Highland Road

The house was a combination of beautiful and eerie. I whizzed by it on my bike, headed down Highland Road, deciding not to stop and take photos although both of us were yelling about how beautiful it was and how we wanted to own it. It was early in the ride and we had another 28 miles or so in front of us. That and it had begun raining a bit and the group was mostly still together. Stopping would have been all kinds of a mess. And so we rode past.

Another bend in the road and another small hill found green rolling pastures and rolled bales of hay on either side of us. Again, beautiful, but the stop was not happening. Instead I told Deborah the story about the time on the Amazing Race when the teams had to unroll bales of hay looking for the next clue and one pair looked for 8 hours or more and finally Phil just came out in the dark to tell them they'd been eliminated. It passed the time as we waited for the rain to stop. But it reduced the pleasure that this road could have brought us in all its rural glory had I remained silent and listened to it as it spoke.

We carried on, in and out of the fingers of this part of the coast of Maine, supported by the LLBean van following us to replenish our water and give us snacks and meet us for lunch at mile 19. We stopped to check out a vista point and watched a cormorant, surely a male, stand on the end of a canoe and hold his wings outspread, perhaps to impress the others around him.

Our bellies were still full from the blueberry pancakes that were our breakfast after a night of what can't rightly be called camping since, even though I did sleep in a tent, it was on a cot with a mattress on a wooden platform with a bedside table. Deborah noticed a swimmer way out in a bay and awaited his return to ask him about his workout. We visited with turkeys and goats and ducks at a farm. I stopped to take a photo of a tiny yellow, wooden, painted shed at an intersection in the middle of nowhere with a sign proclaiming it Symphony Hall.

After lunch, Deborah asked the guides about making a sidetrip back to Highland Road before returning to camp. She got directions and told them we'd be late. Off we went.

Amazingly, although it had only been about 4 hours since our first foray down the road, neither of us really remembered the lay of the land all that well. We were surprised by the first steep-ish hill and got confused by the first edifice we saw, unsure what it was. We stopped to take a few shots of the rolled bales of hay against the green of the grass. We had no sun, but also no rain, and the lighting was perfect to capture the colors.



Another bend, another hill and around the corner was the house we remembered. We stopped on the road to get a few shots, and then Deborah headed up the grass path towards the front door. I remained on the road, liking that Deborah was bonding with the house and got her in the frame, listening to the story it was trying to tell us.



The grass path looked freshly driven upon. The roof was newish. Almost no window pane had glass remaining. The wooden slats that made up the outside walls of the house were there, but the wooden siding slats were falling every which way in many spots. The front door was almost entirely covered by a large, unruly patch of blackberry bushes. The wildflowers were taking over in every direction.



I approached. I squatted, I listened to the house. I saw the light through one window and through another to behind the house. I wondered what had happened here. I hoped I wasn't going to get ticks when I kneeled in the brush to get a different angle. We were silent mostly, but also wondered some of this outloud.



We turned around and rode back towards a hot shower and the car to take us back to the city. But I looked back over my shoulder one last time at the house as I hit the first downhill and anticipated another uphill to get us to the end of Highland Road once again.

We noted the address. Deborah wants to know who owned this place and when. An advantage of a really good zoom on your camera is that sometimes you can see things in the photos that you couldn't even make out when you took the picture. I looked slowly through the images when I got home and suddenly stopped short, afraid that I'd see a face or a ghost or something else I couldn't explain in one of the shots. Alas, this doesn't end with a ghost story.

Instead it ends with the willingness to take some time to revisit somewhere that spoke to us and listen. The house was clear with us. It has a story. We may never know what it is, but now we are part of it. We didn't just whiz by on our bikes. We didn't just assume it was abandoned. Because I have a friend who, like me, is willing to wonder.