I HADN’T expected a reception, but one is waiting on Ted Tihansky and Alison Hill’s lawn. The artists and I have just strolled to their home from the Black Duck, one of two stores still open for business in what passes for a village on Monhegan Island. The sky is a robust blue, but an October wind whips over the headlands, a remnant of the rainstorm that drenched the coast the previous day. Bruised apples and yellow leaves litter the still-damp lane.

And what a strange reception it is. The guests, a half-dozen or so, are tall and scrawny, with coal-black skin reminiscent of the shriveled corpse of King Tut. Wrist-thin necks. Sagging breasts. Squinty eyes. Mouths open in laughter … or is it grief?

This is how Ted Tihansky stays fit and warm during Monhegan’s off-season. Armed with a chainsaw, he spontaneously hacks fallen trees into wraiths and bizarre animal hybrids, then tosses them into a bonfire for a good scorching.

Presenting one joyful couple leaning toward each other, heads tilted, mouths agape, Ted says, “I did these two when we got married – Alison’s first year out here – and that’s what I think was coming from my subconscious. They’re called Singing Man and Singing Woman, and I think I’m just gonna have to keep ‘em.”

The introductions continue. Here’s Skinny Man, lashed to a stockade fence by a twining wisteria, and Cobra, a snake with a profile like Marley’s ghost.  “This is me trying to get a hold of myself,” says Ted, fingertips waxing the cheek of one stressed-looking fellow. “And this woman is having a hard time. I think it’s my female side freaking out at whatever.” Surveying the whole motley lot, he adds, “I never know what I’m going to make exactly. Once I do ‘em, I go ‘uh-oh’ or ‘yaaaaay!’ They’re very powerful. Painting is my focus, but these come from a deeper level.”

Dressed in a bulky sweater and paint-spattered pants, his thinning hair pulled into a ponytail, Ted, fifty-five, declares with boyish earnestness that he will keep carving log figures until he’s made sixty-five of them.

Alison, fifty-seven, is wearing similarly splotched jeans and a ball cap pulled low so she is all blue eyes and pixie smile. The number sixty-five, she tells me later, has no significance. “Ted’s like that,” she says affectionately. “He’ll just come out and say, ‘I’m going to make sixty-five of these!’ or ‘I’m doing twenty of those!’”

Monhegan, a narrow, one-and-a-half-mile-long hulk of meadows and forest braced by glowering cliffs, has famously drawn artists for 150 years. In summer, when the island’s population hovers around 600, painters can be seen dabbing canvases atop every crag and on every lane and cove.  This time of year, though, you can count on one hand the number of artists living on island. Ted has been a year-rounder since 1999. Alison joined him two years later.  Having traveled through the seasons with a community known for reticence toward newcomers, the two have acquired an intimate knowledge of place that informs their work. They can’t help but paint the same coves, fish shacks and lobstermen, often working side by side, yet their expressions are uniquely their own.

“Both are exceptionally talented portrait artists, and there aren’t a lot of artists who do proficient and excellent portraits,” says Elizabeth Moss Civiello, whose galleries in Falmouth and Scarborough show Hill and Tihansky’s works. Once married to the son of Henry Kallem, a prominent member of the Monhegan art colony, Civiello has a particular interest in Monhegan art. “The technical aspects Ted and Alison have acquired as great portrait painters are applied to their plein air work. Portrait painting has given them the skills to capture tonal color differences in their paintings of sunsets and the ocean.”

Civiello, a former full-time Monheganite herself, first met Alison on the island ferry. “She is a very modest and lovely person,” Civiello says. “Ted also is very modest and very eclectic. He’s the stereotypical artist personality – scattered, with flashes of brilliance.”

Before Alison, Ted and I go indoors, there is one more character to meet.  Propped against the deck, he leans back from the waist, one long arm downwardly outstretched. “That’s Pulling Man,” Ted says, rooting in the vines at the figure’s feet. “Pulling Man was made from a chestnut tree at the Shining Sails inn…oh, here it is!” He plucks a skinny black arm from the tomatoes. Holding it against Pulling Man’s stump, Ted explains, “I made an error and cut it too deep, then he fell down and it broke.” (Ted’s artworks are often casualties of his kinetic work style.) “But when he’s up and leaning against something, he’s pulling. That’s important because people on Monhegan pull and push a lot.”

ONE day earlier I was aboard the Elizabeth Ann as she plowed out of the fishing village of Port Clyde into big gray rollers whisked up by wind and the previous night’s full moon. It was nigh impossible to focus on the horizon as the boat scaled one steep wave then plunged into another, flooding the bow and squirting icy seawater through the edges of the cabin door. The boat, which carries mail, freight and passengers to and from Monhegan, was on her fall schedule – one round-trip daily, down from three in summer. Come November, the wood-heated Laura B, a modified World War II army patrol boat, will make the thirteen-mile journey three times weekly, the island’s only link to the mainland until May.

