The original New York Times article that this post satirizes can be found here.
A year-round resident of Blue
Hill celebrates her 97th birthday.
Maine is one of the oldest states in the
country.
Rain lashed the pine boughs outside a journalist’s summer rental
in Blue Hill, Me., in June as a perfectly seasonable chilly fog
rolled among birches and firs. Inside a book-lined office, the journalist
attempted to brush away a swarm of black flies that were getting in the way of
his tear-jerking memory of a pig at the fair. The pig had lain in its own feces
and taken no notice of him. It reminded had reminded him of reality, which was
not supposed to be part of his damn vacation in Bleu Hill, Me.
He gazed out the window at the charming coastal Maine town he
frequented. “How rustic! How picturesque! Behold the humpback peaks of Mount
Desert Island looming due east! I’ve got it!” he cried, smashing a fist down,
killing two black flies and wounding several others, “I’ll write a New
York Times article about the quaintness!” He opened his MacBook Air
and set it next to a vintage typewriter that he’d found in one of the 5,000,000
area antique shops and got to work.
"Poised at the cusp of Maine’s Downeast region, the Bleu
Hill peninsula is a spit of seaboard notable for its rough-hewn splendor. With
boulder-strewn blueberry barrens and clapboard farmhouses flaking into
painterly decrepitude, the scenery seems purpose-built to bring out the poet
within."
The journalist passed up another form of decrepitude that may
send the poet diving back within, which is found in local inhabitants
struggling with heroin addiction, while their Tea Party governor responds by
emphasizing law enforcement over treatment in a throw back to the 1980s. The
number of heroin-related arrests in the state of Maine nearly tripled between
2010 and 2013, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The Bleu Hill
Peninsula has not escaped this trend, despite quaintly not having a police
force. But let us return to the town of Bleu Hill that the journalist
airbrushed with literary appeal.
Marlintini’s Bar and Grill, a far cry from being a bygone haunt
of the area's literati, is just the only place in town with table service
that’s open for lunch. This is why the peninsula’s writers, who are numerous
and internationally recognized (though notably not year-round residents), eat
there along with everyone else. Because of a sharp decline in viable
restaurants in Bleu Hill, finding food or drink after 9pm is impossible. This
may or may not be related to the fact that Maine’s population is one of the
oldest, on average in the country, and nestled among the vacant storefronts on Main Street in Bleu Hill is a thriving funeral parlor.
A touch of reality, squeezed amidst language of patronizing
pastoralism was Marge from Red Gap Used Books saying, of Bleu Hill, Me., “It’s
a welcoming place. Until you prove yourself to be a jerk, you’re fine.”
She’s right, on the whole, though the relationships between
“Mainers”, “transplants”, and people “from away”, can also be more complicated.
The journalist is also right that Blue Hill is strikingly beautiful. At the
same time, travel writers should strive to scratch through the postcard surface of the places they write about to
dignify the complexities that make those place real. Because Blue Hill, after all, is a real place.
Haley Malm was born and raised in Blue Hill.
