A Peaceful, Easy Feeling

His childhood scarred by a traumatic event, Patrick Sayer moved to rural Maine as a young man in search of a simple life close to nature. As he puts it in his story: "The guy I call me lives in central Maine, in the sticks. Or since the nearest town, Milligansett, qualifies pretty well as the sticks, you could say I live outside the sticks."

But now, more than twenty years down the line, he finds himself embroiled in a hateful battle in a one-industry town. Workers at the paper mill have gon...