I was driving in the dark. You know how it goes. Nothing, nothing, something, and sometimes you’re going too fast for something and it’s gone. Here, the something was a gas station.

You want details. I was driving back to the audio storytelling retreat I was helping to facilitate Down East after going on a supply run at the Walmart Business Center in Calais. I had six blaze orange hats, a box of earplugs, a couple of mini SD cards, a toothbrush, and a bag of chips, but very little gas or network coverage to help me locate the nearest gas station. My phone kept suggesting I was in Canada.

A gas station sprang up from the darkness.1 The gas pumps were not well-lit, nor was the parking lot, which is why I drove over the invisible curb when I pulled in and then froze with my foot on the brakes, momentarily stunned. A guy—the guy—sitting on the porch gave me a big, smirking grin.

I rolled down the passenger side windows. “Didn’t see that coming,” I said to the guy.

“I know. You see my face?”

I pulled up alongside the pumps. There were no fluorescent lights, no non-consensual gas pump advertisements blaring, just me and the guy on the porch.

“Another guy drove over the curb the other day,” he said. “He was in a big truck though. His wife was bobbing all around. I was laughing. It wasn’t funny with you, though. Your car’s lower.”

“It was funny with me,” I said. “My car’s fine.”

“You pay inside after,” he told me. “You have to lift that lever. I don’t work here. I used to.”

The guy was quiet as the mechanics whirred and the stars twinkled.

I’ve been talking with my friend Grace recently about seeing people for who they are in the moment and how that can be different from how we interact with people when we know more about their histories, relationships, complexities. I heard a participant from the audio retreat this past week talk about radical forgiveness and how every moment offers us the opportunity to act in alignment with the present instead of the past. I went inside and paid for my gas.

“I drove over the curb once in Pensacola,” the guy said when I came back out. He doesn’t drive now. Or, he can’t. I wasn’t clear.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” he asked.

I laughed and thought about the gas station I grew up next to for the rest of the week, a gas station at a crossroads in the middle of the dark on the outskirts of a tourist town. Many nights I would sit not at the gas station but on the roof of my porch, watching the gas station parking lot, listening to the voices, car doors slamming, engines hurtling off to their next destination on earth, feeling myself an unwilling and unseen anchor of the landscape.

The day after the retreat ended (it was so good),2 I drove down to York, in southern Maine, for the last WHERE event of 2024—the Descendants Walk (it was so good). When I found out my dear childhood friend, who I rarely see, was just an hour away in our hometown—home of the gas station I’d been thinking about all week—I drove toward her—and it—as the moon rose.

She and her partner had planned to cook dinner but there was a snafu so we went into town and ate at a restaurant that used to be Wolfeboro House of Pizza. It was crowded. “We used to live here,” I found myself wanting to explain to the host, who could not have cared less.

I told my friends about how my kid’s birthday is coming up and how I’m thinking of taking him to see a friend for a reading, so that he can get answers to some of the questions he likes to ask about the past and future.

“Like what?” my friend’s partner asked.

“Like, ‘where did stuff come from before there was stuff if there was no stuff to make stuff in the first place?’” I say.

“What do you tell him?”

“What would you tell him?” I asked.

I’m paraphrasing Scott’s answer because I was deliriously tired then and I’m bordering it again now. Something along the lines of, “Time has no beginning and no end. Everything has always been here.” (couched in smart contemporary theories on these things) and how difficult that can be to comprehend.

“I’d like to go back there, though,” said someone in the hallway behind us. “But I would probably be trespassing.”

I needed coffee and to drive 165 miles north. The convenience store of my youth, the one I’d been picturing all week not knowing I’d end up there again so soon, was in my path. My old friend Josh met me in the parking lot3 where I was once put into a police car for being intoxicated as a teenager (and other stories). I looked through the trees and saw Christmas lights on my old porch. The last time I saw Josh we stayed up late at the old grange hall, talking about living rurally, relationships of integrity, neighbors, parenting, the long game, family. This time we only had ten minutes.

The clerk, who was close to me in age, nearly carded me when she rang up my coffee.

“It’s all cigarettes this time of night,” she explained.

This got me chuckling. “I used to live across the road when I was a teenager.”

This didn’t mean much to her because she didn’t live here in the nineties but we laughed at how easy it was to buy cigarettes back then.

I filled my tank yet again and headed northeast, hugging the dreamy, historic, and winding Ossipee River. A dazed doe appeared in front of me. I stopped for her to cross and flashed my brights as another vehicle came toward us. Maybe I should have honked but I didn’t want to scare the deer into the other side of the road. The oncoming vehicle didn’t see the deer until they felt it. I turned off the music, rolled down the window, and got out, hazard lights blinking.

I was the guy this time but I was not laughing. The people were okay but they were not laughing. Their truck was okay. The doe was not. The man walked toward her with the knife, blade shining in the light of the moon our collective headlights. The road was narrow. I drove on, first crying, then slapping my cheeks to stay awake.

Eel Endeavors

Here’s the very concrete task I focused on this election day: learning how to operate an underwater drone at the Belfast Area High School pool.4 I successfully completed the very basic and very rewarding task of sending it to retrieve a pair of goggles we’d thrown in and bring them back to us. I hope to use this equipment to lay my eyes on some silver eels this fall. The fish biologists I’m talking to tell me it’s a bit like trying to find a unicorn. That’s okay.

