What is main without summer? We traips through the snow and sleet and brisk wind of winter and then the mud and rain of spring, but summer in Maine makes it all worth it.

Of course, there's a reason my home state earned the Vacation Land moniker.

The magic of our summers has reached the farthest

ends of the country and without fail each year those folks from away pour into the

pine tree state to soak up a bit of our magic for themselves.

The traffic on Route 1 through his casket backs up for miles as the line at Red Zet stretches

almost as long with locals and tourists alike trying to score themselves the famed

lobster roll from the roadside shack and our neighbors in the north at least in typical

non-pandemic times,

cross the border and make their pilgrimage

to Old Orchard Beach, a procession of New Brunswick license plates

arriving in town like clockwork at the first sniff of pier fries.

Camps that sat winterized through the brutal winter weather begin to breathe the fresh air again

as their temporary inhabitants flip on the furnace, throw open the windows,

and start slamming those spring-loaded screen doors behind them as they pound barefoot

towards Sabago or Moosehead, Rangeli, Cabossie, China, Maranacook, Damerscotta, and any one of the other over 6,000 lakes and ponds in Maine.

And then there's the lucky population of both locals and out-of-staters who have the fortune of

claiming a piece of Maine's rocky oceanfront coastline for themselves.

They pull into the driveways of their well-kept summer homes and settle in for a season of salt water and sea breeze and peace.

That's how the Olanchak family spent every summer at their impressive, modern oceanfront home in a gunk-wit, Maine.

They couldn't have anticipated that their retreat to vacation land in the summer of 1970 would have ended any

differently from years past. But this would be a summer they'd never forget. In fact,

...