Tree #146, an eastern red cedar, appears at first to be approaching death, but it’s not. Half uprooted on the edge of Marginal Way by some maniacal storm, it has continued growing, albeit horizontally. In its peculiar way, it’s thriving. On the water, out past the cedar’s exhumed roots and a neighboring basalt crag, a red-breasted merganser contends with the relentless surf in Oarweed Cove. It begins to fly, sputtering and bouncing over the swollen waves like a skipped stone.

Rain begins to patter onto Marginal Way and me, so I leave tree #146 and take shelter in a stand of junipers, next to an interpretive sign: ORIGIN OF THE ROCKS AND STRUCTURES OF THE MARGINAL WAY. My damp sneakers planted on the Kittery Formation, I scan the stone in front of me for slivers of ancient magma. For a moment, my mind wanders to an email I should have sent, then to the dinner I should start prepping. As my mental to-do list grows, I feel a tinge of guilt for prioritizing this downtime. Then, a small black arrow on the raindrop-speckled map reminds me: “You are here.”

The Marginal Way footpath is a Maine icon, and for good reason. The one-and-a-quarter-mile coastal walk between Ogunquit and Perkins Cove offers arresting vistas at every turn, endless vignettes of thrashing waves and toothy rock. For waterfowl, like the merganser, the churning seascape is formidable. But for land-bound pedestrians, Marginal Way is pure ease. The topography beneath the paved path is surprisingly gentle, as if it were asking, “Why should you have to struggle to be rewarded?” Marginal Way is a foil to Maine’s many steep climbs, those wooded ascents to solitary lookouts. Here, there is no destination and no striving. Hamstrings spared, one is cordially invited to slow down.

At any time of day, I find an opportunity to marvel. At dawn, the sun spills over Perkins Cove’s gray-shingled rooftops, bathing Marginal Way in a sense of possibility. At sunset, a creamsicle hue lingers on the horizon — stubborn, like the exotic bittersweet vines that flank each step of the walk. At the edge of the bluffs, beach-rose hips dangle from thorny, woody shrubs. Rosa rugosa, introduced from Japan in the mid-19th century, has become a quintessential emblem of the New England coast. Mainers of a certain age may remember their mothers making tea from the scraggly rose hips. As foreign as the bittersweet, as Maine as lobster.

After dark, the margin between land and sea is cold and nondescript. I fumble my way to a bench that sits on the edge of oblivion. At the edge of the cliff face, I can distinguish almost nothing. A pruned-back beach-rose bush might be a giant, belly-up tarantula. In the distance, the irregular blinking of buoys punctuates the horizon. To their left, the lights of Kennebunk glimmer. If I forget, for a moment, that I’m in Maine, the silhouette of a pitch pine against the sky behind me suggests a desert scene. The dankness of seaweed in my nose, however, is unmistakable. 

I notice all this because I have resolved to. Mindfulness is not in my genes. Though I moved to Maine just a few months ago, I’ve walked Marginal Way since I was a toddler, often alongside — or slightly behind — my speed-walker mother. On our summer jaunts, the tan quartzite and magenta beach rose must have blurred in her periphery as she propelled her five-foot-one frame past each scenic vista. Stopping to rest at one of the 39 memorial benches might have been permitted if a herring gull had swooped in, untied her sneakers, and flung them into the Atlantic. Probably not even then. 

My father’s energy was similarly hectic. At the end of our annual trips to Ogunquit, he often drove the seven hours back to Pennsylvania without stopping. On two occasions, he speedily unloaded the Ford Explorer and reopened our family pizzeria within an hour of our return. To make up for a week of Shirley Temples, trolley rides, and overflowing bags of gummy candy. To get back to the comfort of busy.

My first year as a resident Mainer is slower and more indulgent than those summers. I soak up Marginal Way during midday breaks and spontaneous nighttime visits. I take time to observe waterfowl long enough to learn more than just their names. Harlequin ducks, in particular, command my attention. Geometric collages of gray, white, and terra-cotta against the indigo high tide, Maine’s harlequins spend the warmer months in southeastern Canada. In October, instead of heading to Florida to sunbathe, they gather at the jagged edges of southern Maine, to spend the fall and winter. From my vantage on Marginal Way, I watch five-foot waves pummel their slick bodies, then whoosh into a milky froth. Beneath the ducks’ pantomime plumage is the resilience of ocean-battered bones.

One afternoon, I meet a woman who came to Marginal Way specifically in search of the harlequins. She’s seated on a bench at the path’s highest point, her mulberry puffer shielding her from the hefty winds. I approach her and work up the courage to ask her what she’s seen. “Harlequin ducks!” she exclaims. She’s been mesmerized, watching the subjects of her pilgrimage bob and dive through her new spotting scope. We drift together down Marginal Way, and she offers me a look at a crowd of purple sandpipers squatting on a seaweed-covered rock — a new bird for us both.

Like a looming wave, a sense of urgency builds in my mind when I remember I have a Zoom meeting at the top of the hour. I was raised by chronic doers, and my first instinct is to rush home. Instead, I make what feels like a brave choice and lean into this joyful conversation about shorebirds and our shared love for this place. Today, I will be a few minutes late. 

Get all of our latest stories delivered straight to your mailbox every month. Subscribe to Down East magazine.

When he was a kid, growing up in New Jersey, Peter Brown spent several summers venturing with his family to a rugged, far-flung island full of wonder and curious creatures. On Frenchboro, he recalls, “we had a picture-perfect Maine experience. We’d walk to the pier and pick which lobsters we wanted. There were wild blueberries growing. We’d hike around and check out all the tide pools. You couldn’t ask for a better experience.”

Today, Brown lives in Newcastle and is the author and/or illustrator of a slew of popular children’s books, the winner of a Caldecott Honor and multiple E. B. White Awards. His most recent is the Wild Robot Protects, the third in a New York Times bestselling middle-grade series about a guileless robot named Roz, who wakes up on a rugged, far-flung island full of wonder and curious creatures. As Roz comes to know those creatures, the Wild Robot books — besides being lavishly illustrated, page-turning, and ultimately poignant — probe the tension and overlap between the natural world and the manufactured one. “You think these are kind of opposites,” Brown says, “and yet, when you think about instinct and how animals are programmed to do certain things at certain times of day or year, they’re sort of acting in a way you might call robotic behavior.”

This theme — that the gap between civilization and wildness isn’t so great — is echoed in books like The Curious Garden (a green patch nurtured by a child spreads across the city) and Mr. Tiger Goes Wild (a tiger leaves a town of Victorian-clothed fauna to stride nude through the jungle). Brown’s fascination, he says, comes in part from comparing his urban adulthood (stints in LA, NYC, and Philly) to his comparatively rural childhood. “I spent a lot of time out in the woods with my friends,” he says, “climbing trees and stomping through streams. When I think about my youth, I think about that stuff.”

These days, when he wants an escape, he makes for the La Verna Preserve, stewarded by the Coastal Rivers Conservation Trust, at the edge of Muscongus Bay. It’s close to home and an easy hike, but it puts him in mind of remote, wild islands. “It’s just really beautiful,” he says. “It’s pretty awesome once you see those rocks and the waves crashing. The payoff is huge.” 

Get all of our latest stories delivered straight to your mailbox every month. Subscribe to Down East magazine.

Antonio Rocha came to Maine from his native Brazil in 1988, to study under the late Tony Montanaro, one of the 20th century’s most praised mime artists, then stuck around to study theater at the University of Southern Maine. Today, Rocha (pronounced haw-sha) weaves his training as a mime into his award-winning storytelling performances. Last year, he started touring his newest show, A Slave Ship Called Malaga, the true story of a 19th-century Maine-made vessel that sailed among Maine, Brazil, and Africa, told from the perspective of the ship. “It’s not a happy-go-lucky story,” Rocha says, noting the delicate balance of relaying the atrocities of the slave trade while weaving in moments of lightness. His performances often involve such an element of push-and-pull tension. “I am a servant to the story,” he says, “and to whom I am delivering the story.” This month, he brings the show to Utah’s Timpanogos Storytelling Festival, his fifth time as a featured performer at one of the world’s largest storytelling events. 

One of the show’s most remarkable performances took place in March, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, in Brunswick. The church’s founders include Joseph Badger, the Brunswick shipbuilder, merchant, and slave trader who built and owned the Malaga. “Members of the church were horrified to learn about Badger’s connections to slavery and how that may have funded the church, and they opted to learn more,” Rocha says. “It received a roaring standing ovation. They donated $4,800 to fund schools that could not afford to book the show, so that I could tell the story to even more people. Talk about confirmation from the universe.” 

