The ghosts in this machine

So we're staying outside of the sprawling and vaguely ridiculous town of Rumford, Maine. It's a small town, but it never ends; first the little villages, miles apart: Rumford Point, Rumford Center. Then the long, sad, strange town of Rumford, all boarded up and sagging. We kept driving through it, as the town meandered from little downtown to little downtown, to its real centerpiece: the huge pulp mill in adjacent Mexico, Maine. The three-story apartment buildings around it were caving under time and mold, with asbestos siding and hastily built porches atop yards of plastic toys and dirt. With a nod to C. Bailey, where there are pulp mills, there is poverty. The town was heavy with it: a teenage girl pushing her baby in a faded stroller, young men smoking and walking aimlessly across the street, old men hunched and weaving. The streets were full of life, but the ghosts hovered just above.



I walked up to a giant statue of Paul Bunyon and took a picture, and a man nearby said: "don't tell me you're a tourist." He was about 60, wearing a Harley vest and sitting next to his friend, their motorcycles nearby. I said yes, and we got to discussing Oregon, and my road trip. "How's the mill doing?" I asked. "Oh, it's doing pretty well," said the first man, "I'm a wood buyer there." After a bit more discussion, I found out it was owned by a subsidiary of Cerberus, a private investment firm. And more: "Nobody wants their kids to work in the mill. There's no pride in that anymore." He was critical of the owners, and critical of their short-sightedness and the decline of the town. Of course. The story of small-town America. Our ghosts in the machine: decay pokes through the thin veneer of civilization, and we recoil at its primeval stench.

We ate at the Chicken Coop, where the sweet waitress spoke to us without the use of the letter "R" at the end of words. "Yo'ah from out of town? The Lobstah he-ah is excellent!" It was an old logger bar, I think; lots of food, some of it not very good but some of it great, all for a very low price. And we drank "Shipyahd" beer. I mean Beah.



Mom and I are staying in an actual haunted house. It says 1885 on the front, and it's got a giant red barn and the most beautiful wood floors I've ever seen, some of the planks a foot and a half wide. Music is playing somewhere and I sit in this room, faux candles blazing on the wall next to a gilded mirror. It's so quiet outside that we could hear the drip of a faucet under the screened porch as we played Scrabble. Marvin is sleeping, tired from our hike up Mt. Eisenhower in New Hampshire today.

He met his first pigs today, and stared at them like he does with cats, backing up on his haunches, his tail wagging in excitement and uncertainty.