I was looking through the real estate section of the paper the other day and had the feeling I was on another planet, or in Massachusetts, which is about the same thing. I was struck by the astronomical numbers pasted underneath pictures of very modest looking Maine houses. It’s not that I’m unaware of what’s been happening to the price of real estate in Maine. It’s just that when you see those numbers right there in the newspaper as bold as brass, it drives the message home quite forcefully.

It got me to thinking about the first house my wife and I bought in the summer of 1971. When we started looking, we gave up on the midcoast right off because those prices were way beyond our budget. So we headed up beyond Belfast, then further to Bucksport and on to Hancock and Washington counties.

In Jonesboro, we came upon a small real estate office in a tidy cape-style house right there by the side of the road.

We went in and met the agent, a pleasant country gentleman named Alva Look, who began showing us pictures of houses for sale in the area. One of the first pictures was of an eight-room house that sat on 12 acres of land located in the town of Cherryfield, about 15 miles south of Jonesport on U.S. Route 1. The asking price for the house and 12 acres was $5,500. That’s not a misprint – the price was really fifty-five hundred dollars.

We told Mr. Look that we’d like to see the Cherryfield property, and so we followed him to the place, a sturdy country house with picturesque gables and a wrap-around porch and big shade trees in front. It didn’t take long before we decided we wanted it, and asked Mr. Look what we should do next. Later, we would learn that you shouldn’t look to buy old Maine houses on beautiful, sunny August afternoons, when everything in Maine looks good.

We dismissed as irrelevant the fact that it didn’t have indoor plumbing or central heat. It had a kitchen sink and sink-drain and a beautifully built privy. Again, in Maine in August, everything looks ideal.

Since no bank would consider financing on the modest domicile that was plumbing and heating challenged, we asked the owner if he’d take $2,000 down and finance the rest. He agreed and a few weeks later it was ours.

I won’t go through all the gory details of our first winter with our woodstoves and our beautifully built privy, but when the spring rains came, we decided maybe we should sell and look for another place.

One night in March, it rained so hard I thought we’d be swept away. The next morning, I opened the cellar door and there were squashes and pumpkins bobbing around near the top of the cellar stairs.

My neighbor, Mr. Flaherty, said the problem was the culvert that ran under the road.

“Your cellar drains into that low spot beside your house and then through the culvert and down the other side. People in your house always made sure that culvert didn’t get clogged with ice,” he said.

I told him that no one had mentioned that to us when I bought the place.

“Well, they should have,” he said.

One ad in the old Maine Times in Topsham and we were getting calls from all over the place. A woman visiting from California came to look at it, liked it and agreed to our asking price of $12,000. By early September we were gone.

I bet you couldn’t touch that place now for less than $100,000, assuming it now has indoor plumbing and central heat.

The moral of the story is: Don’t house shop in Maine in August and don’t ever consider a place that’s plumbing and heating challenged.

John McDonald is the author of five books on Maine, including “John McDonald’s Maine Trivia: A User’s Guide to Useless Information.” Contact him at mainestoryteller@yahoo.com.

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