Author's Note: Hi guys. I'm sorry I don't have an Eight Men chapter for you all. I thought I'd post this and a couple of other shorts as a tide-me-over until next week. Plus, Eight Men's America sections seem to focus a lot on the states, so I thought that I should share a bit about how I envision them. And we all need more histories of New England in our lives, right? This might be just a piece on Maine, I might do all the colonial area states (so, the 15 states that have land in the original areas of the 13 colonies). No idea yet.

Coastlines

01. Maintained

i. Brackets

Maine brackets America with the help of her equally tall, equally blond complete mirror of a younger sister. She in the North-East, looking at the Atlantic, while California lounges on a beach only a little north of Tijuana. Everyone loves Cali, and she will take anyone in. She is easy in her ways, taking the love that everyone gives her, and swimming away, or ignoring it, or accepting it, just depending on her changeable, varied moods. Maine hates her with all of the passion of a northeastern gale ravaging her coast.

ii. Relief

Maine is everyone's older sister. This is not because of her role as a state, or even a function of actual age, but because of who she is. She is the tallest, aside from California, because they are both equal to eleven apples, and hard to approach, but when she is approached she always has a bandage somewhere, or a quietness that, when you live with forty-eight loud, boisterous, quirky siblings-friends-enemies, makes it a relief to be held quietly and look at the sea for a few hours.

iii. Thank You

Maine can always be found on her coast, and never in her interior. Not because she is never there, but because in her interior, she does not want to be found. When she goes there, she is telling the world that does not care about her unless they need her, that she has had enough for a while, thank you for having changed her past recognition. Thank you for having taken everything that you wanted already. Thank you for sailing around, and never to her.

iv. Flaw [1]

Maine has a horrible tendency, that she keeps tight to her chest, to fall in love. France was the first. Francis is the first for most of the North-East. She also knows that he has forgotten her long ago, because he is of Europe, and those of Europe do not remember a small, to them, brown-haired brown-skinned girl in bright colors, bare breasted with necklaces of her own lovely shells hanging on a flat chest. He, also colorful, but bigger and confused by her face paint, smiled at her, sweet-talked her in his strange fire-ripple human tongue, and then left, looking for other, better things. Maine is secretly jealous of Quebec.

v. Earth

Maine has never told anyone why she is no longer mud brown and made of earth. It has to do with her second love. She supposes, now, in retrospect that this is how they could tell that they were going to change. If you fell in love with the huge striding men on their floating island boats, you would become like them, and if you did not, you were still changed, just slightly, because they changed your friends.

vi. Missing

Maine, when alone in her interior, lies among the weeds and water of her swamps. She swipes mud across her pale cheeks, the way she used to paint them white and red. Then, made of earth, and ready, she hides among the weeds, brushing long pale white gold hair with a mother of pearl comb Alfred gave her in 1820, as a first true birthday gift. She loves the comb going through her long hair, because it reminds her of her second love, which was as full of anger as admiration for European sky-born difference.

vii. Drop

Maine knows that Arthur has long forgotten her. He cannot forget Alfred, but the states have become more invisible to him than Canada, and that is saying something. There was a time when he stood on her rocks and among the spray of her ocean, and just let his jaw drop.

viii. Harsh [2]

Maine is only visible on her coastline. Because he wrote poems about her, and spoke those poems aloud to the night air, and cried as her people, remembering Francis, beautiful and cruel, killed his people, and her weather killed his people, and there was a lot of English blood.

ix. Secret

Maine does not smile, except in her sleep, because smiling suggests that she is silly as California, perverted by Antonio long before Alfred reclaimed her. Alfred is his third of the continent, all of them, whole, and now a bit that probably should be part of Matt, or just its own place, the way it used to be, and those islands that should, by all rights, be their own nation. But while he was always the whole of America, some of them had been lost, and he needed to find them once more. Maine had never been lost. She was just waiting by the coastline for Arthur to come again so that she could destroy him once more.

x. Buccaneer [3]

Maine remembers Massachusetts fondly because of Arthur, she is certain. The short, explosive, joyfully tough boy was already Europe pale, and thick-browed, which just matched Maine's memories of the lovely green-eyed man, who wandered her coast, and ventured to brave her interior on legs that were happier on the sea. Massachusetts' hair was black, with that chunk of hair stuck up jauntily, proclaiming that he was no European, and his cheeks, round and proud, sported finger smears of red. On the day she first met him as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and not as a representative of The People (his not hers), Maine kissed the cheeks, both of them, like Francis had kissed her cheeks long ago. The tiny sea captain had grinned, and proclaimed loudly that all her land was now his.

xi. Spirits

Maine loves her interior, which is not just swamps. It was there, half way up a tree, where she was spying curiously on the European who had eyes greener than unfurling birch leaves in spring time, that Arthur finally learned who was watching him. He smiled, and Maine nearly fainted in embarrassment when he asked what manner of spirit was she? Because she had known all along that he was land from far, far away, and how did he know that she was just exactly not like him?

xii. Weave

Maine is a girl. She is proud to be woman, and hauls fish along her coast, carves wood in the safety of her home, and collects cattails to weave in her long blond hair. Every spring she rests in her interior, combing out her hair until it is silky and shiny. Then she knots and loops hair that is thick and bold and American, because neither Arthur nor Francis have changed her that much. In and around, like her basket makers, her fingers weave the cattail stalks, blatantly ignoring the smooth voice of Arthur.

xiii. Fall

Maine is quite vain, in her own quiet way. She would not be, she reasons, if Arthur had not said such pretty things, exclaiming over her scenery. In the old days, land was not yours unless you used it, and it was technically not her scenery, per se, any more than it was the land of any of the other first nations, because she was of The People (her people and no one else's), and not of the land, although she was of the people's love for the land, condensed into the form of a willowy cattail stalk given human life. But Arthur had seen the beauty of the land, and had found her first, because her people were near by, and so he had assumed, in his European way, that she was the land. And Maine accepted the accolade with a smile on her long proud face.

