cornflake girl

i brake for fresh eggs

Wind from the Sea, Andrew Wyeth (1947)

I drove up 95 blasting Tori Amos for hours—windows open, shoes off, as usual, swerving in a Hyundai Santa Fe about 7,000 lightyears ahead of anything else I’ve driven. It didn’t even shake, it didn’t reek of ethanol, I wasn’t driving through a check engine light—there was AC that didn’t bring a smell with it. It just worked. This thing had a sun roof I didn’t discover until I’d put 400 miles on the car, Apple CarPlay—a concept certainly beyond my paycheck—a steering wheel that vibrated when cars came dangerously close, and a searingly irritating “Consider taking a break” dashboard announcement that chimed on after an hour of driving, signaled by a coffee cup icon. It was dead silent inside the car except for third-wave feminist alt rock through Newport, New Wave through Portland, and me expressing aloud to myself how beautiful the scenery was. Sometimes there was the screeching peel of a sharp right off 1, my millisecond decision to hit a roadside antique store or farm stand.

I spent the first night in Rhode Island, with Caroline and her family, Bostonian cousins and a group dinner on the sort of checkered tablecloth that’s plastic on top and that poly fuzz on the bottom. Her mom made steak tips that found their peace in my back teeth. Her dog nose-dived my body on a number of occasions.

In the morning, I made it to Portland for a whitefish sandwich at Rose Goods, read my Chomsky in a window seat to the nodded approval of a bro who pulled away later in his Subaru. I waded in Crescent Beach, watched kids scramble on the rocks and try to catch small fish in nets far too big for that while their grandparents sat quietly on a cliff bench with a view. I found fishnet cedar buoys and an African indigo textile in Brunswick, Japanese silver bowls and pewter platters for $1 each. I ate at Sprague’s in Wiscasset because I can never fuck with the line at Red’s for The Best Lobster Roll having done it once for $45 only to find out all lobster tastes like the smell of a porta potty, no matter where it’s from. I still get at least two every summer.

I listen to about 2 hours of synth music that sends me into a headspace I don’t realize is happening and emerge 100 miles north of where I zoned out, replaying a hundred times a conversation on my last date to determine if my gut reaction to it was appropriate. I determine it was. I send an ending-it text because I’ve been forcing myself to recall romance isn’t supposed to be as hard as I make it. People are supposed to see you and like you and move to understand you and anything else is 6 months of your life you don’t get back. A week later I’m having wine with Zoe in Waldoboro and she tells me there’s something in women where we try to force what’s available into The Right Thing— especially for love—instead of learning to shed; when something is hurtful it’s a challenge to overcome instead of something to leave behind. It describes 4-5 years of my life.

I drive over the bridge into Deer Isle in the late evening, travel down the sort of dirt road so long and pot-holed that it makes you start to second guess your sense of direction. I pass a church sign that says in broken black lettering on a white backdrop: TO GOD BELONGS ALL GLORY GRACE AND LOBSTER. I arrive to Aragosta in those 10 minutes after dusk that are dark blue and a pastel yellow over the ocean, and the moon is out with just a few stars. I sat with a glass of ubiquitous Gulp Hablo and tried to read but instead eavesdropped on the girls behind me, who spoke to the staff in the sort of way rich people do when they feel a kinship to food and bev workers because they spent a couple summers working the pool shack at their country clubs.

Johnny? She says to a waiter. Can you do me a favor—can you see if those wines are for us? Oh—Sammy’s coming, Sammy’s coming with them! But Johnny you’re beautiful, smart, strong and capable!

As Sammy approaches, the woman sings There she is, Miss America. When the same table is delivered their strawberry shortcake, she’s chanting “Mackie, Mackie, Mackie” to no response from Mackie and as he leaves, she says to her table “Oh he loves it, he loves it.”

I walk down to the beach and listen to the water and try to decide if this sort of loneliness feels bad or nourishing or like nothing. I have a glass of complimentary champagne in the shower and fall asleep at 9pm. I wake up at 5:45am to the sun in my room. A mom and her baby are already down on the beach. The baby is picking up rocks as best he can with his fat hands and throwing them into the sea, and his dad sits on a log along the backshore, drinking from a Yeti.

