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We live in an age of improvement-obsession. We’re sold on the idea that a person can do anything—learn a language, master a musical instrument, manage an organic farm—given the right mix of determination and direction. The right location helps, too. These driven times have helped make Maine a prime destination for what we might call the New Tourist: the vacationer with a mission.
Maine has been welcoming summer visitors since long before the state put “Vacationland” on its license plates. But for the New Tourist, it’s not all about the lobsters and the loons and the picture-postcard harbors. The New Tourist is looking for something different, something a little challenging, something off the main road and away from the mainstream curriculum of life. The New Tourist can come from another part of Maine or from halfway around the world. For those from away, return visits are frequent; some even buy land and become part of the permanent population.
Often it’s the places that aren’t in the brochures that the New Tourist finds most attractive, and often they aren’t “new” at all. The Tide Mill Farm in Edmunds dates back to pre-Revolutionary War days, and has been worked by nine consecutive generations of the same family. Now it’s an organic farm that welcomes visitors. It seems like a good place to begin our mini-tour of a few New Tourist destinations.
The tides in Cobscook Bay rise and fall about two stories (23 feet) with each half-turn of the Earth. That’s a vertical measurement, but the water moves horizontally, funneling into and out of the bay’s long inlets in a daily demonstration of kinetic energy. This summer, proponents of tidal power are floating various proposals for this bay, including a series of underwater turbine generators that could turn the force of all that water surging through narrow channels into usable electricity.
Nearly three centuries ago, those same tides attracted the attention of an enterprising Scotsman named Robert Bell, who figured out a way to use them to mill grain. In 1765, he built the grist mill from which Tide Mill Farm takes its name. One of the old millstones still sits at the end of the long finger of water; nearby, you can still make out the outline of the old pier where seagoing schooners, riding the tides in and out of the bay, used to tie up and load.
Today, 17 members of the extended Bell family live and work on the 1,600-acre farm. The old farmhouse down by the landing now serves as a summer rental for groups of artists, writers, naturalists, vacationing families, business groups, and other organizations. The house rents by the week from mid-June to late October. And it sits smack in the middle of a working organic farm, in which visitors are encouraged to participate.
Brothers Terry and Robert Bell and their wives, Cathy and Jane, run the visitor-oriented part of the operation. Robert and Jane’s son Aaron, and his wife, Carly DelSignore, operate the organic farm, raising vegetables, fruits, and herbs, as well as chickens, turkeys, pigs, and dairy cows. The family also practices sustainable wood harvesting on the farm’s forested acreage, which constitutes most of its land. There are blueberries to harvest in August, and wreaths to prepare for the holiday season. Aaron and Carly make periodic deliveries to health food stores along the coast from Lubec to Belfast, and attend local farmers markets from June through October.
It’s a busy life, but not too busy for the inclusion of visitors. “People are on vacation, but around them at all times is the day-to-day operation of an organic farm,” says Terry Bell. “And they are welcome and encouraged to participate at whatever level they want.”
“I do my thing, and I don’t mind if people tag along,” Aaron Bell says, standing in front of the barn just steps away from the door of the farmhouse. “I give them little projects, and they have fun with it. Some people are out here for every milking. When families bring children, they sort of become involved by default.”
“We’d like to do more in the way of marketing the farm experience, such as assigning the care of a calf to a child for the length of his or her stay,” Jane Bell says. She believes that the farm’s location and the family’s commitment to sustainable land use can provide additional educational opportunities. “We want to investigate the homeschool market in Boston and New York,” she says. “This is a great laboratory environment.”
Indeed, visitors would be hard-pressed to find a vacation spot with more going on in the natural world around them, both on land and in the water. The huge tides provide an extensive intertidal zone for marine studies. A biology class from Northeastern University in Massachusetts paid a visit to the farm a couple of years ago to study the marine environment of Cobscook Bay.
Other groups renting the farmhouse have included musicians, writers, and visual artists.
The farmhouse has five bedrooms and can sleep as many as nine. The Bells rent it by the week, and it is usually booked for next season by Christmas. Visitors frequently come back year after year.
“We have a group of artists, serious painters, who’ve come back for 15 straight years,” Cathy Bell says. “They’ve worked their way into the hearts of the local people. The core group is from Franklin County, in western Maine. We go down to the house every summer, after they’ve been at it for a few days. It’s kind of cool to see all these paintings of your own place.”
The Penobscot School in Rockland didn’t start out oriented to summer visitors when it opened two decades ago. But a twist of ingenuity sparked a recent addition of a summer English immersion program, which brings adults from overseas and sprinkles them throughout the community for three weeks at a time.
