The state of Maine has lately been a mainstay of mine: a pillar of my thoughts and feelings, an object of my daydreams. And I use the word “mainstay” in a figurative sense, though since we are talking about Maine, for me mainly its nautical coast, the literal “mainstay” also works.
During my late reveries I’ve often asked myself: How on earth did I spend the first 20 years of my life in New England – a Connecticut Yankee, a “nutmegger” – yet never go to Maine? A couple years later I traveled by car 13,000 miles around this country. Only now, at age 60, have I finally realized the glory of Maine.
My wife, who grew up in New Jersey, had in her girlhood vacationed several times in Maine, and loved it. Over the years, she’s shared with me and our four daughters some sweet memories: swimming and canoeing on China Lake, driving from her family’s inland rented cabin to the coast for seafood (lobster, “steamers”), feeling always an unhurried vibe. So our interest over the years had been piqued, but it is, after all, a long way from where we’ve been living over 30 years, North Carolina.
Last summer, however, we finally as a family committed to the journey. Our oldest daughter Sophie traveled there first with a friend, and reported back to us how much she loved the place (“I want to move here!”). She stayed along the coast, doing reconnaissance for the rest of us who’d be going there a few weeks later.
When that time came, my wife and I and our three younger daughters set out. After a few days first in Boston (my beloved Red Sox!), we drove a couple more hours up the interstate. Then looming into view, I saw the first highway signs that we were approaching the border, and then we got there: We were in Maine.
Things looked wilder, earthier, much less cultivated and manicured compared to my mind’s-eye scenes of the countryside in my Connecticut youth. On either side of the highway were beautiful wetlands, clean and green water-grasses growing in creeks and ponds. One thing I knew I’d never see here was street names and statues and buildings commemorating the greatest traitors this country has ever known, people like Stonewall Jackson and Nathan Forrest and Robert E. Lee. No, in this place would be actual heroes, commemorations for people like the hero of Little Round Top at Gettysburg, Maine’s own Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.
Yes, it felt like home. Over and over I thought, “My roots are here.” And after the cancerous Trump presidency, the national trauma of George Floyd and its myriad marches (we got pepper-sprayed), the insanity of the Jan. 6 insurrection, etc., I started to feel a powerful desire to reconnect deeply with those roots. I owe this result to my wife, for it wasn’t just vacation memories of her youth but also her latest push (with a strong assist from Sophie) that put me on this mind-altering path.
And the people here, those Mainers (and New England Yankees in general): no-nonsense and straight-talking and independent-minded. It was something all these years I’d been missing, yet only occasionally and vaguely thought of. On a map of the 2022 election results, I saw that New England is still a solid blue bloc.
And the places we saw, very nautical, with harbor boats galore: Freeport, headquarters of L.L. Bean; Bath, with its grand old houses; Wiscasset; Damariscotta; Rockland and Rockport; gorgeous Camden, and through fishing villages and lobstering locales until, finally, the seaside jewel that is Acadia National Park.
Our rental house, a cottage, was in tiny Tenants Harbor, near where our newest intellectual hero lives, historian Heather Cox Richardson, author of the popular Substack newsletter, Letters from an American. Often she’ll end a week of her daily letters with a glowing photo of lobster boats on a bay at dawn, or a photo reminiscent of, say, Sarah Orne Jewett’s classic Maine novel, “The Country of the Pointed Firs.” (Tenants Harbor is also where you’ll find the “Forrest Gump” lighthouse: In that movie, Forrest ends his run across the country by running right up to the Marshall Point Lighthouse.)
Since our trip last summer, back in North Carolina I’ve been devouring issues of Yankee Magazine and episodes of the public TV show “Weekends with Yankee,” the latter a spinoff of the former and both full of great information about all six New England states. And both have inspired me to start baking: from their recipes I’ve made several regional desserts, including Maine blueberry scones and potato doughnuts (devoured these, too).
What is this mysterious thing where you sometimes visit a place for the first time, and it instantly feels like home? I think it might be caused in part by things in your personal physiology, something at the level of atoms and molecules in your brain and bloodstream, just like sometimes when you first hear a band or piece of music and instantly love it. Sophie grew up in North Carolina and has spent her whole life there, yet the postcard she sent us from her reconnaissance: “I want to move here!” sounds like the work of those bloodstream molecules. I at least knew New England, so I had some mental and emotional basis. But what of her intense reaction and connection? I felt that same way 35 years ago when I first visited New Mexico. And now, so it has been with me and Maine.
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