The Boston Globe: WHERE TIME MOVES MORE SLOWLY

Author:  William A. Davis

CENTER LOVELL, Maine - Some years ago, a National Geographic article enumerated the most beautiful lakes in the world. One of them was Kezar Lake.

Nobody around here was at all astonished. Kezar Lake is not a great body of water - just a little over seven miles long - but is a translucent bowl tucked into the green hills of western Maine, shaded by giant firs, rimmed by a necklace of sandy beaches, and fed by icy streams running off the slopes of the White Mountains, which look down on it.

This is a resort area and people fish and swim in Kezar Lake, relax, write, and paint beside it. (Artists and writers have been coming here since the turn-of-the century, but no great Provincetown or Lenox-like fuss has been made about them.) Evergreen Valley, best known as a ski area but actually a four seasons resort and recreation complex, is at the lake's northern tip.

Kezar Lake is not undiscovered, but neither is it over used. The lake remains - like the corner of Maine it graces - a quiet, quite beautiful place where nature rather than man appears to have the edge in dominence. It is probably the mountains that makes this seem so.

New Hampshire is thought of as "The White Mountains State" and the principal peaks are there, but the range straddles the border and the White Mountains National Forest actually extends into Maine for about a dozen miles. There are some people, most of them admittedly State-of-Mainers, who contend that the view of the mountains from the Maine side is far superior to that from the other, or New Hampshire side.

It is certainly a mind-expanding experience to stand beside a lake like Kezar and look beyond at the line of mountains marching across the horizon, below them a thick swath of contrasting evergreen, and beneath that a gleaming disc of water mirroring everything else.

Mountain streams feed Kezar, which in turn empties into the Saco River, another dominent physical feature of the local landscape. Maine has great rivers - the Kennebec, Androscoggin, and Penobscot among them - streams that rush, roar, and foam their way to the sea, as if still boasting about the Paul Bunyan like exploits of their logging heydays. The Saco is not at all like that.

It moves very slowly over a shallow and sandy bed, making its lackadaisical way in a series of wide, lazy- S's toward an eventual union with the Atlantic at Biddeford Pool. Every town within sight of the mountains seems to have a piece of it, some have several.

The Saco is a friendly river, nice to children and fond of families, all off whom make good use of it. The banks are lined with local swimming holes, and in summer the surface is usually dotted with canoes and rubber tires rafts. Since for much of its length, the average depth of the Saco in mid- summer is rarely above an adult male's waist, it is the ideal place for a novice to learn the delicate art of balancing oneself in a canoe.

Many canoists and rafters start out in North Conway, N.H. about a half hour's drive away. There is a canoe and kayak outfitter called Saco Bound, just east of Center Conway and canoes can also be rented from Canal Bridge Canoes in Fryeburg.

The out-of-the-way feeling that this section of Maine conveys is not so much a relic of the past as it is a portent of the future. The US Interstate highways which now carry most visitors into Maine run along the coast and up through the center of the state. The railroads, which used to go right through northwest Maine, linking Boston and Portland with Montreal and Quebec, have abandoned the region. (Also gone, is the network of narrow gauge lumber company railroads which veined the woods, carrying out logs but also serving lakeside resorts and fishing camps.)

The old-fashioned flavor is strong here, and likely to remain so. Bridgeton, for instance, is known for its many summer camps, most of them founded in the vibrant decade from 1900 to 1910. They tend not to change much, and the parents who send their children there like it that way - and so did their parents.

In the 1940's, this writer spent some happy childhood vacations at a cottage colony on Lovewell's Pond in Fryburg. I went back not long ago, with some trepidation. It was needless: Everything was just the same, from the faded green shingles of the buldings right down to the battered truck tire dangling over the water from the limb of a gnarled fir tree. Nothing had been taken down, nothing had been gussied up. People seemed surprised that I was surprised.

There are a number of pleasant inns and guest houses in the area where time may not have stopped, but it definitely seems to be moving at a slower pace than elsewhere.