Stonington, ME to White Mountains, NH
Leaving Stonington feels a little like closing a chapter. The quiet harbors, the salt-stained docks, the picture window and its harbor view that I stared at for two mornings without apologizing to anyone. That’s behind me now. The White Mountains are ahead.
This is somewhere around state twenty or twenty-one, depending on how you count. The numbers blur when the days are full. What I’m actually chasing today isn’t a tally. It’s the light in the leaves.
A Note on This Project, a Year Later
I’m sixty-one now, recording the voiceover for a trip I took at sixty, and I want to say something about that gap.
I didn’t realize when I started 50 at 60 that documenting it would take as long as the trip itself. I journaled every day on the road. I have folders of clips and images organized by state and town. I have, at this point, sixty-eight episodes worth of context for the places and people and moments that shaped that year. And I’m still going.
What I’ve found is that the distance actually helps. I’ll open a folder from the White Mountains and look at the shots alongside what I wrote in the journal that night, and I can see things clearly now that I was too tired to see at the time. The stories are still there. I just have more patience for them now.
One of the reasons I took this trip was to rekindle the photography. A Dutch photographer named Lila did something similar — a three-week trip specifically to spark her creativity again. I understand that impulse completely. There’s something about moving through new places with a camera that resets whatever part of the brain generates ideas. This year did that for me.
Whether anyone else finds it interesting is a question I’ve mostly stopped trying to answer. Old Man Mike at eighty-one is still putting out videos that are clear and honest and good. If you ain’t dead, you ain’t done. That’s my working philosophy at the moment.
The Drive
I’ll be honest: I don’t have much footage from the drive between Stonington and the White Mountains. It’s four and a half hours on the map, which meant six or seven hours with my approach, and somewhere in that stretch I apparently went quiet. October 2024, a month before the election, and I was likely deep in whatever combination of news and road noise was occupying my head. The clips I have jump from a lobster boat in the Stonington harbor to the edge of the Kancamagus Highway as the light was going.
Some days are just days. You drive through them. They still count.
Arriving on the Kancamagus
The Kancamagus Highway, or the Kanc as the locals call it, runs through the White Mountain National Forest and is one of those roads that appears on every New England fall foliage list for good reason. I’ve been here before. I arrived this time at the wrong end of the afternoon, the light already sliding behind the ridge, but even in the failing light the color was doing what October does up here.
I pulled off near one of the rivers that run through the area north of the highway and shot a few frames before the sun was completely gone. Time lapses running out the window on the drive in. A few quick stills before the dark settled in.
Tomorrow is the real day in the mountains. Tonight I got here. That’s enough for tonight.
