Sunday evening Katherine and I chilled for a while after our adventures earlier that day and said hello to my brother and his girlfriend before eating what was left of our deep fried s’mores and attempting an early bedtime so we could get up and head into Boston, a little more than three hours away, in the morning.
I can’t say my history with Boston has been the best… I mean it’s a tough city, big, full of rude people and aggressive drivers, statistically the worst in the country, but maybe it’s not their fault. As my brother said, “Those roads aren’t meant for cars.” He’s right. Boston is filled with impossibly narrow roads and streets, many of which sport one sharp curve after another, and none of which make any logical sense. To add insult to injury half the roads are underground where the GPS no longer works and when you finally get where you’re 
going there’s no parking anywhere. And if that’s not bad enough the drivers… wow. They’re called Mass-Holes by the rest of New England. They’re real peaches. I felt like I was playing Russian Roulette at every intersection. But here too is proof of my personal growth in the past year. I only started driving myself to unfamiliar places less than a year ago and Boston was on my “uh-ah, not going to do it” list. But this time around I barely took notice, volunteered to head into the bowels of Hell without a second thought, I think shocking my brother and everyone whom I told. I used to spend my life constantly engulfed by panic and anxiety. These days I wake up and have to check my pulse because I wonder if my heart is still beating when I can’t feel it slam against my chest walls. It’s really odd but so peaceful and wonderful. Even babies don’t thwart me anymore. They used to make me super nervous but just recently I realized they’re not really made of glass. Now instead of being like, “Shit don’t get that thing near me, I may break it.” I actually find them kinda cute. Except infants. They’ll always look like raisins to me.
Back to the story… Katherine asked if we could take an adventure on the way and I said sure, why not. She chose Walden Pond because she wanted to see where Thoreau wrote Fuck People, I’m Going to Go Live in the Woods for Two Years Walden. She’s a fellow writer friend and loved the book. I’m well read and love the woods but oddly never picked this one up. Nonetheless I do love literary history, especially as it pertains to New England, and this detour was only 20-30 minutes away from our original destination.
Neither one of us really knew what to expect but I think both of us figured we’d find a Unabomber-like shack in the middle of bear country. This really wasn’t the case. The park was very busy, filled with people, with all sorts of weird “Byzantine parking” as 
Katherine put it. It was $15 admission and seemed to be… A swimming hole for Bostoners. There were paths around the lake, none marked very well but it didn’t much matter as there were roads and civilization everywhere. No one was going to die out here. A replica of Thoreau’s cabin stood near the visitor center where there was both information and oddly, a gift shop. We discussed how morally strange it was to have a gift shop honoring a man who was all about simplifying one’s life and cutting out materialism… Though this spirit did seem present when we found the sight of his original cabin. Here was a large pile of rocks (just like the rest of New England…) where people had made some sort of weird piled rock memorial to the man. Some used Sharpies to doodle messages and pictures on the stones they left behind.
It seems as if almost the entirety of the lake had been made into one big sandy beach. The one at the front had the shallow bits cordoned off like keeping a mass of people in a big fish net! Further out there was more nature-friendly bits, kayakers seemed to be enjoying the day on the water, and other people had found more isolated spots to swim. Katherine and I were not dressed for this, having no idea there might be swimming involved, but we decided it was a nice hot day and the water did seem rather nice. I pulled off my trusty Chuck Taylors and knee high nerd socks, rolled up my pants, and waded in. Katherine followed suit. OH! The water was so shallow it was warm and clear as the day is bright. Fish immediately came to my shockingly white calves and tried to nibble on them. These fish were weird though…. as they appeared to be a school of African Cichlids. Perhaps this lake was the “farm up North” fish disappear to when they’re no longer wanted. All I knew is these things did not look natural with their bulky silver bodies and fluorescent blue tails.
We stayed in the lake enjoying the day for quite a while, neither one of us really wanting to leave. We had found the site of the original cabin and stared at it’s sad foundation earlier on and now we were watching people stare up at the sky to witness today’s solar eclipse. A little girl near by reminded us about this and although it was slightly darker than usual neither one of us really noticed what was going on behind a large swath of fluffy clouds. Ah well, no eclipse for us, we wandered back to the car and continued on to Malden where a friend was waiting for us.
