White's Brooklin and Blue Hill
E. B. White's Charlotte's Web needs no plot summation beyond this: Some pig. Threat of bacon. Literary spider. White, who moved from Manhattan to Maine in 1937, inhabited an old farmhouse with a barn and many outbuildings in Brooklin. From Buck's Harbor, Brooklin is about a 30-minute drive northeast, and it's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it locale. There's a general store, a "mall" (a clapboard house and barn with an antiques store, a jewelry-and-knives boutique, and a massage studio), a variably open café, and a library. Brooklin is also about 12 miles south of Blue Hill, which hosts the fair featured at the end of Charlotte's Web where "Zuckerman's Famous Pig" makes his debut.
The Blue Hill Fair (8/28-9/01) is still the major local happening each Labor Day weekend; rereading White's description of it, I don't think it's changed at all in the intervening decades, a charming fact that turns unnerving when you're seated atop the creaky Ferris wheel. White's book is so closely associated with the actual fair that the livestock area is called Zuckerman's Farm. There, you can see tragically fat pigs, tawny patchwork cows, and fluffy, topiary-like alpacas. Between ogling the animals in their stalls and the cabbages in the vegetable hall, you can watch the horse pull or the piglet race or the lumberjack show. Adults can play bingo in the smoke-filled "over 18 only" parlors while kids loop jerkily through the twilight on the spinning-teacup ride.
The fair, in other words, is a quick way to dip a toe into a culture where the past and the present, the fictional and the real, the delightful and the tragic, are intertwined. The midway lights and "the crackle of the gambling machines and the music of the merry-go-rounds and the voice of the man in the beano booth" announce the shuttering of summer. As White so aptly puts it, "The crickets sang the song of summer's end...'Summer is over and gone,' they sang...Summer is dying, dying.'" Glee and fried dough commingling with sadness, a day derailed by a temperamental outboard—this is the Maine that White and McCloskey deliver. Whether you're a native contemplating the frigid months ahead or a summer visitor facing your return to the real world via a magic wardrobe or a Volvo, this is a moment as nostalgic and fun as it is quietly heartbreaking.
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