Visiting the Eastern Uplands

Maine Metaphor

What is it about that word? Aroostook. "The County," they call it in Maine. She sat in the Ohio kitchen with books spread out, having just read a word. She said the word aloud. Someone little called. A door slammed. She stood automatically, walked a step, reached up and got out peanut butter. There was cold milk in the refrigerator, and bread speckled with cracked wheat on the counter. The word Aroostook was thickening against the roof of her mouth.  It's been years, but that's how she remembers it, living now in Maine. She'd like to go there. But, driving the Town Road in the western mountains today, her spouse asks, "Why Aroostook? Why is it so important to you?"  Her answer was purely explanatory: about that Ohio kitchen twelve years behind. About the endless prehistoric primal forest in some corner of that distant northern state. About its transformation into a sea of pine stumps; each five, six, or seven feet in diameter. And of how potatoes now grew in their stead. Aroostook today is an aisle of civilization bordering a rolling plain of farms, edging, in turn, a great industrial north woods filled with thin trees. And she had been listening to its story.  Aroostook, she said, is the mystique of exploring Aroostook.  That's why they visited the eastern uplands of Maine. S. Dorman tells you of their experience in this book.