THE FORSYTHIA has already died and blown away in Central Park and the clusters of bloom on the lilac bushes in the suburbs are soon to be a drooping fade. But when you go up to Maine in May the first flowerings are reluctant, not quite ready, not to be hurried. The trees are not yet leafy, not at all. Houses never seen in the summer shadow of tree branches are visible just back from the road even in late spring.
The splendor of the region always retains a pristine frugality in its messages, a puritanical remnant in its pleasures. Like the blossoms, you are reminded that you can wait—and also you can do without. A lonesome pine, country music drift in the air, long-lost sentiments. He’ll never return from the sea (the Merchant Marine) and the blue-eyed girl has gone to the office desks of Connecticut, never to look back.
Maine took me by surprise from the first and still, after three decades of summers, it takes me by surprise. I never expected to have knowledge of this most northeasterly part of our country. Perhaps the true Maine persons, those families on the soil for over a hundred years, will dispute the claims to special acquaintance made by a mere summer resident, even if such turns up year after year. Throughout New England there is a good deal of harmless intensity about length of tenure.
When I look out my window in the little Maine coastal village of Castine, what I see is altogether different from the landscape of my youth and my growing up. I was born in Lexington, Kentucky, a beautiful town, proud to be the center of “the bluegrass country.” It is rolling land, gentle and moderate, and yet suitable to the production of rather extreme luxuries or vices: horses, bourbon whiskey, and tobacco. Lexington was, or so we believed, the most hospitable and refined setting the state had to offer.
By those steps one takes, the paths that mysteriously open up to become life history or biography, I became bound to New York and parts of Massachusetts and then, quite without preparation or planning, on to Maine, or up to Maine, or even down to Maine, as they might express it.
It is a summer long ago and there you are on a visit to a relation, this one a Washington, D.C., lady who had for many decades made her way from the humid national shrines to the breezes and fogs of Maine. She accomplished this with great stateliness and purposefulness, this passage to the “summer place,” in no way as noticeably “summery” as the rest of the country. She came early on by way of the coastal steamers and when they, so to speak, sank like some lumbering victim of practical disrespect, she traveled by Pullman car from Washington to the city of Bangor, a mere stopping place since summer people are on their way to sea and bay and lake—to water.
Water: that is the Maine essence. The dock, the pier, the tides, the coves, the picnic islands within sight. Having grown up inland, I had felt no cause to lament either shore or mountaintop. Often I think the addition of these spectacles is a spiritual gain and also a burden, since “on the water” can become an obsession.
I speak of Maine in the summer and perhaps that is not out of line since the “Pine Tree State” also bears “Vacationland” on its license plates. This may seem a great peculiarity to those accustomed to sandy beaches, deep suntans, and g-string bathing costumes. And I speak mostly of “summer people” as a courtesy earned by those who know the Maine winters. Many summer people have come to Maine as an inheritance. Their grandparents built or bought a large shingle “cottage” somewhere near the water and the generations continued decade after decade since up to Maine is where they have gone and where they go once again. Maine ordinarily is not chosen by oneself in adult life, as one would choose to take a house on Long Island, in Connecticut, or on the islands of Massachusetts. That is, choose to go where others like oneself may be found, perhaps those you meet quite often all year long. For me too, Maine came in a cross-stitch route by inheritance.
The strangeness of Maine is that it is not near anything, unless it can be thought reasonably near Boston, some hundreds of miles to the south. Difficulty inhabits Maine like the great spruce trees. It is a quality in itself, promising and delivering a sort of fetishistic determination upon the management of isolation, cold water, long journeys, boat maintenance, hauls by ferry or scow if the decorative, the fashionable, the useful, and the comfortable are felt to be necessary.
