During the holidays we often think more about the people who are missing than we do about the ones present. This is especially true during times of war. But unless you have loved ones in Iraq or Afghanistan those conflicts might seem like distant, impersonal affairs.

Down East’s founder, Duane Doolittle, had a firm grip on how his new magazine would approach political issues. “Down East will be non-political on a day-by-day partisan level,” he wrote in September 1954, “for it does not grant any major or minor party a monopoly of heroes and great statesman.” To which, I would only add that no party has a monopoly of liars and scoundrels, either.

When the Maine Warden Service approached Down East last year in the hope we might consider running an article commemorating its 130th anniversary, game wardens had no idea that this magazine’s editor was writing a book in which one of their number would figure prominently. In fact I had been following the work of Maine game wardens closely for more than a decade and needed no persuading. I think it surprised Colonel Joel Wilkinson that I embraced the idea.

In The Maine Woods, Henry David Thoreau wrote that “the tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on our humanity. Only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there.”
 

It’s August, and the hills of Maine are alive with the sound of tourists. I know that description sounds facetious, but it’s not. Maine would not exist without our generous summer visitors. And any state that bills itself as “Vacationland” has already decided the limits of its discourse.

Growing up in Scarborough, I knew the spectacular cliffs of Prouts Neck long before I ever heard the name Winslow Homer. Later, while I was working as a bellman at the Black Point Inn, I was given the responsibility (and privilege) of leading hotel guests along the neck’s famous cliff walk to the Homer studio.