See also: The following, in which devotees reveal how a place can become a religion.
BY PADGETT POWELL
Our cabin is on Loon Lake, which is called "pristine" in real estate ads. Cabins, and even outright houses, are called "camps" up here, a somewhat nostalgic touch in that many camps have central heating and Galvalume roof systems and three stories and mortgages larger than their owners' real homes back in Massachusetts. Maine is a place that is brimming with nostalgic touches, you might say, and nostalgic touches can ruin a place, of course, but somehow they do not ruin Maine. It is hard to kitsch up something called a bean-hole bean, for example.
Across our pristine lake you might see of a morning klieg lights. This might mean William Wegman is filming a movie or shooting with his giant Polaroid camera. He might be shouting odd words at his Weimaraners to get them to have a particular expression as they sit in a red boat or pose as detectives or psychotic nurses or fly fishermen. Or someone like the Gap might be photographing Bill Wegman wearing its clothes. Later Wegman and his friend Stan Bartash, a local forester, and I—and maybe my girls, who are 13 and 19—will be out in our boats, rowing about for trout and salmon. And Wegman will not look like Hitchcock directing his canine actors anymore, or be wearing Gap clothes; he'll just be fishing, like the small people.
That is the thing: no matter what happens here, the small people and the small things prevail. Maine can't be swamped by modernity, yet. Not up here, anyway, where it looks enough like Austria that the rogue psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich chose this place to build his house and his laboratory to remind himself of home. It's a museum now; you can go there to learn about ravens and mushrooms—my wife has become adept enough to harvest wild mushrooms for us—and the "orgone" boxes that inspired the Feds to hound him to death.
You can go to the town of Rangeley to see a good second-run movie at a small restored theater, have a Gifford's ice cream cone at the Pine Tree Frosty, and get a book at Books, Lines & Thinkers, a real bookstore (if they don't have what you want at the library). Down the road at First Farm, you can buy organic produce from one of the owners as it is being picked by the other.The offerings—strawberries, kale, special Russian garlic—make you think there just might be something to the fuss about organic.
All of this has drawn enough people that Rangeley has had to put a cop on a bicycle to give tickets for bad parking, but the town has not been run over by its success. Show people Mayberry today and they go nuts, properly. But Rangeley, a homey town with a real Main Street, and its lakes—pristine even with lights—are holding their ground for now.
PADGETT POWELL is the author of four novels and two collections of stories. He directs MFA@FLA, the writing program at the University of Florida.
BY DAVID HANDELMAN
By Christmastime each year I am already longingly anticipating the ensuing summer's Maine pilgrimage with my two girls, who are 7 and 10. But the visions dancing in my head aren't of tree-lined hills or Atlantic bluffs or even my beloved loon-friendly Lake Damariscotta. They're of food. While the Pine Tree State's cuisine may not be Michelin Guide-worthy, it exudes the down-home plainness that attracts so many of us from fancier, busier places.
My first taste of Maine chow was especially humdrum: the institutional thrice-daily squares served up by Kamp Kohut in Oxford, where I summered in the mid seventies. Though our bunk occasionally ventured off-kampus for Mario's Pizza or a milk shake at Goodwin's, I didn't eat true native fare until I returned as an adult.
Now, after 15 years of renting cottages on the Pemaquid Peninsula (a thankfully untouristed region just north of Boothbay Harbor), I am addicted to lobster slapped on fishermen's co-op picnic tables.(My faves: the Pemaquid Co-op, overlooking a fort and the sea; Round Pond, up the driveway from the Granite Hall Store, a standout ice cream stop; and Shaw's Lobster Wharf, with its views of New Harbor.) But what I really dream about is nestling with my daughters in a wooden booth at Moody's Diner. Perched oasislike atop a hill on Route 1 in Waldoboro, Moody's opened in 1927 and, despite a few expansions and the addition of a gift shop, still glows with more than its enticing orange neon. Coffee has gone from a nickel to 75 cents, but the booths are stiff-backed, the tabletops Formica, the waitresses locally grown (not so long ago, one was named the Blueberry Queen at the Union Fair), and the menu packed with the kind of meat-loafy comfort food that cities replicate ironically.