Monhegan’s hemlock-covered precipices did not materialize in the heavy downpour until we were minutes from the wharf, where a small crew decked head to toe in orange oilskins got to work tying and unloading the boat. A couple of battered pickups stood ready to haul luggage for $2 a bag. Passengers set out on foot, following dirt roads edged with stacks of green and yellow wire traps, piles of fluorescent buoys and other gear peculiar to lobstering, the chief occupation of about one-third of Monhegan’s seventy full-time residents.

His first two winters on Monhegan, Ted Tihansky plied that trade as Captain Dan Murdock’s sternman. “I did it to become integrated,” he explains, sitting now with Alison in their living room-cum-gallery whose walls are covered floor to rafters with paintings. “I didn’t want to be an outsider.”

Raised in Pennsylvania coal country, he had no prior fishing experience. His job was to empty each hauled trap of unwanted crabs and fish and re-bait it with a mesh bag of rotting fish parts. Lobsters, if there were any, were tossed into a tank. “You go by that tank and – bang! — their claws go up and they got you,” Ted says, clutching his throat where a lobster latched onto him one day. “You have to scream and drop to your knees while Dan gets the pliers to put pressure on the other claw, hoping they let go. I mean, it scared me. Four in the morning. Eighteen degrees. Staying out there eleven hours.” A few times, while dropping re-baited traps from the moving boat, his legs got tangled in the lines and he was dragged toward the rails. Murdock heard his screams in the nick of time. “It would have been all over,” Ted says, wide-eyed. “How long are you going to survive down there? Seventy fathoms. It’s sick! It’s crazy!”

The experience influenced Ted’s artwork practically and inspirationally. “I was a good bait bagger – fast – and I would get ahead, so I’d scratch paintings onto scraps of wood with a bait iron.” Pieces like his  life-sized painting of two lobstermen pulling a skiff onto Fish Beach ring true, he says, because “I did this work. Dragging that skiff from low tide was about the worse thing you could think about after eleven hours of work. Lobstering hooked up with my art work, with the will to continue painting. It was an experience I had to have to see how hard anything is, whatever you do.”

Some afternoons, still wearing his reeky Grundens, he’d catch the Laura B and drive nonstop to visit his sweetheart in Newport, Rhode Island.  “He’d come into my studio totally covered in fish stuff,” Alison recalls. A longtime Newport resident, she was making her living as a portraitist, taking commissions for oils and sketching pastels at sidewalk fairs.

She inherited her mother’s gift for portraiture, but in college she’d been practical, majoring in psychology, then earning master’s degrees in art therapy and art education. Neither of these subjects figured into her first jobs, however. Hill’s admiration for strong women – her portraits of Monhegan’s female lobstermen are studies in grit and femininity – was nurtured working as a union carpenter and telephone lineman. She is serious body builder, winner of the 1986 Miss New England Natural Bodybuilding Championships. After suffering a back injury, she took up painting in earnest, studying at the Lyme Academy in Connecticut and the Art Student’s League in New York, where she attracted the attention of Deane Keller, legendary for his art courses on human anatomy. In a recommendation, Keller wrote that he’d encountered only one other student with Alison’s ability and spirit in forty-five years of teaching. (It is Ted who reveals this tidbit, prompting Alison to remark, “You’re embarrassing me!”)

It was at an art fair that Alison met Ted, who’d arrived in Newport in the late 1980s with a resume that included training at the Art Student’s League, Lyme Academy and Paier College of Art. He invigorated the local art scene by opening a gallery that heralded show openings with free concerts and plays. (He remains a Newport favorite and is represented in many private collections). He and Alison began painting together occasionally and, after a few years, friendship blossomed into romance.

In 1991, Ted received a fellowship that allowed him to travel the country and paint. His last stop, Monhegan, muse of Rockwell Kent, Edward Hopper, three generations of Wyeths and countless others, kept pulling him back, summers at first, then one winter, then another. In spring Alison came to work with Ted at the Trailing Yew, a rustic inn popular with hikers. Their tiny bedroom was furnished with one single bed and a kerosene lamp. “I was madly in love so I didn’t care,” Alison says. “I thought we’d be going back to Newport at the end of the summer. Then Ted announced he wanted to stay.”

SEVEN years later, Alison delights in the endless inspiration embodied in an island so small the din of breaking waves is inescapable. “The light is always a little different,” she says. “There is never enough time. Even when the days end at 9 o’clock, you work to the last minute because there is always something more beautiful to paint.”

She enjoys Monhegan’s rhythms – the camaraderie of many painters in summer, the introspection of winter, when she and Ted don one-piece storm suits, sling easels over their shoulders and trudge through snow to paint scenes the other artists never see. The frigid temperatures turn their palettes stiff and sticky, but they use that to advantage, the thick colors adding dimension to their paintings. “Ted is hard core, but I don’t last too long out there,” admits Alison, who regards the off-season as an opportunity to paint the stoic faces of Monhegan in her studio. Island living has allowed her to develop as a landscape artist – she renders her subjects with loose, choppy strokes, emphasizing mood and form over details – but portraits are her first love, and hers are luminous.

