How long does it take to inadvertently prove Wiscasset attracts? As in, it attracts people who don’t live and/or work here and therefore who are in town limits because they want to spend time here, some of them as part of spending time in the region, others because their destination was Wiscasset?

Thirty-two minutes or less.

From 10:17 a.m. to 10:49 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 7, I took pictures along the waterfront, the Wiscasset Yacht Club end, so not even the Route One, Red’s Eats and Main Street Pier end where people from elsewhere are even easier to find. And on this quieter, traffic light-free, end of the waterfront, everyone I met – with the possible exception of the lobsterman who declined to be named but was very nice about it, smiling – was from another town or state.

Twelve of those 32 minutes were spent on scenics, those generally people-less pictures that are all about place; or about technical proficiency and creativity, but for photography, that is usually not me. (I’m from the days reporters had photographers along with them on stories. It was a simpler time, but having to take pictures to show a story as well as tell it has made me and surely others become better reporters.)

I only know the exact times on what I was doing across the 32 minutes because the smart phone says when each picture is taken. 

So 32 minus 12 – bear with me, I went to Morse (a nostalgic in-joke when someone’s math is questionable; I never hear this said about Wiscasset or Boothbay schools, or any other) – is 20 minutes of meeting, talking with and photographing people. And as you can see online and in print this week, they were from West Gardiner and Harpswell, and from Bowman, Texas. 

I wasn’t going there to look for Wiscasset residents or non-Wiscasset residents. They just were non-Wiscasset ones. And the randomness of this means, I am guessing, I could have come on any other somewhat nice weekend day, maybe not so much in winter, but other times, and run into people who don’t call Wiscasset home, but who were in town, and not in traffic; each here, for their own, different reasons from one another.

That was the weekend after Labor Day Weekend, and summer vacation is largely gone for school-age children, so this might be post-peak, until foliage season. And yet, these people I happened to meet were choosing a Saturday morning, or part of a Saturday morning, in Wiscasset.

That says something good about Wiscasset.