PH and I went to Blue Hill, Maine a few weekends ago. I grew up in Blue Hill; my parents still live there. I was born in Washington, D.C., but we moved to Blue Hill in 1970, when I was two and my sister was six months old. As I've mentioned before, there is a sense in which if you weren't born in Maine, you're not from Maine, not really. This is true, but it's also true that my first memories are from Blue Hill, and that it's where I grew up, and that it's where my parents still live. (Plus, I'm not from D.C.; I have no memories from there and have been there about as much as anyone who lives in New York has. I sort of don't know where I'm from.)
It's hard for me to imagine wanting to live in Blue Hill again, but I'm so glad that I grew up there, and so glad as well that I still have a connection to it via my parents and family friends. (I went to a boarding school for high school, and therefore didn't go to high school in Blue Hill, so perhaps for that reason I don't keep in touch with anyone my own age from Blue Hill, although I did see many of them two summers ago at a reunion-type thing, and it was wonderful to see them.)
Blue Hill is a small town -- 2,000 people or so. It is, though, also a center for several smaller towns that surround it: Brooklin, Sedgwick, Brooksville, Penobscot, Surry, and so on, with populations of, say, 500). And it is an odd small town; I mean that in a good way. For example: there's a three-decade tradition of steel drumming in Blue Hill -- as in, Caribbean steel drums. The high school has a steel-drum band; I believe the grade school does now as well; the high school offers adult-education classes in steel drumming; there's a standing steel-drum band which plays here and there (they played at BAM -- the Brooklyn Academy of Music -- several years ago). Not your average small town.
Or, maybe no small town is your average small town; I don't really have much experience with other small towns.
Anyway, here are some photos:
This is the Mill Stream, which winds through the village on its way to Blue Hill Harbor. Hanging over the stream here is a restaurant. It used to be called the Firepond; it's called something else now.
Here's the town hall. As in many small New England towns, three selectmen (as opposed to, say, a mayor or town manager), elected by the town, are responsible for the day-to-day administration of the town, and have their office here. Being a selectman, at least in a town the size of Blue Hill, is a part-time (maybe a quarter-time) job. Large decisions (such as decisions about budget appropriations) are made by the town as a whole at an annual town meeting, held in the spring at the town hall. (Most of the voting is via spoken "yeas" or "nays," but paper ballots are used in the case of close votes.) Town meetings can get sort of ugly (or, they used to, anyway); Blue Hill doesn't have its own police force (roads are patrolled by Hancock County sheriff's deputies and Maine state troopers), but the town hires (or, used to hire, and I assume still does) a private constable to make sure things don't get out of hand.
It's also used for other purposes, the town hall is -- I remember seeing Dr. Strangelove here for the first time, for example.
In my opinion (and my opinion may be flawed), the following perfectly nice memorial to U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq (there's one white flag for each of them), on the corner of High and Main Streets, is largely ruined by this sign, which makes me angry every time I see it. Why: because estimates of Iraqi citizens killed as a result of the war in Iraq vary widely, and "1.2 million" is, by far, the largest number I've ever seen. I assume that this figure comes from the Opinion Research Business (ORB) survey of civilian casualties attributed to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but it's orders of magnitude higher than other estimates (and no, I don't mean, for example, estimates supplied by the U.S. government, which doesn't keep such statistics). I can't say whether the ORB survey is accurate; I doubt anyone can. It seems to me that people should be as acutely aware of civilian casualty rates in Iraq as they are of American and coalition-partner casualties. But it also seems to me that the creators of this sign, in choosing to cite the highest (by far) estimate of civilian casualties is cherry-picking its "facts" in much the same way the Bush administration cherry-picked its "facts" in 2002 and early 2003 as it made its dubious case for war.
If it is true that 1,200,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since March of 2003, then that is the number which should appear on this sign. But I can't say whether this number is high (or, for that matter, low), and neither can the people who put up this sign, and perhaps I'm a jerk (or a bad liberal) for therefore taking issue with it, but I do. I don't like it.
Speaking of slightly annoying signs, the Blue Hill Memorial Hospital is now smoke-free; no surprise there. A smoke-free campus though? We have an excellent hospital in Blue Hill, given the size of the town. But its "campus" consists of several interconnected buildings and a parking lot. Come on. (Btw, I hope this doesn't sound like big-city snobbery about small-town silliness; I do think that this is a silly sign, but I don't think it's any sillier than Fire Safety Directors in Midtown Manhattan office buildings who get on the building-wide P.A. after someone's burned some toast on the 57th floor and set off a fire alarm and speak as if they're the President addressing the nation after a terrorist attack.)
