Category Archives: Maine places

Rangeley days, now far away

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Every summer, the town takes us by surprise.  We crest the hill on Route 4, catch our first view of the lake, and descend into an unlikely enclave of commerce:  the Pine Tree Frosty, the video store, the Laundromat, the hulking building of the Rangeley Inn.  Who would expect to find expect this vibrant lakeside village deep in the western Maine mountains?

Should we go to the equator, or the North Pole?

We’ve been coming to Rangeley for ten years now, for a week or so each summer, and the drive through town always generates the same kind of anticipation.  We feel as if we are returning home and can’t wait to get there.

As we drive down Main Street, we check the storefronts to see what’s changed.  Three years ago, Rangeley lost the pharmacy. Before that, the hardware store and soda fountain. Several restaurants have come and gone, but look, the bookstore’s still going, the movie theater is showing Spiderman.  Nancy’s Gifts has closed, but the parking lot of the Alpine Shop is full. The library has expanded its hours.  The new Moose Alley bowling alley is open for business. We’ll go there on a rainy afternoon.

After passing through town, we head up the hill on the other side of town and turn on the Mingo Loop, drive past the golf course, and turn off onto the dirt road that leads to North Camps.  Our cabin, the Silver Doctor, is the same one we stayed in last year, with the same furniture and the same view of the lake from the screened-in porch.  At the main lodge, Henry the parrot squawks as always.  Sonny, the owner, is not here, but he’s still alive andwill return by Friday.  His son Fran, who runs the place now, tells us that the lakeside campfires will be on Monday and Thursday nights, as usual. We’ve come prepared with our marshmallows, Hershey bars, and scary stories to tell around the fire.

The sun sets over Bald Mountain, across the lake in Oquossoc.

During our Rangeley days, we do the same things every year, usually adding a new twist or variation.  We wake up and drink coffee on the screened-in porch or on the dock. We sit in the sun and read books and swim.  We take the kids tubing on the lake. We play whiffle ball in the grassy field and pretend to play tennis on the mud court.  We mix cocktails that we never drink at home. After dinner, we watch the red glow of the sunset behind Bald Mountain, and the moon rise over Saddleback.

At least once, we pick blueberries in the lush fields at the Wilhelm Reich Museum.  Back at North Camps, I make blueberry pie.  We swim some more.

We explore. One day, a canoe trip, on the Kennebago River or somewhere new. This year, we canoe down the Chain of Ponds, up near the Canadian border, and one of the easier legs of Benedict Arnold’s arduous 1775 expedition to Quebec.

Making a few casts on the Kennebago River. To see moose on the river, you have to get out just after sunrise or at twilight.

Another day, we go for a hike, sometimes to a new mountain and sometimes an old favorite. This year, we drive north from Oquossoc village to climb Mount Aziscohos, a lonely summit off Route 17 which some say has the best views in all of Maine, of more than 25 lakes and endless green forest.  With binoculars, we can see the docks of North Camps.

We like our civilization and make many required trips to town: to the IGA for groceries, to the Red Onion for pizza, to the library to check out favorite books, to the Ecopolagian Nature Store to browse and lounge in the swinging chair on the porch.   By the week’s end, some are concerned that we might miss a visit to Pine Tree Frosty. But the weather is fabulous and we squeeze in our ice cream after an afternoon at Cascade Stream Gorge, where we jump from the cliffs into a deep pool of freezing water.

I have only skimmed the surface of Rangeley, (I haven’t even mentioned the fishing) but reading what I’ve written, I’m exhausted. How can we possibly do all this and not be? Where do we find the time?  Partly, we are on vacation, so we are removed from many of the daily obligations (although we still have meals to cook and, without a dishwasher, the dishes pile endlessly in the sink).  But here, we are liberated from our screens: our computers, our televisions, and other devices, our multiple emails and postings. We lack smart phones and don’t regret it.  If we must check our email, the library is open Tuesday to Saturday.

