Heads up - I haven't been anywhere, But this is still technically a travel blog.
Long ago here on Hive I would do a fun thing of spinning the virtual globe, randomly stopping, zooming in on whatever point and investigate whatever I found.
I somehow found even the most mundane locations a place of fascination. For example, in one random state of the US, I found a suburb full of those typical American wooden houses, but Every. Single. Vehicle, both parked and driving, were pickup trucks. I couldn't find a single exception for a fair distance.
Amazing.
Today, I ended up going down a similar rabbit hole - so prepare to experience the mundane!
I started pondering exactly why US houses are so often made of wood. It turns out, in a nutshell, it's largely because they just have a LOT of wood. This lead me to find the state of Maine had the most wood; close to 90% of the entire state is forest.
One reason for this fact is that there is only one main interstate road trundling down the East side of the entire Northern half:
If you go deeper into that big green Northern wilderness - which if you were me, you would, because like I said it's fascinatingly mundane - you mostly get this:
Some small roads, but barely any people. The population density is negligible, the living costs cheap. And I wonder how many schools there are per 100km - 0?
Most of those roads still don't even have any Street View capability, either, but I did find one near a river. After trundling down the road for a bit in the greenery, I actually came across a house - with a man! Living there in exactly the kind of lifestyle you'd expect if you ever watch American movies:
Git awf mah lawnnnn or ah'll shoot y'all wi' mah gatlin' gun
He even had one of those classic rusty mail boxes:
But he in fact was not completely isolated in the forest as I imagined!
Just down a bit more was a sort of makeshift little hamlet of people, and this is where things got pretty interesting, in an exceptionally dull kind of way. I really started to daydream about the stories that could be told, but are never heard, by those living in this far-out lifestyle, not too far, geographically speaking, from New York City.
Barely 50 metres down from that redneck hick was a property coned and taped off, looking new and shiny with a decent middle-classy blue car, and a happily waving woman who put up an astrology-type sign on the wall of her home...? shop? in the shape of a barn. Immediately to her left was an abandoned, overgrown minivan.
This is what caught my attention. On this little isolated street in Maine where barely a dozen people live their lives, there's quite a blend of poor-looking folk and the more middle class.
Case and point, immediately next door, you have a pretty run-down, overgrown home (left), and a pretty run-down tiny hut of a place next to that (right) whose outside area is completely unpaved, grass cut using a rusty hand-pushed lawnmower and a weirdly placed, creepy-ass rocking chair blocking the front door.
In contrast, just a dozen or so metres beyond that, you come across a whole different world of home:
Not only is the home large and well-maintained, its garden freshly installed and beautifully presented, but this family clearly has some cash to spare with that RV, kayak, and outside barn areas with seemingly a chicken coop hiding at the back and even a well behind the RV. However, flip 180 degrees and their view is...
A burnt down, dilapidated shed/house?. So many untold stories here!
This human grassy opening soon closes up, however, and we're back to narrow roads surrounded by trees once more.
And just for fun, here's a church with a weirdly open graveyard. Surrounding it are large houses, all with equally un-bordered land stretching as far as you can see.
Everything, of course, was still built from wood.
And that, fellow bored readers, is Northern Maine in a nutshell.
