The Kennebec Report

Midsommar Fest

New Sweden, Maine hosts a Midsommar festival each year at the solstice, and I went with my friends Dick and Phil. It's a small festival, at it's a small place, but I am a sucker for small-town celebrations. This one was great fun.

When we got there, we'd already missed the traditional Swedish breakfast featuring a traditional Swedish pancake dish, and the Maypole was already festooned with flowers. (For the record, northern Maine abounds in beautiful purple and pink lupines, and they are obviously preparing to take over the world. Maine first.) Many of the girls and women at the festival were also wearing crown garlands of flowers in their hair, though none of the men.

We checked out the New Sweden Museum, which was once the original meetinghouse, or Capitoleum. The altar with communion rail is still in place upstairs in what was the meetinghouse's chapel, but now the museum is filled with Swedish stuff left to it by the original settlers: photos, antique clothing, dishes and kitchen stuff, old books, records, silver, some furniture, a few period rooms, and a totally cool sled carriage that must've whisked Swedish settlers over the snow in the day. I wanted to take it home. I wanted to ride it home, actually.

The newer Swedish church ("newer" being a relative term here; its date is about 1890) is notorious in the state for a murder that happened there a few years ago. Somebody poisoned a parishioner's coffee with arsenic, and as far as I know, the murder has not been solved. I didn't ask about this much, and for obvious reasons nobody wants to talk about it either. So, if you go to New Sweden, don't ask. And don't drink any church coffee.

The Swedish schoolhouse is now a gift shop where you can get Swedish stuff: church cookbooks (don't try the coffee recipes!), Swedish flags, straw Christmas ornaments. The school itself is mostly intact, with tiny little desks for tiny little students and a big desk for the teacher. I want to teach there, as it's so darn sweet. Some of the old books were fun -- clearly some Swedish versions of the old "Dick and Jane" readers.

Some of Phil and Dick's friends came up to them and invited us all to learn Swedish dancing that night at the local bandshell in the park. New Sweden has 700 people, so of course everybody knows everybody. We had previous dinner plans, but the dancing demonstrations looked like fun, if pretty energetic. Swedish dancing is more complicated than contra dancing, which immediately establishes my inabilty to learn it, but it's graceful and clearly of the people at the same time. There was a concert also scheduled of a local singer performing art songs and hymns in Swedish, accompanied by fiddle. I would've loved to have heard it.

There's an old log cabin that one of the original settlers built, with a tiny kitchen, tiny living room, and bed in the loft right under the rafters. One of the things that you notice in these old houses is how tiny the rooms are. The concept of personal space is so radically different from our own that one wonders how one had a private life way back when. The answer is, of course, that one didn't. Given the nature of the "we're all in this together" mentality of this settlement, that's probably a good thing.

This last statement serves as a graceful segue into why the Swedes ended up here in the first place. In the late 1860s, about 50 or so of them initially were invited by the then-governor of Maine to settle the northern reaches of the state so that somebody lived up there. He figured correctly that the climate and topography were similar to that of Sweden and thus they would thrive here. There are a number of settlements up here that are very Swedish (Stockholm, Maine, is just up the road), and it does seem as if the settlers managed to carve out a living and preserve their culture well. It wouldn't be hard to preserve the culture; New Sweden is off the beaten track even today, and in 1870, when the original colonists arrived, it must've been twenty miles past the back of beyond. There's a memorial marker near the premises of these buildings that marks the spot of the original settlement, and it mentions the names and dates of all the original settlers. A number of the inscriptionns are very poignant. Many colonists died before their second or third birthdays. It must have been a very hard life.

Further down the road is a working blacksmith's shop and a two-story log cabin of one of the more prosperous settlers, both of which are on the National Register of Historic Places. The view from these buildings is spectacular. Both are set on a bluff overlooking the Aroostook River Valley, and you can see all the way over the piney rolling forests to Mars Hill, about 30 miles south. Again, the house reminded me of why I would not have made a good pioneer. This was the house of a prosperous Swedish settler, mind you, at the top of the social ladder, and the rooms were still tiny and certainly drafty cold. It was like walking in a 3/4 size house. Even so, it was charming and left in its original state, right down to the Swedish newspapers used as wallpaper in the less public rooms, the sawdust used as insulation between the wallboards, the one-foot deep closets, the genteel and fragile furniture in the parlor, and the very big woodstove in the kitchen.

