A Sense of Place Corea still vibrant a half-century after Maine author Louise Dickinson Rich captured its allure

Driving down the last leg of Route 195 to Corea, I catch glimpses of the heath as Louise Dickinson Rich described it in “The Peninsula” nearly 50 years ago. The flat, sprawling sea grasses, low blueberry bushes and subarctic plants that Rich observed on her first trip to Corea in 1954 still exist, but mostly the road is lined with trees, some of them 20 or 30 feet tall, maybe taller. Pine, fir, birch and ash have grown up; they’ve filled in the barrens, changed the landscape, forcing the eye upward instead of out and giving a sense of enclosure to this part of the Gouldsboro Peninsula.

In “She Took to the Woods,” her newly published biography of Rich, Alice Arlen calls the Maine author’s stay in Corea a turning point in her life, a moving “away from the vertical world of the forests to the horizontal world of the sea.” Rich was 51 when she accepted a stranger’s offer to summer on Cranberry Point in Corea. Her companion of many years had recently died, and she had mixed feelings about returning to Forest Lodge, the summer camp in the woods of Oxford County where she had lived and written her seminal work, “We Took to the Woods.” So she packed her bags, marked the quickest route on the map and drove from Massachusetts to Maine with her daughter, Dinah, and their dog, Caro. Out of her experiences and months of research came “The Peninsula,” a book that examines the lives and land of one corner of the Maine coast.

It’s impossible to read “The Peninsula” and not come away with the feeling that somehow Corea is – or was – different from other coastal villages. That its insularity came not from a forced isolation, as on an island, but as a matter of course, because the villagers found all that they needed there and chose not to connect with the larger world. Whether that was true, or whether it was simply a writer’s interpretation, doesn’t really matter. The sense of place Rich found in the tiny fishing community lives on in the words of her book, as fixed in time as an artist’s watercolor would have been.

But what about the Corea that continued after Rich had moved on, to other places, other books on life in Maine?

With this in mind, on a muggy, overcast day in early July, I’ve set out to find the pristine village so hauntingly portrayed by Rich as a “land still unpossessed” by the humans who lived there half a century ago. Ironically, I’m looking for what has changed, though I’ve never seen this part of the state before. But armed with a fresh reading of Rich’s book, I drive slowly, alert to the landscape and with an eye out for a few landmarks that I hope will tell a tale.

Just past the Paul Bunyan Road, the road dips slightly, beginning its descent toward the edge of Corea Harbor. To the right, the Corea Baptist Church comes into view.

Except for the handicapped ramp now required by law, the white clapboard church with its towering steeple appears unchanged: It still sits “firm on the highest ledge in town, [looking] out over harbor and sea beyond.” I wonder about the membership, and learn later from Beatrice Buckley, a member of the Gouldsboro Historical Society, of what might be a significant change.

“The woman who’s taught Sunday school there for 50 years has had to give it up because there aren’t enough children” to hold classes, she explains. The children have been thinned out, she believes, over several generations, moving away after high school, either to join the service or build homes inland, where jobs and property were more plentiful.

Although, it’s possible, too, that habits have changed, as evidenced by the closure of the Mormon church that once opened its doors for worship just a few hundred feet away. Since then, the church has become yet another home that overlooks the harbor.

It is here, at the base of the hill, that I find the weathered building that once housed the general store. Rich writes of entering the store looking for directions, and finding that the people of Corea had been waiting for her. Today, the building’s vacant, a Black Duck Properties sign resting in one of the many windowpanes that line the old storefront. Another sign announces a grange meeting on July 16. Hanging on either side of the door are novel planters: old workboots, petunias blooming from their necks and a knapsack, also sporting an arrangement. Peering inside, I imagine what Rich saw that first day: the wood stove filling the center of the room, the liar’s bench lining a wall, the polished, wooden counter, a “grizzle-haired [Herbert Young] with alert eyes” standing behind it. But what I see is a room filled with building materials, an overstuffed chair, a modern cookstove. And no one is waiting for me.

The Corea Post Office, once a part of the general store, now occupies the latter third of the building in a space of its own. Walled off from the old store, it looks as modern post offices do, serving 162 families, a number that swells by just 15 or so in the summer. For a time after the store closed, Rich recalled that the post office was housed in “the kitchen ell of Buddy Crowley’s house over toward the head of the harbor.” But when Crowley retired, arrangements were made to rent space at the former store. Villagers still walk for their mail, stopping to chat inside or lingering beside the pink granite steps that lead up to the building. But it’s not like it was way back, notes a woman picking up her mail, when it formed the central social point in someone’s day.

The building’s been for sale now for a dozen years or so: asking price, $90,000, the view of the harbor undoubtedly tucked into the price.

From the store, the Corea Road banks left, leading around the cove to Crowley’s Island, where it ends at the lobsterman’s co-operative. The Co-op still serves the 40 or so boats that work out of the harbor. Today, mist shrouds the water and I count only 12 boats, the rest lost to the mystery of the fog. I make out a lone, mustard-yellow day sailer bobbing alongside the working boats designed not for pleasure, but for making a living out of the sea. Among the 40 who cast to sea from this sheltered inlet, native Colby Young says only two live in the homes that circle the harbor.

It’s one of the bigger changes since Rich’s day, Young says, changes directly related to the number of “wash-ashores” you can count in town.

“Back then, the summer colony tended to live on the outskirts, and the fishermen lived in the harbor. Today, it’s the other way around.”

But Young doesn’t blame high property taxes or townsfolk intent on selling to the highest bidder. He believes that much of the waterfront property was sold to out-of-staters simply because the heirs had disappeared: Those who chose not to fish left in quest of jobs; many of those who did fish bought land of their own in other towns. As homesteads became available either through death or retirement, there was no one to leave them to.

I circle back to the store and follow the road’s original descent, down past the yellow house that once housed a store, carefully skirting the inlet, then branching to the right, where I know I’ll find Cranberry Point. The fog is thicker now, it bellies its way across the land, misting the still-fat lupine that grows in fraternity with the pink- and white-tipped rugosas lining the road. Beyond them lies the Atlantic, as untamed as it ever was.

The road curves inland, then just slightly turns back again, so it runs parallel to, but out of sight of the shore. I pass a handful of newer homes here, surely built since Rich’s day, but bearing the mark of the lobsterman, with wire traps neatly stacked in the yards. Finally, I reach the end of the Cranberry Point road, or at least the public part. The path continues onto posted property and I know that at its end, were I to follow it, I would find the log cabin where Rich lived and worked so long ago. It was the first of several places she would stay in on the peninsula, but by far the most isolated and “unpossessed.” Here, the heath is alive, unmarred, unchanged. I imagine the cabin as she describes it, “crouching at the very limit of the land,” surrounded by nothing but ocean and “coarse-turfed, granite-ribbed” earth. I’ve reached the end of the road, or at least the end of that road Rich first traveled down in 1954. It is one place that clearly has not changed in the intervening years.

And what of the heath? Colby Young, who remembers Rich, also remembers the heath, pronounced “hayth” by the locals in Rich’s day. He thinks the mystery of the missing heath is simple enough to explain.

“Back then, people cut the trees down for wood,” he says, leaving unspoken the fact that fewer people today use wood for fuel. Left to its own devices, the heath just naturally filled in.