Vroom with A View

By Barbara Feinman

BANGOR, MAINE – There aren’t a lot of people in Maine, and there are even fewer Miatas. In fact, there isn’t a surplus of much up here, except lovely views, black flies, cheap lobsters, and good roads to explore.

For as long as I can remember I’ve had this romantic notion of living in New England, driving along winding coastal roads, a perfect blend of nature and technology. So when the executive editor of The Bangor Daily News asked me to come be the newspaper’s summer writing coach, I accepted immediately, visions of lighthouses and Longfellow preoccupying my thoughts.

When it was time to leave Maryland I stuffed clothes, books, etc. into every square inch of my Miata, setting out on the longest trip I’d ever driven solo–more than 700 miles. Because I have a highly developed aptitude for losing my way I make a point of bringing along a navigator on excursions farther than the video store. But there wasn’t room for a passenger and I knew, once and for all, it was time to confront my cartophobia.

“It’s easy,” my sister said, “You don’t even need a map. Just go north. If you hit Canada you’ll know you went too far.”

Thanks for the advice, sis.

A few days later I arrived in Bangor–a sprawling metropolis famous for Paul Bunyon, home of horror writer Stephen King, and also the final stop on Greyhound’s bus line.

My boss had invited me to stay at his home until I found a place to live. Before I began my apartment search I needed a day of acclimation–get my bearings, as my father would say. Come to think of it, I’ve yet to see my father lose his bearings. He’s the kind of guy who drives with one of those dashboard compasses; not because he needs it, but just in case.

When I turned the key to get in the trunk the latch failed to release. My boss gave it a try. Still no action. There’s nothing like not being able to get at your toothbrush after spending two days on the interstate.

“I read about this in a Miata newsletter,” I told my boss, jiggling the key compulsively. “Defective trunk locks are not unheard of.” It was Saturday. Forty-eight hours till I could seek professional help. And of course, I noted to myself wearily, my warranty had run out. This was not boding well, karma-wise, in terms of my summer.

Monday morning first thing I drove over to the Bangor Mazda dealership. I went into my routine about how the trunk lock must have been defective, that it shouldn’t matter that the warranty had run out… The mechanic was silent as I went on and on. Finally he said, “Yup, I’ll have a look at it.”

About two minutes later he came and found me in the waiting room. “You want to see what was wrong with your trunk?”

I jumped up and followed him.

He stuck the key in the lock, smirked, and then the trunk popped open. Goose feathers flew everywhere.

“Err, I guess I packed it a little too tight,” I said, removing the culprit.

“I guess so,” he agreed, blowing a feather away from his face. “It jammed the lock.”

“Yeah,” I said, flushed. “So how much do I owe you?”

“Nothing,” he replied. “Welcome to Maine.”

As I drove off, pillow now safely stashed in the front seat, I looked in my rearview mirror and saw he was watching me drive away, laughing and shaking his head.

“Welcome to Maine,” I mumbled, remembering the state slogan while plucking a goose feather out of my hair, “The way life should be.”

After I got the trunk situation resolved it was time to find a home. I circled an ad in the classifieds: “Reliable, responsible roommate needed. Room available in horse farm.” Horse farm, huh? Now that would he a Maine experience.

Forty-eight hours later I found myself settling in to my new room at the Horse Of Course horse farm in Winterport, an old village along the Penobscot River. My roommates were to be eight horses, a beagle, an Irish Wolfhound, a barn cat, and one extremely nice riding instructor named Linda, who owns and runs this place.

My Miata was an interesting addition to the collection of trucks, hay conveyors and other assorted contraptions that cluttered the barnyard. In fact, my car was a conversation piece for the endless stream of equestrians, potato farmers and neighbors stopping by for a cup of coffee.

The attention my car attracted was fun, yet there were days when I would have preferred to be inconspicuous.