There were two blacksmiths working in the smithy's shop, and they were fascinating. I'd never seen smithing done, and the village smith must have been an important man because he made, well, everything the settlers needed: nails, farm implements, tools. Two little kids there was enthralled, having never seen metal that was red-hot and could be bent and hammered into malleable shapes.

For lunch, we had red hot dogs (I assume that these are not authentically Swedish). In The County, hot dogs have bright red casings. I have no idea why. Nobody else did, either. We finished that off with maple ice cream. There was a public dinner that we could not attend, as we were meeting another friend for dinner in St. Agatha, so we missed the Swedish meatball supper. (Are Swedish meatballs Swedish?) But the festival itself was great fun: low-key, utterly local, utterly charming.   

The County

The top of Maine, or the "crown of Maine" as it's known here, is Aroostook County -- "The County" to Mainers. It's the biggest county east of the Mississippi River, larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island, but is thinly populated with only about 70,000 folks. Most Mainers I've talked to have never been there, as it seems to be in the opposite direction of the coasts, where you're supposed to go on vacation.

The County is surprisingly beautiful. Its primary industries are timber and agriculture, which don't in themselves inspire visions of beauty; but the land is rolly-hilly, intensely green, and fields are interspersed with tracts of forest. The main cash crop is potatoes -- for years this was the primary potato-producing area of the country until Idaho took top honors, and broccoli and peas are increasingly important.

It's also a relatively poor part of an already relatively poor state, and sometimes this shows. When you drive Route 1 up from Houlton, you go through a number of small towns that don't seem to have any reason to exist. They were clearly important to their local neighborhoods at one point, and I presume still are, but nonetheless remain blips on the map until you arrive in Presque Isle, a major city up here at about 9000 people. You pass old gas stations, grange halls, feed and farm stores, old potato warehouses, lovely old houses, and a surprising number of Baptist churches. The oldest and grandest church in town, however, is invariably the Catholic church, built by the Acadians who settled here.

In fact, you tend to forget how close you are to New Brunswick (and Quebec, if you're in the vast forest wilderness of the west chunk of the county) until you tune in your radio and pick up the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, for those of you unfortunate enough to not be able to listen to this superb national radio network. I should say "networks," actually, as the CBC runs both an English and a French network, and they are both absolutely excellent. For much of the weekend, when I craned my neck to the east, I was looking at the rolling hills of New Brunswick in the distance, and when I listened to people in public places, it was pretty common to hear French. This is even more noticeable the further north I went. I had dinner in St. Agatha, Maine, about 5 miles from the top of the state ("St. Ah-GOT," pronounced as the French would) and was surrounded by French speakers, including folks I was having dinner with. The top of Maine is essentially bilingual.

The County is interesting precisely because it's so off the map, as it were, even for most Mainers. Though many of us like the idea of living out in the country, the reality is you're really isolated; I can't imagine a winter up there, though everybody seems to take it in stride. (Probably wearing cross-country skis or snowshoes.) It is a terrific place to visit, though, and I'm grateful that I have friends up there to see on a regular basis.

Up North

In Maine, as in Michigan, I expect that "up north" means vacationing on a lake, getting away, taking a weekend off from your life. This is what I did this last weekend, visiting my friends DIck and Phil in New Sweden, Maine for its Midsommar festival. New Sweden is at the top of Maine, a community of about 700 souls just northwest of Caribou. It's about a four-hour drive, and it was my first real trip in my car. It was my first real car trip, period.

The drive is pretty wonderful. Maine is about as beautiful as you can imagine, though in an unspectacular way. This wasn't the Grand Tetons I drove through, with the kind of scenery to make your jaw drop. I will say, however, that the sight of Mount Katahdin in the distance, Maine's tallest peak at about 5000 feet, is mighty fine. And I-95, the interstate north that I drove is a very well maintained road, as most roads in Maine are. Mainers might scoff at this observation, but perhaps they have never driven on roads in Michigan.

Betty, my car (yes, she now has a name -- I named after two of my aunts), drives very well and seemed very happy to show me what she could do when I stopped taking her on mamby-pamby skipping around town to work and the grovery store. For most of my life I have not owned a car, sometimes out of poverty and sometimes out of my perverseness to not be like normal people. For the first time in my life, though, I understood the General Motors' Chevy catchphrase from the '80s, "It's not just your car, it's your freedom." I succumbed happily to this marketing cliche because it's true. I was in no particular hurry to get north, and I realized somewhere outside of Bangor, hey, I can go anywhere I want up here.

