Alex Penny saw her exit, 282 Chester Lake, and she took it, driving her big honkin’ truck off Interstate-95 and into the back roads of Northern Maine. She was arriving a little early to the small rural town, but she didn’t mind. She had to walk her dog before starting the morning job. She took a left on Route 157 and soon she was surrounded by hilly farmland interspersed with young forest. Unharvested acres of trees, stumpage with which the big landowners bargained, separated the farmland like coins on a poker table. She passed a sign proclaiming Fiddle Woodlands, identifying the local landowner in control of these parts of the Maine Woods.
She glanced at the map on her cellphone, mounted to a cradle on the dash of her truck. Something looked off, and after checking to see if anyone was coming down the road towards her, she focused on the digital map for a quick moment. The little truck icon still showed her as on the road near the highway, even though she knew she had driven several miles west.
A large brown Labrador raised his head from his place in the passenger seat. “It’s okay, Connor.” She patted his head and he turned to look out the window as they headed further west.
She turned into a Circle K convenience store and up to the island pump, feeling a sense of welcome familiarity as she looked at the land around her. The store was nothing to set it out of the ordinary, a postage stamp of cleared land with forest surrounding the rectangle of grass, asphalt and neon lighting.
The surrounding forest drew her eyes. It didn’t make sense. The feeling was in her chest, and it was familiar because it reminded her of traveling to her grandparents house as a child. When the long drive was coming to an end and she would begin recognizing familiar landmarks, that meant they were almost there. The feeling she had standing in that parking lot was like that moment when her heart would jump a little with the joy and interest of a child. It was many decades since she had such a feeling.
She sat still in her truck as she considered this pull on her mind, perhaps even her heart, a sense that had been building as she traveled north past the pull-off for the scenic view near Benedicta, Maine. Off in the distance was Mount Katahdin, and the air and blue skies added their own glory to the forces that seemed to pull at her. It was a feeling of anticipation, almost joy, as if coming home, though she had never been to this region of Maine in the past. She’d gone up to Jackman a few times, but that north route was southwest of here and was much hillier, and the Jackman roads certainly didn’t feel like this.
She recalled passing a sign proclaiming Chester Lake was just a little further. There maker of the sign had failed to list a population number. She figured it was just a couple of hundred, no more than a thousand or so. From the location of the convenience store, she knew the town was just around the next curve in the road, and would take her through another cozy, sloppy and rundown rural Main Street, like she’d seen countless times in her life. The terrain around the town had low broad hills but for Maine’s tallest mountain rising up in the far distance. She knew if she had followed I-95 for another hour, she’d be in Canada.
Alex was a compact figure sitting in the driver seat. She had to pull the seat far forward to reach the foot pedals, but she didn’t care. The truck was a huge 2021 Ram 2500 and bright red. It boasted a large aluminum topper. She’d hired some engineering students to custom design her camper shell, and it looked like a cross between a cable repair truck and a futuristic silver capasule. A parabolic dish was folded down on the top. The assembly was so large, someone might miss the red scooter mounted on the back bumper. A sign on the sleek shell read.
The Terrain is the Map
GIS and Drone Surveys
Alex Penny, proprietor.
“Good morning to another Maine town,” Alex said to herself. She climbed down from the truck, a smallish woman in her sixties, fit, like a retired girl’s soccer coach.
She felt an ache in her hip, and the years were in her eyes as she pumped gas into her rig. She considered how much fuel it consumed, which was a huge drain on her budget. Still, even with her gear, the red truck still managed 14 mpg. Connor woofed from his spot on the passenger seat. The truck was so tall next to Alex, she had to look up to see the dark brown lab. There was gray in Connor’s muzzle.
“In a minute. Just hold it.” Alex said.
She finished pumping the gas. After she paid, she hauled herself back up to the cab and pulled the truck forward to the grass of the field surrounding the convenience store.
She looked around, noting there weren’t many people, and picked up the leash. She decided to just keep the leash with her in case a squirrel distracted Connor. He was a good dog and almost always looked to her to see if it was OK to go off on a chase. A tangle with a skunk had taught Connor that particular lesson six years ago. He was a good dog, aging, but at least he always came to her when she called.
