In Stephen King’s IT (1986), each of Losers has their own horrifying encounter with the entity that stalks Derry, forced to endure and survive this fear alone. When they find one another and are able to share their stories, find understanding in the faces of their friends, and share the burden of this terror among themselves, there is an overwhelming sense of relief, hope where there was previously only despair. 

While many of the Losers are eager to share their stories (despite their initial fear of not being believed, which quickly fades as each tells what they have seen), Stan Uris is the most reluctant to talk about what happened to him, recognizing that by saying it aloud, by sharing it with others, the experience—and the danger he only narrowly escaped—will become more real. Stan is an avid bird watcher and when his father calls to tell him of a reported cardinal sighting in Memorial Park next to the Standpipe, he’s skeptical but excited to grab his bird book, head down, and see what he can see for himself. Stan is watching the park’s birdbath through his binoculars as the sky darkens around him when he hears “a hollow rolling boom!” (427, emphasis original). A bit of tentative exploration reveals that the door of the Standpipe—always locked following a fatal accident—has opened. Stan is unable to resist the urge to check it out and as he steps inside, he hears first the faint strains of calliope music and then, underneath this cheerful tune, the watery, squishing footsteps of dead children descending the stairs toward him, catching a glimpse of something “slumped and somehow unnatural” (430) before the door slams closed behind him, leaving him trapped in the darkness with these monstrosities. His bird book becomes a magical talisman of sorts and Stan grips it tightly, shouting bird names as an affirmation of life and hope, a small light in the darkness that is amplified by his childlike belief and allows him to escape with his life.

Stan is of course badly frightened by his encounter with the dead boys in the Standpipe, but even more terrifying to his well-ordered mind is that this experience demands that he rethink the way he believes the world works, that he must admit that rationality and order do not always hold true. Stan struggles to articulate this dissonance to the rest of the Losers in the aftermath of his story and King writes that Stan “wanted to tell them that there were worse things than being frightened … He wanted to tell them that those dead boys who had lurched and shambled their way down the spiral staircase had done something worse than frighten him; they had offended him” (436, emphasis original). Stan can live with fear, but having his understanding of the world so fundamentally offended nearly does him in. 

In the park near the Thomas Hill Standpipe in Bangor, there is just such a bench and just such a birdbath. The park and the Standpipe were one of the stops on the SK Tours route, and the one that I have no doubt will stay with me always. This is an experience that I am still honestly working to process, to wrap my mind and my heart around the enormity of that spot and that moment. Out of all of my Maine travel stops, this was the place where for me, the real world, the fictional world, and the significance of these intersections was the most profound. The Standpipe and the park are a clear inspiration for Stan’s experience in IT, a recognizable place that a reader or traveler can point to and say “this is the spot.” King saw it, imagined it, and transformed it into Stan’s (and many a reader’s) nightmare. There are a lot of places around Bangor and other parts of Maine where much the same is true: we can read it, see it, feel that jolt of familiarity and recognition, see those spots of overlap where the real world and King’s imaginary ones intersect. 

But this particular bench in this particular park is also where King often sat, writing the book that would become IT in the exact place where his fictional terrors would come to life. This place is grounded in Bangor, in King as author, in that act of creation and storytelling. But it is also grounded in that fictional world itself, the territory of Derry, of Stan and his fellow Losers, of the fear and the friendships at the heart of IT. To draw on King’s larger parlance, it feels a bit like a thinny, one of those places where the boundaries between worlds is permeable, where it just might be possible to slip from one into another. And if you sit still enough and listen hard enough, you just might hear the opening boom of that locked door, the quiet and far-away notes of the calliope inviting you into the darkness. In this overlapping of worlds, this synthesis of fiction and reality, anything seems possible. 

Maybe it’s just a bench, a handy place to sit and rest your legs, particularly if you’ve made the trek up the hill that leads to the Standpipe. But it’s also a reminder of the power of story, the intersections of the real and fictional, the liminal spaces between the two where those distinctions become blurry, the worlds that authors can create with words alone. It is mundane and it is magical. It is real and it is transcendent. 

As I looked at this place and as I sat on this bench, I felt all of this. I saw both the beautiful park in front of me and Stan’s story unfolding. I sat in King’s shadow and followed in Stan’s footsteps. I’m not sure I’ve absorbed the entirety of this moment even now, weeks later, but I also know that I’ll never stop working at it, returning to this memory, reflecting on this experience and the connections it drew together for me. 

I sat on a bench. And it changed my life.

[Page numbers are from the 2017 film tie-in edition of IT]