Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign
Jake Doe Burning Bright: welcome to Rockwood, Maine, home of Ember Road in “Dark Woods”.
A Part II from my last post on New England signs...
I found myself over the past day thinking back to some sign moments in my life and was inspired to share.
The song had it right: Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the signs? They are everywhere in our lives—but fewer in number in beautiful rural New England. Jake Doe would have appreciated this even if he didn’t spell it out on his journey in the book.
Jake was the ultimate nature lover and would have hated any landscape polluted by intrusive billboards and gaudy signs.
To be fair, there are probably just as many do this, don’t do that signs in New England as anywhere else. But the marketing, the advertisements? There are certainly fewer of those, and the ones that do exist tend to complement and blend into their natural surroundings. Lots of browns and greens with an occasional pop of white or yellow or red. It doesn’t hurt too that the harsh winters add weathered character to a lot of these signs.
The red color from the Rockwood sign is all over up here, and I’ve found myself calling it Maine red, or forest red. It lives in beautiful contrast to the colors of the land and the woods.
One sign from my childhood really sticks out in my mind.
When I was about ten, my dad drove me out to go fishing at a new spot on the river that required us to pass through some private property. As often happens in Southern towns, a man knew a man who knew a man who said it would be alright if we parked there and put our boat in the water. As we turned onto a dirt road and entered the property, there was an old wooden sign staked to a tree with a handwritten message in white lettering: No niggers allowed.
I was shocked by that sign. I had black friends and knew how much this word hurt and angered them. This was 1978, so we were only about a decade removed from the upheaval and chaos of school integration and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The sign didn’t just make me sad. It made me angry. Who would be this hateful? And what I didn’t understand then, but I can see clearly now, is that I was also angry that no one made this hateful person take down that sign. And no one had the moral courage to just tear it down from the tree.
Fast forward forty-six years, and I found myself reading a story about a young white man who drove from Atlanta to Spartanburg, South Carolina where he climbed a tree, scaled a fence, and walked onto private property bordering the interstate with a goal of lowering an enormous confederate flag mounted on a 120-foot flagpole. The flag was raised by the Sons of the Confederacy and had been flying over the busy road for two years. Apparently, officials in Spartanburg had been unsuccessful in having the flag removed under a nuisance ordinance, so this young man, disgusted by the symbol hate flying over one of the South’s most-trafficked roadways, summoned the moral courage to tear it down himself.
Now I know this is the fork in the road where some of you will detour from me and raise points about property rights and obeying the law. And so it’s the point where I make the case back to you that there are principles of decency, kindness, and humanity that should, in certain cases, trump property law and county ordinances.
The young man was caught and arrested for trespassing because he was unaware there were cameras monitoring the flagpole for just such an invasion, but he became a bit of a folk hero online for his convictions and willingness to take action. He paid a price with his arrest, but does he regret it? I don’t know. The courts finally forced the flag to be lowered in February of 2026.
There’s a twist to the story.
I know the young man’s family and watched him grow up. JD, as a boy, used to beat me in ping-pong down in his basement.
There aren’t any confederate flags flying in New England, though I did spot a giant wooden sign out in a cow pasture near Bean’s Corner, Maine, trumpeting the truthfulness of our current president. The two small flags on either side of the wooden sign were fluttering in the wind in tatters—I’ll include a photo in my social media post. Our country today could certainly use more citizens with the conviction and courage of young JD.