Vacationland

by John Hodgman

  Also Maine means admitting something. It is easy to have dinner with Black Francis in rural western Massachusetts and think you’re cooler than you’ve ever been in your life. Maine does not support this delusion. There are very few cool indie bands roving the Down East coast of Maine, and Maine’s population is the oldest in the Union. On our peninsula the young people tend to flee for Portland or points away, leaving their parents alone and embittered. Or if they stay, it may be to work at fishing or lobstering on Deer Isle. I have seen the young sternmen and -women when they come ashore for beer and premade subs at the market in Stonington. They have a competent swagger, but their eyes gaze with a dead calm. They are confronted with harsh demands both physical and existential. I don’t think you could spend one season heaving crate after crate of writhing sea insects off the cold floor of the ocean and still be called young, even if you just turned nineteen.

  And then there are the retirees, who are plentiful in our town. They live here full-time or part-time, or visit to learn how to build wooden boats. Some are prosperous, but not at all like the preppies of the yacht club. Mostly they are friendly and thrifty and live in small houses for which they saved carefully. They have hobbies and routine walks and road association meetings until they pass away or move to the assisted living facility two towns over, where they smartly put down a deposit years ago.

  Our house was built by a retired carpenter, whose career had robbed him of a couple of fingers, and his wife, a quilter and crafter. They had a business making and selling “primitives”—new pieces of furniture that are designed to look like antiques. The house was the same: built ten years ago to look two hundred years old by the carpenter himself, with iron door latches and a huge cooking fireplace in the wooden-beamed “keeping room.” They had planned to spend the rest of their lives there, but they changed their mind.

  The house stands above a shallow muddy bay. When we first saw it, the bay was barely visible through the screen of trees and mosquitoes. It was low tide and slimy with rockweed and so it made me think of my bog back in rural western Massachusetts. The house sits at the end of a road that we share with a small colony of other small houses hiding elsewhere in the woods. The road is gravel and dirt and privately maintained. It is topped with a material called rotten rock. I am told that that is the good stuff.

  The first week we spent in our new/old house in Maine we had a bad mosquito problem and no furniture. We would hide in the kitchen, leaning on the counters. My wife was in bliss, and I was in despair. She had spent the first decade and a half of our marriage in Massachusetts. As much as she enjoyed it (or lied about enjoying it), it was always my mom’s world and then mine. It was right and fair now to move to her world. But when I woke up in this unknown country on a mattress on the floor, I felt like a mail-order groom.

  One afternoon a man appeared at our door. He was an older, hobbitish man in seersucker shorts. He said his name was Percy, and he was there to invite us to a party. His eyes were bright and clever, and the whole thing had a fantasy novel quality to it. So when he suggested we join him at his house next door for a cocktail with the rest of the road association, I said yes. I felt I had a pretty good chance of eating some magical cakes or being transformed into a donkey.

  The next day my wife and children and I dressed up (that is, wore socks) and walked on the soft bed of pine needles through the trees to Percy’s little cottage. It was only a few steps from ours, but I had never noticed it before. Part of me wondered if it had even been there yesterday. And then we walked inside, and the fantasy novel turned into a horror novel.

  I have since come to know and adore my neighbors. They have only been kind and they are all interesting and accomplished people. They have never burned our house down during the off-season and I hope they won’t after they have read this account of my first experience of them, colored as it was by my own insecurities at the time, and also maybe Percy had enthralled me with the dark magic of the undead.

  So with that preface I will say: walking through Percy’s door was like waking an ancient pack of vampires. All of our neighbors are older than we are, and all turned at once as my little family entered the darkened kitchen. The sunlight from the door behind us lit up their faces and glowed in their eyes. Some of the older pairs of eyes fixed upon our children with surprise and dawning memory. It was as if we had presented them with a pair of dolls from their own childhoods that they had thought long lost. I remember you, their faces seemed to say. I thought we had burned you when the scarlet fever came.

  My son and daughter looked up and begged with their eyes to be allowed to run away as fast as possible. I granted that permission, and once they both fled, I turned to accept the martini that Percy offered me and allowed them to pull me into their world.

  We all sat on Percy’s screen porch. It was high tide on the bay, the water flat and nickel colored. My neighbors introduced themselves. Here was Clark, head of the road association and a retired pastor. Here was his wife, Diane, a retired travel agent. Percy had largely retired from his catering business in Boston but still taught the occasional cooking class in his home for the local ladies of Maine. Dan and Louise were younger. He works at an auction house. She has corgis. As I listened to this I smiled, but locked my eyes onto my wife’s. What have you done to me? I screamed telepathically. I don’t belong here! I am young! I am cool! This time last year I was getting high in a river making cairns!

  My wife did not hear me. Because there is no such thing as telepathy or vampires. And of course, I did belong there.

