There was a kind of silence in the server rooms back then, the early 2000s—before everything was glossy and clouded, before the dashboards turned the work into cartoons. It was a dry, humming quiet, punctuated by the fans’ slow roar and the blinking of status lights that looked like Morse…

Fifteen years gone, and the Landmark hasn’t changed much — just grown a thicker skin. The wood’s darker, the air heavier with old laughter that long ago burned down to embers. The lights still hang low and tired, throwing a yellow hush over the bottles like a kind of mercy….

I joined this family and their love of Maine late in the game. When I met Susan in the winter of 2014, she already had another trip north booked — probably her tenth — while I was packing for a flight west, bound for Oahu to catch up with an…