If you are enjoying Catching Marbles please consider adding a dollar or two to my limited gas money fund so I can continue going on adventures and sharing them with you! Thank you!
Surprisingly there was enough time after 
It was another hot day but luckily I was in a car with air conditioning, which was a nice change. We had been together now for long enough that our happy burbling had gone from the usual pleasantries to discussing in depth only the most fucked up subjects we could think of – like what we thought was normal when we were kids that really wasn’t, what left the deepest psychological scars, and what was rotting behind each white picket fence in the small towns we grew up in. It was all in good fun and I think we were both enjoying it – though I have to wonder if my company is extreme when I keep eliciting gasps of horror. Perhaps next time I will keep nail clippers in the car so that when I flip a nail inside out and get it bleeding I have something a little more appropriate to remedy the situation that a rusty set of needle nose pliers… maybe. 
Anyway, we got stuck in traffic for a bit where I got into a fight with another Prius who would not let me move over into the exit lane I actually needed… but we survived and no one was shot so it’s all good. When we drove up to the fort the tiny parking lot was almost filled to capacity with cars. People were here with their kids and dogs and we could already see a few pieces of the fort and the boat filled harbor it guarded. Unlike 
It was a small property but so lovely to wander I enjoyed snapping photos and Katherine relaxed with the smell of the ocean wafting in. We picked a couple locations to just stand and watch the waters as we talked, not really wanting to leave until it got dark. We outlasted almost everyone there and when there was only one other guy wandering about we managed to scare him off with our frank discussion of birth control. Always nice.
Portland is a sweet little port city, not nearly as much of a tourist town as Old Orchard Beach. I had enjoyed walking its streets before but now it was nice to return to a different portion of the city. My GPS led me to where the International Cryptozoology Museum used to be, but not knowing this I placed the Prius in a nearby parking garage and we started to walk. Portland is a city of very mixed architecture – some which appeared very Dutch, some which looked like Lego bricks, and others which seemed more relevant to Maine. I took a few snaps here and there. Katherine kept herself entertained finding ninja’d stickers posted throughout the city reading fiercely
critical liberal sentiments. The graffiti seemed almost sweet and added another layer of entertainment but where was this bigfoot museum?? Nowhere to be seen. We stopped in a used bookstore instead and oddly it had a map to the new location of the cryptozoology museum which was a seven minute car ride. So off we went to reclaim the car… only to find the parking garage would not let us out. I tried paying for my ticket but the machine kept spitting out my card, not telling me why, and asking me to re-insert the ticket. I was at a loss but with no one behind me I backed out of the toll lane, parked again, and found a machine inside to pay. With this new pre-paid ticket the toll gate actually worked. FWEW!
We spent way longer than we should have continuing to walk around all these unmarked buildings to find nothing. It was getting annoying so we circled back to the food truck and finally found Bigfoot standing around the side of that building, guarding a chicken shack and a brewery. It was a scene that was just so Maine.
We both went in and it’s a two level (but still two room) museum filled with just the most goddamn bizarre things… The bottom floor was for sea monsters and various beasts which was capped off with a five foot tall plastic ninja turtle for no reason I could see. In the display cases there were Fiji mermaids, labelled as hoaxes, but smattered aside things like a GI Joe standing next to a stuffed beaver with a plate reading, “Do giant beavers still exist?” It was completely mental. We were both getting quite a kick out of this place and I was so happy to experience it with a friend instead of going alone as I had planned a few months back.
This entry is a little different than most. It’s not an advertisement for some great place to go it’s more just a story about getting lost in the woods and finding myself both physically, and perhaps more metaphorically as well, through only the most ridiculous of means.
I must admit I haven’t been taking the greatest care of my health lately. Instead on days when I feel great I WAY overdo it and then crash for a week and repeat! This time around I was so accustomed to the crash I wasn’t even aware I was in a downward spiral until today when I woke up and was suddenly able to focus and move without pain. WOW. That’s different! This led to a morning filled with me bouncing around listening to oddly aggressive music and finishing painting my Droog Cockatoo sculpture.
