Bleu Hill: A Fantasy Ruined - Response to "Blue Hill, a Literary Enclave, Grows in Downeast Maine"

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.

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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.