Hill learns about her models as much through conversation as quiet observation. “You have to get inside that person and get who they are,” she says. “I get a sense of their expressions and what’s behind their eyes.” Thus, she coaxes from the canvas not only the sure-footed stance of Angela Iancelli but something deeper as well – the inner resolve and determination of a lobster boat captain and single mother. Her perceptiveness results in family portraits that seem almost alive – a child’s shy smile, a baby’s innocent appraisal, a mother’s gaze, full of pride and unconditional love.

Like Ted, Alison eased into the tight-knit community by making herself useful. She taught art classes at the schoolhouse (enrollment: five) and served as vice president of the public library. “You don’t want to be in anybody’s face,” she says of the unwritten protocol, “but I’m like that anyway, so it was a good fit for me. I have a lot of space to do what I want.”

Ted’s work, too, has been influenced by Monhegan’s blend of intimacy and isolation and a life paced by nature in all its brutal beauty. His short, quick brush strokes have become more energetic, seeming to dance and leap upon the canvas. His landscapes in particular are drifting from impressionism toward rhythmic and soulful compositions that embody not so much Monhegan’s surface as its essence. Manana island may glow like charcoal ember under a sky seen as orange, red, purple and gray streaks. A frenzied grouping of thick white, gray and brown strokes becomes identifiable as a snow-covered road because of the sketchy figure walking upon it. (That would be Ed Donegan, the man who taught Ted the ins and outs of sterning and a favorite model for both artists.) “I have this desire to express what moves me in the moment,” Ted says. “Staying in the moment. That’s the only time I was ever happy in my life. I can’t rush anymore. I don’t want to think about what’s going to happen three hours from now. It’s this moment, the present, the now.”

Today Alison and Ted are fully embraced in Monhegan’s hug. They create and sell artworks to benefit island institutions. They accompany fellow islanders to legislative hearings  on school issues. Every Trap Day, when Monhegan lobstermen set their traps together, they help load thousands of traps onto pickups for the short jaunt to the wharf, where they unload them. “We’re mixed up in the whole deal here,” Ted says. “The school teachers are going to work. The kids are going to school. The carpenters are indoors working. The fishermen are fishing. You better get out there and do what you’re supposed to be doing too. This is what we’re supposed to be doing. We’re supposed to be painting here.”

Originally published in Down East, October 2008.

Every summer Andy Swift throws a huge party with live music in his barn on a pastoral slope overlooking Bald Mountain in Hope. On one of these occasions, an out-of-state guest assessed the artists, writers, farmers, and athletes mingling among the antique fire engines that Swift restores for an international clientele and remarked appreciatively, “Wow, Hope is hip!” Swift took the stage and repeated the line, drawing whoops and cheers.

Among the partiers was the Hope General Store’s new owner, Andrew Stewart, who recognized a good rallying cry when he heard one. Within a few days he was selling the bumper stickers that have made “Hope is Hip” the unofficial motto of this Camden Hills hamlet. This isn’t a case of excessive town pride. Just a few years ago, Hope Corner, the town’s center, was all but shuttered. Today it is home to several businesses, including a blacksmith, a woodworker, a home builder, two apple orchards, and, most recently, a fine tavern that, in a reversal of the usual traffic patterns, is making Hope a destination for folks from neighboring Camden and Rockland. Sometimes, the quaint crossroads even bustles, thanks to a string of celebrations like a children’s carnival, the Hatchet Mountain Triathlon, and the Hope Jazz Festival, relatively new inventions that already feel like traditions.

Maybe it was a perfect alignment of the planets,” muses Bill Huntington with a shrug as he considers the origins of this rural renaissance of which Hope Spinnery, his wind-powered fiber-processing mill, in the notch between Hatchet and Moody mountains, is a part. “More likely, it was the right combination of people at the right time. Because we’re all people with small businesses in a small community, we promote each other — you don’t find that kind of support in a bigger town. Still, I don’t think Hope would have gelled the way it has if Andrew Stewart hadn’t revived the Hope General Store. So much of what has happened here over the last few years is due to being able to walk in that store and run into three or four people that you know.”

A young Scotsman with a playful spirit, Stewart remodeled the abandoned store four years ago with the conviviality of a British pub in mind. He stocked the shelves with necessities (milk and bread), treats (140 varieties of beer), and a few exotics (Bovril, tahini, and curry paste). He reserved a corner for the post office, which he wooed back to town, and he created a nook for tarriers, furnishing it with a pair of sofas and an open kitchen where he could hobnob with customers as he made their sandwiches and pizza. “I literally had no clue what the response would be,” he reflects, “but opening day was pretty exciting. I overheard great conversations: ‘I can’t believe I’ve lived here ten years and never run into you before!’ People appreciate having a place to meet up as much as having a place to buy milk.”

In the general store, nudged by Stewart’s enthusiasm for his new home, Hope’s old-timers and newcomers discovered something to keep them from hurrying out of town in search of things to do: each other. “Andrew has created a fire in the center of town,” says Emily Davis, owner with husband Brien of nearby Hope Orchards. “You go in there and you see the neighborhood.”

