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If you visit the apartment of Annette Sohns, Tony Sohns and Chris Dodd, located on the first floor of a late Victorian-era house turned duplex on Fifth Street in Bangor, you can expect one of the following things to happen:
Tony, 29, will play his favorite party game “What Is It?” during which he presents you with five random objects from his vast collection of fossils, rocks and other strange items and asks you to identify them as best you can. I correctly guessed the horse toe, but misidentified the petrified tortoise poop.
Annette, Tony’s 25-year-old sister, will sit you down in front of her immaculately maintained saltwater aquarium and feed the creatures that live there. If it’s feeling sociable, the tube worm will unfurl itself from its cylindrical home and catch food particles in its delicate bristles.
Chris, also 25 and Annette’s boyfriend, will play guitar in the “art room” of the apartment, and the enormous, ill-tempered orange cichlid named Big Fish will seem to dance in its 50-gallon tank, listening to the music.
The Sohns-Dodd apartment is equal parts natural history museum, aquarium and art gallery. It’s also a home to three young professionals who rent and don’t own, like more than 50 percent of their fellow Bangor residents. It’s entirely possible to make a rental into a comfortable, interesting home for yourself. Their apartment is proof that it’s what’s inside that counts.
And what’s inside this apartment is as weird, interesting, occasionally creepy and just plain cool as it gets.
“I’ve been collecting for as long as I can remember,” said Tony, who grew up in Bucksport with the rest of the Sohns family. “My mom is constantly finding cool things. And I’ve always been into science. I remember my dad brought home a dead great blue heron for me to look at. I was fascinated, looking at the feet and the head and the feathers. He’d hunt and fish, too, and I’d kind of dissect things to see what it ate, what it looked like.”
“He labels everything,” said Annette. “Everything you see here has some sort of label on it. He’s fastidious. And we have a lot of stuff.”
The elder Sohns’ collection has swelled to hundreds of items, only a portion of which are on display at the house – many items, as well as his pet lizards and snakes, are at the Maine Discovery Museum, where he works as the natural history educator.
“My stuff kind of ends up owning me,” he said. “My ultimate goal is to someday open a natural history museum in Bangor. I can’t believe there hasn’t ever been one. I’m trying to buy a [cast of a] T. rex head. That would be an amazing thing to have.”
In one room, a Cape buffalo skull stares down from above. A photograph of Sohns with famed biologist E.O. Wilson (“He signed it ‘Myrmecologically yours,’ because myrmecology is the study of ants,” added Sohns, with the kind of glee usually reserved for encounters with rock stars) occupies the same wall space as a rattlesnake skin and the imposing jaw of a sailfish.
In the anteroom, a stuffed leopard, with a snarl frozen on its face, greets visitors as they walk through the front door, as does an old wicker coffin hanging from the living room ceiling. A pair of very old but well-preserved owls sits on the mantelpiece, hanging out with a trilobite fossil and a nautilus shell.
“If you ever see a really well-preserved animal, it’s probably because they used arsenic,” said Tony. “And since arsenic’s effect is cumulative, I’ll probably just drop dead one day from it. Oh well!”
One of the main reasons the three chose this particular apartment is the built-in shelves in the living room, which they put to good use by stocking Tony’s books and jars of preserved animals on them. There are also hardwood floors, French doors in the anteroom, and space in the backyard for a garden.
“That was a huge plus,” said Annette, who is finishing up her degree in art education at the University of Maine this spring. “I can have a garden. We have eggplants and tomatoes. A nice little vegetable garden. But the number one thing is to have light for my plants inside, and also a place where there’s no light for my fish tanks.”
She’s an expert aquarium tender, having worked with and learned from pet store owner Vance Peters in Bucksport. She takes care of the aquariums at area businesses, as well as the two tanks in her own house. Like her brother, Annette works at the Maine Discovery Museum, teaching art classes several times a year, and works with art departments in local schools. Dodd is also an educator, working in the Brewer school system.
Both Annette and Dodd are painters, and their artwork hangs on the walls throughout the house. One wall of the third bedroom is dominated by a self-portrait done by Annette, while in the kitchen hang several smaller paintings by Dodd. Annette’s work is lyrical and introspective, while Dodd’s is funny and lighthearted, full of bright colors.
When she graduates from UMaine in May, the younger Sohns might want to move away. She hasn’t decided yet.
“I do want to try living someplace else, but I also love it here and know that I’ll end up back here,” said Annette. “This is my home. It always will be.”
“You cannot fully appreciate Maine until you go and come back,” said Tony, who studied biology at the University of Oregon before returning to Maine seven years ago. “I loved it when I left, and I loved it even more when I came back.”
One thing that the siblings have a lot of (besides jars of dead animals) is civic pride.
“Bangor has something that I love. It gives me hope. It has so, so much potential. It has history, and it has character. There is nowhere else in the world that I feel as at-home,” said Tony. “It’s already a good place to live, and we can make it a better place to live.
“I think people from here always think there’s someplace better that they could be, and that they should go to a city or something and get out of Maine,” he said. “We need to stop thinking like that. Everything you do in Bangor is the first time it’s been done. There is so much room to do cool things here. It’s so exciting.”
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