Everyone Outdoors

by Pete Kallin

Last week the Appalachian Trail Conservancy held their biennial conference at Colby College in Waterville. If you drove through the Colby campus last week, you probably noticed tents pitched all over the campus: under trees; alongside Johnson Pond; and, overlooking some of the athletic fields. There were about 1200 people of all ages striding around in colorful tee shirts, attending various workshops and activities.

Entitled "Views from the Maine Woods," this year’s conference included a lot of presentations about both national and Maine conservation topics, as well as lots of outdoor activities, including hikes, birding expeditions, and paddles throughout Maine. Mel Croft and I were among the roughly 100 or so volunteer "trip leaders." We led several hikes on various BRCA properties that traced the evolution of our landscape over the past 200 million years. Mel discussed rocks, plate tectonics, and ice ages and covered the first 199.99 million years. I then talked about lichens, plants, and other pioneering species to illustrate the roughly 10,000-year transformation of the bare rock and melted ice water, left at the end of the last ice age, into the forests and lakes surrounding us today. It was a lot fun and at least 50 visitors from all over the country (plus Canada) have a greater appreciation for our local landscape.

Tom Duffus and family.

In addition to the out of town ATC visitors, there were a lot of the "usual crowd" on the trails, especially at French Mountain. I met three or four generations of the Phillips family, some of whom have been returning to the family camp on Great Pond for over 60 years. Ten minutes later, three generations of the Comeau family from East Pond and Needham, MA, headed up the trail, as Tom Duffus and his family came down. The Duffus family has also been summering on Great Pond for well over 60 years.

Take advantage of the rest of the summer and get out on the lakes or hike or bike in the hills. Try a kayak trip down the Great Meadow Stream. And take a kid along, or a senior citizen that you will help make a kid again. You will be creating memories that will last a lifetime.

The Comeau family from East Pond and Needham, MA.

Travis Mills’s Tough as They Come

by Martha F. Barkley

Last summer we were so fortunate to have quadruple amputee Travis Mills present his comedy hour at Belgrade Public Library. He was not trying to sell his book Tough as They Come, but he was trying to promote the renovation of the Elizabeth Arden Estate on Long Pond for veterans of war.

I say comedy hour, because Travis has always been a comedian and now that he is a quadruple amputee, his wounded war condition is part of his act. After the crowd laughed for an hour, it was time for Q&A. He answered very real daily pain questions and explained how this summer vets and their families would be given a week on Long Pond.

His book, now out in paperback, has a better cover in Travis’s estimation. The hardback cover posing "to look tough" made him a little uncomfortable. The paperback has his daughter hugging his leg, or prosthetic to be exact. Travis Mills kept telling us how normal he is now with all that has been given to him.

His beautiful new home in Manchester was built to meet his every need. His wife’s parents moved from their Texas retirement to help. Every morning his father-in-law helps him to put on his legs. Not easy and very painful.

Cover of the hardcover edition of Tough as They Come

When injured, he knew he would die. Travis Mills ordered paramedics to help his men rather than himself. They did not follow that order. When he realized he was a quadruple amputee, he ordered his wife to divorce him. She did not and I understand a second child is now on the way.

His book is certainly worth reading and he warned the library crowd that his viewpoint was religious in nature. What he kept repeating was the foundation where he was working wanted to help vets to vacation with their families. What could be better than a week on a lake? Every Sunday evening the new families are flown in by private jet. They take pontoon boats on a sunset cruise and stop at a dock on lower Long Pond where Hope Baptist, Manchester, and Old South, Belgrade friends meet and greet.

It is very moving to know that Travis Mills and his foundation have helped to make all this possible here in our neighborhood. The Travis Mills Foundation headquarters are in Hallowell and Wounded Warrior Funds for vets are most welcome. To have a vacation with their family is healing for these veterans of war.

In the Lunar Penumbra: Local Actress to Star in Eclipse-Inspired Film

by Gregor Smith

On Monday, August 21, much of the continental United States will be treated to a rare celestial spectacle, an eclipse of the sun. Although total solar eclipses are not that uncommon — there’s one somewhere on the earth every 18 months or so — it’s been 99 years since such an eclipse was visible from coast to coast in the United States. This singular event thus provides both the inspiration and the setting for a new motion picture, which will star local actress Debra Lord ("Dee") Cooke and which will be shot partly in Belgrade.

