"onlyinyourstate[dot]com" is a clickbait article factory.

Nobody should reference or post anything from that source.

I’m honored! Beautiful work, as always. Really dig the “god rays.”

I always enjoyed seeing your posts in the Maine subreddit!

"Sorry, sir. We checked tax maps, and your house is just over the border in Lee. You and your children are free to huddle on the stoop outside, though."

The main purpose of a salt grinder is to be able to control the grain size.

I went down to GA to see it in 2017, and honestly, the beauty of these things is that it doesn't matter that much where you see it, as long as you're in the area of totality. It's amazing regardless.

We just found a random town with a village green in the totality band, and set up a blanket on the grass.

I would recommend not overthinking the venue, and I would actively avoid any place that's going to be particularly slammed/crowded, but I do suggest seeing it around other people--and I say that as someone who generally prefers solitude when taking in natural phenomena.

My favorite memory from the 2017 eclipse was that second when the sunlight completely dimmed, and there was this audible gasp from the few hundred people in the park, followed by this crescendo of a hooting cheer.

There was something really fundamentally human about that, and it stuck with me.

The freeway traffic getting back to Atlanta was horrible, but it was well worth it for the experience.

Neurology is brain + spinal cord + nerves.

He's worth it. He worked on my dad.

Pro tip: if you or anyone you know has lower back/sciatica pain, specifically request an MRI and have Florman or another neurosurgeon look at it. They will tell you if it's a good candidate for surgery.

My dad put off surgery for a long time because he figured it would involve a lengthy recovery, but when Floorman looked at the scan, he assured us it was really pretty minor.

It was really amazing how effective the surgery was at addressing my dad's back pain, and he was up and mobile hours after waking up from anesthesia.

Owned by a neurosurgeon at Maine Med!

Yeah, the locomotives are definitely one of the similar examples of backwoods Maine obscura that came to mind.

I do appreciate that the NMW and other concerned organizations responded to the huge uptick in interest in the locomotives by establishing a drivable dirt road with a nice trailhead and hiking path--but that increased accessibility does come with the liability you describe.

I get why people post stuff.

I think it's nice that folks find something really cool and want to share it. I know I have gotten that same impulse.

However, yes--in those moments, it's really important to remember that the internet doesn't need to know about everything, and you might inadvertently have a really negative impact on a place by publishing it online.

It’s a shame that they closed it off to the public— but in a way, it’s also wild that it wasn’t even posted until recently, and nobody seemed to mind visitors.

It seems like a lot of these strange but beautiful remote places in Maine get discovered and posted online, and then visitor numbers spike to an unprecedented level.

The eventual result is either that the attraction is made more formally public with signs and parking etc, which is great, but comes at the cost of mystique— or, sadly, they are made permanently inaccessible to the public, as was the case at Onawa.

I’ve come across a few remarkable and unknown places like that—Maine has many.

My approach is to be forthcoming about these places in person, ie, literal word-of-mouth—but I don’t post them to reddit or elsewhere online, because doing so can have really unfortunate and unintended effects.

Edit: Not at all a criticism of this lovely photo—the damage is already done at Onawa. Mostly just ruminating on the way things are changed by the internet.