For the rich with a puritanical inclination it was the habit long ago to buy a Maine island or, later, to trek to an island and there to make a prodigious effort, with a nod to the Northeast plainness of accommodation, to establish a version of the grand style. Thus the large cottages at Dark Harbor and North Haven, many of them attached to the names of great American fortunes. There one can see, in a willful translation, the chintzes spread about in the style of the reigning New York decorators. In the driveways and gardens, large tubs of agapanthus, ruffled lilies of a salmon hue quite putting in the shade the yellow clumps of the local, hardy day lily—at least the fuchsia, lusher and plumper than usual in their baskets, seem happy in the mist so freely offered. Where you can take little for granted beyond the gorgeousness of the storm-tossed landscape, efforts of the will perhaps give the summer people a pleasant recollection of the old frontier virtues.
“This world is more beautiful than convenient,” Thoreau wrote about New England. In Maine the weather is not convenient, the water is not convenient, the isolation is not convenient. Indeed the state stands at the utmost end of inconvenience. It was covered by the continental glacier during the Ice Age and its hardscrabble soil, its 1,600 lakes, its “embayed” coastline remain as souvenirs. And a certain arctic forecasting seems often to mingle with the breeze-laden heat of summer. In the great spruces the memory of winters past and the promise of winters to come hang like dark birds in the branches. As the wind prompts the sailboats in the bay, it is not a masochistic shudder to wonder if the house will in January be swept away by the winter tides or uprooted by the winds or simply frozen to death and eaten to sustain the crows and gulls.
As a people we appear to be ready to decline even a gentle descent of the winter season. You might say the entire country has just about had it with storm windows, the shovel and the snow plow, the laboriously or expensively gained stack of wood logs. These impositions of nature are a grievous strain on the American soul, now pulsing with a sort of heated-up genetic strain. The tropical and the semi-tropical, or better a moderate, evanescent changing of the seasons, have become a demand dictated by our sense of suitability and natural right. Drafty houses bring to mind nothing except the sane example of migrating birds resolute in their escape from winter.
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Maine, of course, cannot escape winter and so the conversation in the summer solstice often turns to wrapped pipes, thrifty stoves, and the dreamy victories of insulation. Sometimes you can imagine the glare of snow in the sunshine, imagine the pool on the back shore impatient for the scars of ice skates, the hill ready for the child’s sled. The eternal return, the relentless course of sun are part of “vacationland”—along with the high tide and low tide, gale warnings, deer crossings. Weather is the protagonist of the drama.
Maine is humbling to ambition and therefore hospitable to thrift and endurance. It is a poor state with a great number of roadside houses and worn-out farms hopelessly decorated with for-sale signs. The woods, the forest, the wilderness. True they are not neighbors to the coast and yet, looking across the bay in a mist, water and tree come together in a large, black shadow telling of things ancient and careless of man. The patient, meditating heron outside the window at dawn, the shivering birch—no, one never becomes cozily familiar with this world. Depending upon the light, each glance about you is a discovery and what you are pleased to call home has a peculiar visual unsteadiness. An interesting melancholy, quite pleasing, drifts in the air. Unexplored acres, vast tracts, live in the memory, even amidst an unfortunately purchased plastic flamingo stalking the yards here and there. And always the stillness astonishes as you drive over the back roads on the way to Route 1 or Route 95. The crab and the lobster, stalk-eyed, decapod crustaceans—what are they except the watery kin of the tough caribou and moose?
The Maine people, the Maine character, or characters? It is prudent to practice resistance here since the Maine person enters published descriptions in the gross, so to speak. He and she come out of a box labeled THE MAINE NATIVE. Literary folk collect the stories, search for the orthographic equivalent of the accent—and so on. He is, the Maine person in that now frozen mold, the friend of the amateur writer, just as the tilting, scrappy sheds on the dock, the cove with its lonely sailboat, the plain white houses, and distant church steeple are the friends of the amateur painter. The human and natural scenery, expressing some kind of genuine difference, long ago took on a difference altogether predictable. What a chore it must have been for the imagination of Robert Frost and John Marin to rescue from cliché their hired hands and light little boats tossing in the waves.