The language school was started in 1986 by Rockland lawyer and writer Joe Steinberger and his then-wife, Julia Schulz, a French teacher. Though the couple divorced in 1998, they continue to collaborate on the school. The primary mission was, and remains, teaching languages to adults in the Midcoast area. Courses are offered in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese. Teachers come from all walks of life. Many are foreign born; all live in the area.
“If you start beating the bushes, you’ll find there are people from all over the world living in your community,” Steinberger says. “Those resources were out there.”
The school itself is headquartered in a modest house with low wooden ceilings on a shady side street, within walking distance of downtown Rockland, the ferry landing, and the bus stop. Next door, a renovated garage houses the studios of WRFR, the low-power FM community radio station licensed to the school.
A frequent international traveler, Steinberger conceived the English immersion program as another way to involve the community in the school’s mission. “It became clear that there were lots of people wanting to study English, and that they were paying a lot of money to do so,” he says. “We thought we could do something better, that would not cost too much, and that would utilize the resources of the community.”
It’s the reverse of what they do the rest of the year. “We’re one school with two different things going on,” Steinberger explains. “During the school year, we teach foreign languages to people who live here so they can go out into the world. In the summer, we bring people here to learn English.”
Fifteen adults attend each session, one in July and one in August. They come primarily from Europe, South America, and Asia. “Marketing the program has been a challenge,” Steinberger admits. “We don’t want to have a large number of students from the same place. We want as much diversity as possible.”
The program has succeeded, Steinberger says, through word-of-mouth and worldwide exposure on the Internet.
Students stay with volunteer host families in Rockland and attend meetings and classes at the school each morning. In the afternoons, they’re sent out into the community. “We try to connect people with their peers in Rockland,” Steinberger says. “We’ve had doctors, architects, lawyers, and judges come here, and they’re able to meet their American counterparts and make social connections.”
Everyone gathers back at the school for dinner. “We do a lot with sending people out to do research and come back and report on it,” Steinberger says. “Sometimes a neighbor will come over with a pot of soup or something, or other people will drop by during the evening. We have a lot of fun—we’re eating and laughing together, having these wide-ranging discussions.
“The real secret of the English immersion program is to create an environment in which people are eager to communicate, and have no choice but to do it in English.”
Dyer Neck sticks out into the chill waters between Schoodic Peninsula and the Petit Manan National Wildlife Refuge. Down the road, on a small rise called Eagle Hill, are a series of buildings that comprise the Humboldt Field Research Institute. Despite the serene, simple setting, a week at the Institute is no walk in the nature preserve. From April to September, the Institute hosts advanced and professional-level natural history and science field seminars that have historically been intense and specific by design.
“The level of discourse is pretty high,” says Jeorg-Henner Lotze, director of the Institute and the Eagle Hill Foundation, the nonprofit entity that supports it. “We’ve had people sent here for training by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Maine DEP, even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They have critical needs for information that allows them to be better at their jobs. And they get that here.”
The Institute, named for Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), has offered high-level natural history and science field seminars in this out-of-the-way setting since 1987. The seminars are taught by university professors and experts from the United States and Canada. This month, Humboldt Research Institute visitors will be studying topics as general as forest soils, and as specific as “the genus level taxonomy of the Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, and Trichoptera.”
Not all Institute visitors can necessarily identify the characteristics of the preferred meals of trout and salmon (such as the aquatic insects listed above). Four years ago, the Institute decided to branch out, and began inviting artists and art historians to Eagle Hill for retreats and conferences. This month, students with brushes and palettes will join those with calipers and hip boots, improving their skills at painting watercolor landscapes and dissecting the techniques of German master Albrecht Dürer.
Still, the Institute has remained largely off the radar, slowly building its reputation by word-of-mouth. That is about to change, as two new buildings are going up, designed to open the place up to “the very general public,” in Lotze’s words. The first will house a lecture hall, an art and natural history library, a commons area modeled after the Memorial Union at the University of Maine, and an “elegant” restaurant. Lotze says the goal is to draw in people from the area who may be interested in learning more, in a casual way, about the work of the Institute. “It’s a place to come for people who are intellectually curious. We’ll have programs on a broad spectrum of topics: natural history, art, philosophy, literature.” The new facility, he says, “should be reasonably operational by the end of the year.”
