The Man from A.W.A.Y.

When I moved to Maine there were things I was expecting and there were things that nobody told me about.

The weather, yes, I wanted to live someplace cold in the hopes of beating out or at least mitigating the effects of climate change. However, nobody warned me about the sultry summers and the black flies and mosquitoes that would form an angry halo around me looking for the one spot that I neglected to bug spray.

The love for blueberries was self-evident, and I can understand the obsession for donuts which seems to run through all of New England; they love, I mean really love their donuts. I also knew that I would not be able to have the convenience of a dozen or more stores that were open twenty-four hours mere blocks from my house. Nope! In my town after eight in the evening the streets are deserted as if the inhabitants have shuttered themselves in awaiting a nightly attack of vampires. Let me be clear we are at the north end of America and everything is endued with a feeling of being haunted.

Camp! Camp? Is it a noun? Is it a verb? Yes. Make sure that the "a"  has that Boston sound and you will be right on target. They go to camp. They buy a camp. I will not go to camp as to me living in my regular house feels like roughing it. But bless them if they want to do so.

Anyway one of my neighbors explained the concept of being from "away" to me. If you are not born here you are not from here, you are from "away." You could save everyone's life here from a meteor strike, defuse the biggest bomb ever or stop a rabid Sasquatch and you will still be from "away."

This is not cute or funny, it is a deep-seated form of xenophobia that seems to  be a big part of the culture. 

When I said that I would not tolerate this crap, several of my neighbors said it is from the older or more rural population. I'd like to think they believed this but I have seen different.

When I went to a yard sale with my wife the person having the sale said, "You are not from around here." Believe me she was not talking about us being from a different town, she meant we were from out of state.

Last week we were waiting outside to enter a bakery (due to covid restrictions of the number of persons who could be in the shop at one time.). The young guy asked us where we were from. We told them the name of the town we lived in, his next question was did we go to school there? Clearly this line of questioning was to discover where from "away" did we come from.

During the recent elections, Susan Collins, the incumbent senator had commercials touting that she was a "county girl," though at age 67 the term "girl" would not seem to apply. And yet people said they voted for her based on the mere fact that she was born in Maine. Other commercials painted her opponent, Sara Gideon, as living in a mansion and being from out-of-state as she was born in Rhode Island. How her place of birth plays into this is beyond me, but in the end Susan Collins won her fifth term and is going back to the office she has held since 1997; I await eagerly to see what she will do for Maine that she was not able to do during her last four terms in office. 

Maine touts itself as "Vacationland," sounding like a part of Disney I never visited. Its on the sign you see as you drive into Maine and is on our license plates. You'd expect it to be welcoming to all, and maybe it would be, under normal circumstances, however, lately everything has been far from normal.

When covid hit Maine at first seemed to have been blessed with no cases and then had very few cases of the virus. Right away persons who identified themselves as locals took to Facebook to demand that no outsiders be allowed into the state. This demand for a blockade reached a fever pitch as fearful locals went out to spot out of state license plates. Of course your best source for out of state plates would be the car rental places that rented to locals so they could now also be feared like out-of-towners.

It was pointed out that many of the truckers that brought in supplies were from out of state. It was also pointed  out that Maine's economy needs tourism. To be fair some people understood that we were still part of the UNITED States and could not be isolationists.

Later on Maine started a phased reopening by county based on infection rates. Some counties would be able to open before others. In the comments on Facebook I watched as the different counties turned on each other proclaiming that the ones from here should not go there. The definition of "outsider" paradoxically shifted from those from without to those fro within. Of course nobody used "away" as that would have been fighting words.

So I live here now, but know that while I live here I will never be part of here. My licence may say, "Maine" but my pedigree is from "away." So I must consider myself a Brooklyn expatriate living in the land of blueberries and fishers (a small animal which will certainly eat your cat if you leave it in your backyard unattended). I saw one in the land beyond our fence and ironically it sort of looks like a cat from a distance. A friend of ours, not from away like we are confirmed it was a fisher so I have yet another thing to be aware of that I did not know before moving here.