Northern California is like much of Maine in many respects, though geologically quite different. Both have much of something I cherish and elevate to nearly religious proportions: Nature.
In "The American Scholar," Ralph Waldo Emerson, he who brought Walt Whitman to a boil, comes pretty damn close to capturing what Nature (purposely capitalized) is in my consciousness : "There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity in this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles [one's] own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find, -- so entire, so boundless."
I encountered Emerson while at HSU. An enlightened friend I made there who literally changed my life, Shawn Hamilton, used to quote Emerson (something like "Man is God playing Fool"). He also turned me onto, among other great minds, Krishnamurti, Ram Dass, and Alan Watts. I'd read these guys at night, between classes, whenever I could. But I was no bookworm. I knew that the world they wrote about could not be experienced directly in the pages of their books. So every chance I got, I physically went out into that world.
I'll never forget how small and hobbit-like I felt among the towering redwoods of northern California. So high up and far away were their canopies that the immense sun-streaked atmosphere below seemed like a separate--indeed, an almost magical--world beneath a world. The coast along Humboldt county, which continues on into Oregon, is rocky and steep,with long sloping cliffs that would prove treacherous to the clumsy sightseer. Standing at the precipice, looking out over the Pacific, I felt a vastness, an immensity, that I couldn't feel from, say, the cliffs off Bar Harbor, Maine. And seeing the sun set on the ocean's horizon is, to the East Coaster, a remarkable thing--quite different from seeing the sun rise over the Atlantic. Pacific sunsets have a somnolent effect--they possess pathos and are aesthetically moving; whereas Atlantic sunrises, accompanied by an explosion of birds and the blaring of alarm clocks, are more like a jolt of caffeinated coffee.
Maine, though, has its uniqueness, especially when it comes to Nature. In rural Maine, and here I'm thinking particularly of northern Maine--north of Bangor--and some parts of western Maine, you can get lost in the woods and always know that, if you walk long enough, you'll come upon a lumber road or snowmobile path that will lead you to safety. Maine's woods are poetic. Emerson wrote odes to them; Thoreau wrote a treatise of sorts on them; but to really get a sense of Maine's woods--and in this case, in winter--read Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" or Wallace Steven's "The Snow Man." These poets may not have written these poems about Maine specifically, but the imagery in both is Maine through and through.
Whereas Nature in northern California has an immensity that suffuses it with grandeur, more intimacy may be felt in the small, tight, nearly cramped Nature of Maine. The forests are thickets of wild shrubbery and undergrowth that can be difficult for hikers, but that difficulty automatically puts them in close contact with their surroundings. In northern Cal, you can walk through the woods with little hindrance, so wide open are the spaces between trees and shrubs. But in Maine it's a whole different story. You can't walk in or out of the woods without literally being touched by it in some way.
On my deathbed, when my whole life passes before me, I already know one series of scenes from my life that will come upon me then and, hopefully, make the transition from being to not being easily. These scenes are from my many treks to the top of the ski hill in Fort Kent. Most of them were at night, very late, sometimes after leaving Bee-Jay's bar half-in-the-bag. I'd go home knowing full well that if I slept, I'd wake up with a hang over. So, on those cool summer nights, I'd walk the three blocks past dark, quiet homes and ascend the face of the hill.
It was pretty steep but, if I took my time, I'd make it to the top in less than twenty minutes. I liked to wait until I was at the top until I turned around. There were no lights up there; the closest was a solitary street lamp that stood next to the closed-up lodge at the hill's base. The only lights came from above. I'll never forget lying there on the patchy grass and clover, looking up at the Milky Way at the countless stars, most of them trillions upon trillions of light years away. The skies in northern Maine are lenses to the universe, unencumbered by the glowing lights of the towns below--Fort Kent and, across the St. John River in Canada, Clair.
Emerson was right. Nature can teach the perceptive and curious person (his obtuse term, "scholar") many things. And if many of those things end in questions rather than answers, and if mystery prevails where empirical conclusions fail, and if what one "learns" comes via intuition and not common sense, then one has experienced the universe as it really, truly is.
