Paul Gregoire grew up in Maine. As a young adult, he motorcycled across the country and eventually circled his way back over Canadian territory and to a homestead just a few miles from the Maine town he grew up in. The following link provides an indexed, segmented, and transcribed version of Paul Gregoire’s Oral History: Paul Gregoire’s Interview
The Story
Back-to-the-lander Paul Gregoire grew up in a small french-speaking community in Augusta, Maine. After graduating from Coney High School, he matriculated to Colby College.
After Colby, to pay off his college loans, he packed up his bags and headed down to New Jersey, where he worked as a milk-truck driver. The hiatus from Maine didn’t last long. “After awhile — before the loans were paid, that was for sure — I looked at Joyce [my girlfriend] and said, “Do you like it here in New Jersey?”Paul says, remembering his return to the state of his childhood. “No, I don’t,” she replied. Two weeks later, they were back in Maine.
Upon returning to Maine, Paul bought a small hunting cabin in West Athens, Maine. The hunting cabin had no heat. “We didn’t know anything,” Paul recalled. “Oh my God we were so cold. We didn’t know that wood had to be seasoned.” To stave off the freezing temperatures, they learned how to build a house and how to heat their home using solely a wood stove. An old Mainer gave Paul his tools, and they taught themselves the practice of chopping, drying, and burning wood. and Paul began to learn about agriculture.
Each week, they would drive to their friends’ apartment in Augusta so they could shower. Eventually, these same friends from Augusta moved to the hunting cabin, kicking off a few decades of what Paul terms “communal type living.” Eventually, Paul and several other homesteaders founded a land trust called Creep City. Creep City became a haven for counter-cultural values. “There was a lot of sex,” Paul says, recalling the influence of the era’s sexual revolution on the culture of Creep City. He also offered some insights on his take on drugs: “Pot was ubiquitious. We grew our own, until the helicopters came. Then we kind of had to back off on that.”
Paul was also the first man at Skowhegan Hospital to be in the hospital room during a birth.
Eventually, Paul moved to Waterville, Maine, where he worked in The Last Unicorn restaurant. With a friend, he began to work with video and recording technology. His experience with tech landed him a job at Colby College. In the mid 2000s, Paul moved with his partner, Tamar, to Cambridge, MA, where he works at the Harvard Law School.