SPECIAL REPORT: Local legend Don Cote, 93 - warden, ranger, guide, author - faces eviction

'I'm not leaving,' said the first full-time code enforcement officer in Mount Desert

SOMESVILLE, Sept. 12, 2023 - At a time in life when he should be celebrated as an eminence gris on Mount Desert Island, Don Cote instead is facing potential homelessness in 18 days.

He may be the only person who’s ever held the roles of warden, ranger, code enforcement officer and conservationist on MDI - a grand slam of public service. And there were the felicitous detours - successful author, star of a national TV commercial, part-time lobster fisher - to tie the bow around what a long, strange journey it’s been for the 93-year-old.

In February 1976, Cote and his wife Bea were credited with rescuing four boys whose car plunged through the ice on Long Pond.

The Bar Times reported, “Fortunately, said Mrs. Cotes, her husband had the presence of mind to pack a long plank and ladder in their station wagon before taking off for the scene of the accident.”

The four young men - David Butler, George Jellison Jr., Brian Harkens and Clyde Porter - were standing on the top of their car and were able to reach the ladder brought out by the Cotes,, according to the Times.

Don Cotes had been named in 1957 as warden of the Mount Desert Island District, said to be the “most difficult district in the state,” according to the chief warden, because of the deer population. Crop damage and car collisions were “excessive.”

In 1960, Cote bought 20 acres of land at the head of Long Pond from Morris Somes, a descendant of Abe Somes, the first non-native to settle here.

Cote sold off lots as he needed, to generate cash. But he also started building houses - nine in all in the “Pond’s End” area including the cottage on Pretty Marsh Lane from which he is being evicted at the end of the month. “I should be wealthy but I'm not wealthy,” he said.

“But I’m not leaving,” he said without equivocation. County sheriffs will need to come and drag him out, he said. A friend said Cote intended to “die in that house.”

Recently he lost his battle in front of the Maine Supreme Court in which he claimed he had a “lifetime tenancy” as part of the sale of his house and cottage in 2017. The last few years have seen a blur of legal maneuvers some of which - “mediation” for instance - he did not fully understand, he said.

His life since 2017 has been a grind from the unrelenting pressure from the owner to force him to move, said Cote, who takes medication to sleep. A message left for the owner by the QSJ was not returned.

His proudest life achievement was his book, “We Were Wardens Together,” which Dick Broom of the Islander called “an engaging and entertaining story of a truly remarkable life.”

The book “is a large-format, hardcover book that is exceptionally well written, handsomely designed and illustrated with scores of old photos,” Broom wrote in December 2011. Sherman’s Book Shop in Bar Harbor has five copies.

Broom wrote that in 1967, the producers of television commercials for Camel cigarettes were on MDI looking for someone who had “a fisherman’s lope and looked like a resident of Maine.

“After three days they were about to give up when someone suggested Don Cote. They called him, met him, liked him and cast him in one of their ‘I’d Walk a Mile for a Camel’ ads.”

WABI.TV reported that Maine bookstores had trouble keeping the book in stock. Cote said it had three printings and sold 500 copies.

The book could have been entitled, “A Maine Life.” It has an important place in my personal library of local books, including Ralph Stanley’s “The Stanleys of Cranberry Isle,” Thomas F. Vining’s “Cemeteries of Cranberry Isles and the towns of Mount Desert Island.” and Henry A. Raup’s “Place Names of Mount Desert Island and the Cranberry Isles, Maine.”

Bea Cote was killed in an accident in 1983. Cote remarried years later but that ended in a divorce.

In the mid-Eighties, Code served six years as Mount Desert’s code enforcement officer. He turned down the select board’s pleadings to continue.

“I didn’t like telling other people what to do with their homes.”