Any given Saturday

Joy Clough6 Comments

I was browsing the greeting cards at a local gift store recently when the announcement was made: “Oh….it’s Saturday!”

It came from a woman standing in between the complimentary coffee carafe and the cash register. Her tone was not one of dismay or panic, but rather matter-of-fact with just a hint of urgency. She chuckled, pleased at her own sudden recall, made her purchases and left to go about her business.

“Yup, it’s Saturday, all right,” I thought. And then it hit me. There I was, reading through the same cute moose and hummingbird cards I’d seen repeatedly, wondering which critter went best with which upcoming birthday, and I hadn’t even been distracted by the woman’s announcement. I’d simply nodded in silence. I already knew it was Saturday. And, without even looking up, I felt I knew this lady just as if we’d sat down and had coffee face to face. She must be a local, I realized, and I must be almost one, too.

With house moving check lists, real estate deadlines, and 9-to-5 work weeks behind me, most days I’d be hard pressed to tell you what day of the month it is. I do have a calendar pinned to the refrigerator like everyone else. But unless it tells me it’s time to send off a cute card, pay a bill, or remind Tom to stop fishing and start hunting, I don’t use number dates to monitor my activities much anymore. I’ve switched over to a day of the week system instead. It doesn’t so much matter which calendar week I’m in, as long as I know “What day is today?” (Except when you’re talking about the third Thursday of the month. Everyone knows that’s pot luck dinner night at the Rangeley sportsmen’s club.)

Out in Rangeley Plantation (see my description in Finding Community), Saturday is dump day. It’s also fresh seafood truck day, post office and bank in the morning day, library before 2 o’clock and building supply store before 4 day, and make it to the IGA before last week’s sale items run out day. But, first and foremost, it is dump-is-open-all-day day. As you can imagine, Waste Management curbside pickup stops way south of here, leaving us responsible for our own garbage disposal. I can’t run out to the curb at the last minute in my slippers hauling green bags in one hand and pulling a recycling bin in the other. Tom and I need to haul our own by-products to the “transfer station,” so-called because it’s not really a dump, but a place where we dump all our refuse and recyclables so they can get transferred somewhere else to be dealt with. And, if for any reason, we have a total brain freeze on the dump hours of operation (meaning when the gate is left open), we can’t transfer our garbage out of our garage and must deal with those consequences for another week.

“Jeez, is it Saturday yet?” I wonder long about Thursday during unseasonably mild weather when what’s left of what I bought off the fresh seafood truck the previous week is in desperate need of transfer. (While most welcome in all other respects, Indian Summer is a bummer when it warms the garage after the dump reverts back to its winter schedule. In the “winter,” meaning after Labor Day, I lose the respite of having the dump open for a couple hours on a couple week nights.)

So if our noses haven’t reminded us, our bio-rhythms hopefully have and, come Saturday morning, we load up and head off for the dump. But, unless we are in dire need of emergency garbage transfer, we are not headed just to the dump. Out in Rangeley Plantation, 13 miles from the post office and 20 miles from the hustle and bustle of the Town of Rangeley, we strive to never make the 12 miles to the dump our only stop. We do what we call “the loop.” The loop will take us around to all the previously mentioned places of business. It consolidates our errands and conserves on gas, while preserving our sanity and rural way of life. And, more importantly, it reminds us why we came and why we don’t care so much about forgoing bigger city conveniences. At the dump, we are greeted as “hun” by the longtime attendant who has told me she will sort my recycling for me. A true honor, indeed, in these parts where co-mingling and other offenses have banished others to a lonely life of digging through their own smelly cans and sour bottles. At the post office, we aren’t a box number, but Joy and Tom who have a book from Amazon that was too big to put in the box so is handed over with best wishes for our well-being and weekend plans. On any given Saturday, one of us might stop in at the only hair salon that’s on a pond next to an ice cream store, where we have a good hair day as long as we don’t giggle too hard at the proprietor’s jokes and make him slip with the scissors. In our travels, we might also run into the guy who installed our TV dish and wonders if our reception is OK. He’s the Rangeley installation guy, not the DirecTV contractor sent from Waterville who refused to go up on the roof and told us we were out of luck. Our local guy runs into us in the building supply store or in the bank and wants to make sure we’re happy because, if we’re not, he’d “make the trip out” again. On any given Saturday, our “loop” is bigger now, but connected by people who would go the extra mile with us.

