New Haven to Boston, Part 2

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On my night train to New Haven, a little girl with pointy teeth and a punk-rock mommy is singing “Die, Monster, Die” by the Misfits.

11:35: Stopped by the Branford Police near Branhaven Plaza. There’s been some sort of incident here earlier. The cop has a blonde marine cut. He wants to know if I’m coming from the big bar, called SBC (a chain). “That a grenade in your pocket?” he demands. Nah, I just get a hard-on from hilarious cop humor! I give over my passport so he can write my name, birthdate and residence. I notice the year, looks like 1671, on his green town-seal shoulder patch.

Branford keeps attractive fire trucks: banana-yellow, almost green.

I have passed the same ancient steam shovel three times. Its arm is strung with cords and pulleys, instead of pistons. A light drizzle.

2:30 am, near Orchard Market, Guilford: “Stand in front of the car.” This is a Connecticut state trooper, and he attempts to ‘run’ my passport. “Stay dry,” he says finally. I am clean. He’s a nice cop.

From a late-night incident when the whole Fairfield P.D. tried to interrogate me, I’ve learned not to excite cops by telling them the entire truth of my journey. I don’t know why but this revelation turns me into an attractive police catch. “Congratulations, boys, you found Osama Bin Walkin’!” You could say it sends up a red flag.

4:30am: Back in historic downtown Madison. For some curious reason, the only vehicles on Route 1 at this time of night are red pick-up trucks. I’ve noticed this before.  Outside the travel agent’s office is a gag milepost with hands pointing in all directions: “Quebec: 408 Miles”. Feasible, I think. Seductive.

The outdoor amphitheatre in Hammanassett State Park. (Did I see a performance of Romeo and Juliet here as a boy with my family? It rained lightly for the last scenes, the audience swooned a little. I think I remember this store called “The Book Room”. Friend from childhood overdose, I flash on this, what’s the story?)

January 6^th. A very early diner breakfast, lots of coffee, beneath a TV showing ESPN. Today is NBA player Gilbert Arenas’s 25^th birthday, he’s younger than I am. I read a local newspaper. Story of a man honored for forty years of work at the New London water facility. A profile of an English professor at the Naval Academy, also in New London. One of his students, now a fleet lieutenant, told the professor how impressed the enlisted Latinos were with the lieutenant’s knowledge of Garcia Marquez. The Wall Street Journal picks the Giants to lose.

Clinton Historical District. A replica milestone says 25 MILES TO NEW HAVEN. The landscape out here reminds me of way out on Long Island, where I went for a wedding once: wide open marshes, ancient telephone poles, the occasional old man on a bicycle. Salt hay is a high-nutrient feed crop, it provided well for settlers. I take a detour down Grove Beach Street to the shoreline, look at the Long Island Sound for a while, and return to Route 1 via Menunketesuck. Private beaches, dead ends, low stone fences between charming houses sitting in sand. Breeze over the water, pulling clouds along to the East.

Steel-deck bridge over the meandering Patchoge River. Amtrak lines against a low hill to the north, across the marsh. 10 am.

THE BODY.

Bad pain in my left kneecap, and blisters. My body already feels wrung out, hot ears, dry eyes. Maybe pop some multi-vitamins. When I lie down there’s a tingling rush all over. Aw, what a pansy! The lesson of the other day (when I walked from Stratford to Hartford, CT) is, Don’t give up. But what a miserable condition to be in. [So nice to be comfortable and typing this up in my warm dining room.] I just want to focus on this landscape: when I crossed the Westbrook, everything turned beautiful, boat dealerships and wooded coastland under the warming white sky. Bad diarrhea.

Tough nap against a stone field fence out behind some historic house, closed for the season.

Interesting animals that live here: shad, alewife, eastern cottontail, mockingbird, box turtle.

Ah, the waste land segment of this Route 1 stretch, where all the motor vehicle sales lots are. Prices. Brand names.

Saybrook. A nice Slavic man, his wife at his side, stands before the vending machine in the Days Inn motel hallway. He holds up a coin in earnest and utters, slowly and fluently, a scintillating English sentence: “Can you break a dime?” The Days Inn is $64, it’s Saturday night.

 The motel clerk is from Bronxville, New York. He asks me what I do, seeing as I’m alone. I am unintentionally cagey. To another room go two big girls, one a Filipina taller than me. In the bathroom of my motel room I use a Days Inn ballpoint pen to pop a blister on my big toe. I have to really force it through, and a sudden jet of serum blasts me in the right eye. In my room I study an Old Saybrook tourism brochure. “The Fire Department owns such equipment as ‘Jaws of Life’ and a heavy-rescue unit.”

7am, I have an English muffin at the continental breakfast and leave the motel. Birds are singing. On the Baldwin Bridge, a vast arcing span, I stop to watch the morning light on the  Connecticut River. The sun has just cleared the hills. To the north, a vast span of power cables with the red and white marker-things strung on them, they look like volleyballs. They hang suspended in the pale dawn like planets. The river is pale blue without detail or depth. North upriver the land runs to hills, the town of Essex. (The Tylenol took away most of the pain in my ankle, but I wonder how far I will end up traveling.)

The river is flawless. –I have believed that I will go to Hell to suffer, for the sin of not allowing divine light through: not being fully hospitable to God’s grace and not living charitably. Moreover, not being aligned correctly in faith, not having PURE INTENTIONS. But, the admirable ones are those who continue on their path of righteousness and set aside the knowledge of their own mixed motivations and their baseness. The ones who push ahead anyway. (The walker- or else the steadfast one, who doesn’t leave but only moves forward in time, accepts the passage of time.)

Sun more full now. The flat winter hills repose toward the water, meeting it at a border of tawny marsh. South: the x-girdered truss bridge for the Amtrak and the Shoreline East trains. The marshes and the dark copses at the sunlit mouth, where the Algonquins made their base, and then the Seye-Brook Puritans built their forts, looked out with their guns—like the watch house that stood then on Academy Hill in Stratford (that frozen coppery grass).