Scheherazade – III — Maine

It’s a three hour pilgrimage from Boston’s Logan Airport up to my mother’s summer place on the coast of Maine, a journey I can’t make without being dragged along by currents of near narcotic nostalgia.

For over thirty years, in ever-evolving family configurations, I’ve made this trip up the Central Coast towards our farmhouse on the water, swept along with hundreds of thousands of others on surging tourist tides.

Change up here is glacial. I can’t remember when there wasn’t a Taste of Maine restaurant or winding lines running up the side of Red’s Eats. There have always been the same long, sad marshes, the same clean strips of road cut through dynamite-scarred granite, the same life-size natural history dioramas of duck ponds kitted out roadside with model-perfect cattails, and always Wiscasset’s dignified colonial homes and the angry ghosts of her tall ships dragged from their burial grounds.

Flashing by are the minor gauge railway museums, the happy rent-your-basket, child-labor blueberry farms, the regurgitated table jetsam of roadside flea markets, the stranded Route 1 army of skeletal brass beds, the ugly explosion of signage for Boothbay Harbor, the countless minor turnoffs for the pine-tree crannies and salt water nooks that finger and fan along Maine’s coastline like beached seaweed.