Notes from Maine - 2026/08/30

I’ve lived in Maine for 34 years now, but I’m not a Mainer. I never will be. According to the rules, as I understand them, you must be born here, at least one of your parents must be born here, and you have to be able to credibly hand-wave-away the origins of your grandparents.

I have none of those qualifications. 

My father was born in Massachusetts, although he spent some formative years in Bangor, Houlton, and Presque Isle. When Dad was eight, one of his best friends was a kid (Bert Drake) who would play hooky from school to tend to his trap lines. Dad would tag along. When Bert trapped a muskrat, he would skin it and stretch the pelt on a shingle to sell them for four dollars. But Dad was never a Mainer, having moved here from Massachusetts and then moving away before he could blend in enough to pass.

My mother has always been a Virginia person. 

It doesn’t matter how long I live here, I’m a transplant, and that’s absolutely fine with me. I wasn’t trapped here by inertia or financial disability—I chose to move here despite having seen as many as a dozen other places in North America first. I briefly attended high school in Maine, so I knew what the winter was like, and I moved here anyway. Summers here are great. Autumn is priceless, and the winters aren’t that bad.

Decades have passed and I’ve adapted and adopted some of the local vernacular. I won’t bore you too much of it, but I want to share a couple of things that might not translate precisely to other parts of the world.

My sister and I have a “camp” that belonged to my father. We bought it from his estate. In Maine, if you have a small building in a remote part of the state that you use as a getaway, we call that a “camp.” In other parts of the country, you might call it a cabin, cottage, lake house, bungalow, or even a hunting/fishing shack. Dad would have argued that it’s not even a real “camp” anymore since the Maine Cabin Masters (a reality TV show where they fix up camps) added a real kitchen and hooked up the plumbing. It’s just a nice spot in the woods near a stream where we have a working bathroom. I’m close enough to drive to it for an afternoon. My sister has to actually travel and plan a vacation when she wants to visit.

In Maine, by the way, camps are always up.

“Whatcha doin’ this weekend?”

“Goin’ upta camp.”

But where my grandparents lived, their camp was just across the road and down a winding path through the woods. At their house, we would “Go down to the shore.” Technically, their camp was “down” from their house, but that was a special case. When you go to camp, it’s always “upta” camp.

In Scotland, if you have a rustic, unlocked shelter without plumbing or power you might call it a Bothy. Russians might call it a Dacha. 

We’re having a “camp weekend” this weekend. A bunch of friends all gather at the camp and we hang around. Swimming, cooking, talking, cribbage, taking walks, and simply relaxing are all on the agenda. This year we’re lucky enough to have our camp weekend when my mom and sister are visiting. That makes it extra fun.

In other camp news, when my sister arrived she whisked Mom away on a vacation within a vacation. They headed up to Lubec and Campobello. They had a couple of days up there, taking in the sights and learning more about the Roosevelts. Campobello is an island in Canada that’s accessible from Maine by a bridge out of Lubec. Campobello Island was the summer retreat of the Roosevelt family (Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt). They had a 34-room “cottage”. I’m sure my father would have scowled at that and said, “That’s not a real camp.”

When I first moved to Maine, I was confused by “affirmative semantics with negative morphosyntax.”

I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation on a manufacturing line, and I overheard conversations that went like this:

“Did you hear about Darren? He was upta camp last weekend and jacklit a ten-pointer with a 22 pistol.”

“Well so didn’t Paulie G.”

I understood the part about going upta camp, of course, but I had to learn that jacklighting is an illegal poaching practice of stunning a deer with a bright light at night so you can “hunt” it. A “ten-pointer” is a buck with ten points to his antlers. But the most interesting linguistic construction (to me at least) was in the response. It’s not the “Paulie G.” part. There were several guys at Digital who were named Paul Poulin, so they were always referred to with their middle initial. 

The “affirmative semantics with negative morphosyntax” is the “so didn’t” part of the sentence in, “Well so didn’t Paulie G.”

This sentence means that Paulie did the same thing as well, but it’s constructed with a “didn’t.” That’s the negative part of the syntax. Jim Wood, a linguist at Yale, studied this syntax extensively. I first heard it when I moved to New England. 

Shoot, I promised not to bore you too much with vernacular. 

It’s about time for me to head back to the camp. I slept at home instead of the camp because I had tons of horse chores to get done last night and this morning. But some friends stayed up there and more will join us today. I learned to Stand Up Paddle Board yesterday and I would like to try that again. Those things move absurdly fast compared to canoes and kayaks, in my experience. 

My father always vehemently disapproved of paddle boards. 

“What are those people doing? They can’t do that,” he would grumble whenever a paddle board would go by. He loved the water, but he wasn’t big on balance—I’m not sure it would have suited him even if he had been intrigued to try it.