Читать книгу Visiting the Eastern Uplands - S. Dorman - Страница 5

Grown in the writing, this book in your hands has thrown out unexpected roots and branches into our long lives. This is the third book in the cycle of Maine Metaphor but it began in the second book as a yearning to see Aroostook County, The County as it’s called here in Maine. So that the first part of this particular book was initially part of Experience in the Western Mountains. This book is a pruning or scion, cut from the other. But there was not enough of it.

Now the present book opens in our Town in the mountains, as close as convenient in narrative time to our initial Aroostook discoveries. I tried to keep its theme—food, eating, and nourishment—pen in hand, from the beginning. With its uplands material being too slender to sustain a published volume, more was needed.

Two additional trips were made, one alone, camping, reading second-hand finds, and scribbling in a private journal. That journal was not at first meant for publication but has since been adapted, personalizing the formal Aroostook narrative. Afterward, together, Allen and I made another uplands venture. These journeys occurred 17 and 25 years after our initial necessarily brief exploration. I wrote them out to complete the book but that is not why I made these trips. I simply wanted to experience the Eastern Uplands again. And there was the recent migration of Amish to my “Ohio-land” in Maine. I wanted to see them in the Maine upland. I wanted it all, and subsequently “all” was also written out.

As always, our experience was the real interest. Writing it and working out the metaphor with research and meditation was the laborious part, not so rewarding to me as the experience itself. If there are any—readers may find that aging has removed some of my former boldness, and some crafted overbold tonal qualities. For, as my younger self writes—while ignorant of our experience ahead—only later do we realize that the watchers judging us will be ourselves. “We are the judges who can’t help but gauge the performance in our execution of life’s turns.” It will look different when we’ve been made watchful by our experience.