Features
Kiss the Sky
If you want to see Penobscot Bay, try a 1941 biplane. By: Elizabeth Peavey
Linda Bean’s Lobster Dreams
Portrait by Benjamin Magro
Most people who catch, buy, process, or serve lobster are bracing for what’s expected to be another challenging season. There’s a global recession on, and consumers seem to be cutting back on everything from new cars to four-dollar lattes and, yes, pricey seafood entrées. Last fall saw the worst lobster prices in a decade, and the lobster industry is bracing for more tough times.
Linda Bean, by contrast, is buying lobsters like crazy. By: Colin Woodard
Temporary Town
Photography by David A. Rodgers
There is no school in the town of Frye Island. There is no church, either. No commerce, no industry. No historical society. Not even a cemetery memorializing founding fathers and prominent families. In many ways, Frye Island is a town that defies the meaning of the word, but legally, even a bit notoriously, it passes the test. By: Virginia Wright
The Late Great Lenny Breau
It’s not easy being a Lenny Breau fan. It means idolizing a guy, who – while arguably one of the greatest jazz guitarists who ever lived and certainly the best born in Maine – was also a doper, drunk, deadbeat, philanderer, and liar, who mostly failed to live up to his potential.
Read the full review in the July 2009 issue of Down East Magazine. By: Al Diamon
Buy Fish Here
Eight standout seafood markets along the Maine coast (in no particular order). By: Kathleen Fleury
Pure Leaves
It happened during that hushed interlude between afternoon and evening, the hour when unquiet spirits swirl in highball glasses out on the deck. I was walking alone down a shadowy back lane that connects our modest coastal village with the bigger town next door. From somewhere ahead came a rustling noise. I thought nothing of it at first (probably just a domestic animal being eaten alive by mosquitoes, I figured). Then from the corner of my eye I glimpsed a stirring among the undergrowth. By: Richard Grant
You Say Potato
Photograph by Natalie Conn
By the final match, even the referee, Jake Rogeski, has jumped over a hay bale and into the ring. Sticky, white potato mash flies up and over the square-bales and into the parking lot behind the old town offices. By: Peter Smith
Departments
Down East, Version 2.0
This month, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to the relaunch of our Web site, DownEast.com. (You’ll see a snapshot of it on the next page, along with its many cool new features.) But I’d like to trumpet this miracle of twenty-first century technology by doing something unfashionable. I want to invoke the spirit of 1954: the year of this magazine’s founding. By: Paul Doiron
Constructing a View
Building a house in Georgetown before college left me with an unexpected insight. By: Jaed Coffin
Hot Tips
You know those little metal bands that scientists attach to the limbs of migrating birds to track their travels? Well, now you can have your very own. Don’t worry, these birder bands are not destined for limbs (per se). Rather, they are for human binoculars (or purses, necklaces, fingers, and other creative hosts).
The Watchmen
On or about June 15 of this year, the Maine Department of Conservation will liberate more than forty thousand acres of forestland surrounding Seboomook Lake. The so-called Seboomook Unit, a picturesque forest landscape just north of Moosehead Lake, was purchased in 2003 as part of a major Land for Maine’s Future project along the West Branch of the Penobscot River. Until this summer, however, the public still had to pay for access to this ostensibly public land. By: Edgar Allen Beem
Red Sky at Night
Photograph by Jennifer Smith-Mayo
James and Elizabeth Lindquist had racked up years of experience in other restaurants by the time they opened Red Sky in Southwest Harbor in 2003. Consequently, they knew precisely what they wanted. James sums it up in two words: “unstuffy elegance.”
Long View
Talk about the best seat in the house. As if this 1898 swing erected at the summit of Mount Battie in Camden were not the perfect perch, photographer Theresa Parker Babb decided to have some fun by leaning a ladder against the rough-hewn posts. She then persuaded these three unidentified ladies to climb the ladder backwards, creating the illusion of the women practically standing on top of each other. A three-masted schooner is visible in Camden Harbor, at lower right, completing its final fitting-out at Holly Bean’s yard on Sea Street. By: Joshua F. Moore