Channeling Steven King

Yesterday was a long day for Team Grigsby.  We started bright and early in Poughkeepsie and finished dark and late in Castine, Maine, where my friend Emily is from.  The drive would have normally taken about seven or eight hours, but we made some detours along the way, so it took closer to twelve.  Along the way, we stopped at:

• Red Hook, New York, to visit my friends Maggie and Mark and their gorgeous 10-day-old baby Adelie
• Malden, Massachusetts, to pick up my friend Emily's uncle Andy, who needed a ride to Castine, and
• Portland, Maine, where we stopped for dinner at Becky's Diner 

Castine is, as they say in Maine, "Down East," which means pretty much in the middle of nowhere.  And the approach is on a very long, narrow, and bumpy state road that, at night, seems to extend endlessly into dark, ominous woods.  A dense, creeping fog added to the eeriness.  And when I noticed that none of the houses we passed had any lights on -- even though it was only 10:00 at night -- my imagination ran wild and I instantly envisioned myself as the protagonist/victim in a Stephen King novel.

But, I thought, Grigsby would surely protect us.  After all, he has fog lamps:

Of course, I couldn't remember how to actually turn on the fog lamps, so Andy had to get the owner's manual out of the glove box and look it up for me.  Thank goodness we figured it out, though, because who knows if we would have survived without the fog lamps.

Anyway, notwithstanding the slasher movie set up, we did finally make it to Castine a little after 10:00 pm, to the only house with the lights still on -- the home of Emily's parents, Dick and Marjorie.  Dick, Marjorie, Emily, and Emily's boyfriend Russ had waited up for us.  And, more importantly, they had alcoholic beverages ready to calm our nerves.

Castine is a beautiful, quaint little town on the Penobscot Bay, surrounded by water on all sides, and connected to the mainland by a tiny little spit of land.  The town is dotted with white clapboard churches, cedar-shingled waterside homes, a lighthouse, docks for lobster boats, lush green lawns, one hundred year old elm trees, and perfectly appointed English gardens bursting with flowers of every color.  It really is like something out of a New England novel.

Yet, like every such town, it has a King-esque dark side.  In this case, it involves cannibalism and immolation:

Don't let the smile fool you.  I'm terrified in this photo.

What other dark secrets does this town hide?  As we wandered around Castine today, I kept trying to imagine what other horrors lie just beneath the town's picture-perfect façade.  Perhaps, I thought, an evil sea god demands human sacrifices every Sunday, human flesh in exchange for not destroying the idyllic-seeming town.  Just about that time, Jenny went traipsing down towards the water.

"Release the Kraken!"

I immediately feared for her safety.  And my own.