Eighteen years old.
It’s high school graduation time, the end of childhood, the send-off from the nest. It’s sudden independence and possibility said to be limitless.
Eighteen-year-olds know what they want, or so it seemed this May, roaming the spring-fevered halls of Maine high schools, talking to seniors.
They want to be music teachers, police officers, lobstermen and dental hygienists. Some want to raise their children here, and some want to leave the state for good.
Most seniors stated their goals with some certainty. But studies show that for many, plans don’t run deep. According to the National Center for Student Aspirations in Orono, 97 percent of Maine seniors anticipate a successful career, but only 28 percent make plans or set goals for themselves.
During the next 12 months, Maine’s high school Class of 1998 will face some of life’s most important decisions. They will find jobs and get fired, make the dean’s list and drop out of college, have babies, pay bills, move to the city. They will learn how much home means to them, and what makes Maine unique.
In a recent survey, more than 70 percent of Maine’s 11th-graders said they planned to enroll in college right after graduation. In fact, only half of Maine seniors go straight to college.
More than half who go to four-year schools go out of state. Many will stay there to prosper after graduating.
Reality, economic and educational, has a way of focusing the hazy dreams of graduation speeches.
Reality is the subject of this yearlong series, “Life After High School,” beginning today with profiles of four recent graduates with different backgrounds and aspirations. They come from high schools in far-ranging parts of the state, and represent about 13,500 Maine graduates starting life after high school this month.
The Bangor Daily News will follow these four until next June, tracking their adjustments to college and life away from home, to the different rhythms of full-time work and families of their own.
Our goal is to help explain a generation, while digging into the culture of the state that raised them. While politicians debate education and economic growth, we’ll report on individual dreams and the forces that make them come true, change shape or vanish.
Courtney London
The education director for the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, Brian LeBlanc looks worried when he talks about “the dwindling of the talent pool.” He’s talking about Courtney London, one of the band’s best and brightest.
London, 18, graduated from Houlton High School last week. She’s headed to Southern Maine Technical College in South Portland, and plans to transfer to the University of Maine at Farmington for an education degree. She’s a little nervous about city life, but she doesn’t expect to miss Aroostook County.
“I don’t want to live here,” she said simply this May. “Everything’s taken. There’s no more opportunity. I see hate directed at this town, because there’s nothing to do here.”
A month later, London’s anti-Houlton stance has softened. Five days before graduation, after a night of reminiscing at a friend’s camp, she stresses the importance of family and says she will probably come back.
London wants to be a teacher. She flirted with the idea of a business career, but job-shadowing convinced her it wasn’t her thing.
She doesn’t understand American Indian kids who don’t take advantage of the availability of free education at the state’s university campuses. There are seven Maliseet graduates in Aroostook County this year, and only London and her cousin Suzanne Greenlaw are headed to college. “It makes me mad,” she said.
Part of a close-knit family (her sister Brittney, 11 months her junior, is one of her best friends), London has lived with her grandparents in Houlton the past few months, in a tidy blue house in a pretty downtown neighborhood.
London’s mother, stepfather and three sisters live on Conroy Lake in Monticello, about 10 miles north — too far from town to be convenient for the sociable senior. It’s an idyllic spot next to the deep, still water, with a canoe pulled up on shore and a hammock between trees.
“We picked the wrong spot to bring up Courtney — this is too boring for her,” said her mother, Mary Tomah, a community health worker for the local Maliseet band. “I have a feeling she’s going to like Portland better than Houlton.”
London is friendly, open and funny. She’s generous to a fault, known for lending her sisters’ clothes to friends.
“A telephone and a mirror,” her grandfather John Joseph said fondly. “If you took those away from her, I don’t know what she’d do.”
She has many friends, and surprised herself this year by being elected vice president of her class. It hasn’t been all good times and pep rallies, though, not since seventh grade, when racism first surfaced.
“Before that, we could all play together and get along,” she said. “Then people started to get into different groups.”
