To the editor:
I don’t know why it’s taken us 15 years to write this, but it has, so here goes.
In mid-August of 1996, we finally took the trip we had been talking about for months and headed to Moosehead Lake. We live in New York City (Queens County to be exact). We left at 5 a.m. and a short nine hours later, we were at the northern tip of Moosehead Lake, at a place called Seboomook Wilderness Campgrounds, and believe me, being from NYC, it truly was wilderness.
Some members of our family left a few days before us and were telling us how beautiful everything was and that was an understatement. We rented a pontoon boat and explored Moosehead Lake, drove to Golden Road every night at dusk to see moose, and we were lucky enough to see a mama with her baby and a giant bull moose, just strut in front of our car and disappear into the woods.
After five days, the family members who had come up before us had to leave and go back home to NYC. With that, we decided to visit Baxter State Park. I had always known that Mt. Katahdin was at the northern end of the Appalachian Trail and so we drove the Golden Road to get there.
On the way we tried to find a radio station to listen to and the only station we could find was coming in from Houlton. We tuned it in and started to listen to the local news and advertisements from your town. Things like the Pizza Place was giving away free 12 oz. sodas for the first 10 people in for lunch that day. There was also a report that a young girl from Houlton had an accident and had to get 12 stitches in her leg and also news that the high school basketball team was having tryouts.
Being from NYC our entire lives, my wife and I were use to hearing about how many murders happened the night before, who had been raped at gunpoint, who had been carjacked, etc. So at first upon hearing the type of news that was coming from the station in Houlton, we started laughing and began to make fun of it. But after a couple of seconds, we looked at each other and realized that we were dead wrong and that the news coming from that radio station was the way it should be in this world. There is something really wrong when you get used to hearing about murders, rapes, carjacking and it becomes normal news.
We learned that your town should be proud that the news coming out of it was of that quality and civility and if the rest of America could copy it, this country would be a much better place.
Joe Worth
Diane Amico
Whitestone, N.Y.
