Not Hard To Want

Destitute people loiter expectantly outside the building at the end of the block. Their hands grasp at the bars, eager to get inside for something. They turn and look at me blankly as we edge along the pavement. The red light doesn't change, but we hang a right at the junction anyway - still within the rules. Our second time around this block. Parking in Boston is a nightmare. We start walking towards the high rise in the distance. Downtown comes up pretty soon.

Hot dog vendors on every corner. Street traders selling their wares. Steam from the occasional drain cover. People everywhere. A shock to the system after our rural adventures in New Hampshire. We make for the common and sit by a fountain watching the homeless walking around mumbling their slogans in endless hope of attention. So many of them here. The Charles Street Bridge takes us over the water towards The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Runners and cyclists pass every few minutes. We press our backs against the wall. MIT has a plethora of strangely shaped buildings.

The Museum is fascinating. We play with an underwater ROV simulator, but we are too ham-fisted to pilot the thing effectively.

Upstairs we find the earliest AI robots and machines that do strange things in miniature. Antique chairs bounce over cats on rugs or clamber across pieces of rock. One contraption pushes a wishbone along a track like it is a zimmer frame for some invisible invalid. The ghost of a chicken, maybe. Strange people, engineers. Patch tries to log into the MIT database but fears he will break it. Harvard next. And what a picturesque campus for the terrifying knowledge of the law that students can learn to command. Reese Witherspoon is notable by her absence. How many loopholes have been found here?

Patch and I go our seperate ways. He for a ramble, I in search of The Berklee College of Music - a renowned location for those in the study of crotchets and semiquavers. I get lost, crossing the wrong roadbridge and I find myself at the end of a long sidewalk that just dissapears under a flyover by the freeway. I debate crossing the road for a while but decide against it. Impossible. Somehow I find my way to my target. But the performance centre is closed. Balls. I wander past Fenway Park and watch the fans funneling in. Two groups of supporters in rickshaws whip their drivers into a frenzy and they pedal off down the street in good humoured competition. I watch part of the game in a posh bar. The well-to-do folk of Boston immaculately dressed whilst I sit at the bar smelling of firewood and cooked meat. Time to move in. I buy the world's most impractical bananas and saunter back downtown. It's dark now. I stop at The Beantown Pub. Loud music draws me in. Who should I see at the bar but my companion. Great minds. He got lost too, walking through residential areas for last 3 hours in search of the right road. Neither of us had much luck. At least he has an excuse. I was carrying the map. Patch has been talking to a gentleman called Sandeep - an engineer who is studying tunnels, who bemoaned the baseball on the TV. There are barely 10 different types of pitch, but cricket - the game he loves - has at least 100 kinds of bowl. Patch tried changing the subject, but Sandeep was having none of it. He left to go and watch a Dream Theater concert before I showed up. We walk down to Faneil Hall for my second blog meet: Scott of Hard To Want fame. (see sidebar).

'Ultratoast!' he yells from somewhere behind me.

I descend the steps beneath the doric columns and shake his hand. He is tall and well built with close cropped hair and a beard and moustache that is almost as well kept as mine. A big smile is on his face. We adjourn to a bar.

I don't know why, but I was expecting a man much more restrained. Perhaps it is the Wyatt Earp avatar having too much sway over my opinions. I read his blog like a deadpan lawman. In person he is everything but - all enthusiastic hand gestures accompanying emotive discussions. A more-than-average joe. The essence of an everyday american, maybe. He is vibrant in delivery. Very funny too. Within ten minutes of talking, the four letter words are flying and within two hours Scott has gone from 'hello' to 'I've never been so hard'. He is so open that it would seem rude not to join in. So I do, therefore I am strangely liberated. I realise that I have been taking some of the things he writes far too seriously. Scott says he wonders why he doesn't use his real picture. We both agree that the added anonymity allows more freedom of expression. But I suspect that Scott doesn't have a problem with that at all. He tells me that his blog is his place to say and write what he likes. He never mentions his wife as a kind of mutual truce. She is off limits. She doesn't read Hard To Want. She thinks we might be organ farmers. I laugh out loud. We talk of girls and marriage and movies and music. Revel in this trip, he tells me. Whilst you have no commitments. We skim certain subjects, namely disciplining of shildren and I suddenly feel like I am watching the film having read the book and gotten some back story both old and new. But the characterisation is not how I would have chosen it. I am enjoying it and realising the author of that book is far better placed to characterise the protagonist than I am. Not my place to choose. Or judge. Patch gets on famously with him. Midnight comes around all too quickly. I am sad that I will not get to see Scott with his family. The boys he writes about so lovingly. Scott does us the massive favour of dropping us back to our car - half an hour's walk away. It's been enlightening I say. I can only hope all my meetings will go as well. 'Dude, you live in England. Write what you like'. I shake his hand as he leaves, confused and elated to have my preconceptions altered.

