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spruce, healthy-looking couples in canoes, loons and
moose.
    The
headlines told a different story. A rash of teen suicides; support groups for
people addicted to Oxy-C and vicodin; two big heroin busts. Another bomb scare
at the high school. Another confirmed case of West Nile Virus. A missing
persons alert for someone named Martin Graves, last seen August 29th. The
police log listed three arrests for domestic assault and another for possession
of crack cocaine. A body washed up in Burnt Harbor had been identified as a
fisherman lost at sea the previous winter. More bodies were missing from
another boat presumed lost in a recent storm. There was also a feature,
"The Facts About Bear Baiting," and notice of a Benefit Bean Supper
for the Prout family, who had just lost their home to a fire. Someone was still
looking for her husband, last seen driving home to Machias after work at
Wal-Mart a month before.
    So
much for Vacationland, I thought, and
went to bed.
    7
    It
was the second week of November; the beginning of the Maine winter. I was naive
enough to think it was still fall.
    For
a couple of months I'd saved a small stash of crystal meth. Becoming an addict
takes a certain amount of organization to dedicate yourself to your need to get
high. In this as in other matters I'd lacked ambition. Crank was intermittently
fun and useful, but I never could make a serious commitment to it. The
afternoon before I left, I picked up my Rent-a-Wreck then went home and packed
a map, the directions Phil had given me, a fewclothes and my copies of Deceptio
Visus and Mors, my old Konica, a few cassette tapes. I went to the
fridge and opened the freezer, took out the small Ziploc bag of crystal and
another, larger bag. In this was a piece of paper with blurred writing on it—July
2001—along with two plastic canisters of Tri-X film. The date was when I'd
bought them; it was also the last time I'd done any serious shooting. They went
alongside my camera in the chewed-up leather satchel I'd had since high school.
    Even
traveling light, there was room for more. Problem was, I didn't have much more.
I had an old computer, but no laptop, no cell phone. No digital camera or iPod.
I never had much spare cash, plus I just hated the stuff on principle: it made
everything too easy.
    "You're
a fucking Luddite Looney Tune," Phil said once. "You got a microwave
in that dump of yours?"
    I
shook my head. "I don't eat."
    Now
I went over to my old vinyl records and pulled out a portfolio wedged between The
Idiot and Fear And Whiskey. It was filled with plastic sleeves
holding dozens of black-and-white 8x10s. Not the pictures from Dead Girls; the
stuff I'd been working on after that, the photos Linda Kalman had turned down.
I still couldn't bring myself to look at any of them, just stared at the cover
sheet, a white page with my name typed on it and the title I'd given the
collection: Hard To Be Human Again. I put it back, turned and found my
bottle of Jack Daniel's. Very early the next morning, while it was still dark
and I was still drunk, I began to drive north.
    The
buzz from the Jack Daniel's got me about an hour out of the city before it wore
off. Just past the wooded exurban badlands where I'd grown up, I pulled over
and snorted the remaining blue-white crystals from my stash, then shot back
onto the interstate.
    At
some point I must've stopped for gas, but I didn't have another fully conscious
thought until I looked up, blinking, and saw brilliant sun, the span of a
bridge before me and a broad, glittering blue sheet of water below. A sign at
the highway's edge read leaving new Hampshire. I was halfway over the bridge,
reading another sign—WELCOME TO MAINE, THE WAY LIFE SHOULD BE—before I began to
wonder what had happened to Connecticut and Massachusetts.
    That
was my crossing into Maine. What little thought I'd ever given to the place was
faintly contemptuous: Vacationland, snow. I didn't understand yet how this
place works on you, how it