Maybe the woman in the gift store realized it was Saturday since that’s the day they switch over to Back Woods Blend in the free coffee carafe. If she was a renter, chances are she wouldn’t have even been there to make the announcement. Come Saturday, she would’ve hung her head and headed south while a local guy picked up her garbage at her rental cabin and transferred it for her. Nope, my guess was that she was a local and headed out of the store to make it to the dump before the gate closed, and after she got fresh seafood and did the rest of her loop.

“You know, when you retire, every day is Saturday,” our neighbor reminded Tom and me when we were making dinner plans awhile back. “Jeez,” I thought, smiling at the possibilities. “You mean the dump is open every day?”

Going inside…outside

Joy CloughLeave a comment

I’ve never needed much prompting to go to my “peaceful, happy place.”

When I first started going, I wasn’t much more than seven years old. I’d just tumble out of my camp bunk before anyone else and go sit there for hours, at peace with the water lapping against the dock, mesmerized by the mountains mirrored in the calm lake. It was a real location, my peaceful place, one I could occupy by myself with no more than a tiny canvas chair, back when mothers could let their daughters figure out how to keep themselves safe outdoors. I was content to watch the sun dance through the trees and along the green dappled rocks near shore. It was good for me, I’m sure, to just sit there with my hair still bed messy, not worrying or wondering about much. But at that age, there was no context for needing fresh air, for relaxation, for reconnecting with anything. If you’d asked me about healing, I would have shown you a Band Aid on my knee. Was I worried about being balanced? Oh, yeah, I’d admit. If the gym teacher made me try to walk across that scary, skinny little beam, I’d always fall off till she just let me go sit on the bleachers.

Much later, after losing a lot of that innocence and idle time, and losing the parents who used to share my peaceful places, I had to settle more often for returning there in my mind. And sometimes I’d need just a little coaxing from a guided meditation coach or CD to head me in the right direction. “Close your eyes. Breathe deeply, and with each breath, picture yourself in a beautiful, tranquil place where you are totally relaxed, totally at peace….” I’d close my eyes, be a couple breaths in, and poof, I’d be walking down a moss-covered path toward the sound of waves and out to my little canvas chair. I was seven years old again in my special spot. Once there, I felt soothed that life could flow as effortlessly as the lake beneath the dock, that my world could be as secure as the unmoving mountains. For a few precious moments, my mommy could be inside the cabin at the end of the path, cooking breakfast for me and my daddy, who was waiting to take me fishing.

Over the years, I got really skilled at traveling to my peaceful place in my mind. When the physical destination was not possible, I could escape to that oasis in the space of a quiet moment and a couple breaths. This was a very good thing because, while my life hasn’t been what I consider unbearably stressful, or traumatic enough to land me a guest spot on Dr. Phil, I’ve had my share of stuff along the way. And, if I ever get close to running out of stuff, I wouldn’t have to look further than the latest magazines or TV ads to find new reasons to de-stress and detoxify. Who knows, maybe that super stressed out woman in the scented candle commercial has been  sharing the same shoreline with me. She’s kicking off her high heals and transporting herself there, only to run into the “Calgon take me away!” lady who’s been out there since the 1960s trying to drown out her screaming kids and demanding husband. Maybe my metaphysical dock is actually pretty crowded.

I do know that, with more and more people needing to escape society’s pressures every day, teaching my daughters to literally take “out” their feelings with as few props as possible was a parenting priority. I helped them transcend anger, sadness and adolescent frustrations even when a real dock wasn’t available. But, while my intentions came from love, my methods weren’t always yogi-like.

