Silver Lake Stairs

My wife and I have lived in Los Angeles for about seven years -- long enough to become a bit complacent about all the sights the city has to offer.  I'm not suggesting that we've seen everything worth seeing (I believe that a person could live their entire life here, and never run out of new discoveries), but I suppose we've worn out most of the obvious destinations.  As a result, we don't go exploring as often as we used to. That's why I was excited to run across a new urban hiking guide called Secret Stairs. 

This weekend, the book pointed us toward two walks in the Silver Lake neighborhood.  The first one was called the Music Box Loop, because it includes a 147-step staircase immortalized in the Laurel and Hardy short "The Music Box."  If you don't know the staircase is there, you could easily walk right past it.  In fact, if you don't live in the neighborhood or know someone who lives in the neighborhood, you could easily assume that it's not pedestrian-friendly.  Hell, you could assume that about practically any neighborhood in Los Angeles... but Secret Stairs proves otherwise.

The Music Box stairs

The Music Box stairs - view from the top

some stairs are better than others

another view from the top

intimidating hills

I'd like to think of the second walk as "The Walking Dude Loop," because (as our tour book notes) it is the stomping ground of a local doctor known to residents for his obsessive power-walking habit.   Silver Lake's "walking man" is the subject of a 6-minute documentary film that follows this mysterious -- and apparently laconic -- stranger through his neighborhood.  Apparently he walks 15 miles a day during the week, 25 miles a day on weekends, and has covered about half a million miles total over the last few years.  He's like Forrest Gump... if Forrest Gump had stayed in one neighborhood instead of running across the country.



Threading the hills on Silver Lake's narrow lanes, I found my imagination wandering.  I've always been enthralled by the idea of historic Los Angeles; the Spanish adobes always make me think of the studio-era Hollywood and the detective/noir fiction of the 1930s and 1940s.  I can't help looking at these houses -- especially the ones with cracked foundations and peeling paint, relics of former glory -- and wondering: Who commissioned and designed these places?  What was their inspiration?  How did they make the money to pay for these places?  What is/was their life story?  Little eccentricities, like chandeliers in the trees, a Mickey Mouse water feature and a tile featuring morse code for the opening of Beethoven's 5th symphony, serve as evidence that there are no boring answers here.  There's a reason that no two houses look the same around here... and that's precisely what I love about this city.  Along with its hidden staircases, this city is filled with hidden stories just waiting to be told...

Looking down on Silver Lake Reservoir

Note the chandeliers in the tree

Mediterranean medley

A hunting lodge in the middle of Silver Lake?  Sure, why not.

wwnd

Stephen King's Maine - Day 5 (Bridgton, Lovell, Chester's Mill and Castle County)

Sebago Lake, looking ominous

Continued from PART 4: DURHAM, LISBON FALLS, CASTLE ROCK & 'SALEM'S LOT

We spent the second half of our vacation staying in a resort on Sebago Lake, the biggest lake in southern Maine and also the deepest lake in the entire state (although Stephen King attributes that honor to the fictional Dark Score Lake in Bag of Bones).  From there we drive west and north, exploring Bridgton (featured in "The Mist" and fictionalized in Under the Dome) and Lovell (where King has a summer house that most likely inspired Gerald's Game and Bag of Bones).  We also went searching for the geographic locations of King's fictional towns of Castle Rock and Harlow, Tarker's Mill and Chester's Mill, Lake Kashwakamak and TR-90.  We even wandered briefly into New Hampshire, and saw the town hall in Jackson where the finale of The Dead Zone took place.

From what I can tell, Stephen King first began to migrate west into the Western Lakes and Mountains Region around the time he was writing the novel 'Salem's Lot.   According to one source, he finished that novel at a rental house in North Windham, on the east side of Sebago Lake.  Later his family moved north to Bridgton -- buying a house on rural Kansas Road, along the densely wooded shore of Long Lake.  This is where King wrote "The Mist," after a flash of inspiration came to him in the checkout line at the Federal Foods supermarket.  The store was later renamed Food City and featured in the 2009 novel Under the Dome.  (That means this unassuming store has survived being looted by rioters and being attacked by prehistoric monsters....)  The house on Kansas Road also served as a setting in the sixth Dark Tower book, when Roland and Eddie visit author Stephen King in the "real world" in 1977. 

