September 2004
By Tom Snyder
If you’ve been looking for a unique cruising adventure on the New England coast, look no further. Below is an idea for cruising with a special theme in mind. You’ve heard of wine-tasting tours in France or dining tours in Italy or tours of detention centers in Rumania. Well, why not sail our own coast with a compelling premise, an organizing principle that guides you from harbor to harbor in search of something special? Welcome to my first Great Literature of Maine Coastal Cruise.
Day 1. We gather at Isle au Haut, where we will hope to get a peek at Linda Greenlaw, a beloved Maine writer who has written about her experiences working her way from cook and deckhand to captain of a swordfishing boat. We will hang out at bars where we can listen in as fishermen tell her huge lies about themselves. If we’re lucky we may run into Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, who played the part of Linda as a swordfish captain in the movie version of Sebastian Junger’s book “The Perfect Storm.” I think it’s safe to assume that both Mary Elizabeth and Sebastian will be hanging around when we are there. This will be a late night.
Day 2. We will all converge in Camden, where we will ride in a chartered bus to many sites all over interior Maine where Stephen King conceived his grisly novels. King grew up in Durham, Maine, where, according to his biography, his mother cared for his incapacitated grandparents. Which begs the question, in what horrific way were they capacitated? Where was Stephen at the exact time they were being incapacitated? These are questions we will try to answer.
After graduation from Lisbon Falls High in 1996, King met his wife at the University of Maine in Orono. They both had jobs in the stacks of the school library. How many mangled corpses are still filed away there, thanks to some bizarre filing system concocted by those two obsessed lovebirds?
We will end our day at Hampden Academy, where Stephen taught after college. It’s fun to imagine the concerns of the boarders’ parents who read King’s first novel, “Carrie,” which he wrote right there on campus. The bus will have us back at our boats at the stroke of midnight.
Day 3. Next stop, the Brooklin, Maine, residence of the beloved E. B White. E(lwyn) B(rooks) White or “Andy” as we called him, contributed over many years to The New Yorker magazine. After that, apparently he wrote some books, none of which I have read, but I hear that they are classics of their genre, if you like that sort of thing. Most famous is his crime thriller “Charlotte’s Web,” which I assume is about a girl and a web (of lies?).
White also appears to have dabbled (as so many desperate writers are tempted) in the shady world of off-color prose. His most famous is the collection of decadent essays, One Man’s Meat (1942), originally written for Harper’s magazine. We will walk the town and perhaps rub shoulders with elders who once knew this complicated man.
Day 4. Off to a beguiling literary mystery in Brunswick Maine. Harriet Beecher Stowe, born June 14, 1811 in Litchfield, Conn., grew up listening to her father’s anti-slavery sermons. Later in life, when Harriet discovered that her servant, Zillah, was actually a runaway slave, she learned about the Underground Railroad. This was her inspiration to write “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” written largely in Brunswick.
Now for the mystery. Both Harriet and Linda Greenlaw spent time in Connecticut and then in Maine. Both of them wrote about unusual people. Isn’t that just a little too pat, a little too convenient? We will divide up in teams and scour the peninsula below Brunswick to find out what’s going on here.
Day 5. Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for “The Harp Weaver and Other Poems.” Her poem, “Renascence,” may have been inspired by the view from the top of Camden’s Mt. Battie. She and her husband sailed from Camden every summer to Ragged Island in Casco Bay, and that’s where we head next.
At Ragged Island we will go ashore and each try to find our own poet within. This will be challenging, especially for me, because I don’t like poetry – all those little rhymes and dainty metaphors. I hate that stuff and always have. Why don’t people just write what they are thinking instead of beating around the poetry bush?
Day 6. Portland, Maine and the early residence of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864). Hawthorne graduated from Bowdoin in 1825. In fact, his book “Fanshawe” was set at Bowdoin College. He was a transcendental thinker and shared the Emersonian ideal of self-reliance, which asks us to live according to our own nature, listening to our impulses.
“The Scarlet Letter” was perhaps his best-known book. We will go ashore in Portland and head directly for this little city’s famous topless donut restaurant. There, we will confront our own impulses and laugh at the rest of society’s prudish and puritanical ways. For a little fun we will also wear t-shirts with an “A” silk-screened on the front and back.
Day 7. On our final day we will sail southwest to Boon Island, about which author Kenneth Lewis Roberts (1885-1957) wrote. Roberts was born in Kennebunk and later built a home called Rocky Pastures in Kennebunkport. He wrote many historical novels set in New England, such as “Northwest Passage” and “Boon Island.”
Roberts had always been intrigued by the wreck of the Nottingham in 1710. Running aground just off Boon Island, this ship broke up, leaving her crew with no shelter and only a few pieces of cheese. The men survived a month of sub-freezing temperatures and driving snowstorms.
Perhaps more important than his books are the accusations that Roberts was a rabid, ultra-conservative, right-wing Republican who despised the New Deal and detested America’s history of immigration. He “so hated Franklin Roosevelt that he glued Roosevelt dimes to the clamshells he used as ashtrays, the better to grind ashes into FDR’s face!”
We will sit on the rocks of this desolate island and try to imagine how much Roberts would have loved Hillary Clinton and same-sex marriage. And that will be the end of our literature tour. Please join us!
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