They call it Goose Cove, which is the sort of thing I let only Maine get away with. Goose Cove in, for example, central Virginia, is the sort of thing that indicates a gentrified neighborhood full of dermatologists and managed by a vicious HOA. I grew up on Copper Knoll, akin to another cul-de-sac called Watercrest, and another called Spring Ridge. Goose Cove here might well mean there’s geese in this cove, where in Virginia it simply sounds better than Urban Removal.

I go for a hike, made known to me by the concierge at the hotel, on the sort of trail typical of Maine: trailheads are fairly often marked by covert shallow ditches where you park your car— nothing but a random erosive occasion to the untrained eye. But with my landmarks from Hannah—a busted dock and small blue roadside marker—I’ve found my next 2 hours. The trail is tangled, mostly unmarked, covered with wild peas and Virginia creeper.

Afterwards, I burn myself raw on Sand Beach and listen to children screech in low tide. No one was in the water much, and I only hopped in for a minute or so at a time—swam out until my loneliness in the water scared me and I swam back to shore. I burned strangely because I didn’t clean any of the sand or rocks off my legs or arms or ass while I laid in the sun. I’m flanked by families, shell-printed one-pieces and lobster swim trunks, long-sleeved sun shirts. I knew two of the children were from New York because of how they spoke, like adults—“I think I’m about ready to wrap up,” said one, not older than four, picking up his towel from the sand. “Mom—you have a rash or something on your butt,” said the other, and after his third or fourth time saying it, she explained exasperatedly that it’s from the rocks, Milo, and he answered “Geez, okay, just letting you know.”

The kids were named Mackenzie, Milo, Kennedy and Lawson, as you’d expect. Kennedy, say bye to the ocean, says her mother, and Kennedy says to the ocean: Bye ocean! Thanks for getting me!

Isabel arrived, swam, exercised her ability to befriend the ugliest dog within 60 miles, and we spent $500 on a 12-course dinner where we ate crab, lobster, hake, oyster, caviar in such a hurried and gluttonous succession that we both felt ill. Being mistaken for a lesbian couple (“Is this a pride situation?”), we were invited to share one glass of champagne on the deck with a slew of millennial couples, each with love stories Isabel and I debriefed afterwards as rushed and unsettling and reminding me fitfully that everyone closing up shop was just two years older than I. One woman calls her fiancé—for accepting a quarter zip from the handsy lesbian couple across the table—“a sweet autistic boy.” He is the most socially adept person at the table—including this woman who is respectably off her ass on amaro—and he rubs her feet while she says so. She tells me about their proposal a week before, how they got high afterwards and went to see Shrek the Musical. She asks for my number, tells me to “enjoy my singlehood” because she wishes she “could have that time back—they were the best years of my life” and tells me to text her when I meet someone just before tonguing her fiancé in front of the table.

At breakfast, Trump’s bill passes and while Isabel and I try to make sense of it, she says: When the president is looking at money, like: how much is there? I laugh. Right, I say, literally that. We listen to Up Next on our drive and try to navigate the concept of the debt ceiling between each other. We swim topless in a pond and then meet our professor at her new home in Deer Isle, walk through her orchard and rose bushes and down a trail to the water where it’s low tide and you can climb on the rocks around the seaweed. I have no idea what to do with rhubarb, she says, but I have a lot of it growing, and I’m going to learn.

Isabel has booked herself a gig in the far north of Maine, in Pembroke. She’s shooting for a farm up there, ostensibly for socials and grant purposes in the future though the terms of the shoot are completely uncertain. It’s just a little money and a place to stay and a project, so we’re happily going 80 miles out of our way. We drive through thick fog up 1, past Machias and Cobscook Bay, and I say there’s something strange about this—not right, exactly, but not scary. Just like we’re entering into a totally different world, it feels like some sort of spiritual shift. I feel unmoored and sleepy. Isabel says: Do you want to yurt nap while I do bees? It’s a sentence that describes well the state of our being together—it’s always something like this.

Isabel is added to numerous group chats between the farm owner, Severin, and unknown numbers where her directive is to find these various farmers and photograph them at work—harvesting honey, trellising tomatoes, feeding their ducks, making sea trash puppets…

When we arrive to the farm store, I ask the cashier—What’s going on here? She laughs. I say there’s something strange about this place, like something’s awry but not exactly threatening, and she says Oh, do you mean when you’re going up Route 9 and enter like a fourth dimension?

Yes, I say. Exactly that.