Patch is stone drunk. We are lost, having come off at the wrong exit and double backed on ourselves too many times for us to be laughing about it. But we are. I turn down a side road and find myself driving the on the wrong side of the road. Patch is in hysterics and I chuckle. Where the f**k are we? Scott is probably home and asleep by now. Somehow, Middleboro appears out of nowhere. We cannot calculate how this is possible and we wonder whether we have stumbled into some kind of twilight zone.

Cabin Essence

The speakers thud unhappily as bass pumps out at the limit of their productivity. Old crisps, biscuits and sprinklings of tobacco manouvre for position in the door handles and cubby holes of The Sentra. Sleeping bags, cameras, bananas and road atlases squeeze together in the back seat as best they can. We are southbound, aiming for Massachusetts. Patch has been having some weird dreams. In one, he meets Harry Redknapp and David James - prominent figures at Portsmouth F.C. They are trying to sign him. But he is distracted from their negociations. Internet video has been going around of erotic movies featuring ghosts - proof spreading around the world that the supernatural is real. Suddenly, he is in a cage in New York City. Erotica of a non-ghostly origin is playing on big screens around Time Square. One can only watch if one is prepared to move to a smaller cage. This smaller cage has an entry code which eludes our hero. Instead he sleeps and awakes to find his shoes have been stolen. Which must have been confusing. Because he was still dreaming. He tells me that he had another one in which I was wearing Hot Pants and running. I ask him if there was any soundtrack, to which he replies that he cannot remember. The only thing he recalls is a strong desire to wake up very very quickly. Since we arrived on this continent, Patch has been humming a song. The only lyrics he has so far are 'touch my body, lick my nads'. Curiously, it seems to fit the melody of just about every mediocre song shuffling out of the commercial RnB stations we have been listening to. We will nail it down sooner or later. Massachussets rolls past on the gantry above. Patch tells me of another dream in which he is on a bus with all his schoolfriends on the way to see an Iron Maiden gig at a small pub. He meets the band at the bar and orders a drink. A friend of ours is serving. Patch pays with pounds and dollars. The friendly barman does not accept dollars - only gilders. So, he must be in Holland, he reasons. After the gig, he falls asleep, waking in another dreamworld: A house undergoing renovation. He keeps nodding and waking up to more and more renovation, but no builders. He goes outside and finds Gloria Gaynor and Cyndi Lauper sunbathing.
The KOA in Middleboro appears out of the afternoon sun.

I lean on the brakes.

Near The Roof of the North East

The majesty of the New Hampshire north stretches out before us. I guide the wheel carefully, trying my best to peer up through the smudged windscreen at the towering hills. We have travelled 80 odd miles into a geologists wet dream: glacial valleys. A short walk along a nature path yields photos as mountain bikers pedal past. Leona Lewis blasts out of the radio again in a stateside push bigger than I had thought. 'Patch's Diner' lures us in for obvious reasons. I can't manage all of my Chocolate & Peanut Butter Whopee Pie due to a density so great that a confectionery black hole is not beyond the realms of possibility. A silver-haired elder pulls up outside on a vintage Kawasaki with the wind in his mane and moustache. The biggest rock around looms up over the horizon as we pass 'Mount Wash N' Tan'. A circumnavigation of the highest point in north east America brings us to its base and the small toll booth handing out an audio guide. I thumb through How Not To Overheat Your Automobile Whilst Climbing A F**k Off Great Big Mountain. The Sentra whines up to 4000 feet on a narrow rutted tarmac track strewn with rocks and old snow. Gear 1 screams in protest, as per the written instructions. I think of the poor rental guy back in Toronto and try to forget the look on his face. Patch suggests we put our 'This Car Climbed Mount Washington' sticker on the fender/bumper. Perhaps we should also get 'This Car Completed The Gumball Rally' and 'Daytona Demolition Derby? Done!' It would be worth it for the look of terror when we roll back into Rent-A-Wreck in a few months time. We stop at 4500 feet because the road to the summit has not been deemed safe.