My music these days might be a bit alarming to those of you who knew me in the past. I have somehow morphed from this terribly pleasant, quiet, shy, feminine, little house mouse to someone bouncing around swearing like a sailor, wearing garishly awful costumes on a weekday, singing loudly to increasingly aggressive and offensive music, and denying everything I was ever brought up to be – ladylike, prim, proper, well spoken. Every day I inch closer to the real me and every day I am more excited to learn it all anew. And shit, I wish someone had told me all 90’s music didn’t suck. I was always forced to listen to shitty boybands and Britney Spears by my bestie at the time. Fuck, if I knew how beautifully twisted Marilynn Manson, how deliciously sarcastic My Chemical Romance, or how delightfully dysfunctional Placebo was I think my teenage years would have been so much more interesting! So onward I go listening to a delightful clusterfuck of angry, dysfunctional, deeply sarcastic, and utterly gender fucked music.
I only mention all the above to show you what kind of kick ass, loving life, sort of mood I was in when I decided to fill my pockets with random baubles and head into the woods, a camera slung over my shoulder like someone who knew what they were doing…
There’s a big logged out clearing near the dam. I decided to go through to the back of it where there was a nice stone wall to sit on. I wanted to take a few crystal photos with the wall and the lake as its backdrop. This I did before deciding to follow the deer path that ran along the wall to the dam. I made my way to the dam just fine. I spent some time playing in the grass here, snapping photos, enjoying the sun, just relaxing and having a good time. Once I had felt well rested enough I headed back whence I came but found the path I was supposed to have taken in was…. grossly 
overgrown and lacking in any trail markers. I walked in what I believed to be the right direction sometimes where there was an obvious trail (or two, or three) and other times when I was just clomping through underbrush. I did not end up back at the trailhead. In fact I have no idea where I ended up… but I did find some ruins of some sort… some granite had clearly been quarried here, or placed here. I snapped a photo and wondered before getting back on a trail which led me into a loop three times. It was starting to get dark, I had walked way farther than I anticipated and I still couldn’t find my way to the right path. I had to start making some decisions. I decided to keep walking until I hit a road but I didn’t hit a road. I hit an intersection of two joining lakes and no more path. Fuck!
I wheeled back around, by now it was getting dimmer and darker by the step. I was practically jogging – sweating, overheating, starting to get a headache from dehydration because it was hot and I didn’t bring any water with me. I passed the same trees, mushrooms, and various other landmarks again and again before I finally came to a stone wall. The stone wall. I could get back from the stone wall! But the stone wall didn’t lead me back to the right trail, just the same bizarre loop path I kept getting on. I was frustrated. I gave up. I found the stone wall and followed it in the opposite direction of home knowing it’d lead me to the dam and from the dam I could wander through some nice people’s backyard back up to a road. I knew how to get home from there (although it was a hell of a walk.) I stopped by a roadside lake scene, snapped a few more photos, and continued walking in the heat and the sun.
The first bridge I came to was the Carlton Bridge on Carlton Road. Super easy find! I drove right to it! It was nestled between a lot of farmland and some houses, a really pretty area and there was a turn off to park. It’s a one-lane two-way bridge which isn’t unusual, luckily there was no traffic and better still there was a delightful little path that went down to the bottom of it where I could splash in the water and play with the camera. It was quiet here and quite beautiful. I was delighted by this. You go to one covered bridge and you sort of feel like you’ve seen them all but this one was just so sweet, so serene, that it really made me instantly fond of it. Other people were too. I got a few people slowing down to check out Daisy’s lovely new tatts and just as I drove away an old man pulled in, smiling.