Alex opened the door and let Connor out on the field.
He went off near the woods to do his duty, and afterwards she picked up his shit and threw it in the brush of the nearby forest.
She let Connor wander until she saw a car pull into the lot and park near her truck, probably the two helpers she was supposed to meet.
“Come her, Connor!” She clipped the lead to his collar, and headed back to the truck.
She had to help Connor climb to his spot, which was a thick towel shed’ spread over the vinyl bucket seat. The need for her assistance was a fairly recent development in their routine, and seeing Connor age and lending her support reminded Alex that she was also pushing into retirement territory.
She turned to the two men, both in their thirties, who climbed out of the car.
“Are you the guys Mr. Draper was supposed to hire who are going to help me?”
The men stopped in front of her. “Yes Ma’am,” said the shorter one. “I-I-I’m Benny and this here is m-m-my brother, Barney.”
Barney looked at her, arms crossed, and nodded, half smiling. He didn’t add anything. After a beat of waiting for a hello or something from the brother, she looked again at Benny. His round face brightened when he saw her look of confusion. He added, as a way of explanation, “Barney don’t talk much.
“Sheriff Hebert said we was to help a guy named Alex P-p-penny. The sheriff said Mr. Draper was going to pay us $100 each.”
She shook her head at this, as she was planning on working for the next eight hours. At the rate Sheriff Draper had quoted them, these two wouldn’t even be making minimum wage in Maine. She knew what the state had budgeted for the assistance, based on her bid for this contract. She suspected the lawyer and the sheriff might be redirecting some funds to their own pockets.
Alex put her hands on her hips and eyed them, wary. “Can you both follow directions, and have either of you ever been arrested for stealing?”
“Uh,” Benny paused. “N…no... I mean yes and then no.” He seemed pleased with himself.
“Alright,” Alex nodded. She’d worked with worse. She clapped her hands together and said, “Fellas, I’m Alex Penny.” She paused to give them a chance to shift gears, then continued. “I need to go to a place called The Overlook, and then I’ll need you guys to help me move stuff around and hold things still while I record data. I’ll need you for about eight or so hours, and if you stick around and do a good job, I’ll throw another $100 into what Mr. Draper promised. We got that?”
“Hang on,” Benny replied and turned to his brother. Barney was doing some math in his head, occasionally looking upwards. The quiet one looked at his brother and gave a firm nod.
Benny turned back to Alex. “Yes ma’am.”
Alex looked at her cellphone. She frowned. The mapping application still showed her truck just off I-95.
“Do you people use Google Maps around here?”
“Ma’am?”
“Never mind. And call me Alex or Ms. Penny.”
She climbed back in her truck and said to Benny, “I’ll follow you to the Overlook.”
It was Barney who nodded and climbed into the driver’s seat.
Benny joined his brother as passenger, and the old Buick backed up and stuttered onto the road.
Alex pulled in behind the other vehicle with the two brothers. Beside her, Connor looked alert and perky for an old dog. He always liked this part, heading to a survey site for the first time.
Alex followed the Buick through town, which took all of 45 seconds, and then they took a turn at Island Road. They drove out of town a ways, and then hit a T and took a right. The country road became a lake road that followed the perimeter of a large lake. This would be Chester Lake, Maine’s not so famous second largest lake. The water and shore stretched off for miles, from what Alex could see. After passing a final large house with a barn, she took a turn with the older car and started to cross a one-lane trestle bridge.
A sign announced “Sam Cooke Island”. There was text beneath the large words. “Privately Owned Bridge For Public Use Courtesy of Fiddle Woodlands.”
The paving was bumpy crossing the bridge, and Alex wondered if she should stop and let the Buick go on ahead of her. The hundred feet of thick plank boards rattled with sturdy age and the Buick left the other end of the bridge ahead of Alex. She was checking the edge rearview mirror and she missed the weird little pickup that pulled on the one-lane bridge right after the brothers had pulled off.
She looked ahead and the pickup was suddenly in front of her. She pushed the brakes hard, almost throwing Connor from his spot. The old dog grunted.