Once you're north of Bangor -- a fairly major metro area for us, at 30,000 people and six interstate exits -- the traffic thins out enormously, not that it was very heavy in the first place. I stopped at a rest area there and stretched my legs, ate some lunch that I had packed (I felt like such a grown-up), and planned on stopping for a bite somewhere along the way at whatever town looked interesting. I hadn't checked my map very carefully, though, because I passed the exit to Millinocket, about an hour further up, without thinking about it. I then realized that there was nothing all the way to where the freeway ended at Houlton in about another 45 miles.

There weren't even cars or trucks on the interstate at this point; this is truly Maine's empty space. It was just me, the endless pine trees, the rolling hills, and the quiet. Maine's public radio network, MPBN, covers almost all of the population centers in the state, and it's nice how seamless the coverage is. When you start to lose the Portland signal, for example, you simply scan your radio dial until you get the Waterville signal, and do the same again when you get to the Bangor signal; besides, the programming is the same on all the stations, so your programming just continues nicely. Around Millinocket, though, you can't get anything for about thirty miles until you approach Houlton where I-95 ends and pick up the Presque Isle signal, where the University of Maine has a branch campus. So there's a movement of a Sibelius symphony that will remain a mystery to me. Oh well.

When traveling in Maine, you want to have a copy of Delorme's Atlas of Maine, a ridiculously detailed map of the state that shows elevations, hiking trails, all kinds of good stuff that you might want. People swear by Delorme, for good reason. My trip was relatively simple: get on I-95, get off at Houlton and on Route 1 which takes you north all the way to the New Brunswick border, and stop at the U Maine Presque Isle campus, where Dick works. From there we went to New Sweden. More on the rest of my weekend.

Dinner Company

Back in the last Ice Age, when I was a grad student, I used to have people over for dinner a lot. I got into the habit of inviting other grad students over every other week for a meal of some sort -- usually something pretty simple but tasty -- so I could build up a social circle and also get into the habit of cooking interesting things on a regular basis. It surprises me how little of this I've done in the last decade or so. I never had guests over on Guam, in part because my apartment wasn't very well set up for having people over, and I had few guests in Detroit because most of my friends were justifiably afraid that if they parked their car at the big old Victorian pile I lived in, they would return to find it stripped of its tires and doors.

I have returned to my past life by having my friends Lew and his husband Jim to dinner last Sunday. I made some of my standards: homemade pizza baked on a stone and homemade lemon ice cream for dessert. Jim and Lew brought cheeses and crackers and raspberry coulis from their own bushes for the ice cream. I have found that one of the advantages of living in Maine is that the odds that your guests have their own gardens and thus can bring interesting things to the table are pretty high.

The food was very good, if I say so myself; you might wish to consult with Lew and Jim and see what they say. But the real point of the evening was of course the cameraderie. I'd forgotten what good conversation is like in that my house is often very quiet when I'm in it myself. Well, except on Saturday afternoons, when I often listen to the NPR broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera of New York or the Lyric Opera of Chicago . . . I had this same cameraderie experience when my dear friend Lee Kottner, who hosts this blog, came up from New York City for Christmas. I honestly don't remember a lot of what we ate for our meals over the week. I do remember the pleasures of cooking with someone else -- having a good-sized kitchen, as I do, is a plus in this regard -- but I mostly remember the pleasures of just nonstop, funny, deep, intelligent conversation. This must be what Plato had in mind in The Symposium, and breaking bread together is a fine, fine way to achieve those kind of mental and verbal fireworks. It's obvious that I need to resurrect the biweekly, or monthly, dinner guest tradition.

Many people seem to be frightened by the idea of cooking for other people, though my experience has been that the food is really auxiliary to the guests and what they bring to the evening. Of course one wants to make sure that guests are pleased, though I personally am pleased to be eating food that I didn't have to cook. One should cook to please guests rather than impress them. It's a good idea to read cookbooks, which, after all, are books  -- you can read them and not just cook from them, looking for things that are simple but a little out of the ordinary. Lemon ice cream is a good example of this. The recipe is basically take cream, sugar, and lemon; mix; freeze. But who makes homemade ice cream these days? It's the kind of recipe that impresses people, making them think that you really can cook, when it's really not unlike making a mud pie.

I tend to entertain casually, inviting folks who like to talk like me. That's all it is for me: great conversation with dinner plates filled with something tasty thrown into the mix. Everybody should host dinner parties! More specifically, they should host me. Scott and Colin did just last night in their big home out in West Gardiner -- a future blog entry.

