Should you find yourself at Lincolnville Beach, you may notice a small cannon facing the bay. Defending the town from what? Those rascally Islesboro natives? The yachts out of Camden? What dangers could Penobscot Bay present to this little town?

Well, long ago, in 1812, America found itself in another dispute with the British. Having secured our independence, it seems that not all was settled. Our friends across the pond once again seized Castine, just across the bay, and decided that Northern Maine might make a nice new Canadian province, called New Ireland.

I won’t get into all the politics behind the War of 1812, but the little dispute did impact this place. Lincolnville was firmly an American town at the time, and a gentleman by the name of Noah Miller took offense to the British interlopers sailing the Penobscot with impunity. 

Noah Mille was the son of Noah and Mary Miller, who had arrived in Lincolnville around 1777 with six other families from Nova Scotia. Loyal Americans, they had refused to sign an oath to England’s King George, and likely imparted their patriotic zeal to their son.

The younger Noah hired a whaling boat and six hardy men from Lincolnville and Northport, and took to the bay, searching for British vessels. As luck would have it, they came upon a British sloop, the Mary, sailing from Halifax to Castine, laden with “bales of merchandise and a large amount of clothing.” Noah and his crew were able to commandeer the vessel, and take it to Camden.

As you might imagine, this created quite a stir. While Noah, good American that he was, set the captain of the Mary, and his wife up nicely in Camden: “I procured a boarding house for the Captain and his lady, engaging the kindest attention to them, at my own expense.” While granting the captain and his wife their personal effects, Mr. Miller looked to make a profit off the Mary’s cargo.

The British in Castine, meanwhile, offered a sum of $10,000 for Noah Miller, so that he might be hung from the yardarm as a pirate. Mr. Miller suggests that there were those in Camden that considered this offer. 

But in the end, the militias of the midcoast were mobilized, and the U.S. government seized the cargo of the Mary.

The pirate/privateer Noah Miller was left with nothing but the bill for the boarding of the Mary’s captain and his wife, and the dollar a day he was paying for the hire of the whaling vessel he used for his Penobscot Bay banditry.

In spite of this slight, Noah Miller continued his actions for the fledgeling United States, fighting smugglers in a part of the country that was less than enthusiastic about the war. Apparently, after stopping a Belfast native from shipping beef to the British Headquarters in Castine, he was stabbed in the street, leaving him crippled. Years later he would petition the U..S Senate for reparations.

Read all about Noah Miller and his efforts to get compensated here.

And thank to Nancy Heald (Miller) for sharing her family history with me, and for shenanigans of Andy O’Brien and Andy Young on the Lincolnville Town News Facebook page for inspiring this tale.

Leaving Brigadoon

This Week in Lincolnville writer emeritus, Diane O’Brien, once again offers her observations, as she returns to the Midcoast after some time in Florida with her paramour. She wrote:

For those who didn’t grow up on the soundtrack from Broadway musicals as I did, Brigadoon is the story of a mythical village in the Scottish Highlands, a village that became enchanted centuries ago, remaining unchanged and invisible to the outside world except for one special day every 100 years when it could be seen and even visited by outsiders. The name references a place that is idyllic, unaffected by time, remote from reality.

That’s the story that played in my head as we drove away from the Florida RV park Don took me to five years ago. Though “idyllic” doesn’t come close to describing it, and certainly the passage of time is a main feature of the place, “remote from reality” will do.

When our spouses died within months of each other six years ago, our chance meeting at a pop-up barbecue at Lincolnville Beach led to, well, what a couple of grieving and lonely people do. We found each other. Pretty common for widowers as it turns out, but which surprised us both at the time.

By that winter I’d agreed, with some trepidation, to go down to Florida with him and stay in his trailer for a couple of weeks. The misgivings I had were about Florida, not about him. Florida felt like the antithesis of Maine, a place I adamantly never wanted to visit. Yet Mainers have been escaping down there every winter for decades, starting when the first automobiles could make the trip. 

We drove down in his big Chevy diesel truck (“all the old guys here have shiny, black trucks” he told me) to Land Yacht Harbor (LYH), originally an exclusively Airstream park, but now about half “SOBs” (some other brand). That would be motorhomes, fifth wheelers, and other types of RVs. It was a whole new world I knew nothing about.

