Many years ago, my partner and I came up with an idea we called “Rotter”—a hypothetical app that would allow people to complain about businesses, restaurants, towns, architecture, sidewalks, etc. Some of the complaints may have had proactive solutions embedded within them, constructive criticisms. It was not Yelp, promise. It was basically one of us complaining out loud and then the other one yelling, “Rotter!”*

This is the Rotter Edition of my Substack because we were supposed to go on a trip to visit beloved family in another state but alas, said family came down with Covid (Covid stinks but they are okay) and thus we scrambled to find a last-minute vacation situation, hence us visiting mineral-rich western Maine for 48 hours (one of our kids has a newfound obsession with minerals). It was a grumpy vacation (with bright spots!) because of the weather and because apparently I am not good at turning frowns upside down and preferred to “rot” (complain) as a way of getting through it. Apologies to my family. I blame the lack of sleep.1

*Note: it’s “rotter” with a British—not an American—accent (my mom is from England, I am allowed). As in “dirty rotter.” Kind of like this:

Tuesday

The sign for the condo place looked fancy—gold paint. The road to it was long and winding. The parking lot, nearly empty. The condo was clean. Aloysius (4.5) said it smelled like rotten gummy bears. We banished the Glade plug-ins to the balcony (Aloysius pronounced this “falconry”) and opened all the windows. A smelly candle presided over every room. Even the trash bags were scented.2 Gloria (7) got her swimsuit on immediately. She wanted to live in the pool. It was cold and we could not live in the pool. This was upsetting for all.

Many restaurants in Bethel are closed on Tuesdays. We went to Mountain Social. The kids ordered mocktails. Aloysius said his strawberry/citrus/agave mocktail was “better than the human world.” I got the scallops and risotto. Derek got some lamb sliders. The kids said they wanted to try new things. A slider is a new thing. Gloria said she would eat the slider but not the brown part. The brown part is the burger. They ate the buns and a few other things. We went to “sleep.”

Polyester sheets make me want to die. Despite the open windows, the air did not move. The children were hot. They needed things in the night. It made sense. A glug in the sink sounded like Aloysius crying. I raced to his side. He was sleeping. We heard a knock in the dark. It was nothing. All night, on the edge of sleep, never falling in.

Thursday

We drove along winding roads to “Screw Augur Falls.”3

This sign hung off another house’s falconry:

Make
Attorneys
Get
Attorneys

We put money in the mouth of a brown tower. The colors of the state park brand make me want to hurl. One of my children does not like to go into the forest on cloudy days. I don’t like to go into forests or fields until after the dew has dried. But we were on vacation. We had one car. It was 60 degrees outside. The alternative (swimming in the very cold pool) was not real. We drove on to “Moose Cave.”4 There was much stomping through the alpine forest. Derek pointed out the creeping snowberries (Gaultheria hispidula, also known as Moxie plums) and I snuggled up to them on the moss so that I could marvel at the spectacular taste of the white berries in relative peace. I found Moose Cave terrifying.5

We spent a few hours at the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum. World-class specimens. Giant meteorite collection. Impressive exhibits and displays. Not a lot of critique about greed, exploitation, and who profits from it all though my kids were so excited it was hard to concentrate and I may have missed something. One singular kiosk-like exhibit noting anything about Wabanaki history in the area, as far as I could tell. Lots of excitement about Mica Mountain and the newly discovered lithium deposit in Newry.

I touched a piece of Mars. I touched a piece of the moon. I found familiar concretion from Wassumkeag (Sears Island) in a specimen drawer. I felt like I needed to go outside so I went outside and sat on a block of granite presumably from the Devonian period and texted my oldest friend6 that probably we should not be touching Mars and the moon. People who are into rocks and crystals and the like believe they possess potent energetic qualities. The museum has 40,000 gems and 6,000 meteorites. I don’t necessarily abide by minerals’ energetic principles but I was full of competing signals and felt bonkers.

