I think about the James Carville line that Pennsylvania is Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with Alabama in between when we drive to the mountains of western Maine to ski. Our route takes us north along the coast from Newburyport to Portsmouth, along Kennebunk and coastal York County, then through Portland and Freeport. In none of these places would boat shoes, embroidered belts, and Saab convertibles be out of style. In other words: New England gangster. We turn west at a town where the private liberal arts college charges just over $90,000 a year. Eventually, we arrive at a place where the lots of land cost over half a million, but between Waterville and Carrabassett Valley, it's Alabama.
In politics, what counts is votes, and despite all of the red areas on that map, Maine voted blue by a fair margin in 2024. On roadtrips, what counts is miles. Our miles wind across those middle-of-Maine red areas, bedecked with weed stores, manufactured homes, and Trump flags. When we drive through the milltowns, I think about the journalism that parachutes an elite college graduate into someplace in the middle west for a few days. It's remarkable, how the political journalists, usually, exclusively focused on the coasts remember, for a month or two biennially each autumn, that some places exist in between, and they do more than connect our coasts and serve as stopovers on the cheaper cross-country flights. Driving across Maine, I'm tempted to think the same thing, that these towns and rural highways are a background between the places you'd want to be. Even for those of us from real Maine (I'm a pretender, from Kennebunk), the tense used for living there is typically past, as in, "I used to live in Gardiner" or Madison or Rumford or Millinocket. We used to live there. We grew up, moved away for college or people or vague opportunity, and never looked back, except out the window on our way to somewhere else.
A counterfactual personal history I sometimes entertain is to wonder where we might've ended up if my return-to-New England job had started out as remote rather than in HQ. For a time, that was an option: had I joined team purple instead of team orange, I would've been a roving Marketo rep, tied only to a car and a laptop. Not being tethered to HubSpot's Cambridge, MA office, but still ending up in New England, might've deposited us in all manner of places along the way to or even in the mountains. The real estate would've been much cheaper. Perhaps my extended family's center of gravity wouldn't have become Boston, but would've stayed a bit further north. What would that life have been?
These rural daydreams bring me to the reading: two excellent essays about the dream and mirage of flyover country. You can't go home again, but the Mainer in exile's compass makes return, either in imagination or retirement, seem inevitable. Our stories are of people who managed, at least for a time, to return.
Unfiltered Notes From Life in "Flyover Country"
The august before last, my husband and I moved to Muskegon, a town on the scenic and economically depressed west coast of Michigan.