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Originally published in Down East, May 2009

It ought be called Independence, this central Maine town whose citizens gather monthly to share a meal prepared with foods grown on local farms. Whether meatloaf and potatoes or turkey with all the fixings, the community supper is delicious, fun, and powerfully symbolic: Here, tucked into rolling hills thirty minutes from the nearest center big enough to have a supermarket, hums a hamlet of just under 2,000 people. Its village is neat and polished, the storefronts are open for business, and there is no trace of the decay that mars other rural communities whose self-sustaining economies have evaporated.

Or perhaps the name should be Audacity, for that’s what it took to found a college in a place like this without so much as a one-dollar endowment. All the more audacious that this happened forty-two years ago, when the town’s economy turned on a 500,000-chicks-a-week hatchery and Maine’s poultry industry was on the brink of bust. Despite an early history that might be titled How Not To Run a College, the school today enrolls 520 students and offers more environmental majors than any other American college.

But why re-label a town already perfectly named? That village, after all, was re-energized by neighbors using their own dollars and labor to improve it. That college was launched by citizens to benefit their town, and they held it together for the sake of that goal even as the institution teetered on bankruptcy and the door to the president’s office revolved and revolved. These acts define unity, and Unity the town is named.

“Unity is in the middle of everything or the middle of nowhere, depending on your point of view,” says John Piotti, a state representative, executive director of Maine Farmland Trust, and former head of the Unity Barn Raisers, a citizens organization that many credit with nurturing this community’s uncommonly strong sense of place and commitment to self-reliance. It’s true. Unity sits at the intersections of Routes 9 and 139, about midway between Augusta and Bangor and midway between Waterville and Belfast. Interstate 95 is fifteen miles west, placing Unity beyond sprawl’s reach, but the town’s roads are well traveled by trucks detoured from the highway by weight limits.

Small as it is, the village (a designation rarely used by locals who, Piotti says, prefer “downtown”) is nonetheless the service center of farm-dotted northern Waldo County, with amenities like a grocery, a health center, two banks, restaurants, a racetrack (Unity Raceway, “Maine’s toughest oval”) and, most unexpected, a handsome 200-seat performance center that hosts acts of regional and national acclaim as well as Unity College’s environmentally-themed guest lectures (past speakers include Robert F. Kennedy Jr.). Outside Waldo County, Unity is best known as home of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA) and its Common Ground Fair, a wholesome three-day celebration of rural, sustainable living that draws 60,000 people every fall. As they cross into town, travelers are greeted by signs reading, “Welcome to Unity, Where Old Fashioned Values Are Not Old Fashioned.”

Unity is sublimely pastoral. The town’s highest point is only 600 feet, yet views are long and sweeping owing to open farmland and Unity Pond, or Lake Winnecook, on Unity’s northern border. The Quakers who settled the area more than 200 years ago knew it as Twenty-Five Mile Pond Plantation (Unity Pond was twenty-five miles from Fort Halifax in Winslow). When the town was incorporated in 1804, residents named it Unity to express their support of Jeffersonian democracy. Over the next 150 years, industries came and went – grist and carding mills, a cheese factory, shoe and pants manufactories, vegetable canneries and an ice business that, in season, cut 3,000 tons of the state’s “best and bluest ice” daily from Unity Pond and sent it by rail to ships in Belfast. In summer, the same railroad brought vacationers to the Central House hotel, where Williams Jennings Bryan once delivered a campaign speech from the veranda and, some fifty years later, Bing Crosby spent the night. Farming has been the constant. At one point, more than 300 farmers worked Unity’s soil. Today they number about twenty, but Unity remains the heart of a larger agrarian community, counting more than fifty farms within a ten-mile radius.

Today’s Unity – the civic-minded, environmentally conscious, determinedly independent college town – evolved from a feisty response to an early 1960s development that threatened to sap the town’s vitality. That was the construction of Interstate 95 between Augusta and Bangor which, to the dismay of local businesspeople, looped well around Unity, the most direct path. Adding insult to injury, Unity was left off the 1963 official state highway map because of a printer’s error.

In 1965, one year after the Fairfield-to-Newport section of I-95 opened, a group of businesspeople, led by Unity Telephone Company president Bert Clifford, announced plans to establish a liberal arts college. “Unity College was started in part to get Unity back on the map,” says John Zavodny, chairman of the college’s department of advising and services. “The poultry industry also was drying up and that was a big part of the economic base.”

The suggestion of a college began as a joke in the wee hours of a meeting convened to choose a project benefiting the town (other ideas included a sock factory), nevertheless, it captured imaginations. In September 1966, Unity Institute of Liberal Arts opened on the northern slope of Quaker Hill, land donated by a hatchery. It had fifteen teachers, most of them professors coaxed out of retirement, and thirty-nine students, many of whom were looking to avoid the draft. Tuition was $990.

