Today’s little adventure started with the usual – this time it was my mother trying to figure out where this pretty bridge she kept seeing on FaceBook was located. It claimed to be in Pittsfield Maine, the town she grew up in, but she had no recollection of it. This isn’t unusual for my mother…. she’s the sweetest woman you’ll ever meet but she has the attention span of a gnat. On several occasions in the past I had to inform her her cousins were the offspring of her aunt who she swore up and down was a childless spinster. And so it goes… A week of speculation on a bridge…
As it turns out there is indeed a snow mobile bridge in Manson Park, right past the center of town. It claims to be the longest pedestrian suspension bridge over the river but I can’t for the life of me figure out if it has a name or who put it there. Oh well! The mystery continues!
I have been to Manson Park many times over the years, always during the big Egg Festival. It’s a really nice park with a full baseball diamond (complete with dug out) a public swimming pool, several play ground type areas, some scenic picnic spots near the river, and lots and lots of open space to run wild and free on. Honestly this park is better than most city parks I have seen. STILL, I had no idea what this whole damn bridge debate was about so I herded my mother in the car and off we went.
I parked in the lot aside the river and it didn’t take me long at all to locate the bridge. I could see it, though I was uncertain how to get there, I knew I could because there were two women sitting out there chillin’. I walked alongside the river until I couldn’t anymore and found a footpath through the grass not far away which led into the woods and onto the bridge.
THIS BRIDGE IS MENTAL. No seriously, it’s proper scary. It’s a long suspension bridge weighted down on both sides by trees. Trees which, mind you, had grown in the past 30+ years and who were literally being slowly cut down by the wires… This DIY Maine engineering is common out here but always scares the crap out of me. Getting onto the bridge was no better. It swayed and swung in the breeze, lurching back and forth and wobbling heavier with every step. The two women chilling noticed us walking out and they walked off…. they probably know something we don’t. By the time I got to the sections that were missing boards I was more than a little unnerved. If you’ve ever seen the video of Galluping Gertie, this is her little sis in the backwoods of Maine. I find it hard to fathom this is a snow mobile bridge. I sure as hell wouldn’t drive over it! The graffiti was also amusing, reading, “Lesbian tendencies ur fucked.” Seeing as the bridge doesn’t appear to have a name I think I’ll call it the Lesbian Bridge from here on out because I think it’s good to be sex positive, especially out in the boonies…
All that being said it was gorgeous! And attached to a trail on either side which led god knows where… I made my way up to the train tracks before turning around… 85 degree weather will put a damper on anyone’s desire to explore! All and all this was totally worth it… if not just to be grateful for being alive…
Well! As it turns out there’s a bunch of things going on in Maine I should really be up here for so last Thursday I packed up my car and braved five hours of dragon’s breathe (fog) to get to central Maine. I’ll be up here for a couple weeks…. getting into trouble and whatnot. So far it’s been wonderful. I took a photo of the dragon’s breathe and a new friend I found in the yard this morning. I’m calling him Tom.
Today’s little adventure was to a Steampunk Craft Fair and Festival in Dexter. For those of you not in the know Dexter is a tiny town smack dab in the middle of nowhere and a damn strange place to have such a thing…. which is obviously what made me want to go. It’d either be amazing, or amazingly bad, either way I’m happy! So off I went! (I was however not ballsy enough to attend the costume party at the adjoining bar the night before… Not that I had anything to wear on such short notice.)
I must say it is HOT and MUGGY today… and the little festival in the middle of the parking lot around the old factory building. TO my surprise there were a lot of people dressed up! Most were vendors, and the live music, but I think a few were just nutballs like me. I wasn’t totally dressed down – I did wear my octopus shirt which looks very Jules Verne-esque. And someone did compliment it… I think he was trying to say it looked like Cthulhu.
Anyway, I was happily surprised with the diversity here. There were a lot of crafters, a lot of gears, a lot of keys, all glued on masks, tiles, earrings, you name it. Even talked to one young woman making her own chainmail. Seriously. Hand-made chain mail. I asked where the hell she picked up that skill…. she said her school taught it. Wow. Maybe if my school were that interesting growing up I wouldn’t have prayed so hard for the building to “blow down in one good gust,” as one of the teachers lamented, “That’s all it’d take! One good gust!”
Of course I also went in the hopes of seeing local authors. I wasn’t disappointed. I ended up buying three books, all signed, for $35. One was a collection of short stories, another was some sort of whimsical fiction, and the third was a graphic novel which I am not known for buying but it looked so damn detailed… the woman who inked and wrote that one said she was used to doing comic con type circuits, indoors. I could see that. Everyone was super friendly and very passionate, what I would hoped to find in such a gathering. For the dead center of Nowheresville Maine I think this was pulled off pretty well! Especially for the first year in doing this. Maybe next year I’ll return as a vendor!
Between my body not getting the hint it’s go time, and a bunch of issues at home, I have been severely pokey in getting this year’s traveling started, but today I took my first little road trip of the season, and it was goddamn amazing!
