Many years ago I read the book First Person Rural, Essays of a Sometime Farmer, written in 1978 by Noel Perrin. After finishing it I was convinced that one day I would go to Vermont, buy a 10-acre farm, raise chickens, buy a couple of goats, maybe even a cow and live life on purpose. I write this today from my home in Starboard Cove, Maine.

I am here Downeast, but at that particular time in my life, a Vermont life was all I thought about. Perrin went on to write a total of four books, all commentaries on rural life. Each book fed my desire to learn as much as I could about rural living and make this dream a reality.

 In 1963, Perrin bought an 82-acre farm in Thetford, Vermont. At the time he was a 35-year-old professor of English at Dartmouth College.  Over the next 15 years, Perrin learned from the ground up everything farm life had to offer. Then he began writing about his experiences from a practical how-to POV. Sprinkled with broad philosophical commentary and humor I was enamored by his writing. For me, Perrin’s stories fanned the fire of the dream to seek and find my own slice of rural America.

Perrin died in 2004, so these interactions between professor and sometimes farmer with me the aspiring farmer ceased. Over the course of the first few books, co-workers and friends took notice to my determination and lovingly chided my dream and me. I would receive gifts, some useful, some not, but all in jest on this imagined life. One Christmas I received from husband-and-wife coworkers a set of wooden refrigerator magnets in the shape of sheep. Their gift still provides me with memories of them and my talks about Vermont.

And before all of this Vermont-talk started, there was Montana. When I was in the sixth grade, I had the idea that one day I would live in Montana. I am uncertain where this idle thought came from. I was a city kid, raised on the south side of Allentown. I played marbles, basketball and whiffle ball, rode a three-speed bike and the farthest I’ve ever been away from home was a beach in New Jersey. Yet, I found myself drawn to big sky country and its remoteness to everything I knew.

Thinking back on all of this, I believe there was something innate in these visions of a life in Vermont and Montana. Thoughts of leaving and going somewhere remote — where independence was the rule not the exception — somehow crept into me at a young age, sat there for a while and then aged like a fine wine until morphing into something more permanent.

“Go to Maine, it’s a wonderful place,” is what he said. This was a casual response to a serious question with my boss at the time on potential vacation spots. Tyson Sprandel then added with a smile, “Go to Maine, you’ll never regret it.” Recently married, I had my first mortgage, my first car payment, so the expenses were not going to allow the Vermont dream to happen, at least not in the near future. So, heeding Mr. Sprandel’s words, I took his direction on where to go, stay and things to do. That summer of 1983 my wife and I headed to Maine.

Visiting Maine that long ago summer and then “finding Maine” in the years that followed is the result of my ingrained desire to live life on purpose. Maine was the only choice after all. One could say the place has that perfect blend of a Montana big sky and a Vermont green unspoiled landscape, without the covered bridges. And it has a shoreline that speaks a language as if dripping off an explorer’s tongue— come, find and stay.

In Starboard, there is a big blue sky and a magical body of water dressed in fog most of the time, with tall spruce trees nudging forward on a coastline of granite, shell and driftwood. I do not have 10 acres of farmland, but plenty of wooded bliss to walk through from morning to dusk. I do not have a cow or goats but know where to find them if ever the urge strikes.

Life is not a riddle. Life is a seed that is buried deep within each of us. It sits there biding its time, learning and growing until something or someone plants an idea— waters the seed if you will— and it suddenly sprouts, giving direction and purpose. I found my life, my purpose, from the photos of Montana as a child to the stories of a Vermont farm life by a professor and sometime farmer and from the words of a friend who said, “Go to Maine, it’s a wonderful place”. I ultimately did, and in the words oft quoted by Perrin, “It will be no bad legacy to leave.”

© 2019 RJ Heller

First published The Quoddy Tides, June 14, 2019