Zavodny’s office is in South Coop, one of the renovated chicken coops that formed the original campus. While the institution has developed tremendously in forty-two years, it remains modest, with an almost outpost feel. This, in part, is what appealed to Zovodny when he quit East Tennessee State University for Unity in 2000. “I was smitten by the idea that someone could pull off having a college that isn’t the higher education equivalent of a factory farm,” he says.

Zavodny was attracted to Unity’s environmental focus, which emerged with the flowering of the American environmental movement in the 1970s. The college’s own blossoming, however, was painful. Started on a shoe-string with no financial cushion, the school relied heavily on student tuition to meet expenses. Unity suffered severe financial setbacks that jeopardized its accreditation. The founding businessmen, who didn’t fully understand the economics of an academic institution, clashed with trustees and educators over Unity’s direction. The school has no official written history, so the turning point is unclear, but turn it did. With 152 staffers, fifty-nine of whom are full-time or adjunct faculty, Unity College is now the town’s largest employer. Under the leadership of President Mitchell Tomahow, who arrived last summer after a thirty-year career with Antioch New England Graduate School, Unity is poised to boost its national profile as “America’s Environmental College.”

The college is just one of several threads that form Unity’s rich culture. Another was spun by the late Bert Clifford, a dairy farmer and postmaster who acquired the local telephone company, then, in his golden years, struck it rich by winning two telephone service lotteries, spawning the companies Unitel and Unicel. He poured his money into Unity, building Unity Centre for Performing Arts and Field of Dreams, a lakeside athletic complex. The  bronze Forest Hart sculptures of a running black bear, moose, and doe and buck positioned dramatically on the historical society’s lawn are Clifford gifts, as are two of the village’s most prominent buildings – Clifford Common, which houses the town office and post office, and Unity Foundation, one of two grant-awarding charities established by Clifford. Clifford’s unilateral philanthropy was not without controversy (he once offered a $1 million endowment to Unity College in exchange for the resignations of the president and trustees), but no one questions his love for Unity, which yet benefits from his generosity.

Another thread is sewn by the Unity Barn Raisers, whose 450 members are residents and businesses from Unity and surrounding towns. They, more than any institution or individual, have shaped Unity’s identity as a proactive community with clearly defined values. The grassroots organization was founded in 1995, soon after Unity adopted its comprehensive plan, a process that had successfully involved many residents in sharing visions for the town. The planners, however, didn’t believe their job was finished. “They decided it was important to make sure the community developed in ways that built on the existing economy, that kept our rural working landscape and character, and that continued to create better lives for people here,” says Tess Woods, the Barn Raisers’ executive director, a town selector and a Unity College alumna.

The Barn Raisers, then led by Piotti, set their sights on downtown, where all but a few storefronts stood empty. Using grants, they opened a community center in the old Masonic hall. It has rarely gone a day unused since. More important, it became a catalyst, attracting several businesses including the health center.  The Barn Raisers, funded largely through money raised locally in annual appeals, have since compiled a long list of achievements: a farmers’ market, a trails network, a public beach, a community gym, and those monthly suppers which remind folks that farming here is very much alive. “But the greatest accomplishment,” Piotti believes, “is that we turned the community from one that felt destined to take whatever future is thrown at it to one that feels the future is in our hands and we can craft it. “

More and more, these threads intertwine. The Unity Foundation funds the salary of the Barn Raisers’ community service coordinator who works with Unity College students on local school projects and trail building. The Barn Raisers and MOFGA are creating a local farms guide illustrated by college students. The Clifford Foundation has made Unity College the steward of the Field of Dreams and Unity Performing Arts Centre. Unity College’s goal of a sustainable campus echoes the Barn Raisers’ commitment to rural vitality, which echoes MOFGA’s support of Maine farmers. Examples of partnerships and shared values go on and on, threads weaving together, creating Unity.

Originally published in Downeast, May 2007

Royal Montana has generously painted his late 1700s Colonial house burgundy, and we do mean generously. The clapboard siding, the window trim and muntins, the wide storm door that stands open in a welcoming gesture, even the fence and garden trellis wear the same deep shade of red. The monochromatic scheme is at once elegant and bold, which is what a house has to be if it’s going to get noticed in the town of Cherryfield.

The competition is fierce, you see. One of Maine’s most splendid collections of historic homes, many of them dressed to the nines with cupolas, towers, and bric-a-brac, is clustered right here, arising unexpectedly among the blueberry barrens and coastal woodlands of Maine’s poorest county. The houses suggest an audacious streak in this sleepy village’s past and, for that matter, its present: Who built such ostentatious displays of wealth and style in what must have seemed like the middle of nowhere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Who keeps them now, choosing to live in a town that is, if no longer remote, then certainly well off the beaten path?

Royal Montana does, for one, though no one is more surprised about that than he. The firstborn of a local girl and an Amish boy who came Down East to rake blueberries in the early 1950s, Montana grew up here and “all I wanted when I finished school was to get out of Cherryfield, out of Maine.” He grabbed his sitar (he’d learned to play as a teenager) and headed for India where he taught English, math, and Sanskrit folk songs off and on for three decades. It was on a visit home nearly four years ago that he happened upon the Colonial.

