Maine's heart-attack highway

"It {Route 1} is a road rich in the effluvia of clams in batter, frying doughnuts, sizzling lard; in tawdriness, cheapness, and bad taste, but in little else.''

-- Kenneth Roberts writing about the highway between Kittery and Portland, Maine, in For Authors Only (1935)

Poets ignore Maine's blood-sucking reality

Black fly. The blood-loving insect drives fishermen and other visitors crazy in inland northern Maine from late May to July. New England Diary's editor experienced the horror during a fishing trip to Moosehead Lake.

"It seems odd that in all the years during which poets have sung of the lure of the Great North Woods {of Maine} not one of them has made even passing mention of midges and black flies...{It} gives rise to the suspicion that the poets of the great outdoors...have never been north of Portsmouth, N.H.''

-- Kenneth Roberts, in Authors Only (1935)