Yellow snowtrack diggers block our path. Our feet pick their way delicately onto a rocky plateau. The view is, for want of a better americanism, awesome: a panorama of hundreds of square miles. An army of trees that could take back the planet. Nature once again demonstrating its 'Madd Skillz' to quote my companion. We sit and ponder.

The Rockies will be even bigger. Such clear air up here. Perfect for testing the keyfob-against-skull-for-added-transmission-range that Patch so loves. A distant parp-parp tells me it worked. I hope that some children in the car park were scared. We descend and head off in search of camp. 'Continuous Light Rock' oozes through the speakers. Rain falls. No one guarding the gates at any of the campsites we try. Our bellies grumble. The Broken Antler in Meredith solves that problem. Locals are watching the NBA playoffs, vocal in their opinions.
'Get outta there!'
'You cannot rely on one guy!'
'It's all over, baby!'
Pine Hollow Campsite is now guarded by an old couple watching TV in their recliners. The lady has trouble standing when she gets up to book us in. They had been out for dinner, Sunday night being their only chance in the week. Her yappy dog skitters around our ankles. We make camp in the rain then it stops. To kill a few hours before bed we head to Laconia - a place so uneventfull that I'll change the 'a' to a 'c' to make 'Laconic' please, Vince. Staying in and watching Chain Letters might explain the absence of anything at all happening - apart from a smattering of locals fishing off a road bridge whilst a boy dressed like MC Hammer looks on. I stare through the wipers at the headlights on the road out of town.

For shillings short.

