The Cloud 9
Most will remember with some fondness the Cloud 9 Motel and restaurant in Township 31, just west of the Wesley line going to Bangor. We can date the above photo by the vehicles, especially the classic VW bus which can only bring back memories of long hair, Bob Dylan and the 60’s counterculture of love, peace, pot and opposition to the Vietnam War. The Cloud 9 also marked the beginning of a 25 miles section of the airline which remained wilderness even into the 1960’s. The footprint of humanity was largely absent on this lonely stretch of road except for the appropriately named Wilderness Lodge.
Local legend tells us that wolves infested these 25 miles of forest and hills thus discouraging the early settlers of the St. Croix Valley from establishing a road directly from St Croix Valley to Bangor. The longer shore route through Machias and Ellsworth was the only way to reach Bangor until one day in the 1850’s some Calais folks convinced George Spratt, an intrepid liveryman with a stable in Calais, to try driving a team from Calais to Bangor through Wesley. From Calais to Wesley there was a road of sorts but between Wesley and Beddington only a few narrow trails. From Beddington an established road connected to Bangor. Spratt was successful in pushing his team through this wilderness and the Airline was born.
The Cloud 9 was especially busy during hunting season
In the early 1960’s the Cloud Nine became a popular stop for locals and visitors to the area. It was the last stop for gas and other necessary provisions on the way to Bangor and the first sign of civilization on the eastward journey after Beddington. John Dudley relates the Cloud 9 history best:
The Airline was tarred from end to end by the late 1950s and Dick Sullivan of TWP 31 saw an economic opportunity in the increased traffic. Tourists had started using this short cut from Bangor to the Maritimes and the forest industry had stopped river drives so that wood was hauled from the forest to the mills by trucks. All these people passing by would need items and food. Dick put up a building south of the road and opened his business in late 1959 or early 1960.
Dick had a small construction business and apparently preferred working out of doors to store clerking. In January 1964 he sold the business and 12 ½ acres east of his house to Philip and Cora Durling of Wesley.
In April 1969, the Durlings sold to Nicholas and Lucy Metta of Billerica, Massachusetts. In 1971 they incorporated the business as Cloud 9 and sold a house lot on the northeast corner to Jerry and Patricia Torrey. And in June 1976 Mettas sold Cloud 9 to Leland “Pat” and Norma Day of Wesley. The deed specified store, lunchroom, motel, contents, and a reference to water from that spring on the Dodge place. Pat had a wood trucking business; the motel was busy with hunters who returned annually; the lunchroom had a steady business from locals and travelers on the Airline.
But times change. Fewer local men were involved in trucking wood and the big companies got their fuel in Bangor. Wood harvesting jobs became highly mechanized meaning fewer men were needed, as a result people moved away from the area. The Airline was rebuilt, becoming a high speed through highway; travelers were interested in their destination, not the trip or anything in between. And the owners were growing older.
The Days leased the business to Sam and Mabel Roberts in the later 90s, Sam and Norma were siblings. Eventually Pat and Norma closed the business. Their heirs sold the land and buildings to Bob Cousins who took the buildings down in 2015. He plans to use the gravel that the glacier left ten thousand years ago.
Norma Day in the window of the store and restaurant 1995
The most interesting owner of the Cloud 9 was certainly Norma Day, seen sitting in the window of the store in 1995 when the state was engaged in a major reconstruction of the highway near Cloud 9. For 150 years the Airline to the west of the Cloud 9 had wound in sharp curves around what was known as Breakneck Hill, one the major obstacles overcome by George Spratt in his pioneering trip from Calais to Bangor in the 1850’s. Many will recall the Gypsy Wagon gift shop on one of these curves. The state in 1995 was taking out the curves by going directly over Breakneck Hill. The road over the hill is now a long stretch of good highway with passing lanes on both sides of the hill but during the reconstruction it was a nightmare.
In a 1995 article in the Portland Press Herald Norma told the paper:
Norma Day for Portland Press Herald article1995
They’re ruining it she charges. “It’s losing all its character. It had a life of its own, unique, and interesting. Now they straightened it out and flattened it out and prettied it up. It’s going to be just another road.”
From Beddington, the airline snakes through the vast middle of Washington County to Wesley. Its famed Cloud 9, a cramped little store with a snack bar and motel outback, is an island of soda and chips and a sea of construction clutter, dump trucks, steam rollers, trailers, and pickups.
