AUGUSTA, Maine — As an unfailingly enthusiastic supporter of leisure time, I’m always interested in what people do on their vacations. When I sat down with Governor Mills recently at the Blaine House, we talked for about forty minutes, first about what it’s been like on a personal level to get settled into the job she’s now had for seven months, then about politics and policy. One of the topics that came up was how she relaxes and recharges.
“Two weeks ago I went fishing with a couple of friends,” she told me. “We went way the heck up in the woods north of Parmachenee.”
Even people who’ve flipped through the pages of their Maine Atlas and Gazetteer so many times that it’s held together with duct tape might not have heard of Parmachenee. It’s a lake in western Maine near the Canadian border. “It’s way the heck up,” the governor said, a statement that did not need to be fact checked. “We had dinner at Bosebuck Camps,” she continued, “and we stayed off a logging road that was miles and miles long. It took us a good hour and a half to get to the nearest town when we came out.”
I have no idea what the governors of, say, California, Maryland, Florida, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Connecticut have done recently to unwind from the pressures of the office. It seems supremely safe to say, though, that they have not chosen a getaway along the lines of what Governor Mills did. “We were way out there,” she said, summing up her trip. “It was really fun.”