Though we enjoy the chowder, burgers, fish- and-chips, and everything else en route, our final destination is the pie. Strawberry-rhubarb, blueberry, or the one-of-a-kind walnut cream, a wondrously puddingish cousin of pecan—you can't go wrong. Top it with vanilla ice cream and you'll be back for more. I go two or three times a week.
A few years ago when I temporarily relocated from New York City to Los Angeles, I went to Dodger Stadium for a baseball game and was faced with a sartorial dilemma: Should I put on my Mets cap and risk scorn, or go native and buy a Dodgers cap? I solved the problem by wearing my green cap with the bright orange Moody's logo—my true colors.
DAVID HANDELMAN, a former staff writer for The West Wing, is the writer for The Jane Pauley Show. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, and Rolling Stone.
BY ELIZA MINOT
Of all the places I've ever been, of all the terrains and landscapes I've ever seen, it's on the island of North Haven amid the dark blue summer water of the Penobscot Bay that my soul rises up to meet myself, where I am home. Nine miles long and three miles at its widest, North Haven is a place full of broad things meeting: The oceanjoins the sky at the horizon in a long blue line. The silhouettes of the spruce trees huddled on the islands (there are more than 200 in this bay) pierce the sky like bouquets of the arrowheads that can be found along these coasts. Gold-green fields swoop toward the water's edge.
Every summer of my life, I've headed to North Haven to the house that my grandparents bought in the 1940's. It's an old warehouse, converted into a boardinghouse by the previous owners. Built on the wharf, next to the Casino Yacht Club, it's stilted safely above the water and the dramatic 10-foot tides. My family is big—I have six siblings, and many of us now have more than one kid; I myself have a son who's four, a daughter who's two, and another daughter born last August. With our parents dead and our main home long ago sold, our house and North Haven itself are like a shrine to our childhoods, our family, our parents, and our lives.
Each of us and our clans make the annual visit—after much deliberation about who's able to go when. We pack into the house, every room bunked up, cherishing the bustle of being together under the same roof. Thirteen children ranging in age from a few months to 15 yearsbumble about, the toddlers giving you heart attacks as they teeter next to a partially open window with the water below, the older kids taking off for hours on their bikes to buy penny candy and splash at a swimming hole.
North Haven is separated from the larger neighboring Vinalhaven by a lovely, narrow strait, the Fox Island Thoroughfare, upon which lies North Haven's modest town: there'sa fantastic community center, a marina, two restaurants, a few galleries, a post office, a library, and the Legion Hall. The off-season population here is about 350. A century ago, Boston Brahmin families began to frequent the island in summer. Now, the warm-weather population swells to more than 1,200, with people coming from Boston, New York, Portland, and as far away as Hawaii. Some families stay for the entire season, some for part of a month (August's Community Days are rich with parades, sailing races, and an art show), some for a week, while day-trippers take the ferry over to do some hiking and biking.
My family's days are largely spent in boats, buzzing in outboards to nearby islands with nothing built on them: Burnt Island, with its screaming ospreys, or Calderwood, with its knobbed green hill. Or we go to tidal Mill River, actually part of Vinalhaven, where the water's warmer. Once there, we sit together like seagulls, sifting through the rocks at our feet for sea glass and carved flint as we eat our picnic lunch. But most of the time is spent looking out, staring at the wide blue bay, letting the summer magic of it penetrate like a giant tranquilizer.
The wondrousness of childhood never leaves this place. It's in the spray that hits your face as you sway over waves. It's in the fog that socks you in for a day or two, completely obscuring the end of a dock. It's in the textures underfoot (barefoot): the weathered planks of floats and wharves, the soft tar baked in the sun on Main Street, the smooth, round stones of volcanic Brimstone Island, the crushed-shell beaches of Merchant's Row. It's in the freezing dunks, the tidal rivers and coves, the stillness of the abandoned granite quarries on Vinalhaven filled with fresh rainwater for perfect swims. It's watching the crabs scuttle under rocks, the wind feather across the water like a school of fish, the sea shimmer ecstatic with light as the sun starts to go down over the Camden hills. It's seeing the many islands dappling the bay like clouds that have been set down on the water from the sky, waiting to be explored.
ELIZA MINOT is the author of the novel The Tiny One. Her second novel, The Brambles, will be published in early 2006 by Knopf.