“Go outside now and don’t come back in this house until you’ve figured out how to calm yourself down!” I’d yell if either one had an explosive moment of teenage angst. And they would, even in January, and even when the only sanctuary they could find was beneath a fir tree at the edge of the backyard in Rochester. Becky got so good at it that she stays outside now, as an Outward Bound instructor, teaching others how to center themselves in nature. It probably didn’t fit anywhere on the job application, but she’s told me since that her timeouts in the backyard gave her a solid foundation for promoting the benefits of wilderness therapy.

“Don’t ever haul that old tree away that’s laying down next to the brush pile,” Helen, now 27, told me during a recent visit. The cedar had been a favorite hiding spot for her and Becky to play “wilderness Barbies,” dressing up their dolls in fern and leaf costumes. In between checking the minnow trap, swimming, and building sand castles, they’d go there to dry off in their special thicket, not needing too many other props, and not caring that somewhere else, kids were playing Nintendo.

No, the tree’s not going away and the dock’s staying put too. And, now that our special spot in the woods and by the water is also home base year-round, we all need even less coaxing to surround ourselves in peace and quiet each day. Sitting there, I can still hear my little girls giggling and splashing, or shutting out the rest of the world as they wait for a fish to pull their bobber under. I know when they join me in person, they let the setting bring them back, too. And I know a big reason why we have sought out this space together is because we’ve never really left.

I won’t ever be seven years old again, at least not physically. And I won’t really be able to share my waterfront with my mother or other loved ones passed. But when I breathe deeply and listen to the waves, she is there. My dad is right there, too, being uncharacteristically quiet as he appreciates the morning air. My wonderful step-mom is sipping coffee and smiling, looking down the lake to where the water meets the sky. My mother-in-law, the last to leave, is admiring the new paint job she applied to the 20-year-old bench that now sits proudly facing the best view. If the light is just right, I think I can even make out the “Reserved Seating” sign.

Finding community

Joy Clough2 Comments

Isolation, we’re figuring out, is more a state of mind than a geographical predicament.

It is a valid concern, though, voiced regularly by those closer to bigger lights and brighter cities. “What do you expect to do all by yourselves way out there?” That’s what they wonder out loud, anyway. And even though we rattle off our list of comings and goings and the lakeside decathlon of events we engage in on any given day, silently they seem doubtful. What they’re really saying behind their raised eyebrows and nervous giggles is: “Yeah, but summer’s not going to last forever. Then what?”

Sure, it’s only September still, but as fall begins and we enter into the “then what” phase of this wonderous experiment called early retirement, we don’t feel loneliness encroaching. Call us naive, totally in denial, or just plain stupid, but we don’t expect to be lonely, either. Right from the early planning stages of deciding to live in Rangeley permanently, building a new sense of community has been just as important to us as building a newer house. So far, we’re finding what we came looking for.

When we moved, we went from being two of the 30,000+ residents of the City of Rochester, NH, to becoming new additions number 154 and 155 in Rangeley Plantation. (Technically, you see, we live in a “suburb” of the Town of Rangeley given the Maine-unique distinction of a “plantation.” I always thought the name stood for a place with tons more trees than people. But, according to Wikipedia, in colonial times when Maine belonged to Massachusetts, this term described a “minor civil division.” As far as I can tell, when Maine split off on its own, places like Rangeley Plantation kept the name and a lot of summer folks, but dropped all other Massachusetts correlations.)