Jumping off the cliff for the first time was nerve-wracking, but once they were baptized, the jumpers couldn’t be stopped..

This year at North Camps, several of the cabins are empty. Business has been down all summer, a sign of the ongoing recession, and maybe also of changing tastes in vacation.  North Camps is rustic; the furniture is old. In some kitchens, the linoleum may date from the Depression.  Many travelers want their surroundings to look shiny and new and to come with WiFi and cable television.  In judging this book by its cover, they miss out on experiencing the richness of the story.

The kids roam free, devising their own activities, jumping off the docks and playing Apples to Apples in the new pavilion by the lake. They stay up late to finish books.  They bait fish hooks and fall off rafts.  Technically, my son could play with his Nintendo DS – we do have electricity – but during our Rangeley days, he puts it away without protest.

Our week at North Camps is a reasonably-priced vacation, a bargain even.  But what treasure we find in these days of alternating activity and pure laziness.

As an operation that’s been in the family since the 1950s (and which dates back to the 1890s), North Camps will hang on unless the owners decide to close it down and sell this prime lakeside property for the millions that it’s probably worth. We worry about that possibility but Fran tells us not to, because North Camps is their family’s special place, and they have no intention of selling it.

What changes will come to Rangeley over the next year? Will Books Lines and Thinkers Bookstore remain open? Will the Lakeside movie theater still be showing movies?  Can we count on the breakfast at the BMC Diner?  What I see as economic decline may just be part of the usual struggle to keep an off-the-beaten-path mountain community going. Compared to the 1950s, when Rangeley’s many grand lakeside hotels closed down in a matter of years, the ‘decline’ of today may just be a blip in a pattern of recurring small blips.  I hope so.

I imagine moving to Rangeley, maybe buying the Main Street bed and breakfast that was on the market for several years and which now appears to be in new hands.  I’ll swim every day in the lake in the summer, ski in the winter at Saddleback, and get to know the locals sitting at the counter of Moosely Bagels.  I’ll help to organize the Library Gala and volunteer to serve on the town’s Economic Development committee.  And soon my days will fill with emails and meetings and commitments, just like my life back home today

Then again, maybe not. There’s something to be said for having a relationship that is committed but not deep, consistent but not completely connected, because it offers the opportunity for the disconnection so hard to find in our lives today. Next year, I think we’ll stay two weeks.

 

The town at the end of the world

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Sunrise view from my window at the Inn on the Wharf.

My windows overlooking Passamaquoddy Bay are open on this early July morning, but when I first woke up, I thought they must be closed, so silent is the morning at 7 a.m. On a Maine lake, the silence would seem normal, but here in Lubec on this working waterfront, the wharf is too quiet, the bay too empty, with no bobbing lobster buoys and only a few moored boats, evenly divided between working and recreational vessels.

I heard a brief spate of noise at 4:30 a.m., when the sun was rising, but nothing like the rumbles and sputters of other Maine coastal villages in the early morning, as lobster boats roar to life and motor out of the harbor, waking all but the heaviest sleepers before a silence descends again.

Today the bay is placid, calm like a lake.  So far during my stay, I have seen only a couple of kayakers out on the water, both because Lubec is far away from the hordes and because with the 29-foot tides here, the currents are deceptive and dangerous. The power of the water is visible when the tide exits through the Narrows, the channel separating Lubec from Campobello Island, New Brunswick.

Lubec’s iconic Quoddy Head Lighthouse, at the eastern most point of land in the United States. The state park offers several miles of hiking trails with amazing views of Grand Manaan Island as well as the occasional whale and seal.

Back in 1987, when I first visited Lubec, turning off Route 1 onto Route 189, I remember feeling as if I were on a road to the end of the world.  Surrounded by the gray-blue waters of the bay, I drove past green meadows and the occasional small house,  until finally, at the tip of the peninsula, I found an improbable densely packed village of small houses and a main street lined with shops and other business—a community.