It’s just like that here, she says, I remember driving up Route 9 as a kid and feeling that way, too.

We are staying not in a yurt but in the “Grey Lodge,” attached to the farm store. It’s a huge building with creaking stairs and rooms without direction, full of pamphlets about the Agrarian Trust, many copies of Canada’s Watershed Sentinel, cassettes of something called the 2015 Intergalactic Agrarian Mixtape for sale, a guide on Maine’s seaweeds. In the kitchen, someone has written on a piece of wood “Clean up joyfully!” The shelves are full of various grains in jars and seeded cracker boxes, surely stale by now, a coffee machine that I discover the following morning does not work despite another wood sign above saying “DIY Coffee! Help yourself!”

I have been so long away from true hippies that I forgot how much I adore them. Such bright and purposeful people, but always to me there is a true silliness about how they approach the world with a peace and love mentality that I feel—Hobbes-like—has no legitimate place in our society. It’s exactly because of that I admire it so much. And I agree, really, in the generically understood sort of hippie belief system. Particularly I love that hippies believe we’re all one unit, and all have some responsibility to each other, and to Earth, which we continuously run dry for every single gift it offers us. I’m a huge proponent of every single thing being some kind of alive, and also understand Earth as sort of a breathing entity of its own, one with which we can communicate as a whole, and in its individual parts. This is because I’m disastrously sentimental and have no working understanding of science, but upon learning about atoms decided it sort of meant everything was alive and feeling. Also because of Venus flytraps, whose oral autonomy had an enormous effect on my understanding of our responsibility to understand all things as living subjects. Their anatomy felt like the most obvious way to understand plants as alive.

But for a woman who’s sort of pathologically and intrinsically obsessed with achievement and imprint—to my dismay—I feel hippies can always smell on me the separation of my interest from my action. I was not at all a peace and love person. I was competitive—a person who went to work somewhere with a roof and a Keurig and the tense promise of upward mobility. My commitment to environmental action didn’t manifest much further than the farmer’s market and shopping “clean beauty” and sleeping in an undeterminedly-sourced Sierra Club t-shirt.

I’m considering all this as I lay down on a bed with sheets that have clearly been lifted from the Salvation Army and not washed, under a quilt stuffed with a thin sheet of polyfill and a few holes in it that look suspiciously mouse-like, where you can see exactly the sort of fluff inside, like Build-A-Bear’s viscera. Among the curtains and ceiling corners are spiders half the size of my palm. Isabel, even, is perturbed. She smashes them with her Blundstone, and several smear on the wall.

We visit, first, Mark and Arlene, a beekeeping, farming, and stained glass-making duo. I’m along for the ride, here to chauffeur and morally support Isabel, so while Mark shows her the bees and gardens, I chat with Arlene about their life. She calls herself and Mark “homesteaders.” She grew up on a dairy farm. She shows me their stained glass studio, her fiber arts. Inside, she’s cooking banana bread and the house has an open floor plan completely lined with animals Mark has shot. She shows me how stained glass is made. His studio has six or seven guns on the wall. Her studio is just on top of his, where she sews cut-out felt swallows into quilt patterns. The whole house is ADA accessible, she tells me proudly, so we can die here.

In the morning, I have undated iced coffee from a pitcher I found in the fridge, pour it in a Maine pickle jar and sip it outside; I meet the hot farmer who runs vegetable production for the farm. I ask him, as carefully as I can: how is this whole operation lucrative? It’s not. It breaks totally even. Severin later confirms this: $300,000 in, $300,000 out. When Isabel wakes up, I ask where we’re going and she says: This place called the Turtle Dance Coop, which I can’t find on my map. It’s in Lubec. We’re driving to meet Rhonda, Severin’s mother-in-law, who is a farmer, maybe, sort of, but also a longtime Lubec local, also plays a supporting role in the trash puppet ensemble her husband creates. The puppets are made from rope, mooring and lobster buoys, plastic water bottles. They’re obviously fucking terrifying, and yet I’m drawn to one—a mermaid with two nipple rings. Rhonda has ponies, chickens, one extremely haggard-looking goose. I walk through their shit in my flip flops while she gives us a tour of their backyard. She’s deeply tan with white hair, and so beautiful, Isabel and I say to each other as soon as we’re in the car. She wears hiking boots and cargo pants and a fishing hat, and walks slow, and slouched. We walk through town and meet a librarian, and the owner of the brewery, who has us in for a brief tasting of their rhubarb and beet pours. Rhonda tells us about “food sovereignty law,” where you can sell food directly from your house to customers, without any sort of permitting or FDA-involvement. How is that possible? I ask. By county, she says. We voted for that.

