Summer Travel: Maine

One of my elsewheres...

Aug 22, 2023

brown rocky shore with green trees and ocean waves during daytime — Photo by Inera Isovic on Unsplash

This summer, I’m posting short vignettes of places I’ve visited as part of the Summer Travel Series on The Matterhorn. It’s part of our ongoing look at culture and internationalism.

I asked about why you like to travel last month. A lot of the discussion was about keeping it local as well as the environmental benefits of such. This post is in that vein; it comes from a place I lived as a student for four years.

This weekend, I’ll be in Budapest for the Track & Field World Championships! I used to visit Budapest by train when I lived in Vienna and loved the local designers, great cafes, and gothic architecture that went along with the very real (no sugar-coating) creative people. Also the elevated walk over in Pest is magic (especially in snow).

This time, it’s a quick stop mostly for the Saturday eve finals. We’ve got finish line seats, so look for me on TV! [I’m American but happen to have Team GB official gear, so might be donning that with an American flag…it’s all the same colors after all.]

We’d love to hear from you in the comments if you’ve been to or know more about these places, or if the descriptions generate ideas and make you think of something differently. Thanks for reading! - Kate

IG for live summer updates!

Maine

Maine lives in my mind like a vivid swirling parallel world I’m always inhabiting from elsewhere. Don’t we, as writers, all have those? Imaginary intersections of places and times creating our current realities or those of our fictions.

Maine is my elsewhere. I guess it’s not my only one. Other former homes have also taken on this identity in my mind. The nature of a place and its culture move between each other to create its identity; as I inhabit them both, I, too, become a part of them. It’s easier to take pieces of culture with me than nature. Photographs and memories, instead, remind me of this natural beauty. But so do words. Those I’ve written and those of authors who take nature into their minds and allow it to flow out as language. I guess then it has already become cultural as well.

I want to consider these questions in thinking about Maine today, as well as considering any place:

What does place have to do with culture? Or, what does nature have to do with creating a sense of place? Or further still, how does nature shape society?

Inhabiting the natural landscape

My encounters with Maine were first purely connected to nature: hiking and beach trips with my family, later camping by lakes and skiing in the mountains. I later spent four years living in Brunswick during university (and a couple of those summers living out in the boonies near Augusta at sleepover summer camps where I coached gymnastics).

College was also filled with many dives into Maine’s nature, thanks especially to my cross country coach who drove us to various woods, beaches, and (eek) steep hills to make the most of our experience there. (Thanks, Coach Slovenski!) A few times we got lost on our way to apple orchards or waterfalls or farms…but someone in the group of runners always had a team issued walkie-talkie that would eventually come into range of the vans.

Maine has a diverse landscape that attracts many nature tourists, all the way back to Henry David Thoreau who wrote The Maine Woods after several immersive trips to the state that included much interaction with the native Abnaki Indians.

brown moose on green grass during daytime — Photo by Hari Nandakumar on Unsplash

Here is a beautiful quote from Thoreau’s book that investigates the way he has moved completely into nature:

I could trace the outlines of large birches that had fallen long ago, collapsed and rotted and turned to soil, by faint yellowish-green lines of feather-like moss, eighteen inches wide and twenty or thirty feet long, crossed by other similar lines.
I heard a night-warbler, wood thrush, kingfisher, tweezer-bird or parti-colored warbler, and a nighthawk. I also heard and saw red squirrels, and heard a bullfrog. The Indian said that he heard a snake.
Wild as it was, it was hard for me to get rid of the associations of the settlements. Any steady and monotonous sound, to which I did not distinctly attend, passed for a sound of human industry. The waterfalls which I heard were not without their dams and mills to my imagination; and several times I found that I had been regarding the steady rushing sound of the wind from over the woods beyond the rivers as that of a train of cars,—the cars at Quebec. Our minds anywhere, when left to themselves, are always thus busily drawing conclusions from false premises.

Although Thoreau had already famously escaped to Walden ten years earlier, this was a new level. Walden Pond, even at the time, was just a walk away from Concord Center. It’s not really the same thing. Maine still has “virgin forest” and places that are only marked by a town number rather than name for lack of habitants, as well as a bunch of others with populations less than a hundred.

(I’ll be talking more about Thoreau in Yoga & Writing next month; did you know he was into yoga?)

I had some of these experiences Thoreau describes during those cross country runs in college. Notably, on one run, a line of us ran just a couple meters away from a hidden moose. It might be surprising that a moose can hide, but they’re good at it! Seeing a moose on a run was a lot different from seeing it on the side of the road whilst driving. They are massive!

But beyond the forest and mountains (I’ll leave skiing out of today, or I would get carried away with it), there is the great coastline. In fact, there is 3500 miles of coastline in Maine! 5633 kilometers. People often say it’s as long as the equator, but it would have about 20,000 miles to go.

brown sand near body of water during daytime

There are some great sandy beaches like Popham, where we also used to run each year and take Chariots of Fire style photos for the team website. Popham was also the film location of Message in a Bottle, one of those Kevin Costner romances I just can’t get myself to see, perhaps because I’m still embarrassed that for a year or so of middle school I went around saying The Bodyguard was my favorite movie.

There are also many beautiful rocky areas along the coast, often with towns created due to fishing communities. These are on islands and bays, often with small wooden homes and many colorful buoys hanging off of buildings.