Alex was facing a small colorful pickup that was pulling a little teardrop camper trailer. Her truck was almost nose-to-nose with the small compact pickup, looming over it with her higher clearance. There was a handicap symbol embossed on the license plate, and a plastic handicap sign swung from a hook on the rearview mirror. There was a bumper sticker beside the front plate that said “Global warming is a hoax, but Noah’s magic floating zoo is undeniable?”
A fierce grim-faced old man was behind the wheel. He seemed to glare, an intense expression with his eyes forward, not meeting her eyes and staring at her front bumper as if willing to move. Alex sighed, noting it would be more difficult for the old guy to back up his little rig than it would for her to move her big truck backwards.
She shifted the lever and started backing up. Something about the pickup keeping pace in front of her stood out, but she was too busy watching her mirrors to pay attention.
When she reached the end she’d started from, thankfully there were no other cars waiting. She pulled back to her left and finally had a chance to look at the man’s truck as it passed. It was an old red Toyota Courier, last made back in the ‘80s. The old man nodded from the small cab of the compact pickup. He had wisping gray hair, and a set jaw. His dark brown eyes moved, caught her eyes, and they stared at each other for a second.
It was a strange second, and intense for Alex. Like she and someone at the airport recognized each other at the same time. His eyes also widened as if in recognition, and he suddenly looked less grim and serious. And then the moment was over and he pulled from the bridge and passed her parked truck.
As it passed, Alex realized it was an unusual truck in other ways.
“Is that wood?” She said to herself and Connor.
Polished wood formed various parts of the truck, replacing much of the original apple red body with what appeared to be wood veneer of different colors. The front left panel was polished dark grained wood. The hatch in the back was yellow wood. The frame supporting the windshield was red wood. One door was green, but the smooth vermilion appeared unvarnished. The other door was the original door of faded red paint still keeping the driver’s side rust free. The truck had a patchwork quality that seemed a mishmash of original bodywork and a haphazard conglomeration of custom colors, as if someone had replaced parts of the original red body with cleverly fashioned wooden duplicates.
The man and his truck took a right at the T and headed up Lake Road towards town. It disappeared from view.
Alex shook her head, thinking the day was just really feeling strange. She finished crossing the bridge.
She followed the Buick along an asphalt road which curved to the left into thick woods, following a path across the pinto bean-shaped island.
Less than a quarter mile from the bridge, she passed a sign on a tree. It announced “Tom’s Weed” in black paint on a worn piece of wood. There was no driveway, or even a trail, just the sign hanging by some wire from the remains of a broken limb of an old poplar tree.
Alex watched the road wind itself through the island forest with careful attention. She activated the voice recorder on her smartphone and began recording notes of landmarks she observed on the road, along with odometer distances and the directions she faced.
“Though surrounded by forest, I can see the sky through the asphalt corridor of the road. As noted from the original images in the report, there is no reason satellite photos would not show the road from orbit.”
The road was the reason she was here. The island, in satellite photos, was covered in trees, and the road never showed in any image, satellite or aerial. Not one. Sure, the trees could cover parts of the road, but this wide lane should show from above.
Yet it did not.
She tried to track her location in reference to the bridge, using compass and odometer at each major turn, she soon last track of the Buick, but she tallied the turns as she traveled the island road.
The trees of this island were tall, she noted. She’d spent enough time surveying the northeast, she recognized most of the trees. She looked a little closer at the large trunks of oak and maple. They seemed healthy, with thick branches and lush greenery. Even the pine trees looked old and tall, but had not taken over the available ground. She passed a stand of white ash trees reaching upward, strong and bright. The area beneath all the trees seemed formidable with serious green bushes, briar and firm flowering plants competing for the sunshine that managed to penetrate to the ground.
The island was supposed to be two miles along its largest dimension. That’s what the satellite photos showed, though the foliage never revealed any actual ground. Just treetops. After 3.4 miles, according to her odometer, she caught up with the Buck which had parked and waited. It pulled in front of her again and the two vehicles drove up a final rise. The rise kept going upwards until the road opened into a large turnaround area with an arc of pylons on the east end. A wooden sign, painted with faded wood letters, announced “Sam Cooke Island Overlook”.
