These archival articles are presented “as is.” Except for minor corrections or clarifications, most have not been updated since they appeared in print. Thus, some details may be out of date, and some hyperlinks may no longer work.
Buying the Dream: A Place On a Lake
by Esther J. Perne
There's movement on the lakes this summer — real estate movement — and although there is always a strong ebb and flow of lake property ownership, this season it is being described as busy, crazy, awesome and good news for everyone.
Cabin, camp or castle, there's something magical almost mythical about a place — a family place, your own place — on a lake. That's where, it seems, babies sleep more peacefully, where children are raised and absolutely blossom, where teens are influenced to seek summer jobs and later select a college nearby, where the temptation for working away from the office can be a reality and definitely where retirement beckons.
A place on a lake is also where relatives and acquaintances suddenly want to visit, where it's cool to bring young adult friends home, where simple shenanigans provide memories throughout the other seasons and where serious proposals seal the fate of future generations who will dream of a place on a lake.
Of course, lakeside property is a purchase of love and there are true stories of offers accepted before properties were seriously looked at, and happiness still prevailed. But, love aside, there are factors about lakes that must be considered.
First, fishing. Fish, or rather men — there were yet to be women — who fished and talked are what put the lakes of Maine on the map. Fish are still a main attraction and there is nothing as rewarding as stepping out the front door, gear in hand, and into your ready and waiting boat … as long as your fish type of preference is also ready and waiting. That's easy enough to check out lake by lake; fishermen still talk.
Next, children. Children are a huge input to buying lake property. Historically, locations with good swimming, safe boating, nearby trails, and understanding neighbors were selected to help work off that young energy, often complemented with an area youth camp connection to channel more energy. Today, ditto swimming, boating, trails and neighbors; add in a wealth of day camp and sports camp resources in the region. Other parents and grandparents will happily share the details. Children still have energy.
Finally, all other: View of sunrise vs sunset? One season (summer-only, rustic), three season (summer, spring and fall, somewhat heatable), or four season (year-round ready) structure? Guest(s) space or lack of? Electronics reception or lack of? Proximity to town or remoteness? Rentable? Renovate-able? Retirement feasible?
Most important, every pond is a golden pond when the sun shimmers across the water and another fun day is done and every cabin, camp or castle on a lake, pond or stream is a dream.
After three summer seasons and 36 stories from The Luckiest Boy, I thought perhaps the fodder of story material was running thin. Just when the barrel seemed about empty, one of the old timers that were still hanging on around Belgrade Lakes in the middle of the last century comes to mind. I've mentioned many of them in the Guides stories and you've seen pictures of many of them as well. This season I decided to tell you about at least three of the characters that stand out in my memories as being characters never to be forgotten.
Cass French:
Cass, often referred to as Cassie or Cass the Baitman lived on School Street in Belgrade Lakes with his wife Grace up through the 1960s. They had one daughter, Louise, who I believe moved to California when she became an adult.
Cass and Grace lived a quiet, minimalist life in the small wooden house right beside the two-room school house located on School St. in Belgrade Lakes. We saw them daily as we all went to that school up through the 5th grade before being moved down to Belgrade Depot for 6th grade thru high school.
Gracie, as she was mostly called, always had a nice wave as the kids paraded past her house. Their house still exists today as does the school house, though the school house was phased out and became the first Belgrade Regional Health Center back in the 1970s.
I remember Cassie as a short man with a great smile, perhaps one or two teeth left in front, a craggy face that made kids feel safe and not scared, like might be so with some older men. He was missing part of a finger and we kids always secretly talked about how and why that was the case. Oh, and always the tobacco juice creeping out of one corner of his mouth.
Cass, like his cohort Clyde Dalton, usually smoked a corn cob pipe with George Washington pipe tobacco. They both claimed that George Washington was the best "'cause you kin smuck (their word) it or chew it."
Cassie never sported a beard, but always had at least 3 days of growth on his face and some tuffs of gray or whitish hair peeking out around all sides of his felt crusher hat.
Cass's primary employment during the summer season was pickin' and sellin' fishing bait. This included night crawlers, frogs, crawfish and hellgrammites (the larva stage of the Dobson fly). Fishing was still quite popular in the 50s and 60s, so the demand for bait was considerable. Cass picked much of the bait he sold but he also bought from other pickers, many of whom were the kids in the village that had acquired the skills to catch the critters. Cass was always friendly to all of us, even when we went to his house at odd hours to sell him our catches. Sometimes it was a big sale like two dozen crawfish at 5¢ each or 100 crawlers at 1¢ apiece.
Older kids could even catch a dozen hellgrammites, though catching them was difficult and required some equipment. They are found under rocks in a stream and require putting a screen down steam and turning rocks upstream so the hellgies wash into the screen.
Most any time if we were bored or needed money for a soda, we could easily catch crawfish at night down at the old spillway. Using a flashlight while wading around, we would slowly turn over rocks with hopes to expose some of the critters. Catching them had its tricks but it didn't take long to get a dozen or more.