I had decided to go to the Flume Gorge in the spring, before the tourist rush and also when all the water from the melting snow is whooshing down the mountains. I asked my mother if she wanted to go and after a bit of convincing she relented. She was sick on Mother’s Day so this was what I had decided to do with her to make up for it. We were slow getting out, getting into the car around 1PM, and then requiring several stops. I typed in the address wrong and after two hours of driving realized I was still forty minutes away. Could we make it in time?? Yes we could! We got there around 4PM, after mother had smuggled a gas station sandwich into the car while I was filling my tank. It was an egg salad sandwich, which you’d think would be a gamble at a gas station… but it was bizarrely great and much needed.
Tickets to the Flume Gorge cost us $16 per adult, unlike most the trails I go on which are in the middle of nowhere and absolutely free. That’s OK, it was well worth it! I guess my mother had been there before, during peak tourist season, and she didn’t remember much of it. This time around, being the spring, we had almost the whole trail to ourselves and it was gorgeous! The water was lively as we walked over numerous bridges to see see different vantage points. There were a few signs along the trail highlighting various features. A good portion of the trail is on a trellis going over the water and in between two rock walls. It makes for a stunning viewpoint, a brisk amount of exercise, and the sound! I can’t tell you how amazing the sound was! As the water rushed by it echoed against the rocks and became louder and louder until you could almost hear nothing else. I felt so alive! And there were a few beautiful waterfalls, one of which sprayed us with a cool and refreshing mist.
I won’t lie, for a first outing this was a bit extreme. It was three hours of driving to get there and much of the trail was steep, either going up hill or up stairs. Still, being as empty as it was we both could take our time and we had a great day. This was one of the most scenic places I have been so far and well worth the visit! The only complaint I have is that my camera hates taking photos in direct sunlight so a good deal of my snaps came out washed out. I still have to learn how to muck with the lighting setting to avoid this in the future. But with that being said I had a fantastic belated Mother’s Day celebration with my #1 mom, who I took a number of adorable photos of but I am fairly certain she’d kill me if I posted them here.
I needed to escape the Love Canal house for my own health so I started to plan a trip to Maine. Two days later than planned my stomach pains finally let up enough for me to make a midnight trek and I landed softly and quietly in the wee morning hours after spending four hours cranking up the classic rock and caterwauling at the top of my lungs. I don’t know why people seem to despise driving long distances alone so much. I find it… liberating.
I really wanted to make the most of this week. I have a bunch of stops all planned out but today? Up, still got that alcohol-free hangover, and once again didn’t make it out by noon. No matter. I was on my way! I had decided after reading a series of glowing reviews to check out Rangeley Lake State Park, a two hour drive, in the hopes of catching some great foliage snaps. I planned on making September my Leaf Peeping month but the weather has been absolute whack this year and the trees are terribly confused. “Do I turn color now or…? Well I see a third of your leaves are colored buuut….” Lakes are great for foliage photos because if it’s a calm day you can get all those gorgeous colors reflected on the water.
There wasn’t much for foliage when I started out but heading into the mountains I was soon awash with bright reds, oranges, and a few yellows. Perfect. There was however quite a bit of road work, numerous flashing moose signs, and by the time I got to park I don’t think I had seen another car in twenty minutes. That always makes me a smidge hesitant. Lately I have had a lot of concerned citizens tell me I should be loaded up on mace, heavily armed, and walking a large dog wherever I go. Bears! Moose! Serial killers! Oh my! But I probably should take heed. Central Maine is the Bermuda Triangle of weird disappearances and murder mysteries. I always felt this was because, as comedian Bob Marley put it, “There’s four cops in Maine and they’re all busy following the one black guy that lives there.” Dark humor cuts deep. Also it’s rutting season which means there are horny roving bucks who can be quite dangerous… SIGH.
The drive to the park was drop dead gorgeous. Just imagine being surrounded on all sides by coral colored trees fluttering in the breeze as your car zooms at light speed through them. (The speed of light is the general consensus of locals on how fast cars should go on their roads… Speed limit signs aren’t even symbolic anymore. They’re more like a snarky backhanded “joke” about your inadequacies.) The park was however… rather dull!
This place would be AWSOME if it happened to be in the dead of summer and I had a carload of children I wanted to dump in the woods somewhere so I could force them to socialize with other Lord of the Flies styled foundlings. This had everything for that – camp sites, picnic tables galore, well beaten paths with no parking directly adjoining the camping spots, a beach, two outhouses, even a drinking fountain! Granted by now it was filled with leaves and the beach and camp sites were so empty that all you could hear was an apocalyptic wind blow by. But I was here and going to make the best of it.
I parked my car at the boat launching dock, as one does in a Prius to confuse people, and hopped out of the car with my camera. A middle aged guy on a motorcycle drove up, claimed one of the docking ports, and spent an awfully lot of time avoiding eye contact with me as I strode by. HI. I’m Typhani. I have bright orange hair, a purple plaid shirt, and sometimes I bite. Usually only on Fridays though so don’t worry. So went the imaginary conversation in my head.
