Road tripping is savored in slowness. There are the people you meet, the cities, and there is money. I watch how quickly the latter moves on a screen, each digit like a plastic letter on a gas station sign that I’m not in charge of. Instead of making another trip to the ATM, I checked out of the hostel-priced campsite near Acadia National Park on Maine’s rocky coast, and parked my car on a calm street lined with bed-and-breakfast signs (“Vacancy”) and wine shops. I spread my sleeping bag across the backseat and set a sheet on the armrest so that, later, I could drape it over the headrests as a tent for myself in the backseat.
It’s Saturday afternoon. People are all around in clusters.
I walk through a park built on a mound of dirt, landscaped with nice grass. Bar Harbor shares a peninsula with Acadia National Park, and tourists are everywhere, eating ice cream and going on walks along the ocean. The rocks on the shore are covered in a stringy moss that glows in the twilight, casting the deep brown of the rocks themselves in a contrasting magic, equal in force. I stand next to a rock the size of a bedroom to eat a Twix that’s more like sugar than anything else. A glacier dropped off this grand piece of earth a long time ago, presumably without any of the tedium it currently represents on the bed of tinier rocks, mossy and wet rocks. It’s huge, dry, and it blocks the view of the ocean for children walking past. But it’s been here longer than the foreign families, the bed-and-breakfasts, and two-hour parking.
In the afternoon, around 2:00, the tide recedes enough between Bar Harbor and the island nearby that a land bridge forms for about an hour. I arrived late, and walked about halfway to the island. I let the water lap around my hiking boots like puppy tongues.
Later in the evening, I get tired quickly. My muscles are ready to rest after morning hiking, but on the way back to the car I hear a familiar Irish song from a pub. People are crowded inside, and they line the sidewalk. I ask the host if there is room at the bar for one person, and of course there is—I’m the only one-person here. I am the efficiency piece to the bar-profit Tetris game, the one often missing in Bar Harbor.
I squeeze in beside a middle-aged couple, maybe retired and maybe on a yearly vacation. The band keeps doing a wonderful job. I watch a family eat hamburgers for dinner. I try not to watch everyone there, but it’s hard. I leave an hour later, when the streets are quieter, and the music is still on.
The car is hot, and I suck up some cellular data scrolling through Facebook at one point to distract myself. By midnight, sleeping sticks. I’m in a sort of fetal position with my head elevated by a shoebox of books and a pillow on top of all that. I sleep through the alarm set for sunrise. At 8:00, the sun is high inside the fog I’ve come to consider to be Maine itself. I drive out along the waterfront, past closed-up bars and shops, people in baseball caps, people in rain jackets, and a million cawing seagulls.
topopoetics 