But the venue that means the most to him is the Celebration Barn Theater, in South Paris, which Montanaro founded in 1972 and which Rocha says “holds a dear place in my story here.” Dedicated to the art of physical theater, the 150-seat former horse barn put Maine on the map for mime performers around the world. It’s where Rocha first studied in Maine, when he was 22, and he’s since gone back time and time again. “All the various times I have performed there have been incredible, because of this connection I have,” he says. “I wouldn’t be here without the Celebration Barn.”

Headshot courtesy of Antonio Rocha

Get all of our latest stories delivered straight to your mailbox every month. Subscribe to Down East magazine.

First Rangeway is a long residential thoroughfare off Kennedy Memorial Drive, about a mile east of where you might exit I-95. Where it T-bones, you can either turn left, wending your way up Mayflower Hill, home to Colby College’s emerald campus, or you can turn right and soon enough find yourself in downtown Waterville. 

For nearly a century, left has been left and right has been right. To most, the college and the town were worlds unto themselves, and rarely did the twain meet. Today, my husband and I take a right. We zig past his former junior high, then zag up Park Street, a few streets over from the street where he grew up. As we approach downtown Waterville, instead of passing by the “For Lease” signs, tired storefronts, and cracked pavement that have characterized the district for decades, we catch sight of a giant, gleaming sign that now looms over Main Street. It has one word on it: Colby.

The sign sits atop the Bill & Joan Alfond Main Street Commons, a sleek, new $25 million dormitory that was one of the first installments in an ongoing $200 million project to reinvigorate Waterville’s downtown. A collaborative undertaking among Colby, the city, the Harold Alfond Foundation, and plenty of local businesses and community organizations, the effort relies on both private and public funds and has been underway for eight years, aiming to better integrate the college and the town and to create a sustainable economic future for the central Maine city of 16,000. 

It’s already had dramatic results. At the south end of Main Street, three blocks from the dorm (and its 2,500-square-foot community-activity space), sits the $26 million Lockwood Hotel, with its boutique-y décor and locavore restaurant, Front & Main. Across from the hotel’s boxy-mod facade, in a former hardware store, is Greene Block + Studios, opened in 2021, with workspace on its upper floors for visiting artists and flexible gallery space downstairs for exhibits, performances, and events.

A block north, the marquee of the $18 million Paul J. Schupf Art Center — proclaiming, simply, “Arts,” in luminous shades of violet and indigo — was lit at the end of last year. Inside are galleries, performance spaces, a café, and three state-of-the-art screens that now host the city’s venerable Railroad Square Cinema. Connected via skybridge is the just-renovated 1902 Waterville Opera House, which is already welcoming big-draw acts like David Sedaris and Ani DiFranco. In July, the arts center and opera house hosted their first Maine International Film Festival.

There’s what was once known as the Hains Building, across from the dorm, restored in 2017 to the tune of $6 million. Abandoned for years, it now houses offices and businesses. And then there’s the street itself, once a traffic-choked one-way, now a two-way with new granite curbs and street lighting, flanked by widened, handsome brick sidewalks that invite foot traffic.

Which is the whole point, really: inviting people back. “We asked, ‘How do we help develop downtown so people live and work and lead full lives there again?” says Colby College vice president of planning Brian Clark. Clark came to Waterville in 2014, accompanying then-new college president David Greene. Before that, they’d both been at the University of Chicago, where they worked on a similar initiative together in a blighted neighborhood near campus. “We now have 200 students living in the dorm on Main Street, and they spend money downtown,” he says. “They’re engaged in the community, doing civic work as part of their academic requirements. And we’ve put arts programs and a hotel there, so guests are downtown every night.”

The idea is that more private investment will follow the initial $200 million, and an influx of new businesses and jobs will grow a stronger tax base for the city, along with higher property values that benefit longtime residents even outside the downtown core. Since the investments in downtown began eight years ago, 40 new properties have opened up: a café and market, a yoga studio, a bike shop, an art gallery, and plenty more. Colby reports that since it began buying and developing its Main Street buildings, they’ve gone from generating $42,000 in annual tax revenue for the city to some $500,000.

The reinvention of Main Street seems to be winning over many around Waterville, but by no means all. Beyond the garden-variety wariness of change and some initial squabbles over lost parking, there’s also grumbling from some independent retailers about newly raised rents. Others worry the city lacks enough housing, at both affordable and middle-income levels, for an influx of new Watervillians — including the folks staffing all those new businesses. Feelings are mixed in neighborhoods that aren’t yet seeing a benefit from downtown’s renaissance, and deep wounds and divisions remain across a city that’s worked for decades to address poverty, hunger, crime, and addiction. Given all of that, it remains to be seen whether the ripples from a revitalization effort — even one fueled by so much optimism, expertise, and money — will be felt all the way across Waterville.

The Howard Miller Room at the Lockwood Hotel is an event space that doubles as a photo-filled shrine to its namesake and the department store that once occupied the site. Miller, who died in 2005, was a lifelong Watervillian, Colby alum, and longtime manager of his family’s business, Levine’s, which opened in 1891 and anchored downtown retail in its mid-century heyday. My husband, David Atallah, who grew up in Waterville in the ’70s remembers the store as a point of connection between the college and community. “It was this haberdashery owned by a pair of twins, Pacy and Ludy Levine, and they were unbelievable salespeople,” David remembers. The Levines were also proud Colby alumni and donors. “It was a ritual for every kid in town to buy your first suit there or pants for the new school year,” David says. “And if you weren’t already going to Colby, they’d try to talk you into going there someday.”

Levine’s closed in 1996. That Colby commemorated it in its new hotel (as well as outside of it, with a stretch of lawn now called Levine’s Park) speaks to an understanding of how much Waterville cherishes its history — and how hard it is to see it disappear. 

“When Levine’s was torn down to build the new hotel, that was really emotional for people,” Waterville native Shannon Haines says. As president and CEO of the nonprofit community-arts organization Waterville Creates, she’s now ensconced down the street, in the new Paul J. Schupf Art Center, an edifice she couldn’t have envisioned growing up in the ’80s and ’90s. Haines moved away for college but returned in 1998 to her hometown, where for years she ran the nonprofit Waterville Main Street. In 2014, she helped form Waterville Creates, which today encompasses the city’s largest arts and cultural entities. “Waterville has the oldest and largest art museum in the state,” she says. “The largest and longest-running film festival in the state. The only Sundance Art House theater in the state. A 100-year-old opera house. A national-medal–winning library. These are huge assets that are here because the community has supported them.”

I ask her about a mural in the Schupf Center, a painting of the Two Penny Bridge, which spans the Kennebec River, connecting Waterville to neighboring Winslow. The work of local artists Elizabeth Jabar and Colleen Kinsella, it’s emblazoned with the phrase “Be a Bridge.” “It’s a symbol of connecting two communities,” Haines tells me. “And that’s what we’re doing here.”

When Colby, originally called the Maine Literary and Theological Institution, was founded, in 1813, there was no need for a bridge — the school was located downtown. Though not yet incorporated, Waterville was a mill town on the rise, a center for agriculture, shipbuilding, and lumbering. In 1930, with the college outgrowing its site and considering relocating to Augusta, Waterville citizens raised $100,000 to buy land two miles from downtown, on Mayflower Hill, for a new campus.

Waterville in the rest of the 20th century followed a familiar mill-town arc. For decades, its robust economy was fueled by factories and paper and textile mills along the Kennebec, as well as by immigrants — prominently Québécois and Lebanese — seeking good wages. Then, starting in the 1950s, mills began moving where labor was cheaper, first to the American South and then abroad, until the forces of globalization and mechanization in the ’80s ushered in an era of mill closures. Mid-century urban-renewal efforts razed much of Waterville’s downtown, and the construction of I-95, bypassing the city center, brought big-box stores that supplanted what was left of it. Houses once occupied by mill workers, surrounding downtown, were replaced by parking lots, discount retail stores, and several banks. Plenty of Waterville residents moved away, and those who stayed struggled to find work. 

“The middle class was gutted for a while,” is how my husband remembers it. “When I was a kid, you still had friends whose parents worked in the mills and had a steady paycheck. Not everyone had the same income, but they all still felt pride and could put food on the table.”