The next bridge was on Sawyer’s Crossing. My GPS didn’t seem to know which road was Sawyer’s Crossing and this area was super confusing, filled with all sorts of winding roads all connecting to each other in what I can only say is the most disorienting rat’s nest of turns I have seen in a long long time. I did eventually find the bridge by looking for a river on the GPS map and going towards it. However by this time there was a sports car behind me, nudging Daisy’s poor ass, so I had to go over the bridge instead of stopping. As it turns out there’s no place to park, AT ALL. There’s no parking lot, no turn offs, you could barely pull over aside the road far enough to let another car go coming form the other direction. It was weird. I found three trails down a nearby road but not their beginning, just their middle which went across the road. My curiosity was peaked but I didn’t really know how to explore that further. Instead I wound over that damn bridge two more times, both times a car appearing out of the middle of nowhere to ride my bumper. I got annoyed, never did manage to snap a photo, though it looks much like the other bridge, just lacking in the quiet charm.
The third bridge is called Thomson Bridge and it is right on Main Street, has a pedestrian walkway right over it, and ample parking! I couldn’t have asked for better! Instantly I liked this bridge too. It was bigger but still only one lane for cars and one for pedestrians. It spanned a lovely river and a dam which apparently doesn’t exist anymore. It was such a drop dead gorgeous day I loitered and took marble photos for quite a while. Some cars passed but not many and going back to the car I was struck by how beautiful the decaying wool mill behind it was. I wanted to explore that further so I hopped in my car, turned it on, drove over the bridge, and turned down a nearby street to see the ruins better.
To end one day’s worth of chasing waterfalls I drove up to Rumford falls just as it was starting to get a bit dark. I hadn’t realized this was also the location of another one of the things on my list of roadside attractions – a giant Paul Bunyan statue complete with Babe the big blue ox!
Sadly I showed up at the wrong time of year and the falls were completely dry… nothing really to see here except a series of weird Indian Cut-Outs?? I guess Maine hasn’t been seen by the PC police yet… but anyway! If you’re going to go see this, go in the spring when there is a flow! Unless you’re just here to take cheeky photos with Paul Bunyan…. he’s out in the parking lot and just as tacky and hilarious as he looks. Great opportunity for selfie mischief! I would say I look like a total dork with my jeans still rolled up from playing in the water but then I realized I’m hugging a big blue ox soooo…..
Screw Auger Falls was another one of the waterfalls listed on the
But with that all said and done Screw Auger Falls was an awesome little spot. Besides having two waterfalls within easy walking distance the smaller of the two allowed for a local swimming hole where children splashed about in the shallow water. Adults mostly loitered around the edges because this place was made of natural granite which had been worn very slick and smooth by the erosive nature of water and perhaps by retreating glaciers before that. On top of that algae grew over many bits which made for an intensely slick surface. None-the-less I had been driving all day and it was in the 80’s. Despite my lack of swimwear I decided to roll up my jeans, lop off my trusty Converses, and wade right in! The water was just above where I had rolled up my jeans at the deepest point across the river where I had started. It had taken me a good ten minutes to get this few feet because of the slick nature of the rocks. Children here knew how to navigate this danger as they slid around on their bellies like joyful seals. It was a sight to see! When I managed to get into this somewhat deep spot I bent down and splashed in the water letting it whoosh over my face and arms, essentially bathing in the river with my clothes still on.
The ice cold water felt almost baptismal in a way. I’ve been playing in a lot of rivers these past few months and every time it’s the same – the healing properties of the waters come from the psychological boost you get when you can almost feel all the negativity in your life just washing over your skin and tumbling down stream never to be seen again. At long last I was encouraging my true hippie nature to come out and play. How joyful I have been getting back in touch with the beauty of New England, and cranking up the radio as I go – singing along loudly and badly to Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and all the music I had stopped listening to over the years when I never should have. The raucous screaming guitars and belted out rhythmus soothing my soul. At night I escape into another long forgotten guilty pleasure – beatnik literature, now with far more bite and meaning with my age and life experience. It’s interesting to almost reach back in time and touch another generation with such a powerful wanderlust. In addition to this seeing all these new beautiful places and meeting so many wonderful people had relit something powerful and intense in my heart – such a strong feeling of connection and wonder. In remembering who I am I learned who I need to be.
