by John Hodgman
But with the iPhone, Steve Jobs stole the internet from the desktops of the relatively few white nerds who had previously dominated its user base and put it in the hands of millions more. And many of those hands—soon the majority in the US—are brown. There is no privacy anymore. With a civilian surveillance device in everyone’s hands, the pattern could not be hidden, not even in Maine. We had video. We could see the similarity of the killings as they tumbled one after one into our feeds, the specific details, mitigating circumstances, and tragic split-second decisions blurring into what couldn’t be denied: a pattern, self-similar and replicating, seemingly infinite and seemingly unstoppable . . . an ugly fractal of injustice with cruel edges, twisting in on itself, choking out life.
You had to see it, though many tried not to and tried hard. In different parts of the world, protests sprung up to defend the humanity of the specific people who had been killed, as well as non-white people everywhere. Some white people found that standing up for the humanity of non-white people somehow threatened their humanity, and made a point of saying so on the internet. They fought the Black Lives Matter idea with a fervor that was unseemly and dumb. It reminded me of the offense I took when I realized I would not live forever: how dare you suggest I am not the hero of this story? I am a straight white man! I have been right at the center of this culture for a long time, and now you ask me to be quiet for a few days to listen to someone else’s experience? Look, I know that you will soon outnumber me, and my ability to define reality will soon disappear, but not yet! I am still here! YOU NEED TO LISTEN TO ME THAT MY LIFE MATTERS BECAUSE I AM SECRETLY NOT SURE OF IT ANYMORE! I’M STILL COOL! I’M STILL RELEVANT! HERE ARE HORRIBLE, BADLY DESIGNED MEMES TO PROVE IT! It wasn’t just aging guys like me anymore; it was as if all of Whiteness was going through a desperate midlife crisis.
I was ashamed. Even after a summer in Maine, at the tannest I would ever get, you could see the blue veins in my forearms, so thin is the skin of my people. But I felt worse because I knew where I was. The killings and their aftermaths were on the internet. The internet was in my lap on my screen porch in Maine, 94 percent white as of 2013. And if I closed my laptop, I could make it all vanish.
Maine is a tolerant place. It has a wide range of political thought and lifestyles within it, generally moderated by a “let’s not talk about politics (or pretty much anything)” policy suitable to the region’s temperament. The coast has a leftward lean (where it is not inhabited by Bushes), with our peninsula long attracting artists and freethinkers, including a bakery staffed by elfin, starry-eyed young people that I am pretty sure is a free love cult. Sometime after I first met our neighbors, the non-vampires, I learned that our private, rotten rock road, which I had taken as a symbol of my journey into dull, conservative adulthood, was actually named for Mildred Harris, who with her life partner Fredda Goetz built their house on the road in the 1970s. Fredda was an artist and a Red Sox Fan, Mildred a physical therapist and expert in Jungian analysis. As far as I can tell, they were well liked and their partnership utterly uncontroversial in town. Their final years were spent on their lobster boat ordering their hired captain around as they went out in search of mackerel. I have been on that boat since. It’s an honest and unflashy craft, never used for lobstering, purposed unapologetically to spending time while it lasted with beloved things, and I take it as a reminder to never underestimate the cool of your elders. They might be a kickass pair of lesbian superwomen who lived exactly the fuck the way they wanted to, even in what we now consider to be less enlightened times.
What’s more, there are sizable communities of immigrants from Somalia, Rwanda, and other African countries that are invigorating failing towns like Lewiston and offering even additional vibrancy to Portland, a city that is so young and vibrant and cool that it is known as the Portland, Oregon, of Maine.
But this is also true: Maine’s governor at this writing is a foul-mouthed bigot who openly accuses black men of crossing the southern border into Maine specifically to sell drugs and have sex with white women. And well before there was the Trump Administration there was the Paul LePage constituency, which also took root in a white, conservative working class who had lost their manufacturing jobs and were watching their kids succumb to an epidemic of heroin. I’m not suggesting that LePage voters are necessarily racist. I would posit that even those of my neighbors who are racist would not act upon those prejudices. They would probably offer a person of color from away the same taciturn blank stare they offer me. The difference is that I never have to worry about whether someone is a racist, because I am white. And the racists rarely need to worry about racism either, because, just speaking statistically, there are hardly any other races to see.
I have picked up hitchhikers twice in my life, both in Maine. The first time was a young couple who flagged us down as we were driving the loop road in Acadia National Park. They had gotten lost hiking and were looking for a ride back to the parking lot.
When they got in the car they said, “Are you John Hodgman?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Oh, wow,” they said, “we are huge fans of your podcast.”
I said, “This must be very surprising for you.”
“It is!” they said.
“What makes it even stranger,” I said, “is that usually it’s the hitchhikers who end up murdering the driver. And not the other way around, like this time!”
It was just another example of the wit and wisdom of me at my finest. I didn’t murder them. We met up again later in Brooklyn, because of course that is where they live.