The gutting has had lasting effects. Census data from 2022 reports 23.1 percent of Waterville households living below the poverty line. The town’s median household income is $41,245, more than $20,000 below the state’s average — and more than $40,000 less than the full tuition rate for a single year at Colby.

The persistence of that disparity is what troubles some who very much want the revitalization project to succeed — folks like native Watervillian Kathleen O’Halloran, the executive director of LifeFlight of Maine and a former associate director at Colby’s Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs. “I want to be clear that I love Colby,” she explains. “I grew up in a Colby family. My grandparents and brother and two nieces went there, my dad got the Colby alumni award. I grew up in the ’70s, and I didn’t see any distinction between the town and Colby — they were vibrant places, and I felt there was a strong middle class in town.” She left Maine for college, and when she returned, in 2003, the dynamic felt different. “There was a whole faction of the community who would never come to Colby for an event,” O’Halloran says. “It felt like an elite institution, and people from town didn’t feel welcome. So what’s happening now is what needed to happen.”

But O’Halloran, who now lives just outside Waterville, in Fairfield, wonders if some of that money and energy might have been better directed. “I’m really torn, because I’m grateful every day for the investments that Colby’s made. And it’s not Colby’s job to fix Waterville. But I’m also very aware of the big problems that are still there,” she says. “From what I see, what Waterville needs is a way to feed the kids in town. A way to deal with the drug prevalence and the poverty and violence. I worry that it’s a matter of time before we might have a violent event in the dorm on Main Street.” Last spring, a fight between three Waterville men at a party in a dorm on Colby’s Mayflower Hill campus led to gunfire, a lockdown, and an arrest. If a long-range goal of downtown redevelopment is to help address Waterville’s broader social problems, O’Halloran says, “I really worry about whether this is going to work.” 

If anyone could convince you it might, it’s John Phillips-Sandy. Another boomerang Watervillian, returned after a college stint, he’s director of food and beverage at Front & Main, the Lockwood Hotel’s restaurant. Sitting beneath swanky, retro light fixtures in the restaurant’s bar, the thirtysomething is clearly invigorated by the possibilities ahead for Waterville. “This is a place that’s chosen to be a strong community,” he says. “That strengthens its appeal for people like me to come back and for new people to come in.” 

The mills were already all closed when Phillips-Sandy was growing up. Waterville’s population was at the nadir of a 40-year slide. The arts scene, however, was already vibrant — Phillips-Sandy’s mom was a community-theater producer at the opera house and later the first director for the Maine International Film Festival. Looking out the window, he gestures to a huge mural on the side of the adjacent building, an homage to the Lebanese-American immigrants who’ve helped shape the city. 

“That mural didn’t exist when I was growing up,” Phillips-Sandy says. My husband, who’s half Lebanese, leans in. “That’s Al Corey’s sax,” Phillips-Sandy goes on, pointing out the instrument in the mural’s corner. “I bought my first saxophone at his music store. I remember once, Al’s band was playing, and one of the player’s wives went into labor and I got the call — and I got to play with Al!” The experience steered him to studying jazz in college. “And in a way,” Phillips-Sandy says, “it helped to shape my path to want to come back here.”

When he did, he was lucky to snag an apartment in the mixed-use Hathaway Creative Center, in the former Hathaway Mill, across Spring Street from the hotel. “When I was a kid it was largely an unused space,” he remembers. Developed by Colby alum Paul Boghossian, it spearheaded Waterville’s downtown revitalization, in 2017, and is currently a mix of apartments and businesses, including Hathaway Mill Antiques and Waterville Brewing Company. It’s also home to Dirigo Labs, a startup accelerator program that’s helping incubate small businesses (this year’s cohort includes a Rockland company making plant-based construction materials and a Millinocket-based renewable-energy company).

“My unit faces the Waterville-Winslow bridge and the Kennebec River,” Phillips-Sandy says. “At the end of my day, I look out, and it feels like I’m living in an emerging, growing city. But it also has this connection to the city it used to be. The mill where I sleep was where entire Canadian and Lebanese families used to work.”

If his unit faced the opposite direction, however, it would look out over the South End neighborhood, on the other side of Bridge Street from downtown, where rows of dense triple-deckers and vacant lots don’t yet suggest any spillover prosperity from the new investment. After the mills closed, the French-Canadian families who lived on the South End largely left, and the once tight-knit area became run-down and crime-ridden. In 2001, some residents got fed up and formed the South End Neighborhood Association, an effort to control drug activity and improve the area. 

“We’ve managed to get the city to repave some sidewalks and roads,” says Anna Holdener, who’s lived in Waterville for 13 years and been chair of the association for eight. “But that was after we’d been neglected for a long time.” Crime is still a problem, she says — break-ins, drug use, violence — though there have been fewer incidents over the last few years. “There’s an area on the nature path where you still find drug paraphernalia and people living,” she says. “But we’re just a small group of residents, and we can only do so much.” 

Neighborhood volunteers have renovated green spaces, established a teen center, and held twice-annual clean-up days — at which she estimates 25 to 30 Colby students from the new downtown dorm help them. Other than that, it seems, benefits from the downtown redevelopment have yet to trickle over. “We don’t feel a regular impact from it yet,” Holdener says. “We’ve been working on trying to improve things here long before that started. But there’s a long history of bias in town against the South End, and a lot of people feel we’re not welcome downtown because it’s all new, shiny things there now.” 

“One criticism we’ve heard,” says Clark, Colby’s planning officer, “is, ‘Why is Colby investing in downtown when places all over Waterville need it?’ But we feel things emanate from that downtown investment.” The prior weekend, he says, he took his son to a new playground on the other side of town, built with tax revenue from the new downtown developments. “So you’re seeing projects happen beyond downtown that are 20 or 30 years overdue.” 

He also points out that property values are going up. “That’s the primary source of wealth for a lot of people in this area,” Clark says. “Then, going forward, these investments will generate population growth.”

Improvements in one arena, of course, often create needs in others. “Jobs have increased, but now our biggest barrier is housing,” Waterville mayor Jay Coelho says. “We don’t have anywhere to put employees.” But the city’s addressing it, he says, with “two or three developments” already on the near horizon, such as a new mixed-use complex with two five-story buildings and 63 apartments (18 of which would be affordable housing).

Meanwhile, rising retail rents worry some downtown business owners — even a few otherwise thrilled with the street’s progress blame above-market prices for storefronts that are currently sitting empty. “It’s been wonderful to have so much foot traffic, and so many people coming in before shows at the opera house,” says Tanya McCarthy, who owns Wild Clover Café and Market. But she says she couldn’t afford to be there if she hadn’t bought her building. “The rents are very high, so owning our own place was the only way to make it work. We got lucky and were able to, but high rents aren’t helpful to keep the Main Street momentum going.”

Anecdotally, some in the community are noticing incremental progress on longstanding problems. At the Alfond Youth and Community Center, CEO Ken Walsh sees 200 Waterville kids roll up in buses for after-school care, where they get hot meals and access to a slew of activities, regardless of their economic circumstances. “Food insecurity for kids in Waterville is high, but it’s far less than it was 30 years ago,” Walsh says. He’s seen it diminish in the last five or six years, he says, ever since “community leaders started talking with each other more and creating better partnerships.” 

As with the South End Neighborhood Association, the Alfond Center also welcomes between 20 and 30 Colby student volunteers each semester. “You get highly talented students here mentoring, and you see a five-year-old kid get visions of higher ed because of that relationship,” Walsh says. “That’s huge.” He also points out the center’s internship and hiring programs with Waterville’s Thomas College and Kennebec Valley Community College. “The only way this works,” he says, “is if we all do it together.”

The new spirit of togetherness is in evidence on Mayflower Hill too. This fall, Colby opens its $85 million Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts, a 74,000-square-foot building sited at the gateway to the campus. In addition to housing the academic programs for theater, dance, music, and cinema studies, the state-of-the-art facility will include a 300-seat hall and other performance and exhibition spaces. And part of the opening, Clark says, is a concerted campaign to invite all of Waterville in for shows, festivals, and other events. “It’s meant to be that bridge to the campus for the community,” he says.

There’s that word again: “bridge.” Like on the mural in the Schupf Art Center, seen by the hundreds of Waterville kids who’ve already come in for tours of the new space. “We always tell them: ‘We built this building for you,’” says Waterville Creates’s Haines. “It’s meant for the local community, and everyone’s welcome. Our biggest goal is to make people understand that art is for everybody, in their everyday life.” 

