So this is the beginning of an on-line volunteer Community Access project offering a multi-media public voice to the residents of central Maine and environs. Organizations and individuals in central Maine communities have an opportunity to speak their minds, share their interests and concerns, and report on community events in the same way as they would do it over a community radio or television station. Temporary audio production space and help with basic technical resources is available.

Eventually, and hopefully, this project will grow to the point where it will best be served by a board of directors. If you are interested in being a founding member of Public Access Media, Voices of Central Maine, tell us about yourself in an email.

In any case, please take a few moments to leave a reply.

You won’t find Tilbury Town listed in any Triple-A travel books or Cook’s Tour Guides, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a tourist season. We do. Last year, for instance, our Tourist arrived a little later than usual. Harriet Meekel’s trip was delayed a couple of weeks. Her only means of transport was a Norwegian unicycle which needed a replacement part from Oslo.

Ten years ago, before the Big Blast, of which more later, our tourist business was twice what it is today. Every summer for twenty years, Harriet and her husband Otis cycled all the way from Cooper’s Mills to enjoy two solid weeks amidst the natural and unnatural wonders of life on our little island.

The opening of tourist season is always an occasion for festive celebration here in Tilbury. It all centers around Gram and Gramp Boolean’s Bed and Breakfast just up the street from our famous Theatre-on-the-Fritz.

Up to the year of the Big Blast, the guest room was located in a separate cottage down back of the crabapple orchard. In the off-season the cottage doubled as a low profile distillery, which produced a brew the proof of which has never been matched up or down the Kennebec River. Sod Ferment’s potato crop surplus provided the raw material, Grammy Boolean’s ancient recipe provided the ways and Gramp’s engineering genius provided the means. Every year on the day before the Tourists were scheduled to arrive, the machinery was moved to an empty stall in the barn, the cottage was given a quick airing out, furniture and linen was installed and everything was made ready

The brewing method Gramp used was an open vat process. This required that the chilled distilling hood sit loosely above the vat allowing plenty of room for vapors to spill over into the general quarters of the cottage.

This went well for years until Harriet’s husband Otis, a traveling salesman at the time, decided to come directly to Tilbury rather than go to Coopers Mills and cycle up with the missus. Gramp was rushing through a final batch before the two-week hiatus when Otis arrived a couple of days earlier than expected and couldn’t find Gram or Gramp who were off-island at the moment. He headed for the guest cottage unaware of the alternative use being made of it during the off-season. Ignoring the no smoking sign, Otis, lighted cigar clenched firmly in teeth, opened the Cottage door and stepped into history. The blast was heard from Waterville to Wiscasset.

For months small pieces of the original cottage were spotted around the island but, except for his sample case, no trace of Otis was ever found. This was possibly due not so much to the octane of the brew as to the large number of small carnivores on the island. But the sample case is still stored at the Town Clerks office, just in case Otis shows up someday.

Communication being what it is in Tilbury, Harriet had no way of knowing that she had become a widow until she arrived at the scheduled time. She took it well, everything considered. The fact that there was no need for the fuss and expense of a funeral helped a bit to ease her grief and she decided to go forward with her vacation.

With their little cottage industry suddenly terminated, Gram and Gramp had quickly taken measures to make their guest’s visit pleasantly wistful and fully reflective of Tilbury hospitality. By putting an old table top over the business end of the three-holer attached to the wood shed, adding a little creative interior decorating, some lye and plenty of incense, the Booleans created a respectable ambiance quite enjoyed by the new widow Meekel. How the Boolean’s and guest manage for two weeks every summer without an outhouse is curious but not essential to the story.

The return of the tourist is also the occasion for much merriment at the Fish House Bar and Grill. That year however, the Tilbury Towners for whom the Bar and Grill was a way of life had mixed feelings about the Meekel’s role in destroying the town’s only source of native bar booze. Since Otis was only a memory, the tendency might be to take it out on his poor widow. Harriet sensed this possibility right away and for the next ten years, right up to now, she always arrived not only with her two weeks supply of lingerie and other stuff, but with a full case of Jim Beam Black Label for the boys in the Bar. Whether her motive is conscience or protection remains her secret but the full measure of Harriet Meekel’s generosity is best put into perspective by recalling that her only means of transporting the Jim Beam is that faithful old Norwegian unicycle.