“They were going to tear it down to build apartments,” Montana recalls. “I was getting ready to go back to India, and I was sitting on the weedy lawn watching the Narraguagus River go by. I said, `If I buy this place, I can look at this pretty river every day.’ I stayed. This house completely altered my life.”

“Royal’s Folly,” his friends called it, and Montana couldn’t argue. “It looked like someone had pulled a pin from a grenade and threw it in the door. The parlor ceiling was full of holes. In some rooms the lathe held not one bit of plaster. There was no running water, no heat, nothing.”

He moved in that January and set up a tent in the living room, where every night he and his cat, Grace, “would sit and freeze.” Come morning he’d break the ice that had formed on the buckets of water he’d collected for washing and chores. Working room by room, advancing his tent with each little victory, Montana re-plastered the entire place in four months. He rebuilt the stairway he found dismantled under a second-floor sink, and he made peace with the crooked floors (one bump “the size of a skate park” is hidden under his bed) after he was warned that jacking them might snap the wooden pins joining the post-and-beam frame.

Along the way he discovered tantalizing clues to the lives that passed through the narrow, low-ceilinged hallways: a small boy’s britches, school chalk still in the pocket; whalebone corsets; pieces of fine china; letters to one of the house’s earliest inhabitants, Justice of the Peace Caleb Burbank; and, on a ledge above an attic window, “the coolest thing of all,” the business card of Warren Wass, captain of the Nellie Chapin that carried 158 Maine pilgrims on a widely ridiculed attempt to colonize Palestine in 1866.

Today, Montana makes his living managing a four-hundred-acre dairy farm, selling organic eggs from his own turkeys, geese, and chickens (the brood includes a sensitive rooster that Montana, a vegetarian, keeps caged in the kitchen during wet, chilly weather), and caring for a disabled man. He has no regrets about his life’s sharp turn. “Can you imagine tearing this place down?” he asks. “My gosh, it blows my mind! Many of the big houses in the town have similar stories. People came along and said, `Not acceptable. You can’t tear this down.’ Cherryfield looks better now than it ever did.”

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Down East, July 2008

L’long pi l’court (The long and short of it)

When Don Levesque joined the U.S. Army, he was asked how many times he’d been to a foreign country. “Hundreds,” he wrote on the form. Soon after, he was pulled aside and interrogated. Why, suspicious officers demanded to know, did he travel out of country so often? He shrugged. “Where I live, it’s like crossing the street.”

Levesque tells this story from the back porch of the St. John Valley Times, whose offices sit above the fast-moving St. John River in Madawaska, the most northeastern corner of the United States. Across the half-mile-wide river, wrapped in lush green fields and mountains, is the Canadian province of New Brunswick. Later on this warm humid June day, the newspaper publisher will be on the riverbank representing Levesques from both sides of the border at a reenactment of the landing of Acadian pioneers who settled “the Valley” in 1785. At day’s end, he’ll drive downtown, a gantlet of fluttering blue, white and red flags for the annual Acadian Festival, and turn left onto a steel two-lane bridge. On the opposite riverbank, a Canadian customs agent will ask, “Do you have anything?” Levesque will answer, “No,” and he’ll be waved on, through the city of Edmundston to his home in Saint-Basile. “I grew up in Grand Isle, went to high school in Van Buren, college in Fort Kent and now I live in Saint-Basile,” Levesque says. “Oh yeah, I’m a St. John Valley guy.”

The 20,000 people who live along the south shore of the St. John from Van Buren to St. Francis will tell you that the international border is all but invisible. Predominantly Franco-Americans, they often find more in common with the French-speaking folks “across,” than they do with the rest of Maine. In Madawaska, the region’s heart, nearly everyone traces his roots to the original settlers who built their homes on both sides of the St. John, long before it was used to divide the Valley into the United States and Canada. “We’re not American and we’re not Canadian,” offers Jean Cayer, who operates River Watch, Madawaska’s only bed and breakfast, out of her modest ranch-style home. “We’re Acadian.“

That’s true as far as it goes. Reality is more complex. For generations Madawaskans have voted in presidential elections, served in the military and attended schools that teach from a distinctly American perspective.  They are proud of their citizenship, but it has cost their culture dearly. Take Don Levesque, whose delightful weekly column, Mon 5¢, switches back and forth from English to French, mirroring the conversations heard on Madawaska’s streets. Colorful Valley French is unlike French spoken anywhere else, and Levesque’s spelling of it is playfully inventive because he, like most natives, didn’t learn to read or write in his first language (indeed, schoolchildren were punished if caught speaking French). Levesque’s Canadian-American daughters, on the other hand, go to school in Saint-Basile, just five miles from their dad’s boyhood hometown. Their classes are in French. Many of their friends don’t speak English at all. “It’s all one community,” observes Levesque of the towns straddling the border, “but the language is killing us.”

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Originally published June 2006, Down East

Author’s note: Since the publication of this article in Down East magazine, Poland Spring has opened a bottling plant in Kingfield.

