RANGELEY is only just in Maine, a little way east of New Hampshire and an even shorter distance south of the border with Québec. Furthermore, as the café-bar Doc Grant's (tel 207/864-3449) on Main Street makes a great show of telling you, it's equidistant (at 3107.5 miles) from the North Pole and the Equator. That doesn't mean it's on the main road to anywhere, although if you're avoiding the coast altogether you can get here direct from the northern side of the White Mountains. It has always been a resort, served in 1900 by two train lines and several steamships (though now you have to get here on your own), with the main attraction then being the fishing in the spectacularly named Mooselookmeguntic Lake.

This small and very cozy one-street town, nestling amid a complex system of lakes and waterways, serves as base for summer explorations, and in winter as the nearest town to the ski area at Saddleback Mountain . Rangeley also has one unlikely tourist attraction, about halfway along the north side of Rangeley Lake, a mile up a side track off Route 16. The remote Wilhelm Reich Museum at Orgonon (PO Box 687, Rangeley, ME 04970; July & Aug Wed-Sun 1-5pm; Sept Sun 1-5pm; $4) is where Wilhelm Reich eventually made his American home after fleeing Germany in 1933. An associate of Freud in Vienna, who wrote the acclaimed Mass Psychology of Fascism , Reich is best remembered for developing the orgone energy accumulator, which he claimed could create rain and dissipate nuclear radiation. Skeptical authorities focused on the rather unspecific way in which it was said to collect and harness human sexual energy. In a tragic end to his career, Reich was imprisoned after a wayward student broke an injunction forbidding the transportation of his accumulators across state lines, and he died in the federal penitentiary in Lewisberg, Pennsylvania, in November 1957. He is buried here, amid the neat lawns and darting hummingbirds, and his house remains a center for the study of his work.

Rangeley

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