The Countryman: Culturally deprived ‘up here’

Readers are more interested in what happens in the classroom, I told the publisher and his staff, than they are in the mechanics of school operation. I suggested folks might like to read, for example, about schoolkids who take part in Odyssey of the Mind.

The publisher wasn’t impressed. He said something like, “Oh, that’s not important to our readers. We have a richer culture than you have ‘up there’ in rural Maine, so we don’t have to resort to such things.” None of his staff showed the temerity to disagree.

I was interviewing for the job of editor of Maine Times, a liberal weekly that purported to serve the entire state. I didn’t argue with the publisher because I wanted the job. I didn’t get the job, and the gentle soul who did, a friend from our days at the Bangor Daily News, was chewed up by a fractious staff within a few years.

OM — it is now rivaled by its spinoff, called Destination Imagination — is a competition in which teams of kids compete with teams from other schools, presenting skits or science and engineering projects to judges and audiences. Maine’s winners go on to compete against schools from all over the country. Maine teams have won national titles.

At that interview, I had just returned with my son, age 10, from the national finals of OM in Arizona. On the way home, we toured the National Gallery in Washington, between trains, and he saw paintings by Picasso, whose work had been the basis of the skit created by his team from the New Sharon School.

New Sharon’s kids and Ingalls’s kids won state championships in 1986 and had represented Maine at Flagstaff.

The publisher’s putdown was not the only time that someone in southern Maine has been at pains to tell me how deprived we are to live “up here.” A woman in Buxton to whom I delivered products from our farm had an African-American son. She said she wouldn’t live in our part of the state because her son would never see other black folks and the white folks around here are so prejudiced. I wondered, first, how many black folks her boy encountered in Buxton and, second, how she knew we were all bigots. I bit my tongue. I wanted her business. But, she never ordered again.

An aside: At the farmers market at the West Farmington Grange in January, I saw three black folks, two selling food, one buying. Wonder how many black folks she sees at the Buxton farmers market. Oh, wait. There isn’t a Buxton farmers market.

In the 30 years since that publisher put down the “up here” part of Maine, I have often been happy that I live “up here.” Not that everything I want to do can be done in or near New Sharon, but Franklin County isn’t quite so removed from culture, popular and high alike, as the publisher wanted to believe. To wit:

I can attend secular concerts (six a year) that the New Sharon Congregational Church holds to raise funds and concerts that the kids stage at al of the Mount Blue School District schools. Old South Congregational in Farmington holds secular concerts, too.

Our favorite music is singer-songwriter, the phoenix risen from the ashes of the “folk scare” of the ’60s. No way we can get to all the concerts sponsored by New England Celtic Arts, let alone all the shows put on by our friends the Gawler Family Band from Belgrade or all the one-time shows by local or touring acts that you see listed in The Daily Bulldog.

Marilyn and I love movies, especially the small, independent pictures. We live 23 miles from Railroad Square Cinema in Waterville, a triple theater that sometimes shows five or six movies in a week. Portland doesn’t have an independent movie house. Bangor doesn’t have one. Indie movies make it to those cities, but not nearly so many as find Waterville. And movies that we miss at Railroad Square often show at the Narrow Gauge Cinemas in Farmington within a week or two of showing at Waterville.

Portland has lots of live theater. Bangor and Lewiston, too. Mount Blue High School has long had a strong drama program. Our sons benefited from taking part. We have attended theater productions at UMF. Lakewood Theater operates in the summer in Madison with local actors. We are less than an hour from Cumston Hall in Monmouth, where the Theater at Monmouth uses professional actors to stage two Shakespeare plays and three other plays each summer. It’s a terrific evening out in western Maine, and we often buy season tickets.

We follow women’s basketball, and I bleed UMaine blue. We have held season tickets for the past 18 years, except when one or the other of us was slowed by serious illness. In New Sharon, we are 71 miles from Paul Bunyan, and the UMaine women play at the Cross Insurance Center right behind Paul. That’s about 80 minutes. We get to games at Bowdoin or Bates within an hour, Colby within 30 minutes, UMF within 20 minutes.

Marilyn and I combine basketball trips with art-museum trips. My tastes are rather traditional. I don’t much care for artists who paint soup cans or splatter paint onto a canvas rather than brush it on. Along the way, we have spent entire days in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Chicago Art Institute. By combining round balls and rectangular pictures, we have stumbled onto such gems as the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, which has a nice collection of impressionists and one of the largest collections of the Hudson River painters, and the Clark Museum in Williamstown, Mass., where we saw 16, count ’em 16, Renoirs in one room.

True, that’s not “up here.” But we don’t travel much farther than Portlanders do to find these gems. And when the basketballs aren’t bouncing, we can check out the museum at Colby College or Bowdoin and the shows, from which we have bought watercolors, that hang at Railroad Square. And, the shows at Sugarwood Gallery in Farmington change often enough to be worth checking from time to time. We have bought craft work there, though not paintings.

Perhaps no one anywhere takes more heat from folks than the local hospital, wherever local may be. I need say the name Franklin Memorial only a time or two before someone offers a negative story. Usually unsupported by verifiable facts. But, raising two sons and running a farm — both pursuits are seldom benign — we have been quite satisfied with Franklin. Anyone can mutter about this or that. But Franklin was there when I had a heart attack, and I’m alive six years later. Franklin was there this winter when Marilyn got pneumonia, made worse by her compromised immune system. And she’s alive.

I can attend worship in New Sharon, with any of three congregations.

Anyone who has ever visited us has raved over the beauty of the landscape. You cannot eat the scenery, of course, but at least it won’t cost much, if you don’t consider your property taxes. The scenery can help you stay in touch with nature’s rhythms. Maybe your own, too.

We use that landscape to chart the progress of the seasons, or its lack. You can judge how tough winter will be by how early the ice creeps right up to the spillway at the Long Pond outlet in Belgrade Lakes village.

Most years, I know I can step into the garden within a month after Long Pond is open. We sense spring’s arrival when the ice shacks start coming off North Pond in Oakland. Many a year, you can drive past on Route 137 (on the way to or from Railroad Square) and watch a tardy shack or two tilt into the water as the ice leaves.

The sumacs along the shore of Sibley Pond in Canaan hint at how early autumn may come and how long it may last. Red sumacs in early August in Canaan? Early, short season for leaf peepers. Late August? More like an October leaf season.

The Maine Times publisher died at 67 in 2004. I doubt that he changed his notion about “up here.” Maine Times died at 31 in 1999. Reporters and its staff said at the time that it had lost touch with its statewide audience. Especially, perhaps, “up here.”

Bob Neal, a retired farmer, lives in New Sharon, roughly halfway between the ancestral hometowns of both sides of his mother’s family, Guilford and Norway. He edited and reported for newspapers for 20 years. He hopes he can afford to live out his years here.