Soon after settling in, we went from numbers 154 and 155, to Joy and Tom, or just “the new folks living on the old Upper Dam Road all winter.” And in the four months since, we have mingled, been entertained, reciprocated, and basically hung out with people more frequently and more intensely than we did in the 35+ years we spent packed closer together with them in Rochester. Why? Well if you’re a Rochester reader and are about to stop because you’re feeling this is a Rochester vs. Rangeley “the grass is greener and the people sure are swell” comparison, please don’t. I love you and want you to still spend gas money to come see us because you were included in the friendship intensity I just mentioned. And, if you’re a Rangeley reader, please don’t stop because you think I’m saying you aren’t above and beyond what neighbors should be. You are. You see, I don’t think there’s such a thing as a geographical cure for loneliness. I believe you get what you look for in people, no matter where you go, if you choose to look. I believe people are giving, open and nice to be around unless and until proven otherwise, and I trust them to believe in me the same way. Whether I’m talking to the clerk at the DMV or someone I meet out walking, that’s what I put out there and, in large part, what I get back. So, the difference – the reason Tom and I are more closely knit with friends even though we moved “away” has not been so much a change in attitude or a change in population. It’s been a sharpening of focus, a recommitment to building relationships and the luxury of time to make it possible.

“Having the time” to stop in for coffee, to check in on our nearest neighbors, to participate in town and township events, has really been nice. ‘Course we had the time all those years we were commuting to jobs and busy with kids and any number of other things that put friends further down the list, but we didn’t take the time. Now that we have more time, taking advantage of it is a top priority. We’ve joined clubs. We’ve been to three festivals named after fruit harvests, and are reaching the limits of my “friends over for dinner” menus. One new friend has even invited me to join her group of bikers who pedal to the Oquossoc Grocery for muffins and coffee each morning! As the farthest away, with a 13-mile one-way trip on dirt roads to get there by 7 a.m., I can’t imagine what she’d ask me to do if she didn’t like me. (Just kidding. I love my new friend and am sure I’ll accept her invitation sometime between now and July 2012.)

So, while building a sense of community isn’t as cut and dried as building a year-round house, we are just as glad to be surrounded by friends this winter as we are to have R30 insulation in our new walls. We are glad to be finding what we’re looking for – friends new and old to keep us company, to call us by name and ask what’s up as we come out of the IGA or the bank. And when we look over their shoulders while chatting with them and see the gorgeous Rangeley lakes and mountains that are now our back yard, we’ll know we are doubly blessed.

Book smart

Joy CloughLeave a comment

When it comes to home improvements, I’m not what you’d call a do-it-yourselfer. Conditioned since early in childhood to “just stay out of the way so you don’t screw this up worse,” the only thing I tend to do completely by myself is bathroom chores. I am definitely a “build it for me, let me try to use it for a while, and then I’ll make silly suggestions on how to improve it next time” type of girl. About the only thing I have ever tried to build solo is my self-esteem. Way back before Barnes and Noble devoted a whole section to self-help books and I had to search around the shelves in the back corner, past all the alternative lifestyle manuals I didn’t want to crack open, I’ve been a self-help journeyman. Rowing my own boat, discovering what color my parachute is, chasing after my cheese, and manifesting my own destiny, I’ve studied it all. But books that teach you how to make something concrete, something three-dimensional and real enough so that, if you’ve pictured it this morning you can be using it this afternoon, I never cracked a one. They were always on the other side of the bookstore, away from me, along with the readers who had already manifested their destinies and were celebrating by building themselves a patio.

I should point out here that, as a technical writer, I can write those kinds of books. I can interview computer hardware engineers, refer to their schematics, figure out how they expect Joe IT manager to install networking component A into device A without electrocuting himself, and write the book about it that gets shrink wrapped and shipped with each sale. I have published volumes of guides for propeller-headed audiences,  filled with words like flange, rack-mount, configure and counter-clockwise, and illuminated by little number-and-arrow-annotated diagrams. I once even devised a whole table to describe recommended torque values for G3G134-P installation! 

