Microcosms

When you were a baby, you could be fooled by a game of peekaboo.  This is because you had no sense of object permanence.  If your mother hid her face behind a blanket, you thought she was gone.  In the same manner, you did not think of the room behind the wall.  You only saw the wall. 

This type of thinking doesn’t last very long.  Quite soon we learn all the rooms in the house, and then we may feel stuck and want to leave.  We no longer see the wall like we did with our infant eyes.  We are looking into the next room hoping that one will be better.  I spent much of my winter in a Texas house where I imagined what my future in Maine would look and feel like.

    

When I opened the door to my dormitory, I assumed I would find much of the same I had in the past.  There would be a bed, a table, a toilet——no unfamiliar furniture.  First, someone had to show me to my room.  None of the rooms were decorated.  The walls are panel wood with wavy lines and an oily sheen when the lights hit them.  In appearance, my room was no different than anybody else’s.  The only distinction that concerned me was that I slept there and not somewhere else. 

Inside the bedroom are two bunkbeds.  There is a decision to make:  top or bottom.  The top has more headroom but poses an inconvenient climb during midnight pees.  A shelf gives me a landing pad for my book and glasses.  The bottom looks cozy and dark and accessible, but anybody can stumble in drunkenly and sleep on my mattress.  There is no lock on the bedroom door, and the hallway is full of potential intruders.  The top provides a layer of security like a bird’s nest sitting on a high branch.  The top it is. 

I make the bed with the company’s sheets, duvet, and pillow.  The mattress is thick and comfortable.  I lie down to test it out.  I could sleep here until the novelty wears off and I can move confidently in the dark without stubbing a toe or making the door creak.  Soon this bed won’t seem strange to me.  The space will become inviting and it will be mine, not due to possession but due to habit.  I don’t own the mattress, only the history of having slept there.    

There is a small closet with shelves and hanging space for my clothes and knickknacks.  The space is small but large enough to fit all that I need.  My wardrobe is limited, but I can wear a different shirt every day of the week.  When I move out in November, I’ll pack all my clothes into one bag, and the mice will move into the closet, where they’ll live for the winter.  The next person who moves in will wipe out the mouse droppings before putting his clothes in the closet, which he will use for a brief time until it’s the mice’s turn again.        

The bathroom is communal and is right next door.  The toilets flush like they do at home, and the showers have hot water.  Dispensers shoot out shampoo, conditioner and shower gel, so there is no need to ever buy soap.  There is even a dispenser for lotion.  Every morning the janitor cleans the bathroom.  Sometimes when I go in there, I am not alone.  Privacy is rare, but I don’t have to scrub the sink or pay the water bill.    

Down the hall is a laundry room with a bucket of detergent that looks like blue Kool-Aid powder, and beyond that is the employee dining room.  It is someone’s job to cook breakfast, lunch and dinner for all the employees who eat together at long tables.  There isn’t much space between the tables, so people push in their chairs and you must suck in your gut to squeeze past.  Even if you want to sit in the corner in the sunlight by the window just to be alone, you will be surrounded by people.  This is the inside world, and for the first evening this is all that I knew. 

The next day I walked down a path through a forest of birch trees until I reached the restaurant, a big blue building with a porch and balcony.  Inside there are wooden tables that seem randomly scattered throughout the dining room, but someone engineered their arrangement.  They are all numbered according to a memorable pattern.  Soon I will look at a table and associate it with a number.  To the untrained eye, it is just a place to sit and not part of an organized system.

The view from the restaurant is of Jordan Pond.  The water is pellucid, and you can see the reflection of two bubbly hills on the north side.  After the first workday, I walked around the pond on a dirt trail that transitioned to a stone path and then to a boardwalk.  I watched a beaver swim in the frigid water.  I listened to sparrows whistling on skinny, leafless branches.  I could hear the loon cooing between the mountains as the water lapped against the rocky shore.  On the second day of living here, my world stretched four miles from my bed to the pond’s edge.

 

Each day I try to expand my radius.  I bought a map of the park and took a bus tour of the island.  We drove up the park’s highest mountain and from the top you can see mainland Maine and the Atlantic Ocean dotted with spiky islands.  The sea is tarheel blue and stretches all the way to Portugal.  Some people say we live in a small world, but we don’t.  The world is too large for anyone to rightfully say they’ve  been there, done that.  I think what people mean when they use this expression is that the world is full of microcosms where friends know friends-of-friends and people bump into each other at the grocery store. 

In these microcosms, these spidery little networks, people sleep in familiar beds and eat at familiar tables.  They drive the streets they can navigate without using their phones.  Or they take the subway where they can read and not worry about missing their stop because the ride has become muscle memory.  Biological clocks synchronize with our routine and the way we move through our environment. 

When you go to a place with an unfamiliar bed where you don’t know the streets, you must build a new nest.  The walls again become unfamiliar, and at first you don’t know what’s behind them.  Your new home becomes worthy of exploration, and your backyard is full of mystery.  You are eager to map out every inch of this new land, but you are also hesitant to know a place so well because you risk getting bored. 

On the third day, I hiked the mountain on the left and made plans to hike the mountain on the right.  First I will walk as far as I can go in a day and summit all the nearby peaks.  Then I might buy a bike to venture to the farthest reaches of the island.  Albert Camus said a man loves islands because he can easily dominate them, and this is especially true of the small ones.  Once the place has grown too familiar, I will rent a car and drive to Canada, where they speak French but not with the words I learned in high school.  That’ll make everything look new again.