Still, one observes the often-observed crankiness and balky independence that confirm the legend. A certain colonial aspect prevails between the summer people and the year-round native; a late colonialism, perhaps, filled with uncertain advances and quick retreats. The beloved carpenter and the agreeably puzzled plumber will not quite spring to the demand, that hailstorm of demand in the summer months. Or so it seems. And in the end the colonials rail at bills that would occasion relief in the city.
No matter, there is something boldly impractical in the Maine economy, in the measured pace, as well as in the confident and elegant persevering skills of so many. In this economy, useful things abruptly, almost arrogantly, disappear from the village. Gone in the last two years are two garages with mechanics. One went and then the other, more or less except for gasoline; and as for the hole left, well, you might scratch your head like an old Russian peasant and ponder the whim of history.
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The Northeast with its old battlefields has a pride of the drowsiest kind, like the nodding head of the antiquarian in the library. Fife and drum, pilgrim dress, the sweetest little straggle down Main Street on the Fourth of July.
My little village of Castine on the Penobscot Bay has a history worthy of the Polish Corridor. It has been held by five nations: the French, the English, the Dutch, the Indians, and ourselves. Gray wooden markers, lettered in blue, point out the old forts and the canal built by the British. During the Bicentennial, the entire nation was made aware that the Revolutionary expedition under the command of Commodore Saltonstall and General Lovell shamefully dozed over their cups while in the harbor and were ignominiously surprised by the British rolling down from Fort George. It was all over there, next to the golf club.
The town takes its name from the French occupation and from the Baron de Castin, a freewheeling character who may or may not have been worthy of memory. This ambitious explorer found life on the Penobscot Bay to his liking. He took as his bride the daughter of an Indian chief and thus there remains a little lane with the name of Madockawando. Everywhere in the state of Maine the crossing signs tell of far-flung voyages: China and South China, Sorrento, Corea (sic), Poland Spring, and Smyrna. Perhaps a kind of internationalism lies buried in the rocks up by the old lighthouse, but on the Castine streets, in the graveyards, on the mailboxes around the county the persistence of local names such as Perkins, Bowden, and Wardwell assures the Anglo-Saxon primacy of tenure. For the state as a whole, the resonance of Indian times outshines all interlopers: Passamaquoddy, the Allagash and Musquash Lakes, Mount Katahdin, Pemaquid, Orono, Abenaki, Kennebec.
Maine is designated a New England state and so it is when you smoothly pass over the New Hampshire line into the splendid, reassuring city of Portland. Southern Maine seems to belong to its sister states, but as you go north or inland you begin to feel you are in a region quite solitary, one that is a part of New England only by convenience.
Rock-bed America it is, yes, yes. And such an abundance of flags about, large ones swaying on their staff” and small ones from the dime store in the windows or over the doors of the skinniest little shack, the dwelling place of so many. When you imagine Maine, apart from the southern section, as in some inchoate way a separate country, an old one, it does not appear old as Rome is old with its buried layers of civilization. It comes upon you old as the forest, uncharted, just being there.
Even the forest itself is peculiar, as Thoreau noted. He was not reminded in his travels to the Maine woods of “our” Massachusetts, where “the wilderness you are threading is, after all, some villager’s wood-lot, some widow’s thirds, from which her ancestors have sledded fuel for generations, minutely described in some old deed. . . .” The Maine forest was just the forest, not tilled and spaced-out, handed-down acres, claimed by some weed-choked bounding marker.
There are fine houses everywhere in Maine. Every town thoroughfare has a number of them and the fields are dominated here and there by large, square structures painted white, topped by their chimneys, often four of them, and even in decay promising spacious rooms. And there are inhabited homes of such smallness and lack you might be in another country, the sparsely peopled Scandinavia perhaps. The poverty stands fronting the road or placed down a ragged path. Hardship, the Depression, a reminder of deprivation and also of modesty and patience, and a sort of huddling domestic chill. Poor soil, short growing season, not much to work with. These conditions create in the spirit a thoughtful contradiction between lassitude and extraordinary exertion in the management of a profound absence of accommodation.