  There are times when all the lies you have told about yourself to yourself just fall away. In your twenties, you tell yourself the lie that you are unusual, unprecedented, and interesting. You do this largely by purchasing things or stealing things. You adorn yourself with songs and clothes and borrowed ideas and poses. In your thirties, you tell yourself the lie that you are still in your twenties. Many in their forties tell themselves the same lie, until a moment like this, and suddenly you see yourself clearly. Yes, I went to see Public Enemy in a small club in 1990 by myself, which was pretty cool of me; but less cool now that I remember I saw them at Toad’s Place in New Haven while attending Yale University. Yes, I shoplifted some off-brand beers and snuck into the London Zoo when I was in my twenties; but only now do I realize that I did so with full, if unconscious, confidence that I would not be executed in the street for doing these things. Yes, my parents came from modest working middle-class families, but I have never truly wanted for anything in my life. I do not say these things to flay myself for my many privileges, just to draw out the truth and see it. I opened this book by apologizing for my beard, but the fact is that we can only grow the beards we can. This is my life, and even my beard is a lie if you look at it plainly. I do not look like the Church of Satan’s bookkeeper. I look much more like the IT guy for Duck Dynasty. And there, on Percy’s screen porch, I knew exactly what I was: a forty-five-year-old wealthy white Bostonian who had gone north for vacation, here to a cold dark place, gripping a martini, surrounded by his people but not speaking to them, simply staring over nickel gray cold water that I would never, ever swim in.

  When we got home from Percy’s house, our children kept their distance from us. It stayed that way for the rest of the summer. One could argue, as my wife did, that it was just a case of age-appropriate self-individuation. I think they smelled death on us. Either way, our son spent much of his time playing alone in the yard. Our daughter would set out alone on her bike many mornings and ride the two miles into the little town. There is a cemetery there where a famous writer is buried. She would visit his grave and put a little stone on the headstone, as is the custom. Or maybe she danced on it. I don’t know. I didn’t go with her. She didn’t need her old man to go have graveyard fun anymore.

  So Thin Is the Skin of My People

  The famous writer who is buried in our town also lived there. I had no idea of this when we bought our house. B
ecause he is one of my wife’s favorite writers, you might presume that our move to this town was a simple case of spousal manipulation. But she also didn’t know. That was the way the famous writer wanted it. He was private. When asked once by the New York Times where he lived, he said he lived in a town on the East Coast “somewhere between Nova Scotia and Cuba.” I won’t tell you either.

  My wife was raised by her father to respect the privacy of the people of Maine. Know where the property lines are. Don’t ask people about their health. Don’t go near lobster buoys because if your boat fouls their lines you will be marked for death. When hiring someone to do a job, don’t ask how much it will cost. That kind of curiosity will mark you as an outsider.

  And it was true that first summer, when we had to hire people to fill up propane tanks (again!) and do all the other things we couldn’t, the very idea of openly trading money for services was treated like a confusing breach of etiquette.

  We wanted some trees cut down, for example, so we could see the muddy bay a little and deny the mosquitos some small percentage of still air and damp nesting pools. We followed the rules, naturally. We had a local forest warden come out first. Mostly you can defile your property however you want in Maine. If your neighbor, for example, clear-cuts the forest on his land and erects a goofy giant Lincoln Log house with a golden cupola on it, there is no homeowners’ association to step in and police their awful taste. Even if they put a pen out and fill it with llamas and donkeys, that is their strange, private universe they are building, and it must not be disturbed. You must train yourself to not hear or see or smell it. But within seventy-five feet of the shore, state regulations kick in regarding drainage and runoff. You cannot denude the shoreline the way the first generation of ravaging wealthy Bostonians did, casting their perfect lawns to the sea. The forest warden tramped through our small strip of woods, inspecting the trees and their age, measuring their distance from each other, tying bows on those that must be kept; the rest were dead or dense enough to be doomed.

  My wife’s uncle suggested we call a person named Jerry to cut down the trees. I was told to call, not text or email. I did so and left a voicemail message. It was very quaint and time-travelly. But Jerry did not call back. Days later, we were considering who else to call when Jerry just drove up in his truck. He was a tall, lanky guy in his thirties. His visit amounted to him looking at the woods, saying, “Yup,” and then driving away. We didn’t discuss money.

  Days passed again. We were confused. Had Jerry forgotten about us? Had he gotten another job? Should I put some pressure on him? Is another voicemail enough? Do I need to go so far as to send him a fax?

  Then that morning we woke up to a buzzing, then that sharp, hollow baseball-bat-crack of a trunk giving way, followed by the cascading tumult and crash of treefall, sounding almost like surf. Jerry had come to cut down our woods. We ran downstairs. It was like Christmas, except in this case Santa has a chainsaw and you get to kill a whole lot of pine trees instead of just one.

  Jerry came cutting for two days. Then he disappeared again for a while. Then he came back for a third day. When Jerry was cutting we canceled our morning plans to watch from the screen porch. It was like a monster was crashing through the woods. You couldn’t see the monster, only the trees shuddering first at the top, and then collapsing in its wake. Every now and then, though, we could hear Jerry laugh. Or a falling tree would reveal him with his boots and his gloves and his chainsaw. Maybe I saw him wearing eye protection, but I can’t be sure. He was just alone, unaided, happily fighting with a forest.

