Hallowell, in Kennebec County, is known for its plethora of antique shops and bars — with almost all the latter offering live music every night. In fact, it’s “a drinking town with an antiques problem,” its citizens proclaim, sometimes soberly.

It’s only 30 miles north of Brunswick, but when I moved from Hallowell to Brunswick, I might have been moving from Mars, considering the amount of trouble I had finding my way in this area.

Full disclosure: I was apparently behind the door when they handed out a sense of direction.

The mere shift in counties proved problematic. Delighted to be invited to my first dinner party, I got MapQuest directions and found my hosts’ street quite easily: Old Stage Road in Bath. How odd, though, that I couldn’t find the right house number!

I stopped and asked for directions. “Oh, that’s on another section of Old Stage,” I was told. “That’s a ways back.” Another section? I’d passed it?

Did MapQuest know about this? I should have asked how far back, of course. After a while I stopped at a house where a bunch of hens were running around the front yard. Literally running. Hens look so comical when they run.

A really nice woman helped me out. Evidently, I was going in the right direction.

“It’s just past Cumberland Farm,” she said. “On your right.”

Terrific! I had noticed a few stretches of fields back there.

“I think I did pass a farm,” I said. “Or maybe a couple.”

For some reason she laughed, as if I’d made a joke. I asked, “But does it have a sign?”

Then she gave me a strange look. “Sure. Big one.”

So I thanked her and proceeded on, figuring that any moment I would see a lane stretching back through verdant fields to a farmhouse. With a big sign. Like at the entryway, two tall posts, and stretching between them a rugged wooden sign, on chains, maybe.

Eventually, I reached what looked like a store and gas station. With a big sign that read: Cumberland Farms.

Oh.

Nomenclature seems to be a general difficulty in this area. Take Route 1. On my first venture to the YMCA in Bath, I went north on Maine Street, turned right, because I knew Bath lay east of Brunswick, and saw the sign: Rte. 1 North.

Oh-oh. Did north mean east or west?

And then of course, the same quandary on the return trip. After I bought a DeLorme Maine Atlas, the light dawned.

Route 1 eventually goes north to Wiscasset and south to Freeport. I devised memory nudges.

BRUNSWICK TO BATH: North is east. Think northeast. Hence, Bath = Iceland. So think icy cold Bath.

And BATH TO BRUNSWICK: South is west. Think southwest. Like (bueno!) El Camino! Brunswick = Mexico.

But coming east on Route 1, if you want to get off at the main section of Brunswick’s Maine Street, make sure you don’t use the exit labeled Brunswick.

No, no, you want the Topsham exit: the ramp on your right just before the huge green bridge, where the sign says “ME-24/US 201 toward Topsham/ Lewiston.”

And don’t depend on maporiented directions. They don’t work in downtown Brunswick, because the words up and down in Brunswick do not mean north and south, as they would on a map. Up, you see, is actually south, because there’s a slight slope upward in the direction of the college at the south end of town.

When people would direct me to find a place “up a few blocks,” I learned to ask: “Up toward Topsham or up toward the college?”

And whichever way you go, you encounter one-way streets. Of course, this leads to all those “No Entry” signs to prevent going the wrong way on these streets.

But as we all know, every solution to a problem can create another problem.

Say you’re tootling along Maine Street, heading for Topsham. No worries about east and west, because you’re obviously heading up (north). But you start to cross that huge green bridge at the north end of town and “whoa!” There’s a sign saying “No Entry.”

The first time I braked for it, I may have caused successive multiple heart failures in back of me before I wondered, “Or is it just slanted wrong, so it looks like it applies to the bridge? In which case I better zoom into action!”

Gradually, you get it. Maybe you even get sharper.

Brunswick is one of the 13 best small towns in the nation, according to Smithsonian Magazine. That implies that Brunswickians are smarter than the average bears. And how did they get this way?

Perhaps their brains have been tuned up for years by the constant exercise derived from making instantaneous translations regarding what their street signs really mean.

Sybil Baker lives in Brunswick.

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