Norma also gave her uncensored opinion to Bangor Daily News Columnist Kent Ward as reported in an article he wrote in 1995.
Kent Ward Bangor Daily News 1995:
Amateur hour on Airline.
I see by Thursdays paper where some tourist from Pennsylvania, in a wicked big hurry to get from Calais to Bangor, has taken exception to the states roadbuilding practices on Route 9, affectionately known by locals as the Airline because any damn fool knows it’s better to fly over it than drive it. In a letter to the editor the man wrote that he had traveled 3,500 miles on vacation through six states and provinces and had encountered highway construction in every one of them. But nowhere had he come across such a horror show as on our beloved Highway From Hell or, in this case, Highway TO Hell, seeing as how the poor fellow was outbound from Paradise to the Lower 47 when he encountered problems. For mile after terrible mile the surface alternated between muddy and slippery and dangerous or dusty and all but invisible …and dangerous, he wrote, to which any true Mainer conditioned not to expect too awfully much out of any drive between Calais and Bangor even by way of Fort Kent might reply, Ayuh. So, what’s your point? There were no flag people, no alternative bypasses, and no prior warning of the disaster ahead, the writer whined. Immense projects are underway across the Northeast and the Atlantic provinces. All were well-planned and minimally disruptive to traffic and safety. All except in Maine.
In Maine it’s the Amateur Hour, this uptight tourist wrote. Well. If Piqued in Pennsylvania thinks traversing the Airlines 88 miles of wilderness at the height of the summer construction season is a horror show he ought to try it in the dead of winter sandwiched between overloaded pulp trucks in a raging snowstorm, with visibility backed up to the hood ornament. It’s an undertaking guaranteed to make a guy forget about an alternative bypass and go straight for the full-service heart transplant. Reconstruction presently under way at Wesley and Crawford will make the run less of an extreme sport and more like a drive in the park.
When the job is done, those 88 miles shouldn’t seem like more than 86, tops. I rang up Norma Day, the plain-speaking proprietor of the Cloud 9 Motel at Wesley, to get her reaction to the Pennsylvanians letter in the morning paper. I think it’s a bunch of crap, she replied. Gee, Norma, don’t beat around the bush, I said. Come right out and say what’s on your mind, dear.
I don’t know what this guy’s problem is, she said. Maybe he was having a bad hair day. Just how is the highway going to improve if they don’t work on it? I don’t like all of the mess it is creating around here, either, but I sure do love the money that the construction workers are leaving at my motel. A long-time Airline booster, Day does not have a whole lot of patience with those who think Route 1 is the only jewel in the state’s highway crown. Last spring, she also wrote a letter to the editor about the Airline, but unlike the motorist from Pennsylvania who pessimistically saw the glass half-empty, she optimistically saw it ultimately as half-full.
In this spirit, she wrote- “It must be the time for the headlines from Down East to shout about 99 Reasons To Travel Route 1 in an attempt to discourage motorists from driving the Airline. For years, we have been here on Route 9, dying a slow death. Business is poor, the Canadians are staying home, and we talk of big fishes eating little fishes… “
Still, the nine Airline communities from Eddington to Woodland continue to cater to travelers, she pointed out, adding- “We’ve been in this mess for almost 20 years, but were hanging in and hoping things will get better with the road improvements and scenic turnoffs. “
Come fall, take a ride over this beautiful 88 miles of wilderness. I think you may be impressed… An autumn ride down the Airline at the peak of the foliage -season with a pit stop at the Cloud 9 Motel for a cup of coffee with Norma Day are two Amateur Hour acts that would be tough to follow, no doubt about that. Tell her the Old Dawg sent you and you may con her out of a free one. Then again, you may not.
Kent Ward, a regular NEWS columnist, lives in Winterport.
The Cloud 9 continued operating into the early 2000s. In October 2002 the Portland Press Herald reported:
The Cloud Nine store on the airline always a hospitable entertaining assignment during moose season, registered 45 with numbers favoring the October week.
John Dudley says the last hurrah for Cloud 9 was the filming of part of the movie Anniversary on site. I have hit a stone wall in our research, finding no movie of that name which could have been filmed in part at the Cloud 9.
Only the sign remains
All that remains of the Cloud 9 is the sign which seems as indestructible as the legends about the Airline wolves.