This past summer, Hubert Hellbender, postmaster and resident understudy at Theatre-on-the-Fritz here in Tilbury, bought his nephew, Horace, a sail plane for his birthday. The plane was hand-crafted by a snowshoe salesman up north in Eagle Lake to help fill in the time between snow seasons. If you set your mind to it you can accomplish a lot in two weeks.

Horace was some surprised when he got the card from his uncle announcing the present, but he had to take delivery at the airport in Augusta, our State Capitol, about six miles up river from Tilbury Island. Early on a bright sunny morning in June, Horace rowed over to Farmingdale on the west side of the river and bummed a ride to the airport with a trucker who was delivering a load of surplus votive candles for use as emergency runway lights.

About mid-morning, following a brief briefing by the sailplane builder on how to fly a sailplane, Horace hitched a tow from a departing Delta flight and cut lose at thirty thousand feet. The sail to Tilbury was uneventful if you discount the effects of oxygen starvation. Several hallucinations later, over Tilbury, Hubert still had twenty thousand feet to burn. Updrafts being what they are along the Kennebec River, it was just about sunset before he could established a glide path to Tilbury’s Little League ball field.

As everybody knows, the Central Maine Power Company’s high tension tower, carrying 300,000 volts of native Maine electricity across the river, straddles the ball field on the north end of the island. It had been a long day for Horace and he was tired. His piloting skills being on the minus side of zip didn’t help much. Horace touched down about eighty feet too high.

If you picture one of those back yard bug zappers and multiply the picture by a factor of say, three hundred thousand, you’ll get the picture. The purple flash was visible in the dusk a good ten miles in all directions. A puff of white smoke, the last earthly remains of Horace and his birthday present, drifted around Tilbury for a week or so, providing friends and neighbors a proper period for mourning.

Moral: Never buy a sailplane from a snowshoe salesman.
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America may run on Dunkin’ Donuts but in many localities the claim is based more on availability than choice. Last summer, Spouse and I drove from Gardiner to Eastport. We decided to forgo breakfast on the Gardiner end of the trip and planned to stop an hour or so down the road to enjoy a late breakfast of our favorite health food, coffee and doughnuts. By lunch time we were still looking for breakfast. Nary a doughnut in 203 miles. We should have stopped at Bolleys in Hallowell before heading east.

But wait. Before we can intelligently discuss the state of Doughnuts in Maine, let’s be sure we’re all taking about the same thing.

From here on, it’s all a matter of opinion … ours.

Note the spelling; there are “donuts” and there are “doughnuts”. One is not just a variant spelling of the other and anyone who thinks so has a lot to learn, and we’re here to teach ya.

“Doughnut” refers to scratch-made bread-like dough that’s hand-rolled out on a slab and hand-cut with a cookie-cutter type tool adapted so as to cut the dough into ‘torus-shaped’ pieces, one at a time. And one at a time each piece is carefully slipped into a kettle of real hot fat for a spell. How hot and for how long is the difference between a good doughnut and a disgustingly ‘juicy’ fat-soaked abomination.

A “Donut” on the other hand, refers to the end result of a semi-fluid batter mechanically squeezed through the nozzle of a machine from which it drops into the hot fat, which may be why they are sometimes referred to as ‘drop’ donuts. These are the things you find on the shelves of supermarkets everywhere in boxes marked ‘donuts’. In spite of their similarity in appearance, they don’t make the grade as a ‘doughnut’ by a long-shot, but desperation breeds tolerance.

And that, at long last, brings us back to the focus of this essay and the man who has it all nicely under control.

A quarter mile or so above the railroad bridge on the north end of Hallowell right next to the cemetery, Donny Pooler, Bolleys owner and Master Maker of Marvelous Meals, fires up the fat every morning before 4:00 am. By opening time at 5:00, the first of Bolleys genuine home made, hand cut toruses of succulent artery-clogging deliciousness rests within the glass case on the right end of the service counter. Plain white, cinnamon, and chocolate sugared they sit. And right there beside them are Bolleys soon-to-be-famous Molasses Gnarlies. These are characterized by their, um, gnarlie-ness; a plain molasses doughnut liberally embossed with tender crispy random protrusions impossible to achieve with the drop method, and all but impossible to avoid with the real (hand cut) thing. The rougher the raw cut toruses are handled, the gnarlier they are and, for my money, much the better.

