Maine

Common Sense is an Oxymoron

Hank Garfield

This may seem at first like a trivial topic, but I assure you that I am driving toward a larger point.

I grew up on Maine’s Blue Hill peninsula, where, to paraphrase Richard Hooker, author of the M*A*S*H books (long before the TV series), it’s often quicker to get into a car and drive four miles than to make a phone call. It was true then and it’s true now, given the sometimes spotty cell phone reception. The area is a panorama of seascapes, blueberry fields, trees, and small towns and the meandering roads that connect them. The main roads have route numbers, but most people know them by their local names: South Street, the Mines Road, Penobscot Flats.

Because it’s impossible to drive very far in a straight line without running into the ocean, the roads don’t run straight, either. They overlap and combine. Route 172 in Blue Hill is also route 15 and 175. Different roads going different places, they join for a short time.

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What’s the Big Deal about Empathy?

Hank Garfield
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In the West there was panic when the migrants multiplied on the highways. Men of property were terrified for their property. Men who had never been hungry saw the eyes of the hungry. Men who had never wanted anything very much saw the flare of want in the eyes of the migrants. And the men of the towns and the soft suburban country gathered to defend themselves, and they reassured themselves that they were good and the invaders bad, as a man must do before he fights.

— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

I am lucky to have a livelihood that can adjust to the pandemic in relative safety. I teach creative writing at a university. For me, working from home is merely an inconvenience, while many of my fellow citizens are unemployed or at risk at work.

The University of Maine has welcomed students back on campus (and seen at least one COVID-19 outbreak). But I won’t be in a classroom this fall. Half of my classes were online before the virus, and it wasn’t hard to convert the others.

Maine isn’t a bad place to be marooned in. We’ve been spared the worst of COVID and we have, so far, avoided the violence around street protests in other parts of the country.

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Things Have Changed

Hank Garfield

These are trying times for an American dedicated to not owning a car. The Concord Coach bus that used to get me back and forth to the coast has suspended operations indefinitely, and I’m wary of city buses and taxicabs. I have my bicycle, and my feet, but I’ve probably done more driving in the past four months than in the last two calendar years combined.

As regular readers know, I live in a two-person, one-car household within walking distance of downtown Bangor. But for the past two weeks, the lovely Lisa’s vehicle has been undergoing one of its increasingly frequent old-car hospitalizations. Like victims of the virus, its recovery is uncertain.

One of the silver linings of COVID-19 is that the world’s car owners are driving much less than before, and air quality has significantly improved. Lisa’s car, even when healthy, has sat idle for days at a time while we both work at home. But we do rely on it for one or two things, like grocery shopping, and transporting heavy objects. At times we’ve used it for trips out of town, when the sameness of staying at home gets to be too much.

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