Post by Grubb.
Touring the new dimension, I’m getting used to not being thrown by the counterintuitive. As Ella covered in her blog post, waterfalls not only don’t fall, they ripple in reverse. Today (I’m guessing Monday) on our way up the coast we took a side jaunt into Eastport and discovered that although there was a commercial district, there was no commerce.
But let me backtrack. Years ago, (well, make that decades) I visited Bangor, Maine with my former wife before we drove to Campobello Island and took the ferry to Penguin Island where I sank a rowboat in the Bay of Fundy. (Safety note: when the water in the boat is above your knees and you’re pulling at oars that are afloat, start swimming.) So now with our trek through Maine I elected to skip Campobello and Canadian Customs so we could explore the more far-flung outposts.
And as we flung about, I stopped at small marina park to grab a couple more shots of yet another rocky shore with a distant view of wooded islands. Approaching the right rock for the right shot, a man with a service dog (it had an inscribed halter) came up to me and asked if I wanted an eagle feather. He looked to be in his forties only his teeth were in bad shape which made him seem older. He pointed out a fence behind a house up the shore and said an eagle liked the tree in the backyard. Offering me the eagle feather, he said he already had picked up a lot over the last few months. I said, “Enough for a headdress?” “Eh, yeah, no, enough for my regalia.” Aha, setting foot in a new world I have met royalty. And me, without any glass beads to trade! So onward, with eagle feather in hand, I joined Ella and we headed to Eastport.
The eastern-most city in the continental US, Eastport has a marina and a downtown. When we hit town there was a commercial boat at one of the docks, and a cruise liner moored inside the marina. Neither vessel showed signs of life. Half the storefronts downtown looked abandoned. The other half had shops with musty wooden interiors selling oddities like cheap tarot decks and beeswax candles, the kind of merch guaranteed to never turn a profit. If the store wasn’t empty, or a dubious enterprise possibly fronting for something more dubious, then it had a sign saying it was closed. Walking past the dilapidated brick buildings made me feel like a spectral presence, as if only ghost would wander a street where only the past had any meaning.