There’s an urgency in her voice as she tells me this. So I ask about the chicken-and-egg conundrum: if some Watervillians say they don’t feel welcome in the fancy new spaces — in part because they’re so nice — how do you get them in the door to convince them it’s for them? 

“That’s the million-dollar question we’re constantly asking ourselves,” Haines says. “What’s relevant? What’s local? How do we use a language that’s understandable? We need to keep offering an invitation to people. And if they don’t accept it right away . . . .” She pauses for a second, then finishes, more urgently still, “We just need to keep saying, please come in.”

Get all of our latest stories delivered straight to your mailbox every month. Subscribe to Down East magazine.

These days, operatic mezzo-soprano Kate Aldrich lives with her husband and daughter in Rome, Italy. She speaks Italian and French fluently and has also performed in German and Russian. But as a teenager, her Continental bona fides were limited to a dalliance with the French horn and a part-time job at Wiscasset’s Le Garage restaurant. That’s where she met the members of her high-school band, Liquid Daydream, a rootsy jamband she calls “very much in style in midcoast Maine in the mid-’90s.” 

Today, Aldrich’s style is more Georges Bizet than Jerry Garcia. She’s renowned for performing the title role in Bizet’s Carmen, though her list of credits is long and diverse. When she returns to the midcoast this month — a guest of Damariscotta’s 29th annual Salt Bay Chamberfest — she’ll be performing Il Tramonto, a 1914 piece for soprano and string quartet, composed by Italian maestro Ottorino Respighi. The piece, based on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s romantic poem “The Sunset,” aligns somewhat with Aldrich’s crunchy granola roots. “There are so many natural references in it, and they’re so visceral, where you can hear the sound of the woods in the instruments,” she says. “It’s magical.” 

Le Garage wasn’t the restaurant that loomed largest in Aldrich’s Maine upbringing. That would be the Cheechako, on Damariscotta’s Lewis Point, which her family ran until she was a teenager — and lived next door to. “All of our babysitters were waitstaff, and we ate there at least two or three nights a week,” she remembers, “just going through the buffet line in our bathing suits.” Steps outside, the tidal Damariscotta River was a constant, lined with favorite swimming and picnic spots. Memories of the town’s gonzo annual raft race are particularly vivid — inflatables careening down the river, dodging projectiles from a “flour-bag catapult” a mischievous Team Cheechako rigged up outside the restaurant.

These days, Aldrich and her family own a house in nearby Alna, and when they visit in the summer, languid days on the Damariscotta River always figure into their plans.  “We’ll go out in a boat, or we’ll paddleboard down the river,” Aldrich says. “It’s always beautiful.” Now that’s what we call a liquid daydream.

Get all of our latest stories delivered straight to your mailbox every month. Subscribe to Down East magazine.

When Madison Paper Industries folded, in 2016, locals around the central Maine town of Madison feared their community’s 600,000-square-foot mill was shuttered for good. Built in 1980, at a cost of $200 million, Madison Paper was, throughout its run, a state-of-the-art producer of magazine and insert paper — and very much the anchor of this small Somerset County town. At its zenith, the mill employed more than 300 workers and turned out more than 200,000 tons of paper a year. But as periodical subscriptions dwindled in the smartphone era and paper production increasingly moved offshore, the mill’s balance sheets took a hit. When its joint owners — a subsidiary of the New York Times Company, together with a Finnish company called UPM-Kymmene — pulled the plug, Madison Paper joined the ranks of 13 Maine mills to have closed in just over two decades.

The closures have left behind abandoned buildings primed for decay. New England winters, hard on any structure, are particularly ravaging on industrial sites like paper mills. Concrete cracks. Moisture accumulates, turning corrugated metal into filament. In the region’s more urban pockets — Worcester, Providence, or Biddeford, say — some historic mills have been successfully repurposed as condos, studios, or shopping centers. But across rural Maine, the specter of permanent abandonment looms large: buildings slowly reclaimed by wind, water, and time, stand- ing as silent testaments to the ever-evolving nature of technology and global commerce.

Nestled on a sharp bend in the Kennebec River, the town of Madison literally grew up around its mills. From the late 19th century onward, brick and cement smokestacks rose higher than any steeple, while behemoth piles of timber dwarfed homes and businesses. Families settled in Madison for the jobs, first making textiles, then paper; Maine industrial titan Great Northern Paper got its start here before moving to Millinocket. When skiers and paddlers started flocking to the region in the mid-20th century, the smell of simmering wood mash — pleasantly yeasty on some days, all sulfur and brimstone on others — marked the gateway between central Maine’s industrial corridor and the wilds of the western mountains and upper Kennebec. Travelers who happened to pass through town during a shift change found traffic on Main Street backed up for blocks.

The mill’s closure left more than 200 jobless, gutted the town’s tax base, and prompted the inevitable cascade of boarded-up shops and diners. It brought other, subtler losses too: for the first time in anyone’s memory, the town just felt quiet. Yes, the American Legion still held baked-bean cook-offs. The town’s next-largest employer, a 42-acre commercial greenhouse, kept turning out hothouse tomatoes. But locals and visitors agreed: the tenor of the town changed, becoming more muted.

When I visited on a warm day this spring, however, I found no such stillness. Main Street was packed with pick-ups and construction vehicles, and the mill thrummed with activity. Behind its security fence, a 300-foot crane cast a shadow that extended to the bank of the Kennebec. Beneath it, a dozen construction contractors were busy installing an aluminum chimney stack that would soon rise higher than the massive mill itself. Hundreds of yards of gleaming ductwork connected the stack to a state-of-the-art cyclone dryer, adding some futuristic flair to the aging infrastructure around it.

The dryer and the stack are among the many renovations the mill has undergone since GO Lab, a Belfast-based research-and-development firm, purchased it in 2019. Now known as TimberHP, the company has a plan to take 230,000 tons of green wood chips each year and turn them into sustainable, high-performance insulation products. If it’s successful, TimberHP will be the first operation in the country making wood-fiber insulation. Its founders, Joshua Henry and Matthew O’Malia, want the company to serve as a blueprint that can help bring other abandoned mills back online, in New England at first and eventually across the country. Along the way, they’re hoping their product will revolutionize American construction practices — and, in doing so, help save the planet.

On the day I visited the rebooted Madison mill, members of TimberHP’s newly assembled operations team were working on a just-installed bin-feeder system, which will convey wood chips into a steamer to make them pliable before they’re shredded, then reconstituted as one of three types of insulation, then slowly baked in a massive conveyor oven. The oven is one of many pieces of equipment that TimberHP purchased used from mills across Europe — where there’s already an established market for wood-fiber insulation — delivered via 80 trans-Atlantic shipping containers.

It falls largely to the small operations team to determine not only how to reassemble the machinery but also how to use it to produce a product never before made in the U.S. Ops team members on the floor that day included several former employees of Madison Paper, like Joe Clark, who served as mechanical-maintenance manager there for 25 years. Now 62, Clark had assumed the closure of Madison Paper had spelled permanent retirement for him and other longtime employees.

“But Josh had me at hello,” he says of TimberHP cofounder Henry. “I’ve spent over half my life in this building. It’s invigorating to be on the ground floor of a new company, a new product.”

Standing next to him was 39-year-old Jessica Vigneault. Born and raised in Old Town, another Maine mill town that’s seen dramatic ups and downs, she’d grown up believing that mills were good employers that took care of their people. She got a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Maine with plans to work in her hometown’s Georgia-Pacific paper mill. Two months shy of her graduation, in March 2006, the company announced the closure of its Old Town location. Vigneault went on to work for two other Maine mills. Now, as TimberHP’s operations manager, she’s found herself at the center of the effort to master a brand-new enterprise.

“I pretty much spent the winter reading dense 600-page instructional manuals,” she says. “None of us have ever done anything like this before.”

But Vigneault says she’s undaunted. She’s seen what it takes for a mill to survive. “It’s the nature of these markets to shift — we have to be able to transform alongside them,” she says. “It’s a lot to learn. But it’s also the nature of Maine mill workers to come to any task with a can-do attitude.”

Industrial papermaking has never been a static affair. In the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution prompted both a boom in worldwide demand for wood-based products, especially paper, and the technology to mass-produce it. Before the mid-1800s, most paper was made out of rags. Once mill owners figured out how to turn trees into wood pulp, Maine, unsurprisingly, became the seat of America’s paper industry. Not only was it the country’s most forested state, but its seven major rivers provided easy conveyance for logs, along with the hydropower needed to animate a mill’s machines.