She has had some bad experiences. People found out she was native, and some made fun of her for it. Kids who live on the new reservation in Houlton take the worst harassment, being told they’re “trash,” she said.
“I try to speak up, and people know that,” London said, cool and unflinching on the subject of prejudice. “When I started junior high, I said, `Don’t say it to my back, say it to my face.’ So they did.”
Standing up for herself and other natives (the high school is about 10 percent American Indian) has made her stronger, she said. Some of her peers have apologized for their behavior.
“The little things don’t bother me anymore,” she said. “Most of my friends are white.”
London doesn’t rule out the possibility of teaching one day on the Houlton reservation. She is interested in her culture, and disappointed at how much is being lost.
“When I was little, it used to be fun to be native,” she said. “We used to go to camp and lessons and do things. It makes me kind of mad I wasn’t pushed to learn more.”
In her grandparents’ kitchen, pieces of tape on the salt-and-pepper shakers bear the faded Maliseet words “sol a way” and “da pas a way,” remnants of a time when lots of objects in the house were marked with their native names.
When she has visited other Maine reservations, London has sometimes felt inadequate. “They say, `You don’t look Indian, you don’t dress Indian, you can’t do this.’ Then they talk about you in Indian. You feel so stupid, you think, Why did I come?”
Siblings rely on London’s knowledge of their family tree. “I don’t even know half my relatives,” Brittney London said. “I have to ask her, because she knows everybody.”
She admits she has trouble getting along with her stepfather. She speaks warmly of her own father, a Vietnam veteran who is not Indian. He’s free-spirited, she says, not judgmental. His laugh sounds just like hers. He now is serving a prison sentence for driving drunk. London tries to write to him, but sometimes she’s too busy.
“His last letter inspired me,” she said. “He told me how he’s changed his view of life.” In the letter, he told her how he doesn’t plan to return to Houlton when he gets out of prison because that’s where the bad influences in his life have been.
As she has grown older, London has seen changes in her family. She used to be the “bad” daughter, the mouthy one who gave her mother a hard time. These days, she said she’s more likely to be the one lecturing.
“She shows me what I can do,” said her outgoing younger sister Alexandra, 13. “She gives me ways to be myself around my friends, and not necessarily do what everyone else does.”
A closer relationship with her mother has come with maturity. “I used to not want to talk to her,” London said. “She’d get upset and my sisters would tell her, `She’ll talk to you someday.”‘
Living in Houlton, London has become more independent, cooking for herself and doing her own laundry. She thinks of it as a transition to moving away.
Her mother, Mary, said she has tried to teach her daughters to “depend on yourself first. Get to know yourself, and then you can start choosing your mate and your life.”
London’s grandfather has told her to stay out of dark alleys in Portland. He was hit in the head and robbed once in North Carolina.
But he respects her right to live an urban life if she wants. “We hope they’ll come back,” he said of his grandchildren. “But it’s their choice.”
Patrick Kelley
While most of his classmates at Jonesport-Beals High School are bound for college or the military, Patrick Kelley has decided to stick to the traditional industry that founded his town.
His father, grandfather, and several generations beyond all have fished for lobsters off the unspoiled shores of Jonesport. After high school graduation this June, Kelley too became a full-time fisherman.
He will continue to live at home and to fish alongside his father, Ernest Kelley Jr. But he already has taken out a $5,000 loan to buy his own new wire mesh traps — forest green with bright blue polypropylene line.
“He said if I got my own traps, he’d give me a third of the proceeds and give himself a third and give a third to the boat,” said Kelley, a sturdy young man with an amiable grin and a gold hoop in his left ear. His cheerful blue eyes are shaded by the well-worn leather bill of his baseball cap, which covers fuzzy blond hair shorn to near-baldness.
On a cool, sunny May afternoon, Patrick Kelley, his 15-year-old brother, Ira, and his father are preparing Kelley’s new lobster buoys in the yard of their tidy one-story house off Route 186.
Ernest Kelley Jr. fishes a white foam buoy out of a cardboard box, loops blue line through the hollow center, and tosses it to Ira, a lanky sophomore who plays guard on the much-vaunted Jonesport-Beals basketball team.
