August 5, 2008
Maine Postcard: Peary to the Pole!
Greetings from the Blue Hill Public Library, which luckily for me has free wifi. (The inn where we're staying is a Net-free zone, and I had to file a book review that, in a moment of bad planning, I failed to turn in before we hit the road.) This may be the swankest public library I have ever been in. It even has a separate area for young adults, with signs posted asking grown-ups to make way for YAs. They have loaner laptops and so much polished wood everywhere I feel like I'm on board somebody's yacht. Fittingly, there's a piece of wood on the wall from the deck railing of Robert Peary's ship Roosevelt, built in Verona, Maine--so the sign says--for his Arctic explorations. Kind of great that it's hanging between shelves of YA fiction, like some talisman of boys-adventure books of yore. Peary to the Pole! We won't dwell on the frostbite etc, although it is chilly up here in the north.