It's what you get when you don't cross enough time zones for real jet lag, but still fly too far, too fast to remember where you are without a nagging feeling that you should be somewhere else - or wish you were.

It's like a double-exposure snapshot in your mind.

In the first photo, I'm in the deep woods of Maine, pulling glistening metallic-green bass out of a cobalt-blue, sun-sparkled river while a real bald eagle soars in a cloudless sky. In the second picture that steps all over the first one, I'm driving to work down a river of concrete, just another fish in a school, waiting to be reeled up to the 19th floor with a paycheck hook in my mouth.

I have Delta Disorientation. Comair Confusion.

Bangor at 5 a.m. Downtown Cincinnati by 7:30, and I could still almost taste the woodsy venison and fried "bayuh" we had for lunch on a riverbank.

That's right, "bayuh." It's a big hairy critter with large teeth and claws, like the ones that terrorized Goldilocks - aka "Yogi," "Booboo" and "Sugar."

It tasted like - well, not like chicken. More like a piece of Daniel Boone's boots, marinated in weird. Wild black bayuh meat from Maine has the faint scent and flavor of some deep-woods mystery that makes dogs howl and horses roll their eyes back in their heads.

"That's why bayuh is sacred to the Indians," our fishing guide John Reynolds told us. "They didn't want to eat it eathuh."

Mainers (don't call them Mainiacs, especially if they are carrying large bayuh-skinning knives) put extra vowels and "ahhs'' in their words, like they are talking around a tongue-depressor in a doctor's office. Think "Mayor Quimby" from the Simpsons, then dial the lobstuh chawdah up a few notches.

"Paahk the cayuh ovah theyuh" means - well, I'm still wondering.

Here's something else you won't find in the brochures:

A large smallmouth bass is not an oxymoron like "jumbo shrimp," "poor Republican" and "honest Democrat." They jump and fight a lure like a dog killing a snake, or maybe like an angry bayuh grabbing a guy from Ohio who ate his brother ...

But then the phone rings and I'm back in my office again. Someone is calling to talk about Kerry and Bush and the prosecutor and the Bengals and ...

I just don't cayuh.

My mind starts wandering back to the top of Penobscot Mountain in Acadia, with a 360-degree view of forever - oceans and islands and white-laced bays where the deep Atlantic blue is crashing on granite rocks the size of parking ramps, and my dogs are barking in my hiking boots like the whole ASPCA kennel, but every step up the steep mountainside is another calendar picture for the eyes.

In the office, e-mail beeps at me, but the jet nag flies me back to dawn in the woods, where wraiths of mist rise gently over a lake and loons speak in the language of shadows.

Or I'm back on top of a mountain, trash talking with a hiker wearing a Kerry button. At 1,194 feet, we finally rise above the partisan rabies that made some bonehead try to twist the head off a heckler at a Kerry rally in Cincinnati.

Yeah, yeah, there's an election crashing through the woods like a wounded moose. But theyuhs lobstuhs to crack, wild blueberries to pick and endless horizons of God's creation as beautiful as a soaring eagle.

America looks fine from a mountaintop in Maine. Now I know why they stretch every word to pack in another "ahhh.''

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E-mail pbronson@enquirer.com or call 768-8301.