Seven years ago I was riding around in a beat-up old landboat, crammed onto a bench seat next to some girl that I’d met three days earlier.  Seven years ago I went with some girl that I’d met three days earlier and a bunch of friends to a shitty diner at eleven in the evening.  Seven years ago some girl that I’d met three days earlier told me a pirate joke and I proposed on the spot.  The joke?  This one:

A pirate with a peg leg, hook and eyepatch goes into a bar.  Bartender gets to chatting with him and asks “don’t see many peg legs these days, how did you get yours?”  The pirate says “Arrhhh, I fell overboard during a storm and a shark bit off me leg.”  The bartender sympathizes and says “well, how about your hook?  That’s quite an accessory.”  the pirate answers “yyaarrr, me hand got caught in some rigging during a storm and I cut it off to get free quicker to go help the lads save the ship.”  The bartender gives him some drinks on the house and then asks “so why do you wear that patch over your eye?  Another storm accident?”  The pirate goes quiet and the bartender asks again.  Finally, the pirate says, “Well, a seagull pooped in me eye.”

The bartender can’t believe it and says “why do you wear a patch?  Seagull poop can’t be that bad!”  To which the pirate replies…

“Well, it was me first day with the hook.”

About three years ago, I married some girl that I’d proposed to on a hot, gross June night because she told me a pirate joke.

My wife and I wanted to get away, so we decided waaayy back in February that a trip to Maine would be a kickass idea.  She’d been there several years ago and I’d never been to the east coast, never seen the ocean(s, either one but you’ve gotta start somewhere), and never gone camping.

I fixed this last week.

I’ve been trying to write about the trip for the past week, but it refuses to be transcribed.  The memories left claw marks on the inside of my skull from clinging to the bone while I yanked on their feet.  Then I gave up.  I can’t pen a breath-taking view, or the feeling of standing in the ocean for the first time, or my wife and I shouting at each other to keep moving so that the cloud of mosquitoes behind us can’t catch up while we went exploring.

But I do have a few pieces of advice that I gleaned from my road trip and several days camping in Maine.

1. Don’t piss anyone off in eastern Maine.  Your body will never be found, because it will be buried beneath the seven metric tons of crab bits washed up from the ocean every half-hour.

2. Don’t drive length-wise through upstate New York.  It’s pretty like a desert – great to look at for the first hour but there’s too damn much of it and after a while you start to hallucinate.  Especially at night.  Especially as you plunge up and down the hills and watch the city lights blend with the stars until you’re not sure where the ground ends and the sky begins.  Especially when you’re half-mad from twelve hours of driving.

3. Out-of-control-truck ramps are both thrilling and terrifying.  The mountains that require them even moreso.

4. The sand on the beaches was mostly mica.  It created a beautiful, shimmering beach, but if you dug about an inch down in the sand you got a nostrilful of rotting ocean stench.

5. If you grew up with computers, and then spend a solid week without using them, you have a hard time typing when you come back.  It’s a good feeling.

6. Seagulls and island critters love to pull crab takeaway out of the garbage and scatter it all over the path.

7. Campers love to buy crab takeaway.

8. New Hampshire has a “state liquor store” that’s open on Sundays.

Pictures are forthcoming.