Labor Day Travel

Written Sep 1, 2022

In early September 2008 my good friend Alan Vaughan called from Gary, Indiana. The art dealer from Bruxelles was driving to his old hometown, Sarasota, Florida from Onekama, Michigan, where his family had maintained a cottage on Lake Michigan below the Acadia Dunes formed from the glacial melt. He had just visited the Jackson 5 home on 2300 Jackson Street. A little out of the way, but we all loved their 1979 hit ABC. We hadn’t seen each other in a good six or seven years. He knew that I had returned from Thailand to dogsit a mad Airedale rescue for two months in Palm Beach. That job was over and it was time to vacate the mansion off Worth Avenue. I informed him that I was heading north to New England.

“How you getting north?”

“I’m hitchhiking on I-95. I figure it will take 3-4 days.” I actually had a airline ticket from West Palm Beach to Boston, but preferred to mythize a drifter's northbound voyage. “I’m broke so that’s the only way I can get there.”

>“You’re kidding?” He was incredulous. “I haven’t seen a hitchhiker on the entire trip from the Upper Peninsula.”

“Not one?"

“Not one.”

“Well, I’ll be a blast from the past.”

I hung up and then called Alan the next day from the Palm Beach airport saying I was in Jacksonville. He was in Memphis. He had stopped there to see Graceland.

The next day from Brooklyn I called from Dillon, South Carolina. On Labor Day Roanoke, Virginia.

"I’m making real good time."

By the way I was already drinking voka screwdrivers made by my brother-in-law, David Rutter, on Watchic Pond in Standish, Maine. Nowhere close to South of the Border. At my family cottage with my sister and her family and my Aunt Sally and Uncle Russ. Twice the vodka. Half the ice.

The trip from West Palm Beach to Boston wasn't fun, but it han been faster than standing on I-95 waiting for a ride in the middle of the night fast.

And there was nothing like Maine at the end of summer and a cold water lobster. And of course heavy-handed Vodka-tonics from my brother-in-law David Rutter.

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Much more to come.

August 1, 1995 - The South Shore / Watchic Pond - Journal Entry

I had planned on leaving for Asia the previous weekend, but after a long phone call with Todd Shigekane, I decided to bus north and visit Michael's grave as well as my grieving mother. She had lost her baby son. His birth on December 7, 1960 was clear in my head. Thirty-five years ago. I had sublet my apartment for six months to Paul Brissman, a young Swedish photographer. I rode the Chinatown bus north to Boston.

My mother cried upon seeing me at South Station. My father bore his sorrow inside. Like me we were true New Englander. Emotions ran cold in our veins. Our mutual pain was was not to shared in private or public. I wanted to say that I remmember him driving into the school on that cold Pearl Harbor day to tell us about the arrival of our baby brother. He said nothing on the ride up to Maine. We were spending the weekend on Watchic Pond in Standish. It was a family ritual. The camp belonged to my sister and his husband, I slept on the bottom bunkbed. Everything was so familiar; the tall pines, Italian sandwiches, the tannin tainted water, the loons, my Aunt and Uncle. Shutting my eyes i saw my grandmother across the pond and only two years ago swimming in the Saco River with Michael.

My father drove the Olds 88 fast, almost as if he were fleeing the past or the future without his youngest son. When Michael had been unable to walk, my farher carried him to his radio show ONE IN TEN.

I had hoped for him to make it another year or two. He had been on experimental AIDS meds, only his were a placebo. Some of his friends had survived the scourge. Not my brother.

I wished I had gone insitead of Michael, but my mother couldn't surive the loss of another son, so I'm determined to live into the next century.

Until then it was time to soak in the soul of Maine.

The smell of the camp, canoes, the faint stench of the SD Warren paper mill, the Casco Bay, losters, soft shouldered roads, pine cones and the Saco River running to the sea. .

August 1, 1995 Watchic Pond Standish Maine - Journal Entry

My younger sister and the rest of the clan had deserted Watchic Pond to visit a nearby Aquapark, so I arrived at the camp and sat outside under the pines to eat an Italian sandwich. Pine trees shiulded me from the sun and orange needles carpeted the groundhad been p My grandfather and his friends had dammed a stream to create the pond back in the 1920s. It always seemed part of my life. Two years ago my brother and I had drifted down the Saco River rapids. It had been a happy day. We all loved Maine.

The next-door neighbor, Cary Kimball, shouted out his greetings. His wife waved for me to join them on the dock for a glass of wine. As much as I wanted to be alone, I needed company too.

They had lost his brother only two weeks ago. My brother, Michael, died less than five days ago. We spoke of the dearly departed wishing they were with us. None of us spoke of heaven or hell or said God moves in strange ways. Life had been shucked from our brothers. This shared existence without them was an unwanted communion and we raised our glasses to their lives.

Cary's a pyschiatrist at Maine Medical in Portland. I told how my parents had brought to the Catholic Diosecian shrink to fathom my avowed atheism and that was the only other time I submited to having a mental examination was in kindergarten to divine whether my speech defects were from a diminished brain.

"I bet they used the word 'retarded'."

"They might have."

"You seem fine now and I know crazy."

"Postal workers."

"Lots of them."

"They go crazy having to deliver flyers people throw away. No love letters, no postcards. Flyers. A meaningless job."

"I wish that was the case, but people have mental issues, because they aren't unaware of their psychosises. I deal with a lot of veterans from the Viet-Nam and now an increasing number from the Iraq War. Going postal is an exxageration."

"Especially since we're all mad."

"More or less. I have this vet working at the SD Warren Paper Mill."

"I know it well." My grandmother had lived down the street. Its sulphur stench smelled of home to me an anyone living within ten miles of the mill on the Presumpscot River. "He was dealing with his horrors with drink. One night coming home from THE TOP OF THE HILL." The local bar on 25. "He rearended a moose. Their fur is stiff as a brush and wiped off his skin."

"Let me guess. He didn't stop drinking." I had no intention of getting sober. I was still in mourning for Micheal.

"He's trying."

"Good for him." I held out my glass.

He filled it to the brim. In a week I was flying west to the Far East. Tibet, the temples of Thailand, the ghats on the Ganges. Nywhere where I coukd feel nothing__