Don't expect to get a view of the lake from Kansas Road...

... at least not until you reach the northern end, near Bridgton

East of Food City is the town center of Bridgton.  In a recent CBS interview, King gave one interviewer a tour of the town, noting that it was his inspiration for Chester's Mill in Under the Dome.  He stopped at a historical society map on the north side of the street and pointed out the exact area where he imagined the dome had fallen.  Comparing this map of Bridgton with the official map of Chester's Mill, it's not hard to recognize similarities.  In the real town and in the fictional town, Food City exists off of Route 117 to the southeast.  The lower part of fictional Route 119 seems to correspond with the lower part of the real Route 302 (Kansas Road).  The upper part of fictional Route 119 corresponds with the real Route 93, which leads northwest to the town of Lovell -- our next stop.

These are not the only similarities between Bridgton and Chester's Mill.  The center section of the fictional town -- including a defunct movie theater, a newspaper office (The Democrat), a bookstore, town hall, town common and a "peace bridge" -- is a mirror image of the buildings and businesses in Bridgton.  Bridgton Books sits right next door to the town hall, which is adjacent to a small park and a wooden bridge spanning a small stream.  Across the street is the movie theater, though this one is very much open for business.  Just around the bend in the road is the local newspaper, The Bridgeton News.  (The Democrat may be a tribute to a historic Bangor newspaper of the same name.)

Main St. in Bridgton, looking north

Sweetwater Rose, the diner where the main character in Under the Dome works as a short-order cook, doesn't appear on the map of Chester's Mill... maybe because it is further north, like King's real-world inspiration.  Rosie's General Store sits across from the library in Lovell near the intersection of Route 93 and Route 5.  And, yes, there is a real Rosie (Rosie real?).

Rosie's

The town of Lovell is an interesting study.  It is geographically divided into four different areas clustered around Kezar Lake: Lovell village (to the south), West Lovell, Center Lovell (to the east) and North Lovell.  Historian Pauline Moore suggests that the divisions may have once represented political differences.  According to her narrative, Center and West Lovell were Republican strongholds during and after the Civil War.  The village, on the other hand, was mainly inhabited by Democrats.

Resident writer Richard Beckhard says that the town was equally fractured in the early 20th century.  He explains: "The universe of humans was divided into three classes.  1) Natives  2) Summerfolk 3) Goddamn tourists.  To qualify as a native you and your ancestors had to have been born here and spent your life here... Summerfolk were people like me, whose families had been coming here since before the turn of the century or in its early years... Goddamn tourists had two universal characteristics.  They were all rich and all dumb (about things like living, taking care of themselves, understanding nature, etc)."  Yikes.  I'm reminded of Shirley Jackson's short story "The Summer People," about the harsh fate of tourists who have the nerve to stay past Labor Day.  There's also a bit of this insider/outsider mentality in King's work, particularly his short story "Rainy Season," in which a pair of tourists are sacrificed to a plague of razor-toothed frogs!  (For the record, the people of Lovell were perfectly nice to us during our short visit, and made us feel right at home there.)

Bold outsiders Stephen and Tabitha King bought a summer home in Center Lovell in the early 1970s, and they seem to have been embraced by the locals.  No doubt it helps that they have put a lot of time and money into preserving the resources and privacy of the community on Kezar Lake.   Still, I imagine there may be some old-timers there who still think of them as "summer people." And perhaps there are some old town secrets that the Kings don't know... though I don't imagine there are any secrets in Lovell's history that would rival the dark past of the community of TR-90 in King's novel Bag of Bones.

That's not to say that King's summer home hasn't been the setting for some dark events.  On June 19, 1999, the author went for a walk on the edge of Route 5 in Center Lovell and got hit from behind by a van.  Thankfully, he survived the day and live to tell the tale.  His near-death experience inspired similar incidents in Dreamcatcher and the TV series KINGDOM HOSPITAL, and also became part of the plot of The Dark Tower series, which finds gunslingers Roland and Eddie playing the role of "goddamn tourists" in Lovell, Maine.  Their goal: to save Stephen King.  Talk about intersections of life and art!

