Echoes magazine features music, mushing and John R. Braden

    The new issue of Echoes magazine immortalizes Presque Isle’s legendary race horse John R. Braden in the first of a series by Presque Isle native John Lewellyn Hone of Silver Spring, Maryland. Part I of “I Never Saw Him Run” recalls the fierce rivalry at the race track among northern Maine towns and captures the excitement surrounding John R’s first year as Presque Isle’s star pacer.
    Music is a recurring theme in Echoes No. 84, with stories about the new Northern Maine Fair Music Festival, the Van Buren Drum and Bugle Corps and a Caribou man who transforms scrap wood into fine stringed instruments.
    The apple blossom on the cover defied the snow on the ground in Aroostook County as the spring edition was released. Photographer Jennifer Hersey Cleveland, a Dyer Brook native who is now a newspaper editor in Barton, Vt., focused on the blossom as a drop of water hung from one petal.
    Former musher Lucy Leaf of Surry, who won the first 30-mile Can-Am race in the 1990s, also begins a series of stories in Echoes 84. “Labrador by Dog Team” chronicles the 1,200-mile sled dog trip she and her then husband Sam Woodward took to explore a possible course for a new Canadian sled dog race.
    Preparations included advance shipment of supplies and food to tiny French-speaking Canadian villages. Stunning photos of the Quebec North Shore, its people and the two Woodward teams traveling out on the sea ice illustrate the story, including a scene on the back cover as they entered a whiteout. One sequel in the series will described the challenges of taking such photos in sub-zero weather.
    Echoes 84 contains essays by popular columnists Glenna Johnson Smith of Presque Isle and John Dombek of Utah, fiction by J. D. Aiguier of Winslow, a book review by Leaf and poetry by Dombek, Hone, Trudy Chambers Price of Brunswick and Dorothy Nash Gibson of Rockland.
    Editor Kathryn Olmstead reflects in the current issue on the potential for economic strength in rural communities in “Town Without Country,” a column that first appeared in a 1994 edition of Echoes. She also tracked down people pictured as children in early editions of the magazine for the third in a series of photo features titled “Where Are They Now?”
    When Jean Cobb was touring Aroostook County in 2004, trying to decide if she could move here from central Maine, she wrote an article that appeared in Echoes No. 67 about her travels and deliberations. Now she is a resident of St. Agatha and Echoes asked if she would write a sequel to the story. She agreed, and the result appears in the current edition under the title “Raising Sunsets: Surrounded by Beauty in St. Agatha.”
    “Since moving here I have become the area’s biggest cheerleader,” she writes, explaining how she has dispelled myths that there is nothing to do in Aroostook County. “Coming here gave the term ‘God’s Country’ new meaning.”
    Published quarterly from offices in Caribou, Echoes is dedicated to preserving qualities of community at risk in today’s world, but still strong in places like Aroostook County, Maine. With a circulation of 3,200, it has been printed continuously since 1988 at Northeast Publishing Co. in Presque Isle. More information is at echoesofmaine.com.