I can successfully tell someone else how to assemble something because, typically, I’ve had long, drawn-out pre-deadline test phases when engineers would follow my words like gospel, give me endless prototypes to monkey with and, ultimately, would take ownership of my instructions if none of us electrocuted ourselves by following them. I can do this sort of work for pay because I’ve had middlemen. And by far the most valuable of those middlemen was a genius graphic artist named Bob. You see, while I was referring to engineering schematics, Bob was actually understanding them and transforming them into drawings that illustrated component A sliding into device A. He would take the G3G134-P from a flat, one-dimensional CAD print out and actually show its tiny assembly screws and its rack-mount adapters and all of its networking interfaces in drawings that would make its black, boxlike features practically leap off the page in high-def. Once I could study Bob’s drawings, I could wrap my text around them, layer on the little numbers and arrows, and I’d have some step-by-steps even I could follow. And if the steps were really complex, Bob and I and our engineering team were bolstered by the caveat that empowers all cutting-edge technology to make it out of the development lab and into the hands of users: Depending on your operating environment and your specific device configuration, your results may vary from those depicted in these instructions.

So how did it ever come to pass that I could articulate remodeling instructions for my home renovation? How did I take a firm stance at the conception end of such a major redesign process and still want to be the end-user of the product? And how in the world did I do this in partnership with practical, level-headed Tom, who is so handy that he once fixed a toilet with nothing but a plastic fork, some string, and his own ingenuity? He bought me a book.

From the down to earth part of the bookstore I had previously only imagined, Tom purchased The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live by Sarah Susanka. At first wary of the “blueprint” part of its title, I soon discovered this handy book had pictures. It showed actual before and after illustrations of homes like ours that needed to do a lot with not much space. It had tips and tricks and conversion charts, gathered from families that, I felt fairly certain, were living happily ever after with their own handiwork. When I figured out I could refer to various parts of this book as my prototypes for a kitchen layout, for how to translate my desire for “casual, open living spaces” into real nuts and bolts lingo, it became my bible.

“I want the new kitchen cabinets to be this color, but this style,” I’d proclaim to Tom, flipping through the book and pointing. “And I want that place where we said we could hang my special blue plates to be something like this, but without that wall in the way.” Soon the The Not So Big House book was dog eared and crammed with sticky notes bearing numbers and arrows that eventually corresponded to a building plan and workable instructions. I never had to say “flange” or talk about torque, but I began to feel like a real engineer. If I couldn’t articulate what I did want, I could refer to what I didn’t want and work from there.

My initial reference manual soon became part of a mini library of do-it-yourself remodeling books. I even graduated from Barnes and Noble and Amazon to hardcore purchases straight from Home Depot, right on the shelves by the duct tape. What drawers fit my lifestyle, how light fixtures could add the perfect accent, and how to store pots and pans without needing a head lamp to find them — I had a book about it.

They’re in storage now, gathering dust on our do-it-ourselves book shelves. I sure was glad to have them, knowing there could be no prototype phases and my results couldn’t vary if I wanted to live with and in them with my specified husband. I got book smart, got my head out of the clouds (where I was drifting, attached to my imaginary self-discovery parachute) and helped execute the biggest project of my life. Not only is the end result exceeding my requirements while conforming to the strictest of all regs – those mandated by the Maine Land Use Regulatory Commission – it is the perfect operating environment for rowing my own boat.

Surprise visitors

Joy CloughLeave a comment

“Yep, I seen it. Long about dusk, it come creepin’ alongside the woodshed, eyes shinin’ through the trees. Wasn’t actin’ like any racoon, no suh!”

Tales like this are the stuff of cabin folklore and, since staying at a tiny camp on Moosehead Lake as a little girl, part of my family history. The locations and casts of characters have changed a bit through the years, but the common story line runs the same. Some “thing” is in your woods, coming toward your cabin, getting closer. Once it’s in your driveway, if you have a driveway, it is officially a visitor or a trespasser. A common property boundary nearly everywhere, a driveway leading up to your lake place takes on heightened significance as a line of demarcation. When there is something in the driveway and it’s not your car, not the CMP guy, not your expected company, or not even approaching on two legs, the actual driving right down to your cabin luxury you were so proud of when you carved that dirt path through the trees turns into a mixed blessing. While whatever it is uses your access route to get closer, it blocks your escape route over dry land!

