Miles & Miles To Go

That Time Seymour Krelborn Got Lost in Canada

Apr 03, 2025

Editor’s Note: This is a completely true story. I have witnesses.

A Wrong Turn

St. Croix, NB Border Crossing - Photo taken by Wbaron, CC BY-SA 4.0,

As I looked into the eyes of the border patrol agent with my homeland behind me and a foreign country under the wheels of my shiny new silver 1987 Chrysler LeBaron turbo coupe, I wondered how on earth I had arrived in Canada.

The Bad Little Falls Players were doing “Little Shop of Horrors” and I was playing the lead male role, Seymour Krelborn, who was hopelessly in love with the beautiful Audrey.

I was supposed to be arriving at the venue and getting into character. Instead, I found myself looking into the eyes of a Canadian border patrol agent and wondering how I had become lost. I was in that no-man’s land that is neither the State of Maine, nor the Province of New Brunswick.

All of my plays up to that point had been rehearsed and performed at the University of Maine Performing Arts Center. This time, however, we’d been invited to take our current production on the road to Vanceboro, Maine, where we’d be performing and staying overnight, with accommodations arranged for the cast and crew by someone named Betty.

Most of the cast and crew were traveling together in a convoy of cars and a few trucks bringing the set with us, which we would need to re-assemble in the school “auditorium” before the play. Given what we expected to be confined space we had cut the set down to size, but would need to reblock major scenes in the production to get everyone in the right places at the right time. We had our work cut out for us before our afternoon matinee and evening show.

“What is the purpose of your visit to Canada?” asked the border agent.

“I was actually not expecting to get to Canada,” I said. “I’m supposed to be going to Vanceboro, Maine to do a play today, but I must have taken a wrong turn.”

“Vanceboro?” she said, “Well, you just drove through it.”

That, I thought, was not a good sign.

Welcome to Vanceboro

I hadn’t traveled with the group. I went up the night before, stopping some miles short of the Topsfield/Vanceboro area to stay at a creaky-floored but quaint B&B in Princeton, Maine. I left early the next morning for Vanceboro only to find myself at the Canadian border and pondering how I could possibly have driven through a town with enough people to see two shows that day.

Vanceboro, it turned out, was a village of a few hardy souls living in the middle of nowhere, a few hundred yards away from a lightly manned border crossing. To put it into perspective, the town was about twenty-two square miles in size and had a total population of one hundred. That’s about one hundred forty acres per inhabitant. Had we known that at the time, we might not have rebuilt our entire set to take on the road.

“I’m looking for someone named Betty, but I don’t have a last name. I guess I’ll find her at the schoolhouse, wherever that is.”

“That’s Betty’s house over there,” the Canadian border agent said. “This time of day, that’s where she’ll be.”

I never did find out if she was the town manager or the town busybody, but clearly, she was the one in charge, so I turned around and went through the US customs to return, having a laugh with the two U.S. agents, neither of whom lived in Vanceboro.

“She might not be up yet,” one of them said.

I looked at my watch. It was ten a.m.

The other agent pantomimed drinking a beer and winked at me.

I nodded, shrugged my shoulders, and headed towards Betty’s house, feeling like I was in a Heinlein novel.

Betty’s Beers

But Betty was up. She invited me into her 1950s décor Cape Cod home and offered me a Budweiser. I saw that she had five empties sitting on her green-topped stainless steel kitchen table and I wondered how many of them were from last night and how many had been consumed more recently.

“What do the kids around here do for fun?” I asked, trying to seem older than my twenty-one years.”

“They go to the gravel pit,” she said, cracking open another Budweiser.

“So, what they go parking there?”

“Well, no. Everyone goes when they go.”

“What do you mean by everyone?”

“Well, basically everyone from fifteen to about twenty-five. They go up and drink beers.”

“Fifteen?”

“They’re not supposed to drink, but what are you going to do?”

“So a big party then?”

“Ayuh. I mean sometimes a dozen kids at a time.”

I did a quick calculation in my head. If the town had a hundred people. A dozen kids would be everyone between fifteen and twenty-five.

She finished her beer and opened another.

The rest of the cast and crew arrived about ninety minutes later and by then there were nine empties on the table, only one of which had been mine.

The school was a one-room brick schoolhouse neatly divided in two by a folding partition that was opened for the production. There was no auditorium. It was a classroom.

The stage size we had been given was the actual width of the classroom, which meant there was no space around our reconstructed set for entrances and exits, so we spent another hour resizing the set again. Thankfully our set crew had tools with them.

We performed our play in half of a classroom, and I am quite certain that there were more people in our cast and crew than in the matinee audience.

Between scenes, Sandra Sinford, a lovely actress and singer who played my love interest, Audrey, cornered me backstage.

“They said accommodations,” she hissed. “Where?”

“I have no idea,” I whispered.

She was right. There was absolutely no place to accommodate a cast and crew of twenty people for the night. There was no hotel. There was no motel. There was not even a campground where one might pitch a tent.

