Even though he moved away from Maine when he was only a few months old, my husband was welcomed home like a prodigal son when he “returned,” forty-two years later. He had made summer visits throughout childhood, but never called Maine home until we moved here with four kids in tow. I’d been a regular since college, when Jonathan first invited me to join him on his beloved Sutton Island (one of Maine’s Cranberry Isles). Our kids had immersed in the magical world of that mossy island for a memorable week or two every summer of their lives, but we weren’t born here, and a summer person isn’t the same as being a real Mainer.
Is it?
When may we call ourselves Mainers? Is there a residency requirement? Must we spend a winter here? If we have shoveled the driveway after at least four blizzards, have we made it? Some seem to think it’s all about lineage, generational depth. How many generations? Is it possible that one can become a Mainer from scratch? Once we’ve lived among these seascapes and mountainsides, lakefronts and remote forests, potato fields and blueberry barrens, might we grow into true Mainers?
I first became aware of the birthright argument for Mainer membership when my husband was told upon moving to Bangor, in no uncertain terms, that he was a Mainer. No matter that he’d left Maine in infancy, long before he was cognizant of his geographic place in the world. No matter that he hadn’t lived here since then, outside of a week each summer. “How does it feel to be coming home?” people asked him.
I encountered the phenomenon again when I was a columnist for the Bangor Daily News. I had long grown attached to the natural landscapes of Maine, but my writing job was the beginning of my growing fondness for Maine’s people. One of my column subjects was a writer whose Maine roots went five generations deep. He had lived in Maine all his life, but by chance, had been born out of state. It irked him when people suggested he was, therefore, not a true Mainer.
For other column interviews, I danced with an old potato farmer at New Sweden’s Midsommer Festival, stroked the soft noses of horses at a Prentiss rescue farm, baked bread in the backyard oven of a UMaine professor/karate instructor/master bread baker, and visited a makeshift stage in a Benton field that hosted years of epic, weekend-long fiddle festivals. I met boat-builders, stone masons, military veterans, homemakers, high-tech inventors, low-tech DIY-ers, world travelers, and homebodies. Cumulatively, they illustrated for me the spirit of Maine—straightforward, innovative, independent. It didn’t matter a bit where these folks were born. Maine infused them.
“One doesn’t have to be born in a place to have roots there,” wrote author Rachel Field; “I think one root struck down into Maine soil on my first visit to the state.”
I have always clung to her theory of taking root. Botanically speaking, transplants might work in some soils and not so well in others. If they find good soil, they can take root, become established, integrate with the local ecosystem, propagate (without taking over), become a positive part of the local landscape. One might argue against their native status, but transplants can become “naturalized,” good local plant citizens.
When my status changed from summer visitor to Maine transplant in 2002, I wasn’t sure if my roots would take in this new state. I’d grown deeply embedded in my home state of New York, then I’d moved around the northeast, sinking tentative roots into various new soils then digging them up again. So, I arrived in central Maine with an asterisk in my mind. Would this new place become home? Maybe, maybe not.
My children were more malleable when they arrived in this new environment: a 15-year-old, 13-year-old twins, and a 10-year-old entering fifth grade. Island Maine was familiar, but this interior Maine was new, and they were alternately cautious and hopeful about making a home in a new place. They explored the 10-acre field behind our house, caught frogs beside the pond, and clambered down the back hill to Reeds Brook, following it out to where it empties into the Penobscot River.
As an entering high school sophomore, Anna was most resistant to accepting her uprooting, so I worried about her. I have a favorite photograph from that first early fall. Anna and my middle daughter Nellie appeared after a low tide expedition at the confluence of stream and river. They were coated in tidal mud head to toe, laughing delightedly as they told the tale of their first—and probably their last—foray into the mud flats. I like to think it was their Maine baptism, a celebratory immersion into Maine soil.
The years flew as years do. Our kids went to college out of state, and Jonathan and I wondered if any of them would return. Meanwhile, our integration into Maine’s environment crept upon us, not only through the wider explorations on foot, on skis, and in canoes, but through intimate acquaintance with the land behind our house. In those fields our dogs got their baptism by skunk spray and porcupine quill. We encountered ducks and deer, ermines and eagles, foxes and muskrats, songbirds galore, a spring fawn, a coyote, and one racehorse (non-native, returned shortly to our neighbor’s barn). The seasonal rhythms of the land sank into our souls, and our roots burrowed deep.
Then Anna chose to get married in our back field, eliciting months of preparatory attention to the property and adding another layer of history to attach us to this place. Tessa, our youngest, got married on Sutton Island, a further imprinting of Maine onto the soul of our family. Nellie chose Tufts’ Maine-track program for her medical training, which brought an unexpected confirmation of her Maine-ness.
When Nellie’s cohort of doctors-to-be had a coastal Maine retreat, they spent a day in and out of the teeth-chattering sea, clambering over the rocky shore. At the end of the day, she saw that most of her out-of-state classmates were covered with bleeding gashes from slipping over rockweed and treacherous, barnacle-bristled stones. Nellie’s body was pristine. Through insider experience she’d instinctively perfected her barnacle navigation technique.
Nellie and Tessa both moved back to Maine with spouses, then grandchildren arrived, three of them, all born in Maine.
Jonathan and I each have ancestors born and bred in Maine. Did some genetic marker activate and call us to return, to re-introduce their progeny back to the soil of their heritage? Three of our grandchildren are unarguably Mainers, born here and likely to stay. Fiona started winter camping at nine months. She wears princess dresses while rock-hopping over streams, climbing Bradbury Mountain, or running on the beach at Mackworth Island. Lucy searches the beaches for seaglass and shells. Martin rides on his parents’ backs over mossy island trails. Maine is where their taproots have found purchase. Maine is their homeland.
Can we inherit citizenship in reverse? It feels like we can. We may have a glimmer of Maine from our past, we may have discovered our own Maine through its staunch people and its glorious natural settings, but it is through our children and grandchildren that Jonathan and I have felt ourselves inextricably rooted, attached to the very core of the state of Maine. He is, by some standards, a native Mainer, a Mainer by birthright, but it was only by inhabiting Maine, by breathing its air, by forging a life, that Maine became his home.
As for me, I have established myself through propagation, integrated with Maine’s people and places, become a good local citizen, a part of the ecosystem. Maybe I won’t achieve native status, but my roots are firmly implanted in Maine’s good soil. I came as a transplant, but I’ve become a naturalized Mainer.