JOHN DILL CALLS THEM “whisper trucks,” the 25 or so Poland Spring tanker trailers that pass daily through the western mountain village of Kingfield on their way to and from the company’s well in nearby Pierce Pond Plantation. Unlike the logging and lime trucks that rumble, always too fast, through the center of town, the Poland Spring trucks stop at the stop sign, follow the speed limit and rarely use their engine brakes. Dill, who is Kingfield’s first selectman and the Kingfield Water District’s treasurer, would like to hear a lot of more of them. They whisper hopes of jobs, prosperity and better times in economically depressed Franklin County.

Poland Spring, bottler of the nation’s third best-selling brand of water, has zeroed in on Kingfield as a location for its third Maine bottling plant. It would offer 60 jobs at startup and could grow to 250 employees. Kingfield’s aquifer has “wonderful water,” said Dill, who is satisfied there is more than enough to meet the town’s and Poland Spring’s needs. “It’s going to be a great thing for the town of Kingfield,” he said. “It’s going to bring in new energy. It will stabilize our school population. We have a lot of underemployed. People are waiting tables. If it gave someone a good job with benefits, he could have better health care, a little better car, a little better diet.”

Forty miles away in Rangeley, the very idea of Poland Spring trucks screams big problems to Selectman Rob Welsh. Poland Spring wants to withdraw 184 million gallons of water a year in nearby Dallas Plantation; if Maine’s Land Use Regulation Commission approves the application, as many as 100 tankers a day could be driving through downtown Rangeley in summer – peak season for a tiny lakeside community almost entirely dependent on tourism. “These are state roads, for sure, and everybody has a right to drive on them, but they also are part of our recreation,” said Welch, an innkeeper whose guests always ask about “moosing.” “People drive on those roads very slowly looking for moose. They stop in the middle of the road! You could easily have three, four, five cars stopped, looking at the same moose.”

One county, two towns. Two views of what an industry could mean. Sounds like the sort of responses one would expect when any large enterprise threatens to change the neighborhood. But it’s not that simple. Rarely has a company’s growth been met with the high anxiety that has accompanied Poland Spring’s reach into western Maine. “We’re not dealing with some little homegrown industry,” Welch said of Poland Spring, whose parent company is Swiss food giant Nestlé. “Their loyalty is to their stockholders. They are going to tie up and control as many aquifers as they can. Water is a huge issue, not just to our little community and our little aquifer. One hundred years from now, water will be more valuable than oil, and companies are staging themselves all over the world to control it.”

Welch echoes the message of H20 for ME, a grassroots campaign to make commercial water bottlers pay for Maine groundwater. The group made national news this winter when it petitioned for a vote on a bottled water tax. The petition drive failed, but H20 for ME leader Jim Wilfong has vowed to pursue the effort, which is aimed at strengthening state oversight of groundwater withdrawals. Maine has many laws governing the withdrawal of surface water, such as rivers and lakes, which are considered state property, however groundwater is largely treated as the property of the well owner.

Now several western Maine towns have imposed moratoriums on large water withdrawals as they draft ordinances to ensure sustainability of their aquifers. At times, the debates have been ugly. In Fryeburg, where Poland Spring has taken the local Board of Appeals to court for overturning a truck-loading station permit, some speculate that the “long tentacles” of Nestlé have reached into town boards and influenced decisions. In Kingfield, people complain of “hidden agendas” and call Poland Spring’s $10,000 gift to the town a bribe.

Some blame the tension on Poland Spring itself – for putting hundreds of trucks on rural roads and for profiting from the same water that flows into their sinks. (”Forget the jobs, forget the trucks,” one Kingfield man said. “I just don’t want them taking our water.”) Others blame H20 for ME, with its alarming vision of a not-too-distant future in which billions of gallons of groundwater are shipped out of state in railroad tankers. Whatever its root, the charged atmosphere has sharpened what would already be hot-button issues about jobs, growth and notions of what life in Maine should be.

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Originally published in Down East, May 2006.

No doubt Chellie Pingree will have a lot of concerns as she packs her bags for Washington, D.C., where she soon begins her new job representing Maine’s First Congressional District. Not disappointing the Maine State Legislature’s feisty new speaker of the House will be one of them.

“It would be brutal for me to turn her down,” says Pingree, a mischievous twinkle in her blue eyes. “If we don’t get funding for the fisheries or something’s she’s working on, I won’t dare show up at home. No one says no to Hannah.”

