Dat’s Molly Tuttle from Palo Alto, of all places, playing at the Ossipee Valley Music Festival in South Hiram, Maine in 2022. Her whole family are bluegrass aficionados, and I believe at least one person on the stage with her is her brother. She went to school at Berklee in Boston, so I guess South Hiram’s not that far out a place to find yourself for a California bluegrass player.
People who’ve never been to Maine, and many that have, don’t understand Maine very well. They think it’s all guys with whales on their pants married to second wives with Pomeranians in their purses who live in Bar Harbor. It ain’t like that. Except for a thin strip along the coast, most of Maine is Alabama with snow. Bluegrass is close enough to country to get by out here. Because this ain’t no joke:
Joe and Nic’s Road Trip YewToob channel is a rara avis. They do the most useful thing you can find on the intertunnel. They go places, point the camera at what they’re looking at, tell you what they’re looking at, and report as much information as they can find about where they are. If the news media ever did this, they don’t do it now. Joe and Nic do.
They kind of specialize in going places others don’t, and for good reason. They favor abandoned places, and rundown places. They have the stones to go places like Gary Indiana and Detroit, and do not appear to be carrying sidearms, so they’re braver souls than me. They’re also brave enough to visit Belfast, Bangor, and Augusta, Maine, and tell the truth about them: i.e.: they’re pretty pleasant places to be.
It’s fun to hear them scratching their heads over crime stats in Belfast. They’re accustomed to crimes per thousand citizens, and Belfast has 47 crimes last year. Total. Welcome to Maine, kids.
We’re fairly familiar with Belfast, although it’s quite a ways away from our hovel in western Maine. Our children performed at the Belfast Harbor Fest one year. It was held in a giant circus tent in the park by the harbor.
Joe and Nic travel down the road to Bangor. Bangor’s a bigger town, and has a history of being a bit rough and tumble, all the way back to when it was lumber central for Maine exports. But it’s still a plenty safe place. The downtowns in these towns are mostly made up of handsome brick structures. They’re fascinated with the second best writer in Maine, who dwells there, but they’re from way out of town, so they’re forgiven. They mispronounce Orono, where the largest campus of UMaine is located (OR oh no). Our son attends UMaine, although it’s the campus in Augusta where he lays waste to the President’s List.
They mosey on down to Augusta to finish up, or Ogguster as we call it. It’s the state capital. We go there from time to time. We mostly press on down the road to Hallowell, which is an offbeat little strip of shops and restaurants. Ogguster has a handsome downtown, but truth be told, most of the burg is the usual gutbucket stripmall wonderland.
They visit the capitol building, which from the exterior looks like it belongs to a state with more people in it. When they get inside, they notice that it’s got a spare, no-nonsense Mainer vibe.
Joe and Nic sound like pleasant people. They should stay in Maine. But buy better books.
We don’t live in Boothbay Harbor. We don’t live anywhere near Boothbay Harbor. But every once in a while, when we’re feeling Huffy, we load up the chariot and go places and see things. We went to Boothbay Harbor this summer. We had to drive a long way, dead east, to get there.
Boothbay Harbor ain’t Boothbay. They’re two different burghs. More people live in Boothbay. That’s not to say a lot. Only about 3,000 people live in Boothbay, and about a thousand fewer live in Boothbay Harbor. Add them both together and our town is about the same size, and we live at the edge of nowhere. Our town is big if you go by the dotted lines, however. It looks more like a county on the map if you’re from a wee state like Rhode Island or something.
Of course those are the population numbers for the winter. In the summer, the population of Boothbay Harbor is Boothbay Harbor in the winter, plus all of Massachusetts and New York, with a smattering of flyover states, by the look of it. It’s nice in the summer and people go there.
It’s in Lincoln County. That’s Downeast, which you get to by going up and to the right on the map. Boothbay Harbor and thereabouts was big into shipbuilding, and fishing, but it’s mostly just a vacuum cleaner wand for tourist wallets now. The ocean is still there. I know. I checked:
Boothbay Harbor has the hahbah right through the middle of it, in a loop. They built a big pedestrian causeway across it. I was standing on it while taking this picture. They built little rest areas along it, with benches, and we sat and drank coffee and watched each other’s noses turn red from the cloudless sunshine.
Right in the middle of the pedestrian bridge across the runnel, there’s a private residence, man. Neato.
It’s perfectly maintained, and has a sign warning you that it belongs to someone so go drink your coffee somewhere else, so we did. I think I could just about stand to live in that house. But only because it’s about perfect. No other reason.
But I think I’d rather live in this one. It’s more than about perfect. There are little streets around the harbor, mostly circles that dip down and loop back up to higher ground. The streets were plenty quiet enough to ride bikes on, but a little hilly.
Head downtown, and they go all Greek on you. They were selling trinkets or tchotchkes or something in front of the library, and we stopped and sat in the shade for a little while. They have a nifty flying carpet statue out front. I imagine they’ll replace it with a statue of a tween girl surfing the internet when they get enough bronze. Libraries try to stay topical nowadays. That’s why there are no books in them anymore.