By 1870, Maine dominated the pulp industry. Paper was to Maine what cars were to Detroit, says University of Southern Maine economics professor Michael Hillard, author of Shredding Paper: The Rise and Fall of Maine’s Mighty Paper Industry. Paper companies owned half the state’s land mass, an area larger than the whole rest of New England. Mills sprung up across the state, and many communities became de facto company towns. In their heyday, paper companies built schools, stores, and parks. They also polluted the state’s air and water and, in some cases, left behind toxic legacies at mill sites.

In Madison, the first paper mill appeared in 1889 (two woolen mills preceded it by about a decade). Initially, Madison’s paper mills turned out newsprint and brown bags, but by the 1920s, they’d begun to shift to the more lucrative market for magazine-quality paper. Soon, they’d cornered that market, prompting the 1980 construction of the mill now owned and operated by TimberHP.

But the paper bubble burst not long after Madison Paper opened, and the mill’s lifespan saw one long, gradual decline in demand for the only product it was equipped to produce. In 2014, UPM-Kymmene and the New York Times subsidiary, which had been renamed Northern SC Paper Corporation, asked the town for a significant revaluation of the mill — from $229 million to $50 million — which cut their tax contributions by 60 percent, forcing the town to take out a $2.5 million loan to make up for lost revenue.

“People feared the worst,” says Tim Curtis, Madison’s town manager. “And some of it did come to fruition. That revaluation was the start of a decade of foreclosures and empty storefronts.”

Curtis recounted the town’s history as he gave me a walking tour of Madison’s downtown. Pointing to some of the still-empty shops, he rattled off what had once been there. The revaluation was the bellwether moment for Madison, he says, and he wasn’t at all surprised, in March 2016, when it was announced that the mill would cease operations entirely. UPM-Kymmene and Northern SC Paper sold their hydro dams to an energy company that continues to operate them. The rest of the mill and its contents were handed over to a pair of asset liquidators based in New Jersey and Canada.

“Their mission was to sell off everything they could,” Curtis says. “It was clear they weren’t interested in redevelopment.”

Unheated and without a power source, the mill languished more with each passing winter. Curtis says the town of Madison received occasional inquiries from potential investors — interested in restarting the mill to produce biofuels or toilet paper — but none had a viable plan.

As for Madison Paper’s former employees, some enrolled in a re-education program offered by the state. Others, like Joe Clark, took early retirement.

“We went away just like buggy whips did when the Model T came around,” he says. “For some workers, it was probably a relief. Others were totally despondent and beside themselves. They’d paid off their mortgage and put their kids through college on mill salaries. And now there was nothing.”

Much of the machinery powering TimberHP was shipped from Europe.

A third group found work down the road, at the Sappi North America mill, in Skowhegan. Clark, Vigneault, and Hillard all agree that Sappi bucked the mill-closure trend by committing to constant innovation, shifting from paper to high-end packaging materials.

As recently as 2022, the company announced a $418 million project to update its machinery, this time to create a more sustainable packaging alternative to plastic.

“We’ve seen this for over a century now,” Hillard says. “The mills that innovate are the ones that survive.”

Henry and O’Malia, TimberHP’s founders, will tell you that innovation is the driving force behind their partnership. Henry is a materials chemist and onetime professor at both Bates College and the University of Maine. O’Malia, an architect by training, cofounded the passive-house design and construction firm GO Logic, based in Belfast. Their origin story starts with the two of them serving on the board of Belfast’s Waterfall Arts and chitchatting about work. When Henry heard O’Malia was installing traditional insulation in GO Logic’s otherwise hyper-efficient, sustainability-minded homes, he was horrified.

He remembers telling O’Malia, “You’re basically wrapping a green house in a cheap beer cooler, just replacing one environmental disaster with another.” O’Malia, for his part, couldn’t disagree.

Most traditional insulation products offered in the U.S. are made of either fiberglass, polyurethane, or cellulose. They’re known to contain harmful additives, like formaldehyde and ammonium sulfate; exposure to insulation can irritate one’s skin, nose, and throat. They also have a tendency to lock moisture into a house, resulting in mold and mildew.

Both Henry and O’Malia studied in Europe, where wood-based insulation is common. Its champions say it outperforms synthetic insulation by multiple measures, but until recently, Americans were little incentivized to produce greener construction materials, and there were many more lucrative markets competing for the country’s wood supply. So it’s only ever been manufactured across the pond — and as an import, it’s been too costly to catch on. Maine, the pair thought, seemed like an obvious place to produce it domestically: not only is there a surplus of empty mills, the raw material is in close and ready supply. The state timber industry, Henry and O’Malia say, is operating well below sustainable replacement rates — the ratio of trees felled to those planted or grown to maturity. Meanwhile, the state’s logging and sawmill industries already produce thousands of tons of wood byproduct that can be converted into wood chips and then, eventually, wood-fiber insulation.

With a plan in place, they began approaching investors, eventually raising $85 million in bond funding, exempt from state taxes because the wood they’re using is a waste product (the state considers TimberHP a recycling facility). The company also received an additional $750,000 from the state to purchase and maintain a fleet of green vehicles, along with multiple federal grants. To hear Henry tell it, securing that kind of financing for this kind of project was no small feat. “It can be hard to persuade investors to contribute money for an industrial site,” he says, “when our country doesn’t really do that kind of work anymore.”

In the summer of 2019, they began looking around the state for potential mills. Built relatively recently, Madison’s was in exceptionally good shape, Henry says, and required no environmental remediation. Equally key was the availability of Madison Paper’s former workforce. Henry and O’Malia soon assembled a small team of former mill employees to help with the renovation and conversion of the site. “Between them, they have over a hundred years of experience,” Henry says. “That pretty much saved our asses.” TimberHP eventually plans to employ about 140 people at the Madison plant.

What remains to be seen, however, is whether American consumers and contractors are willing to switch to wood-fiber insulation. At the time of my visit, TimberHP had yet to secure any distributors or installers. Next to the mill, a demonstration center functions as a hands-on science lab, where prospective clients can handle the company’s wood-fiber insulation products, with displays explaining how they outperform existing types in breathability, energy efficiency, noise reduction, and more. The insulation has the added benefit of being both nontoxic and sustainable, O’Malia says. But what he’s most proud of is its environmental impact.

“Wood is really just stored carbon,” he says. “Our insulation arrives at the job site already carbon negative.” Yes, converting green wood chips into insulation is energy intensive, O’Malia and Henry concede. But they’re quick to point out that the electricity used at the mill is generated from a neighboring hydroelectric dam (the conveyor oven is fueled by natural gas). They also point to a recent report by the Rocky Mountain Institute, which finds that wood-based insulation has a much lower carbon footprint than traditional materials.

Finally, O’Malia says, wood-fiber insulation also offers an incentive to cull small, low-value timber that remains after logging operations in fire-prone areas, like Colorado or California. Termed “coarse woody debris” by forestry scientists, naturally occurring detritus serves an essential role in forest ecology. But when it’s left after intensive logging activities, it skews that ecology and promotes hotter, faster-moving fires.

“Converting that kind of byproduct into fiber insulation,” O’Malia says, “is a viable solution not just for rural Maine but also for rural communities around the country.”

Town manager Curtis says he’s guardedly optimistic. “Right now, I see my job as mostly about managing expectations,” he admits. “Once upon a time, Madison was seeing $4 million in taxes from the mill. We have to accept that we may never get that back.”

A part-time minister and a former car salesman, Curtis says he’s unfazed — on a personal and a civic level — by the prospect of cobbling together uncertain income. He also says TimberHP’s eventual valuation isn’t the point. His ancestors settled in Madison at the turn of the last century, not long after the first mills got up and running. His family has seen boom and bust. Any investment in the mill is good for Madison, Curtis says, even if it only serves to make the property more appealing for the next buyer. And ultimately, he adds, bottom lines are only part of the equation. “We are already witnessing life return to the most iconic part of this town. There’s a returning sense of pride in the community. That’s invaluable.”

After I left Curtis, I heard similar sentiments over chats at Madison’s indoor shooting range, cannabis dispensaries, dinner theater, and elsewhere. At the Elm House Laundromat, 69-year-old Carolee Webster was waiting for her wash while her young grandson sat nearby, playing a handheld video game. A resident of the area since 1980, she reflected on the changes she’s witnessed.

