Berwick. Maine

Don and Carol dropped me off Saturday below Boston, and I had a great walk through the city and surrounding locale. The commons and waterfront were swarming with people, as was the Charles River filled with small sailboats on a windy but sunlit afternoon. By evening I made it to Revere Beach, walking right along the sand, lights flickering on the bay. I camped by a highway turnoff, put my tent up just across from some houses and next to the road and slept well, undisturbed.
Sunday I walked through the towns of Lynn, Swampscott, Salem, and Beverly, where I met and chilled with a couple different groups of students from Montserrat College of Art, just back for the semester. Sitting up on a little hill in the trees, and nearby on the lawn of the commons, I felt nostalgic for my own college, my own college friends just starting their own semester back in Colorado. I'm not ready to go back to school, not ready to enroll again and try to stay focused, but I think maybe I'm ready to stay in one spot for a while, with people I know.
I camped for the night in Wenham, in a big park, rolled out near some playground equipment.
In the morning I walked through Ipswich, then Newburyport later in the day, and stayed the night on the edge of Salsbury, just shy of the New Hampshire border.
Tuesday was easily one of my favorite walking days of the trip. I met the ocean in Salsbury Beach, turned north and stayed nearby for nearly all of the day, sidewalk and water only separated by dunes or dark rock hidden under wigs of green. My neck grew stiff quickly, and I kept kicking the lip of the concrete or stepping on easily visible rocks because I was paying attention only to the waves, my head turned permanently to the right, the endless blue. Instead of feeling ready to go home Tuesday made me think of living here, in a little shack by the water, maybe working on a boat. I know that someday I will live by the ocean.
By ten oclock I made it to Portsmouth, and slept behind a truck stop. It started raining around six the next morning, and I hadn't bothered to prepare so I was forced to get up and pack quickly, then took refuge inside the truck stop with coffee until the rain let up. Back outside, the caffeine did nothing and I only wanted to sleep more, so I rolled out next to an Odd Fellows lodge, stretched my poncho over the deck rainling to ward off the intermittent sprinkles which continued for a couple of hours, and slept until eleven thirty.
Maybe two hours later, not having gotten far, I met Jay Wheeler, who I'd been in contact with, and he drove me into Berwick, Maine, to the Wheeler residence, where I remain now, as I write. Peg and Jay were good friends of my parents some twenty-odd years ago, before I was born, and they have welcomed me in with old stories and picture albums. Yesterday Jay drove me around, showed me the old farmhouse apartment where my parents used to live, the vet clinic where my mom got her first job out of school. He dropped me off at the historic Hamilton House and for a couple of hours I walked the trails nearby, along the river through Vaughan Woods, another old haunt of my folks. My parents tell me, talking on the phone, that they easily could have stayed here, worked here, raised me here, and I flirt aimlessly with notions of what it might have been like to grow in these woods, along these rivers. I question who I would have become, whether I would have ever walked, and if so, whether I would have walked through the forests in Colorado and imagined this life, then, asked these same questions. If there is another me, somewhere, traveling parallel, then perhaps that me began nearby to this place, in the summer of Maine. Here I look for traces of myself, my own footprints in the sand.