Tenting Again

Intrepid Tracker and tiny tent trailer at Lobster Buoy Campsites

7/14/12: After luxurious living for the month of June in our rented Camden house, we are quite happily back to basics in our tiny tent trailer.  We hope that July brings good weather, but right away two afternoons of grumbling, rumbling thunderstorms, stunning sheet lightning, and torrents of rain put our fifty year-old old tent to the test.

Hallelujah - the rain rolls right off!  The first week it rains often in the night and often in the day, testing the tent, and making boat work impossible.  We are cozy in our canvas cave: reading, talking, listening to the Sacramento/Stockton NPR station on our smart phone.

As for our campground, it is a very special spot - the Lobster Buoy Campsites in South Thomaston, Maine with just forty sites.  The land has been in the same family since 1916, when it was farmed by Eleanor's (the current owner's) grandparents.  Their little “camp” (house) that they built the year they were married and given the land is still here at the top of the low hill that runs down to the cove, although a bathroom has long since been added to replace the "backhouse" (outhouse).  One of Eleanor's daughters lives in the little house now; the other daughter lives on a Maine island, population: 8 families.

Eleanor's mother, Mabel, lived on this property her entire life and died here at eighty-eight after a full day's work here on a tractor and riding lawn mower.  Sometime during Mabel and her husband's (Fred's) lifetime, they opened the campground, and it is now Eleanor's..

Island with house and horses.

The place is full of character and characters. Eleanor is an energetic, seeming seventy-something hippie with a blue bandana headband worn around her forehead and her shoulder-length, graying hair. Her partner, Doug, with his long hair, old-style prosthetic left arm, and taciturn manner, looks like someone she met during the summer of love. We keep discovering campers (who are now in trailers or RV's) who have been coming every summer for thirty or forty years and whose children and grandchildren now come.  And, they all have tales to tell around the campfire about Mabel and Fred, and the campground in years gone by.  The small bathhouse, with two showers each for the men and women, is old and funky but clean, with lots of hot water for the two quarters you put in the coin slots. There are still some of the apple trees from Fred's orchard, and at each campsite, a weathered wooden picnic table, and a rusted truck tire rim as a firepit.

Lobster Buoy Campsites cove and island with Osprey nest.

The cove is home to clams and lobster pots, and boats from dinghies to kayaks to motor boats to lobster boats.  There are at least nine small islands off the cove.  On one there is a visible house, and the family who owns it brings in horses to ride every summer.  Another island has a skeletal evergreen tree topped with an osprey's nest.  The legend is of a man who invested all of his life savings to purchase the island and started building a house on the ocean side until environmentalists won a lawsuit that stopped the development to protect the osprey.

At last, it does seem like Conrad's health is improving slowly. His neck and back are still a problem, but better.  He's off to the chiropracter again this morning.  He's decreased his blood pressure medication to a point where the dizziness has lessened (it's not gone entirely) and his blood pressure is still low.  No matter the boat work delay, we're having fun and eating lots and lots of lobster.

Conrad waiting for lobster.

Lobster prices are so low that some lobstermen aren't even going out because the cost of fuel and bait exceeds the price they get for their catch.  We are diligently doing our part to raise that price by eating lobster almost daily, and exploring local spots on the water where the lobster boats dock.  It seems as if every back road in the direction of the Atlantic leads to another lovely, granite-rocked cove, edged with evergreen forest.  We've eaten at simple lobster diners with picnic tables on docks, at a high quality restaurant with a large menu, and our favorite, a place where you bring everything you need to eat and drink except the lobster, which they cook for you on the spot and bring to your picnic table.
 

Miller Lobster Company - "diner on the dock."