Blue Hill

Voices of a Place

Kate, Noel and Anna leaving the sheep after the afternoon feed / Photo by Tom Jones

When Jeanne proposed that she be the one to write this Substack about the town of Blue Hill, I felt conflicted. I mean, after all it was us—Betty, Liz, Anna, Kate and me—the Stookey family who’d done the actual moving some fifty years ago to this little seacoast community near Acadia National Park and Bar Harbor.  But I hadn’t taken into account that Jeanne might be looking for something more significant than a description of this town, named after a mountain that reaches nearly 1000 feet above Blue Hill Bay on the coast of Maine.  

While she maintained that “you can learn much online about the attractions of the area—its natural beauty, its recreational opportunities, and its arts and culture,” in the following post she wanted to touch upon “something deeper, something more like the spirit or soul of Blue Hill.”  And so…adopting the role of both the subject and the reviewer of her words here, I shall retire and enjoy with you her warm appraisal of this place Betty and I call home.

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By the early 70’s Noel had been longing for several years to move to the country, in part because he had fond memories of his childhood in a rural area south of Baltimore. After reading Helen and Scott Nearings’ The Good Life, Betty and Noel became interested in the back-to-the-land movement. The Nearings were advocates for simple living, sustainability, social and economic justice, vegetarianism, and the non-exploitation of animals. Their homestead, Forest Farm, is located in Brooksville, Maine, just a few miles away from Blue Hill. After Scott and Helen died, the farm became the Good Life Center, which is a clearinghouse for their numerous books and other publications, a model of sustainable living practices, a social justice center, and in summers, the site of a speaker series, workshops, educational programs, and volunteer work projects.

Noel and Betty wanted a simpler life for their family on a small farm where they could grow vegetables and raise farm animals. Although they had considered some inland places in New England, Betty was attracted to the Maine coast where she’d spent summers when she was growing up. When I asked Betty how they’d found and chose Blue Hill, she said, 

We drove up to the coast to Canada and then back, going in and out of every inlet. When we drove into Blue Hill, we saw that it had all the basic things that we thought we would need to live there—a hospital, a school, a drug store, a market, a town hall, and a library. And it was small and pretty. We both loved it right away so it was not a hard decision.

In later posts, we will mention more about the Stookey family’s life in Blue Hill—the contributions they’ve made to the community and the ways the community has enriched their lives—but here I begin with a quote from author and naturalist Barry Lopez in which he focuses on the call of a place.

He observes that “something emotive abides in the land, and that it can be recognized and evoked even if it cannot be thoroughly plumbed. . . . To hear the unembodied call of a place, one has to wait for it to speak through the harmony of its features—the soughing of the wind across it, its upward reach against the clear night sky, its fragrance after a rain.” 

Though I have visited the Stookeys in Blue Hill, I have not been in its natural  world long enough to hear that harmony, but I’ve read books by residents of the area who have paid a lot of attention to the call of the Blue Hill Peninsula as a place. Several miles down the road from the Stookeys’ home is a farm that belonged to writer E.B. White, author of several beloved books for children, including Stuart Little, The Trumpet of the Swan, and of course, Charlotte’s Web, through which he gave voice to the call of the Blue Hill Peninsula. With his great love of animals and close observation of nature, he was able to embody the spirit of the place even in this reply to 5th graders in Larchmont, NY, who had been reading the tale of Charlotte, the spider, and Wilbur, the pig. 

“It is true that I have a farm. It is on the sea. My barn is big and old, and I have ten sheep, eighteen hens, a goose, a gander, a bull calf, a rat, a chipmunk, and many spiders. In the woods near the barn are red squirrels, crows, thrushes, owls, porcupines, woodchucks, foxes, rabbits, and deer. In the pasture pond are frogs, polliwogs, and salamanders. Sometimes a Great Blue Heron comes to the pond  and catches frogs. At the shore of the sea are sandpipers, gulls, plovers, and kingfishers. In the mud at low tide are clams. Several seals live on nearby rocks and in the sea, and they swim close to my boat when I row. Barn swallows nest in the barn, and I have a skunk that lives under the garage.  

I even see White’s embodiment of that spirit in this story told to me by Karen Frangoulis, co-founder and co-editor of Farmstead Magazine and friend of the Stookeys. When the first edition of the magazine came out in 1974, Karen obtained permission to print one of E.B. White's articles from the New Yorker, “Mr. White's Brown Eggs.”  When the magazine was published , she made an appointment to deliver a copy of the first issue to Mr. White. 

When Karen and her young daughter got out of their truck at the White farm, they were met by Mr. White himself. Karen said, “He took her hand and walked toward the barn to show her the goose and the chickens. I followed along and when he got to the hen house, he rapped on the door and said, ‘White here.’ He was very polite to his hens, and his eggs were for sale in Merrill & Hinkley’s store in square boxes with EBW printed on them.”

A special feature—though not directly a natural one—of the Blue Hill area that speaks volumes about its spirit is the Blue Hill Fair. When Disney Studios made Charlotte’s Web into a film, E. B. White wrote in a letter to a friend, “The movie about Charlotte is about what I expected it to be. The story is interrupted every few minutes so somebody can sing a jolly song. I don’t care much for jolly songs. The Blue Hill Fair, which I tried to report faithfully in the book, has become a Disney World with 76 trombones. But that’s what you get for getting embroiled with Hollywood.”  

Another keen observer of the unembodied call of the place that is Blue Hill was Rob McCall, who for 28 years was the minister at Blue Hill Congregational Church.  Perhaps even more widely known as a naturalist and the producer and host of the Awanadjo Alamanack, he was heard regularly as part of the programming of WERU, the community radio station that Noel helped to found. Rob explained that the word “awanadjo” is Algonkian for “small, misty mountain,”  which also became the title of one of Rob’s books, a collection of observations of the Blue Hill Peninsula through the seasons of a year. Rob wrote:

The town of Blue Hill is situated in what could be called a “spiritual vortex.” It seems to draw numinous energy from the mountain or from some geomagnetic source deep in the rocky crust of the earth beneath. Nearly everyone around here acknowledges this phenomenon; and nearly everyone describes it differently. This energy pours forth and forms people in amazing ways. You would be hard-put to find a town or village of like size anywhere with so many gifted artists, musicians, craftspeople, seers, prophets, and just plain characters . . . .” 

Rob and Mr. White (I can’t call him E.B., or even Andy, as he was known to his friends) were two of those gifted “characters,” but Noel has introduced me to many neighbors in the course of working on our book, each of whom have in some way embodied the spirit and the energy of Blue Hill in their work and their lives. The beauty of the place shines forth in the beauty of the community, and just as Wilbur was SOME PIG! and E.B. White was SOME WRITER!, Blue Hill is SOME TOWN!

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Connections

Watch this video about The Good Life Center, the homestead of Helen and Scott Nearing. 

Here’s a short video of Blue Hill Fair that gives a glimpse of the Charlotte’s Web display.

In this article you can “Meet Wilbur and His Friends at the Maine Fair That Inspired Charlotte’s Web.”

Listen to an edition on Rob McCall’s Awanadjo Almanack on WERU Community Radio. 

Some Writer!—The Story of E.B. White, by Melissa Sweet is billed as a children’s book and is a even Caldecott Honor Winner, but this adult (Jeanne) believes it is wonderful for all ages. 

Vibrations

From the Noel Paul Stookey album Something New & Fresh “The Country Song.”

From the Peter Campbell album “Rearview MIrror “ Blue Hill (live),” a song which gives voice to unembodied call of the town.

Resonance

Where have you heard the “unembodied call of a place” and how would you give voice to that call?

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