The second building, due to be completed a year or two from now, will house a dedicated museum and expanded library. It’s all part of the Institute’s plan to augment its scholarly summer programs with year-round attractions for metro residents (some of its residential cabins are winterized) and the tourist who isn’t afraid to venture down the road less traveled.
Maine has been welcoming summer visitors since long before the state put “Vacationland” on its license plates. But for the New Tourist, it’s not all about the lobsters and the loons and the picture-postcard harbors. The New Tourist is looking for something different, something a little challenging, something off the main road and away from the mainstream curriculum of life. The New Tourist can come from another part of Maine or from halfway around the world. For those from away, return visits are frequent; some even buy land and become part of the permanent population.
Often it’s the places that aren’t in the brochures that the New Tourist finds most attractive, and often they aren’t “new” at all. The Tide Mill Farm in Edmunds dates back to pre-Revolutionary War days, and has been worked by nine consecutive generations of the same family. Now it’s an organic farm that welcomes visitors. It seems like a good place to begin our mini-tour of a few New Tourist destinations.
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The tides in Cobscook Bay rise and fall about two stories (23 feet) with each half-turn of the Earth. That’s a vertical measurement, but the water moves horizontally, funneling into and out of the bay’s long inlets in a daily demonstration of kinetic energy. This summer, proponents of tidal power are floating various proposals for this bay, including a series of underwater turbine generators that could turn the force of all that water surging through narrow channels into usable electricity.
Nearly three centuries ago, those same tides attracted the attention of an enterprising Scotsman named Robert Bell, who figured out a way to use them to mill grain. In 1765, he built the grist mill from which Tide Mill Farm takes its name. One of the old millstones still sits at the end of the long finger of water; nearby, you can still make out the outline of the old pier where seagoing schooners, riding the tides in and out of the bay, used to tie up and load.
Today, 17 members of the extended Bell family live and work on the 1,600-acre farm. The old farmhouse down by the landing now serves as a summer rental for groups of artists, writers, naturalists, vacationing families, business groups, and other organizations. The house rents by the week from mid-June to late October. And it sits smack in the middle of a working organic farm, in which visitors are encouraged to participate.
Brothers Terry and Robert Bell and their wives, Cathy and Jane, run the visitor-oriented part of the operation. Robert and Jane’s son Aaron, and his wife, Carly DelSignore, operate the organic farm, raising vegetables, fruits, and herbs, as well as chickens, turkeys, pigs, and dairy cows. The family also practices sustainable wood harvesting on the farm’s forested acreage, which constitutes most of its land. There are blueberries to harvest in August, and wreaths to prepare for the holiday season. Aaron and Carly make periodic deliveries to health food stores along the coast from Lubec to Belfast, and attend local farmers markets from June through October.
It’s a busy life, but not too busy for the inclusion of visitors. “People are on vacation, but around them at all times is the day-to-day operation of an organic farm,” says Terry Bell. “And they are welcome and encouraged to participate at whatever level they want.”
“I do my thing, and I don’t mind if people tag along,” Aaron Bell says, standing in front of the barn just steps away from the door of the farmhouse. “I give them little projects, and they have fun with it. Some people are out here for every milking. When families bring children, they sort of become involved by default.”
“We’d like to do more in the way of marketing the farm experience, such as assigning the care of a calf to a child for the length of his or her stay,” Jane Bell says. She believes that the farm’s location and the family’s commitment to sustainable land use can provide additional educational opportunities. “We want to investigate the homeschool market in Boston and New York,” she says. “This is a great laboratory environment.”
Indeed, visitors would be hard-pressed to find a vacation spot with more going on in the natural world around them, both on land and in the water. The huge tides provide an extensive intertidal zone for marine studies. A biology class from Northeastern University in Massachusetts paid a visit to the farm a couple of years ago to study the marine environment of Cobscook Bay.
Other groups renting the farmhouse have included musicians, writers, and visual artists.
The farmhouse has five bedrooms and can sleep as many as nine. The Bells rent it by the week, and it is usually booked for next season by Christmas. Visitors frequently come back year after year.
“We have a group of artists, serious painters, who’ve come back for 15 straight years,” Cathy Bell says. “They’ve worked their way into the hearts of the local people. The core group is from Franklin County, in western Maine. We go down to the house every summer, after they’ve been at it for a few days. It’s kind of cool to see all these paintings of your own place.”
The Penobscot School in Rockland didn’t start out oriented to summer visitors when it opened two decades ago. But a twist of ingenuity sparked a recent addition of a summer English immersion program, which brings adults from overseas and sprinkles them throughout the community for three weeks at a time.