Ira Kelley pounds a plastic orange spindle through the buoy core with a rubber mallet. He passes the work-in-progress to his brother, who carefully paints a fat brown stripe around the top and leans it up against the picnic table to dry.
He is using his father’s colors for now — brown, white and orange — and his father’s number — 3873 — but the initials carved into each buoy with a soldering iron are his own: PEK.
Kelley has been fishing every summer since fifth grade. No one in the family was surprised when he announced this year that he wanted to go into fishing full time after high school.
“It’s fun,” said Kelley. “I like being out on the water. I guess when you enjoy it, you don’t notice all the work really.” Yet both his father and grandfather have reservations.
“There has to be a better job somewhere,” Ernest Kelley Jr. said wryly. “But it’s what he wants to do.” He said to keep the family afloat, he has tried just about every type of fishing available, including scalloping, gill netting and mussel dragging, and he even drove a truck.
Kelley keeps his traps at his grandfather Ernest Kelley Sr.’s house, which has its own wharf by the water in downtown Jonesport. A beaten-down path through the grass winds through towering piles of wooden and wire lobster traps stacked by the water. Kelley Sr. bought his grandson his first fishing license at age 7, but this year he tried to persuade Patrick to continue his schooling.
“Fishing has been wonderful for me,” he said. “But if I were his age now, you’d never get me into it. I see it going downhill all the time.”
Only a few Jonesport-Beals seniors are following their family footsteps into lobster fishing. About two-thirds of the 27 graduating students are going to the University of Maine, either in Orono or nearby Machias.
Kelley is undeterred by the naysayers, both family and classmates.
“There’s a lot of people go on to college around here who end up fishing anyway,” he said. “They just enjoy it.”
Anyway, he added, the fewer of his classmates pursue fishing, the more lobsters will be left for him.
Ira doesn’t share his enthusiasm for the family business. Though he too goes lobster fishing every summer, he said he probably will go to the University of Maine when he graduates.
“It’s kind of boring here,” he said. “You can’t do much. You have to create your own kind of fun.”
While many of Kelley’s fellow seniors also say they want a change from small-town life, Kelley likes the fact that everybody knows everybody in the close-knit community. He reeled off a seemingly endless list of relatives who live in town, including both sets of great-grandparents and a slew of aunts, uncles and cousins.
He plans to live with his family for a few years, work on his father’s boat through summers of lobstering and winters of scallop-dragging, and eventually find a piece of land on which to build his own house.
“I don’t know how he’ll feel when he has to do it all winter long,” said his mother, Patti Kelley. “But I don’t think he’d be happy doing anything else.”
Brandi Cossar
It’s the day after graduation at Nokomis Regional High School, and Brandi Cossar sits at the kitchen table in her parents’ house in Corinna. Fighting a cold, she wears a “Class of 1998” T-shirt and a weary expression. Her cocker spaniel, Buffy, is at her feet. Nearby, her 9-year-old sister, Tricia, makes invitations to a pool party.
At the sink, Cossar’s boyfriend, Wayne MacMullen, 20, has finished the dishes and started peeling potatoes. He wears a black Nike baseball cap. By the time Brandi’s parents, Larry and Vicki Cossar, get home from work at the Dexter Shoe company, MacMullen will have steak, spinach, rolls and potatoes ready.
MacMullen, a streetwise, well-spoken Nokomis dropout, says his own family kicked him out. He has been living with the Cossars for about five months, since Cossar found out she was pregnant. The baby, a boy, is due in September.
In the beginning, there wasn’t anyone happy about the pregnancy. Cossar always loved animals, and chose a career as veterinary technician when she was still in grade school. She got good grades, knowing she would go to college. She had just obtained birth control pills and was about to start taking them when she found out it was too late.
When she told her mother, Vicki Cossar cried in her bedroom and broke the news to her husband. Larry Cossar shared a few choice words with his oldest daughter and left the house.