The best ever nail-biters are stories in which some critter has approached totally without warning, ambling up whatever path leads it toward you, on to your porch. It’s on the porch, snuffling and scratching, inches away from your last barrier between fleeing or fighting for your life — the door inside!

“I heard it come up on the porch, so I peered through the window in the front door and saw its neck fur in front of me! I figured it must have stood at least six feet tall. I looked around for what I could grab in case it tried to bust down the door and all I had was a fire extinguisher and a shovel!” (Infamous bear on the front porch story as told by my dad; Moosehead Lake; circa 1962).

With stories like this woven through my psyche, and buried memories of lying in a bed a couple feet away from the front door where the bear on the porch was showing his neck fur, I try to be vigilant about knowing who or what is approaching my space. Even so, poor vision, and slothlike reflexes usually render me defenseless, peering at any intruder with, as my dad put it, “a dull vacant stare.” Such was the case last Friday as I stood in my kitchen, cozy in my fuzzy pants, planning nothing more exciting with Tom than hanging up the picture I just bought at the blueberry festival. But suddenly, the beagles were bellowing and there was something on the porch, something that hadn’t even come down the driveway, something that was at the door and had already found a way inside!

When I saw who it was, I froze, helpless. BECKY?!! How did Becky, my Outward Bound instructor, world adventurer, based out of Moab, Utah (when she happens to be indoors) daughter get into my kitchen in Rangeley? Wasn’t I just talking to her on the phone last night about the hot weather “out there?” My expression lapsed to another one of my dad’s favorites: the “close your mouth you’ll catch black flies” face. One of those surprised people whose reaction didn’t quite measure up to what the surprise perpetrators had hoped, I didn’t shriek or flail, jump, or fall over. All I could muster was a few stammered half-questions. Thinking back on it now, I remember my mind racing wildly and my thought process going something like this:

  • I know I have a special maternal connection to Becky and her sister that transcends time and space. But try as I might, I don’t think my super powers can materialize her in my kitchen, even if tomorrow is her birthday.
  • Is she alright? She’s just come off leading a 23-day course hiking the LaSalles and rafting the Colorado and is on the verge of a 50-day course. She’s selected to proctor the fall semester, which is Outward Bound-speak for the person in charge who doesn’t come off the trail the entire season. Did she have second thoughts? Had she gone some sort of desert crazy?
  • When was my last trip to the IGA to get groceries and is it possible I have enough food for her?

Becky, knowing why her mother’s nickname has been Fidget since way before she was born, was quickly over the threshold and answering my questions during a hug with her dad. She wanted a sanity / R and R break before her next assignment. She had flown into Boston the day before, where her sister and brother-in-law, Helen and Jerry, picked her up. She was not in Moab during our last phone call, she was in Portsmouth, talking to me from a hot spot she wouldn’t get a chance to enjoy in Rangeley: a bowling alley. After spending the night at Helen’s, they drove up to the lake, abandoning their car by the road to encroach on foot. They combat-crept through the trees along the driveway, timing their porch landing just right until…..SURPRISE! And yes, she assured, pointing to Helen and Jerry coming through the door behind her laden with plastic shopping bags, they had enough groceries.

“Can I have a Mom hug?” she asked coming over to the sink where I stood, still slack as an empty feed sack. As I grabbed ahold of her for the first time in over three months, she said she also wanted food…..mass quantities of steak, chicken and other non-freeze dried proteins she could eat indoors on a plate. She wanted PBRs (college-speak for cheap beer) by the lake. And most of all, after spending most of her birthdays since she was a teenager out on the trail — missing her family from Grand Teton to the Kennebec River and many points in between — Becky wanted to be home for her birthday.

My fork in the road

Joy CloughLeave a comment

Oprah would call it my “Aha!” moment — that pivotal point in life where I had to choose one course of action over another and forge ahead. Living in logging country, I now know to ponder a fork in the road, hypothetical or otherwise, much more seriously. Both directions may look passable, but not too far off, one turns into a gnarly spur road taking you way, way off course. Five years ago, though, when I stood at my crossroads with my “smart thing to do” blinders on, I walked right into danger and almost lost my bearings for good. “Aha!” would have been too poetic. My change of direction, when I finally let my heart lead the way, was more like a “Holy crap, what did you almost just do, you idiot?” moment.