I took a few photos of the mountains beyond the boat docks before heading into the woods where I found a trail leading to the beach. Goodie! This was a well worn path. So many tiny traipsing feet had gone by here that the path was more of a gaping maw in the ground where tree roots clung to a tenuous existence above ground.
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 
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.
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.
So after taking that little detour to 
Still, the trails that headed over to the falls were short, easy to walk, and provided far more beautiful a scene than I had expected. Apparently the falls were named after Captain Snow who had a camp set up just about where the picnic tables are. He was a fur trapper at the time living out in the wilds of Maine pretty far from any real white settlements. This may be why he ultimately died during a brutal Indian raid – easy pickins’ I suppose. The tale tells of an Indian chief leading the raid wearing an entire eagle over his head, it’s wings outstretched, and it’s beak agape. Quite an image! This happened sometime in the 1750’s or 60’s, as several historical accounts contradict each other.
On my list of destinations I had several “castles” and estates that have been turned into public spaces for whatever reason. This was one of them and was situated at the end of a trail. There was supposed to be a trail head behind a local restaurant but there was also another entrance down a nearby dirt road – again a hard find. It was a set of steps aside the aforementioned road with a tiny cut off on the other side. Though it was poorly marked it was marked so we headed into the woods not really knowing what we’d find. Turns out hills. We found one steep hill after another that went deeper into the forest before dumping us out into a pasture and then at the top of the last hill a phenomenal view of everything below – a beautiful pastoral scene sprawled out ahead of us framed in the distance by the blue ridges of a mountain. A tractor plowed back and forth and a field of lilacs added additional color. I was already happy and we hadn’t even found the castle yet!
and cows. Wow, had a blast there! And came home smelling of cow, but that’s quite another story! It was an hour and forty-five minutes to get there and NH being what it is, very little of that was proper highway. This was my second time up in this direction in the past month and I had passed by a couple things I wanted to check out.
hour in direct sunlight with a bunch of cows only to shove myself back into my car which doesn’t have a working air conditioner… or transmission for that matter. I tell you, you drive a lot more carefully when you’re afraid your tranny is about to flop out on the highway! I’ve been told it’s a matter of time. SIGH. Poor Daisy. Anyway, the bridge wasn’t that spectacular but the water was wonderful! I washed my hands of all the cow dirt and grease and splashed about for a few minutes to cool down. Been doing this a lot lately. It almost feel baptismal – a completely refreshing thing to do for both body and soul.
almost two hours away from home, with no ride back should this happen until 9PM, I decided to play it safe. I drove the normal route back home but I did make a couple stops. The first was a very short detour to see the Hopkinton Dam which was… not much to see. The second was far better, it was the McCabe Forest. I had seen a sign aside the road and figured I would check it out. The beginning of the trail starts in the parking lot of an abandoned auto mechanic garage. Though I had passed by at least four times I hadn’t noticed any cars. Today was no different. I love places like these. You never know where you are going to end up or what you are going to find! So I locked Daisy up, pulled out my new used camera, and off I went into the forest with a big gulp.
play with the camera a bit. I wasn’t particularly successful – I really need to purchase a good macro lens for this sort of thing (and I’ll be absolutely honest, a macro lens would be used on mushrooms and bugs far quicker than flowers!) Eventually I tired of this and walked on. The path was poorly marked in the sense it was marked but seemed to diverge with no markings pretty frequently. I didn’t really know where I was going but as usual I took a snap at every intersection as a record of where I had come from – photographic bread crumbs should I need them.
And then I ended up near a very colorful sandy bottomed river. It was still in the 80’s and I was sweating bullets even though it was cooler under the trees. Another river seemed a godsend but this one couldn’t be reached unless I wanted to just jump in. It was a tempting thought. No one was here… I could totally skinny dip and hope for the best…. but alas I was too chicken for that. I was however suffering from heat exhaustion as well as regular exhaustion from two weeks of insomnia. After taking all sorts of photos with the new camera and old I lay down on some soft moss, listened to the soft gurgling of the water going by, and stared up into the canopy above. I felt like I could have melted into the ground right then and there and been completely happy having just become part of the forest. I may have even nodded off for a bit. When I got back up I didn’t realize how much I had needed that little break! WHEW! Starting to feel better already!
path so I continued on only to run into a sign that pointed the directions I was coming from. It read, “entrance.” Hmmm… I heeded it’s advice and went back the way I came, found Daisy still sitting there melting in the parking lot, and hopped in. It was a long hot ride and by the time I got home I was absolute toast! I fell asleep and three hours later woke up to the worst migraine I had ever had in my life. The dizziness and nausea were so intense I literally couldn’t move and my whole body felt like I had the worst flu ever. I did have the phone next to me though and literally called for help… For my efforts I received an ice pack, a swig of Sudafed (as this seemed to have started with my sinuses) and a small bowl of macaroni which took me four attempts to eat. Even with all that the day was completely worth it and when I woke up the next morning without the migraine I counted my blessings fiercely and felt once again at total peace.