The Hills are Alive, with the Sound of Grunting

The hills of Augusta, Maine, that is. My grunting, as I try to go up them on my bike, that is.

My bike is back from the local bike shop after its tune-up. It's Au Clair's on Belfast Street, and I recommend them, as its staff is very nice and their prices are reasonable. I can see that I will be a regular.

Having made my inaugural ride a couple of days ago, though, I can say that Maine is going to take some getting used to. Part of the reason is that though I shipped my bike to Guam, I rode it only once there. It was dangerous to ride there: the roads have no shoulders, Guamanians drive like maniacs, and where there were sidewalks, there were concrete telephone poles in the middle of the sidewalk itself. Whose idea was that? I tried hard to bike but gave up quickly, figuring that if nobody else did it, there's got to be a reason. So I hadn't ridden a bike in two years, though I found out that they're right: you really don't forget how.

I rode along our river trail to Hallowell, one town down. This is not a far ride, maybe six miles or so round-trip, and because the trail follows the riverbed, it's flat. This is the way all biking was in flat Michigan, where I think I used maybe two or three of my 21 gears on my hybrid mountain/commuter bike.

Well, not here. Once I was off the trail and in downtown Hallowell (and after checking out the chichi pottery and antique chandeliers in the retail stores for which Hallowell is known, and indeed exists), I decided to take the road back into town that's up the hill. Hallowell basically is built on the river slope, which makes it very pretty but susceptible to flooding. And susceptible to tough biking.

I came back via the road that I normally walk to St. Matt's, my parish in Hallowell, and I've never noticed it being particularly hilly on foot. Perhaps I'm now used to the hills of Augusta. On my bike, though, I thought that I was going to die, or at least my legs were. I learned quickly that the nice bike manufacturers give you 21 gears for a reason. I used 20 of them. Hills that look modest aren't; I finally had to give up and walk my bike, feeling like a wuss all the way while cars whizzed by me, their drivers presumably laughing at my pathetic-ness.

My plan for this summer is simply to be able to negotiate the basic hills of Maine, with an eye to being able to bike comfortably to Waterville and back, 15 miles north via a very hilly and beautiful river road. I admit that this goal is pretty modest, but apparently so is my leg strength. That said, this state is a biking paradise. Roads are beautiful, drivers so far seem to be pretty respectful, and there's a really good statewide biking coalition (Bike Coalition of Maine, logically enough) that advocates for bikers and biking. Next summer I may think about doing one of those "bike across Maine for a cause" rides, or maybe one of the East Coast AIDS rides. RIght now I'd settle for being able to bike to work without stopping for oxygen . . .

The Marden's Experience

So I needed a new rug for my living room, whose floors are cold (as, indeed, all of my floors are). This of course means a trip to Marden's.

I called my friend Bruce who lives in Waterville, about 15 miles north of Augusta and home of Colby College, a liberal arts college so prestigious that it's likely you've heard of it. (To give you some perspective on this, Colby's excellent art gallery already had a strong collection of 19th- and 20th-century American art, but it just got stronger to the tune of a set of paintings worth $100 million. I kid you not.) Bruce was game to introduce me to yet another important Maine institution, so off we went to look at rugs. And pretty much everything else.

Marden's is a discount retailer of a specific sort: the kind that buys up odd lots, overstocks, last year's whatever, puts them all in a warehouse, and watches the merchandise fly out the door. There are Marden's all over Maine, and the company does big business. I wouldn't say it has everything; it's probably more accurate to say that in its illustrious history, it, at some time and in some place, has had everything.

The Waterville Marden's is located in a former Wal-Mart, which is an excellent reuse of a building that, frankly, can't be used in a lot of ways. (Let's face it, a former Wal-Mart is a little big for a Mexican restaurant or a coffehouse.) We started with furniture, which it had plenty of, and got to rugs. The deals are exceptionally good -- big Oriental wool rugs at 65% off and up. Still to rich for my blood, but still . . . carpet remnants galore. Flooring. Water- and smoke-damaged linoleum. Clearly, somebody will buy this stuff, because Marden's has been buying damaged stuff for years, and it keeps on selling.