Direction “A” was the common sense thing to do, the “right” choice according to our bank book and, no doubt, all those level-headed, man on the street-type people I imagined grouping themselves on the side of reason. It first came into focus as a hot tub conversation. It was fall, near closing up camp for the season time, when it was necessary for Tom and I to adopt an all-business, end of summer attitude so we could forget that we really didn’t want to leave Rangeley, didn’t want to go back to school/work, didn’t want it to be September already. Practicality went way beyond talking about packing up and shutting down, though. On this night, it watered down the wine, drowned out the loons calling, and pretty much counteracted the whole purpose of a hot tub soak. Topic of discussion was our tiny, four-room cabin which, after 20 years of use and sharing it with the critters, needed a roof and other major improvements. Sneaking up on early retirement, would we be able to add enough living space to relocate comfortably and affordably? Not according to the Land Use Regulatory (LURC) guidelines, or so we first imagined. LURC said our setback from the water, originally 85 feet when we built the place, would now need to be 100, minimum. We couldn’t add rooms to each side, either, without infringing on our neighbors’ property lines. So, even though we loved our waterfront property, our discussion kept coming around to how it just wouldn’t work to keep it, to sink more money into it to live there, only to have our dreams of a fulltime residence constrained by LURC and other logistics. And, more than anything else, our thread of conversation kept winding its way back to one huge positive in the midst of all the negatives: Our tiny cabin on its beautiful spot of shoreline, even needing some repair, had appreciated in value four times more than our investment. Our real estate in Rangeley could fetch double the selling price of our four season home near the bright lights and bigger cities.

Sell it, we decided. With the profit, we could build from scratch “exactly what we wanted” in any of those just as nice towns like Farmington. We wouldn’t have to be right on the water. We’d have college-town culture, brand spanking new everything and money….money to travel wherever and whenever we wanted. Course we probably wouldn’t come back to this lake, to Rangeley. That would be too sad. But we would go to Alaska, to Jackson Hole, to Yosemite, to all those other lakes Maine was famous for. Wow, we’d even start exploring islands we’d earmarked in Caribbean Travel and Life. Our girls were grown up now, they’d understand how we couldn’t keep camp, given our exciting new agenda!

Oprah says you can navigate your way through an “Aha!” moment to your best possible course of action by quietly posing the alternatives to your inner self. Does one make you feel more “open” and light-hearted, while imagining the other drags you down? Does one make your gut clench while the other expands your solar plexus? YES a small voice was saying. But still I hauled myself and my sinking innards into the realtor’s office that Columbus Day afternoon and signed a contract to put my camp on the market.

Looking back on it, I don’t so much remember it as a gut clenching moment. It was more like a hole opened in the floor of the realtor’s office and swallowed me whole, pen in hand, along with the sinking realization that the dollar signs in my head would never buy my way back to solid ground. I did manage to get out of the real estate office, and the quaint streets of Rangeley framed in fall foliage blurred as I got in the car and cried all the way back to Rochester, NH. I cried past all the property for sale signs just outside of Rangeley, where Tom said we might be able to build a cute house by the river. Through Farmington and south to the turnpike, not able to pick my head up to look out the window or even for a Subway sandwich, I cried. Not crying tears you dab with a Kleenex, but two-year-old bawling, gooey, hiccuping sobs.

Luckily, the universe didn’t allow me to ignore instinct for much longer. Waiting for us in our driveway back in Rochester was Becky, one of our grown up girls who needed to hear our news and would, reluctantly, agree and understand. Even more rooted in Rangeley than us, Becky had found her calling working as a counselor for the Rangeley Lakes Heritage Trust environmental camp. And now, what a coincidence that she chose to make her first trip home from college (where she was learning to be an outdoor educator) on the night we agreed to sell the source of her inspiration!

