While the rest of the Valley Advocate staff spent last week putting the finishing touches on the Dining and Travel section for this issue, I was out dining and traveling my way across Massachusetts and up into Maine, stopping occasionally along the way to snap photos and gather material for feature articles in upcoming editions of the Advocate’s sister publication, Preview Massachusetts, stopping often to fish and to forage for dandelions and fiddleheads.
I’ve made the trip from the Pioneer Valley to Maine’s North Woods every May for several years, timing my departure to coincide with ice-out on Moosehead Lake and the unofficial beginning of the open-water fishing season. It’s become an annual event in my life, which would ordinarily cause me a certain anxiety: I’m not much for annual events, which can become tiresome, growing stale over time and causing participants to begin simply going through the motions. Thankfully, my annual pilgrimage to Maine in May doesn’t yet feel the least bit repetitious—mainly because each year’s trip is almost entirely different from the year’s before.
I have the plenitude of rivers and streams and lakes and ponds in New England, and particularly in Maine, to thank for offering a fisherman like me an endless variety of angling opportunities. On this year’s trip, for example, I didn’t fish at all on Moosehead Lake, and instead made my first trip to Sebec Lake, a pristine spot not far from Dover-Foxcroft in central Maine. As much as I love Moosehead, I didn’t feel any regret not visiting this May, knowing that a season or two’s absence will merely make my heart grow fonder. And now I’m in love with Sebec.
While the variety New England has in store for travelers (whether piscatorially inclined or not) has much to do with its natural history, it isn’t just the shape of its mountains or the composition of its forests that excite our desire to explore. Whether I’m tramping around the Valley, haunting areas close to home and familiar, or venturing to places in the region I’ve never been, I invariably discover establishments—restaurants or bars or some sort of lodging; any number of hidden cultural gems—that I never would have expected to find.
My greatest discovery in that regard last week came in Monson, Maine, the last (or first, for hikers headed south) town on the Appalachian Trail before it heads off into the storied 100-Mile Wilderness. After a pleasant afternoon spent fishing for brook trout on a nearby river, my companions took me to the Lakeshore House, located just off the Moosehead Trail in Monson. The Lakeshore House is not just a restaurant, not just a pub, not just a lodging house, not just a laundromat. Neither is it just a place for hikers, or for bikers, or for locals, or for tourists. The Lakeshore House, owned and operated by a charming woman named Rebekah Santagata and her two young children, Max and Bella, is all of those things and more.
While I sat at the magnificent bar sipping good beer and sampling Rebekah’s fantastic cooking—I fell in love with the fried calamari on a bed of peppers and black olives, as well as the fresh crab meat on a portabella mushroom topped with asiago—I felt the same satisfaction, the same sense of unexpected discovery, the same sense of good fortune and deep gratitude, that I often feel here in the Valley.
I thought about how different central Maine is from Western Massachusetts, yet how much the two areas have in common. Both places are rich in natural beauty; both are considered “bucolic” by folks who come from more urban climes; both are populated by diverse populations, a mix of locals and relative newcomers.
My already good opinion of Monson, Maine grew measurably thanks to Rebekah Santagata’s Lakeshore House (you can read more about it in an upcoming issue of Preview) just as no doubt thousands of travelers have come to think even more fondly of the Pioneer Valley after discovering any one of the hundreds of interesting, authentic, independently-owned and operated bars and restaurants that add richness to our region.
When I returned home a few days ago and had a chance to see some of the local eateries the Advocate’s staff chose to feature this week, I saw the common theme instantly: all of them are successful in large part because they are one-of-a-kind creations, unique because of the people who run them, because of the places they’re located, because of the adventurous souls they attract. Seeing individuality and self-reliance rewarded was enough to make me oddly hopeful for a world that seems too often compelled toward consolidation and homogenization.
