Stop, Enjoy, Linger Awhile

by Esther J. Perne

Summer in Central Maine: It’s the right place at the right time. There are sunny, clear days to explore the outdoors, to seek adventure among the lakes and woods and hills and towns, to walk and hike and bike and boat or to sun and doze and dream the dream, unless, of course the breeze is right and a good book beckons on a screened-in porch.

There are gentle rainy days to explore the indoors, the shops and stores, the museums, the libraries, the workshops and presentations that are family-friendly and fuel the imagination, unless, of course, there are games to play and yummy treats to bake and share with family and friends at the kitchen table.

There are wild, windy days to retreat to the wooded trails, the protected parks, the cozy camps and all the awesome eateries, unless, of course rough water boating and sailing are on the agenda.

Summer in Central Maine: It’s the right place at the right time. On any type of day, there is a bounty of activities, of outing opportunities, of sociability, of more to do than the Calendar of Events can contain.

This time of the season, music and art top the summertime list. Outdoor concerts are available every day of the week; and on many days indoors performances, too. Films from the world over are close by at the annual Maine International Film Festival. Summer theater productions fill the stage almost nightly. SummerFests, fairs and festivals are plentiful among the Upcoming entries.

This time of the season, organized outings top the summertime list, too. Check out the guided history tours, informational hikes and nature classes, the birding and boating trips. The timing is right, unless, of course, time alone or with just family or guests is the preference for enjoying the many trails and coves and winding back roads that top the outing list at this time of year.

Summer in central Maine: It’s the right place and the right time to stop, enjoy and linger.

Mischievous Boys Riding Horses at Camp Abena

by Rod Johnson

In the early 1960s, the Camp Abena Girls Camp was alive and fairly well. The property was a peninsula sticking out into Great Pond in Belgrade Lakes, Maine. Most of you probably know the general area and perhaps some of you live on it now, often referred to as Abena Point or Abena Shores. By car it is found off the Sahagian Road just south of the Lakes Village, and by boat it is the first peninsula that you see after leaving the Mill Stream.

At that time, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Tinker, Sr. operated the seasonal camp. Mr. T was also a high school math teacher, and Mrs. T was an RN at Thayer hospital in Waterville. They moved to the Lakes a few years prior and bought the girls camp, as well as a village home that we sometimes refer to as the "Lime house," right in the center of town.

Their son Joe Jr. and I became good friends as my folk’s house was right across the street. "Tink," as young Joe became known, fit right in with the local kids and we all grew up together being mischievous teenagers. We were not generally a destructive bunch, but did like to raise a little hell now and then. Camp Abena was included in our gigantic playground, especially before the girls came in early summer and after they went home in the late summer.

Mr. T. was good-natured and let Joe and I get away with quite a lot, but every now and then he’d put his foot down and reel us in. Most often he’d lose patience when we "borrowed" the camp’s old International pickup truck. We’d ride the camp roads and slew around corners, taking turns spinning dirt and so on.

Mr. T. also owned and used an old Cadillac hearse which had been turned into a work vehicle. This too was fun to use, especially if the old man was preoccupied and we could heist it without him knowing it. We would take it out onto Sahagian road and try to burn rubber, or get going really fast and see how far we could coast. The car weighed a couple of tons, and one day we coasted all the way from Hampshire Hill to what is now Peninsula Drive, around three miles on Route 27.

Enough about motorized vehicles, because we ultimately found that riding the horses used to teach the girls to ride was much more fun. The horses were rented from Meader’s horse barn out in Waterville. Each year they supplied five or six horses and delivered them to the Abena barn a few days ahead of the girls' arrival. That was the key time for Tink and I to "ride 'em cowboy."

We weren’t experienced riders at all, just a couple of young teenagers willing to try most anything. We figured it out enough to make our way on a trail or two around the peninsula, one trail being on the ridge that runs along the east side overlooking Sahagian Cove. We occasionally got thrown off a horse, or wiped off trying to duck a tree branch. Occasionally, a horse named Elvis who had a mind of his own, would decide to head for the barn at full gallop. There was no stopping him or getting off, we would just hang on as best we could, duck when he went through the barn door, only to be bucked off when he stopped in his stall.

Horse riding was not a long term endeavor for either of us, but the experiences are still quite vivid as you’ve just heard. Mr. Tinker sold the girls camp not too many years later, and by then we had moved on to hopped up cars and dating girls. That’s another story. THE END.