“We’ll be able to go to such cool places,” Tom said after he dropped the bomb. But Becky didn’t hear anything about Jackson Hole or meeting up in any of her future home bases. “No, no, no!” she said as she stomped off to her room and slammed the door. “We are not having this conversation! Not now. Not ever!”

Fast forward a few years to August. Tom and I have slept in the garage loft above all the stuff from our camp we’ve shoved into storage when the old roof was torn off to rebuild two stories higher. I am standing in sawdust looking out at my new view from what is shaping up to be the best bedroom I could ever imagine. Thanks to Becky serendipitously slapping us upside the head, plus umpteen different remodeling plans to fit enough square footage on our tiny footprint, a realtor grateful we would be staying to support the Rangeley economy, and a builder who worked miracles, I was enjoying my second-story panorama. I now know without a doubt that we couldn’t have gone through with selling what was rooted in our souls. My “Aha!” moment, the poetic one, came after I got a timely shove down the road less traveled. And looking through my white birches, across the lake to Bald Mountain and Saddleback in the distance, gratefully breathing in the new cabin smell, my heart soared and still does.

You can get here from there

Joy Clough6 Comments

So how does an out of work writer and her recently retired teacher husband “leave it all behind” to move permanently to their cabin in Maine? What’s it really like living ten miles from the nearest stop sign and 37 miles from the nearest traffic light on a big lake with a long name that, in Abnaki, means “moose feeding place?” 

Good questions. In the three months since my big transition north, I’m starting to come up with some answers, which I’ll share in the following posts. As they come, I’ll also share answers to things I’m still pondering, sometimes in the middle of the night, and sometimes after embarking on a chore I used to take for granted that now involves bug spray, a change of clothes, a water bottle, an ice pack and an itinerary posted on the refrigerator so loved ones can come find me. I’ll share how I came to uproot myself after living in the same house in the same city for all of my adult life to move year-round to what had previously been my summer camp. I’ll share how I got here and how I intend to stay.

For now, I do know for sure, that my transition from Flatlander to Rangeley transplant would never have grown past a whim without a few prerequisites. To take this leap of faith and begin to make it work, I needed:

  • Enough money and enough faith to believe that enough will be enough
  • A  vision for a new lifestyle with the guts to follow through when opportunity allowed and the grace to back pedal or change course if it didn’t
  • A sense of adventure
  • A sense of humor
  • A logistical, up-to-the minute project plan that would impress even the most detail oriented spreadsheet gurus from my office working days
  • A soul mate who instigated and inspired and, more often than not, just plain took charge of all of the above necessities, and still thinks he wants to pull up his Adirondack chair next to mine when it’s all said and done

Some folks say we’re crazy. Some say we’re “too young” to retire, to which we say we’re “just young enough.” Some say we’re taking a huge risk leaving the malls, the curbside garbage pickup, and ambulances that can reach the emergency room fast enough to resuscitate us.  Even one friend says we’re way to far from a wine and liquor outlet to make this lifestyle feasible. It’s a bit too early to say they’re wrong. The jury’s still out…at least until next April or May when we can, hopefully, still claim victory with whatever  the winter thaw leaves in working order. And if we can’t, and we truly are crazy, let’s hope it’s sweet old Nana who could marvel at the same birch tree over and over like she’d never seen it before kind of crazy. Let’s hope it’s not standing out in the driveway with a shotgun and a tin foil hat kind of crazy.

Meanwhile, I also know for sure I already have the most crucial element in this whole leap of faith, and have possessed copious quantities of it for the past 23 years. I love Rangeley. I love this place, its people, my new-old house here that holds all my treasures. I love the way I feel when I walk down to my waterfront and can still see my daughters as toddlers running ahead of me eager, as I was, to jump in. I am rooted in this land of lakes and mountains. Always will be. With that grounding force, along with the previously mentioned keys to survival, plus lots of blankets, dried beans, homemade wine and stacks and stacks of reading material, the saga begins!