I looked at the sky. It was cloudy, not raining. I read the historical pamphlets I had procured from a rack inside the museum. I missed texts from Derek asking for me to come back inside. I felt the familiar sinking feeling that is the absolute gutting dearth of historical context for anything before the settler. I read about the lithium deposit in Newry, the couple who has bought up more than 3,000 acres of land in the area (on my phone powered by lithium batteries).7 How they want to mine it. The 1.5 billion dollars it’s apparently worth. How Maine won’t let them…yet because the regulations around mining are much more stringent than those around quarrying (essentially a free-for-all?). This couple is famous, as is the lithium. What is not famous here is/are centering considerations about such mining operations from an indigenous perspective. I understand that the first word in the RRR trinity is “reduce” and that energy must come from somewhere. The historical pamphlet talked about recycling (mostly houses), Bethel’s ability to reinvent itself to keep up with the economy/industry at hand.

My family emerged from the museum very hungry. We got sandwiches at the Good Food Store (a spicy veggie burger for me, something else for Derek, who knows what for the kids). An old plane circled thrice overhead. The kids ran in circles. They counted 19 trees. Derek studied maps. It started to rain. My family entered the car. Rain began to fall on my pickle. I wanted to eat it. My family was dry. I ate half of the pickle while staring at my family wondering if it’s possible for a family vacation to ever feel like a vacation I actually want to be on. (Lack of sleep truly destroys me.)

It was truly raining so we returned to our monument to synthetic smells/condo for a plastic-y rest. When the rain let up, we headed to Tamminen Quarry in Greenwood, Maine—a recommendation from the folks at the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum. A small shack along the dirt road to the quarries has a fading yellow “Explosives” sign. In the distance, we heard the clang of chisels. Gloria kept finding me sheets of mica thick like books I could not stop running my fingers along the edges of.

There were two mines at this site: Tamminen (open to hobby collectors) and Waisanen (closed to the public) and three realities: visiting this mine with my family, the mine as anthropological site, and the act of mining itself.

Psychoanalysts sometimes categorize people who “pick” (scabs, boogers, skin, etc.) as neurotics. Intellectually, or perhaps, somatically, I understand why chiseling out a giant apatite, tourmaline, or cleavelandite specimen is satisfying but it’s hard not to read the holes in the quarry’s walls as a sign of neurosis; rockhounds getting lost in the netherregions of their own psyches.

The people in the mine that day were few but committed: a single rockhound with grey eyes, a blue sweatshirt, frosted hair, and a skeleton hand tattooed over their own hand vaping and putting their specimens into a Ziploc bag. “I come out here because it takes my mind off of…everything,” they said. They showed me a rock. “There’s a rock dealer you can call. You have to set up an appointment. He’ll pay a dollar a rock for a piece like this.” They gave Aloysius a piece of smoky quartz for his collection and a shovel.

A kid was looking for frogs and leeches. His dad had broken the handle of his chisel pounding into the wall in an attempt to work out a piece of cleavelandite large enough to carve. The night before he (the dad) had carved an owl. His forearm was bloodied and he kept slipping on the gravel of the steep wall. The mother had a rose behind her ear that fell out as she carried buckets of water over to the area her partner was working to clean it out. They do this.

A small crew of older men (including the father of the woman with the rose behind her ear) shuffled in carrying rucksacks, chisels, and buckets. “We didn’t bring the rain with us,” they said, laughing. Everyone agreed that the rocks looked better wet. They wore suspenders and no safety goggles. They made piles of their specimens to bring home to their rock gardens. They found “color.” I huddled in a hole someone made in the wall to keep dry and observed the scene.

(Listen to the audio in the video above to hear the dedicated rockhounds discuss the rising cost of sledgehammers, etc.)