The brutal toil of the fisherman, the zest of the hunter, each a fierce adaptation to the forest and the sea. And then the nights, the darkness. Darkness comes down early in the winter, as if by fatigue. The arrival of the morning sun or merely the morning light itself is the joy of every season. If one would treasure Maine, it is well to forget about the evening except for the full moon shining on a high tide or the theatrical surprise of the yellow, red, and violet northern lights in August. For the rest, near the shore the stars are sketchy, shy, and fleeting. A deep green, a startling green, is the sensation of Maine and for that one needs the first and last light of day.
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Thinking of modesty, patience, and rural poverty does not prepare the mind for Mount Desert Island, with its dramatic Mount Cadillac, its coves, ponds, its thundering spots with waves rising to forty feet. And certainly it does not prepare for the spectacular settlements of wealth, the presence of Rockefeller, Ford, and Astor in Northeast Harbor and Seal Harbor.
But Maine is Maine and even Mount Desert is not quite a northerly Newport. There are “palpable piles,” as Henry James called the outsize and, to him, vulgar mansions of Newport; yet the Maine landscape casts upon a like ambition a sort of pleasant fog of discretion that reduces the grandeur, if not in intention, at least in function. There is little of the fast, the thrilling, and the glamorously outgoing. Too great a chill in the air for practical ostentation. The sailing vessels at the piers are splendid, but they do not give forth the hope of a riotous excursion. The puritanical tides have their way.
Last summer I saw a fine mansion outside the fashionable town of Camden on the Penobscot Bay, a bit to the south of Castine. The mansion provoked thought, if not for itself alone, but for many others one has seen on islands and towns in the “rich” pockets of Maine summer life. A mansion with a determined bravado that would not be scorned in Palm Beach, possibly constructed by an owner bearing the name of a renowned American invention or a surviving strike in faraway lucky fields. Sometimes the name recalls the flash of interesting divorces in the city tabloids, the flare of deviations, the auctions of loot long dusty in the stone palaces on Fifth Avenue.
Some bygone wish had created the Maine summer castles with their fine long windows coming down to the imaginatively divided spaces of the terrace. Delicate exterior decorations, Art Nouveau iron garden furniture, curling and swirling in a pattern. One I remember sat high on its site and looking out to the bay with a fond, now haunted, serenity.
In my memory I see the long stone wall at the shore giving way, the planks of the pier rotting here and there, the tricycle of the caretaker’s daughter overturned in front of the timbered garage. A place with the sharp, abandoned charm of the grand in a wistful neglect. To me the message reads: They don’t come up anymore. They? The generational promise unhonored. And one can imagine the bewilderment of new mates without memories and most definitely with ideas for a reasonable substitution of the South of France or perhaps Martha’s Vineyard or Southampton. How easy to hear the ring of the pertinent and unanswerable question about the old family estate in Maine: What do you do once you’re up there?
Summer in Maine. The gull and the cormorant, the sudden vision of the skull of a seal coming up for air, the unforeseen treachery of the afternoon’s sail, the osprey’s nest. The tracks of the gray wolf last seen in Blue Hill in 1930, the unpredictable views from the bay, sometimes Japanese in the outlines of the islands and the opposite shore, the fading red of the boathouse at the end of the field of a saltwater farm.
Main Street in Castine gently slides down past the fine clapboard houses, past the post office and the inns and the unaggressive shops, slides down to the water, the public dock, the harbor restaurant. A handsome place this is, the natives say. Yes, it is an endowment of nature and on a human scale altogether reticent, benign, and courteous. Perhaps it is not to everyone’s taste. And, true, there is nothing much happening hereabouts, although the first vision casts upon many a powerful longing for some bit of the beguiling landscape. And then the car moves on, leaving behind the old settlement on its point, with its odd locationary divisions, such as “off the neck” and “up at the head.”
Yet, the shore village remains, static no doubt, but a gift of immaculate retrospection. The reflections of its tones, long outlasting the summer months, are a strange, even mystifying, baggage for the mind packing up for a return to the city.
1986