A Boat Called "Agitator": An Account Of My Weekend

I woke up in Portland (ME) at 6:30 a.m. on Friday and checked out bus schedules and campgrounds. I picked, pretty much at random, Keene's Lake Family Campground in Calais (pronounced "callous"). There was a bus leaving at noon. It sounded good. I went back to sleep, and woke up at 10 a.m. I packed and found myself, for no apparent reason, a little panicked. As though there would be severe penalties for missing that bus. As though staying in Portland were a fate worse than death.

To get to Calais I took the bus from Portland to Bangor. I took Concord Trailways, because I thought it was a through bus. In fact, I had to change buses in Bangor. Concord Trailways gives you bottled water and pretzles when you ride its buses. Everybody was white on Concord Trailways.

I had an hour in Bangor. I ate a lobster roll and purchased supplies for the campground (lots of Spaghetti-Os, a couple of oranges, some wine in a box). To get to Calais, I took West Bus. The Discovery Pass doesn't work on West Bus. You have to pay cash to ride West Bus. It was a small bus. Midway through, the bus driver stopped to pick up his kid. The bus driver said that we were the quietest group of passengers he had ever had. We all appeared to be smokers.

Everybody but me got off the bus in Machias. I had no idea where I was. When we got to Calais at 7 p.m. the bus driver pointed out that Canada was right across the river. I was surprised. I had dinner at a road house (scallops) and took a taxi out to the campsite. I should say here that both taxi drivers that I used in Calais, as well as the West Bus driver, had the radio going loudly in the background. I feel there may be some sociological significance to this.

It was 8 or 9 p.m. when I got to the campground. Hard to tell, because my cellphone kept flickering to some later, Canadian, time. It was raining. But they told me I could still go swimming in the lake, and so I did. The lake was grand. I floated on my back and looked up at the sliver of moon. Later, on the phone, someone told me that it was the perfect opening to a horror movie. That made me a little uneasy.

The campground was mostly trailers. It reminded me of the vacation spots of my youth. The owners had been there for five years; the patriarch was an ex-firefighter from Mass. who had always dreamed of owning a campground. He said that a lot of people kept their trailers there year round, and would come down for weekends in the summer. He said everybody moved closer to the lake as spots opened up. Some had been coming for twenty years. Most of the regulars were Canadians, he said. We talked about Canadians a little bit. From my cabin, I could hear the couple at the next site switching back and forth from English to French. They had their fire going; I watched the father try to start it while the kids kept running around, calling his attention to things: rocks, bugs, animal imitations. I bought wood and a starter log at the store myself, and, for the first time in my life, tried to build a campfire. It didn't work out, but not in any kind of interesting madcap way. The logs smoldered a bit and I sat there and tried to arrange kindling. It was a pretty fun way to pass time, actually.

I'm back in Portland; tomorrow the bus pass comes to an end. I suspect it may not work anymore -- the pass says Expires May 25. But one way or another, I'll be heading back to Kingston (NY). I'm feeling a little at sea.

Maine, by the way, is every bit as beautiful as it is popularly supposed to be, and I highly recommend it.