Maine: A Love Story – Part 1

Every fall, Zach and I take a week and go somewhere. Late September, early October, right before the holiday season turns into a demolition derby. We started it in 2019 and it has become the most protected week on our calendar. Tucson one year. Jekyll and Cumberland Island another. A big loop through Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon and Joshua Tree that I still rank near the top.

And then there was Maine, which is the year I learned that the best vacation is the one where you mostly stop moving.

It started with a question I did not see coming. In early 2023, Zach asked, “Would you want to go to Maine?” Now, you have to understand the odds here: Zach is a mountain person and I am an ocean person, and Maine had never once come out of his mouth. He also didn’t know it had been sitting at the top of my bucket list for as long as I’d had one. So when he offered it up, unprompted, I did the only reasonable thing and said yes before he could reconsider.

I’d originally booked a place on Mt. Desert Island, a few miles from Bar Harbor, the part of Maine everybody pictures. But the host emailed before the trip to say they had maintenance that week and couldn’t host us, so I went back to searching, and that little accident turned out to be the best thing that happened to the whole trip. I found a cottage much farther north, out on a peninsula near Pigeon Hill and the Petit Manan stretch of the Maine Coastal Islands refuge. Remote. Quiet. Two bedrooms, a fireplace, walls of windows, and a big deck hanging out over a rocky coast with the water right there. The listing photos undersold it, which in my experience never happens.

And then there was Ray.

Ray was the caretaker, and Ray is the reason I will talk about this cottage for the rest of my life. He texted the day we arrived with everything we needed to know, then asked if he could swing by the next morning during his bike ride. He came around ten and walked us through all of it: where to eat, where to hike, where the groceries and the firewood were, which drives were worth the gas. He gave us his cell number and he meant it. And on our way out at the end of the week, when we texted him about the food we hadn’t finished, he came and collected our extra salad and bread and fruit and flour and sugar, and told us that whatever he and his wife couldn’t use, he knew families who could. That is the whole man in one sentence.

Here is what we actually did in Maine, and I want to be honest about it, because it turned out to be the point: we sat on the deck.

There were big rocking chairs and a swing and a stack of blankets in the living room, and we would wrap up and sit out over the rocks for hours. We watched seals. We watched otters. We watched more kinds of birds than I can name. There was a telescope in the cottage, and once the storm that met us at the door had blown through (more on that storm in Part Two), the nights went clear and cold and ridiculous with stars, and we would haul the telescope out and just look up. I am a person who plans vacations down to the half hour. Maine cured me of it for a week.

The high point, if you can call the absence of activity a high point, was the day we declared a stay-home day and did nothing on purpose. I made Smitten Kitchen’s chocolate chip sour cream coffee cake; Zach turned out a pan of his famous buttermilk biscuits another morning. We put records on the turntable that came with the place. I had packed watercolors and pens, so I painted and drew out on the deck while Zach read on his Kindle, and then we both fell asleep out there wrapped in blankets like a pair of retirees, which I mean as the highest possible compliment. We ate the coffee cake that afternoon and saved the rest for breakfast. It remains one of the best days of my adult life, and nothing happened during it.

The other thing we did was eat, and this is where Maine quietly humiliated every coastal vacation I have ever taken. Ray pointed us to Chipman’s Wharf in Millbridge, a small family-owned fishery where every single person was kind. I walked out with four lobsters, two dozen oysters, two dozen clams, and fish, and the whole haul came to less than eighty dollars. We got four meals out of it.

Ray had told us to boil the lobsters in seawater, so Zach walked off of the back deck to the water and fetched a pot of it, and we boiled them in the actual ocean they came out of. We ate some of the oysters raw on the spot. The rest became a seafood stew with leftover lobster and fish and clams, potatoes, corn, cream, and stock, and another night I made clam chowder. I have paid four times that price for half as good in cities I will not embarrass here.

I also conducted research. Over the week I worked my way through four lobster rolls, hot-with-butter and cold-with-mayo, strictly in the name of science, and I am prepared to defend the findings: the hot buttered lobster roll is superior, full stop. Cold mayo has its people and I wish them well. They are wrong.

We did go out properly once, in Bar Harbor, to a place called Galyn’s. I had the Maine Combination (a lobster tail, two grilled local scallops, and a homemade crab cake), Zach had a seafood fettuccine swimming in lobster cream and ringed with steamed mussels, and we split a Maine blueberry-apple crisp because obviously. I also had a cocktail called the Maine Waters, cold and clear, local Cold River vodka with white cranberry and Cointreau and clarified lime over Eagle Lake ice, and it was so unexpectedly perfect that I am still mildly annoyed I cannot order one at home.

Even the small stuff felt right. You buy firewood on the honor system up there: you pull into a driveway, drop five or seven dollars in a box, and take a wrapped bundle. The little grocery in Millbridge (Red’s) expects you to bring your own bags, and the whole state, down to the smallest towns, was visibly recycling-minded and visibly, stickers-in-the-window LGBTQ friendly. It is a place that seems to have quietly decided to take care of itself and its people, and you feel it the whole time you’re there.

I fell in love with coastal Maine the way I have fallen for exactly one other place in my life, which is Alaska, where I lived for a year in 1994, in a cabin off Exit Glacier Road outside Seward with no electricity and no running water. Maine reminded me of it: the sea and the rock and the light, and the particular kind of person who chooses to live somewhere that winter takes seriously. I told Zach we should sell everything and move there. He agreed it had the vibe. We both knew we wouldn’t. It was less a plan than a feeling, and the feeling was: we’ll be back.

So that is the gentle half of the story. The blanket-on-the-deck, lobster-in-seawater, nowhere-to-be half. The half I would move there for.

But I have left something out. Maine did not open the door gently; it met us with a tropical storm and no power and a drive through the fog that felt like the first chapter of a horror novel, and over the week it carried us to the easternmost edge of the country, through a graveyard behind a ghost guide, and up to a famous writer’s wrought-iron gate. There is a whole other Maine inside this trip, the gothic one, and my mother is in it. That’s Part Two.

Where’s your bucket-list place? Have you ever fallen so hard for somewhere that you started quietly doing the move-there math? Let me know in the comments.

P.S. Four lobster rolls, hot and cold, strictly for rigor. Hot buttered wins. This is the hill I will die on.

P.P.S. Less than eighty dollars at Chipman’s Wharf fed two people for four days, lobster included. I think about it more than is probably healthy.

P.P.P.S. Yes, I told Zach we should sell the house and move to Maine. He gently pointed out that I say this in every place I love. He is right. We still might.