Harpswell
The world reveals itself to those who travel by foot
-Werner Herzog¹
In the summer of 2009, I was trying to volunteer building homes in Maine.
I signed up for a volunteer build day in Harpswell, Maine, a town on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. Before the build day, the logistics fell through. That meant I was at the job site, an hour and a half from where I lived, without any volunteering to do. I'd taken a bus for part of the trip, so I couldn't just drive home.
For some reason, I thought camping in the woods for the night, without a tent or whatever, was a good idea. I sat and read from a book for a bit. Nearby, I saw a piece of resin from a tree. The resin was, as I recall, roughly heart-shaped, and it reminded me of a person in whom I had a romantic interest, and whom I later dated.
I went out jogging, barefoot, up the side road, then along the main road. A ways down the main road, I saw the entrance to some kind of nature preserve or something. I ran down the entranceway, into the preserve.
The large concrete buildings in the preserve were abandoned, with broken glass around.
After a while, I ended up on a pier, surrounded by the ocean, at sunset.
I had my cell phone — a flip phone — and took some photos:
I returned to where I was thinking of camping. At one point, after it was fully dark, I was walking down the side road and looked up at the stars. It was a rural area, right near the ocean, so there wasn't much light pollution. The stars were clear, bright, and numerous.
At another point that night, I was looking out through the darkness, across a stretch of ocean to the shore on the other side. There were two points of light on the other shore, which reminded me again of that romantic interest. In my mind, the two points of light were me and her.
The night ended with me traveling in a taxi to a nearby hotel, then heading home the next day.
The next day — the day that started at the hotel — I felt a singular emotion. It was a sort of lightness and a completeness, like turning in a test at school on which you know you did well.
I conveyed that impression to my father, who told me Jack Kerouac used to say he felt "wiped clean" after his famous trips across the country. The slate was made blank, so to speak.
Later that month, I went back to the build site and actually helped build a home.
For those following along, I was being an idiot about nearly everything:
- Swinging a hammer wasn't the most efficient way for me to contribute to society at the time. I was doing a STEM degree at a fancy university and unironically should have been trying to cure a disease or something.
- I should have verified the build was going to happen
- I shouldn't have entertained free-camping in a random place
- I shouldn't have been so romantic
A market research professional once told me surveys show a highly consistent trend among people as they get older: their view of life gets more negative. I think there's danger in navigating that long slow slide without having had any idealism to begin with.
In the case of Harpswell, it's perhaps realistic to look across the lonesome vastness of the ocean and be filled with feelings of love.
Sources:
¹: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/werner-herzog-interview-on-bruce-chatwin-film-nomad