Route 5 - a dangerous stretch of road featured in the last two Dark Tower novels

Kezar Lake, view from the east (on a clear day you can see the White Mountains in New Hampshire)

The region north and slightly east of Lovell seems to be the geographic hub for most of the places in Stephen King's novels... but good luck finding them.   Aside from the fact that King is generally pretty vague about the locations of his fictional towns, he mixes real and imaginary points of reference.  Even more confounding: Some of his towns seem to have migrated over the years, from one story to the next.  Let me explain...

In "The Body," the fictional town of Castle Rock is said to be adjacent to Durham and Pownal and not far from Lewiston.  In that same story, the boys follow train tracks into the fictional town of Harlow, which is said to be on the Royal River.  This suggests that Harlow is south-southwest of Castle Rock.  Also nearby are the fictional towns of Motton (hometown of Carrie White's mother), Castle View (the setting of Lisey's Story) and Shiloh. 

In The Dead Zone, Castle Rock is said to be "considerably west" of Pownal, and about thirty miles from Norway and twenty miles from Bridgton.  This would put the town west of the train tracks along the Royal River, west Interstate 95, and well into the Lakes and Mountains region -- maybe somewhere between Naples and Bridgton if we interpret "considerably west" as "due west."  Cujo seems to confirms thi approximate location, situating Joe Camber's place approximately twenty-two miles from South Paris (sister city to Norway).

The short story "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut" seems to place the town in the immediate vicinity of Durham, while "Uncle Otto's Truck" states that Castle Rock and Harlow are both adjacent to Waterford.  Needful Things places the town eighteen miles southwest of South Paris -- slightly west of Waterford and just east of Lovell.  But then Under the Dome places it northeast of Norway and South Paris.  If you're having trouble wrapping your head around these contradictions (and who could blame you?), he's a cheat sheet.  

The simplest explanation is to say that Stephen King's "Castle County" is not a fictional counterpart to Oxford County, Maine, but a parallel or alternate reality with different rules about time and space. Driving through it means following Mrs. Todd's shortcuts through wormholes of imagination.  I have no doubt that King has intentionally avoided creating specific maps over the years, because he doesn't want these places to be pinned down in any conventional reality.

As far as I know, the author himself has only created one official map showing the location of Castle Rock.  The "Total Eclipse" map included in Dolores Claiborne and Gerald's Game places the town slightly southwest of the real town of Mexico, around south Rumford and North Woodstock. Interestingly, the same map places Motton to the northwest of Castle Rock, Lake Kashwakamak (the setting of Gerald's Game) to the east of Rangeley and TR-90 even further north (somewhere near Eustis, in Franklin County).  If we use this as an "official" point of reference, then many of the literary references from King's novels are out the window.

Traveling east from Lovell, we passed a Saint Bernard breeding place ("All Saints" something) that suggested we were on the right path for Castle Rock.  Later, in Milford, we passed a vacation house called "The Enchanted Dome" -- another stranger-than-fiction clue?  For the most part, however, there wasn't much to see north of Norway-Paris except trees and logging trucks.  North Woodstock, a prime candidate for the "real" Castle Rock, was just a cluster of houses and a T-intersection.  I didn't even see a road sign with the town name, only directions to Rumford.

Entering North Woodstock.... Castle Rock just around the bend?

Of course I didn't expect to "find" Castle Rock... but what I found was just as revealing.  We passed through several small communities that must be recognizable only to the locals.  As historian Page Helm Jones points out, the towns in this region appear to the outsider like indistinguishable settlements built up around old mills on the Androscoggin River.  Jones writes:

"Here again we find the New England penchant for town independence for these towns are really one and the same community but retain their distinct governments.  Rumford, with its close to ten thousand and Mexico with nearly five thousand inhabitants, but each with their own fire and police departments and town fathers, are again communities, almost totally dependent on one industry.  Here it is the Oxford Paper Company, an intengrated pulp and paper concern which specializes in fine book papers and coated magazine paper for the 'slicks.'"

As one continues driving north, the communities become even more anonymous to the outsider... little more than names on a map.  Residents no doubt know all the nuances and defining characteristics of these places, but we "goddamn tourists" know nothing.  We see only a fearsome wilderness -- and perhaps that's appropriate.  For me, at least, it sustains the mystery of Stephen King's creations.  On a remote and solitary road like Route 17 toward Rangely, it is easy to believe that you have left the real world behind and crossed over into the unknown.  This is a place where it is easier to believe in ghosts and aliens and things that go bump in the night.  And beyond that...