Back then, one sardine factory still operated, along with McCurdy’s Smokehouse on Water Street.  Although a steep decline from the 24 smokehouses and sardine processing plants that once commanded all the best views of the bay, these two businesses persisted, thanks to entrepreneurial owners who had found niche markets for the sardines and smoked herring for which Lubec  once was world-renowned.  I didn’t take much notice these operations and only stayed long enough to get a cup of coffee at a shop on Water Street before heading over the international bridge to visit Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s family ‘cottage’ on Campobello Island.

This week, I am sleeping in the belly of Lubec’s last sardine factory, which closed in 2001, and was purchased a few years later by Victor and Judy Trafford and renovated into a waterfront inn and restaurant.  Below the restaurant, they maintain a working wharf at which fisherman unload their catch and kids sell periwinkles and clams gathered on the mud flats at low tide.

During the Depression, Lubec was a great place to live, but you probably didn’t want to visit as a tourist.  The place

Although Lubec’s fortunes have declined, the Fourth of July parade remains a big event. Although this lobster made a great parade float, Passamaquoddy Bay doesn’t support an abundant lobster fishery.

belched with smoke as fires lit on the wooden floors of the waterfront smokehouses smoldered day and night.  Everyone stank of fish, but they had jobs and money in their pockets  — a lot more than many other Americans had circa 1933.  On Saturday nights, residents thronged Water Street  to see a movie, eat a meal or catch up on the local gossip.  The Depression was a boon to Lubec because canned sardines and smoked herring were a cheap source of protein that didn’t need to be refrigerated.

Today, at Lubec Landmarks on Water Street, visitors can tour the small wooden skinning shed of the McCurdy plant and learn about the traditional process of smoking fish — a process that originated hundreds of years ago and which continued, with minor revisions, in Lubec until the mid-90s.  Fresh herring were packed into bins of salted brine to cure for several days, then strung on racks and left out on the wharf to dry before before smoking.   Then, as workers tended smoldering fires around the clock, the fish were gradually and manually shifted upwards on the racks in the smokehouse as a part of a multi-stage process for premium smoking.  Finally, the fish were “skinned” – their heads and tails chopped off – and packed into wooden boxes.

The industry rapidly declined in the 1950s and 60s, partly because herring were getting harder to catch and partly because of changes in taste, both in fish and employment.  By late 1990s, I imagine the last sardine cannery had a hard time finding enough employees to do the dirty work of packing sardines, even in an area with high unemployment.

Growing up in the 1960s and 70s, I can’t ever recall my mother opening a can of herring.  I’ve eaten smoked herring, or “kippers,” on camping trips and can’t say I was later tempted to serve them as a party hors d’oeuvres.  You can still buy sardines and herring in the supermarket – and both are an excellent source of omega 3s – but when was the last time you saw them on a menu?  What was once a non-perishable portable source of protein has been surpassed by the widespread availability of fresh fish, meats, and poultry.  Easy to blame the government for the industry’s decline (which raised concern in the 1990s about the dumping of brine into the bay as well as the safety of the traditional smoking process), but harder to blame ourselves, the ways our tastes changed.  When local or regional sustainability means eating strong-tasting oily fish, it’s harder to get on board.

Today, Lubec is a great place to visit, with its long views of the bay and the iconic red-striped Quoddy Head Lighthouse, the most easterly in the U.S.  But it takes a certain kind of person to live here at the end of the world.  The year-round population has declined and continues to decline, falling by 17 percent, from 1,652 in 2000 to 1,359 in 2010 (and down more than 60% from a high of about 3,300 during the 1930s).  Abandoned houses, some falling apart and others looking as if their owners had packed up yesterday, are a common site downtown.  The high school closed in 2010.  Like many Downeast Maine towns, Lubec struggles with a significant prescription drug abuse problem.

A house in downtown Lubec.