Told the news over the phone, Wayne MacMullen was shocked. He had never wanted children, though he sometimes thought about adopting unwanted kids, born without “the luxury of growing up in a house with someone taking care of them.”
“My first feeling was, to be honest, that she had ruined her life, that she wasn’t going to be able to do what she wanted to do,” Vicki Cossar said. “But over the last month she’s shown me she’s still determined to do it.”
Cossar offers few words, but they are well-chosen and honest. She smiles rarely but brilliantly. Her eyes show quiet affection when she playfully provokes MacMullen, glancing up to catch his reaction.
She was a shy child, her mother said, never a joiner. Because of her shyness, Cossar said, classmates were surprised to see her pregnant.
She is realistic about the obstacles ahead, and she doesn’t romanticize motherhood. “Scared to death” is how she puts it. She’s scared of the pain of labor, and scared her child won’t be healthy. But she never considered not having the baby.
She has been accepted at University College in Bangor, a branch of the state university system offering mostly two-year degrees. She learned at graduation she had won a $700 scholarship. She hopes for a job at a small grocery store that just opened a few doors from her house.
“It’s going to be hard,” she says, her voice shaking a little. “The baby’s going to be born in September, when school’s going to start. I need money for a baby sitter, I don’t have a license, and I don’t have a car. It’s a lot harder where neither of us have jobs.”
MacMullen has been out looking for work every day, a claim Cossar’s parents confirm. A month ago he had a temporary position on a farm. Judging by his dogged, attentive efforts in the Cossar kitchen, he’s willing to work, though he describes himself as a screw-up who likes to party too much.
“I’m 20 years old, I’ve got a girlfriend and a baby coming, and no responsible way to take care of either one of them,” he said.
Simply by sticking around, he has earned some respect. “I have confidence in him, that he’s going to make something of himself,” said Cossar’s mother, a sweet-natured woman who said her daughter always came to her with problems. “He’s been here for her. He’s not one of these scared kids who run off.”
Strange as it may seem, the family arrangement feels natural. It is not completely foreign to the Cossars. Both of Larry’s parents died when he was young, and when his caretaker aunt moved to Canada, he stayed behind on his own. Larry and Vicki met as freshmen at Nokomis, and he moved in with her family when he was 13.
Cossar may get her determination from her father, who put himself through University College before getting married. “We told her always, always, always, go to college, so she didn’t end up in a shop like we did,” Vicki said.
Cossar said her parents are afraid if she doesn’t start school this fall — baby and all — she never will. Both generations agree the couple shouldn’t get married yet.
For years, the Cossars lived in a trailer in Palmyra, while they stubbornly saved for a house. They succeeded three years ago, and are proud of their white-shuttered home, with its swimming pool and big, grassy back yard.
Larry Cossar is an involved father, coaching his youngest daughter’s softball team and spending hours with his son on the pitching mound. He learned how to be a dad from watching his wife’s father. “I respected that man highly,” he says of when he was younger.
MacMullen seems to feel similar respect for Cossar’s dad. “He talks to me now,” the young man said of their improving relationship. “We actually have conversations.”
The family disciplinarian, Larry Cossar has had the hardest time accepting changes in the blueprint for his daughter’s success. Sitting by a window, smoking a cigarette and designing invitations for her graduation party on the computer, he is philosophical.
“The straight road we had planned for her has a few curves in it, but it still goes to the same place,” he said.
Shirley Moe
An athlete and academic whiz who accompanies herself on guitar while singing Indigo Girls tunes on open mike night at the nearby University of Maine at Machias, Shirley Moe is the epitomy of the well-balanced applicant college admissions officers say they look for. And Bates College was pleased enough with what it saw to offer the Machias High School senior an $18,000 scholarship.
“I’m just so excited,” said Moe, her class’s valedictorian and vice president. “I think it’s going to be awesome.”
Seated on the sofa at the compact white house of her father, Peder Moe, in a subdivision off Route 1, she squirms with embarrassment as her mother, Bessie Moe, tallies up her achievements, such as straight A’s for the past two years and a voice that — at 11 years old, mind you — sounded like Whitney Houston’s.