Stephen King says that he loves Maine because much of the state is still undiscovered country.  To him, the line between the possible and the impossible seems thinner in the country, and all but invisible in the darkness of the northern woods.  What better place to conclude our little jaunt?  Travel safe and dream carefully.

Stephen King's Maine - Day 4 (Durham, Lisbon Falls, Castle Rock and 'Salem's Lot)

Continued from PART 3: ORONO, ORRINGTON, LUDLOW & LITTLE TALL ISLAND

A few years ago, I took a trip to Maine to visit the home of some of my ancestors.  My great-great-great grandfather Lewis Kingsbury was a resident of Bath, Maine, and he worked there for most of his life at the Iron Works near the mouth of the meandering Androscoggin River.  His son Frederick Kingsbury also worked as a riveter in the same factory.  Growing up, I knew very little about these ancestors and even less about Maine.  I spent my childhood in Virginia, and most of what I knew about Maine came from Stephen King novels.  Naturally that affected my initial impressions of the place.

As it happens, King came of age just a few miles upriver from Bath, in a town called Durham.  From about age 11, he lived with his mother and his older brother David in a small house on Runaround Pond Road, between the historic West Durham United Methodist Church and a one-room grammar schoolhouse.  King returned to the neighborhood in 1999 for a BBC documentary, and noted that things haven't changed much over the years. The church is no longer in use and the one-room schoolhouse is now a private residence, but the neighborhood he knew as Methodist Corners looks more or less the same.  

This is one of the great things about the rural areas of Maine: they do seem to be sort of timeless.  Here's how one local writer explains it: "With only 40 people per square mile, the population pressure is not very intense.  Even if we consider a more realistic count that eliminates Maine's vast tracts of uninhabited forest, there are still only 200 people per square mile.  Massachusetts, by comparison, has an average of 765 people living on each square mile.  And because rural Maine had such a strong, 19th century life, remaining rather quiet in this century, the architecture prominent when an area was first settled - or when it found prosperity - endures, even now."  Presumably King likes writing about towns like Durham because, in the modern world, such places seem a little bit unreal to begin with. 

Stephen King's childhood home

Stephen King's grammar schoolhouse

West Durham UMC

[Skip to 9:36 in the video below for the official tour...]


Just down the road from Methodist Corners is Harmony Grove Cemetery, the inspiration for Harmony Hill Cemetery, where Mike Ryerson digs up undead Danny Glick in the novel 'Salem's Lot.  It's a small burial ground that no one would be likely to notice unless they already knew it was there.  King and his childhood friend Chris Chesley knew, and according to Chesley they were once bold enough to spend a night camping out among the stones.  The impressions of that night on the future horror author may now be more timless than the headstones. 

Just beyond the graveyard is Runaround Pond, a swampy watering hole where King and Chesley supposedly saw a dead body for the first time.  Chesley suggests that King's memory of this event may have inspired the novella "The Body," which was later turned into the film STAND BY ME.  As far as I know, King has never spoken about that particular incident... but he freely admits that "the leech incident" really happened here.  Runaround Pond is also where Johnny Smith has his formative accident on the ice at the beginning of The Dead Zone, so obviously this real-life setting was important to King.

Runaround Pond

In his book Stephen King Country, George Beahm talks about another intriguing location in Durham -- a haunted house on Deep Cut Road that allegedly inspired The Marsten House in 'Salem's Lot.   Deep Cut Road doesn't appear on any modern maps, but that's probably because the name has changed.  King says that Runaround Pond was a dirt road when he grew up there, and I suspect the same thing is true of present-day Rabbit Road, Quaker House Meeting Road and Durham Road -- all of which are basically extensions of Runaround, leading toward the tiny settlement of Deep Cut in Brunswick.  If that's the case, then the haunted house seems to be long gone.

Researchers like Beahm have turned their attention to Shiloh Chapel, based on Chesley's claim that it too may have been a source of inspiration for 'Salem's Lot.   The chapel was built in the 1890s as the home for a controversial evangelical group known -- appropriately enough -- as The Kingdom. 

