Bold Coast: Cutler never changes much. That’s one of the things people love about it.

“There is a web of family connections,” Delia Mae Farris, 64, says of her hometown, Cutler, located about ninety miles east of Bangor on a remote stretch of Maine coast. “We just kind of live it, but sometimes it’s fun to try to untangle it. Everyone is woven together, you see. I can look up town and see many of my relatives’ houses, and they can see mine. We live in a fish bowl. To live that way requires real skills in small-town etiquette and appreciation for each person’s need for privacy. You live your own lives with as much dignity as you possibly can in a live-and-let live way, but when there’s an emergency, we’re all there for each other.”

Read about Cutler – and watch a video of the Cutler Coast Preserve -  in the September issue of Down East magazine.

In Good Company: Edgecomb Potters

Rachel Maldovan used to make her living picking shrimp for a fishmonger in Bath. “I don’t like shrimp. I don’t eat shrimp. I don’t even like the smell of shrimp,” she says. “I was so unhappy.” So she took a chance and applied for a job at the pottery that, as a child growing up on the Boothbay peninsula, she had watched expand from a converted one-room schoolhouse to a rambling series of contemporary silvery gray barns whose outdoor crafts displays are among the area’s biggest summer attractions. In turn, Edgecomb Potters owners Richard and Christine Hilton took a chance on her. Under the Hiltons’ tutelage, Maldovan graduated from smoothing seams on soft, freshly molded pots to applying and firing temperamental glazes to embellishing the pieces with Richard’s signature brushstroke. “That was pretty special because Richard had trusted only one other person to do it,” Rachel says. “I practiced it so much that I dreamt about it.  I found that because I had picked shrimp, I had the hands to do it.”

Maldovan is one of several people that pottery owners Christine and Richard Hilton have hired on the strength of their intuition rather than the conventional wisdom that said their potters should have formal training in the ceramic arts. In fact, Christine suggests, her employees’ lack of formal training has proven something of an advantage to what the Rand McNally Road Atlas called “one the most highly acclaimed art potteries in America.” Unencumbered by the rules, they are open to experimentation. “We push it,” Christine says. “Rachel is always pushing the glazes. We give her permission to create, and we give her permission to fail. Every time we open a kiln it’s like Christmas because you never know what is going to come out.”

Read the Edgecomb Potters story in the July 2011 issue of Down East magazine.

Our Town: Mount Vernon is the kind of place we’d all like to call home

One summer afternoon a few years ago, Wayne Davis set out for a drive into the countryside south of his home in Farmington. It was new territory for the retired marine biologist who had recently married and relocated to Maine, and he ventured onto the back roads that rise and tumble through the farmland and forests of the Kennebec River valley. Suddenly, at the foot of a long hill, there it was: a wee village pinched between a glinting lake and a pond. Kids splashed on a little beach next to the community center, a former church with Victorian stick-work painted deep green. There was a brick general store selling everything from curtain rods to pesto, a couple of small antiques shops, and a two-hundred-year-old shingled gristmill — waterwheel and all. “I had this experience that I don’t have the words to describe,” Davis recalls, placing his hand over his heart. “The place had an emotional impact on me. Something just felt right. I didn’t even know the name of the town, and I didn’t know how to get back.”

When he stumbled upon the hamlet again six months later, he not only made a point of knowing where he was, he began looking for property, settling on a 1915 automotive garage whose ruptured walls and sagging roof were challenges he was eager to tackle given the building’s glorious perch on Minnehonk Lake. With its large industrial-style windows, open floor plan, and drywall whose jaggedy edges expose rock walls, the home and guest lodge he has created is a bit unconventional, but that makes it perfectly suited to the little town of Mount Vernon.

“Eclectic,” says Davis, summing up his adopted hometown’s nature. “We have artists, writers, educators, farmers, and retirees who have created what the world is looking for: a real community. It’s a hidden valley, a little oasis.”

Read about Mount Vernon in the June issue of Down East.

Robbinston: A Town in Repose

Alden Mingo is a contented man. “Everyone wants to go to heaven,” the blueberry and cranberry grower tells his wife every day, “but when I get up in the morning and put my two feet on the floor, I’m already there.”

He wakes up in Robbinston, the last town on the Down East shoreline — the last town, for that matter, on the Atlantic coast in the United States. If it were possible to make a running leap off Robbinston’s wild red sandstone cliffs and soar over Passamaquoddy Bay, you’d land in the resort town of St. Andrews, New Brunswick, whose fine mansions, two hundred dollars-a-night historic hotel, and botanical garden inhabited by peacocks represent not just another country, but another world.

Lean and ropy from working the land, Mingo is in his early seventies and has lived in Robbinston, a lake-dotted hamlet of five hundred people, all his life. “I’ve traveled quite a bit,” he says, “so I know what a beautiful community it is. The people here are real people. When there’s a disaster, like someone loses a home to fire, the whole community is right there. The grade school is the best — the teachers, the principal, everything. The kids who go to that school go very far in life — you’d be surprised to hear what some of them have done. And the basketball games, well, you can’t get in because the seats are full for every game.” He grins and folds his arms across his chest. “I’m not moving.”

Heaven could be more heavenly, Mingo admits. His daughters — one in upstate New York, the other in Delaware — would love to move back home, but there are no jobs for them in the Passamaquoddy Bay area, whose roughly 17 percent poverty rate mirrors that of Washington County as a whole. “We’re losing all our younger people,” Mingo laments. “They’re all gone.”

Continue reading Robbinston: A Town in Repose in the May 2011 issue of Down East.

A Plague of Pills

For most of Paula Frost’s life, crime was practically unheard of in her hometown of Perry, a community of 850 people way Down East in Washington County. Then about five years ago, she started locking her doors. “I have deadbolts on both of them,” says Frost, who directs outpatient drug counseling at the Regional Medical Center in Lubec and heads Perry’s volunteer fire department. “And I always take my keys out of my vehicle. If addicts are not supporting their habit by selling pills, then they’re stealing. They will take anything that isn’t nailed down, quite literally, and they might even pull the nails out and take them and the hammer, too. Because of what I do, I have a pretty good idea of who is doing what out there, but the average person doesn’t. There is a huge amount of distrust in the community.”

Continue reading about Maine’s prescription drug abuse epidemic in the April issue of Down East magazine.