The Lure of Maine
Portland Magazine Summerguide, 2004
by Colin Sargent

It's the promise of coming on an undiscovered beach, or paddling into a quiet cove no one's ever seen before. It's the tremolo of a loon on still mornings with the air so fresh it's almost icy, even in mid-summer. It's snow-capped mountains on the horizon, even if they're just imagined. Or The Knife's Edge at the top of Mt. Katahdin, holy to Indians. It's tree-lined Colonial streets that end with a white church. It's sea roses on Marginal Way in Ogunquit, above the fog and the thundering sound of the surf. It's the high, slow circles of gulls playing in the wind. It's the romantic elixir that makes visitors come back year after year and convinces natives to stay for a lifetime. It's the pine-needle floor around a lakefront cabin, the sound of whispering pines up above. It's the secret, shaded inlet brimming with speckled trout swimming lazily below an ancient log. It's a mystery, undeliverable and unexportable. It's the conviction that just around the next bend, there's a view so deep, so lofty, and so impossible, that you'll be able to see all the way to England. It's the last deep breath you ever remember having. It's so many islands we gave up counting them. It's an island named Pound of Tea. It's your childhood, rushing out to jump waves on the beach. It's the Big Dipper reflected in a lake. It's rituals, like taking the winter sheets off your summer cottage. It's the thrum of lobster boats heading out early in the morning to bang out their traps, it's the opening up of summer theaters and summer churches, it's the two weeks of blue-dungeon fog in June that make July somehow more voluptuous, it's the promise of good, honest, hand-made treasures that are meant to last a lifetime, it's dream islands, dining so alfresco your dining room is lost somewhere in a meadow, it's muffins made from fresh blueberries, it's devouring great, delicious, furious monsters from the sea with your hands after they've snapped at you while you were slamming the pot lid down on their heads, it's knowing that John Neptune, the Penobscot witch, is watching every step you take through the woods, it's something in the water, it's something in the air, it's too loud for the neighbors, it's too soft to hear, it's the lure of Maine. For more information, see pages 1-224.

1. The Loon Question: Are loons lake birds or ocean birds? Answer: Both. According to Maine Audubon's Living in Loon Territory, common loons îreturn to Maine's lakes right after ice out and spend about a month€in courtship displays like dipping their bills in the water or swimming around each other in circles.ï Both male and female loons îtake turns sitting on the eggs, built into a lake's muddy shoreline.ï After the eggs hatch in exactly 27 days, îchicks ride on their parents' backs to stay warm and safe from predators.ï In late summer or fall, rafts of loons fly out to the ocean. îJuvenile loons will wait about seven years before they return to fresh water to breed.ï It may sound romantic, or like the call of the wild, but loons actually make their famous îtremoloï sound when something is annoying them.

2. Hudson's Bay Trader Blankets Don't leave L.L. Bean without buying one of these. On the side of each blanket embossed with the company seal, you'll see black stitches woven into the side. This is not a factory reject. The practice of these stitches goes way back. The stitches are telling you how many beaver skins your blanket is worth. These are the finest, and warmest, blankets in the world. N.B. We said Mainers love Hudson's Bay Trader Blankets, not necessarily the traders they were named for, who made a practice of lying in wait for Penobscot hunting parties, mugging them, and stealing their furs, presenting them as their own in camp.

3. The Maine Hunting Shoe Central to the pop iconography of Maine, these sturdy shoes were instant classics when L.L. Bean founder Leon Leonwood Bean dreamed them up in 1911. According to L.L. Bean, Inc.: A Company Scrapbook, quoting an article by Christopher Borrelli in Outside magazine, "That winter, Bean sewed leather tops on basic rubbers, and soon fellow hunters and friends were asking for pairs of the crude-yet-slimeproof boots. Working from the basement of his Freeport clothing store, he created the catalog colossus on the strength of the boot sales alone. The boots are still hand-made in Maine the 1924 catalog states, 'Outside of your gun, nothing is so important as your footwear.'" Early enthusiasts included Babe Ruth. Such is the love of these boots that Borrelli closes with, "I hear ya, Mr. Bean. When the government comes knocking at my door, they'll have to pry the duck boots from my cold, dead feet."

4. Rosa Rugosa These sea roses actually came to Maine as part of the China Trade. Like Mainers, the more you cut them back, the more they come right back at you. So stubborn are their beautiful petals that they bloom into November here. Warning: they are mortal enemies to the Frisbee.

So much for concrete particulars. We're lured not so much by individual things as the larger realities they suggest: sparkles on the ocean approaching infinity as a limit. Seen this way, Maine's lakes, seaport towns, our perfect fried clam shacks at the end of the mind are a collective craving for innocence.

Because Maine, no matter how many internet technology firms cluster up here, will always have one foot in sophistication, one foot in naivete. More than anything else, that's our saving grace. And no matter how hardened Maine natives can be, we sightsee as well, possibly because we're all îtourists in our own lives.ï

For example, I am writing this in a ramshackle cottage my wife and I are visiting on the shores of Highland Lake in Falmouth. It's almost falling apart; there isn't a square corner in the place, but it's shaded by 200-foot white pine trees and it's close enough to the water to hear the lake talking to itself in the early morning.

I grew up in Portland not knowing about this place. I was sure the closest lake to Portland was Sebago, along Route 302, not this huge blue miracle just six minutes away from the Portland North exit off the Maine Turnpike. It seems that an early colonial farmer was pulling rocks out of a field when he discovered it. He saw a little bit of blue. He took a few steps toward it. The blue got bigger. It laps against the shores of Falmouth, Westbrook, and Windham.

I told a friend, writer Barbara Lefcowitz, about discovering this "lost" lake in my own backyard so late in my life and she started looking for a lake herself in Brooklyn, New York, where she grew up. She found it last week, spilling out from the green stairs of her childhood brownstone. The lure of Maine is that full of suggestion: I expect to see her this fall, arriving by canoe.

Copyright 2004 Portland Magazine. All Rights Reserved.