Shiloh Chapel

The haunted house may be gone, but the name "Deep Cut" still fascinates me.  I have a theory that if the boys in "The Body" / STAND BY ME are starting out in a fictionalized version of Libson Falls (a town just north of Durham), then their destination (Harlow) may be a fictionalized version of Deep Cut.  A set of train tracks does run alongside the Androscoggin River, past Shiloh (which is mentioned in the novel), toward Brunswick.  The distance between Lisbon Falls and Deep Cut is only about 10 miles -- easily traveled in a few minutes by car.  To a kid, however, ten miles on foot can seem like a long way.  And the woods in that rural part of Maine get pretty dark at night. 

The mysterious Deep Cut Road appears again in Dreamcatcher and in Under the Dome.  The name could be a tribute to the old dirt lane in Durham.... or simply an acknowledgment that such roads exist throughout Maine, in rural areas once dominated by the logging industry.  There was, for instance, a Deep Cut Road in Lovell, Maine, which a local historian describes as follows:

"All the neighborhood had to cooperate to 'break out the road' after a [snow]storm.  This meant that anyone who had cattle must drive them out on the road, up and down, until the snow was packed enough to permit a sleigh or sled to get through.  Often the farmer living farthest out on a road would start first and, as he reached the next farm, would be joined by that neighbor and his cattle.  Quite a herd would be following by the time they reached the bridge of the village.  Then a sled with a six-foot timber attached in front of it would be dragged by oxen over the tracks.  Now it was ready for traffic.  But when the sun melted the snow on the top during the midday hours, deep ruts were cut.  These would freeze when the sun went down and again, the road would be impassable."

Just as those timbers permanently altered the physical landscape, so King's childhood experiences carved out the geography of his fictional world.  Castle Rock is named for a location in
William Golding's Lord of the Flies, but its spirit comes from the real towns of Durham and its neighbor to the north, Lisbon Falls.  The latter also clearly provided inspiration for the fictional towns of Chamberlain (the setting of Carrie) and Gates Falls (the setting of the short story "Graveyard Shift").

The text of Carrie puts Chamberlain (named for Civil War hero and Maine governor Joshua Chamberlain?) adjacent to Durham, probably somewhere along Royalsborough Road between Durham and Lewiston.  It's worth noting that there is a Brickyard Hill in Carrie and a Brickyard Hill Road off of Route 9, just south of the town of Lisbon Falls.... where King went to high school, and rode to school each day (in a converted hearse, no less!) with a girl that he claims was a lot like Carrie White.

When I paid a visit to the Lisbon Falls High in the summer of 2006, the kind people in the administration office let me conduct my own private tour of the building.  There were no commemorative markers indicating that the one of the world's bestselling authors had attended school there, but I was enthralled nonetheless.  I couldn't help thinking that this was where the "real" Carrie White walked the halls and attended prom. 

Libson Falls is also the real-world counterpart to Gates Falls, the setting of Stephen King's short story "Graveyard Shift."  Nevermind that Bag of Bones places Gates Falls along "the western edge of the state".... Worumbo Mill, a now-defunct weaving mill in Lisbon Falls, is where King worked the summer job that inspired his first professional horror story.  He describes it, in On Writing, as "a dingy fuckhole overhanging the polluted Androscoggin River like a workhouse in a Charles Dickens novel."  If that seems a bit harsh, one should realize that mills like this were slowly destroying the natural beauty of the Maine landscape until environmentalists turned things around in the 1970s.  Also, there were rats....

Stephen King hates rats.

Worumbo Mill (with Kennebec Fruit Company in the background)

Just across the street from the Worumbo are the Moxie Store and Al's Diner from King's more recent novel 11/22/63.  In that work, Lisbon Falls plays itself.  So does Frank Anicetti, owner and proprietor of The Kennebec Fruit Company.  In the novel, King describes Anicetti as "an elderly sweet-natured man" who believes "the world's population [is] divided naturally (and probably by genetic inheritance) into two groups: the tiny but blessed elect who prized Moxie above all other potables... and everybody else."

When my wife and I stopped in to his store, this larger-than-life character was only too happy to talk about his association with Stephen King and to formally introduce us to his favorite potable.  As soon as my wife expressed an interest in an ice cream float, Anicetti pounced, "What flavor would you like?"  Before she could answer, he gleefully provided the right answer: "MOXIE?!"  She politely asked for chocolate instead.  I, on the other hand, couldn't bring myself to let the guy down.  He was just so damned enthusiastic.  And you know what?  My Moxie ice cream float was pretty good.  (To me, Moxie sort of tastes like a combination of root beer and ginger ale... Sweet, but not too sweet.)