Another way to make easy money was catching night crawlers on smooth grass that had been mowed, so we all hit the original Belgrade golf course. After the hotel burned in 1956 the fairways were no longer mowed and picking there was over. My Uncle Al Johnson often went to the Augusta golf course and in three or four hours would pick a thousand crawlers.
Cass could be found each morning hanging out beside his old truck right across from Day's Store. Before Cass got his '52 Chevy pickup, he always drove a Ford Model A coupe. People and guides came wandering down from the Belgrade, Lakeshore and Locust House hotels to get their bait for the morning fish. By noon Cass went home and rested up to pick more bait later in the day and at night.
Grace outlived Cass by a few years and eventually went to live with her daughter. Uncle Al took over the bait business, truck included, and later my cousin Cary took it over from his dad. As the summers went by, less and less fishing and more artificial bait rendered the bait business no longer profitable.
Cass was a WWI combatant and was buried in the Veteran's Cemetery, Augusta, Maine. There's a picture of him selling bait on p.&bnsp;79 of my earlier book Luckiest Boy Season II, complete with crusher hat and corn cob pipe! Hats off to Cassie French the Baitman.
Tools of the trade: water quality meter, Secchi disk, Aquascope, and a nice brown trout caught by fishing at the right depth in the temperature-oxygen profile.
by Pete Kallin
Last week began with a couple of days in Orono at the Maine Lakes Society's annual meeting. The Maine Lakes Society, on whose board I serve, is a statewide nonprofit membership organization dedicated to the protection of all of Maine's lakes through science-based education, advocacy, and action.
The only other statewide lakes nonprofit is the Maine Volunteer Lake Monitoring Program (VLMP), for which I am a volunteer water quality monitor. The VLMP trains, certifies and provides technical support to hundreds of volunteers who monitor a wide range of indicators of water quality, assess watershed health and function, and screen lakes for invasive aquatic plants and animals. Formed in 1971, Maine's VLMP is the longest-standing state-wide citizen lake monitoring program in the U.S., as well as one of the largest, with more than 1,200 active volunteers monitoring more than 500 lakes statewide.
On Sunday morning, I was recertified for taking temperature oxygen profiles. I collect dissolved oxygen and temperature profiles every two weeks. That information not only helps monitor lake conditions, but gives me insight into where the fish (especially salmon and trout) will be hanging out.
Grandson Nathan with a Long Pond bass.
Now that school is out I also get to spend a little more time with my grandkids. My grandson, Nathan, came to visit for a couple of days while his sister was attending an acting camp. Nathan is an avid fisherman and we spent most of a day fishing, catching a few bass and a bunch of yellow perch that made a nice breakfast the next day. Nathan honed his skills in operating the electric trolling motor and improving his flycasting with a conventional flyrod. He has been using a Tenkara rod for a few years, which is much easier to use but doesn't really do the distance and depth necessary for fishing a big, deep lake like Long Pond. We also got to see a lot of birds and other wildlife and spend some time checking out the bog bridge under construction at BRCA's Fogg Island preserve.
A highlight this week was the appearance of at least three loon chicks on Long Pond. The new generation is beginning to appear at all the lakes in the area and it is a special time to watch the parents nourish their young and teach them to survive on their own. Bring a pair of binoculars so you don't have to get too close. I will be talking more about loons in a couple of weeks after the annual loon count on July 15.
Loon chicks, born last night, with their mother.
There were frequent showers this week but I squeezed a couple of hikes in between the weather. I began searching for chanterelle and black trumpet mushrooms, which I anticipate will be appearing shortly but so far, no luck. This area offers some great outdoor recreation, whether you like to hike, bike, birdwatch, fish, sail, or paddle a canoe or kayak. Pick up a map of the local trails at Day's Store or from the BRCA at the Maine Lakes Resource Center. And make sure you take a kid along on your next outdoor adventure and help create some memories.
Last week, I introduced to you a couple of landowners, Lush Lawn Lenny and Unruly Ursula. They have very different attitudes about how to care for their property. This week I'd like you to meet a "Dudley Do-right" of conservation, Soil Health Sherman. He works with landowners and property managers around the lakes to help them keep rain runoff and stormwater from eroding the soil and depositing erosion and phosphorus into the streams and ponds.
We've discussed stormwater runoff before. "Stormwater" is just that: the rainfall or melting snow that then runs across the landscape in liquid form. Soil Health Sherman has some great advice for people living around the lakes and streams. Sherman can be a bit of a "know it all," but he tries to focus on the basics: The ditch next to your driveway will have a lot of water in it during and soon after a rainstorm. The culvert beneath your driveway will run full. While that stormwater flow is just nature doing what nature does, nature sometimes does more than usual. We need to prepare for those cases. Sherman can help!