xiv. Sarah; March 4, 1820 [4]

Maine loves Alfred for the comb. It is the best present that she has ever been given. It has the date of the birthday that he picked for her, and the name he gave her engraved in the handle. They are things given and not taken, and that is very precious to Maine. Arthur only tried to take. She is proud that she helped run the land operations for Massachusetts while he took to the sea, and the rivers and the lake so far from Maine. She is proud that she has shot Arthur before, even if it was in the name of Massachusetts.

xv. Anniversary [5]

Maine knows that she is no real beauty in of her person. Her land still makes jaws drop, rocky, verdant, glorious, vibrant, and austere. Arthur, who loved her land enough to save her some special stanzas, told her so one day, as they walked through the interior. He told her what a European looked for in a woman. One with the decency to cover her small breasts against more than the cold. One with the flawless skin of a cloud. One with eyes as blue as the sky. One with a proportion that was not out of line with her brothers, but properly delicate. One with the modesty not to draw attention to herself with flashy colors. One with a voice that did not remind the European of fighting jays in the far northern woods. One who did not let her feet get muddy and soiled by walking everywhere. One who did not love anything of the outside world more hardy than an ephemeral spray of flowers, which would of course be held in the elegant, white little hand. One with hair long, blond, and fine as Venetian silk.

xvi. Sky Colors

Maine knows that she is plain, and it is her own fault. She took all of Arthur's advice on that cold blustery March day in 1613. On the 25th, she stepped out of the woods, transformation not complete, but half way there, because she wanted to show Arthur that she could be as beautiful as his European beauties, in time. Yes, her hair was still the vibrantly strong American hair, but it was the color of the pale gold earring Arthur wore. She had removed the sturdy cattails, although she had not been able to find any really pretty flowers, so she had let that long, impractical length of watery gold flow around her unbound. She had put on shoes, which pinched and hurt, but were cleanly without mud. She did not speak, because changing her voice was hard. Her new dress was sober woolen blacks and browns, with starchy white cuffs at her wrists. She would work on her height, too, but she was vastly smaller than Arthur, so maybe he would not notice that she still was taller than any of the other people-lands that Arthur knew. Her eyes could not manage the blue yet, but they had achieved the gray of her stormy ocean. And her skin was clear as clouds. She was proud of her cold white European skin, no longer paint adorned, because it was exactly what Arthur had said he had wanted.

xvii. Flood

Maine still cannot stand to hear people make fun of other people. Because Arthur laughed. He howled. He roared. He could barely breathe when he asked Maine if she had been caught in a rain storm and lost everything about her that had once been lovely and colorful, and bloody minded, which was what he enjoyed about her.

xviii. History [6]

Maine is bloody minded. She stabs the cattails into her hair, braided and knotted in the way a European woman would never think of, still leaving trailing strands to blow in the breeze like defiant flags. She is bloody minded as she dashes ships against her rocky shore. She is bloody minded as a gale rushing in from the North East. She shoots Arthur in the name of Massachusetts because she is bloody minded. She leads instead of following because she will not follow a European again, in her bloody minded stupidity. She is bloody minded when she dresses in a navy uniform, perches a nurse's hat on her head for good measure, and follows Alfred into the thick of Europe at war, keeping herself in France even after the German nations invade and all the women are ordered back. She is bloody minded when the closest she allows herself to get to Arthur are her ships on England's coastline. She is bloody minded when she refuses to speak again in anything but the screaming crash of breakers.

xix. Defiant

Maine wears a crown of plain brown cattails, that California mocks, along with her coarse t-shirt, muddy jeans, and modest jacket, as she stands at the edge of the rocky coast, letting her weather batter her tall, ugly sea-eyed, wind-streaming blond self in defiance of all those Europeans who try to make her into something she is not as she brackets the rest of America.

Notes

[1] - The first European settlement was one French colony was established on one of the islands off the Maine coast. Basically it was used as a rest point before getting into Canada. And then it was destroyed by the weather, a plague, and one of those angry English sea captains came and burned the rest of it to the ground.

[2] - The journals and letters of early English colonists to Maine tend to run something like this: Day 1 - We have found Eden on earth, a fitting place of serenity and extreme beauty where our toil will be just as God wills. ... Day 138 - It's cold and unpleasant as fuck! Get me out of this impossible Hell hole! I imagine that Arthur's poetic side really was inspired by the contrast.

[3] - Maine was part of Massachusetts until granted statehood in 1820.

[4] - Bonus to whoever can guess why Maine's human name is Sarah. If you don't know, but are curious, you can always ask.

[5] - The 24th of March, 1613 was the 10th year anniversary of the death of Elizabeth the First. Arthur might have been reminiscing on typical European beauties for a reason that did not involve humiliating Maine.

[6] - The newly made state of Maine made it a point to be aggressively anti-slavery in political matters, which is where the motto of Maine "Dirigo (I lead)" comes from. In WWI Maine residents made up the second largest proportion of the Navy (Massachusetts had the largest). Also, Maine sent a good number of women over to France to serve as nurses, and when the Germans suddenly made the behind-the-lines hospitals part of the front line, all the nurses were recalled. The women continued bandaging the wounded, instead.

I hope that I have managed to entertain you. Any questions about Maine, or suggestions on how to deal with personifying certain states, or comments in general are always welcome. Connecticut in particular gives me many problems, as that to me is one of those states that you drive through to get to something else. The Carolinas are also a little hard to pin down, as well.

~ MF