Post by Grubb.
Tuesday morning we woke up to marvel at the colorful sunrise on the bay. Across the water, in Canada, the lights of St. Andrews were still twinkling through the trees.
After breakfast (banana for Ella, pistachio muffin for me), we drove up the highway eight miles and then stopped for a hike on the Devil’s Head Trail towards Brooks Bluff. Before we left Albuquerque I’d scoffed at Ella’s suggestion, er, mandate that we bring along bright orange vests because October was hunting season in Maine. (To make our trip less contentious, I bought an orange hat at the LL Bean store in Freeport.) So imagine my chagrin when we parked at the head of the trail and there was a sign warning us that we weren’t allowed on the trail unless we were wearing orange. Fine. There we were decked out in our orange finery and all I could think about was how the color made us easy targets for the psychopathic hunter, the one who bought his assault rifle for the purpose of turning humans into prey, the one who gave the name of this trail it’s due.
Fortunately, as it turned out, we had the trail to ourselves. The gun-wielding psychos had apparently bagged their limit. We were alone on a forest path that was remarkable for its fairyland undergrowth. The base of the birch trees had aprons of spongy green club moss, mouse ear mushrooms grew out of decayed stumps, and patches of bog cranberry lay like snow on the ground. I wasn’t about to miss any of this since the trail was one long arthritic tangle of roots and, if I was to avoid tripping, lowering my gaze was essential.
Before we looped back to our car we got to stop at Brooks Bluff and peek through the branches at the St. Croix River. There was a bench there that had my name on it, but I had to leave it behind. At about this time we heard rifle shots echoing through the woods.
Just because the bench had my name on it didn’t mean I wanted to die there. The bench I wanted to die on was overlooking the Adriatic on the Greek island of Hydra.