Alex pulled into the turnaround, and picked one of the parking spots in a neat halo around the perimeter.
She looked at her phone, which still showed her on I-95. She reached in her glove compartment and pulled out one of her older GPS devices. The LCD panel reported, “No Data” and blinked.
Alex spoke into the cell’s recorder, “Note that I am at the highest point of the island, the Overlook. This is a bare spot of cleared foliage and should easily be visible from commercial satellite images. My phone GPS is still showing my location as twenty miles west of this point.”
She paused the recorder for a moment, then continued.
“It appears something is keeping the satellite data from reaching this location. I can’t even tell my elevation.”
Alex went to the back of her truck. Connor transferred from the passenger seat to the driver’s seat, poked his head out the window and looked around with doggy interest.
Knowing the dog would stay in the truck, Alex went through her setup routine. She opened a panel beside the main door. She reached in and removed two poles, which she transferred each to Benny and Barney. “You just hold that for a moment.”
The men complied, watching what she was doing.
She brought out a tripod with a spotting scope, and then she opened a second compartment and removed a drone. It was an ROV with a precision camera capable of capturing high definition video in varied frequencies, including infrared, radar, x-ray and sonar. Six propellers carried the light rigid platform of the drone, a four-foot wide hexagon. It was made from graphene trusses and was much lighter than it appeared. Alex had painted it with the gray and blue tones of starships from a famous science fiction franchise. The cargo was the sensor package she’d mounted to the platform. It weighed twice as much as the rest of the drone but had the finest sensor technology a surveyor could ask. She’d even used it to map the floors of a few harbors on the coast.
Benny looked in awe at the device. “Is that a spaceship?”
Barney, standing beside his brother, rolled his eyes.
Alex looked at Benny quizzically. “You’ve never seen a drone?”
He looked up to the sky as if trying to come up with a good answer, before saying in a friendly way, “We don’t get out much.”
Benny kicked his brother’s foot and glared at him.
“What?” Barney said indignant.
Alex turned on a monitor built into the sliding tray that held the drone. She took out a controller, and, with practiced ease, fired up the propellers, which hummed, then buzzed louder. The drone lifted itself up and Alex landed it near the front of the truck on a grassy area.
Only then, through the viewpoint of the drone, did Alex actually look out from the overlook.
She could see for miles across Chester Lake, and the hills and mountains of Maine off into the forested distance, and there was Mt. Katahdin adding a sense of wonder. It was quite the view, but that did not impress Alex.
She set the drone in hover as she walked forward from the rear of the truck. She walked past the pylons and paused. She stood at the edge of a cliff that rose from the water below, at least 100 feet. The cliff extended left and right before the old forest of the island blocked the view.
The hills surrounding the lake were far across the water from this point. She knew the lake shore in the far distance was at least five miles. Second biggest lake in Maine, she thought.
“Well let’s have a look, boys.” Alex sent the drone soaring skyward and out over the cliff edge.
After a few hundred feet and the sound of the blades had faded away, Alex pulled the forward thrust back to hold the position so she could start taking readings.
The drone, however, kept going east. She moved other knobs and buttons, but the drone just kept going.
“What the hell?” She looked down at the screen, and saw it change from the detailed GUI you would expect to a red screen and the words “No Signal”.
She looked back up, and the drone was accelerating away. “Well aren’t you moving lickity-damn-split.”
Barney looked quizzically at Alex, and Benny asked, “Where’s it going?”
Alex stared, helpless. “I don’t know.”
The drone kept going until she lost sight of it, even using the spotting scope on her tripod. Her best piece of equipment was gone. She hoped it landed safely and someone called the name and number she’d printed on the frame under the words “IF FOUND”.
Alex shook her head, pursed her lips and put her hands on her hips. Whatever. She walked back to the rear of the truck. She opened the large door to reveal a small office space, bunk and bathroom. She grabbed a knapsack, hauling it out with weary practice and the clicking sound of more equipment. In the front pouch, within a resealable plastic bag, was her magnetic compass. Another resealable bag contained a printed USGS map.
“Now we do it old school.”