Travel

Acadia National Park. (From the National Park Service)

It's always been a requirement of mine: finding a moment of quiet solitude where I can commune, uninterrupted, with nature. Since moving to New York City, however, the quest isn't easy. So, when my Florida-based family invited me to join them for a week's getaway in Maine, they didn't have to ask twice.

    The first time I saw Psycho, I thought, hey, this Norman Bates looks like a nice guy. But after that famous scene where Tippi Hedron face-plants onto the bathroom floor and Bates carries her off in the shower curtain, I realized you never really know what goes on at a hotel behind closed doors.

Ah, the family road trip: getting car-sick trying to entertain myself with a book, smashed up against the window because the younger brother is taking up a little more than his fair share of space and Mom has been in charge of the radio for the last hour, transfixed on old Hall and Oates and Jimmy Buffet albums. The air conditioner doesn’t work on one side and the batteries in the Walkman are dead. Are we there yet?
   

"It is pleasant to have been to a place by the way a river went," Henry David Thoreau wrote. Just my sentiments, as I surveyed the Buffalo National Scenic River on a trip to northern Arkansas in early May. The river suggets a kind of serpentine vitality, and on this day its taut surface resembled the smoothness of mercury as it coiled into a bend in the near distance. I was eager to launch our rented canoe and be swept along to our takeout point five miles below.