“Things got slow after the mill closed,” she said. “It was hard for a lot of people.” She admitted she didn’t know much about TimberHP or its products, but she likes the idea of the mill reopening. “It seems like a good thing,” she said and then paused. “At least, I hope it will be. For all of us.”

Get all of our latest stories delivered straight to your mailbox every month. Subscribe to Down East magazine.

Many years ago, I fell asleep in the back seat of my father’s car while driving home to Brunswick after a trip to Vermont. Occasionally, I woke to groggy visions of pastoral New England: rolling fields, roadside farm stands, tired-looking general stores. Then, suddenly, we were stuck in a traffic jam, on the outskirts of a town I didn’t recognize. Rather than wait it out, my dad parked the car, and we went to have a look around. 

The source of the congestion was a bustling lakefront boardwalk packed with tourists. On either side of a swing bridge — the sort that rotates, rather than lifts, to let boats through — cars were lined up in both directions, and lines of kids had gathered by a railing to watch a double-decker paddle-wheel boat make its way through a narrow channel, live music drifting from onboard. Another traffic jam, of pontoon boats, formed nearby.

We ate lunch inside a huge white building, where crowds of people sat out front, in neon beachwear, sipping cocktails. Still coming to, I ordered my usual vacation cuisine: a side of onion rings. What arrived instead was a fried monstrosity called a “blooming onion,” roughly the size of my 8-year-old head. I felt like I was in Disney World. But the name of the town, it turned out, was Naples, and some three decades later, I finally made a point of spending some time there.

About a half mile south of downtown Naples, a traveler passes by a preview of what’s to come, in the form of Moose Landing Marina, where a three-story, open-air hangar, maybe a couple of football fields long, is stacked full of motorboats. It looks a little like a Connect Four for giants, signaling fun on an almost military-industrial scale. A large sign reads: PONTOON CAPITAL. Across the street is the always-packed parking lot of the Umbrella Factory Supermarket, so named for the bright canopy of umbrellas hung upside down from the ceiling. There, mostly out-of-state pickup trucks fill their beds with 30-racks of cheap beer, barbeque supplies, and other summer essentials.

After that, it’s a short drive to the Causeway — the epicenter of that foggy childhood memory — across the Chute River, which separates Long Lake on one side of town from Brandy Pond on the other (it’s something of a point of local pride that the Chute, only 1,000 feet long, ranks among the shortest rivers in the world). Once on the Causeway, there’s no structure more conspicuous than the Naples Casino, its upper deck aglow in neon green lights. A good portion of the casino is occupied by Rick’s Cafe, and that, I recall, is where I had my first blooming onion.

On a busy Friday night, Rick’s looked just like I remembered it: almost everyone in beachwear, pink cocktails served in long-stemmed glasses, baskets of fried food. A summer breeze lifted the leaves of potted palm trees. Bailey Odum, the 27-year-old manager of Rick’s Cafe, wasn’t surprised to hear that my childhood memory of Naples had endured. When I asked her about the blooming onion, she laughed: “Oh yeah, we still have it. People are obsessed with it.” Those same people often ask Odum why this restaurant in rural Maine has palms out front. 

From left to right: The beach at Sebago Lake State Park; at the Causeway’s Harpoon Lagoon arcade.

From out in front of Rick’s Cafe, the full buffet of waterfront attractions, from aqua-trike and Jet Ski rentals to seaplane tours, is in view. I mentioned to Odum that Naples didn’t feel like any other Maine lake town I’d ever visited. At a glance, I said, the vacation culture of Naples gave off some Ozarks energy, at least based on what I’d gleaned from the eponymous Netflix series. “Yes, oh my god,” she said. “Exactly!” 

For years, Odum, who grew up a few miles away, in the sleepier lakeside town of Raymond, never understood what she calls the “funky flair” at Rick’s Cafe. Then, she took a trip to Florida with her former boss, Eddie Osborne, who owned Rick’s from the ’80s up until he passed away last year. Walking down Las Olas Boulevard, the central hub of Fort Lauderdale, it suddenly made sense to her. Tropical plants, vintage cars, Parrothead vibes — Osborne had brought a little bit of south Florida to rural Maine. “Look at this place,” Odum said, gesturing at all the campy memorabilia that fills the dining room. “We have a plane coming out of the wall!” 

The only other place in Maine that feels remotely like Naples is, I think, Old Orchard Beach, with its all-day-and-into-the-night boardwalk revelry. In Naples, there is similarly no shortage of entertainment. But it wasn’t always that way. Like many Maine lake towns, Naples was once a staid, stately resort destination. It had big old hotels that attracted well-heeled rusticators from Portland, Boston, New York. And Naples was uniquely connected to Portland via the Cumberland and Oxford Canal, which ran 47 miles over some 27 locks, transporting timber and farm products south and vacationers north.

Over time, the commercial balance shifted solidly toward tourism. In 1899, the Bay of Naples Inn opened, on the east shore of Long Lake, with 100 rooms and a staff of 85. Visitors arrived on steamships at the town landing, and then horse-drawn carriages whisked them to the inn. In 1902, the casino was constructed — a casino in an old sense of the word, as in a place for amusements but not, in this case, gambling. Over the years, it housed bowling alleys, movie theaters, dance and opera halls, and a roller rink. It served as a venue for local parties and political rallies. Famous entertainers, like Eddie Cantor and Rudy Vallée, made appearances. The casino’s inaugural act was Julian Eltinge, a renowned “female impersonator” who, after his Naples gig, went on to perform on Broadway and across Europe. 

Through the 1940s, the tourist economy stayed relatively stable. With the construction of U.S. Route 302, a car could start out on Forest Avenue, in Portland, and roll up to the Causeway without making a single turn. But by the 1950s, steamship service had ended and the complexion of the local economy started to change. The grand Bay of Naples Inn went out of business, and word has it that high-school kids used to party in the ornate, abandoned rooms until the inn was demolished, in 1964. 

From left to right: Boaters on Brandy Pond; a scenic floatplane flight takes off, from Naples Seaplane Adventures.

Housing previously reserved for hotel staff was converted into lakeside rental cottages. A Howard Johnson’s hotel, which opened in 1937 and operated until 1973, increasingly welcomed guests who enjoyed floatplane tours and zipping around on speedboats. The era of the genteel, tea-sipping, gown- and tux-wearing rusticator had clearly ended. The old cupola from the inn had been spared during demolition, and there was some local ambition to repurpose it as a historical monument. For years, though, it sat in limbo at a town-owned campground, where it was pressed into service as a mount for a basketball hoop and as a kiddie playhouse. In 2020, a local antiques dealer moved the cupola to his property, with plans to convert the beat-up structure into a one-bedroom Airbnb. Last fall, however, his property was listed for sale, for $2.5 million, unrestored cupola included. 

A few doors down from Rick’s Cafe, Chris Cooke opened Beacon Bar & Bistro two years ago, in a building that was previously home to, among other things, a gas station, a Chinese takeout, and a real-estate office. When I stopped by in the evening, customers were gathered around propane firepits, and Cooke made the rounds, chitchatting with his clientele. Born in Jamaica, he blends culinary traditions, from full lobster dinners to rice-and-bean bowls to hot-honey chicken sandwiches. But no matter their food order, patrons tend to wash down meals with colorful cocktails — lots of Jamaican rum and fruity mixers, like strawberry-guava.

“This is what our locals wanted,” Cooke told me, gesturing across the Causeway to Long Lake at dusk. “Good music, great food, and the sunset. It’s like you’re having dinner in your backyard,” he said. “But with somebody else making the meal.” 

Stream Reggae, probably Maine’s most prolific reggae band, was performing that night, and an all-ages dance party had developed on Cooke’s patio. “On their next set,” he told me, winking, “I’ll get up there.” Minutes later, he was at the mic, belting out a reggae classic, “Murder, She Wrote” (no relation to the cozy-mystery series set in Maine that shares the same title).

Clockwise from top left: the members of Motor Booty Affair — “Maine’s ultimate disco party band” — board the Songo River Queen II before a show; Motor Booty Affair fans; the Motor Booty Affair “lot scene” in downtown Naples; getting sweaty on the Songo River Queen II; aboard the Songo River Queen II (with a Neil Diamond tribute band Cherry Cherry).

A little later, the Songo River Queen II pulled into port at the end of its evening cruise, the Village People’s “YMCA” blasting from the decks, performed by disco-funk cover band Motor Booty Affair. Meant to resemble an old-time riverboat, the original Queen was launched in 1971, taking passengers on scenic trips around Long Lake, through the swing bridge, and into Brandy Pond, with forays into the Songo Locks that lead to Sebago Lake. Then, in 1981, someone flicked a smoldering cigarette butt into a trash can and the resulting fire destroyed the ship. 

