Fort Kent

In our family I am the dreamer and Layne makes it happen. I have spent much of my life fascinated with maps and adventures and biographies and I spent hours between phone calls street viewing all the places in the world I’d like to visit. At three in the morning with droopy eyelids, waiting for 911 to ring it’s easier to walk around Tristan da Cunha or to inspect Scott’s 1912 Antarctic Hut than it is to read a book. So it was I wanted to visit Fort Kent.

I explained to Layne that Fort Kent is a long way up. If you look at a map you’ll see it’s at the very end of the road in northernmost Maine. 

Madawaska is a half hours drive down the highway and is a few minutes latitude further north so it gets the designation of the topmost corner, the place where people visiting the four corners of the lower 48 have to stop at to say they’ve been there, but I had another mission. I wanted to see the other end of US 1.  The place Fort Kent calls “The First Mile.” It sits right next to the Port of Entry at the bottom of the bridge from New Brunswick Canada. The red car on the bridge, below, has just driven through the border post on the US side. The white van on the left is parked next to the Highway One Marker. Rusty is walking on the US border bike path: 

In 2008 the St John’s River, the border with Canada flooded Fort Kent, a disaster that prompted the creation  of a  massive levee  system to protect the town. Funnily enough the border itself is not at all like the wall and other fortifications built along the border with Mexico. What you see is what it is, a useful trail for the locals!

Fort Kent was not at all what I had pictured, a worn out border town, a blip on the road map. It seemed lively and full of interest to me and I wished we could have stopped for more than a few hours there. For a start it seems more than half the residents are primarily French speakers and many residents have dual nationality so cross border relations are strong for many people here. 

I can just imagine the uproar in staid Key West if city hall was labeled in two languages! However you will see lots of French last names on businesses in Fort Kent.

And gas is sold at prices that must appeal to Canadians. I will say I noticed no New Brunswick tags in town. The gas station wasn’t pay at the pump so when  I asked the clerk jokingly if I were better off getting gas in gallons or liters he looked at me as if I were babbling. Ah well, not everyone is as amused as I am by the little quirks I find on the road. 

I had a delightful cultural moment when we went to do laundry. Here’s the thing: Dinah’s is the only laundromat anywhere south of the river. So when we pressed the doorbell and got no reply we figured we were out of luck. Just as maybe was saying she got a bad vibe from this place Dinah herself appeared and we were about the have our  most eccentric  laundry experience ever. I was entranced. 

Dinah also sells fuel for stoves in pellet block and brick form and has six apartments she rents out for $800 a month with a year lease. There is a university campus nearby but Dinah says the student population has dropped by half to 500 as they can’t find enough faculty. In the same breath Dinah says people don’t want to work because the government is handing out free money. I wondered what sort of university lecturers got free money but opinions don’t have to make sense to be heartfelt. 

I immediately blotted my copy book by putting dirty clothes in the cart. Then I nearly touched a washer door but luckily Layne intervened with a smack of the hand and a hiss. No dirty clothes in the cart and no one but Dinah touches the machines’ doors. Layne was privately impressed by Dinah’s commitment to cleanliness. No need to wear a mask here she said, she’s more germ-phobic than I am. 

I think Dinah would be a tough landlord and to stay on her good side might well be beyond me but she was a delight to chat with. She speaks English with a strong French accent and I threw out a couple of French phrases but got no reaction so I figured I’d better leave it alone. On her Facebook page she announced she is no longer taking dry cleaning in a message I found fascinating. She used to drive peoples’ cleaning to a meeting point in Canada and a dude from Edmonston met her and picked up the lay dry. Twice a week for years but Dinah had to cut back.  

Can you imagine the uproar in Key Weird if you had to take your laundry abroad to have it dry cleaned? If you are looking for an eccentric community to call home Fort Kent has your number. This place makes Key West look positively pedestrian. 

Dinah went to college on Massachusetts and got a job in Connecticut but she didn’t like it so she came home. She worked at various businesses around town before buying her laundry/pellet shop/rental building which she is now ready to sell. 

It is her way of the highway and I am so glad we got to wash our clothes there. Layne was a bit more grumbly muttering about how she just wanted a laundry, not a cultural experience. 

Fort Kent has been at the epicenter of weirdness for a very long time. In 1820 Maine got to break away from Massachusetts, and it’s a long story. However the short version is Maine felt ignored by Boston which was a hotbed of Federalist politics. Maine went Republican and anti absentee property owners ( who lived in Massachusetts) so to secure a Federalist majority in its statehouse Massachusetts finally okayed the break up. Then things got complicated. 

The full story is above if you want to read it but the abbreviated version is that Maine’s border with British North America was totally undefined. Britain wanted a lower border to make communication between Montreal and Fredericton more direct. Maine wanted the border closer to the St Lawrence river to claim more logs and furs for trade. Neither side wanted to give. So they had the Aroostook War from 1839 to 1842. 

Two men died in the war mauled by bears. However the war was a genuine pain in the butt with incursions by both sides, arrests, protests, claims and counter claims. Finally the Webster-Ashburton treated of 1842 settled the border we see today. And there is the wood blockhouse of the original Fort Kent still standing. 

We talked with another visitor who says her family lives in Fort Kent and she told us she’s never seen it open. No matter, we enjoyed the sunshine. The blockhouse was built in 1839 and named for the Governor of Maine Edward Kent. At the time there were other buildings around the fort but it is the sole survivor, passing into private hands and being occupied as a home before being sold back to the state. 

The visitor also told us to check out the moose. Another grotesque Fort Kent tradition. 

I suppose it’s no worse than weighing fish at the docks but I got creeped out to see Bullwinkle reduced to this: 

Layne pointed out the moose get eaten ( they taste like beef I’m told) and the state sells lottery tickets to make sure only enough are killed to keep the herds in check. Whatever. 

The hunters freeze gallon jugs of water to put huge ice cubes inside the animals’ cavity to prevent them rotting between death and weighing. That just made it all the more weird seeing loose cannon balls of bloody ice rolling around the trailer. The moose hunt is a big deal in Fort Kent. 

On a happier note we found a water faucet in the park just below the blockhouse. Can’t turn down the chance to water the beast! We filled GANNET2’s thirty gallon tank with our hose. 

We met another man walking his dogs, big rangy happy dogs that came on strong to Rusty who, to my amazement stood his ground and got playful, even with the dog that I could see annoyed him. Their owner at first was embarrassed by his dogs forwardness but they didn’t bother me; happy dogs don’t piss me off. 

We talked a little and he told us he grew up in Fort Kent and went away before deciding for whatever reason to come back. I asked him if he went to Canada very often, the place we could see just across the river from the park. Nope he said, I’ve never had a reason to go in the past twenty years. Okay then, fair enough. 

In the end if you live in Fort Kent you have that choice. In Key West you can’t bop across to Havana for lunch more’s the pity. Oh, and in Fort Kent you get to snowmobile in winter. I just can’t imagine.