The Kennebec Fruit Company

Moxie-man Frank Anicetti at work

A few doors down, we stopped into Dr. Mike's Madness Cafe for lunch.  Although it's a 50's style diner like the one in King's story, Dr. Mike's is relatively new and probably couldn't have been the inspiration for Al's Diner.  Nevertheless, the doc -- a talkative and enthusiastic foodie who greeted us like family -- has embraced the idea that he's part of the Stephen King universe.  When people come in and ask him about King's novel, he points them toward the bathroom.  (In 11/22/63, the bathroom door leads to a time warp.)  Adventurers who follow his lead will find a life-size cutout of Indiana Jones awaiting them.  This good humor, in conjunction with great home cooking, made our stop in Lisbon Falls one of the highlights of our trip.  As for that time machine...

Dr. Mike's Madness Cafe

The ghost of meals passed

When I visited Lisbon Falls in the summer of 2006 (before King had published 11/22/63), there was a crumbling red building across the road from Worumbo Mill -- right around the place where Al's should have been, "across the tracks from Main Street, in the shadow of the Worumbo Mill"  When I returned in the summer of 2013, that red building was gone.  Coincidence?

2006

2013

After our tour of the Durham and Lisbon Falls area, we headed south for the afternoon, passing through the one-stoplight town of Pownal (hometown of Ray Garraty from The Long Walk and Johnny Smith from The Dead Zone) on our way to.... Jerusalem's Lot.  Although King obviously took some of his inspiration for The Lot from Durham, he also says that his haunted colonial town was also based on an apocryphal story he heard about a village in upstate Vermont called Jeremiah's Lot.  A college friend allegedly told him that Jeremiah's Lot was settled during the colonial era but abandoned after all of the founders mysteriously disappeared one day.  King wrote his own variation on this story in the college-era short, "Jerusalem's Lot."  Years later he returned to the fictional town in his second horror novel. 

'Salem's Lot places Jerusalem's Lot "east of Cumberland and twenty miles north of Portland," on the ocean-side of Interstate 295, near the oldest section of Yarmouth.  King goes into a fair amount of detail about the layout of the town, noting that the northwest quadrant (where the Marsten House stands) is hilly and heavily wooded.  The northeast quadrant, he says, is mostly open land fed by the Royal River.  The southeast quadrant is the prettiest, owing to the success of a dairy farmer named Charles Griffen, whose "huge barn with its aluminum roof glittering in the sun like a monstrous heliograph."  The southwast area is, comparatively, a slum. 

We entered Yarmouth from the northeast, following the Royal River and passing under the highway.  In King's story, this would be the "small wooden Brock Street Bridge."  We continued south on Lafayette Street for half a mile or so, until we saw a historical marker on the side of the road.  The sign drew our attention to a pioneer cemetery and a few centuries-old houses -- the remains of a bygone community -- as well as a huge barn visible to the southeast.

Brock Street Bridge?

Yarmouth is not, of course, a ghost town like 'Salem's Lot.  It is a beautiful, affluent and apparently thriving community.  But it does have a tragic history.  Many of the original settlers buried in the pioneer cemetery died defending themselves from Indian attackers (or so the sign says).  Perhaps for that reason, this seemed to me like the most compelling example of art-imitating-life.  Beneath the picture-perfect exterior, there was something genuinely eerie about this place... Maybe it was the winged skulls on the top of the colonial headstones... or maybe it was just the spirit of the local historians trying to ward off their connection to America's master of horror.

 

Pioneer Burial Ground

This gravestone, hidden in the back of the cemetery away from all the others, is just begging for a story...

Continued in PART 5: BRIDGTON, LOVELL, CHESTER'S MILL AND CASTLE COUNTY

Stephen King's Maine - Day 3 (Orono, Orrington, Ludlow and Little Tall Island)

Stephen King was a quick study in terrifying people, as evidenced by this UMO "public service announcement"

Continued from PART 2: BANGOR AND DERRY

On our third day in Stephen King Country, we started visiting locations just outside of Bangor.  First up was a short jaunt to King's alma mater, the Univeristy of Maine at Orono.  This is where the author wrote his earliest Bachman novel, The Long Walk, as well as an unpublished novel called Sword in the Darkness, which still exists in the special collections of the campus library.  It's also where he wrote his earliest Night Shift stories: "Here There By Tygers," "Cain Rose Up," "Strawberry Spring," "The Reaper's Image," "Jerusalem's Lot" (the foundation for the novel 'Salem's Lot) and "Night Surf" (the foundation for the novel The Stand).  Years later, UMO also became the setting of the 1999 story "Hearts in Atlantis," which is based on King's experiences as a college freshman during the late 1960s.