The rebuilt Queen debuted a year later, almost a third longer than its predecessor (since the 2011 replacement of the swing bridge with a fixed bridge, the boat has been confined to Long Lake). As Motor Booty Affair wrapped up their encore, boozy passengers dressed in rainbow wigs and various other disco-hippie paraphernalia stumbled across the gangway and out onto the Causeway, then disappeared into the night. 

No Naples experience is complete without cruising Long Lake and Brandy Pond on a pontoon boat — the town has six marina businesses that rent, sell, and store boats. Naples has a year-round population of only about 4,000 but a summer population of more than 20,000, and some 14,000 boats call the town home, according to local officials.

As a newbie boater, I opted to rent from Dingley’s Wharf, mostly for the convenience of being able to park right on the Causeway and have a staffer from the marina tote our coolers and bags onto our 22-footer. After a brief boating-safety lecture, our family, with a group of friends, set off into Long Lake, toward the dozens of other pontoons floating in the distance. 

“These last couple years, we really saw the dynamic change,” said Shawn Hebert, the Naples Marine Safety Division harbormaster, who was sitting in his office, in a squat brick building on the village green. When so much was shut down around the country during the first summer of the pandemic, Naples saw an influx of first-time visitors. Many boat renters, Hebert told me, think boats operate just like cars, which leads to lots of “inexperienced traffic” and keeps Hebert’s crew extra busy responding to breakdowns and issuing citations for speed violations and disorderly conduct. 

Hebert sometimes imagines Naples as a combination of the busy outdoor-recreational scene in North Conway, New Hampshire, and the boisterous boardwalk scene in Old Orchard Beach. (Naples is, in fact, just about halfway between those two towns.) Members of his 16-person department can issue summonses on the water but lack authority to make arrests. For arrests, he has to call in state wardens. “Some people,” Hebert half-joked, sounding a little exasperated, “like to call us the mall cops of the water.” 

Clockwise from top left: Dancing at Beacon Bar and Bistro; Stream Reggae performing at the bar; Beacon owner Chris Cooke.

That afternoon, a steady wind had kicked up, and Long Lake was choppy. After a while, we puttered under the bridge and into the more sheltered waters of Brandy Pond (which, according to lore, was named for a barrel of booze that fell off a boat back in the 1800s). We wanted to check out an informal gathering place known as the Sandbar, and when we got there, we found a pack of at least 40 boats that had dropped anchor in a vast, bobbing circle. 

College-age bros in American-flag swim trunks chucked a football back and forth while sipping White Claws. A few older couples kept an eye on their lapdogs that perched on nearby rafts. Moms carried travel mugs, presumably filled with something other than coffee, as they waded after toddlers held afloat by pool toys. The music of choice was country and classic rock, and there were more than a few flags flying astern with right-wing political messages.

People around town had described the Sandbar to me as “the Redneck Riviera,” “kind of Ozark,” and “very honky-tonk.” I might add “precarious.” With the wind still up, it was no small feat to slide our boat into a vacant slot and drop anchor without drifting into our new neighbors. Behind cans of Bud Light, they watched me maneuver. I thought they looked largely unimpressed. 

“Believe it or not, the Sandbar kind of manages itself,” Hebert told me. “Most of the frequent users, they know how special it is.” Boaters have an unspoken agreement with the adjacent property owners: keep things under control or lose the privilege. 

Suddenly, a clanky, electronic version of “Pop Goes the Weasel” drowned out the music playing from people’s radios — the Chunky Dunky Ice Cream boat was making its afternoon pass. The husband-and-wife duo of Barb and Richie Vieira has captained the ice-cream boat since the summer of 2020, when they sold their laundromat, 40 minutes away, and chose a semi-retirement gig on the water. The name comes from a term of endearment they told me friends had bestowed on their big-boned family. Their business slogan: “We’re not skinny dipping anymore! We’re chunky dunking!” 

Early on, the Vieiras worried that boaters and homeowners lounging on their docks wouldn’t want to be sold anything while trying to relax. “But 99 percent of the time,” Richie said, “people are happy to see us.” The Vieiras also had concerns about collisions, what with so many inexperienced boaters on the water, so they instituted a “we come to you” policy that involves a pool-skimming net on a 15-foot pole, for shuttling credit cards, cash, and SpongeBob popsicles between vessels kept at a safe distance from each other. “We haven’t lost one yet!” Barb said. 

Dockside pizza delivery from Randy’s Wooster St Pizza Shop.

We spent the rest of the afternoon yanking the kids around Brandy Pond on tubes and taking turns seeing who among the adults remembered how to water-ski. On our way back to the Causeway, we approached the old town landing, where, a century ago, genteel travelers stepped off steamships. Instead, an employee of Randy’s Wooster St Pizza met us there. She was waiting with several cheesy pies we’d called in for waterside pickup. 

While we were tied off at the landing, I started chatting with a group of tourists from out of state. I mentioned the Ozarks analogy to them. “No way!” one said. “I’m a Missouri guy, and this is way better than the Ozarks.”

Get all of our latest stories delivered straight to your mailbox every month. Subscribe to Down East magazine.

She’s the only woman in America to captain a swordfishing boat, but that’s hardly the most interesting thing on Linda Greenlaw’s résumés. She grew up hauling lobster pots during summers on Isle au Haut and started working on a swordfishing vessel at 19. She appeared in Sebastian Junger’s bestselling book The Perfect Storm, about the 1991 sinking of the Andrea Gail, which claimed the lives of her friends. Then, she wrote a book of her own, The Hungry Ocean, a gritty recounting of a monthlong swordfishing trip, which landed on the New York Times bestseller list. She’s since written 10 more books and founded a charter tour business, Linda Greenlaw Charters, near her home, in Surry. It was while piloting a tour a few years back that she found her favorite Maine place, a little cove on the eastern side of Morgan Bay that she appreciates for its quietude. These days, whenever she has time, she likes to hike to the cove at low tide to go clamming. 

Of her many pursuits, fishing remains Greenlaw’s favorite, no matter how demanding the lifestyle. She considers herself retired from chasing swordfish, but when pressed, she takes a “never say never” stance on someday unretiring. “Swordfish are alive and colorful when they come on board,” she says. “With their big bills, it’s like catching unicorns.” Last fall, she flew to Alaska to join the cast of season 19 of Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch, a series that follows the day-to-day dramas of crab-fishing crews on the Bering Sea. She spent weeks captaining a ship, hauling and setting gear, and learning the art of king-crab fishing on the icy waters with co-captain “Wild” Bill Wichrowski. She found that her optimistic leadership style and Wichrowski’s grouchy disposition complemented each other. “We were like black and white,” she says. 

Greenlaw celebrated the show’s season premier, back in April, by throwing a watch party for 140 of her friends and family at Bucksport’s Alamo Theatre. She’s pretty sure she liked the episode, but she might need to watch it again to get the full effect. “Every time I came on the screen, everyone started screaming and cheering,” she says. “I couldn’t hear a thing.”

Headshot courtesy of Discovery Channel

Get all of our latest stories delivered straight to your mailbox every month. Subscribe to Down East magazine.

The runway at the Machias Valley Airport is exactly 2,880 feet long, which leaves just enough asphalt for LifeFlight of Maine to land its twin-prop medevac plane, and only in clear weather. “We can get in there if the pavement is dry,” says John Rolfson, LifeFlight’s aviation-infrastructure engineer. “No snow, no rain, nothing like that.” So much as a puddle in the wrong place can change the equation. The runway, used mostly by small single-props, is hemmed in by Route 1 at one end and a bluff above the Machias River at the other. Despite its limitations, the airstrip is essential to operations for the nonprofit LifeFlight, the state’s only air-ambulance service since its inception 25 years ago. 

LifeFlight crews get called into Machias all the time, often for the most high-stakes of cases. (Neonatal and maternal emergencies are frequent, since the town’s Down East Community Hospital is home to the only obstetrics unit in all of Washington County.) On calm days, flying in and out isn’t a problem. One of LifeFlight’s helicopters can operate easily, and so can its airplane. But when the weather turns ugly — and this is Maine, after all — helicopters can’t get in. If the plane, which can handle rougher conditions, can’t make it either, patients have to rely on ground transportation. The nearest high-level trauma center, equipped for most emergencies, is Eastern Maine Medical Center, in Bangor, 85 miles away. For patients in the “golden hour” — the crucial time immediately following a medical event — that distance can mean the difference between life and death.