The attendance at the matinee was insufficient to pay for our fuel to get there, let alone a return trip. Betty suggested that we would probably get a larger audience for the evening showing if we offered refreshments.

Our enterprising director agreed, deciding to hold two intermissions even though the show didn’t call for even one. Seventy people showed up for the evening show due mostly to the hastily scrawled signs with the words “Beer” and “Popcorn” written on them.

The people of Vanceboro are not very vocal in their response to a live performance. The only sound I heard was one girl crying in the audience when I placed the dead body of my lover in the hungry maw of the giant, bloodthirsty, evil plant. I found out later that she was only crying because she had run out of beer. It had nothing at all to do with the performance.

We decided that holding a third show the next day would be fruitless and asked about the accommodations that they had promised. This turned out to be sleeping bags on the floors at Betty’s house. For twenty people.

I considered driving home, but found a threefold reason to stay.:

First, staying in Vanceboro was sort of like seeing an automobile accident: you don’t really want to see it, but you can’t look away. Second, when you are just twenty-one years old and you are the star of the only play production in town, you’re the automatic hero of many young ladies who have never seen a man to whom they are not at least partially related. It only seemed ethically the right thing for me to stay for the sake of my new fans. Third, being the star of the show, at least I got the couch.

It’s good to have perks.

Miles and Miles

It turned out there was a party at Betty’s house every Saturday night. Also every Friday night. And every Tuesday. Most Thursdays too. Wednesdays were for prayer meeting, and Sundays were for church—so those were out.

We were just settling in for a meal of baked beans and franks when a man in his seventies walked through the door carrying two cases of Budweiser.

“This is my husband, Miles,” Betty said.

“Hello, Miles,” we all said in unison, happy to see that more beer had arrived. We were all thirsty for some reason, and we were pleased when he made a second trip to his truck for two more cases.

Soon the Buds were being passed around and I noticed that Betty had taken three for herself and stashed a couple of them in cupboards for safekeeping. She caught me watching her and nodded her head, giving me a knowing smile.

About an hour later, a man in his fifties came through the door, carrying a keg. “Hullo,” he said, huffing and puffing. He set the keg down and wiped his brow with a filthy red handkerchief that almost matched the color of his face.

“This,” said Betty, “is my son, Miles.”

“Hello, Miles,” we all said, smiling inanely.

Soon, plastic cups were being passed around the room, the contents of which were regularly being spilled on sleeping bags.

I sat down between Miles the elder and Miles the younger. “So, you’re Miles the second? Or do you call yourself Junior?”

“Actually, I’m Miles the sixth,” he said between gulps of frothy pilsner.

“I see.” I stared blankly at my empty plastic cup. For some reason, my head started to spin.

Just then, the door opened and a man in his thirties arrived carrying two jugs of what looked like moonshine in milk cartons.

“Hello,” he said. “Name’s Miles.”

“That’s my grandson,” said Betty.

At that moment, I almost went insane.

I looked around, but nobody was the least surprised by these events. We all nodded at Miles and then returned to conversations, beans, hot dogs, and beers as if nothing had happened.

About an hour later, a teenage boy came through the door, trailed by four girls, all of whom were two or three years younger than me, but clearly tagging along to hang out with the college-aged “men” in the play.

The teenager pulled three large bottles of Canadian Lord Calvert whiskey out of a paper bag and set them on the table.

“This is my great-grandson, Miles.”

“Hello, Miles,” we all said stupidly.

Of course, by this point, Betty didn’t need to introduce us. We knew that every man who walked through the door from now until eternity would be named Miles and would somehow be related to Betty.

I was becoming delirious and was just moments from a permanent state of muttering and drooling. I was saved by Sandra. She came and sat next to me on the couch, bearing the gift of a spare Budweiser, which I gratefully accepted.

“You’re pretty popular in Vanceboro, Maine,” she said, eyeing the half dozen girls nearby who were all too young to drink but sloshed anyway. “Do you think they’ll give you a key to the city?”

“I doubt it,” I said, “Vanceboro isn’t a city and I think the only building in town that even has a lock on the door is the liquor store.”

The Curtain Call

Later that evening as people were settling in for the night, I heard our director in the hallway talking with Betty. “We should plan to do it again next year. We’re going to do Les Mis or Phantom,” he said.

“Miles will like that,” she said.

“Which one?”

“Either one.”

I wasn’t the only one who snickered.

We all drifted off (or in some cases, spun off) to sleep perfectly happy with our day and thinking that returning next year was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

We left Vanceboro the next day, but as we put miles between our convoy and Vanceboro, our mass delusion gradually dissipated. By the time we returned home, we knew we would never return to Vanceboro, Maine.

But sometimes, late at night, I wonder if we ever really left.

There is a nonzero chance that I actually went insane in Vanceboro in 1987 and that everything I’ve experienced since has been an ongoing delusion.

Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible. The first seven chapters are available on this website for free.