Still Life with Banana

All of the news this weekend is about AI accelerating and trying to kill humanity, but meanwhile, I am at a destination wedding in Maine where you can barely pick up a phone signal. 

The drive here was through a part of the country where I’d never been, on a ferry across Lake Champlain, and through the Green Mountains of Vermont, the White Mountains of New Hampshire. We kept losing our GPS signal. Can they find us if we can’t find them? I bought a paper map at a gas station. 

I had it splayed out on my lap, and I kept running my finger over the road lines, trying to pin us down, but then I would look up and remember we are here in real life. The ferry cutting through choppy water, the mountains rising up. We were telling stories about ourselves, the friends we were going to see at the wedding, people we love. 

We went on a hike with them in the morning. The hike was called “moderate.” The trail wound past a beach and into the woods. It ended at an outcropping of boulders. 

But no, the trail continued, a splotch of blue paint at the top of the boulder pile indicating that was the way we should go. We all burst out laughing. We were supposed to climb that? And if this is a moderate hike, what is the strenuous version? 

We climbed the boulder pile. My friend had been eating a banana on the way, and now she was holding the banana peel, because this is a rule at the park, leave nothing behind. But the banana peel was making the climb more challenging, so we took turns carrying it. When it was my turn, I stopped on a ledge and held the peel up like it was a flag. 

The wind was blowing and you could smell the trees and the ocean. I took pictures and tried to send them to friends in other places, but my phone said No Signal. And where was the trail now? We found the blue paint mark far down below. I was marveling at these trail makers. Were they nuts or visionaries? And could we trust them? 

I let someone else take a turn with the banana peel. I was looking over at my friend. She’s the one getting married at this destination wedding, but for now, we were just two humans planning our descent down a mountain. 

We made it, with only a few stumbles.