Isolationism

Taking the boy out of the city

By Max Alexander

The propellers whined as the Saab 340 banked over Yankee Stadium, lowering toward the Hudson for a morning cruise down the length of Manhattan. Crosstown streets fanned past like fence pickets before we pivoted over the Statue of Liberty’s torch and across Brooklyn to a southwest landing at LaGuardia. When I first started flying between New York and Portland 20 years ago, the planes were full-size jets — they call it Portland Jetport, right? Now both cities are bigger, richer, and glitzier than ever — and the planes are puddle jumpers made by car companies. I’m sure that says more about the wretched state of air travel than anything about Manhattan and Maine, but the tiny low-flying planes do make for spectacular arrivals.

The excitement ended when we touched down and sat on the tarmac for half an hour — half as long as the flight itself — waiting for a gate. I was back in New York, on assignment from a Big National Magazine, and not particularly happy about it. Gotham was in a frenzy over the Subway Series championship between baseball’s richest team and its third-richest team, and like most non-New Yorkers I was nonplussed.

In truth I was annoyed that a Subway Series never happened during the years I lived there, and I was determined not to enjoy this one; my visit in the midst of it was entirely coincidental. I wanted it to go away — which it finally did on Thursday night as I sat in my favorite bar in the East Village and watched the Mets flame out. This bar being a noted Mets establishment, I didn’t have to listen to any whooping Bronx obnoctoids. There was enough idiocy on the screen, as Mets fans cheered on their catcher, Mike Piazza, with signs like HE DELIVERS and PIAZZA DELIVERY ZONE. “Piazza means plaza!” I wanted to scream. “Place! Square! Courtyard! There is no cheese on it!”

In search of higher culture, I ambled down to a nearby jazz club where the last set of the Mingus Big Band was about to start. This was the 14-piece unit that Charles Mingus’s widow put together, to keep his music alive after his death from Lou Gehrig’s Disease in 1979. Using charts written by the arranger Sy Johnson, who worked with Mingus in the late ’70s, the band swung through an hour’s worth of Mingus standards, closing with the classic “Nostalgia in Times Square.”

The music was great, like nothing in my corner of Maine — and I was feeling fairly nostalgic myself about New York at that point, although not enough to consider a stroll through Times Square. I couldn’t recall the last time I had shoes on at two in the morning, and I flopped exhausted into a taxi for my hotel.

The next day was less romantic. At magazine offices around town, friends who work in cubicles until late at night (“gotta go, we’re closing the book”) talked earnestly about media mergers and masthead shuffles. None of it would mean anything to my neighbors back home — even if it were about a publication like Field & Stream. And always came the inevitable talk of housing, the New Yorker’s obsession.

“Remember those studio apartments in the East Village with the bathtub in the living room?” said a friend.

“How could I forget?” I replied. “You put a board over the tub and there’s your dining-room table. With a shared toilet down the hall, right?”

“Right, like a youth hostel. Those are going for eighteen hundred a month.”

“That’s about half what you’d have to pay me to live there,” I said. But there was a time when I actually wanted to live in New York badly enough to sell myself into that kind of slavery. Now I felt like Elliott Merrick, the New York author of the 1930s who moved to Vermont and described a return to Gotham in his book Green Mountain Farm: “Here are the lost city millions who can never be freed because they don’t want to be freed.”

Which is a good thing if you live in a quiet corner of Maine you hope stays that way. With the airlines doing their part to keep people away, I felt safe in my solitude, if not downright smug.

Until I got home on Saturday afternoon. “I think we need to rent an apartment in town,” said Sarah when I walked in the door.

“Huh?”

“The distance is really starting to get to me.” Sarah teaches at the same school in Camden that our kids attend, more than 20 miles from our farm. “It isn’t just the driving,” she went on. “I don’t feel like I’m part of the school community way out here. I need to be closer.”

She was finally putting words to one of our biggest fears — a major issue that until now we had danced around delicately. The fact is, our house is more isolated than we’d ever imagined. And it’s a bigger problem for Sarah, who needs the kinship of friends much more than I. “We could get a place in town during the week, and stay out here on weekends.”

“Camden’s expensive,” I said, which sounded absurd after hearing about Manhattan’s $1800-a-month hovels. “But we can look around.”

Then came the details. We’d need another computer. What about my work phone? (Maybe I need to rent an office.) What about the dog? The cat? So much for getting a flock of sheep . . . Suddenly it all seemed hugely complicated and limiting, the opposite of why we moved to Maine. I began to feel trapped by our circumstances, and I regretted my feelings of superiority over those miserable New Yorkers.

I needed some air. I went outside and walked through the dark around to the north side of my house, where the blueberry field runs up to the lawn. A major storm was blowing in — one of those epic collisions of Artic and Atlantic fronts — and pounding gales charged across the meadow at 30 miles per hour, moaning against the gables of the house and stripping copper leaves off our giant oak. I gulped for air in the vacuum of the wind, and stiffened my knees to brace myself against the current, but it kept changing direction.

We woke Sunday to an October blizzard. Trees still bearing leaves sagged and snapped under white blankets as the wind whipped harder, and the snow fell faster.

Max Alexander lives in Washington, Maine.He can be reached at malex@midcoast.com.