Millinocket, Maine

I'm familiar with it, but it's fake news. It's not like the typical CNN-type fake news, but it's still not factual. All of the newspapers are reporting it as being in Millinocket too, but I know where the Big Moose Inn is, and it's not in Millinocket. The Millinocket post office delivers mail to a large rural area, as well as a few neighboring towns, but that that doesn't place them in the town limits. Mostly tourists and people vacationing at Baxter State Park go there. I've been there only once. The wedding was in East Millinocket, with fewer people, and the wedding reception was at a place known as the Big Moose Inn, which is about twelve miles northwest of Millinocket. Although the Millinocket post office delivers mail there, it's not even in the same county. It's in Piscataquis County, while Millinocket is in Penobscot County. Only one of the people who tested positive was from Penobscot County, the others were from southern Maine. They held the wedding reception at the Big Moose Inn because Piscataquis County had lighter restrictions than would have been in place in the southern part of the state, where most of the COVID cases were. Plus, nobody is even sick, as far as I am aware. They tested positive for the virus, and most people who test positive for the virus are not sick although, from the news reports, we're supposed to picture everyone who tests positive as being on their deathbed. Anyhow, there's no reason to believe that any of these people even stopped in Millinocket.

 

The people who tested positive aren't from here. They don't shop in our stores or eat in our restaurants, so I'm good, thank you. I wouldn't worry much about it anyhow, not any more than I worried about the flu every flu season. Viruses have always been with us, and if this is like any other virus, it is going to mutate several times on its way to a vaccine, which will probably be about as effective as the flu vaccine, which I don't get.

Just beyond the Big Moose Inn is Baxter State Park, the terminus of the Appalachian Trail, which brings in more than 50,000 people each year, but few of them stop in Millinocket. I don't worry myself about their health.

 

I know. It's just a sensitive topic because all of the news outlets are reporting it as being in Millinocket so now people are going to go crazier here than they have been. I also noted that pretty much everyone who is being quoted from Millinocket has been people who just moved here, like our library director, who has been here for only a few months and probably believes the Big Moose Inn is in Millinocket. How would he know any different? He's probably been hiding in his basement since he got here.

There was an argument on Facebook about it, with people insisting that it was in Millinocket because it has a Millinocket address. Well, people in Norcross have a Millinocket address too, but Norcross still isn't in Millinocket, although it's closer to Millinocket than the Big Moose Inn. In the Facebook group, one woman argued, "It's in Millinocket. It's right there on Millinocket Lake." However, Millinocket Lake isn't in Millinocket either.

 

A video of the Top 10 towns in New England, where you can live on an income of $1500 a month, Millinocket was #2, beat out by Castleton, Vermont. Three of the ten are in Maine.

 

The True Value store is not the only hardware store in Millinocket, and it's not the cheapest one. The other hardware store caters mostly to contractors, although it is a retail business, so the prices are quite a bit better there, but the owner is used to dealing with people who know what they're looking for, and more interested in doing business with people who buy in bulk, so he doesn't suffer fools well.

Shortly after I moved here in 2001, I stopped there looking for something, I don't remember what, but the house I bought was a wreck and I was doing a lot of work on it. Although I knew what I was looking for and would be able to recognize it when I saw it on a shelf, I didn't know what it was called. When I walked in, the owner asked me what I was looking for. When I tried to tell him that I didn't know what it was called but would know it when I saw it, he said something on the order of, "Well, if you don't know what you're looking for, I don't know why you're here."

It's not just me. I have a friend who is a contractor and he says the guy is an ass, too.

I left, and have only been back a few times since, during the period when the True Value store was closed, and for things like compost and topsoil, because the prices were so much better there. However, he was pretty nice to me this summer, maybe because I was buying quite a lot of topsoil, compost, peat moss, and mulch, and maybe because contractors aren't doing as much business now as they were in 2001.

The True Value store closed a few years ago when the guy who had run it for decades retired, but it reopened under new ownership about a year later, still a True Value store. It's an interesting place because people don't seem to leave there for long. When it reopened, the new owner rehired a couple of the employees who had worked there under the previous ownership, and others who left for better things soon returned. The store manager left to become the office manager at the town hall after a stint as a town councilman, but he's back at True Value.

