Maine Magazine – October 2015
Weatherby’s Weekend
By SANDY LANG – One thing to know about Grand Lake Stream, the men are telling me after dinner, is that “a fair number of guys on the stream smoke cigars.”
Several of us are sitting on the long porch at the sporting lodge Weatherby’s, which is set on a hilltop in the village of Grand Lake Stream (population 109), about 30 miles west of Calais and the Canadian border. I see a waft of smoke and smell sweet tobacco. Cigars, the men say, help thwart the biting flies.
Red-headed lodge owner Jeff McEvoy is in one of the chairs, and his English cocker spaniel, Curly, is curled up in another (or is she Bridget? McEvoy keeps three of the hunting dogs). Dogs, cigars, wine, and books are the night’s after-dinner topics.
A doctor who comes up from Massachusetts several times a year for the fly fishing is on the porch, along with an investment advisor who’s got a photo of his poodle on his iPhone screen, which he’s showing around. One of the guests is part-owner of a winery. Another just finished a novel with a Jekyll and Hyde–type storyline. I’m the newcomer to the group, and happen to be the only woman arriving at the fishing lodge today. A three- generation family with a young granddaughter left just this afternoon, McEvoy tells me.
Weatherby’s lodge and cottages was operating as a traditional Maine sporting camp by the early 1900s— the first in the region. When I arrived this afternoon, I nosed around the lodge and looked at the wood-paneled walls and shelves arrayed with grouse feathers, fishing books, and canoe paddles, and I saw framed black-and- white pictures taken when there were fewer trees on the property, making it appear even nearer to the famous salmon-fishing waters of Grand Lake Stream…..
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