What Was and Wasn't, Part II:
Claudia La Rocco

’Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free
’Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be.
—from the Shaker song “Simple Gifts”

My adolescent bedroom’s pale blue walls featured three posters: Andre Agassi sweaty and glorious with his shaggy mullet, soulfully fingering his strings in three-quarter view; Bobby Brown, resplendent in gold, staring (soulfully) out from between his shoulder pads; and Saul Steinberg’s famous 1976 New Yorker cover in which a bustling West Side abuts the soulless wasteland that is Everywhere Else. It was the great tragedy of my youth that my parents left New York in ’76, the year before I was born. I considered Steinberg’s map to be an earnest cultural portrait. And here’s another: a chubby pubescent white girl singing “My Prerogative” at top volume, dreaming of escape to the Big Apple, Andre and Bobby in rebel solidarity. Tell me, tell me, why can’t I live my life?

Lots of kids talked about how much it sucked living in Downeast Maine, but lots of kids talk about lots of things. Those kids weren’t necessarily the ones you knew would get out, with that fatalistic certainty particular to the young. My friend Cora was getting out. And so was I. With Cora it wasn’t so much what she said. Most of that was made up or at least exaggerated—with someone else you might say lies. But there was something that would happen to her eyes, a place she would go, amid dire events. In those moments, she was already gone.

On some level Cora and I must have registered the disconnect, that while we dreamed of escape, people from away escaped to Maine. This surely contributed to the enraged glee with which we tailgated RVs, a tribalism that still ghosts me when I see out-of-state plates. The annual deluge dates to the mid-1800s, when wealthy “rusticators,” many of them lured by artists’ depictions of coastal Maine, began flocking here in the summer months; as other industries failed, tourism filled the gap, rendering entire towns unaffordable year-round to many locals and simply unendurable between Memorial and Labor Day. In 1958, Louise Dickinson Rich published The Peninsula, an account of her seasonal love affair with Corea, a village in my hometown. Rich lays forth a way of life already losing its essential qualities as it succumbs to invasive, modern forces. Reading The Peninsula now, I’m reminded of the despondent exasperation I experienced as a young and very green dance critic when certain elders made clear that the best stuff, the authentic stuff, was long gone.

Rich is a lively writer—the book means to charm, and it does. Her descriptions of land and sea meet something deep inside my own childhood. But there’s a quality I find irksome, too, beyond the typical narcissism of much writing from that time, which ties history’s beginnings to the arrival of Europeans. My irritation clarified recently when I saw a tourism marketing campaign instrumentalizing a quote from Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck’s 1960 American road odyssey, which I fitfully imbibed as a nascent, terribly adrift college graduate, having finally made it to Manhattan:

To put it plainly, this Isle is like Avalon; it must disappear when you are not there

The isle is Deer Isle, about eighty minutes’ drive from Corea. What’s bothersome about the quote, the same thing needling me about The Peninsula, is the romance of it all (though Steinbeck, a darker and savvier portraitist, doesn’t make pets of people as egregiously as Rich often does). I escaped into the Arthurian legends in The Mists of Avalon as a teenager. And there’s truth to Rich’s and Steinbeck’s view, their mourning for a vanishing localism, however self-unaware the mourning is in Rich’s case. But I promise you, the last time I looked in my rearview mirror when navigating the narrow, vertiginous bridge linking Deer Isle to the mainland: it was still there, even when I was not.

The Peninsula doesn’t include Marsden Hartley, the Maine-born painter and poet who lived in Corea toward the end of his life; his restless, complicated relationship to his home state lies outside Rich’s purview. For a time, Hartley made his studio in an abandoned church on a rise overlooking the harbor. Church at Corea, his 1941 painting, to my eyes depicts a landscape as much as an edifice, the building’s arched doors and windows curving like the dark ribs of the earth beneath winter’s white carpet.

My friend Anna recently took me to Selkie Sauna, a mobile unit that on this day was set up on Mount Desert Island’s Long Pond. Sliding perilously between the steamy cedar sauna and a hole cut into the thick ice, then plunging into chest-high, almost unbearably cold water, for a moment I was back in elementary school, on one of our mid-year outings to Jones Pond. A disaster on ice skates, I would inevitably retreat from the blinding cold white to the warm darkness of the shelter, where I could guzzle a thin, sweet mixture of scalding water and Swiss Miss hot cocoa powder while waiting for the field trip to end. Now my partner and I walk from our house to a nearby farm and look across the frozen fields to the pond, where snowmobilers carve lemniscates on its still surface. Above the water the Pond Road is visible as a break in the vegetation, if you know where to look; the long straight chute down the peninsula boasts the town’s lone surviving elm tree, and the skeletal remains of my grammar school. Driving me and my brother there in the mornings, my mother often sang “Simple Gifts” in her clear, rich voice.