A wisp of smoke and an empty campground signals the departure of Mike and Kevin. We roll out towards southern Maine and the New Hampshore border. Portland seems like a good stop to log in. The city seems dirty after the purity of the countryside. The homeless seem prominent in this tiny square of the town. They stare pensively, watching the fat and the thin and the young and the old walk by, sternly focused on whatever tasks await them at their destinations. We go into Starbucks. The month's worth of internet cover I bought in Montreal is worthless here. I pay for a day and crack on with the typing. My camera cable has been misplaced. No pictures for now. We leave downtown behind and aim for Hampton Beach State Park. Patch tunes the radio to WXYZVXXYYZZV 104.3 'The Bone' - a station proclaiming that if it were a dinosaur, it would be 'Badass-asaurus'. Hampton pops up on the signs. I ponder whether or not this is the upper class retreat for well-heeled New Yorkers I hear about on the TV shows. Patch tells me 'The Hamptons' are much further south, a fact confirmed when we roll past Arcade Machine Halls, Ice Cream Parlours and fading Novelty Tat Shops stretching the length of the seafront. I see a resort town aging towards obscurity. The state park is for RVs only - exposed, pebbly and currently home to a towtruck rally, we elect to pitch elsewhere. Our tents would not fit in amongst the V8s and crane lifts. The shorebound breeze would batter us. 20 miles inland, Pawtuckaway State Park looks better. We drive along the long, long feeder road to the campground from the registry office and camp amongst the towering trees next to the lake. The fire cooks cheap steaks and sausages just right. Patch spys some ants. They look buff, he says. Perhaps they are on the all-thorax workout. He suggests they might be using the 'Thoraxinator' - works all 6 arms. Fleas laughing at you on the beach? Termites think you look weedy. Thoraxinate! Ant 56784 from colony 5556778 says 'Thoraxinator(tm) changed my life! Even The Queen looks at me twice!' Patch goes to bed and I pick my way through the shadowy treetrunks to use the facilities before doing the same.
I pass a stocky man washing his dishes in the dark.
'You lookin' for access?' he says in a thick Irish burr.
'I'm just wandering.'
Aodh Og (pronounced a-yog) was born in Cork. He seems to be in his late '40s. Dark eyes shielded by educated spectacles regard me from the nest of a big beard and curly hair. A gaelic Jerry Garcia. He is a student of medieval music, having studied the subject extensively before dropping out prior to the end of his doctorate. He learned all he needed to mix up his sound with eastern, folk, classical and jazz elements. A dazzling array of instruments fall under his spell - tin whistle, spoons, renaissance woodwinds, gemshorn and the dumbek. I nod knowingly, unsure of what half those instruments are. His partner appears from the darkness. Her name is Christy. She is a spritely soul from San Diego with a hippy beauty. The Hammered Dulcimer, Madolin, Mandola, Sitar, Banjo and Guitar bend to her will. Together, they are Four Shillings Short - a roots music duo whose breadth of talent I can only imagine. A state tour is underway. Tomorrow's gig is a public access radio job.
They invite me to their fireside.
Their tour van is their statement. Political slogans jostle for position across the back doors of the vehicle. No holds barred for the driver in their rear view mirror. They don't cross the border much, Aodh Og says when I suggest Cape Breton would be a playground for them. Their van gets torn apart by border guards. The IRA connection gets made when they hear the Irish accent. It's not worth the hassle. They have been touring off their own backs for 11 years, organising gigs with Christy's business degree savvy from the back of their wagon. Nomadic musical pioneers. A hard life, but one true to their principles. It can still be done, they say.
I tell them our route.
Christy says that New Orleans is on the verge of reclamation by the sea. Soon to disappear like Atlantis or Alexandria. It cannot carry on the way it is. I tell them about an acquaintance who worked in New York. She knew only snippets of the devastation until she returned home to England and read the stories about people taking shelter in the Astrodome. She tooled up with papers and headed stateside with the news. Aodh Og gives me a paper called The Nation. It is liberal, aware of the urgency for change. It seems well balanced, painting the shortcomings of the trumpeters of change as well as their plus points. Goldman Sachs, it says, is the biggest contributor to Obama's campaign. His people refused to comment when asked whether or not Sachs would be accountable for the $6 billion made from devalued mortgage securities in the first 9 months of 2007. Regardless, we agree that he would be a good choice for the Democrats and a good choice for president. He is the man to mobilise the black vote, probably the most misrepresented vote within the American electoral demographic. It would be something to see a record turnout by the african american community.
I bid Four Shillings Short goodbye and let my torchlight guide me back to my tent on the other side of the ridge.