MIFF Celebrates the Art of Filmmaking

by Gregor Smith

What do Footloose, Kramer vs. Kramer, Peyton Place, and Nobody’s Fool have in common? All will be shown at the nineteenth annual Maine International Film Festival, which runs from Friday, July 8 to Sunday, July 17, at the Waterville Opera House and Railroad Square Cinema.

With its mix of Hollywood classics and new independent and foreign films, MIFF presents magnificent movies that may never make it to the cineplex at the mall, as they were created to tell a story or convey a message, rather than to maximize profits for their creators. In addition, with the filmmakers present at many screenings, audiences can learn about the art of filmmaking through informal question and answer sessions afterwards.

The festival opens Friday, July 8, at 6:30 at the Waterville Opera House with a screening of Seasons by French documentarians Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud. Known for their two previous nature documentaries, Winged Migration and Oceans, the team’s new film focuses on the animals that occupied Europe’s verdant forests following the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago, before the arrival of man. According to MIFF website, "Seasons, with its exceptional footage of animals in the wild, is the awe-inspiring and thought-provoking tale of the long and tumultuous shared history that inextricably binds humankind with the natural world, told with the most stunningly lush images you’ve ever seen. It’s our world as we’ve never seen it, but always sensed it."

Afterwards will be the first of several free, post-screening receptions during the festival. Held in Castonguay Square and catered by Silver Street Tavern, the Opening Night Party will feature music by Bella’s Bartok, a six-piece band that blends "Bohemian Klezmer Punk with pop sensibilities into an eminently danceable party," and a performance by VJ Suave, Brazilian duo Ygor Marotta and Ceci Soloaga, who ride custom-built tricycles with onboard projectors and speakers for sharing audiovisual vignettes.

The opening weekend will also bring the visit of the first of four special guests. Director and screenwriter Robert Benton will receive MIFF’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the Waterville Opera House at 6:30 on Sunday, July 10. The presentation will take place at a showing of Benton’s Oscar-nominated obody’s Fool (1994), which he adapted from the novel by Richard Russo, a former professor of English at Colby College, and which starred the late Paul Newman and Jessica Tandy. During his five-decade career, Benton has won three Oscars, two of them for Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), which will be shown on Saturday, July 9. Two other Benton films, Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Late Show (1977), will be screened on Saturday and Sunday respectively.

MIFF’s other three special guests are actress Erica Rivas, best known in the U.S. for Wild Tales (2014), that year’s Argentinian nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar; actress Lori Singer, best known for the movie Footloose (1984) and the television series Fame; and actor Grabriel Byrne, this year’s MIFF Mid-Life Achievement Award honoree. MIFF’s first seven days will have screenings of two Erica Rivas films, Wild Tales and Incident Light (2015); four Lori Singer films, including Footloose; and two Gabriel Byrne movies, Jindabyne (2006) and Louder Than Bombs (2016). Byrne will receive his award on Friday, July 15, at the Opera House; we’ll say more about him in the next issue.

As Erika Rivas’s presence will attest, MIFF brings not just foreign films, but also their filmmakers, to Waterville. This has been true since the first MIFF in 1998. Last year, MIFF expanded that commitment with its first World Filmmakers Forum, which brought four filmmakers from four continents to present and discuss their works and had two of them and two Maine filmmakers hold a panel discussion on the challenges of independent filmmaking around the world.

This year’s Forum guests are Pia Marais of South Africa, who will introduce The Unpolished (2007) on July 9 and Layla Fourie (2013) on July 9 & 10; Fernando Epstein of Uruguay, who will present Neon Bull (2015) on July 10 & 11 and 25 Watts (2001) on July 12; and Alejandra Marquez Abella of Mexico, who will offer Semana Santa (2015), or "Holy Week," on July 14 & 15. Completing the Forum will be VJ Suave, who, besides pedaling the streets on their projector-equipped tricycles, will present their animated "Digital Folklore" project as part of MIFFONEDGE, an exhibit running July 9 — 16 at Common Street Arts that "features audio visual works that undermine common sense assumptions about the nature of film."

On Wednesday evening, July 13, the festival will present its Centerpiece Film, a gorgeously restored version of the 1957 potboiler Peyton Place. Shot on location in Camden and nearby towns, this adaption of a popular novel was nominated for nine Academy Awards. The story opens just before the outbreak of World War II, when an outsider (Lee Philips) takes over as principal of the high school in a conservative New England town. He becomes involved with an attractive but prudish storekeeper (Lana Turner) and learns that beneath the town’s prim and proper exterior, many secrets are hidden, including rape, suicide, and murder.

