From the "Guest Manual"

AMENITIES: Dilapidation and decay: This is not Bar Harbor. It is hinterland Maine, not heavily visited by the hordes of cars and tourists you'll find on the coast. It is a formerly populated farming region that lost people after the (old) North West opened up. Most of the landscape is not natural forest but is farms abandoned just about anytime from 1830 to 2022. You came here because you wanted to find the real Maine, so enjoy it. Your neighbors are for the most part birthright Mainers, including Acadiens and later Québécois migrants with a few Wabanaki and MicMac, as well as incomers of one type or another: Amish settlers from northern Maine and Canada, original back-to-the-landers and new-blood Maine organic farmers, Florida sunbird retirees who get by on Social Security, often living in camper and trailers during the summer, and/or decades-long transplants from away. All are refugees from urban America. We all get on and get by on way less than most summer visitors do and are expert at it. It's not our job to tidy up our lives and landscapes to make Maine's hinterland look like suburbs-by-the-sea. It's a working landscape. Expect to find in it rusty trucks, run-down trailer homes, piles of firewood, graveyards of ancient rusty farm equipment, abandoned but somehow cherished motorcycles, snowmobiles, three and four wheelers and ubiquitous "yahd" trucks, as well as logged forests, struggling dairy farms, dilapidated Congregational and other churches being fixed up for homes, Grange halls falling down, cemeteries with orders of magnitude more people in them than the towns they are located in, and so on. All of these are violations of the National Park ethos of unsullied landscape without humans in it. But all are real Maine. Enjoy all of this, but also watch out, look, or listen for frogs in abundance in spring, geese at the farm pond, ducks in the ditch, chickens crossing the road, and Amish buggies going way too slow for comfort. Breathe. Smell the woods. Relax.