Millinocket, Maine

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.

 

Although if anyone knocked, I didn't hear it, or if I heard it, I dismissed it as a dream, but with Michelle away in Maryland again, someone paid me a visit once again at an early-morning hour when I can't imagine an actual visitor showing up. I know this only because the sliding outside door was wide open when I woke up, and I hadn't left it that way. I've started to keep my handgun in the bedroom. Previously, I felt good about having a couple of weapons around but never really anticipated needing them, so my shotgun has been kept in my office downstairs while the handgun was in the spare bedroom downstairs, both requiring me to walk past the front door to retrieve them. I'm still not very concerned, but I have had to concede that there's no point in having weapons for protection if I'd have to walk past the intruder to get to them.

 

You got any unused game cams hanging around? When I was working, I had one pointing down the only access point to my property.

 

Only about twenty of them, but my front door is only a few feet from the sidewalk and the road, so the cameras I set up there fill up with nothing photos in no time. My porch is too small for me to put up a camera that wouldn't be immediately seen, and they all store the images on an SD card, so someone would probably remove the card or take the whole camera. There are cameras that would work, but I don't currently have any. I could set one up in a tree where it couldn't be reached without a ladder, and since the tree is only a foot or two from the sidewalk, they'd be very exposed in doing so. Before we both leave for the night together, I'll probably put one up there, but it would take a picture of every car that drove by and everyone who walked past the house, so I'd likely return to find a filled SD card.

If I were to put one in a tree, I would choose one that displays a light while recording because it would probably be more of a deterrent than something that would identify anyone.

I used to find people taking shortcuts through my backyard (or scouting things out), but after putting cameras up on trees in the back and side yard, they quit doing that. Where I live, while neighbors are generally pretty good about looking out for things, everyone is in bed shortly after the sun goes down. When I take Ella out to let her listen to night sounds before going to bed, ours is the only house that I can see with a light on after 10 pm.