Travel to Guilford!

  I know my audience, mostly.  You are probably either a fellow fledgling travel writer, or someone who knows me personally (hi dad).  So my sympathetic reader, here is my situation.  I am currently enrolled in an interesting, online, travel-writing course.  My first assignment is to write an article on my home town (this article).  I started it with a pretty good first line, “clouds seem to float closer to the ground in Guilford, Maine.”  That’s when the problems started.  I became distracted.  You see, I am in La Paz, Mexico on the southern tip of the Baja peninsula.  I have been traveling by motorcycle, on repose for a few days while I wait for a ferry to cross the Sea of Cortez.  The plan is to meet up with an old friend, a beautiful Mexican woman with the hopes of rekindling a love while taking a scenic train ride through the Copper Canyon  (if that wont do it, nothing will!).  It is hard to concentrate on anything but the present, and my hometown of Guilford is not part of my present.  Also Reggi, the old Moroccan guy down the hall, is always inviting me to go drink tequila with him and his local buddies.

  Guilford  (mi pueblito) is a small town in Piscataquis county, the most rural county of the most rural state in the union.  The innocent town was my cocoon, and when my wings developed I flew, like most of my peers.  Small towns in Maine have a problem with retention of their youth.  Most of my current observations, who I am, what I think, are at least partially based on where I spent those most impressionable young adolescent years, Guilford.

  Physically beautiful, central Maine can be as lush and green as a  tropical forest in Guatemala or as harsh and desolate as the high Sierra during the long winter.  The Guilford I know is through the eyes of a 13 year old boy with a bicycle, that is, I know Guilford very intimately.  The smell of mud season, (defrosting dog shit) the song of chickadees, “chicka dee dee dee,” and the boredom, the desire to leave.

  When someone asks me where I am from, without hesitation I say Maine, although now I have lived outside Maine for more time then I have lived there.  I often use Guilford as a conversation starter spitting out facts about my old home.  I say, “in my hometown, we produce 90% of the worlds golf tees,” (I’m not sure if that was ever true) or “where I come from the mosquitoes and black flies are so bad that there have been reports of moose being driven into suicidal rampages” (I have never seen such a report).  I have a plethora of Maine “facts” at the ready.

  If your car ever breaks down in Guilford, (why else would it be a destination?) you are in for a treat.  You are in the very footsteps of  Henry David Thoreau.  Thoreau came through Guilford on his way north to Moosehead lake and Mount Katahdin looking for wilderness and isolation.  And although the trip to the north is now much easier, (you don’t need an Abnaki Indian guide) much of that wilderness, and isolation desired by Thoreau is still there.  Too bad his mom wasn’t around to do his laundry, or maybe he would have chosen the banks of the Piscataquis river in Guilford, to write about solitude and self reliance instead of the comparably urban Walden pond in the “woods” of Massachusetts.

  So, like I was saying.  Clouds seem to float closer to the ground in Guilford, Maine.  The sky is smaller.  I am not sure what causes this effect.  It could be that the northern end of the worn down Appalachian mountains don’t stretch that high into the heavens and that the thick, mixed conifer hardwood forests don’t produce the towering trees one sees out west making the sky seem more accessible, closer.  Or maybe this is some sort of psychological effect only perceivable by one who regards Guilford as home.

  Well, you will have to excuse me as I am off with Reggi to go drink wine with his expat friends at a local, La Paz pizza joint.  Maybe they will want to know where the machine gun was invented  (really close to Guilford).