Then we went through acres of googah and doodads, tools, lawn stuff, clothes, wallpapers, toys, you name it. Much of it is tat, I'll be the first to admit. But you go to Marden's because you just never know. Its slogan is "You shoulda bought when you saw it . . . " because it's never really the same store twice. For example, if I had so chosen, I could've acquired:

enough matching bathtowels to dry off Iowa

a great number of angels and angel-related stuff (wind chimes, notepads, garden plaques, soap dishes) with which to decorate and/or bless my home

power tools, many of them large and sort of scary

a wooden bridge for my garden, presumably to be placed over the stream that I would be obligated to install

baggy jeans a la Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs, so that I be gettin' jiggy wit' it in, uh, central Maine

T-shirts to show that I've been to various beaches on Maine coast. Whether or not I actually have is irrelevant

little, tiny Oriental rugs to place in front of one's chair, just big enough for one's feet

wineglasses for Bordeaux. I mean all of the people in Bordeaux

women's shoes! women's shoes! women's shoes!

Marden's is popular because its stuff is cheap and, among the dreck, often of very high quality. So you just have to go and wander around and see what's there. Until you get a sense of what it normally stocks, it's not the kind of store where you go looking for a specific something. In fact, many of the shoppers I saw seemed to be wandering about, as I was, simply seeing what looked interesting. Bruce and I began to play a game that is particularly suited to stores like these, which I title, If You Really Hated Me a Lot, What Would You Buy Me for Christmas? I had nearly settled on the glow-in-the-dark guardian angel switchplate when Bruce spotted the SpongeBob Squarepants electric toothbrush holder, which was clearly the Winner.

I can see myself going to Marden's on a regular basis for the entertainment value. I envision taking someone from behind the Iron Curtain there, sweeping my arms across the acres of merchandise, and saying in a loud, American voice, "THIS is what capitalism looks like." He might break down and weep, though whether from joy or from horror I'm not sure.

Summer, Sort of

Spring has sprung, and it seems as if it's trying very hard to be summer in Maine. For academic purposes, summer has started; the term is over, my grades are in, and I am putting together my summer plans after this initial laze-about that I have undetaken for the last week. The end of the term always knocks me over, and it really starts three weeks before the term ends when the papers start a-rollin' in, which is why you haven't read a Kennebec Report in a while.

Spring does not last long here, and it's a weird pastiche of weather patterns, as if the state can't quite decide what it wants to do. In late May, the temperature hit the 90s in the south by the weekend, capping off a week in which it snowed in the northern Crown of Maine. What is up with that? And though the weather was pleasant last week, in the 70s and even 80s, it's dropped to the 60s this weekend, with lots of overcast-ness and rain. Part of the weather patterns is determined by the location of the state and its own peculiar geography. The coast is often colder and certainly foggier than the inland, the White Mountains to the west generate snow, and Aroostook County way in the north ("The County" to us) seems to operate under its own rules, as if it were another state. Some folk I know up there believe that it is another state--or maybe province, given its French, Quebecois nature.

Regardless of the weather, I am going through the pleasant feeling of knowing that I can set the alarm for 7:00 AM, wake up to MPBN (the Maine Public Broadcasting Network, which covers the whole state), and then consequently loll about, serene in the knowledge that I don't actually have to get up at all. I do have projects for the summer--three articles for publication that need attending to, reading for my fall courses and revision of their syllabi and handouts, reading for the Renaissance literature course I'll teach in the spring--but typically, I begin the summer by doing not much of anything, or at least things that aren't very strenuous: pleasure reading. Polishing my brass lamp. Buying a rug for the living room. (More on that later, as I report on the Marden's Experience.) Organizing my personal files. Taking my bike in for a tune-up. Walking in the Maine State Arboretum. Planning my trips around Maine this summer--one's set, two more are getting set, and my New York City trip in August is on the calendar. Just attending to the things I should've gotten to a while ago and never did because I was grading papers or whatever.

For an academic, summer is just a long continuation of summers that you had when you were a kid. You wake up in June and realize that you have months ahead of you and no particular responsibilities. I live for getting up very early--despite what I wrote above, I still generally rise early, even if I don't have to--and drinking my coffee on my backyard porch, listening to the noisy birds sing, and watching the sun rise over the Kennebec Valley. Henry James commented that "summer afternoon" constitutes the two most beautiful words in the English language, but I would make a case for "summer morning." You have the whole day ahead of you, and then you realize that you have a whole summer of days ahead of you.

I will of course get to work, but thus far I have sought to regain that feeling that I had as a kid on summer mornings when the sun shone through our neighbor's ash tree and I would get on my bike and ride off, not knowing where I was going or when I'd get home. It's a luxury that we who teach have, and it's one of the great perks of the job. We may not be paid well in the humanities, though it's certainly enough, but we do get the luxury of reliving our childhoods for our entire careers.