The Machias reading was wonderful. Everyone I met seemed to be so pleasantly overexcited by life, in one way or another. And there is something miraculous about driving through dark, bleak Washington County and simultaneously conversing happily about Wordsworth. To think that people do that! For some reason, I still can hardly believe that other people on this planet actually love these writers so ardently. And then to find them in Machias. (If you were ever in Machias, you would know why this is especially strange. Suffice it to say that Washington County is kind of like my own Somerset County, except that, last I heard, it ranks higher on the prescription-drug-abuse scale and lower on the domestic violence scale.)