Born here, to people from away, I occupied a strangely indeterminate position, receiving and internalizing mixed messages about where I belonged. I think this is one reason I appreciate Hartley’s ambivalence, and it also must relate to my deep feelings of alienation toward much prevailing wisdom in this country about how the other half lives. Growing up, I couldn’t stand certain neighbors’ ideas about urban centers (dangerous dens of iniquity), just as I am now routinely appalled by city acquaintances’ ideas about rural Americans (ignorant simpletons seething with all the isms).

My most recent visit to Deer Isle was to see my friends Meg Wolfe and Lorrie Snyder. Lor and I were discussing the hierarchy of “from away,” and where we fall on it. I outrank her, although her connection to Meg, a self-described “second generation year-rounder from away,” and the fact that both women make their livings with their hands, means that she outranks others. She told me about a shirt someone wore to a local establishment last year, causing a mix of glee and consternation. The shirt read summah people and summah not. “People from away” allows us to pretend it’s geography, not class. But it’s almost always class. The other day I met a woman who has lived in the next town over for more than twenty years; she referred to the lobstermen as “aristocrats,” bitterly decrying the way they threw their weight around at local meetings, and the deference they inevitably received. I thought of this when I read Rich’s musings that lobstermen have “an air and bearing of individual dignity that is almost regal.” She attributes this to the men being fully at home in their arduous world, having made peace with loneliness through long hours “on the empty wastes of the sea.”

Is the little church on the hill lonely? Or is it only that the painting (the painter) is lonely? “There seemed to be no cure for loneliness,” Steinbeck writes, “save only being alone.”

We are all of us, as Rich and Steinbeck (and Hartley) well knew, alone. And of course we are almost all from away; it just depends how far back you go. Learning about the Wabanaki peoples in elementary school, I don’t remember that we spent much or any time on the state’s shameful record of dishonoring already outrageously inequitable treaties. People from away, indeed. “And on and on however far back to the bacteria on glaciers,” as Meg puts it.

Nor did we talk much in the present tense, even though the counties feeding the school system contain many indigenous families. In my kitchen now sits a small, delicate basket by Mary Newenham, a Micmac basket maker who lives one town over. It’s unassuming, meant for daily use. The more time I spend with it, the more presence it holds. My mom gave it to my partner a few Christmases back, having made the purchase in an otherwise empty parking lot one cold, rainy morning; I remember the cheerful dash between cars. It makes a difference, when you know the people who make the things you use. That’s part of the romance, I suppose. Familiarity can produce far nobler offspring than contempt.

Arriving in Corea, Rich observed, “It was beautiful with the only kind of beauty that I was now beginning to recognize as authentic: the great, unadorned beauty and strength of the functional.” Lor and I have been talking about a summer trip, to see the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, which is the last active Shaker village, and go up the mountain where Lor sources butternut, a disappearing North American hardwood she fashions into elegantly unadorned furniture in conversation with Shaker woodworking.

An invasive fungal disease is largely responsible for the butternut devastation. But there’s cause for hope: some of the trees are resistant, as are hybrids, naturally occurring crosses between the native species and Japanese walnuts. Help from away. I was thinking about this recently when I opened to a random page in Beyond the War on Invasive Species, by Tao Orion, which Meg recommended to me last fall when we were commiserating on our Sisyphean battles against the Asiatic bittersweet vine: “Life is organized in systems, their component elements and processes related to and nested within each other on infinite scales.”

Cora would laugh and laugh if she knew I’d come back. I can see her falling sideways on the couch, long hair spilling across the flowered fabric like a glossy curtain, fighting to find the breath to tell me what an idiot I am. But then I think—maybe she’s back, too. Steinbeck again: Maybe understanding is possible only after. Maybe it never is.

Note: “Simple Gifts” is generally believed to have been written in 1848 by Elder Joseph Brackett, a Maine-born Shaker who was then living in the Shaker Village at Alfred as a member of the Maine Shaker Ministry.

Photographs courtesy the author.