LifeFlight has established landing sites around the state, from the western mountains to the north woods to remote islands. Pilots can look at weather reports for a general idea of what they’re venturing into, but until recently, getting an actual visual required having someone from a sheriff’s office or the warden service drive out and snap a cell-phone photo. That’s why, last year, Rolfson and Josh Dickson, LifeFlight’s director of aviation services, began installing some three dozen cameras, $4,000 a pop, at rural airstrips and along high ridgelines that pilots need to judge if they can safely clear. 

“People don’t get that investment in rural airports is an investment in health care,” Dickson says. “For us, airports are health-care facilities.” With almost a third of Maine’s rural hospitals facing the risk of closure, according to one recent study, these airstrips become even more important. LifeFlight’s five helicopters and one plane are each equipped with half a million dollars in medical equipment. Not only do crews bring patients to hospitals, but they also deliver what’s essentially ICU-level care to the middle of nowhere. “We can drop an on-demand hospital at a moment’s notice,” Dickson says.

Rolfson calls the cameras “the next evolution in weather reporting.” LifeFlight crews can manipulate the cameras from afar to see in different directions and to zoom up to 32 times normal magnification. It’s like having actual eyes on the ground. 

Within a week of Rolfson installing a camera in Machias, Dickson says, it “saved the day.” A medevac call came in from the local hospital that morning, but a storm had made air transport impossible. LifeFlight also has its own ground ambulances, so a Bangor-based crew sped to the scene, where they found a person in critical condition. Every moment counted. At LifeFlight’s command center, Dickson and his team monitored the situation. “We’d been watching the weather,” he says, “but we thought, let’s see what it’s looking like now.” Dickson zoomed in and saw that there were still wet spots on the runway, but where it needed to be, it was dry enough. “We looked at that live feed, and we said, ‘Let’s go.’”

Get all of our latest stories delivered straight to your mailbox every month. Subscribe to Down East magazine.

As part of a mental-health initiative, L.L.Bean posted photos of a campsite in a lush valley, overlaid with text that read “Off the Grid,” before shutting down its social-media feeds for an entire month.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by L.L.Bean (@llbean)

Sanford

On Discovery Channel’s Naked and Afraid: Solo, an in-the-buff survival show that leaves people alone in extreme environments for up to three weeks, Sanford resident Cheeny Plante lasted the whole time in South African grasslands. She ate lots of grubs.

Denmark

Tornadoes are rare in Maine, but a type of twister known as a landspout damaged buildings and trees after touching down in a rural area. Landspouts are usually less intense than supercell tornadoes — this one clocked relatively modest 55-mile-an-hour winds.

Ogunquit

When a pair of swimmers was spotted floundering in waves 150 yards from land, a fisherman gave first responders a ride out, and firefighter Nathanael Pierce jumped into the surf and helped both people swim to shore.

Acadia National Park

Six local fire departments responded to a blaze on St. Sauveur Mountain, and a Maine Forest Service helicopter dropped water on the flames. Together, they managed to contain the burn to just half an acre.

Portland

The nonprofit Portland Downtown teamed up with Maine College of Art students on snarky banners for city lampposts, and one — “We were here first, Oregon. You’re not even a port.” — made the news in both Portlands (as Oregon’s is, in fact, a major port).

It should have been a normal day for the lighthouse keepers on Goat Island. The weather was clear, they’d been keeping up with maintenance, and there were no signs of trouble in the keepers’ quarters or the lighthouse in the days prior. But when Nick Lewia woke up on November 3 last year to boat his eight-year-old son to school, the island was without power. It’s not uncommon for things to stop working on Goat Island — that’s the nature of lighthouse keeping — but Nick assumed a grid issue. When he realized electricity was flowing normally on the mainland, he knew there was a bigger problem. 

Goat Island Light, its keepers’ station, and a handful of outbuildings are the only structures on the three-and-a-half-acre island, about a mile off Cape Porpoise. For 38 years, they’d been linked by a 5,000-foot underwater cable to the mainland grid. The cable had a lifespan of only about 30 years; still, it had failed without warning. The automated light and foghorn remained functional, since the Coast Guard put them on solar power in 2008, but the cable was the source of all other electricity. 

Nick and Amy Lewia, who are in their late 30s, and their son, Brandon, have been living on Goat Island intermittently since last summer. They’re more property caretakers than old-school wickies — mowing the lawn, keeping up the historic buildings — as are long-term keepers Scott and Karen Dombrowski. In their 60s, the Dombrowskis have been inviting friends, like Nick and Amy, to learn the ropes and tend to the place while they winter in Florida — and perhaps be on deck when they eventually retire. This summer marks the Dombrowskis’ 30th year as keepers. Members of the Kennebunkport Conservation Trust, they began living on the island with their five- and seven-year-old sons in 1993, when the trust acquired it from the Coast Guard. Since then, they’ve made Goat Island Light a fixture of Kennebunkport life. They’ve hosted scouting troops and college classes, acted as stewards for 2,000 summer visitors, and participated in 25 maritime rescues. The light, as far as the Dombrowskis know, is the only one with a lighthouse-keeping family left in Maine. “We’re part of living history,” Scott says.

And they’re still living in a historical fashion: the estimated cost to replace the cable is $500,000, which the trust is attempting to fundraise. Despite the high cost, replacing the cable seems to be the best option. The trust had considered installing a generator and more solar power, but the logistics of transporting and storing fuel and the cost of replacing roofs for a solar installation are major barriers. So, more than six months later, the power on Goat Island is still off — and lighthouse-keeping ingenuity alone isn’t enough to fix it.

The Lewias, the Dombrowskis, and the rest of the keeper apprentices are brainstorming fundraising ideas — they have to, to hear Scott tell it. “Without power and the tools necessary to maintain the island,” he says, “it will diminish the community service we’ve built over the last 30 years.” They plan to approach Maine businesses for donations and offer individual cable sponsorships: a foot of cable for around $70. So far, one donor has pledged $100,000. But not having power won’t stop the Dombrowskis and Lewias from living on the island this summer — and they’re still welcoming visitors. “We have lanterns, candles . . . it’ll be like glorified camping,” Nick says. “Our plan is to be out there no matter what.”

Get all of our latest stories delivered straight to your mailbox every month. Subscribe to Down East magazine.

The new president of the 40-year-old nonprofit Island Institute comes into her role at a time when there is, as she puts it, “no shortage of issues facing island and coastal communities”: dearths of affordable housing, a warming and rising ocean, fewer opportunities for fishing and traditional waterfront jobs. In the face of these things, to hear Kim Hamilton tell it, her organization isn’t out to shield island lifestyles from change but to facilitate adaptation. “I think we tend to think of our islands and coastal communities in a nostalgic way, as sort of preserved in amber,” she says, “but islands are actually these incredible examples of change and rebirth, something they’ve been doing for centuries.”

Generational memory stretching across those centuries, she says, is part of what makes island communities special. Eight generations of her own family have lived and worked on Chebeague Island, in Casco Bay, fishing and lobstering, quarrying granite, running a general store, and more. “Just drawing on all of their resources,” Hamilton says, “emblematic of what it takes to live on an island.” Her father, a dockworker, moved to the mainland as an adult, and Hamilton grew up in North Yarmouth, visiting her grandparents on Chebeague in the summer. “We’d spend a few weeks and just run all around the island,” she remembers. “One of the wonderful things about being young on an island is that you really can’t get lost.”

When she headed off to college, in Oregon, in the 1980s, she didn’t envision returning to Maine. She got a graduate degree at Johns Hopkins and a doctorate at Brown and went to work for a series of humanitarian and development organizations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Then, a few years ago, she felt Chebeague’s pull. “It was just time,” Hamilton says. “I think people just fall in love with island communities, and there’s this deep connection to place. When we moved there, I felt it at a cellular level.”

These days, she lives in what had been her grandmother’s house, along a dirt road, a short walk from forested trails at the Littlefield Woods preserve, where she played as a kid. “I get this sense of deep history there,” Hamilton says. “These are the same paths that my father and generations of island folks have walked on. To me, it’s almost a sacred place.” 

Headshot courtesy of the Island Institute

Get all of our latest stories delivered straight to your mailbox every month. Subscribe to Down East magazine.