Fishing for the truth

Glen Beck is driving me crazy asking his listeners ridiculously random questions. 'Do you hate african americans or women more?'. He gabbles out of the radio, talking more than his guests, bemoaning the Saudi's for not producing more of the black gold at a reasonable price. A liberal opinion is sniggered at in playground mocking with no reasonable alternative offered to the opposite number's opinion. Just a diatribe about Shakespeare and Glen's visit to the theatre to see a play. He made sure he had an aisle seat so he could walk out at half-time. He seems to be under the mistaken impression that he is the voice of America, moaning about the 'disenfranchised'. The poor people of The States should rise up against DC where the marvel of common sense has abandoned all parties. Disenfranchised. Oppressed. His usage of these words is an insult to their real meaning outside a bubble Glen seems unaware he is living in. I want to bring him home to England, give him a V8 pickup and $10 worth of fuel and see how far his hot air carries him around the outer reaches of Dartmoor. I would say that Glen might choke if he saw the price tag for a full tank of fuel back in blighty, but it seems that his head has been lodged so far up his ass for so long that he has not been breathing air for some time. Just before signing off, he advertises a Hybrid vehicle, then signs off noting that he is off to an NRA meeting later. Fox News Radio: Fair and Balanced. No wonder the middle east aren't interested.
We stop at Captain Shorty's in Searsport for meatballs sandwiches. When our food arrives, the waitress asks us where we are from. She loves our accents. They are awesome. Does she sound like a hick to me? No. I hear an enthusiastic lady who is excited to meet people from overseas, but I do not say for reasons I cannot remember. She had a chinaman in last week but we are the first englishmen she has served since arriving from Florida 11 years ago. Portland is a big town. 150,000 people. We'll see when we roll in there, she says. We wish her well and bid her goodbye.
The road calls again. Sebago lake is where the call stops. We make camp by the water again. Burgers spit happily on our newly acquired grill. Patch goes and makes friends with our neighbours - 2 good time boys in their 50's on a fishing trip. Mike is a bear of a man. A full size Tolkien dwarf with his weatherbeaten skin, squat frame and biker's beard. Native American and Scottish by blood, he fishes by trade. There is violence in his blood, he says, tossing another log on the already-fierce pyre. He is a veteran of the service who watched his buddies go off to die in Vietnam. Guilt still ravages him to this day. Too young to leave with them, he was left with a need for psychological help he has been getting for a long time. The service seems to have beat something out of him he is still looking for. Today, he pulled an expensive diver's watch out of the river. There was an unhealthy kind of resistance on the line. A body, he thinks. He will report it tomorrow. Another log tumbles proudly onto the fire. Mike staggers back to his chair, rallying against an early night. Kevin is semi-retired from the boiler business which took him all over. Built large, but less manic than his friend, a well-trimmed moustache spreads across his friendly face. He talks and listens easily, fascinated by our story. A veteran too, he spent some time in Australia in a town with a name that escapes him. He does this trip every other weekend or so. We should make the most of this whilst we have no ties, he says. The talk turns to politics. Both men are disgruntled. They hate the war. They don't agree with it. Another Vietnam in waiting they say. They want change, but they don't know if Obama or Clinton are it. I say that greed is the worst human condition. I say it is an oil driven war with the US importing being the highest in the world. Kevin tells me that China's is higher - twice that of the USA. But storming into Iraq and demanding the Saudi's bend to the government's will is no way to solve the problem. The rich have no idea of the lives of the poor, we think. And we are not really poor. America needs an Ordinary Joe(line) in charge. The rich send the willing poor off to war. Those with nothing to lose fight for everything whilst the rich guard the money. But from what. Kevin would have faith in Bush if George's daughter was out there with a gun in her hands.
We stare into the fire, mutually peturbed.
It seems, at first experience, that the real voice of america is not found in the paranoid announcements blasting from the radios in the cities. It is found in the voices around the campfires on the edge of town. Voices who spoke to us in earnest disappointment borne of reasoned argument; Not slung in fresh mud along the frequencies and airwaves.
Kevin says the nights we've been having are mild compared to the starry nights of the remote north of the state. We tell them we have had great nights so far. An early start for them tomorrow to fish out the limit on their permits. Best be out there earliest when their targets are most prone to bite. Reel in four before the morning is out.
We bid them farewell. Mike asks for a postcard from us. Kevin is the only friend he's got. Patch takes his address and promises that we will send him something, thanking them for their sharing of the local produce. I walk back to the tent through an intimate orchestra of wildlife singing a crescendo somewhere beyond the dying firelight.