Upcoming Events

Belfast Variety Show & Community Supper

This event is part of the work Chris Battaglia and I do through the StoryCorps’ One Small Step program. We’re still looking for performers—if you would like to share a song, tell a story, or read a poem to a cozy hall of humane humans, get in touch at onesmallstep@weru.org (you can also just show up). We’ll be hosting a follow-up conversation about collaborating across differences on Wednesday, December 4, from 6–8 p.m. at Torchlight Media (158 High St. in Belfast).

Torchlight Winter Film Showcase…Featuring Eels

Come check out what the Torchlight community has been up to at this film showcase at the Colonial Theatre in Belfast on Tuesday, December 10 from 6:30–8 p.m. Eli Kao and I will be reveeling our eel reel (a preview of the eel documentary we’ve been working on) alongside student works-in-progress, Torchlight Media creations, and more.

A lot is going on in the Torchlight world. Including a fundraiser! If you’re local, you may want to sign up for the Torchlight mailing list or follow Torchlight on Instagram.

From the Manager

NYTimes Cooking Newsletter + Elvers

Yesterday, my friend Tina told me Sam Sifton, an assistant managing editor at The New York Times gave my story on Passamaquoddy eel conservation a shout-out in The New York Times Cooking newsletter. I’m chuffed and pumped that this story, which is as much about Wabanaki sovereignty as it is about eels, is reaching even more folks. Thank you, Sam. (The original story is here, in case you missed it.)

We Won a Prize

We (on behalf of WERU, the radio station that hired us for One Small Step) received first place in the Best Feature category from the Maine Association of Broadcasters for coverage of our One Small Step conversations.

And in this room full of hundreds of radio and television media makers across the state of Maine just a week and a half before the presidential election, there was not a single mention of the upcoming election nor Gaza, nor any other conflict in the world, nor increased threats of violence against journalists (at least by the time I left, around 9:30 p.m., unless I missed something, which is possible).

So many awards were won for coverage of “Mass Shooting in Maine” that I stopped counting. Every time another team came up on the stage to collect their awards clips from the mass shooting coverage played, over and over and over at full volume. I’m not saying reporters don’t deserve recognition for covering awful things or that awful things shouldn’t be covered. Tragedy needs documentation, local reporting is crucial. But the fact that such a tragedy occurred with no award-winning follow-up stories about gun safety reform?5 I’m not surprised but I haven’t given up, either. And therein lies this ongoing question about media and journalism at large, where they fall short, and what to do about it (queue my plug for Brian Reed’s podcast, Question Everything, where he is laying into these questions and more).

I have been told that in this picture it looks like I am smiling from ear to ear but I’m not. Look at my neck. I’m supposed to write something for StoryCorps soon—about how facilitating One Small Step conversations has impacted me, my neck, and more. Please hold.

Annual Get Rich By January Announcement

I Quit.

I have not published anything recently (though I think the words I wrote to accompany a photo essay by Tara Rice in Maine Farms Journal will be out soon) and all I can think about is jobs, so…

hells bellsMichele Christle

Every November/December, I either quit my job (see above) or at least take stock of where I am so that I can hit my target of becoming extremely wealthy by January. While I have yet to reach that target, it‘s time to take stock again. (Maybe, actually, it’s time for a job again.) If you hear of anything within the world of communication, storytelling, writing, and/or community work that pays decently, please send it my way.6 More on the kinds of things I have done/like to do is here. I’m still open to project-based/gig work, just need a bit more stability/increased income/ability to plan ahead.

Currents

National Day of Mourning

Thursday, November 28, 2024
Cole's Hill, Plymouth, Massachusetts
12 noon SHARP
More info here.

I first attended the National Day of Mourning in 1998 or so, with my sister. Thanksgiving had never been a big deal to our family (my American father was often at sea and my English mother never adopted this tradition), but attending this event changed my relationship to the holiday forever. You do you, but if you ever have the opportunity to go, I recommend it.

The Crash of the Hammer - How Concerned Citizens Ran a Neo-Nazi out of Rural Maine by Mira Ptacin

How do you sit quietly in the middle of a storm? (an episode from the Search Engine podcast)

I listened to this podcast in the days leading up to the election. I love host PJ Vogt’s laugh. One moment stayed with me in particular: Vogt asks guest Rev. angel Kyodo williams, an ordained Zen priest and teacher, what voice(s) she’s hearing in her head as they talk. “Yours,” she says. Revelatory. Also, this notion (that aligns with other texts I’m reading, ideas I’m thinking about), that while being apart and away from our regular lives and routines at retreats or residencies or monasteries or intentional communities can be ultra conducive to relaxation, meditating, calming the mind, creating, establishing new ways of relating or co-existing, etc., it’s not widely accessible or achievable for the vast majority of us. williams suggests the need to attend to our consciousness wherever we are and that whenever we feel ourselves start to slip away or sense other voices creeping in other than what is directly in front of us, to “return.” I love this simple edict and am grateful for the recording of williams’ voice uttering it.