That would be Hannah Pingree, Chellie’s thirty-two-year-old daughter, who this past fall not only ran unopposed for her fourth term representing District 36 in the Maine State House, but faced no challengers in her bid for the House of Representative’s most powerful position. “Oh, I’ll be her chief lobbyist,” promises Hannah, rising to her mother’s affectionate teasing. “Whether it’s fisheries policy or funding for roads and bridges, it’s difficult for the state to make a big difference alone. It’s time for the federal government to step up. During the past year I’ve certainly thought, ‘Well, if I get my mother elected, I can get her to help me.’ ”

Mother and daughter are sitting opposite one another in the cozy living room of Nebo Lodge, a ninety-six-year-old inn on North Haven island that Chellie, 53, and some friends purchased and restored two years ago. Wearing jeans and an olive quilted vest over a sweater, Chellie sits with her legs draped over the arm of a wing-backed chair, unwinding after pinch-hitting on the breakfast crew. Hannah, whose pale blonde hair is all the more striking against her navy sweater, settles into the cushy sofa, having just strolled in from the Pingree home, the inn’s backdoor neighbor.

The Pingrees’ relaxed manner belies their shared reputation for passionate and gutsy leadership. Chellie, who served eight years in the Maine Senate and four years as CEO of the Washington-based ethics advocacy group Common Cause, is best known for her pioneering fight to permit the state to negotiate with drug companies for lower prices. Hannah gained national attention for her efforts to phase out toxic flame retardant chemicals found in common household items, like mattresses, furniture, and television sets. The women, both progressive Democrats, faced strenuous opposition from industry lobbyists. Both prevailed.

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Down East, January 2009

Gary Freeman aims his flashlight at the cavern wall, illuminating a cavity big enough to hold a child playing hide-and-seek. A yellowish prism angling out of the hollow’s floor is briefly but excitingly disorienting. That quartz crystal was locked in this rocky cell for three hundred million years, unseen by man until now. It’s as if we’re gazing through a portal to the past.

Freeman and I are perched atop a mound of fresh blast debris deep inside Mount Mica, the United States’ oldest gemstone mine, located about a mile east of the western Maine village of Paris Hill. We walked here by way of a two hundred-foot tunnel dimly lit by lights strung along a sloping floor of parchment-colored stone and glinting mica. The air is cool and damp. Overhead, ninety feet of schist lies between us and sunlight. The daunting layer of metamorphic rock is the reason Freeman abandoned quarrying in favor of burrowing into the hill to find the tourmaline and other rare minerals that unfailingly give him “a rush” each time he chips into one of the rockbound jewelry boxes rockhounds call “pockets.” The one that has our interest now is the latest of scores that Freeman, 61, has exposed since he bought the mine in 2003.

By Mount Mica standards, the cavity is a dud. It yields only a tiny bit of green tourmaline, and that prehistoric hunk of quartz is, Freeman says, “pretty beat up,” not worth the effort required to extract it.

That’s the way it goes sometimes. “It’s hard to find a pocket,” explains Freeman, wearing a hard hat and a heavy-duty back brace buckled over dirty jeans, “and harder still to find one with good material in it, but we haven’t had a dull day here yet. We don’t always find great gems, but we always find something to keep us interested. At Mount Mica, you don’t have to be smart. You just have to dig up rocks.”

Freeman is being modest. A few years ago, Mount Mica was believed by some to have been mined out. Under Freeman’s direction, it is giving up world-class green, blue, and pink tourmaline crystals that are as good, and often better, than any found here in the past. Freeman has found unusual blue apatites, giant smoky quartz crystals, and extremely rare crystallized pink quartz reminiscent of a splendid Brazilian specimen that made news forty years ago. The owner with his wife, Mary Freeman, of a Florida-based clinical laboratory instrumentation company, Gary Freeman spends $150,000 a year, “plus or minus,” on his avocation, which he pursues with the discipline of a shrewd businessman, except that he keeps much of the best product for himself.

“Most of us are amazed by Gary’s consistent success,” says Woodrow Thompson, a mineralogy specialist at the Maine Geological Survey. “He’s found pocket after pocket. He is very systematic and thorough. He’s going end to end and top to bottom and has a far more serious gem-mining operation than anyone has done in the past. He’s also very lucky.”

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Down East, June 2009

Rachel Degrosseilliers remembers the chain-link fence that encircled the Bates campus when she was growing up in Lewiston, Maine, in the 1940s and 1950s. “Bates College was like an island,” says the Franco-American millworker’s daughter. “We regarded Bates as the elites, the intellectuals. The fence seemed to say, ‘Keep out.’”

Degrosseilliers, director of Museum L-A, is telling this story in her office in the vast Bates Mill complex along the Androscoggin River. Next to her sits Jessica Dumas, Bates College, Class of  ‘06 and curator of the young museum dedicated to preserving Lewiston-Auburn’s industrial and cultural history. On the opposite wall is a design concept for Weaving a World: Lewiston’s Millworkers, 1920–1980, a traveling exhibit researched by a team of students working with David Scobey, director of the College’s Harward Center for Community Partnerships.

Downstairs, in a loom room-turned-gallery, is Portraits and Voices: Workers of the Seven Mills, a multimedia exhibit co-designed by Bill Low, assistant curator of the Bates College Museum of Art.

“We wouldn’t be able to do this without Bates College,” Degrosseilliers says. “But this is not just Bates, the savior, doling out help to the community — it’s a real give-and-take. We give their students great educational experiences. They help us build our community’s history.”

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Bates, Summer 2008