The Maine Ingredient

Miia is about to leave for work. She gives me a jumpstart by tickling my feet through my sleeping bag, wishing us well as she heads off into another day of doing the right thing. We depart with Benji waving through the door. Our hosts allowed us a peek into their lives and I saw a couple building a nest of morality and self belief. Benji's blog is a small, unstained window into his world. The economy he uses in his words reflects in his demeanor.. No wasted movement or gesture from that slight athletic frame of bohemian fashion guided by eyes bright behind one-armed spectacles filling in for the contact lenses. The short dark hair is chic and maintainable. To the untrained eye he might appear reserved, introverted even. But as an avid reader I know that reservation is rathermore some kind of subconcious refinement and contentment. Benjibopper reads like this. Choice cuts of a life seemingly without fat on it. As I suspected. The poetic frames of reference online ring true when one walks into his world. A world with the individuality of his writing style. Cutting a path through the years with a wife he clearly loves. No front to break through. Just two souls with direction, Benji and Miia.
We say goodbye to Halifax. A town raw and real. The traumas of the new crashing against the heritage of old. A melting pot. We use half a dozen hours in a horseshoe approach to St. Stephen. The weather is glorious. Bug corpses cast their shadows through the windshield onto my jeans.
The border. I am expecting harsh and thorough questioning. A search of the car. But no, the officials are genial. No strip searching today. No rubber gloves stretched out like an elastic nightmare. We are extra polite. They ask some basic questions disguised as conversation. Where are you going? Who are you staying with? Do you have money? What are your occupations? The All Clear follows without incident, other than fingerprint capture and our eyes caught on camera. Highway 1 takes us into the rolling greenfields and expansive residences of Maine. Plush timberframe houses line the roadside with ride-on mowers and pickups dotted around their gardens. Cobscook Bay Park in the Moosehorn National Wildlife Reserve appears. The park warden recommends a pitch. She warns us about the blackfly and asks us about the fuel prices. Her eyes widen at the rates back home. We camp amongst the trees by the water, foraging for wood to get a fire going. Chicken wings cook as the night time falls like the casualties of our griddle into the hot embers. Absolute stillness here amongst the pine trees. Patch tells me stories about the policemen he evaded playing 'flat money' as a boy. Coins placed on the railtracks got hammered flat by the locomotives as he hid in the bushes. When the law came running he would flee through woodland and gardens. We climb down to the water's edge and cast flat stones to break the night time reflection into shimmering waves of symetry. I call out for whales. The hours pass and the cold creeps in. We stand close to the flames until the clouds cover the moon.

Meat Cove and the sounds of the sea mammal

My nose is cold. But nothing else is. My multi-layered cocoon worked. However, the uneven ground did little for my comfort levels. I must have woken every hour or so to turn over. I get out of my tent. Patch is already packed down. He's sat in the car, desperate for the keys. His night was not good. 3 hours ago he surfaced. The car gets fired up quickly so that he can defrost his toes. The drive down roads frostbitten by winter takes us to the Englishtown ferry and a short crossing to the sandbar barely 50 metres away. Cape Breton astounds us with it's beauty. Narrow roads wind around the dramatic slopes on the coastline. Small towns rumble past. Children stare from the roadside next to piles of lobster pots and cars stood decrepit. Boats sit idle on the land. Old snow languishes on the hilltops. We pass two weathered silos piled high with salt.
'For the roads' I say, sagely.
'I didn't think they were for chips' quips Patch.
I grin as we climb another huge incline, holding my nose to pop my ears. The same ontarian couple cross our path at each lookout. Picture postcards stretch majestically at every turn, sweeping in huge rocky arcs through the full scope of my vision. The road rolls past like a dream. Fishing villages peek around the headlands. Patch turns off towards Meat Cove. A dirt track carries us the last precarious kilometres to the tip of the cape. We alight and sit at the picnic table watching the waves crash into the bay. All this beauty tires the eyes. Winding back up the the track scored into the hillside, we are passed by a kamikaze schoolbus bright yellow through a trailing cloud of dust. Lunacy to pilot such a vehicle at the speeds she reaches on these demanding curves. I see an aging wooden shack with a Coke sign painted on it. Patch stops to get a picture of the Meat Cove roadsign. A long even 'moooo' swims over the flutter of branches and dirt. I run for the nearest cliff edge through the bramble and grass scanning the waves. Only that metronome sea call greets me. I stare for a while but see nothing. I trudge back to the wagon. The main road appears. We circumnavigate the rest of the cape, up and down past snow and sea. I break my second nail of the day at the gas station near sea level. The tarmac throws the afternoon light in my face. I squint and yawn. Endurance prevails. We get back to Halifax late. I eat Benji's tea and watch America's Next Top Model with Miia. We laugh at Tyra The Fashion Witch. Corner Gas and Northern Exposure flick on and off. Patch hunts out the ferry to Maine. But to no avail. Landing like our forefathers would prompt a long delay. No time for that. I retire when my fingers get tired under the lamplight and tiptoe to bed. Patch is snoring like a missfiring moped with a broken muffler. I fall into a deep sleep.