Lobster culture

Now, if we move to a topographical approach, that is: nature + artificial physical features, and likewise consider landscapes created by humans, we start to see how nature has impacted culture.

In Maine, we must start with the lobster. It’s everywhere. Ok, maybe the moose is almost as ubiquitous, not just roaming freely but also on T-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, and menus. Yes, you can eat a moose. It’s really really good. I’ve had my vegetarian moments (two years at one point), but I do try to eat as ethically-minded as possible. The Maine moose population is too large, so permits are given each year via lottery. In college, we had a “Jan term” which for me meant winter track training. Many local families would host us for meals. I was lucky one year to go to Winnie’s house, the lady who manned our field house front desk, and eat some of the moose she had hunted that year. It really was delicious. I hope this moose had a good life in the wild.

Ok, but what about the lobsters? Everyone knows about Maine lobster, right? They market it well. And it’s had a long history in this state, well before the British arrived:

Long ago, Native Americans used lobsters as bait and as fertilizer for their crops. Lobsters were so plentiful along the shores of Maine during colonial times that they were considered “poverty food” and were served to prisoners and indentured servants. (Servants eventually rebelled and listed in their contracts that they were not to be forced to eat lobster more than 3 times a week.)

white speedboat on body of water during daytime — Photo of lobster traps in Maine by Matt McNulty on Unsplash

Colonists began trapping lobster in the mid-1800s but it was the Rockefeller family at their summer home on Mount Desert Island and its view as a “delicacy” during WWII that made lobster into a treat.

MDI is home of Acadia National Park, where I went to camp with friends in high school, looking at the sunrise from Cadillac Mountain, supposedly the first each morning in the US. Then, again I went to camp and mountain bike at the start of my university studies as a sort of first-year bonding trip (US colleges do this kind of thing!). It’s a beautiful place but also a visceral manifestation of the divide of rich/poor in this state. It has been famously the home of the Rockfellers as well as many other rich vacationers, often from my home state (labeled as “Masshole” when touristing, even though the two were joined as one state until 1820). There is also political divide in this state. echoed in it being one of only two states that can split its electoral vote for US president.

MDI famously offers lobster ice cream at Ben & Bill’s in Bar Harbor (linked origin story). Or maybe you’ve heard of the lobster roll at McDonald’s?

While lobster may be a delicacy and less plentiful (and more expensive) than ever thanks to overfishing and climate change, back in the years 1998-2002, my college used to serve the entire student population and staff lobster at the start of the year and then again during graduation week along with their parents. It’s always smart to leave a good taste in one’s mouth when it comes to alumni giving! But also: it wasn’t so difficult or expensive for them to do. Lobster, on a good year, was still plentiful.

Additionally, when parents were in town with their credit cards, we would drive twenty minutes over the bridges to iconic Cook’s Lobster House, which felt like a different world. The tiny island villages surrounded by water were all about the lobster. The restaurant began in 1955 and has since been featured on a national Visa commercial, solidifying its stand as a part of Maine culture.

The Maine Lobster Festival in Rockland is an international annual event. It became the subject of David Foster Wallace’s article for Gourmet magazine in 2004. “Consider the Lobster” is also housed in a collection of essays under the same name.

Here, DFW tackles the complexities of animal cruelty with many a great footnote. He doesn’t have a solution. He’s both horrified by boiling these animals alive and eating them in such quantity and acknowledges the human impulse to simply ‘do it and not think about it too much.’ Of course, much of the essay is pure metaphor, although it is written for a food magazine. It’s DFW, so…

Trying to understand whether or not lobsters feel pain when they are boiled alive, goes in some deep places:

Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that other human beings experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy — metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics.
…
Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming). (p. 246-248 of the book version)

[A footnote explains the legend of a ‘lobster scream’ is indeed vented steam escaping.]

So do you eat lobster or not? And should I eat it when I next go home and my parents want to bring some from the fish market?

Literary histories

You might be aware that Stephen King makes his home in Maine, his native state. He also uses the setting for many of his spooky tales.

Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, by Gary D. Schmidt, is a Maine-based YA novel sometimes taught in secondary schools about a whale, friendship, religion, and racism. It explores some of these small coastal towns and the homogenous nature of them as well as their inherent connection to the sea.

Another famous book that was written in Maine, in fact at Bowdoin College, my alma mater, is Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, an anti-slavery novel that some say sparked the Civil War some ten years later, mostly due to the backlash against it by slaveowners.

Bowdoin has also been home to other celebrated American authors, most notably Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter) and poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. And other Maine natives from the past include Edna St. Vincent Millay and E.B. White.

There is a lot more in terms of the arts that comes from Maine, especially in its colleges and in Portland. For example, in the Portland Museum of Art. However, there is also so much artistry in the small watercolor paintings, handmade pottery, and books of poetry that one can find for sale at such places as The Lobster Festival.

I have yet to write a fiction set in Maine, but I think that if I do, it must play with this topography and interaction between culture and place. I can imagine spending a summer along the coast doing this, undoubtedly falling into cliché unless I can conjure the spirit of Thoreau and just look really closely at what’s right in front of me.

Thanks for reading! Please let us know if you have memories or a relationship with Maine you’d like to share. Or perhaps you’ve got some other related art! Links welcome.