The late Charles Kuralt, a frequent visitor to the Boothbay region, once referred to Maine as a place where it’s possible to become so relaxed that your self-winding watch stops working.

Aside from the fact that any reference to self-winding watches these days is likely to draw a blank stare, it’s easy to see what he meant.

Many generations of summer folks have, in fact, trekked to Maine to do exactly this sort of “unwinding.” The old timers even have a name for them. Seasonal visitors seeking relief from life in the fast lane were traditionally referred too as “rusticators.” According to my dictionary to rusticate is to “go to, live in, or spend time in the country.” In case you haven’t glanced up from your iPhone recently you may have forgotten that a lot of Maine still qualifies as “the country.”

I was actually thinking about rusticators the other day while idling in a line of traffic waiting for the gal in the lime green vest to rotate her official traffic paddle from “stop” to “slow” and wave me on through a four-block section of Portland’s Washington Avenue currently undergoing refurbishment.

I never mind a few extra minutes of drive time in my old roadster.

With the top down, the sun on my face and the aroma of warm asphalt in my nostrils, my thoughts naturally drifted toward the topic of summer traffic.

My ruminations no doubt sprung from the fact that I’m a sucker for irony. And there’s plenty of irony in any story featuring throngs of urban escapees jammed into the family Prius, heading north in search of inner tranquility only to discover, just beyond the Welcome to Maine sign, several cement barricades flanked by flashing yellow lights with digital messages advising; “Caution! Road Construction Ahead! Next Four Months!”

Welcome to Maine: Life in the Slow Lane.

It’s no great secret that Maine’s highways are always being repaired at the most inconvenient possible time, right in the middle of tourist season. What? You thought maybe we’d be doing this in January?

No, the real head scratcher is that with mile after mile of Route 1, plus dozens of other roads from Kittery to Fort Kent under construction, legions of Maine-bound, hypertensive, serenity-seekers paradoxically find themselves stuck in a situation where there’s no rational alternative other than to relax. Though they rarely figure that out until they’ve exhausted all other options.

Even those of us with native status who’ve been to this dance often enough to know better, occasionally succumb to the urge to pass some lurching, lumbering motorhome with out-of-state plates only to find ourselves, an hour and a half later, just a couple of car lengths and maybe three seconds ahead of that same vehicle when we finally pull off Route 1 into the Moody’s Diner parking lot.

Native or neophyte, we all eventually arrive at the same conclusion: no amount of horn honking, hollering or digit waving is going to push this particular river along any more quickly than it’s inclined to move anyway.

The good news, grasshopper, is that once you’ve accepted this Zen-like worldview, the other views you encounter along Maine’s scenic roads might inspire some surprising insights.

Let’s face it, when forward motion is in the 10-15 mph range you have a lot more time to notice details than you would rushing along the same stretch of blacktop at 55 or 6, which leads to such observations as …

“Hey honey, have you ever noticed that none of those worm diggers out on the clam flats in Cod Cove seem to be wearing a belt?”

And let's not forget the road crew workers themselves. With their picks, shovels, pneumatic jack hammers and massive earth moving equipment they put on quite a show all by themselves.  

I was reminded of this a few years back when my wife and I visited England and took in an exhibit of rare antiquities at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

The show featured a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to view the actual personal sketchbooks of iconic renaissance visionary Leonardo da Vinci.

One sketch in particular caught my eye. It was a drawing of several workmen repairing a section of a 15th century Florentine piazza. Something about the scene seemed eerily familiar but it took me a while to figure out exactly what it was.

Then it hit me! Leonardo had drawn five laborers, each holding a shovel. But only one of them was actually working. The others were leaning intently on their own shovels while watching that first man dig a hole. Just like out on Route 1!