“Hey BLUE!” I heard someone yell as I sat at a red light in downtown Bangor one afternoon. Our police reporter and I were out on assignment. We looked over. There were two guys in a pickup truck hanging out the window. Emphasis on pickup.

“Yeah?” “What kinda car is that?”

When I replied they looked the car over, then us. “Ya wanna trade?”

“I could use a truck,” I said, shrugging. The sting of my jammed trunk had not completely worn off. The light changed and I moved to shift into gear.

As I drove off we could hear him yell, “You want to go for a motorcycle ride?”

A friend from New York came to visit towards the end of my stay here. She craved a few days away from the city and the humidity, and she wanted to make the most of her temporary liberation while her two teenage sons were at camp. She told them she was going up to Maine to drive around with the top down on her friend’s Miata–summer camp for adults.

The weather cooperated, delivering four days of perfect cruising conditions. I charted a route up and down the coast of Maine, and armed with my newly honed navigational skills and a Maine road atlas, we set off. My friend, Flip, spent a lot of her time, eyes closed, smiling, enjoying the sea air as we zoomed along.

“LOOK!”, I would yell, whenever I noticed a particularly beautiful view. She would open her big green eyes, peer out at the ocean, and then with the serenity of a Trappist monk, she would smile and gently let her lids slip shut again.

During our four-day road trip we passed a few Miatas here and there. “Why do you wave at some Miatas and not others?” she said, momentarily rallying from her zen coma.

“Well, you’re supposed to wave,” I explained. “It’s like a secret fraternity or something. But sometimes I can tell that the driver isn’t going to wave back, so I don’t wave.”

Flip was silent, eyebrows raised. “You always wave at other blue Miatas,” she pointed out, trying to identify a pattern. “Well yeah, because there’s a special bond there.”

At this, she couldn’t help herself, sighing, eyes rolling dramatically.

She may have outwardly mocked my Miata fever, but by the end of the trip I could tell Flip was secretly coveting my car. We stopped at one of those scenic overlooks and sat watching the water. “It’s perfect,” she murmured, eyes fixed on the waves pounding the shore. “Perfect.”

One of our final stops was an L.L. Bean outlet. When we returned to the parking lot with our loot we tried to jam cotton blankets and flannel shirts into the trunk. I remembered the pillow incident and warned Flip against over-stuffing. If we couldn’t fit everything in the trunk we were going to have to put the top up and use the back shelf for storage, I remarked.

“No,” she said firmly, shoving packages around fiercely, “whatever happens, the top stays down.”

Whatever happened, I couldn’t go back to the dealer with a stuck trunk again. Where’s a guy with a pickup truck when you need him, I thought.

 

Rides of Joy

By Barbara Feinman

“I kind of feel sorry for you,” my neighbor said to me. Her husband was underneath my house, trying to turn off the water. We were huddled in the kitchen by the stove, trying to pretend the house wasn’t freezing. It was the middle of winter and another pipe had frozen and burst. We could hear rushing water below the floorboards.

“I mean, here you decide to move out to the country and we have the coldest winter in … well, EVER” She tried to hold back a giggle, but it was too late. I started to hum my favorite Billie Holiday song, “Everything Happens to Me.

It had seemed like a good idea back in October. Give up my apartment in Washington and move out to the country for six months or so. My siblings and I own an old captain’s house on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, along a river that feeds into the Chesapeake Bay. I’d go live in the house (nearly 200 years old) and write. That’s what writers do, I told myself; they move out to the country, and they think, and they watch the birds, and they hoe beans, and they write. You know, Walden and Henry David Thoreau and all that. I would do the zen thing. No more honking cars, only honking geese. No more sirens in the night. It sounded idyllic.

