How to live in rural Maine? How in the 1980s, when descendants of Maine's settlers wonder about our coming out of the Rust Belt in search of work, in search of a life? They were not bitter about our coming here, where jobs were already scarce, they were incredulous. Why did we come? Sometimes I answered, "God." God brought us, the formerly middle-class inept, to live among these most hardy and canny of make-do people. God brought us to experience life in Maine, where my spouse sometimes worked turning and trimming four thousand boards a night, waking to drive one hundred miles round-trip to finish our undergraduate educations with the aid of loans and grants. So I studied the place where we came to live. And I forgot where we came from. Rural Maine was ragged, rugged, hardscrabble, and wild, but full of the most visible, vital, natural creation

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