By the time most of you receive this latest edition of The Lincoln County News, temperatures are expected to be topping out in the 90s. According to reports, it’s supposed to hot and muggy for the next few days.
It’s the perfect weather for this time of year.
Summer officially arrives mere hours after this edition rolls off the presses.
For the year ’rounders among us, this is the time of year when we brace ourselves for the annual influx of visitors from away and start planning road trips around Wiscasset.
In March, at the economic summit hosted by the Twin Villages Downtown Alliance, Newcastle Economic Development Committee Chair David Lawrence pointed out that tourists have a bad rap.
He suggested we should be careful not to consider the Damariscotta River as a kind of moat, and warned against the dangers of using the word “tourist” as a quasi-pejorative term. Lawrence advocates using the word “visitor” as more welcoming.
We agree.
Tourists, visitors, what have you, are more our special guests than annoyances. Our local businesses, most of them small, locally owned – the very heart of our state’s economy – depend on these people; people who have taken time out of their valuable lives to come and sample what so many of us generally take for granted, simply because we enjoy it every day.
Sure it’s easy to snicker when someone asks about the difference between a hardshell or softshell, and it’s hard not to give a smart-aleck response when someone visiting Round Pond asks how much farther it is to Bristol, but the fact of the matter is, our great state would suffer without them.
Our summer visitors, most of them, could have chosen to go anywhere this summer, and there are a lot of great places to go, but they chose to come here and spend part of their season with us.
The next time we are idling in traffic or standing in what, for these parts, counts as an unusually long line, we will take a deep breath and try to savor it.