That was before the ice storms, the snow-storms, the frozen pipes, the burst pipes, the electricity (and heat) cutting off overnight, the tree blowing down, more snowstorms, the wild bird coming down the chimney and flying madly around (and then dying under my bed) … And to top it all off, my Miata wasn’t in its element, to say the least. It was the first garaged winter of its pampered four-year existence. My driveway’s slight incline made any amount of snowfall a considerable obstacle. Part of my daily January routine became trying to dig my car out, wheels spinning, snow spraying. The neighborhood kids, liberate from school by the weather, would look up when they heard me cursing. The hill in front of my house, which overlooks Blackbird Marsh, was the perfect toboggan run.

“Come on,” one of them would invariably say, abandoning his Flexible Flyer. “Let’s go push her out again.” The good news was that while my little car with its rear wheel drive didn’t fare so well in the snow, it was light enough for four medium-sized kids to rescue with relative ease. Each day I would skid around town, coming home with groceries, the news-paper and a bag of cookies for the sledders. I would invent errands — my cabin fever increasing exponentially.

At first I told concerned friends from the city who called that I “felt like a pioneer, that it was a real adventure.” But as the days turned to weeks and fresh snow kept falling, I grew less enthralled. About that time, I began to covet every four wheel drive vehicle that drove past my house. But I couldn’t afford two cars, and I could never do the unthinkable…

‘Spring is only thirty-nine days away,’ I would tell myself; looking out at the frozen marsh. But somewhere deep within my soul I feared that Spring just wouldn’t happen, that some-how it would just bypass us this year altogether. My little blue car sat patiently in the driveway, covered with ice and snow, and I would shiver with empathy, obsessively imagining it with its top down. I would picture putting the top down, zipping around the back roads. It seemed three million light years away.

Three months later. There I sat in front of my computer, putting the finishing touches on a project which had completely consumed me for the last month. As I stood up from the desk I realized it was a Friday night and I had nothing to do. I felt like celebrating, but all my friends were seventy miles away. I didn’t want to drink alone. But I had to do something more exciting than laundry to mark the end of this thing. I looked out the window absently. Of course! I’d go for a drive, put the top down and head for the hills — exactly what I had fantasized about all winter.

Dusk was approaching. It was the kind of perfect day where the breeze is light, the sun feels sweet against your skin.

I made my way over the wooden bridge and on toward Spaniard’s Neck, a long, windy, lush two-lane road where you rarely encountered another car, much less a police cruiser with radar. My joy rides usually take the same route: Spaniard’s Neck to Conquest Farm. Conquest Farm is a private estate, with a long imposing driveway and vast rolling fields. To one side there stands a huge sort of barn-warehouse, filled with pigeons. I’ve never figured out what the pigeons are for. Sometimes I imagine they are carrier pigeons, trained in delivering mes-sages to star-crossed lovers. Probably not.

Across the road is a locked gate leading to Conquest Beach, which I’ve never had the nerve to climb over and explore. The view from the road is awesome enough – a beautiful, majestic vista of the river.

As I came around the bend and could see the farm in the distance, I noticed something ahead of me. I slowed down and realized it was two deer, sprinting across the road. I got closer and then cut off the engine. The deer looked at me and I looked back, realizing they were part of a large herd. I started to count: one, two, three, four, five … oh no, I thought, there are thirteen! I am horribly, excessively superstitious. Thirteen deer was a bad omen I started to recount. And then, from behind the trees, came ten more deer. Twenty-three, my lucky number! The day on which I was born. I sat. there in silence, watching the deer graze, feeling like I was on safari. They seemed unfazed by me, or the Miata, and they roamed around the field languidly. The breeze rolled in across the dashboard, there were crows cawing in the distance. The sun was beginning to set across the river.

I thought of Thoreau. His two years and two months at Walden Pond were filled with moments like these. Okay, so he didn’t drive around in a Miata, or approve of material things at all, but I’d like to think that if Thoreau had been there with me he wouldn’t have eschewed a spin in my little car. It had transcended its material worth for a moment; somehow it had led me there — reaping a chance meeting with twenty-three deer on a perfect spring evening.