King spent his freshman year in the Gannett Hall dorm on the northeast side of campus.  On the back side of the building, there is a lawn overlooking three other dorms, including Androscoggin Hall (named for the meandering river that runs through King's hometown of Durham, and once provided the life blood for local industry).  In a senior year editorial for the school newspaper, he remembered his initial impression of the place:

"There I was all alone in Room 203 of Gannett Hall, clean shaven, neatly dressed, and as green as apples in August.  Outside on the grass between Gannett and Androscoggin Hall there were more people playing football than there were in my hometown.  My few belongs looked pitifully uncollegiate.  The room looked mass-produced.  I was quite sure my roommate would turn out to be some kind of freak, or even worse, hopelessly more 'With It' than I.  I propped my girl's picture on my desk where I could look at it in the dismal days ahead, and wondered where the bathroom was."

Gannett Hall (view from Androscoggin Hall)

Androscoggin Hall (view from Gannett Hall)

The next four years awakened King socially and politically, and built his confidence as a writer.  By the time he graduated from UMO in the spring of 1970, he couldn't imagine being anything other than a writer.  That summer, he rented a house nearby and started an early draft of The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger.  The epic story quickly overwhelmed him, and he abandoned it in favor of simple horror stories that he could sell to men's magazines.  (In those early days, money was a deciding factor... as it is for most young writers, who feel the need to justify their seemingly self-indulgent habit to polite society.)  The rest is history.

While in Orono, we visited the house and noted that it would have not only provided King with an inspiring view of the rushing Penobscot River, but also a view of a train trestle spanning the waterway.  Perhaps this was an early inspiration for "The Body" / STAND BY ME?

Penobscot River (view from Orono)

train trestle near the Penobscot River in Orono

Later we turned our attention to the south of Bangor, beginning with the small town of Orrington.  This is a pretty sedate community on the east side of the Penobscot River -- a quick stopover between Bangor and Bucksport.  Its main claim to (literary) fame is that this is where King wrote Pet Sematary.  Just as the author substituted the name Derry for Bangor, so he fictionalized Orrington during his brief residence there in the late 1970s, re-naming the town Ludlow.  According to the novel, Ludlow exists south of Bangor, west of Hampden and Winterport, and north of Bucksport (and Derry).

Louis Creed, the modern-day Dr. Frankenstein whose life gets turned upside down and inside out by Indian magic, describes his house as "a big old New England colonial (but newly insulated, the heating costs, while horrible enough, were not out of line in terms of consumption), three big rooms downstairs, four more up, a long shed that might be converted to more rooms later on - all of it surrounded by a luxuriant sprawl of lawn, lushly green in this August heat."  The Kings lived in a similar house off of River Road, a busy stretch of two-lane highway that was responsible for the death of the family cat... and the birth of an idea.  The other main inspiration was a real pet cemetery in the woods behind their house, which has (according to King researcher George Beahm) been picked clean by rude fans over the years.

The house in Orrington where Stephen King wrote Pet Sematary

We continued south on River Road (passing only a few eighteen-wheelers from the Verso paper mill in Bucksport), then headed east on Route 1 toward Ellsworth.  The city of Ellsworth is a kind of gateway to the "downeast" region, including Maine's biggest tourist destination: Mount Desert Island.  Ellsworth was also one of the primary shooting locations for the film PET SEMATARY.  The scene that takes place at Louis Creed's hospital was shot on the steps of the Ellsworth City Hall, and the cemetery itself was constructed indoors at a military installation nearby.  (I'd love to know where the Micmac burial ground was created... Maybe somewhere inside Acadia National Park?  I'm hoping that the forthcoming documentary Unearthed and Untold will provide a definitive answer.)

