, she found the more she walked the better she felt. But that Tuesday my wife ached too badly to walk, and she spent most of the day in the cart.