  Eventually Jerry cut up all the trunks and stacked the wood for us and went away. Some days later, almost as an afterthought, he came back with a number on a piece of paper. I don’t remember it, but it was very low. In honor of ancient technology I wrote him a check, which he put in his jeans pocket and left. We barely spoke.

  At first I thought Jerry was so distant because we were from away. But after watching him cut I decided that it was simply that he didn’t have time to waste on us. He liked cutting down trees (and whatever else he liked when he went back to his own private world) and he was not going to spend a lot of time opening up to me when the days in Maine shorten so quickly.

  Eventually my wife and I began to suspect that her father’s reverence for privacy, his fear of being branded an outsider, was really a trick he used to mask his own desire to be left alone. Which is, of course, what makes him native.

  The famous writer was not a native Mainer. He was from New York. But he found in Maine the same thing my father-in-law and my wife discovered and that Jerry was born into: a love of the natural world, and a desire to keep human interaction to a minimum. He was already famous when he worked in New York, but he did not want to be. When people would come to see him in New York, he would flee his office using the fire escape. When he moved to Maine he avoided most weddings and other large gatherings. He raised chickens. Once he wrote about how his hens had lain surplus eggs, but he would not take them to sell at the town store out of some opaque combination of reticence, shame, and shyness that my wife cannot quite figure out because he didn’t bother to describe it, really. It was as if to describe that part of himself would be the same as pointing out that he was born with a nose and still had it and used it to breathe: needless words.

  Look. I’m not going to be cute. You can figure out who I am talking about very easily. You can figure out the name of his town, and then you can find that town, and you can come and murder me and my family.

  But you will gain no happiness from doing that, and I trust that you won’t. One thing I’ve learned in the public eye is that if you give people a measure of trust not to invade your privacy, they largely don’t. (It helps if you are only book famous and not actually famous. And no matter how close I might have come to being the latter, the fact that I am writing to you now proves I will always actually be the former.)

  The famous writer eventually died, and his house was put up for sale without ceremony. He did not want it to become a museum. A married couple who are not famous writers bought it and live there still. And whether out of special respect for their privacy or the famous writer’s legacy of same, or just out of decency, the location of this particular local point of interest is not celebrated and definitely not advertised. It’s usually not discussed at all. It was a long time before we knew about the house, and longer before we knew where it was. But eventually the information was slipped to us, and we received it as a gift of trust. When my wife’s mother came to visit that first summer, she asked that we take her to the famous writer’s house to take a picture. My wife told her, “No.” This gave my wife tremendous pleasure for many complicated reasons.

  When we learned the location of the famous writer’s house, we realized we had been driving by it all the time for weeks. Now that we knew, we would not even slow down as we drove by. We would catch little flashes of it in the corners of our eyes, assembling an image of it, piece by piece, into something we could look at in our minds later.

  Over time, my wife received more information about the house. She did not ask anyone—she is her father’s daughter. She gleaned. From many conversations around town, she pieced together a story that grew in the telling each time we drove by. The couple who lived there were older than us. They were childless. The house was getting to be too much for them. They would be selling it soon. But they were waiting for the right person. They were waiting for someone who knew how special the house was. The kind of person who reads aloud from the writer’s books to her husband in the car, and they both fight off tears, because of the kinship that she feels for this writer and his love of Maine. And when the current owners find that person, they will sell it to her. And it won’t matter that she and her husband had just bought a home in the same town and cannot afford a third summer home. Because they were going to sell it to her for a single dollar.

  My wife’s information was not accurate. First of a
ll, no one told my wife that the house would be sold for a dollar except her own hoping brain. And second of all, the couple who own the house definitely have children, as I would soon learn. My wife’s delusion was born only out of an affection for the famous writer, which also extends to his heirs, who still live in town and deserve their privacy. And her affection also extends to the couple who own the house now, whom we’ve never met, whose own affection for its legacy is shown by their immaculate upkeep of it. It’s not a museum, but it is perfectly preserved. Or maybe, unlike us, they are simply not garbage people who do deserve to own a home. Whatever the case, I ask only that my neighbors in town do not blame my wife for what I am about to reveal, or for the fact that I’ve already said too much.

  I wasn’t going to write about the famous writer at all. But I was thinking of him last summer while sitting on the screen porch. It was the same porch where we had watched Jerry tear through our woods, but now we were in the middle of a different reaping. Two black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, had just been killed by the police in rapid succession in Louisiana and Minnesota, respectively. Their deaths were the most recent iteration of a pattern of similar killings of unarmed people of color stretching shamefully far back, and reaching far nearer in time than most white people wanted to admit. If you were not a victim of the pattern—and statistically speaking, if you are white, you weren’t—it was easy not to see it. It was easy to picture the news of each killing as unconnected points, distant and discrete stars out there in space that we could only see fuzzily from a distance, and behind which, we would console ourselves, lurked no angels.