Remembering Maine

As the small plane tipped its left wing downward toward the rocky coastline below, Michael fought the urge to dig the camera out of his bag and start shooting pictures through the window. The sun was setting to his left, and the tilt of the plane gave him a beautiful view of the horizon over the wing behind him. A beautiful canopy of clouds was greenish-blue over the land, but was washed over with pink and orange as if on second thought.

Already feeling embarrassed, Michael reached into his backpack which he had kept under his knees on the tiny plane and, within a second or two he had his camera out and was framing the pictures to not include pieces of the plane and window in the foreground, using the photography tricks he had learned to eliminate glare from the double-paneled window by tilting the lens slightly and making sure the flash was turned off.

Oh, please make sure the flash is turned off, he thought to himself. He already felt foolish for taking pictures out the window. Number one, because he had a suspicion that the shots wouldn’t come out well, anyway. He remembered his parents coming back from a trip to Hawaii, mocking a woman who was taking pictures of the USS Arizona from the island-hopping airplane at dusk.

He could still hear his dad telling it to his grandparents over a cocktail: “Can you believe that? Wasting money on a picture like that? It’s just going to be a gray blob on a bigger, darker blob! What an idiot!”

Well, now you’re that idiot, he thought to himself. Someone’s going to go home and tell their 10-year-old how they were on the plane with an idiot taking pictures out of the airplane window. Funny, though, aren’t they entitled to say what they want? You don’t know these people anyway--what do you care? But, for some reason, you do, don't you?

The second reason that made him think to be embarrassed was that he was so uncontrollably inspired by a sunset. You’re acting like a 13-year-old girl who’s into purple, he admonished himself, chuckling a little.

“Yes, I like sunsets and ponies and going to the mall. I’m a Capricorn and I’m getting my braces off in March…”

He shot the pictures on his digital camera, switching out a couple of the settings to highlight the scenery and minimize the foreground. One, zoom out, another, change the zoom, another, reframe with the sun to one side, Lens flare effect-grab that one it might be interesting—you’ll never know what you can crop and change and get a good shot from. Just grab raw data right now to work with. He rolled his eyes thinking of pictures as “data”, but that was just a side-effect of his job.

A slight commotion shook him out of his mental focus a little. The couple to his right was rubbernecking across the aisle and out the window to see what he was documenting so fervently. Michael flushed a little, truly embarrassed now, and now with all the reasons to be so spelled out in his brain, which made him a little apologetic and shy. He looked somewhat sheepishly at the man and woman, who were still curiously focused on the window like they were trying to see if there was a car accident or some other event happening which required such vigorous picture-taking. The man looked at Michael and seemed a little irritated, shot a glance back out the window for a second, and then leaned toward his wife and said something.

Gee, dude, I’m sorry I made you look—you can go back to reading “American Way” and shopping in the crappy catalog for porcelain frogs, Michael thought to himself. Like you had something else to do. He flicked the switch on the camera and looked at his pictures. Pretty good, he thought—these will work very nicely.

Then he tilted his head a little and looked down at the jigsaw-puzzle coast and waterways below. So this is Maine, he thought to himself. Somehow, his thoughts were brought to a puzzle of the United States that he was putting together when he was about 5, sitting on the tile floor of his white house in Texas. It was a wooden puzzle with little pegs, and, as he remembered, a lot of the smaller states in the northeast lumped into one wooden block with a red peg sticking out over New Jersey. He could always remember Maine because it was the top one, like a pointer finger aimed to the right. But that was his first consciousness that there were far away places, and now he was here, and retrospectively he wondered if as a five year old he had thought he would ever get to that top piece of the puzzle.

Maine had an allure to him. It was a place that you couldn’t really get to see unless you tried hard. True enough, he thought to himself, this trip has taken forever today. Now the sun is going down and you still have to drive out to the island.

Content and hopeful, he quietly turned off the camera and slipped it into the bag under his knees, and for the rest of the flight, Michael thought about the things that worked together in his life to bring him to this beautiful place.