J. Burden's Travels: Episode 1

A mildly factual description of Sinclair Maine

Well past Caribou, within a stone's throw of the Canadian border, as all the locals say, there is a chain of small villages. The soil is dark, rich, and smells like rotting logs. The people are just as likely to be Hansons, or McAllens, or Bourdreauxs as anything else. In every two street town, there is a mass-produced statue of a man with a musket, mustache, and a coat that would have been blue. Under this lies a list of names much too long for a town this small. A list of men, who while they are named here, lie seven-hundred miles away in Vicksburg, Harpers Ferry, or Manassas. A few minutes down the road, there is another list of names. These names, of men who died much farther away than Virginia, have their own simple white stones. And again, there are far too many for a town like this.

This is the land you found when the farm went bust, the well went dry or the Anglos took over New Orleans. It is an old frontier, but a frontier nonetheless. Well over a century later, it is difficult to find a face without the echoes of three generations of Mainers. Between the cold and the red man, they grew up hard. Even in this age of decadence, you still see these strong roots show through.

You can’t live this far north without loving it. After a century or so, the siren call of the big city has left more homes empty than full. One can’t help but notice the methadone clinics on the outskirts of every village. Still, there are good men here. The men of Sinclair Maine are potato farmers, ice fishermen, and mill workers named for cities they’ve never seen. They truly are God’s people.

So I found myself in a family restaurant, located in a county bigger than a few states. We overlook a lake so slow and wide that everyone just calls it a river. Around the water, the potatoes and the old growth stretch as far as the eye can see. The place is packed from wall to wall, and our host tells us “ People here don’t eat out much. When they do, it’s an event.” Everyone orders dessert.

We wait for a table and strike up a conversation with the locals. The man I met has tanned leathery skin and faded USMC tattoos on his arms. We chat about the weather, the best way to build a shed, and the Harley he’s leaning on. I discover he’s been to my hometown, and also that I’m standing in his. When I ask him if he’s lived here his whole life, “not yet I haven’t” is his only response.

We bid our farewells and head in. I began to realize one of the other benefits of the North-East: the liquor is cheap. There’s something about extremity that brings the importance of a stiff drink into focus. Man cannot live by bread alone when it’s twenty below.

Throughout dinner, as I sink into the warm glow of alcohol and good company, my mind begins to wander. A note of melancholy slinks into my thoughts. I consider myself very much a somewhere kind of man. I love where I am from and intend to live there all my life. Yet this evening, I caught a glimpse of someone else’s home, that was still entirely their own. Everyone here had been in Sinclair for decades. My thoughts went to where I live, and how every year it is becoming less and less mine. At a certain point, the men without chests would win out and my somewhere would be just like everywhere else.

Maybe this is what my town was like ten, twenty, or fifty years ago. It isn’t this close, this tightknit, and this wholesome now. And based on the changes that have happened in my short life, I shudder to think what it will be like in the decades to come.

The cold had not only made the men here strong, but it had kept the weak men out. None of the Brooklynites could make it here. So Sinclair remained, perhaps less full than it had been, but largely unchanged.

But my town, with its sweltering summers blunted by AC, has taken in its fair share of blue state refugees. With them came the entropy that plagues so much of this country.

However, after a while, a silver lining formed along the cloud forming behind my furrowed brow. It’s true, what I saw here is rare. Yet it still exists. All the slings and arrows of the Enemy could not stamp it out. The fire is dim, and in many places gone to ash. But it is still alive. The embers are waiting for new fuel.

The hard times that made the great men of the past are coming again. There may be no more red savages in the hills, but there are enemies all the same. Our calling is not a slow slide into entropy but an adventure. Your fore'-fathers made their names in the wilderness, and you now have the opportunity to do the same.

That’s why, even now, as I sit in a Civil War train station, waiting for a dingy AMTRAK I smile. I may be a child of the embers, but they aren’t ashes yet. And who but me, who but us, will fan the flames again.