Moe is slim, almost waiflike, with fine, straight brown hair and blue eyes. Wearing a tank top under a flowered cotton shirt, she looks a bit like a wholesome version of model Kate Moss, minus the pout and bubbling with energy.
“I used to be nicknamed Motormouth. I talk a lot less now,” she said — a comment which, made in an interview at the high school, prompted an incredulous look from classmate Sarah McKinney, the salutorian.
Moe says she wants to become a psychiatrist because she’s as good at listening as she is at talking. It’s a goal unlikely to bring her back to her hometown any time soon, as she and her parents both realize.
“My father was raised in the city and wanted to live in the country. I was raised in the country and wanted to live in the city,” said Moe. “I guess it flips back and forth between generations.”
Peder Moe grew up in Fall River, Mass. and is now the student activities director at the University of Maine at Machias. Bessie Moe is a live-in caregiver, who grew up in rural Maine towns. She has kept her married name though the couple are now divorced.
“Growing up here is pretty special,” she says. “In 20 years, Shirley will appreciate it.”
Moe acknowledges that Machias is beautiful, and safe, and that she has enjoyed the opportunities to explore the outdoors. But just now, she’s feeling more appreciative of the scholarship that will allow her to enter another world, just three hours from home.
“You can get tired of everyone knowing everything about everyone all the time,” she said. “The thought of walking down the hall and not knowing everyone — it’s so different. But kind of comforting in a way.”
Moe says she knows that Bates will introduce her to a wealthier and more high-powered species of student than most of her Machias colleagues, but she’s not intimidated.
“I can’t imagine that anyone would really think they’re more special just because they have more money,” she said. “Maybe they do. I am nervous about the difficulty of the classes. I just hope I’m prepared.”
Moe plans to major in psychology and hopes to spend a semester or year abroad. She rattles off a few options: Toyko, Chile, France, Spain. She may join the volleyball team but also has to get a job.
“I think anything could happen at Bates,” she said. “I want to try everything but I’m not going to have time to.”
She already has tried about everything Machias has to offer. This year, she played softball and volleyball, and belongs to the math team, the government club, and the National Honor Society. She used to play basketball and violin, and played clarinet in the school band for eight years but dropped it — “too squeaky,” she said, wrinkling her nose — to focus on voice and guitar.
“I just have to be involved with everything,” she said. “If I don’t I feel left out.”
Yet she’s not a mindlessly determined overachiever. She chose not to take the high school’s two advanced-placement classes because she didn’t think they would suit her learning style.
In her bedroom, a yellow smiley-face backpack hangs by the door, acrylic paintings on the wall: a boldly colored seascape with boat, a still life of a white flower. She pulls out her early graduation present, a cherry-red Fender Stratocaster electric guitar. Most of her possessions will remain in Machias, but the guitars are going.
Moe said she’s ready to move on, though she obviously hasn’t had too much trouble staying busy in the town of 2,500.
“I can’t say I’ve even been restless,” she says. “We’ve always had things to do. If worst came to worst, we’d go down to the video store and rent eight movies and watch them all day.” She added, however, that it would be nice to have a YMCA in town, or to be able to pick up a new pair of jeans without driving two hours to Bangor. And she is eager to meet new people.
Moe has ridden the subway in New York City and visited Quebec City, but has never gone farther afield. Not even, she says in disbelief, not even to Florida. She sees Bates, a short drive to Portland, as a way to dip her toes into urban life without diving into a metropolis like Boston.
“It’s so easy here. You always know how to get everywhere,” she said. So I’m kind of taking things one step at a time. Maybe for graduate school I’ll go out of state and see what it’s like.”
As Moe talks eagerly about her plans, her parents look on with proud but prematurely wistful expressions. It’s as though they just let go of the back of the bicycle seat and are watching their only child wobble down the road away from them for the first time.
“It’s going to be great. Painful, but great,” said Bessie Moe.
“Mom, you can follow me wherever I go,” Moe replied dutifully, not missing a beat.
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