I finally began working with some photos from my trip earlier this summer to Maine. We were up the coast further then I'd been before, in Hancock County, near Mount Desert Isle, but away from Bar Harbor, overwheening metropolis that it is, and off among the quieter peninsulas nearby. Castine and Blue Hill and Deer Isle were the principal places we visited, and along the way Searsport and Bucksport and even tinier crossroads.
This is a place of character, full of lost pasts, but also people who enjoy their present and work hard at making it possible, work hard at the job of being able to live someplace that is unto itself, and not a way station on the way somewhere else.
All around are the reminders of the past. Castine is a town that has as its point of pride how many times it was destroyed: overrun, burnt down, abandoned, resettled, renamed--and all as a part of a struggle that has largely been forgotten in modern America. It was a waypoint and a battleground in a grinding of frontier against frontier in a struggle of empires we're barely aware of anymore.
