9-hours in my faithful black Jeep, and maybe longer, as Google Maps just shunted me off the highway and now I’m rolling through small beach towns (signs flash Ogunquit and Kennebunk), where tourists stroll the streets and mill around in trendy bars, hanging out beneath tall gas lanterns on this cool summer evening — but I’ve got a dull ache in my butt (piriformis syndrome from doing squats again) and I just want to get to Millinocket – or anywhere, honestly.

Strictly speaking, this is vacation, but my mindset is all business.  My mission — to climb the state’s 4,000-footers, of which there are 14.  With long driving times between mountain ranges and interruptions for work calls that can’t be rescheduled, the schedule has little slack.  And it’s not like I can just bang out these peaks.  I hike barefoot.  My pace is slow.

A few weeks ago, this strange thought popped into my mind – that Maine was the “land of the Black Sun.”  The intuition being, I guess, that if you journeyed far enough from home, you’d find places so radically different from the familiar, that common attributes might shift into their opposites.  Like when Clarence King traveled west from Connecticut to join the California Geologic Survey and then, as soon as the expedition was under way, begged permission to climb a mountain.  Any mountain.  How about the tallest one in sight.  This was 1864.  When he and a companion finally reached the summit of Mt. Tyndall, King looked into the sky and saw the darkness of vast yawning hollow space.  While the desert basins below were blindingly bright.  It was a “strange reversal.”  The opposite of familiar sunlit skies and dark cool earth.

On occasion I, too, have experienced strange reversals.  For example, I’ve noticed when wearing sunglasses with polarized lenses, that when I tilt my head, the contrast shifts.  The brightness flickers.  Shadows come awake.

I roll into Millinocket at 2 am.  An envelope with my room key is taped to the door, just like they said it would. Continue reading “To the Land of the Black Sun” →