It's the kind of hardware store that people hang out in, although I don't generally do that. They never once mandated masks, even when the state was demanding it, nor did their employees wear masks, except for one younger girl who is probably an unthinking millennial, afraid because she was told to be afraid. Unless I'm buying a whole lot of something that's significantly cheaper at the other store, I prefer to shop there. Apparently, I'm not alone in that because there are always people there, and some of them are buying stuff.

 

We don't have a lot of violent crime here, but since the mill closed several years ago, we have a larger percentage of poor people than we used to have. Other than those who own businesses here, work for one of the few businesses here, or for the school, medical facility, or non-profit organization, I think it's safe to say that most of the people here are either retired because of age or because they have no interest in working, and that latter group has brought some crime to Millinocket. Still, most thefts are committed by the children of that last group or children in general.

I don't feel particularly unsafe here, as this is probably the safest place I have lived since I left my father's home fifty-five years ago, but there is crime. I have weapons, although I don't anticipate ever having to use them for anything other than recreation.

That said, while Michelle was in Maryland and I was here alone, someone knocked on our door at about 4:00 in the morning. Although it's not unusual for me to be still up at 4:00 a.m., we don't get visitors at that time of day, and I can't imagine anyone knocking on our door at 4:00 a.m. for any reason that I wouldn't be concerned about.

As it was, I was asleep. I woke up hearing the first knocking, about five knocks in succession. While I was still trying to figure out what was going on, another string of knocks came. I thought maybe Michelle had come home early and didn't have her key, although that wouldn't make sense because she never drives at night, and there was no reason to think she wouldn't have let me know she was coming home early.

I turned the light on to get dressed, and there were no more knocks. From the top of the stairs, I could see that the first door (a sliding door) was open all the way, and I never leave it open all the way. I leave it open just enough so the feral cats can get in. The sliding door doesn't lock. It leads to a small porch area where I feed the feral cats. That door is never locked because UPS and FedEx leave packages on the porch. The actual door leads to the house itself, which is closed and locked at night, and that was the one that someone had knocked on.

As I see it, and I can't think of anything else that makes sense, someone had noticed that one of our cars was gone and had been gone for a few days. I had been home alone but hadn't been leaving the house much except to go to the backyard, given that I had no reason to go anywhere. Since we usually go together on multi-day trips, I think someone was checking to see if the house was empty. Since our bedroom is at the front of the house, he would have seen the light going on. If this was someone who actually wanted to talk to me, he would have waited for me to answer the door, but since he didn't want to talk to me, he left hurriedly, not even closing the sliding door.

A motion-detection light on the porch comes on when someone comes inside, and I can see into the porch through the glass on the door from the top of the stairs, and whoever it was had left already before I got my clothes on.

There could be another explanation but I don't know what it would be.

 

People come by two or three times a day to feed the cats and sit with them for a while, and we have a woman who cleans every couple of weeks, so we usually schedule a day while we're gone so she will be here most of the day cleaning. Until he got sick, our neighbor across the street would keep a close eye on the house, even when we didn't ask him to. He even told us stuff that our nephew was doing in his room that we didn't know about a couple of times. Other than that, I have several devices that I can set up to turn lights on and off several times during the day, and we have motion-detected nightlights that the cats will trigger while they're walking around. I'll have to give it some thought before we both go to Maryland in December.

Besides the motion-detection light on the porch, I have another one outside the door. Maybe it would help to switch the 40-watt bulb out for a 100-watt one it would help, except that it is triggered sometimes when a car goes by. Maybe I can pick up a camera that can't be subverted by stealing the SD card, or the whole camera.

 

I don't think local burglars are likely to be professionals. More likely, they'd be teenagers or someone who's looking to score enough stuff for drugs.

 

In Dreamcatcher, the school buses that evacuate people to the FEMA camps are Millinocket buses, although, in reality, the Millinocket school system doesn't operate its own bus system. They contract with a private bus service. He uses places in Maine a lot, although he often gives them other names and sometimes sets them in parts of the state other than where they actually are.