Start with the trailer. Don’s was an Airstream, 30 feet long, 30 years old. He and his wife had spent every winter for years, traveling the southwest finally settling down on a site at LYH, the park where her parents spent their winters.

Have you ever been in an RV? I hadn’t until that day we arrived in Melbourne, Florida, and he unlocked the door to what he’d been calling a silver suppository. But by then I knew him well enough to figure that was a term of endearment. Also, kind of accurate.

These things are covered with a sleek, aluminum skin, neatly riveted to form the curvey shape that makes them so aerodynamic. They pull smoothly, and when stationary never tremble in the wind. It also means none of the interior walls are perpendicular. His was considered a Classic, which probably just means it was old, but is apparently an Airstream designation. Certain people seek them for the way they’re fitted out.

Stepping inside felt like entering a child’s playhouse – tables that folded up against the sloping walls, every possible cranny held a cupboard with a door that closed with a catch, a small fridge complete with freezer, a four-burner stovetop, convection/microwave oven, tiny, double sink. The whole kitchen barely five feet long.

A funny, marine-type toilet you flushed with your foot, and an impossibly little shower. Its floor space, some 20” x 30” (I measured), was interrupted by one of the trailer’s wheels, leaving about 16 square inches for your feet. Drop the soap and you’d have to open the shower door and step out to bend over and pick it up. Or just have two bars of soap in case you drop one.

And a queen size bed that took up almost the entire width of the trailer – an 80-inch bed in a 90-foot-wide wide trailer. Imagine making that bed every morning. Changing the sheets was a major project! 

Roughly 225 square feet of living space for two people. LYH includes a 9’ x 9’ shed on each site, where you can store bikes, tools, washer/dryer, winter clothes, Christmas decorations for the palm tree growing on each site – you name it. The electrical, water, and sewer hookups are attached to that shed, giving the (usually) man of the house plenty of problems to solve.

Especially the sewer. Don says every RVer has black tank stories, that’s the tank that holds the poop. The other tank is for gray water from the sink and shower.  One afternoon we watched a neighbor trying to contain some disastrous overflow from his black tank. Apparently, it was amusing. At least it was in the retelling.

In fact, issues with your RV, whatever brand, make up the bulk of park conversation. Walking the two mile loop every morning I caught snippets of many discussions between men, if they weren’t busy washing their shiny trucks or scrubbing down their trailer.

The other favorite topic is politics: park politics. There seems to be an unspoken rule to leave national politics off the table, a very good thing. No partisan signs in sight, just the occasional American flag; no one complains about that.

Ah, but park politics can be heated from time to time I’m told, as the elected board of directors navigates the rocky shoals of varying differences of opinion about how to spend the park’s money. Actually, LYH was built mostly with volunteer labor back in the late 1970s and volunteers continue to be a big part of what keeps it running. 

I watched a crew of a half dozen men dismantle the old Bocce courts on one of the hottest days, replacing the rotten timbers with new ones, pulling up the old surface and hauling it all off to the dump. Some professionals will come in and replace the surface they told me.

Different volunteers put together the biweekly ice cream social in the rec hall and organize weekly bingo, while the coordinators of a busy woodshop, equipped with nice lathes and other tools, teach woodturning to anyone, male or female. Somebody keeps the bulletin board current. I arrived to a heart-filled display and left when it was green with shamrocks.

LYH isn’t fancy. It’s not a destination kind of place with all the amenities which, if you believe the TV ads, retired folks seem to need these days. Melbourne’s beaches are a traffic-clogged, eight-mile drive away, and the park is within earshot of I-95 and on the airport’s flyway. There’s no pool, no golf course, no tennis or pickleball court. The only trees are a sort of stumpy palm on each site, the only water a man-made pond with two fake swans (I thought they were real at first), and a couple of swings we sat in on really hot days.

There is Bocce, a game in the ascendency at LYH, while some 10 shuffleboard courts lie dormant. Shuffleboard has apparently become sort of a joke, a game only old duffers play; the fruitcake of the recreational world. Bocce has a fancier vibe, Italian and all that. 

But back in the day, Don tells me, shuffleboard was popular at LYH. His own mother-in-law was a champion; he found her special carbon fiber stick in his shed when we were packing up. He taught me the game over the past few years, and I actually got pretty good at it, beating him rather often. The shame of it would be the many times he beat me. Beaten by a blind man, I’d say. 