The second time I picked up a hitchhiker was last summer. We were driving out to see my father-in-law. It was a hot day. We were not far from the Kingdom Property and the yacht club when we saw a black woman in her twenties had her thumb out. This was such a profoundly uncommon thing to see that it unnerved us. We worried she was in trouble. She wasn’t. She sighed happily as she climbed into the AC of our car.
“Phew,” she said. She told us she was going just a few miles up the way to her parents’ house.
“Do you not have a car?” I asked.
“Not anymore,” she said. “But I usually get a ride. I’m pretty well known around here.”
Once in Bar Harbor I saw an older, affluent black couple sitting on the porch of the ice-cream parlor. They were on the same side of the table, facing out toward the town green. They were just silently watching the parade of well-heeled Caucasians walk by. They were sharing a vanilla ice-cream cone. I could not guess what they were thinking about.
Maine is a beautiful place that I paradoxically want to hoard to myself and share with everyone I meet. But that day on the screen porch I thought, shamefully for the first time, about what it would be like to be a non-white person visiting Maine. How it might be glorious and wonderful, but necessarily complicated to see so little of yourself. I knew, shamefully for the first time, that when I closed the internet today, I could go out into my community and never have to think about race for another second of the day. I don’t know what about that particular day on the screen porch made me feel this so keenly. I should have known it all along.
That summer I thought about the famous writer in a new way. It won’t surprise you to know that he is white, and he wrote about the rhythms of his life in this white place. There is nothing wrong in this: all places and experiences deserve writing about. But what made the writer a greater hero to me in that moment was, unlike so many white men, he wasn’t braggy. He never suggested that his experience was heroic, or correct, or even unusual. In fact, it was profoundly usual, beautifully mundane, and merely his to offer. His offering was his insight into the small joys of his particular life, which by extension could help us recognize the small joys that exist everywhere, even outside of Maine. And he offered it humbly. You really should use your detective skills and find his work. He’s great.
We who are white men can’t change who we
are. But we could do worse than to follow what I took that summer as his example: to be aware of and curious about the world around you, to give what you have with neither apology nor self-congratulation. When praise comes to see you, get out on the fire escape. When it’s someone else’s time to talk, listen. Don’t turn your house into a museum. When your work is done, get out of the way.
I resolved to be disciplined in following this lesson. But then someone posted a photo on the internet that made me mad. It was some weeks later, and because it was summer in Maine, my wife had built a huge fire in the fireplace. I was lying on the sofa and I wanted to see what photos people had taken of this part of Maine so I did a search for our peninsula on a popular social media platform. Mostly I found a bunch of rocky beaches and kayaks and docks and buoys and junk. Someone was taking pictures of food and dogs, of course. Someone was posting pictures of their cracked foundation. And then I saw the young couple standing in front of a porch, arm in arm, smiling for the camera. I knew that porch, even if I had only seen it in dozens of split-second drive-bys. And in case I wasn’t sure, the photo was named, tagged, and pinned on a map: it was the house of the famous writer.
How do I describe this couple without invading their privacy? They were young, white, beautiful, and happy. The account belonged to the beautiful young woman. The caption suggested the handsome young man on her arm was related to the current owners, who clearly did have children after all. I scrolled deeper into her feed. They were clearly about to graduate from college, or had done so recently. They were travelers: here they were in Europe, here they were at an American country club, here they were on a beach, here they were in the mountains, each jaunt posted just days after the last. Either the photos had been stored up, or they were speeding through the world on an insane grand tour.
They were doing nothing wrong. They were reveling in the joys of their particular lives, and they were sharing their selfie-triumphs with a verve entirely common to their age. It was wrong for me to think that they were embodying the worst of whiteness: the casual, unquestioning acceptance of good fortune, in the form of money, perhaps, or opportunity, or skin that lets you pass through the world with a smile, or a house in Maine, famous for someone else’s work, and passing it off as if you earned it all yourself, or were beyond earning, simply deserving. Did they think this way? Who knows? Perhaps they are more woke than I will ever be. Was I any better than they? I was worse, because I was the creep stalking them then and writing about them now. But I could not help but feel desperate and mad. Not only had they revealed the secret of the famous writer’s house, but they would possibly live in it one day, and they would not sell it to my wife for a dollar.
I shared this with my wife. She instructed me that I should just forget it, and I should have listened to her. But Handsome Young Man and Beautiful Young Woman haunted me. One evening I went deeper into the feed than I had ever gone before. I was like Ant-Man at the end of Ant-Man, shrinking deeper and deeper into the dark microverse, where I finally found a photo, taken at the house, that pushed me over the edge, into a new, previously undiscovered dimension of smallness.
There is a famous photo of the famous writer at work. He is sitting at a manual typewriter in a plain shed, a bare plank for a desk and not even a window so much as a square hole in the wall open to the water and sky. The shed, apparently, is still there. Beautiful Young Woman took a picture of herself sitting at the plank, pretending to write: a replica of the older photo. She placed the two images together. “Here is a photo of the author writing all their famous novels and essays,” she wrote. “And here is an old man sitting in the same place.”
