We celebrate Bangor this weekend with the National Folk Festival. But other riches lie beyond our city’s limits. We asked NEWS writers throughout the state to tell us why they live where they live. Below you’ll find their stories about Belfast’s gothic architecture, blueberry barrens in Washington County, good neighbors such as Earl Dean of Pittsfield and the easy, peaceful feeling of back roads in Penobscot. These are the lifestyles that add music to Maine during the rest of the year. Welcome to our towns.

– Alicia Anstead

I woke up the other day to the sound of something munching outside my bedroom. As I sat up, the head of a deer appeared in the window, stared at me for a second with, literally, big doe eyes, and then, along with the rest of her body, took off.

After 30 years in Maine, I still get a charge out of seeing the real Maine natives up close like that.

I grew up a short subway ride from downtown Manhattan. So you know the kind of wildlife I saw there. I had enough of the big-city brouhaha while growing up. That’s the main reason my wife and I sought the quiet life on an old farmhouse at the dead end of a dirt road in Penobscot.

There were other reasons, of course. This town is a great place to raise kids, which we’ve done. We know our neighbors and their kids, and we were on a first-name basis with their teachers, the selectmen and the fire chief.

We’re close to all the attractions people come to Maine to see. We hike in Acadia National Park, climb Mount Katahdin, ski in the winter, camp in the North Woods, boat along the coast and canoe the lakes. But that’s what we do. It’s not why we live here.

We live here for the quiet nights and days at the end of the dirt road.

Life is slower once I turn off the asphalt and head for the farmhouse. It’s not for everybody, but I like that there’s grass growing up in the middle of my road and that I have to pull over on the rare occasion another car needs to get by.

We are surrounded by woods, and it is quiet enough to be peaceful on occasion. So quiet, we can hear the wind through the trees, the call of the loon from the distant pond, the whoo-whooing of the resident owl at night and the cries of the coyotes, usually in the distance, but sometimes, close enough to prickle the hairs on the back of your neck.

Quiet enough to hear yourself think.

There are tradeoffs for that kind of solitude, or at least what some would call tradeoffs. This is not the Maine on the travel brochure. There are no whale watches or excursions, no bookstore or soda shop, gift store or hotel. No Starbucks or Borders in town, no McDonald’s, no Dunkin’ Donuts. Not much of anything, really, except woods, farms and fields, streams and ponds, and the bay.

But the lack of attractions attracted me and keeps me here. This is where I come to get away from the Maine that everyone comes to Maine for, where I am far enough off the beaten track not to be bothered by anyone but those whose presence would not be a bother.

The others don’t know where to find me.

And that, of course, is the whole idea.