Peyton Place will not be the festival’s only vintage film. The festival always includes several "re-discoveries," i.e. classic films that have been undeservedly neglected but are now available in newly restored prints. Among this year’s classics are the directors' cut of Blood Simple, the 1984 film-noir debut by brothers Joel and Ethan Coen; Chimes at Midnight, Orson Welles’s 1965 take on Shakespeare’s great comic character, Sir John Falstaff; and 1943’s Heaven Can Wait, in which a newly dead aristocrat’s life of "continuous misdemeanor" keeps him out of Heaven, but may not be enough to get him into Hell, which to him is the more desirable destination, as it appears to be a luxury hotel with Lucifer as the gracious host. (This last film has no connection to the better known 1978 comedy of the same name that starred Warren Beatty.)

With nearly seventy new and classic films being shown at this year’s MIFF, it’s not possible to describe them all here. To see the complete schedule of screenings and read brief descriptions of all the films being shown, pick up a copy of the MIFF broadsheet, which is available at many of the same places where one can find Summertime in the Belgrades. For fuller film descriptions and color photos, visit the MIFF website or get a free copy of the festival’s 68-page program guide at either festival venue.

Admission to most screenings costs $10; the Opening Night Ceremony costs $12; and the Lifetime Achievement Award Presentation and Centerpiece Gala are $14 each. One can buy tickets in advance either online at www.miff.org or in person at Railroad Square Cinema. For $95, one can buy a Partial Pass, which is good for ten admissions, up to two per show, including to the aforementioned special events. Those planning to see more movies can buy a nontransferable, Full Pass for $200, which will admit the buyer to all festival events. As screenings can sell out, it’s best to arrive at least 15 minutes early, especially when a screening is held in either of Railroad Square’s smaller theaters.

MIFF

Memories Being Made

by Pete Kallin

It always amazes me that that although summer days are the longest of the year, they seem to go by the fastest. My grandson, Nathan, came to stay for a couple of days while his sister was away at acting camp. He is an avid fisherman and we spent a couple of days fishing.

The first day, we began by catching quite a few nice bass on streamer flies fished near schools of alewives. He then announced he wanted to try to catch a salmon so we headed down to one of my favorite spots in lower Long Pond. I rigged up one of my trolling rods for him with a Mooselook flutter spoon and he began trolling 30 feet down, just below the thermocline. I told him to catch a nice one because I needed a good picture for this week’s column. He assured me he would.

Ten minutes later his rod bent over and he yelled, "I have a big one on!" Thinking he might have a good-sized pike on the line I reached for my net and started looking for my pliers. Suddenly a huge salmon jumped out of the water 30 feet from the boat. Fifteen minutes later I was netting one of the better salmon to come out of Long Pond in quite a while: 24 inches and 4.25 pounds. Judging by the smile on his face I think he’ll remember that one for a long time, as will Grandpa.

Nathan Kallin with his landlocked salmon.

My friend Dick Greenan also had kids and grandkids in town for the week. They spent time hiking, fishing, water skiing, and sailing, all activities that created memories that will be with them the rest of their lives. Every day included a boat trip to Day’s Store for ice cream.

Mel Croft and I also led a geology-ecology hike at >BRCA’s* The Mountain property last week. We had thirteen intrepid hikers and a couple of big dogs that joined us to learn about how the Belgrade Lakes region has changed over the past 200 million years. We discussed plate tectonics, ice ages, rocks, minerals, lichens, mosses, trees, salmon, and how all these things helped create the landscape we have today. I think everyone had a good time and learned something in the process. Bill Hankermeyer was there with his wife Sharon and several of her family from Indiana, as were new Great Pond resident Tim from Tennessee and long-time BRCA members Michael Bernstein, Dave Gay, Kathy Croft, and Chris and Andy Cook (with dogs). Mel and I will be leading a similar hike for families, sponsored by the Belgrade Lakes Association, on July 13 on French Mountain.

This is a perfect time to enjoy the outdoors in this area. Now that school’s out, it’s easy to take a kid fishing or on a hike, or paddling in a canoe. You won’t be sorry.

*In December 2017, the Belgrade Regional Conservation Alliance (BRCA) and the Maine Lakes Resource Center (MLRC) merged, forming the 7 Lakes Alliance. Now retired, Pete Kallin is a past director of the BRCA.