Maine Postcard: Peary to the Pole!

Greetings from the Blue Hill Public Library, which luckily for me has free wifi. (The inn where we’re staying is a Net-free zone, and I had to file a book review that, in a moment of bad planning, I failed to turn in before we hit the road.) This may be the swankest public library I have ever been in. It even has a separate area for young adults, with signs posted asking grown-ups to make way for YAs. They have loaner laptops and so much polished wood everywhere I feel like I’m on board somebody’s yacht. Fittingly, there’s a piece of wood on the wall from the deck railing of Robert Peary’s ship Roosevelt, built in Verona, Maine–so the sign says–for his Arctic explorations. Kind of great that it’s hanging between shelves of YA fiction, like some talisman of boys-adventure books of yore. Peary to the Pole! We won’t dwell on the frostbite etc, although it is chilly up here in the north.