Here's part of George Stevens Academy (GSA), the high school I would have attended if I hadn't gone to boarding school (and where my sister did go to high school, and most of my grade-school friends). Blue Hill is like several small towns in Maine in that, on paper, it has no public high school. What it has instead is a private high school whose only admissions criteria is graduation from eighth grade somewhere and whose tuition is paid directly by the town (GSA also serves the four or five surrounding towns I mentioned above). For almost all (but not all) practical purposes, it is a public school, but with a headmaster instead of a principal, run by a board of trustees instead of directly by the town.
But there are some weird quirks. One is this: if you're a high-school-aged resident of Blue Hill, the town will pay your George Stevens tuition or an equivalent amount of tuition to the high school of your choice. The town, therefore, paid a fraction of my tuition to Middlesex, the Massachusetts boarding school where I went to high school (a small fraction, if only because Middlesex tuition included room and board).
Another is this: at the moment, GSA is having a hard time financially. Real estate in Blue Hill is becoming increasingly expensive; fewer working-class and middle-class families can afford to live there or in the surrounding towns, so there are fewer high-school-aged kids around. Also, there is now an "alternative" high school outside of town (not sure what "alternative" means, but I think it's a Waldorf-school-type school); as far as I know, the town is required to pay for Blue Hill students to attend that school instead of George Stevens if they like.
So to compensate for the declining size of the student body, GSA now accepts boarders! The dorm, in fact, newly built since the last time I was in Blue Hill a year ago, is across Mill Street from my parents' house; these boarders are, according to my parents, mostly or all east-Asian kids. I think this turn of events is surreal and sort of wonderful, although I also don't think it's good for the town to have it's public-like school taking such a financial hit; I have a certain affection for GSA even though I didn't go there.
I went to grade school at the Blue Hill Consolidated School. "Consolidated" because prior to 1939, Blue Hill's grade schools were spread across several one-room schoolhouses (one in Blue Hill, one in South Blue Hill, one in East Blue Hill, etc.).
When I went to BHCS (1974-1983), I can assure you that there were no "goal-setting conferences."
During high-school summers, I mowed lawns. I didn't have a driver's license until the final summer; before then (and often, even, during that final summer), I rode my ten-speed to my lawn-mowing jobs, which often weren't right in town. I loved some of the views I'd get from my bike on the way to these jobs, views that one might miss from a car. This is one of them, near Blue Hill Falls:
Street signs! Times change. There were no street signs in Blue Hill when I was growing up. The streets and roads had names which everyone knew (Main, High, Mill, Pleasant, Water, Beech Hill, Union, South, Parker Point, Tenney Hill, and a few others), but no signs. (That's not entirely true; the town garbage dump was located on a road called the Dump Road, but the guy who lived at the end of the road didn't like that and attempted to rename it in the public consciousness to Turkey Farm Road; he did this via a street sign which he paid for himself, I believe, but everyone still called it the Dump Road.) In retrospect, it seems to me that it must have been difficult to give people directions (out-of-town visitors, say), but I don't remember that being an issue.
Anyway, "911" emergency telephone service was introduced in Blue Hill maybe a decade ago, and one of the things you need if you're a town with "911" service is street signs (and street addresses, another thing we got along without when I was growing up). I sort of miss the days of street-signless streets in Blue Hill, when old people called High Street "School Street" and younger people called it "High Street" and both were right.
Here is the Stevens Bridge, under which flow the "reversing falls." On the right side of this bridge is Blue Hill Bay (which leads out to the Gulf of Maine is therefore, of course, tidal); on the other side is the "salt pond," a small tidal body of water. As the tide comes in, water rushes (river-rapids style, once it gets going) under the bridge from the bay into the salt pond; as it goes out, the water rushes back out. This is also one of the places in town where mussels are free for the picking, which grow between the high-tide and low-tide marks below and to the right of the bridge.
This is the "firepond." This "pond" if formed by the damming of the Mill Stream. It's called the firepond because this is where the fire department fills up its fire trucks. Main Street runs over the bridge (I took the first photo in this post from the bridge, looking up the stream).
A view from the Main Street bridge with the firepond in the foreground and Blue Hill Harbor beyond it. In the 1800s, Blue Hill was a ship-building town, but there's no commercial (and little other) traffic in this part of the harbor anymore. Lobstering is a way that some people make a living (almost always a partial living, I believe) in Blue Hill, but most lobstermen moor their boats at the Steamboat Wharf (steamboat at one point was the main mode of travel to and from coastal towns in Maine), which is about two miles out of town, or at another wharf in South Blue Hill. And there's a yacht club, but that's also a few miles out of town.
