SIGNS OF LIFE

By Brian Hannon

Driving along Route 16 to Greenville, I always noticed the signs.

Remnants of the salt poured continually by county work crews during the long winter left a chalky patchwork on the cracked, gray tar that jolted my mother’s Saab. The radio was chronically broken due to a problem with the electrical system, and the only sound was the humming of the tires against the cold pavement, the steady noise intermittently broken by the rattling thump of a pothole or the momentary silence of the front wheels spinning free at the top of a sharp rise. I could see about a hundred feet into the woods through thin trees where bright-eyed deer and the occasional moose ambled, seemingly indifferent to the encroaching world of men.

Dotting the embankments on both sides of the road, plastic and hand-painted wooden signs advertised the spirit and self-reliance of the Mainers living on this rural byway.

FOR SALE CHOCOLATE LAB PUPS. DON’S SMALL ENGINES. WELCOME ICE RACERS. HOME OF THE SKIDDER TIRE DONUT. ANTIQUES. ROOM FOR RENT. MAINE MAPLE SYRUP. HAND BRAIDED RUGS. LOBSTERS AND CLAMS PACKED FOR TRAVEL. UNITED WE STAND AND SURVIVE.

There was even a sign for SIGNS, an offer to paint the notice boards and posters the residents used to convert their homes into commercial outposts.

Eventually the sea of pine and birch surrounding the road opened to reveal Moosehead Lake, with Greenville clinging to the southern tip of its forty-mile shoreline. This is where I stayed.

I had returned to the United States after a year and a half in Europe, a professional and personal adventure deemed a moderate success or an abject failure, depending on which side of the bed I exited on a given morning. The start of graduate school classes in Rhode Island and a promised job on campus were still three months off when my girlfriend evicted me from her apartment in Boston for many of the same reasons women have been kicking men out since Cupid first shot an arrow.

My mother took pity and offered me a room at her house. I was wary of the invitation due to my reservations about the small town in which she lived. Since leaving Maine after high school, I had resided in three other states and a European capital city; for a guy who had grown used to urban living, Greenville might as well have been the ice caps of Greenland. Yet I was still fond of Barb Hannon’s cooking, despite her proclivity for capers, and I had no better offers; in fact, I had no other offers at all. I packed my two bags and got reacquainted with an old college friend: the Concord Trailways bus from Boston to Bangor.

The passengers scattered down the double rows of worn cloth seats were the same faceless students, drifters, and grandmothers I had encountered on every other bus ride from Massachusetts into central Maine. It was like the Hotel California on wheels. I split my time between a book about the rise and fall of the Third Reich—the dust jacket emblazoned with a swastika that earned me a harsh look from a granny—and staring at the endless stone formations and creeping forests of I-95. Anyone who has spent time on that highway knows what I mean. Visible across the grassy fields that occasionally open up at the sides of the interstate are big and small bodies of water and houses and stoplights and stores, yet for the most part it is a recurrent chorus line of green trees and gray rocks.

When the bus pulled into the depot near the Bangor airport, it was 10 P.M. on a Sunday. My mother and her fiancé piled me into his dusty SUV for the final leg of my reluctant trip to Moosehead, but an impenetrable wall of dark surrounded the isolated roadway, and I had to wait until morning before getting a good look at my new, temporary home.

There isn’t much to downtown Greenville. The “village,” as it is called, is just a handful of businesses that subsist on the custom of locals during the colder months and then rake in most of their yearly income when the tourists and summer residents come up from Portland or Boston to barbecue and put their personal watercrafts in the lake. Some days you might not spot a soul during a drive through town; but again, there are the signs confirming there is life.

MUZZY REAL ESTATE. MAINE GUIDE FLY SHOP. GLORIOUS HAIR CARE. YE OLDE VILLAGE DELI. VILLAGE FOOD MART. MAINE MOUNTAIN SOAP AND CANDLE. HARD DROP CAFÉ. NORTH WOODS OUTFITTERS. GREAT EASTERN CLOTHING COMPANY. AUNTIE M’S. MORRELL’S HARDWARE AND LUMBER.

At first this quiet landscape bored me to tears. I had just spent eighteen months in Prague, one of the most picturesque and action-packed cities in Europe, preceded by three years in Boston. Greenville seemed slow, to put it kindly. My hometown of Bangor could be dull, too, but there I could at least drive out to the mall and catch a movie. In Greenville, unfortunately, I had the exact same option: drive an hour and twenty minutes to Bangor to see a movie.

I had no friends on the lake besides my mother and, despite what Norman Bates will have you believe, a boy’s best friend is not his mother. Yet she tried to help, even sending me out one night to all three of the bars in Greenville with a young nurse from her staff at the regional hospital. The woman was very nice and enthusiastic about showing me the local nightlife, but I just couldn’t get excited about mingling with the other two people at Whiskey Cove.

Mom also urged me to venture beyond the house during the day, often handing over her keys and instructions for unnecessary errands. At first these chores simply transferred the setting of my boredom from the living room to the car, but there was a hidden blessing in the busy work. Although I never said it out loud, I eventually came to look forward to these excursions during which I reconnected with Maine’s backroad landscape.