A solar eclipse occurs when the moon is perfectly positioned between the earth and the sun. The eclipse will be total in a band 70 miles wide stretching from Oregon to South Carolina. Most of the rest of the continental United States will see a partial solar eclipse. In Belgrade Lakes Village, the eclipse will start at 1:30 p.m., will peak at 2:45 with 56% of the sun obscured, and will end at 3:55.

More important here, however, than the details of when, where, and how the eclipse will occur will be its ability to awe and inspire, as total solar eclipses have for ages, such that not only astronomers, but also ordinary citizens will make pilgrimages to view it, traveling great distances to the places where totality will last the longest and the likelihood of good weather will be the greatest.

Such is the crux of the story of In the Moon’s Shadow, a new screenplay that will be shot in Belgrade and in Nebraska. Cooke will portray hard-charging, workaholic, fifty-something Lisa, who comes to the Belgrade home of her younger, more laid back, but recently widowed sister, Karen. The two sisters have long been estranged, but they decide to take a road trip to Nebraska to view the eclipse and try to work out their differences.

Cooke lives in Belgrade and has appeared in various television series, including soap operas Guiding Light and As The World Turns; in various feature films, including Time and Charges and The Congressman, which were shown at the Maine International Film Festival in 2013 and 2015, respectively; and in local community theater productions at the Waterville Opera House, for Aqua City Actors Theatre in Waterville, for Gaslight Theater in Hallowell, and at Lakewood in Madison.

She met her co-star, Elissa Piszel ("Karen"), when both were working on Woody Allen’s Café Society. Piszel refers to herself as a "bi coastal actress," having appeared on stage in New York City both on and off Broadway and in Los Angeles in various television shows, including Quantico and Law and Order: SVU. Most recently, she wrote, produced, and starred in "Ellie’s Perk," a humorous, 13-minute short about the lead character’s obsession with coffee — a film in which Cooke also appeared.

The director will be Alvin Case, for whom Cooke played the lead in Analogue, completed, but not-yet-released film, which, according to Case’s website, "combines domestic melodrama, classical music, and science fiction in a tale about a former prodigy haunted by the death of a student during his experimentation with aural portraits, sound recordings using the electrical impulses of the human body." The Boston-based director and producer has been making movies since the 1980s. His previous feature-length films include fictional films Sun Opener (2014) and The Whirlpool (2012) and a documentary, The Secret Universe Of Paul Laffoley (2017).

The script was written by Alvin Case’s brother Edward, whom the film’s promotional materials describe as "a nuclear physicist by day, screenwriter by night." On January 2, after reading about the eclipse, Alvin Case asked his brother to write the screenplay. Edward Case completed the first draft in only eleven days. Including In the Moon’s Shadow, Edward Case has written or co-authored 36 screenplays, several of which Alvin Case has directed.

As often happens when a film approaches the start of shooting, the script of In The Moon’s Shadow has undergone substantial revisions in the past two months. Those who attended a staged reading of the script at Belgrade’s Center for All Seasons on July 2 may remember the sisters' father, who appeared at the end of the story. That character is now gone, but the younger sister now has a step-daughter. That role will be played by Jules Hartley, a Los Angeles-based actress who has appeared on Black-ish, Law and Order: SVU, and The Young and the Restless.

Actual production of the film will begin with three days of shooting, August 19-21, in Nebraska, where the eclipse will be total and the sky is expected to be clear. In an email, Cooke wrote, "We absolutely need to shoot the eclipse. We looked at sending a crew to just get the footage of the eclipse and we’d fudge the scenes — but we felt intimately that we needed to experience the event and include the event for real in the scene. That’s always been the major point. Sharing a once in a lifetime experience…. " The cast and crew will come to Belgrade in September to shoot the remaining three-quarters of the picture.

Although like most independent films, In the Moon’s Shadow is being shot on an "ultra-low budget," the filmmakers still need to raise more money to complete the project. Donations of any size are welcome. For more information, one can visit Cooke’s website, www.debralordcooke.com.