It may be the Mountain of the People of Maine, but the pull of Katahdin reaches across continents, and every year we have campers from all over the world. At the Togue Gate we have a map of the U.S. and the gatekeepers flag the home state of visitors who come through. This year it filled fairly quickly - except for Nebraska. (Come on, Nebraska.) We didn't have any Cornhuskers until September. In the margin of this map are written the countries that have been represented, and it's a very long list.

Back to Maine weekly from my visiting professor job at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, a five-year position at that marvelous campus on its hill. The drive is three-and-a-half hours, down on Mondays early, back home to Maine on Wednesday evenings, 230 miles, a yo-yo burning about eight gallons of gas each way, stopping in Portland for dinner, usually taken at the bar at Fore Street.

But a couple of Wednesdays ago I had an evening literary event to attend-Baron Wormser,

September 17, 2007

It certainly looked as if the Morning Sentinel had a big scoop on its front page on Sept. 15. The headline in the Waterville daily read "Foe now backs Black Nubble," a reference to the controversial wind power project proposed for that western Maine mountain.

Somebody

September 13, 2007

The Maine Department of Transportation has a serious problem - too much road and not enough money, a shortfall officials estimate at $162 million a year. New construction has been postponed or canceled, and maintenance of existing roads and bridges has fallen farther behind. For instance, a truly abysmal stretch of Route 1 in Wiscasset is just now being resurfaced, after two years of broken pavement and potholes.

So perhaps we shouldn't be surprised to hear Peter

August 27, 2007

There it is, the first fiery leaf at the edge of the forest, and only mid-August. And now that I'm looking, I spy several distinctly yellowing popple trees off in the distance, and a shade of purple taking over some of the grand ashes spotted through the canopy. The broken old box elder in the yard is all but bare. I tell myself these are stressed trees, not harbingers. But the field weeds are dying back, too, only the golden rod in its glory, the first fresh monarch