In the center of town, hard by the water, the tourists and their money part company. If you need stuff and junque, they got it.
We didn’t spend a lot of time in this part of town. It has a Potemkin village vibe. It’s a cartoon of the Maine seacoast. The real deal folks with whales on their pants and spinnakers in their forecastles live in Boothbay, and sail off private moorings and docks, in my experience.
A young woman came out of one of the shops to get a breath of fresh air and complimented my wife on her bike. Well, it technically was a compliment, but we translated it into a desire to watch that bike whenever we parked it.
If you look hard enough, you can find two Adirondack chairs in a quiet spot and eat your lunch. Then again, you can find that in my back yard, too. The bird bath is much smaller than the Atlantic, however, and the gulls don’t favor it quite so much.
If you’ve got 18 minutes or so, the time will be well spent.
E.B. White is known to most folks as the guy who wrote Charlotte’s Web. Ink-stained wretches know him as the White in Strunk and White, authors of the bible of recipes for sentences, The Elements of Style. I know him as an essayist about Maine, where he is unexcelled — so far.
He lived in Down East Maine. He knew and respected the men and women he describes in blasts of interest like this one. Unlike today’s writers, he doesn’t rely solely on describing objects to achieve verisimilitude. He tries to understand the motive force behind the populations, traditions, and the landscape he’s surveying. Others skim over an ocean of meaning without dipping into it. E.B. dropped his traps, and hauled the good stuff up, just like Eugene Eaton.
This video is all before my time, of course, but I’ve met plenty of stalwart people like Eugene when they were a lot older, and I was a lot younger. They were taciturn fellows. Chatty guys don’t stand in a wheelhouse alone for very long before they find a job elsewhere. The laconic Maine lobsterman was the real deal. Calvin Coolidge was a gadfly compared to them. E.B. doesn’t have the right accent, but he’s close. He has Maine stapled over New York City. Eugene’s is the real deal.
I’m always sort of in awe of people like Eugene. If you watch him pull on his oars when commuting out to his working boat, you can see how much force he’s putting on each stroke, with how little effort. He could do it all day and not get tired. He’d wear out an Olympic oarsman, if he could be bothered to race, which he couldn’t. He rolls his wrists perfectly as the oars leave the water and again as they enter it, never showing a splash of water, coming or going. There’s no wasted effort in his whole day. Plenty of effort, mind you, just none wasted. When he pulls alongside his working boat, he ships his right oar effortlessly without looking at it. It’s a small thing, but his life is made from such small things. Just stuff I can’t help but notice, because I’ve thrashed oars and banged into boats and lost oars overboard and wrenched oarlocks out of the gunwhales and sprayed water on everyone and everything within hand-grenade distance while doing these things. And I dare you not to get seasick with the boat rolling in that chop, next to a barrel of reeking bait, with the stink of the diesel exhaust. I couldn’t.
I’ve knocked together lobster traps like Eugene is using. They’re fun to make. No one uses them anymore. They’re all brutish steel cages, pre-made now. Something lost, something gained, I guess. I love Eugene’s no-nonsense clothing, too. It was from back when LL Bean made more than men’s pinstriped button-down shirts for WASP ladies to vacuum the house in.
Out on that ocean in a 34′ boat with nothing but a hinky compass and tide chart. They should have left Michael Collins at home, and brought Eugene along instead. He’d get them back from the moon with a hand on Apollo’s tiller and an astrology column from the Bangor Daily News. No Tang for me, fellows. I brought my lunch with me.
I’m reminded of the Breton Fisherman’s Prayer. A snippet of it was on JFK’s desk, a present from Hyman Rickover, who could order battleships around and all, but I doubt he could row as well as Eugene.
We had to import a guy from Scotland to make a decent lobster sandwich, apparently. The fellow knows his business. Both of them.
Maine has a love/hate relationship with lobsters. Lobstermen call them “bugs,” and many won’t eat them. They prefer to sell them, and eat hamburgers on the grill. Lobsters are their stock in trade, and you’re not supposed to get high on your own supply, dude. It’s the same in many walks of life, I assume. What’s a treat for others is the same old thing if you see it every day.
Like most traditional dishes that are considered delicacies, lobsters used to be poor person food. Back when New England was first settled, you could simply collect them from the shoreline. They were so cheap that in colonial times, they served them to prisoners every day, or at least until they rioted and demanded real food. But lobsters eventually got scarcer, and people began to associate them with upper crust folks, who were descended from the people who originally pestered the Indians away from the shoreline and kept all the bugs for themselves.
No one tell Gordon, but in Maine, lobster is almost always served as a lobster roll: diced up, overcooked lobster, buried in mayonnaise, and served on a flaccid hot dog roll. It’s usually accompanied with a plastic tub of runny cole slaw, in case you haven’t got enough mayonnaise in you yet. If Gordon finds out, he might disparage Maine, and I’d be forced to publish a recipe for haggis to fight back.
Tag: Maine
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A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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