The name on the sign

Guy Butman Howe, Jr.

Guy Butman Howe, Jr. was Captain Guy to everyone on the water: the name stitched on his shirt, the wooden launch at the float, the big cruiser he ran with a beard and a pointed finger. Family and friends went out with him and came back to the house for dinner.

The house was The Apple Trees, on a quiet cove of the Boothbay shore, with a dock, a lawn that ran to the rocks and a station wagon in the drive in the earliest photographs. Three generations grew up on that dock. When Guy died in 2001 the family set a bronze plaque into the ledge above it: may you have fair winds and following seas.

Guy’s Inn is what the family named the old Greenleaf building when they came back to the harbor to buy it: ten rooms, a reading room with the family photographs on the wall, a bar, a sky deck, and the same welcome Guy gave everyone who stepped onto his float.