My father-in-law, Jeff, who we visited on the way home, says that it’s not a vacation unless you eat at a bad restaurant. Writer Jennifer Senior, says that book reviewers try not to write bad reviews of emerging writers—they save that for the writers who have been around for a long time. With that in mind, I would like to say that Sysco food distribution is destroying restaurants and that the food at the Millbridge Tavern was unnecessarily bad. I believe the avocado I was served was this avocado and it was so weird I could not eat it.

The thought of ordering food for a restaurant kitchen has always really stressed me out and continues to. I hate wasting food. Maybe I was naive to assume a restaurant in western Maine could or would serve a non-previously frozen avocado but it was not an inexpensive restaurant and surely the attached golf course subsidized profits.8

The tavern did have arcade games and long carpeted hallways. And a canoe paddle attached to the wall by a hot glue gun. Gloria checked to make sure we didn’t need to bring our plates to the kitchen. Aloysius wanted to know why we couldn’t take our shoes off. We ran in circles around the parking lot (before returning to the condo for another relatively sleepless night). They liked this. I liked this.

Thursday

The Gemini Café and Bakery has nice bread and bagels but the scene was loud so we ate (spilled cream cheese) on the village green.

Before we departed from downtown Bethel, Gloria and I went to Brooks Bros. hardware to ask about the doll outside it that we had spotted the day before. One of the employees dressed up as the Wicked Witch of the West for Halloween one year. She dressed the doll as Dorothy and skewered her on a broom she carried around at a party. After Halloween, she placed the doll outside the store and enjoys dressing her up in seasonally appropriate attire. Once, a group of tourists stole the doll and brought her to their hotel. They put her in a bed and tried to scare one of their travel mates before returning her to her lawn chair. This is not very interesting but it was a way to show my child that when you are curious about something you can ask questions and see where the story leads you. It’s not like my kids don’t know this, it’s that most of their questions are asked of Derek and me, rather than strangers, who often know better. (In Gloria’s version of this story, the doll’s eyes glow red at night.)

I asked if before we headed out, we could stop by the general area where the lithium deposit is. My family obliged—the children, unwittingly, my partner, willingly scoured Google Earth to determine how to get close to it. I suspected there would be a gate and that we wouldn’t be able to get too close without communicating in advance. One brief look at the map told me this:

I wanted to see what it felt like. If we could sense it. What it felt like to be on the periphery of such a large mineral deposit with such huge implications—not just for Maine, but for the world (it’s truly the world’s biggest known lithium deposit). As it were, the children were bickering, I was wavering, and the exact location was not entirely clear, or at least, how to get to the exact location. We hovered in a precise location that may or may not have been close to the entrance for thirty seconds during which I reflected that it’s probably not very practical, efficient, or pleasurable to try to turn a family vacation into an impromptu reporting trip.

We drove away, past the intervale farms and the monstrous paper mill in Rumford.9 I told Derek about a person I’d talked to at the museum the day before whose family had been in the area for twelve generations.

“When did they first come here?” I asked.

“I don’t know, I’d have to look back at my genealogy,” she said. “There’s not many of us left here now.” The elders have died and the young people are leaving because “there’s nothing to do here.”

“I have a mineral collection,” Aloysius told her.

“That’s great. Want to learn something? Write down where you find your rocks,” she told him. The name of the mineral, where you found it, when, describe it. “That’s called provenance. It’s part of your history. It will help you later.”

New Work in the World

I wrote a story about my previously mentioned father-in-law, Jeff Yorks. It is in the August issue of Down East, along with some beautiful photos by Derek Yorks. The story is yet to be online. Sneak peek here or buy it online/at your local news store (if you live in Maine).

Currents

I’m reading The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan.

I’m listening to Vampire Empire by Big Thief and There, There by Mali Obomsawin & Magdalena Abrego.

I’m listening to The Retrievals, a Serial Productions podcast (a recommendation from Emily Hunt).

I’m wondering how you get enough sleep and how you prevent yourself from being a monster to yourself, the people you love, and the world around you.

Housekeeping

If you like what you see, say something. This is how things grow. Thank you for reading. Thank you for your support.

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