I saw this, and I did the wrong thing. I scrolled down and left a comment. I will not reveal what I said, because it is a direct reference to the famous writer’s work. Oh, it was very clever. My internet comment was literary and oblique, a deft critique of hubris and odious comparison. But all it really was was an insult.
I am the villain of this story. I was a forty-five-year-old man trolling a young woman in her twenties who was simply making a joke. I guess I just wanted to explain to her everything that was wrong with the way she saw the world and was living her life. Just like every other dude on the internet! After all, there is no mansplaining like white mansplaining, because white mansplaining don’t stop. My insulting her was an insult also to the famous writer and my own soul. But I won’t lie. I did it. I am ashamed to admit that it took me twenty-four hours to delete my comment.
I hope she and her young man have a wonderful time visiting and later owning the house of the famous writer. I am grateful to be reminded of how vigilant I need to be about my skin and its thinness and the responsibilities both entail. I apologize to her for what I said, and I apologize to her and to the owners of the house for apologizing here. I couldn’t do it in the comments. Because a few days later, I noticed she had gone private.
You Are Normal People
In the middle of our first summer in Maine, as our children ignored us, something happened. Left to our own devices, my wife and I fulfilled our Caucasian class destiny in the most loathsome way possible. I feel embarrassed even now admitting to you what we did. But I have promised to be truthful, and so I now confess: we bought a boat.
In our defense, I offer that (a) it is not a yacht or anything: just a thirteen-foot rowboat, and (b) we bought it by accident. I’m sure you have also bought a boat by accident, so at the risk of boring you, here is our story.
As July ended, flyers started going up outside the general stores of our town and many more around it. The flyers advertised a charity auction to be held some Saturdays from now to benefit a church whose roof was failing. People had donated many things to be auctioned, but the premier item was a wooden Jimmy Steele peapod.
You don’t know what a Jimmy Steele peapod is because you are a normal person. I did not know what it was either. But as conversation spread across the peninsula about the auction and the peapod, I learned. A peapod is a style of rowboat that is about twelve to fifteen feet long and pointed on both ends, like a peapod. (Get it?) It is very typical to this stretch of Maine, because it is very stable and heavy, good in choppy waters and rowable in both directions. It can also take a very rudimentary, boomless sail called a spritsail, which is a word I just learned. Before there were motors, it was the traditional craft of the Maine lobsterman. He would stand up, rowing his peapod into and out of the coves with long oars, hauling up lobster pots, his foot braced flat on the gunwale, which is another word I just learned, without fear of tipping. And then he could bring up the sail and let the prevailing winds carry him back to shore, thus making a living entirely on his own, almost without ever having to see or speak to another human ever in his life, which I am convinced is the secret dream of every person in Maine.
I have mentioned that ours is a town of boatbuilders, many employed by the big former cannery that was transformed in the ’60s by the son of the famous writer into a boatbuilding yard. The son of the famous writer did not want to write. He wanted to design and build wooden boats in the traditional style, and he is famous for doing exactly that. The boatyard along with the boatbuilding school he also helped to found are a double mecca for the weird dads who follow that sort of thing. But the town is also home to many solo wooden boatbuilders, and one of those was Jimmy Steele, whose old workshop still sits at the head of the flat, muddy bay.
Jimmy Steele died in 2007. He built not only boats but also a lot of the homes in town, including Percy’s. Everyone has a story about him, and the impending sale of one of his peapods shook them out of people’s memories. As you know, I am changing the names of many people in this book, but I will identify my neighbor Brian Larkin, because I think he’d enjoy it, and he has taken us out on his own boat to many interesting islands, and if he’s wrong about any of this I want him to take the blame. Brian is also a boatbuilder. One day he realized he was running low on white oak, which is a kind of wood, I guess. Don’
t ask me. I am not a builder of traditional wooden boats.
Brian went to Jimmy’s workshop and asked his neighbor if he could buy some white oak off of him. Jimmy told Brian he was not in the business of selling fucking lumber, so get out. Brian, who is native to Maine, seemed to anticipate this possible response and, thus, politely got the fuck out.
The next day, Brian was at work when he heard the noise of an engine outside his shop. It was Jimmy Steele in his truck. His truck was full of white oak. Jimmy Steele dumped the wood into Brian’s dooryard and said, “There’s your goddamned wood.”
I like to think about what happened in the brain of Jimmy Steele during the hours that passed between Brian getting the fuck out and the dumping of the goddamned wood. I like to think that Brian’s simple request made Jimmy angry not merely because it was an intrusion, but because it added a chore to his life that he did not choose for himself. And yet once the request fell upon his brain, he could not stop thinking about it. It became a curse of neighborly obligation that could not be lifted until he dumped the magic wood. And then he would be free again to go back into his solitude and next time not answer the door. I don’t know if Jimmy Steele thought that way. But I like to think he did, because that’s how I think a lot of the time, and I want to feel normal. And it would prove my maxim about favors, which is the exact opposite of what your encouraging parents have always told you: it does, in fact, always hurt to ask.