The location of Louis Creed's house from the film is actually a bit further east, on Point Road in the sleepy town of Hancock.  This setting is a bit more remote, and it's hard to imagine that very many trucks pass through there, since the road dead ends on the water less than a mile from the house.  Nevertheless, some fans insist that they have had to dodge fast-moving trucks on this road.  Fact or fiction?  You be the judge.  Regardless, the vast woods surrounding the property offer plenty of inspiration for dark imaginings. 

The house from the movie PET SEMATARY (viewed from behind - trucker's POV in the movie)

The house from PET SEMATARY (view from the front)

Judd Crandall's house no longer exists (it was burned down for the movie), but the shed is still across the street.

We continued south to Acadia National Park, the most popular tourist destination in the state of Maine and a location that is mentioned in King's novel The Tommyknockers.  It was uncommonly hot while we were visiting (90+ degrees with 95% humidity), so we mostly stayed in the car and explored the park via the famous Park Loop Road. 

Acadia - looking south from the eastern edge of Park Loop Road

Acadia - looking northeast toward the Porcupine Islands

From the highest point in the park, Cadillac Mountain, we looked down over the town of Bar Harbor -- which some fans say is the inspiration for King's Little Tall Island, the setting of Dolores Claiborne and the TV miniseries STORM OF THE CENTURY.   Instead of visiting Bar Harbor (which is reputed to be a bit of a tourist trap), we headed to nearby Southwest Harbor, the boat-building community where STORM OF THE CENTURY was actually shot.  According to a 1999 article in The Post and Courier, the town's main thoroughfare was used for location shots, and then the town was recreated in an abandoned sugar-beet factory in Toronto!  (A set was necessary because the filmmakers needed to be able to control the weather.) 

View of Bar Harbor from the top of Cadillac Mountain

Near the corner of Main St. and Clark Point Road in Southwest Harbor

Southwest Harbor - view from Beal's Lobster Pier

The following morning, we headed south toward the part of the state that King has written about most affectionately.  Instead of taking Interstate 95, we traveled along Route 9 -- because the area is rich in Stephen King lore.

Our first stop was at Hampden Academy, whre the author was working as an English teacher at the time Carrie was published.  The school has a long history, dating back to its 18th century origins as a seminary.  Today the institution is a massive complex with so many buildings that it was difficult to locate the original site where King would have taught in the early 70s.  On Cottage Street, we eventually found the real-world correlative to Johnny Smith's Cleaves Mills school in The Dead Zone. 

Hampden Academy - the old seminary building

Immediately adjacent: the Hampden Academy front lawn - site of the Battle of Hampden during the War of 1812

We continued south through the woods (Big Injun Woods?), looking for the fictional towns of Derry and Haven.  In the novel IT, the author situates Derry 30 miles west of Bangor, somewhere along interstate 95 before Newport.  In Pet Sematary, however, he says that Derry is south of Bangor -- apparently somewhere near Haven, the fictional setting of The Tommyknockers.

Haven is situated along Route 9 near the towns of Troy and Albion; the most likely candidate for a real-world counterpart seems to be Dixmont, which has a historic town house and a town office, but not much else.  In the novel, several visitors leave Haven with gruesome nosebleeds and stop at the general store in Troy to clean themselves up.  In the novel, the owner of the store does a thriving business in cheap t-shirts.  We stopped at the store, but didn't see any t-shirts for sale.

Troy General Store

Route 9 near Dixmont

We kept going, following roughly the same path charted by the enigmatic heroine of "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut."  If you haven't read that short story (collected in Night Shift), it provides what is perhaps the author's most detailed geographical description of the state.  Real and fictional places overlap like parallel universes as Mrs. Todd finds new and mysterious shortcuts between Bangor and Castle Rock.  On one route, she passes through the Unity and the village of China Lake (as well as Haven).  On another, she takes an unnamed back road and disappears from the "real" world completely -- never to return.

We decided to stick to roads that exist on traditional maps.  After passing through the sprawling community of China Lake (home to the "China Dine-Ah"), we jumped on the interstate in Augusta.  It would have been easy to route ourselves through nearby Togus and check out the VA hospital where Teddy Duchamp's father was incarcerated in "The Body," or to head for Lewiston (a common point of reference in Stephen King's novels) and search for the "real" Kingdom Hospital, but I was eager to get to the heart of Stephen King Country -- the author's childhood home and the inspiration for Castle Rock.

Continued in PART 4: DURHAM, LISBON FALLS, CASTLE ROCK & 'SALEM'S LOT