But the town persists.  A sizeable core of dedicated Lubeckers, both summer and year-round residents, stay on, find a way to make a living, to keep the community going.  About 100 kids attend the K-8 school and ride their bikes around town, unsupervised and free.  Retirees, teachers and others from away have bought up and renovated older houses to use as summer places. (Lubec is the kind of town where a teacher can afford to purchase a summer residence, possibly even one with a water view).

Downtown, painters and carpenters hammer away at dilapidated buildings. Every restaurant and shop on the

On Water Street, the Lubec Landmarks gallery and Atlantic Coffee Shop catch the eye with bright colors, but sit near abandoned buildings and homes.

eastern side of Water Street has a waterfront deck for viewing the Narrows, with its currents and frolicking seals.  On a summer night at the Congregational Church, built in 1820 on a high point of land downtown in 1820, a packed house fills the pews to hear a decidedly non-traditional but beautiful performance of Olivier Messian’s “Quartet for the end of time,” which the composer wrote in a prison camp in France during World War II.  The town’s half-dozen restaurants appear to be doing a brisk business during this peak season.

I am here in Lubec to study piano in the SummerKeys music program, a sort of intensive music camp for adult music students.  Founded by New York-based pianist and teacher Bruce Potterton about 25 years ago, SummerKeys has helped to pump up the town.  Most summer weeks, 40 or more students come to town from around the United States to study piano, cello, violin, guitar, or another instrument. These music students fill the inns and B and Bs, buy iced tea at the Atlantic Coffee House, and dine at the various restaurants.  On Wednesday evenings, the program sponsors a concert at the church that brings in people from around the area.

Watching Mr. Potterton, who isn’t getting any younger, race around town in his little station wagon, moving pianos and meeting with students, I am struck by how just a few people with a good idea and a lot of hard work can make a difference in sustaining a community, in creating a new ecosystem of social and commercial activity.  At the Inn on the Wharf, the Traftons, who could be enjoying a comfortable Florida retirement, work 18-hour days running the restaurant and inn, buying fish at the wharf, teaching yoga classes in the meeting room.  Visitors stay at the inn, or study with SummerKeys, and then tell other people about their experiences, and then more come the next year. This summer-based economy may be one which is more dependent on the “outside” for sustainability, but then again, maybe not.  As a one-industry fish town, Lubeckers were always dependent on the tastes of far-away consumers.

I daydream about buying a small home downtown and spending the summer by the bay, walking to the library, the grocery store, to a night out at the Wharf restaurant.   But probably not. I live near the sea now, in Kittery, and Lubec is far away, a five to six hour drive.  But I’ll tell other people about my visit, especially other music students.  And I’ll come back myself another year, to be part of this town at the end of the world, if only for a week.

More on Lubec:

Lubec:  A Border Town Shaped by the Sea: A detailed, well-written account of Lubec’s history, hosted by the Maine Memory Network.

Klondike: Lubec’s Gold from Sea Water Hoax: In 1897, an ordained Baptist minister from Martha’s Vineyard and his collaborator came to Lubec claiming that they had devised technology that could extract gold from sea water.  They set up their operation in North Lubec and hired a hundred locals to set up their gold “accumulators.” Thousands of shares for the project were sold, mostly to eager investors in Massachusetts, New York and Connecticut. Many invested their life savings and/or mortgaged their homes to get in on this “can’t miss” opportunity. A year later, Jernegan and Fisher disappeared along with the money, and the hoax dominated newspaper headlines in New England and around the country.

Visit Lubec Maine: Sponsored by APPLE (Association to Promote and Protect the Lubec Environment), this site includes information about Lubec’s history and economy, as well as about town services and community activities.

Additional links:

Quoddy Head Station:  Lodging at former Lighthouse station.

Inn on the Wharf: Modern spacious rooms overlooking Passamaquoddy Bay in a converted sardine factory. A great value and the food in the restaurant is excellent.

SummerKeys: Adult music and art program, including photography and creative writing.

West Quoddy Head Lighthouse Keepers Association: This organization maintains the West Quoddy Head Lighthouse and Visitor Center. The website includes include links to Lubec-area lodging and other local resources.