We visit Severin at her farm on 160 acres. Her husband tells us she’s in the “Summer Kitchen.” He’s holding the Gerber baby. We go up and meet Severin, who has a high-pitched voice and curled hair that’s more or less dreaded but short, thrown over to one side of her head. She has the sort of eyes that don’t blink. Her dress is unbuttoned. She has some sort of sauce on her fingers and when we walk up she’s talking to herself. They’re making dinner for us—pork chops—and she pours a bottle of dill-something into a tub of cheese and cuts up kohlrabi. I pick up her littlest, maybe a little over a year, and don’t put her down for about an hour. The older one, 3ish, sits in a thicket and picks strawberries, passes them along to us. She has curly blonde hair, as dreaded as Severin’s. She’s always making sound but never talking. During our tour of the farm, she wanders away and comes back with a bouquet of poppies and peas for everyone. As we walk around the farm, she pulls up different plants and eats them. A goat follows us into the yurt and pees everywhere, and she walks barefoot right through it. In the chicken barn, she unlatches the door and crawls into the hay, picks up one chick at a time and hands them to each of us to hold.

They have two friends over for dinner also, a couple with the sort of energy where it’s impossible to tell if they’re coupled. They’re weathered—mustached, bandana-ed, friendly. They bring oysters from Massachusetts and talk about building, agriculture, crop yield, Colorado’s surrender to the tourist economy. The group bemoans the issues of septic system installation, which is a tune I hear throughout Maine, and recall even from my post-grad year at Sewanee, when I used to spend half my time drinking beer on a mushroom farm amongst morally delayed men in their thirties.

They mention you don’t do things with “permits” here, they say, with a sort of playful distaste for the word itself. It’s an ask-for-forgiveness game, and barely that out here, anyway.

Throughout the week, these farmers seem at first tired, reserved, skeptical of two girls from New York coming to photograph their bucolic life and sell it. And with 10 minutes under our belt, they become so open—so proud of their work, friendly as soon as they see you’re here apolitically, inquisitively, gleefully picking wild strawberries with their children and holding their goats and expressing interest with flushed admiration. And then they tell you they grew up in this county when it still had one of the highest crime rates per capita in Maine, so they left town to learn political science at University of Maine and came back anyway because it turned out what they wanted to do was grow something.

There were people that lived with belief still. I drove away from one particular farm saying to Isabel it’s so hard to believe they know they could be remote insurance salespeople. Instead they have 300 birds and a 4:30am wake up call, so many acres to their name they tell me ticks stay out of the “upper 20” thanks to the chickens’ voracious appetite for them. When they use the term gentrified it means something positive—they leveled the fields and brambles themselves, built out blueberry patches, rows of pear trees, and a greenhouse full of tomatoes and peppers. It felt right that Isabel had ushered me into such a situation and reminder, being someone who lived her beliefs, who worked hard but joyfully.

We drive to our friend’s house in Walpole, where a batch of couples with direct or tenuous UVa connections assemble every year for fireworks and tubing and long days on the dock. I spend the weekend like a teenager—lay out in SPF 15 and don’t say much, bring a friend who also doesn’t say much, hang around in the background except for when it’s dinner time. I feel a strange sort of deep sadness having left northern Maine. Like I knew I wasn’t going to be back around anything like that for a long time, like I was having to make peace again with my values as I manifested them instead of how I considered them.

Everyone here works in corporate America, in fintech, in media, they are looking to move to Alexandria, build a home, buy land, have kids. They, like the couples at Aragosta, are 2-3 years older and their skin is so unporous, and every hand is on every leg—like something, or everything, about their life is settled.

There’s a long mirror in the bathroom and when I get out of the shower I realize I haven’t seen my body in full view in I don’t know how long. I look kind of lumpy, I think, kind of old. I’ve lost an earring on the boat. My nails are so clean. On the sink is a bumper sticker I picked up from Smithereen, one that says “I BRAKE FOR FRESH EGGS,” and underneath “EATING LOCAL IS THE ADVENTURE” that I’ll put, I suppose, on my Away Bigger Carry-On in Jet Black.