I first saw Bill Staines perform at The Folkway in Peterborough, New Hampshire. It was 1979, and my sister, Anita, had come from Boston to visit me in Dublin, where I had just moved. Bill Staines was tall and lean; he wore a cowboy hat with jeans and boots, and his songs were like short […]
Lighthouses speak to us of lives both spare and romantic. Barely 200 feet from the shallows of Maine’s Long Sands Beach, the Cape Neddick Light Station perches so handsomely on its bony 2.8-acre nest of Nubble Island that we call it simply “Nubble Light.” Maine boasts more than 60 standing lighthouses. Nubble Light, Maine’s southernmost […]
They’re an unlikely pairing for immortality together: Alfred Eisenstaedt, a German-born photographer who roamed New York with his Leica for Life magazine, and George Mendonça, a young sailor, just back from World War II, who was raised in a Rhode Island fishing family and would soon return to that life. In a Times Square instant […]
Jud Hale, Yankee’s editor-in-chief, is one of New England’s greatest gifts to America. Still the editor. Still the chief.
In mid-May 2014, they came together on Indian Island, the heart of the Penobscot Nation. They were Thoreau scholars, Maine Guides, advocates of North Woods tourism, members of the Penobscot Nation, whose ancestors had guided Henry David Thoreau into the wilderness. The 325-mile journey would follow his 1857 trip with Penobscot guide Joe Polis into […]
Soon after my father died, my mother became a caterer. She designed a business card with her name, “Adele,” written in bold tangerine cursive letters against a bright yellow background. At the bottom of the card were the words “Party Fair.” In truth, she did not cater very many parties. She no longer lived in […]
Off-season travelers to Maine’s Southern Coast leave with memories for a lifetime. I know of few things more satisfying than to sleep by the sea. It matters little whether I find a room large or small, plain or fancy. It’s the windows that matter; if I can see, hear, and smell the sea, I’m a […]
Having Park Director Buzz Caverly show you around Baxter State Park is like having Emeril teach you how to cook. We’d been climbing Katahdin in the near darkness for more than an hour, at first lighting our way from Chimney Pond over the steep, boulder-strewn Saddle Trail by flashlight, then by the breaking dawn. On […]
We board the schooner American Eagle in the late-summer darkness, the last of the 26 passengers to arrive for the four-day Penobscot Bay cruise that will set sail in the morning. Captain John Foss welcomes us. His pride in this ship that his hands transformed from a worn-out fishing schooner to a jewel of the […]
The occasion was the 150th anniversary of Thoreau’s “The Maine Woods”—a literary milestone that would be marked by an adventure into “Thoreau’s Maine.”
Yankee’s March/April issue is on newsstands now.
How a stray dog bounded his way into the hearts of one Massachusetts family.