On the routes I took from Greenville to Newport or Dover-Foxcroft, the roadside was an industrial catwalk of wood chippers, gravel pits, and municipal lots housing plows, towering piles of coarse road salt, and dump trucks waiting for the next storm. Telephone lines ran along hilltops and tight corners where traffic slowed behind utility vehicles and flatbeds carrying fresh cut trees stacked like number two pencils in a box. A covered bridge perched like a forgotten monument, its decaying wooden slats resembling cracks in the stony riverbed below.

The late winter scenery appeared to be stripped of life; leaves were missing or dead, a grove of softwood stood dry and gray, streams were frozen still, brown grass poked through the snow covering pastures that stopped at stoic tree lines. The only visible movements were the cold gusts leaning into pine boughs and the sand and rocks sliding down the sides of ditches below the gravel shoulder of the road. The car radio was still broken, and it seemed like the whole countryside was waiting for me to turn on the music.

I knew there were people just beyond my view. Windblown dirt layered cars parked alongside neat homes where American flags waved proudly over doorways. Old farmhouses set back from the road and double-wide trailers mounted on blocks were fronted by yards with swaying apple trees and the rust orange corpses of vintage autos and harvest equipment. Tar paper and paint curled away from walls. A black and white POW/MIA banner flew from a pole standing centerpiece in a wide lot. Heavy plastic sheets, stapled over rectangles where glass panes had once been, breathed in and out with shifting winds. Homemade swings with frayed ropes hung from high, scarred limbs. Barns and tool sheds constructed one plank at a time by forgotten great-grandfathers leaned over embankments carved by years of unchecked erosion. Satellite dishes threatened to collapse dilapidated roofs. Wooden triangles protected manicured shrubs from the piled snow, and basketball hoops with torn nets awaiting spring replacement jutted out above barn doors. Yet, despite these indications of existence, at times the only signs of life were the signs themselves.

FOR SALE BY OWNER. LIVE BAIT. HIKERS WELCOMED. MOOSEHEAD TOOL RENTAL. INDIAN HILL MOTEL. BREAKNECK RIDGE DEER FARM. THE BLACK FROG. FOLSOM’S SEAPLANE. MOOSEHEAD TAXIDERMY. JOEY O’S CAR AND TRUCK WASH. APPALACHIAN STATION. SHELTS—TURN AROUND.

The tricolor sign at an Irving gas station offered FULL SERVICE, although there was nothing to indicate the existence of an employee ready to serve fully or otherwise. I passed the Grace Community Church, Christian Family Park, and Monson Community Church but saw only their signs welcoming me to WORSHIP WITH US. In an obvious ploy to attract tourists, another sign advertised the sale of a FOUR SEASON LODGE, as if there are actually four seasons in Maine. Everyone from the southern outlet store managers to the French speakers along the Canadian border knows we have only three: snow, mud, sun. Repeat.

RICHARD’S AUTO SALVAGE. HARRY’S GARAGE. PAUL’S TIRE SERVICE. MARC’S AUTO SALES. DAN’S REDEMPTION CENTER. HENRY’S BAIT SHOP. VERN’S GLASS. CATHY’S PLACE.

Each time I drove, I noticed more of these personal billboards. It almost seemed that not having one was an admission of holding no special purpose or place in the community. On my trips to check the post office box for the latest New Yorker or even a food magazine to break up my day, I spotted people quietly buying stamps and tossing out junk mail and wondered which of them belonged to signs I had seen. Who among the other patrons was tuning saw blades and who was selling antiques? Did the elderly lady scanning the new grocery circular have a room to rent? Was the bearded man in scuffed work boots and denim a purveyor of live bait and engine repair, or did the rough exterior mask the soul of a weekend candle maker? Could that woman amiably chatting with the postal clerk be Cathy, owner of her eponymous Place?

Eventually I began to imagine what kind of sign I would erect if I stayed.

WORDS FOR RENT? FRESH JOURNALISM? HANNON’S UNPUBLISHED STORIES? FREELANCE WRITING PACKED FOR TRAVEL? BRIAN’S PLACE?

In an area full of signs, I felt I needed one of my own to be relevant. I wanted to be counted as an equal among sign owners, a person who was worthy of his very own sign. Or it could be that I was just suffering from sign envy.

The winter steel softened into wet spring and then the ripening emerald of nascent summer. Some of the signs came down while a few new ones appeared, updating their offers to fit the season. Throughout this cyclical transformation of the landscape, the signs continued to provide me with an opportunity to analyze the rural homespun economy and peek through the little entrepreneurial windows they opened into the lives of their owners.

Yet it was not until my last drive out of town, in a U-Haul truck filled with borrowed furniture, that the signs finally came together for me like a completed jigsaw puzzle, revealing something much larger than its pieces. Call it my billboard epiphany.

Rather than examples of Maine’s sheltered quaintness or the quirky individuality of its residents, I realized the signs were simply advertisements for all the things Greenville and its neighboring communities share with every other town in America. You can get a haircut and your tires rotated, buy a homemade wind chime and some fresh vegetables, or stop in for a beer. The people behind those signs send their children to school, argue about the economy and war, save for rainy days, and pray for contentment.

UNITED THEY STAND AND SURVIVE.



 

 

5 1/2" x 5" 2008 Wolf Moon Calendar just $10.00 each
More Info

More Info

© Wolf Moon Press 2002-2008 all rights reserved.

Submission Guidelines