Sherman will provide advice on how to manage that stormwater. In some cases he can even help his crew of workers to help construct, or reconstruct waterways and runoff corridors. He helped Unruly Ursula to design gravel "filtration steps" so she could get to the water's edge without creating an eroded pathway. And then he helped her install rain barrels and rain gardens to collect runoff from her roof and parking area. They slowed it down and allowed it to seep into the ground rather than run across her property to the water.
Unfortunately Lush Lawn Lenny didn't take the same advice. During a recent heavy rainstorm he lost "control" of the stormwater runoff. One inch of rain on a single square foot of pavement, sidewalk, or roof equals 0.6234 gallons of water. During that big rainstorm recently, Lush Lawn Larry's property flooded from his house, driveway, parking and lawn areas. Those impervious areas channel to the lowest point and cascaded into the lake from a concentrated runoff area. An impervious surface doesn't soak up the rain but carries it off to another location. For every inch of rain that falls on those surfaces, your property needs to deal with tens of thousands of gallons of water. Depending upon how your structures are designed, that concentration of water can do a lot of damage. Now consider your property. How much impervious surface do you have? And how is the runoff managed?
What can a property owner do in order to mitigate the damage? Soil Health Sherman had helped Unruly Ursula plan for it! The stormwater was directed into vegetated areas or rain gardens. She'd installed filtration steps. The water from her parking sheeted off the edges and into areas that did not erode the soils.
Take the opportunity now to use some of those best management practices. Sherman, or someone like him can help you focus on how to manage your yard and property. Control the water runoff. Look for places that have been damaged in past storms. It will happen again unless you do something.
A good buffer planting, if well established, does a good job of intercepting water runoff and filtering it before it gets to the lake. The objective is to filter it so it doesn't concentrate and transport soil, chemicals, or other toxics into the water. Remember, there is a lot to do in order to protect water quality.
Music Festival Offers Free Classical Concerts in Waterville
Violinists perform as part of a larger ensemble in a past AMF concert.
by Gregor Smith
Classic music lovers, rejoice! Starting this Saturday and continuing for the rest of July, the Atlantic Music Festival will present a series of free concerts at Colby College on Mayflower Hill Drive in Waterville.
Now in its ninth year, the festival will bring some 180 musicians — faculty, students, fellows, and guest artists — to the Colby campus for four weeks of private lessons, master classes, rehearsals, and performances. The students and fellows are mostly in their twenties and are either still in school or just starting their professional careers, while the faculty and guest artists tend to be older, more established musicians. Although at least half of the participants are from the United States, fifteen other countries on six continents will be represented this year, most prominently South Korea, China, Taiwan, and Australia.
Thanks to its Composition Program, which enables aspiring composers to refine their craft, new music has always been a hallmark of the festival. During its first eight years, the festival has offered world premières of over 300 works — pieces that have not been previously performed in public or commercially recorded. During its ninth season, the festival expects to introduce at least 40 more.
Thus it is fitting that this year's opening concert will be of new music. (And no, "new" does not mean weird or atonal; most of the works are quite melodic.) That concert will take place Saturday, July 8, at 1:00 p.m. in Lorimer Chapel. If you can't make it on Saturday, you will have two more chances to hear new music, on Thursday, July 13 and Tuesday, July 18, both days at 7:00 p.m.
The festival's concert series will begin in earnest the following Wednesday, July 12, with the first of seven chamber music performances. From that point on, there will be a concert nearly every night, and on Saturday afternoons as well, until July 29.
These chamber music soirées will feature soloists, duets, trios, and other small ensembles playing instrumental works of different eras and styles. These 7:00 p.m. chamber concerts form the festival's backbone; they will be held every Wednesday and Friday through July 28, and also on Saturday, July 22.
While Wednesdays and Fridays will be devoted to instrumental music, one can thrill to vocal pyrotechnics on Thursdays. On July 20, members of the AMF Opera Workshop will present a series of semi-staged opera scenes in Strider Theater, with costumes and some props and set pieces. The following Thursday, they will present a more basic performance of art songs in the chapel.
Lovers of piano music will get their turn on Saturdays, July 15 & 22, at 3:00 in Given Auditorium, when participants in the festival's Piano Institute will demonstrate their skill. Additionally, the winner of the festival's annual piano competition, a juried competition in which students compete for a $1000 cash prize, will perform a solo recital on Monday, July 24, at 7:00 in Lorimer Chapel.
Finally, if you crave the sound of a full symphony orchestra, come to the chapel on Saturdays, July 15 & 29. In the first performance, the AMF Orchestra will present Richard Strauss's orchestral suite Der Bürger als Edelmann, Ludwig van Beethoven's Leonora Overture No. 3, and Béla Bartók's Dance Suite. The program for the second concert, which will close this year's festival, has yet to be announced.
Admission to all AMF performances is free, and except where noted above, concerts will take place in Lorimer Chapel and will start at 7:00 p.m. The schedule is subject to change, and more performances may be added. For the latest information, visit the AMF website at www.atlanticmusicfestival.org or call the AMF office at (888) 704‑1311.