If Donny reads this, it may be the first he’s heard of Bolleys Famous Gnarlies, but I gotta tell ya, Donny, you’re sitting on a gold mine in those wee hours. A little practice and experimentation, and you’re well on your way to a break-out in the world of hand cut doughnuts. The Eating Out guy will be dropping by frequently and you can expect some on-going feedback.

Love them Gnarlies!

This is a home made demonstration of what can be done with a collection of photos already on your hard disk, or stacked in a shoebox (if you have a scanner to make the .jpg files.)

These were taken around my house in Gardiner over a couple of winters . I used the Pinnacle Studio editing suite to put it together - it took 4-5 hours over a weekend - but you could do it with any of several free video editing applications. Just download a couple and experiment.

You, too, can do something similar. Pick a place or subject you’re familiar with around Central Maine and go for it!

Milo Ferguson is our Community Intellectual. He was elected to the post by a slim margin at last Spring’s town meeting on the basis of having read both of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s great plays “Van Zorn” and “The Porcupine”. This immediately distinguished him from all other contenders who had merely CONSIDERED reading a play. Marion, our town librarian, nominated Ferguson over the objections of Arlo Cheevy’s cousin Clyde. Clyde felt that neither “Van Zorn” nor “The Porcupine” qualified as a play. This immediately identified Clyde as a pseudo-intellectual and eliminated him as a candidate.

Sad to say, there’s a deep rooted anti-intellectualism rampant here in Tilbury. It manifests itself every Hallowe’en when the reigning Intellectual is found dangling head down fifty feet up on the Central Maine Power Company’s transmission tower which straddles the Little League ballfield at the north end of our island town. The “trick-or-treaters” are reasonably careful to avoid a fatal experience for the Intellectual, but their best plans aft gang astray.

One Hallowe’en a few years back Howard Hatfield, the then Community Intellectual was accidentally dangled across two wires of the 300,000 volt transmission lines on the tower and all that was left of Howard was a puff of white smoke which drifted through Tilbury Town for a week.

When a special election was called to replace Howard, his wife Sadie presented herself as a logical candidate. The Anti-Intellectuals quickly pointed out that a woman had never been elected to the post so Sadie backed off, wisely realizing that she was a poor loser and didn’t need the hassle. The Town Council eventually decided to leave the post vacant until Town Meeting the following March. A near-fatal decision. That was six years ago and Tilbury has all but recovered from the dreadful Winter of No Intellectual.

Around the turn of the century a Pulitzer prize-winning Maine poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson, made occasional references in his poems to a place he called Tilbury Town. Here are a few examples:

“We’ve each a darkening hill to climb;
And this is why, from time to time
In Tilbury Town, we look beyond
Horizons for the man Flammonde.”
Flammonde

“In Tilbury Town did Old King Cole
A wise old age anticipate,
Desiring, with his pipe and bowl,
No Khan’s extravagant estate.”
Old King Cole

“Where are you going to-night, to-night, -
Where are you going John Evereldown?
There’s never the sign of a star in sight,
Nor a lamp that’s nearer than Tilbury Town.”
John Evereldown

Local readers concluded that Tilbury Town was a code name for Gardiner, Maine, where the poet grew up. Robinson denied that this was so, admitting only that it could be any small New England Town. So there.

Tilbury is the home of the famous Theatre-On-The-Fritz where locals and visitors go to soak up culture and watch the bats mate. The theatre is also the meeting place of the Tilbury town council whenever a quorum is present. This last happened in 1976.

So where exactly is Tilbury Town?

It will come as a surprise to a lot of folks that Tilbury Town is, in fact, located on an island just around a bend of the Kennebec River just north of Gardiner, Maine.

Tilbury folk are charming, if not downright frightening. After visiting with them for a spell via the enlightening tales herein, you might even start thinking about moving there to live. Few have actually done this, and fewer still have ever returned. We recommend that you resist the urge at all costs. But if you can’t resist, then we recommend you learn everything you can about the place. This book will help. It samples the everyday life on this unique river island and is the only known source of reliable information about, among other things, Tilbury Town politics, coping with tourists, the economics of isolation, rural community theatre and other arts and culture stuff.

You scholars out there will be thrilled to know that a tilbury is a light two wheeled carriage for two people. It was named after a 19th century coach builder. Ain’t that exciting?

(Next time we’ll meet a true Tilbury intellectual - Stay Tuned)

Here is a short video clip of a performance in Bridgton a few years ago. After you watch it, you’ll have a clearer picture of Readers Theatre. Enjoy!