enlarge Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

Robert Poulieot’s season-opening chores included painting at the Sea View motel in Old Orchard.

enlarge Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

James Rydle paints the swimming pool at the Sea Drift Motel in Old Orchard Beach last week in anticipation of an influx of tourists.

 

 

OLD ORCHARD BEACH — Bob Scott was doing his best to slap a coat of tangerine-colored paint on the deck chairs in front of Sheila's General Store.

But the cell phone in his pocket wouldn't stop ringing, and customers kept pulling in to ask if the seasonal variety store was open for business.

"Everyone's rushing to get open," said Scott, dropping his brush to ring up sales of cold beer and bodyboards. "Supposedly we're going to have a lot of Canadians coming this year."

Fresh paint glistened, power saws whined and women dragged vacuum cleaners into motel rooms up and down East Grand Avenue as Memorial Day closed in last week.

The holiday weekend marks the unofficial opening of summer in Maine, when floodgates part on the New Hampshire border and waves of tourists descend on the coast, mountains and lakes.

It's a season that could be measured in numbers: the 17.4 million vehicles that traveled the Maine Turnpike in 2008; $6.7 billion spent by U.S. tourists in Maine in 2006; the 2 million yearly visitors to Acadia National Park.

Figures like these will spell the difference between prosperity and struggle this year for thousands of Maine businesses and the people they employ.

But the season is more than just economics.

It's also a kind of high noon on Mainers' inner clocks, a time that imposes changes on the pace and texture of life as residents make room for the hordes that descend on the beaches, lakes and shopping outlets.

"I love it," said Sheila Lauzon, who works at the public library, just a block or two from the surf in Old Orchard. "It's like living in the suburbs and then living in an urban area all in the same place."

Summer seemed to be getting ahead of itself in southern Maine last week.

Temperatures leaped into the 90s, and the village square in Old Orchard teemed with shirtless young men in low-slung bermudas and women in bikinis and halter tops.

Most of the cars pulled up to the curbs bore Maine plates, and the throngs on the sidewalks were a pale imitation of what will happen in town in July and August, when tens of thousands will swarm in from Quebec province.

James Mitkonis, whose father owns the Moby Dick Motel and variety store, noted that many places will open their doors only on weekends until July arrives.

Still, Moby Dick's was gearing up, as delivery trucks parked out front and drivers shouldered their way inside with racks of milk jugs and fresh loaves of bread.

"It's crunch time," said Mitkonis, as he cleared shelf space for boxes of doughnuts. "Even if it isn't good weather, people just want a vacation."

Around the corner at the Sandpiper Motel, yellow plastic "crime scene" tape fluttered in the breeze, protecting a freshly striped section of asphalt as owner Denis Rioux cleaned rooms inside.

Rioux keeps the motel open all year, hoping to cover the winter heating-oil bill with off-season rates that draw a few lodgers who come to southern Maine for work projects.

For July and August, though, Rioux's motel ledger is chock full of names, evidence that his business – and all of Old Orchard – will soon be transformed.

"It's totally different," said Rioux. "It's like being in a different place."

The same can be said of other Maine summer towns.

"It's like a switch flips and we go from hibernation to high energy, we sort of have to shake ourselves and say it's time to wake up, it's time to come alive," said Marty Gleason, a Boothbay Harbor native who runs Gleason Fine Art gallery on Townsend Avenue with her husband, Ned.

Barbara Freeman, who moved to Boothbay from the suburbs of Philadelphia 18 years ago, says she and her husband gauge the coming and going of summer by the boats they can see in the harbor.

Last week there were maybe three, but she knows in a few weeks there will be hundreds.

Summer traffic requires an adjustment...