BETHEL, ME — The sugar maple at the corner of Mason Street and Paradise Road, long considered the showpiece of the block by anyone with eyes, has this week acquired both a folding card table with a hand-lettered tip jar and a sixty-eight-year-old retiree in a reflective vest directing traffic around it.
The tree, which locals refer to simply as Doris’s Maple, after the late Doris Aldrich whose porch it shades, hit peak color sometime Monday evening and is expected to hold for what longtime residents are calling “another good two days, weather permitting and barring wind.”
By Tuesday morning, three rental Subarus with Massachusetts plates were idling in the road taking photographs through the windshield. By Wednesday there were eleven, a charter bus from Quincy, and a woman from Connecticut who asked Pat Aldrich, Doris’s son, whether the tree was “on the trail.”
“There is no trail,” Pat said. “It’s a tree. It’s in the yard.”
Pat’s neighbor Gus Lemoine, who retired from the Bethel highway department in 2019 and has been described by his wife as “looking for something,” appointed himself crowd marshal Tuesday afternoon after a Volvo wagon nearly clipped a child on a Razor scooter. Gus wears the orange vest he kept from the town and carries a whistle he purchased Tuesday evening at the Aubuchon Hardware on Main.
The tip jar, a repurposed pickle jar with the label still partially attached, was added Wednesday by Pat’s daughter Hannah, age eleven, who has so far collected $73 and a Canadian quarter. Pat says the money is going toward a new mailbox, the previous one having been backed into Tuesday by what witnesses described as “the second bus.”
Reached at the Sunday River Brewing Company, where she was eating a chowder, longtime Bethel innkeeper Marjorie Pell said the volume of leaf traffic this year is “the worst it’s been since the autumn the New York Times wrote us up,” referring to a 2017 travel piece she has not forgiven. Pell said her own front-yard maples, which she described as “frankly more uniform in color than Doris’s,” have not received a single visitor.
Town manager Dale Frechette confirmed the town has no formal mechanism for regulating roadside tree tourism and is unlikely to develop one before Sunday, when the leaves are projected to drop. Frechette did note that Gus Lemoine is operating in a strictly volunteer capacity and that the town is not liable for whistle-related hearing complaints, of which it has received two.
By Wednesday afternoon, a second card table had appeared across the street, manned by a teenage boy selling cider donuts at a markup his mother described as “appropriate to the moment.” A handwritten sign taped to the donut table read RESTROOMS NOT AVAILABLE, underlined twice.
Pat Aldrich, asked whether his mother would have approved of any of this, paused for some time before answering. “She would have hated the bus,” he said. “The rest of it she’d have charged more for.”