Maine was just the right size

Maine, like many brilliant schemes, was a branch off from an original idea. I’d wanted to go to Newfoundland, to the coastline of St. John’s where sunlight first hits North America. A girl I knew in high school gave me the idea. She told me she’d climbed a hill in St. John and had seen the sun coming over the horizon. It had been cold, her toes were freezing, and then the dark world turned yellow and orange and alive.
I lived my high school years in the dark, in a shadow of sexual assault, of fear-induced silence that left me isolated in a town where everyone knew everything except that I was in hell. Newfound became my greatest hope, the place I ran to when I passed my assaulter in the grocery store or when my teachers made fun of gays in the classroom.
If I can get to Newfoundland, I’d thought, if I can see the sun before anyone else on the continent, it will fill me and I’ll be yellow and orange and alive again.
I told this to Lara a few years later. I was at work holed up in a cubicle, killing the last hour before I could catch my bus and go home. I told her I’d dreamed of Newfoundland, of getting back the light I’d lost in years of tacit fear and in moments of complete terror.
“Oh, Lindsey,” she sighed into the phone. “Let’s go. Let’s go today.”
So we did. With a few minor adjustments.
First of all, we decided if I’d been waiting three years, I could wait two more weeks until fall break. Then we’d have five days to go 1900 miles.
“Nineteen hundred miles?!?” I gasped when I looked at the Mapquest directions from Washington, DC to St. John, Newfoundland. “Canada is big!”
We searched airline prices, car rental costs, and ferry logistics for a few hours and determined, much to our chagrin, that Canada was too big (and too expensive) for two college girls, a shitzu, and a Jeep with balding tires.
So Canada became Maine and I became a nervous wreck as fall break got closer. I’d never driven so far from home, I’d never thrown caution to the wind and my own paranoia like this before. But Lara pushed me forward and the Saturday evening of our fall break we unrolled sleeping bags in a cabin fifteen minutes outside of Bar Harbor.
The Thoreau Cabin, as it was called, was a one room shack with a mattress, table, and a propane lantern. It didn’t lock, and running water was a walk through the woods away. The notes of my violin echoed up into the pines and Lara took pictures of the shadows and the candles, while Stosch stayed close on the porch, presumably afraid of the dark.
Later on, Lara wrote “Thoreau Cabin did us good.” It did. The whole state of Maine did me good; the alpaca farm, the quirky residents, and the John Kerry signs posted every other mile.
And there was the ocean, the rocky coast. We found it at six o’clock Sunday morning. Stosch was sitting on Lara’s lap in the passenger seat and when we rounded the bend on Route 1 North, the ocean opened before us. It had been there long before high schools and rapists and gays and alpacas.
“Wow,” Lara said.
Stosch’s ears perked up and I pulled the car to the side of the road.
The coast was amazing, not sandy and monotonous like the beaches in the south. Each rock was different. The ones closest to the water were covered with moss and seaweed, they were yellow and green and slippery and wonderful.
The sky was foggy and gray when we got out of the car, a hundred different colors between white and blue. My lungs grew cold as I breathed in the salty air.
“I’m alive,” I said, looking up at the sky, telling God there was no doubt in my mind.
Stosch grew alive, too. She bounded from rock to rock, falling on her hind more than once, going into the ocean up to her neck. Lara laughed and took pictures. Stosch may have been too small for Canada, but she was just the right size in Maine.
And so was I. My toes froze in the early morning mist, my fingers nestled deep in my pockets. We waited. Time passed as it should, slow and deliberate, like vectors in clockwork, like the roll of a wave. I stared east.
The sun came not as a rising star, but as a paintbrush in the clouds. The whites became yellows, the grays- pinks.
“This isn’t Newfoundland,” I told Lara as she stood beside me, “but it’s beautiful.”
I don’t remember if she said anything back. I wanted to kiss her, to tell her how I’d been in love with her, and to ask her to stay in Maine with me forever.
And then it happened. Heat entered my lungs and my toes grew warm inside my tennis shoes. The waves took my years of silence and rushed them out to sea.
I walked back to the car with my arm around Lara, Stosch bounding along on the rocks ahead.
“I’m alive,” I repeated.
No longer afraid, I began to heal.