Mattawamkeag, Maine

 The hilly terrain of central Maine dished up the most climbing of any day of the first fifteen of these travels—4,362 feet in seventy-one miles, just the third day of over four thousand feet.  But the day after all the hills the terrain leveled somewhat and I managed the second eighty-mile day since I set out.  Mileage is becoming important as I seek to reach Sydney before the weather gets too nasty, six hundred miles away, at the far tip of Nova Scotia, where two Carnegie Libraries await me, the only two in the province.  There is another in New Brunswick that I’ll drop in on the way back to Maine.

I may get my first rest day this weekend, as I’ve had warnings of a significant storm bearing down on the coast.  I first learned of it from a checkout woman at a Dollar Store and then from Michael Lombardi’s football podcast, as he said rainy and windy conditions could keep the scoring down in games played on the east coast this Sunday.  

So far wind hasn’t been a factor in my first thousand miles, just all the climbing and a few stretches of dirt.  The cool, mostly dank weather has limited those cycling to just about me.  I was very fortunate that Greg back in Vermont was out on his bike late in the day and could provide me directions to Ian Boswell’s remote homestead.

I did come upon a ghost bike shortly after I crossed into Maine, locked up to a guardrail.  When I stopped to pay it my respects, a motorist pulled over and asked if I needed any help.  I asked if he knew anything about the ghost bike.  He did.  It marked the site where an older cyclist had been hit and killed by a truck about five years ago during a big annual bike ride.  A nearby post with the number 1945 on it was the year of his birth.

The second of Maine’s twenty Carnegies on my agenda in Madison was the first stunner of the nineteen I have visited so far, a rare circular building crowned with a second floor that had an interior balcony looking down upon the circulation desk.  It provided a most tranquil spot for a rest.  It also had a spacious basement devoted to children’s books.  A statue in front honored “our boys in blue 1861-1865.”

The next Carnegie in Guilford was built on a slight rise above the road.  The addition to its side was more than just a few rooms tacked on, as so many are, but had some character of its own adding to the luster of the original.   Unfortunately, as all too often on this ride through New England, my visit to a Carnegie did not coincide with its opening hours.

And so it was too in the small town of Milo, whose tiny Carnegie was only open four days a week and not on Thursdays.  I was lucky though that a sewing circle was going on and one of the ladies was arriving as I was.  She let me peek inside at its cozy confines made all the more cozy by its lushly textured wooden desks and shelves and circulation desk and railing up the steps with the usual portrait of Carnegie gazing upon his domain.  The woman also gave me the password to the Wi-Fi so I could linger outside and do some catching up, but without charging, forcing me into a McDonald’s down the road.

A plaque in front of the library celebrated the local volunteer fire department, which was based behind the library.  With wooden buildings dominating the town and surrounding area, fires had been a concern since the town’s origin.  One of its first communal expenditures was for hooks and buckets and ladders for its fire brigade in 1871.  Twelve years later the town purchased a steam-powered pumping engine.  They later excavated an huge hole for a tank to store water to pump.  Even as its equipment improved over the years, the fire department remained staffed by volunteers, a great point of pride.  The plaque concluded its tribute saying, “The volunteer fire department has remained a key element of public safety where the spirit of independence and self-reliance has led people to depend on their own resources.”

I was fortunate to have some sun as I sat outside the library.  Rare patches of blue hovered overhead for the rest of the day allowing me for the first time to see the sun touch the horizon not long after 5:30.  With so few habitations and so much forest and so little traffic I could ride until virtual dark knowing when it became too dark to ride I’d assuredly have a place to camp.  The night before I turned off the road into a cemetery and continued to the forest behind it well from the road.  This night I passed up logging roads every mile or so that would have led to first-rate camping until near absolute dark when I had reached eighty miles for the day and turned off on a side road into the forest, which I had all to myself.

Earlier in the day I came upon a stash of coins strewn along the road, including six quarters, doubling the number I’ve found so far.  When I first spotted the coins I figured they had to be slugs, but no they were all coins, including nine dimes, five nickels and eleven pennies.  I didn’t count them at the time, looking forward to totaling up my haul in the tent.  I also stopped for a bright orange wash cloth tangled in the weeds, which I could use to sop up moisture in my tent left over from a morning dew or rain and also to strap on the back of my bike to make me more visible.  It took a full day for it to dry though after I washed it, even dangling in the wind from the crossbar of my bike.