The language school was started in 1986 by Rockland lawyer and writer Joe Steinberger and his then-wife, Julia Schulz, a French teacher. Though the couple divorced in 1998, they continue to collaborate on the school. The primary mission was, and remains, teaching languages to adults in the Midcoast area. Courses are offered in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese. Teachers come from all walks of life. Many are foreign born; all live in the area.
“If you start beating the bushes, you’ll find there are people from all over the world living in your community,” Steinberger says. “Those resources were out there.”
The school itself is headquartered in a modest house with low wooden ceilings on a shady side street, within walking distance of downtown Rockland, the ferry landing, and the bus stop. Next door, a renovated garage houses the studios of WRFR, the low-power FM community radio station licensed to the school.
A frequent international traveler, Steinberger conceived the English immersion program as another way to involve the community in the school’s mission. “It became clear that there were lots of people wanting to study English, and that they were paying a lot of money to do so,” he says. “We thought we could do something better, that would not cost too much, and that would utilize the resources of the community.”
It’s the reverse of what they do the rest of the year. “We’re one school with two different things going on,” Steinberger explains. “During the school year, we teach foreign languages to people who live here so they can go out into the world. In the summer, we bring people here to learn English.”
Fifteen adults attend each session, one in July and one in August. They come primarily from Europe, South America, and Asia. “Marketing the program has been a challenge,” Steinberger admits. “We don’t want to have a large number of students from the same place. We want as much diversity as possible.”
The program has succeeded, Steinberger says, through word-of-mouth and worldwide exposure on the Internet.
Students stay with volunteer host families in Rockland and attend meetings and classes at the school each morning. In the afternoons, they’re sent out into the community. “We try to connect people with their peers in Rockland,” Steinberger says. “We’ve had doctors, architects, lawyers, and judges come here, and they’re able to meet their American counterparts and make social connections.”
Everyone gathers back at the school for dinner. “We do a lot with sending people out to do research and come back and report on it,” Steinberger says. “Sometimes a neighbor will come over with a pot of soup or something, or other people will drop by during the evening. We have a lot of fun—we’re eating and laughing together, having these wide-ranging discussions.
“The real secret of the English immersion program is to create an environment in which people are eager to communicate, and have no choice but to do it in English.”
Dyer Neck sticks out into the chill waters between Schoodic Peninsula and the Petit Manan National Wildlife Refuge. Down the road, on a small rise called Eagle Hill, are a series of buildings that comprise the Humboldt Field Research Institute. Despite the serene, simple setting, a week at the Institute is no walk in the nature preserve. From April to September, the Institute hosts advanced and professional-level natural history and science field seminars that have historically been intense and specific by design.
“The level of discourse is pretty high,” says Jeorg-Henner Lotze, director of the Institute and the Eagle Hill Foundation, the nonprofit entity that supports it. “We’ve had people sent here for training by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Maine DEP, even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They have critical needs for information that allows them to be better at their jobs. And they get that here.”
The Institute, named for Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), has offered high-level natural history and science field seminars in this out-of-the-way setting since 1987. The seminars are taught by university professors and experts from the United States and Canada. This month, Humboldt Research Institute visitors will be studying topics as general as forest soils, and as specific as “the genus level taxonomy of the Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, and Trichoptera.”
Not all Institute visitors can necessarily identify the characteristics of the preferred meals of trout and salmon (such as the aquatic insects listed above). Four years ago, the Institute decided to branch out, and began inviting artists and art historians to Eagle Hill for retreats and conferences. This month, students with brushes and palettes will join those with calipers and hip boots, improving their skills at painting watercolor landscapes and dissecting the techniques of German master Albrecht Dürer.
Still, the Institute has remained largely off the radar, slowly building its reputation by word-of-mouth. That is about to change, as two new buildings are going up, designed to open the place up to “the very general public,” in Lotze’s words. The first will house a lecture hall, an art and natural history library, a commons area modeled after the Memorial Union at the University of Maine, and an “elegant” restaurant. Lotze says the goal is to draw in people from the area who may be interested in learning more, in a casual way, about the work of the Institute. “It’s a place to come for people who are intellectually curious. We’ll have programs on a broad spectrum of topics: natural history, art, philosophy, literature.” The new facility, he says, “should be reasonably operational by the end of the year.”
The second building, due to be completed a year or two from now, will house a dedicated museum and expanded library. It’s all part of the Institute’s plan to augment its scholarly summer programs with year-round attractions for metro residents (some of its residential cabins are winterized) and the tourist who isn’t afraid to venture down the road less traveled.