The rec hall is a gathering place for card games, pancake breakfasts and the popular ice cream social, for Thursday morning coffee and donuts (Krispy Kremes!), bingo, for Sunday morning church, and Salvation Army band concerts. Hundreds of ragged paperbacks fill the shelves of the library room along with jigsaw puzzles in progress.

The population of LYH’s 350 sites are all over 55, mainly couples along with several widowed spouses. Many come year after year to the same site; they may leave their trailer, as Don did, while some haul it home. A few are year-rounders. And then there are a few who stop for only a few nights on their way to somewhere else.

Over 55. That’s the magic number for retirement communities. As someone intending to “have them carry me out” of my house (a phrase I heard on first arriving in Lincolnville 53 years ago) the concept of moving somewhere else to “be retired” was foreign. Why would you?

I’ve learned a lot in the few weeks I’ve spent at LYH over the past five years. Some people have sold their houses up north and become full-time RVers. That 225-square -foot (give or take some space if it’s a motorhome) is the only home they’ve got. I was amazed to learn from one new friend that she wove rag rugs – in the motorhome she shared with her husband. On a loom! 

Others keep their trailer at LYH year-round and come down for the three months or so of winter; Florida is, not surprisingly, popular with Canadians and New Englanders. We knew all the Mainers there.

We also saw the ways couples honored those few words we all spoke on our wedding day, or maybe as an intentional pledge to a loved partner: in sickness or in health until death do us part. 

There’s the woman who packed up early this past week to get her ill husband home, singlehandedly hauling their Airstream some 1,150 miles to home. Probably they won’t be back.

And the husband caring for his wife, severely handicapped after a stroke several years ago. We never saw him without her by his side. 

Another wheelchair-bound fellow is tended by his wife who takes him to his favorite fishing spot most days. She naps while he fishes.

The widows gamely coming back alone every season after losing their spouses, one woman revealing how she’d been ignored by her married friends once she was widowed. “Why don’t you include me anymore?” she asked her lifelong friend. “Because you’re a threat!” Her response: “After all the complaining I heard you make about your husbands why would I want him?”

Brigadoon indeed. It certainly is affected by time, time which finally runs out. For Don and I, it was bittersweet to pack up for the last time. With his failing sight it made sense to make this his last winter in Florida. He sold his beloved trailer to a guy from Georgia who would haul it away from LYH. 

We played a few last rounds of shuffleboard “girls against boys” with our friends from Vermont. Neighbor Tim hooked up the rack to transport Don’s bike home, and a last four o’clock was held in his honor, plenty of snacks, drinks, and stories under the shade of an Airstream awning.

And I was the one to shed tears. Somewhere two plastic swans are floating on a murky pond; somewhere folks are carrying over their chairs and drinks to another four o’clock; somewhere people who were – who are – our friends are fixing dinner in tiny kitchens, settling in for another night as the sun sets.

While our reality is here.

Middle School Musical

March 23 and 24, LCS will perform the musical Frozen Jr. at 6:30 p.m. I caught up with director Kim Murphy to talk about the performance. Kim is the former choral director of Camden Hills Regional High School, responsible for 25 musicals over 25 years. And in retirement, she helped Appleton Village School put on Elf last December, and is now assisting LCS music teacher Susan Iltis with Frozen Jr.

With a cast of 35 middle schoolers, Frozen Jr. tells the story of two sisters learning the meaning of true love. Kim talked about the challenges of wrangling such a large group of kids, and helping guide them to put on such an ambitious performance.

The Pandemic took a toll on the performing arts, and it is wonderful to see live theater again!  Email frozentix@gmail.com to reserve your seat.

Benefit Supper

March 18 there will be a public supper at the Community Building in the center to raise money for Crissi Pendleton and her family, who lost their home in a fire recently. Join them between 5 and 7 for spaghetti, salad, and garlic bread, prepared by Rose Thomas of Dolce Vita farm. Delicious food and helping neighbors- personally, I can’t wait!

Okay, Lincolnville and beyond. Be well and be good. Reach out to me at ceobrien246@gmail.com to share your news from Lincolnville.