ONCE MORE TO MAINE

Reflections on America’s literary Vacationland

It looks like a first-baseman’s mitt, the sort you might see on a summertime evening at a local baseball diamond. Turn it clockwise 90 degrees and it looks a bit like Nebraska, though that state is landlocked and lacks anything faintly resembling mighty Mount Katahdin. Twist it 90 degrees in the other direction and it looks like a pregnant Minnesota, with fewer lakes and better shellfish. It doesn’t have a panhandle, like Florida, West Virginia or Oklahoma; it more nearly resembles an oval poultry roaster with a cool-touch handle attached to one side. Maine sure has an unusual shape.

But it sure has a rich literary tradition, too.

I like to think its shape, a reflection of its culture and character — ineluctably tied to water: the rivers of the north, the ocean of the east — has something to do with that. The state’s contours can be explained by conflicting land claims, power politics, enduring folklore and, in the case of Daniel Webster, who negotiated part of the border in the 19th century, outright deception. So, too, its literature.

On the coast on the east, with the topography separating land from sea, and the boundary that Maine shares with Canada in the north — a result of historical developments going back to the state’s early European exploration and 17th century settlement — geographic Maine is defined in an unusually jagged, even jiggly, manner.

It’s not like Wyoming or Colorado, with their straight lines and right angles making them the only perfect rectangles in the Union, nor Tennessee or Massachusetts, slender slices slapped along the land like smashburgers on a Blackstone grill. Like the state it defines, its borders are distinctive, shaped by prehistoric natural and early national forces. No one confuses it with New Hampshire, the way Indiana might be confused with Illinois.

And no one confuses the writing done here with the literature of any other state, particularly New York, with perhaps the richest literary scene, or Massachusetts, even though the Bay State and this state share Henry David Thoreau.

From the novels of Kenneth Roberts (am I the last living soul who has read “Arundel?”) to the lyricism of Sarah Orne Jewett (you must dip into “The Country of the Pointed Firs”), and from Stephen King (he’ll scare you to death) to Robert Russo (try “Empire Falls”), it’s a brilliant harvest. Don’t forget John Irving (“The Cider House Rules”) and Elizabeth Strout (“Olive Kitteridge”). And don’t let your children grow up without reading Barbara Cooney (“Miss Rumphius”) and Robert McCloskey (whose paintings illustrating his books, including “Blueberries for Sal,” are on exhibit this summer at the Curtis Library in Brunswick, Maine).

Maine is sometimes known as Vacationland, and, as you probably have guessed, I’m on vacation. Maine’s a wonderful place to visit if you like the bracing scent of salt water, or are inclined to climb a mountain or pop into a used bookstore.

It’s full of remarkable geographical features — have you heard about the Desert of Maine? — and marvelous characters, some of whom are on the rural byways, some of whom are between hard covers (consider “Spoonhandle,” by Ruth Moore, published in 1946).

Some of them claim French as their first language.

“Maine’s long continuous border with Canada gave it a history of international conflict and cooperation few other states could claim,” the scholars Richard William Judd, Edwin A. Churchill, and Joel W. Eastman wrote in their landmark 1995 “Maine: The Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present.”

I could go on about Maine’s books, and books about Maine, and on other occasions I have. But today I want to linger on two old timers, both dead. Maine likes to think of itself as thoroughly modern — it has a female governor who is a part time poet and has enough gourmet outlets to satisfy your craft-cheese needs — but it’s the old timers who still provide the state’s character. One of them is E.B. White, whose “Cold Weather” essay of 1943 contains a sentence that is as relevant as your last text message: “There has been more talk about the weather around here this year than common,” he wrote, “but there has been more weather to talk about.” That’s for sure.

But it’s Mr. White’s 1941 “Once More to the Lake,” published in Harper’s, that lingers with me, year after year, vacation after vacation, from the time when my children were young to these years when they are grown and mostly gone away:

“Summertime, oh, summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade-proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end ... the cottages with their innocent and tranquil design, their tiny docks with the flagpole and the American flag floating against the white clouds in the blue sky, the little paths over the roots of the trees.”

And then there are the 1946 ruminations of Robert P. Tristram Coffin, who is all but forgotten these days — all but forgotten but deserving of being remembered. He grew up on Sebascodegan Island — check the web and you’ll see a rudimentary map of it, from 1741 — and was a Rhodes Scholar and a Pulitzer winner, for poetry, in 1936.

But it is his little essay in “Down East” magazine that concerns us now. It’s his account of spending the night with a lobsterman whom he describes as “one of the few survivors of that race of oral storymakers who used to live along the Maine coast.”

Mr. Coffin described the night at sea, and he wrote about how the “herons were taking their stations for the night, indistinct on the mud flats,” and he went on to talk of how the night “gloomed anddarkened,” adding, “The mighty 200-foot cliffs of the shore faded into the few bright stars. Other stars came out, blurry with September softness, over the jagged spruce skyline along each side of us.”

These are the things one thinks about in the country of the pointed firs, far from home in a state whose highway signs at the New Hampshire border once bellowed “Vacationland” or, more recently, “The Way Life Should Be” (the title of both a 2007 Christina Baker Kline novel and a recent one by William Dameron).

Today the sign has a simpler message: “Welcome Home.” Not quite home for the holidays — but a welcoming home for making a summertime holiday take shape, books in hand.