Whirligig

Brent takes the bus to Maine, transferring in Port Authority despite his father’s urging to avoid it. He passes through Boston without visiting his relatives. In Maine, he stays in a bed-and-breakfast for the first time and finds it “too similar to a small dinner party with strangers” that forces him to lie about himself and his journey (116). Brent goes farther north, to a campground in Weeksboro. The campground’s owner tells Brent that he built the table on Brent’s camp site by refashioning materials he found at the dump.

At his site, Brent realizes that he does not have the whirligig manual and feels “abandoned” but “in his mind there materialize[s] the notion of a whirligig all his own, its plan found in no book in the world, its ingredients his remaining scraps and whatever he could find, as the campground owner had” (120). Brent goes to the beach to look for wood and meets a woman painting a crab shell. Brent likes the way she speaks to him “as an adult” and they talk for an hour (122).

Brent works on his whirligig for three-and-a-half days, playing his harmonica for breaks and going to the dump for more materials.