Southbound

Headlights staring at the driveway The house is dark as it can be I go inside and all is silent It seems as empty as the inside of me

I've had some time to think about you And watch the sun sink like a stone I've had some time to think about you On the long ride home

-Patty Griffin

Droning south, now 18 minutes out of KELM, after watching Little Joe Tower and Corning disappear off the starboard wing.

A mile-and-a-half up in the air, Pennsylvania’s green hills stretched out over every horizon in the bright early morning sunlight.

Two plus fifty-five to my fuel stop at Ben Epps Field in Athens, Georgia, a special place for me. Up ahead I see some weather, thin layers of clouds a little above and below promising a few bumps but not much else, the big predawn storms having mostly drifted off to the east.

I should arrive at KECP around noon, a melancholy moment and the beginning of eleven days without Peg. I pick a jury a week from today in a case that really shouldn’t be tried, but both sides are stubborn and well-heeled so here we are. A lawyer’s dream date, or more accurately a younger lawyer’s dream date.

I’m still worn out from a busy weekend, spent with good friends at their home right outside of Boothbay, Maine. Boothbay has been one of P’s favorite places for as long as I’ve known her, a sleepy lobstering village tucked deep in one of the coves that line Maine’s jagged coast. When our friends invited us over for the weekend we leapt at the chance for good company in a beautiful, beloved spot.

And it was terrific, truly it was. But Boothbay has changed for the worse, like a lot of the good places around the planet. Over the last decade climate change has shooed the lobsters north toward cooler water, and competition is fierce to harvest the ever-diminishing numbers that remain in the inlets around the little town. Now the crustaceans have been largely replaced by waves of tourists who descend on the place in the summer for lobster rolls and ice cream and a t-shirt memorializing their tacky-ass Maine vacation.

And then there are folks like our friends, who can afford to spend their time anywhere and are gobbling up the shorefront family compounds where the lobstermen have lived for generations. Now there are Range Rovers and impeccably dressed women and boutiques where once they sold fishing tackle. The newbies think the lobstermen are rude, and complain about all the buoys marking lobster traps that make any boat outing into a slalom. And apparently the crusty old Mainiancs arent’t thrilled with their new neighbors who’ve driven real estate prices through the roof, and driven the longtime residents inland.

I’ve seen this dynamic before, in Apalach, on the beachfront in Portugal, and along the central California coast, among other places. A mini-class war that always ends the same way. The larger checkbook wins.

But we love our friends there, some of the last remaining from my days flying jets for a living. They, and we, are the rare birds who left the military-industrial complex to reinvent ourselves a couple times, to feel that moment when like Cortez we burned our ships and followed a path toward a destiny we couldn’t really imagine as earnest twenty-somethings. We had great conversations out around the fire pit at night, and the war and our distant past almost never came up. It was delightful.

Flying home to Corning P and I pondered on geographic choices as I disagreed with P about the relative desirability of Boothbay and Corning. She left Maine Sunday dreaming of a home of her own on one of those coves, while I made the closing argument that Corning represents the best of all possible communities. It’s progressive, picturesque, and filled with some of the nicest people we’ve ever met. And it’s a functioning town, with a reason to exist that doesn’t involve selling ice cream cones to tourists. It has its more and less well-off, but the spread’s not all that great because Corning, Inc. levels the playing field, and money isn’t flooding the real estate market. By the time the Catskills were fading behind us, giving way to the beautiful wildness of the Susquehanna Valley, I think P agreed with me. Which is nice, because it means I won’t need to find a second job to fund that fourth home.

As if to remind us of all that, our Sunday was capped with a trip out to the housewarming of a lake house newly built by one of P’s colleagues, a nice, self-deprecating doctor with two of the most well-spoken and polite teenaged kids you’d ever want to meet. We sat out by the lake watching pontoon boats drift by and telling stories with our host and Peg’s boss, a nice, self-deprecating doctor with two of the most well-spoken and polite teenaged kids you’d ever want to meet. One’s going to Swarthmore in a week to begin life as a college freshman. Remembering the day I dropped off Jim and PT at New College and watched them stride excitedly into the failing late-afternoon sun to their new dorm and new adventure, I suggested he bring plenty of Kleenex.

The Southern Tier is just gorgeous, and populated with folks who represent the best of our country. The hills have their bad eggs, and of course the Amish are crazy puppy millers who should bathe more, but there’s little of the drama and organized theft and environmental piracy one sees at today’s destination.

But all that bad behavior is paying for this plane ride, Donk. Shut up and show a little gratitude for all the sin and folly in the world. There’s a reason you don’t see a lot of high-flying lawyers in the upstate. As so many of us litigators pray every day, “Lord, sew strife among your children, that your servant may not perish.”

Amen.