This is what happens when well-intentioned people write about my homeland.

The Kennebec Café, named after the Kennebec river, is located in Fairfield (pop. 6,573, mostly blue collar families and the occasional moose) and also serves adjacent Waterville (pop. 15,605, including the 2,000 barefooted students of Colby College).

I can’t remember the last time a moose wandered through downtown Fairfield, though I’m sure it’s happened (we have those Moose Next X Miles signs for a reason). But of all the adjectives I might use to describe Colby* students, ‘barefooted’ would not make the top hundred. It’s damned hard to play beer pong or drive up to the condo at Sugarloaf if you’re not wearing shoes, or boots. Or sandals and socks, in some cases.

Central Maine is a place where Souter-style New England understatement and back-country flannel folksiness come together. Like the other Mainer old salts who line up outside before every 5 a.m. opening and hunch over their coffee and doughnuts until closing, Ann and John are at once the friendliest people you’ve ever met and the most reserved.

Dear heavens. Let us parse. Souter, okay, fine, he’s an exemplary Yankee jurist. But for the love of Bean, is it impossible to write a paragraph about central Maine without falling back on ‘flannel’ as a descriptor? Why is the equally-ubiquitous chamois always overlooked? As for ‘folksiness,’ I can’t even- this is maybe one thing I have in common with Southerners ex. Atlanta, a lifetime of being haunted by this word, this cheap nonsense. Ma and Pa in their dungarees. The ol’ red pickup truck. Haw haw, ayuh. No, ‘folksiness’ isn’t just redaction. At best it’s a misunderstanding or a misrepresentation. At worst it’s a form of calculated dismissal.

And ‘old salts’? If there are any aging sea cap’ns in Kennebec County, an hour or more from the coast and a full two and a half hours from anything that could even remotely be called Down East, well, I haven’t seen them. Perhaps they swam upriver and got disoriented before they could spawn? (I am flashing back, now, to a television report last summer in which a national newsman stood on one of Portland’s piers in his crisp navy windbreaker, describing the scene here ‘Down East’ now that our daily paper is on the rocks. He was only off by 200 miles and a million more.)

In conclusion: I get far too worked up about these things, the Atlantic’s new food blog is an excellent read, and the doughnuts are just as good as they say.

*Full disclosure: I attended Colby for a semester and a half in 1997-98. But I never once walked the campus without shoes.