ME Day 6 - A Little Bit of Germany, A Little Bit of Canada, and a Whole Lotta Nothing in the Middle of Maine
Quick Note: I'm a having some technical difficulties with my camera so the videos might not be back up for a couple of days.
I left Fryeburg and started heading back to Brunswick because I promised my parents I'd eat at a German restaurant they liked. They lived in Germany together for a while in the 80's because my mom taught elementary school kids at an American army base. It was still divided back then which is strange to think about how recent that feels. One major reason they got married when they did was actually so my dad could stay in the country since he didn't have a work visa like my mom did. I believe love was also a factor, but sometimes other things have to take precedence. Because of this they're always on the lookout for quality German food wherever they go. Jacob Wirth's in Boston is a great example if you ever get a chance to go. Easily the best German restaurant in Chinatown.
On the way, I got to have my first, and likely only, stereotypically masculine moment of this trip when I knew how to work the old timey gas pumps and got to show a couple of guys from MA who were struggling. I only knew because two days I was in the exact same boat as them, but it was fun getting to feel like I knew something about cars and could now be the protagonist of a Bruce Springsteen song.
The german restaurant, Richard's, was great, and I was glad I got to spend a little more time in Brunswick because it's a really fun city even if there weren't too many open mics there. I had mushrooms stuffed with crabmeat and a flight of real imported German beers which were all very, very good. Dunkel is also just a fun word to say.
After that, I hung out for a bit at the Little Dog Cafe. I think college must have just started up for Bowdoin, and there were a lot of students working away at laptops. It made me kind of nostalgic for college. I don't really miss frantically writing essays in coffee shops, but it sure was nice having such a large percentage of friends all in one place at the same time. That's one thing that I'm really grateful for during this trip is all the people I'm getting to see who have spread out across the country.
Properly caffeinated, I set out to see America's first mile in Fort Kent. Which as you can, see was a bit of a hike:
I made things longer for myself, by trying to see Baxter State Park. By the time, I got close to the park though, it had gotten pretty dark, and after seeing a particularly big spider at a gas station I decided I wasn't up for hiking. All stereotypical masculinity from the earlier gas station was now solidly in check.
I stopped at a little country store for dinner, and because it was so late they just let me have a couple slices of pizza and some chicken fingers for free. I was really touched by their kindness. The idea of general stores at gas stations is kinda new to me, but they're really nice environments. In MA, I'd never think to eat food from a gas station, but the quality at these little stores is so much better. They're really great for weary travelers, but I also got the impression that in some of the smaller towns near the highway where people are pretty spread out, they make for convenient community hang out spots to grab a bite and chat with friends.
I did eventually make it to the first mile landmark, right across the border from Canada. I don't know but it was kinda powerful to stand there and feel how connected we all are by these big silly highways and what a huge but worthwhile undertaking they were (even if they probably weren't great for the environment hindsight being 20/20).
Since most of my day was spent driving, my thoughts really meandered around, but here were some random thoughts that stuck out to me:
Isolation: I knew intellectually that there are places where you can drive for 20+ minutes from your house without seeing another house, but I don't think I'd ever witnessed places like that first hand. I've been a spoiled suburban brat. I got to thinking that when the amount of people you know is so small, your access to thoughts and ideas from people that are really different than yourself is also a lot smaller (not that that can't be true in big cities as well, we're a very self-selective species). But then I also got to thinking, that I never would have visited these smaller towns if some big university hadn't given me a grant to travel. This all made me realize in a way that had never occurred to me before that isolation is really a two-way street. I hear a lot of liberal people in the Northeast complain about small conservative towns in middle America, but if you're not gonna bother actually going there and talking to people, do you really get to complain? I think a big reason why small towns tend to be fairly religious and fairly conservative, has to be that the churches and the conservative politicians actually bother to go there and talk to people. You're never gonna convince anyone you have their best interests at heart if you can't be bothered to meet with them. To some extent, we all really live in a bubble.
Confirmation Bias: I think everyone thinks of themselves as being basically good and basically right. That can't possibly be true for everyone, but you don't have to be good to be right and you don't have to be right to be good. I think everything would be better if people allowed themselves more to have the thought, "Maybe I'm wrong". I could be off the mark though.
Wrestling: A song by Macho Man Randy Savage and an wrestling-themed concept album by the Mountain Goats came on my car. This might be a big generalization, but in the six year I've worked with people with various disabilities, I've never met a person with Down Syndrome who didn't really like professional wrestling. I've talked to people who also work with people with developmental disabilities, and one theory is that there's just a simple morality plus a lot of action to wrestling. I wonder why this would be specifically true to Down Syndrome moreso than any other form of intellectual disability though. Down syndrome is linked to a known genetic cause, so does that mean whether or not we like wrestling could be in our DNA? Is it just a coincidence? I think WWE knows though that they have a lot of fans with disabilities, because in the mid-2000s they had a wrestler named Eugene who was supposed to be mentally handicapped and kind of a wrestling savant. He was played by a neurotypical wrestler though. Honestly, not as offensive a portrayal as it could have been, and I think their hearts were in the right place, but it probably wasn't the WWE's finest hour (nor certainly their worst)
The White Album: Came on while I was driving. Listening to Revolution #9 on a pitch black highway in the middle of the night is pretty damn terrifying. It still might be my favorite album of theirs though. I've always like art that is intentionally tonally inconsistent. Life is chaotic, and it's always cool when art can make that chaos feel beautiful. Also, when a band is trying out a lot of styles it shows that they're not letting themselves fall into a rut, and it's always exciting to me to see artists strive for creativity even when the results are mixed. For years, I thought the song Rocky Racoon, was actually about a raccoon. I have a joke that when I learned that it wasn't that was my equivalent of a bar mitzvah because that is when I became a man.
Favorite random sightings: Hack Aging; A father and daughter busking together; A license plate that just said "Paints"; a shop called Cool as a Moose; "Closed, but still Awesome"; Two Hogs Winery
Regional Observation: I have never needed to use my high beams on a highway so much in my life.
Albums Listened To: Bad News Boys by the King Kahn and BBQ Show (weird alternations between doo wop and hardcore punk); The Band by the Band (one of the greatest records of all time); Band Geek Mafia by Voodoo Glow Skulls; Bare Trees by Fleetwood Mac; Basement Style by Jaya the Cat (just Forward); Bastard by Tyler, the Creator; The Battle of Los Angeles by Rage Against the Machine; Bayou Country by Creedence Clearwater Revival; Be a Man (single) by Macho Man Randy Savage; Be OK (single) by Ingrid Michaelson; Beat the Boots by Frank Zappa (just I am the Slime and Bobby Brown); Beat the Champ by the Mountain Goats; The Beatles by the Beatles; Beatles for Sale by The Beatles; Beautiful Girls (single) by Sean Kingston; Beautiful Vision by Van Morrison
People's Favorite Jokes:
A blonde calls a fire department and says her house in on a fire. "How do we get there?" the fireman asks. "What are you, stupid?" the blonde says, "The big red fucking trucks of course!"
What do you call a samurai's grandfather who has diarrhea? A slap-happy Jappy's crap-happy pappy.
