'All environment'

Umbagog Lake on the Maine-New Hampshire border. It’s considered one of New England’s cleanest lakes.

“I am a big lover of the environment. I actually come from Maine, which is pretty much all environment.’’

— Noah Gray-Cabey (born 1995), prodigy actor and pianist, who grew up in Newry (pop. in 2010 of 329), near the White Mountains in western Maine.

He was admitted to Harvard at 15, but took a “gap year’’ to spend with his family in the Pine Tree State.

He told DownEast magazine:

“You couldn’t pick a better place to grow up. We had a couple of dirt bikes, and we could take those things up through the logging roads for, like, ever. It’s such an amazing, untouched part of the country.”

He prefers the lakes of interior Maine to the its famous seacoast and cites the pleasure he took in fishing on Umbagog Lake with his grandfather, a game warden.

He told the magazine: “I mean, if you talk to fancy people, they’ll go on about the coast. But I’m like, you guys don’t know what you’re missing — inland Maine is the best! Although, sure, the mosquitoes and blackflies will make you want to shoot yourself eventually.”

— Photo by p199