Maine
Maine's singing, Scottish mailman contemplates a full-time music career
PORTLAND, Maine — Ross Adam is two people at once.
By day, as a gray-and-blue-clad mailman, he has trudged the same Deering neighborhood route on foot for nearly a decade. He stuffs letters through mail slots, scans bar codes, takes care with the occasional aggressive dog and deals with the weekly flood of Saturday fliers that make his satchel extra heavy.
By night, dressed in his trademark tartan trousers, Adam packs pubs and venues all over southern Maine with his brand of high-energy, multi-instrumental folk music. Adoring fans and strangers alike hoist their glasses and sing at full volume, eager to forget their troubles and revel in the tattooed, Scotland native’s relentless charm.
But late night music gigs and early post office mornings aren’t a friendly fit, and maintaining the balance is nearly impossible.
Increasingly, like many artists with day jobs and successful side hustles, Adam feels like he must make the difficult choice between one or the other.
Adam is a responsible father of two children with college expenses. He’s got a mortgage, a wife and a future retirement fund he’s nearly vested in.
At the same time, he recently released a popular new album and secured a music manager who is helping him get better-paying gigs. He’s about to embark on his first international mini-tour of Ireland, using vacation time.
He has the nagging feeling that at age 36, it’s now or never for becoming a full-time musician.
“You only get one life,” Adam said. “It’s so sacred. You’ve got to be able to look back and be happy with what you did with it.”
Growing up in the small Scottish town of Burntisland, Adam didn’t come from a musical family. He discovered music as an eight-year-old while sheltering from a rainstorm on a family camping trip inside a music store.
There, he picked out the melody to “The Skye Boat Song,” a traditional lullaby his mother sang to him, on a piano. His astonished parents soon bought him a small keyboard.
At 11, he and a friend wandered into a free bagpipe lesson. Adam stuck with it, coming back every Wednesday night, learning the pipes and life lessons from older men he recalls as being “big, tough guys.”
The band was called the Burntisland and District Pipe Band, and Adam was soon traveling, marching and competing with it, all around Scotland and England.
“When I joined that pipe band, it changed who I was,” he said. “It was my whole life. It gave me discipline.”
High school rock bands followed but, at the same time, Adam was fascinated by folk musicians who could get a crowd of distracted pub-goers all singing together. He was especially impressed by Alex Killin of the Kingdom Folk Band.
“He could get everyone singing — old people, young people, even the bartender,” Adam said. “I always thought it was a cool superpower.”
Adam was soon emulating his hero, playing solo gigs and doing whatever it took to get a crowd singing. But, as a young adult, grownup realities also started to take over. He earned a social work degree, worked with at-risk youth, married an American woman, moved to South Portland and started a family.
Crossing the ocean, he left his professional musical ambitions behind. Instead of gigging, Adam got a good job at the post office with decent pay, union benefits and a retirement plan.
But a subsequent divorce and what turned into a new marriage changed all that.
Shortly before the pandemic, he went on a blind date that morphed into a bonfire party with friends. There, Adam pulled out his guitar and entertained the gathering the way he would have, in a pub back home.
“I knew I was going to marry him after about the first 10 minutes,” his blind date and now spouse, Shannon Adam, said.
Enamoured and encouraging, she urged Ross Adam to take his talents seriously and booked him for a St. Patrick’s Day show at a pub. The gig was a success, and his music career took off.
At a recent show at RiRa in Portland, it was standing room only with all eyes and ears on Adam as he commanded the room. Using special, sound-looping pedals, he played guitar, fiddle and banjo at the same time while stomping another pedal creating a drum sound — which made the crowd clap along to the beat.
At one point, wearing a wireless headset microphone, Adam left the stage and asked the rowdy crowd to be quiet while he sang them a tender song about whiskey. Almost like magic, the hushed room stayed silent as he walked among the audience like a revival preacher, singing, patting children on the head and laying his hands on shoulders.
Then, as Adam finished the a capella song, he raised his pint and released the audience with a toast. The crowd burst into whoops and applause while he remounted the stage and got the party going again with traditional Scottish and Irish songs, as well as the hip-hop classic “No Diggity.”
A few days later, on a gray, snowy morning, Adam pulled his postal van up to the sidewalk on Stevens Avenue, and he stepped out of the sliding side door. There was no applause as he started his route, mail satchel slung off one shoulder, his steaming breath hanging in the air.
Adam said he genuinely likes his post office job and cherishes the connections he’s forged.
Down one side street, he found Steve Robnett, standing in his driveway. After handing Robnett his mail, the two chatted for a while. Robnett said he knew all about his mailman’s other life.
“We’ve actually had him play two house concerts here,” he said. “We love Ross.”
Further on, at the Rwanda Bean coffee shop, manager Alexa Kelly said Adam has always been more than just a mailman and helped her as she struggled through a messy divorce.
“He was one of my biggest rocks,” Kelly said, “I didn’t have anyone else in my life who knew what I was going through.”
To this, Adam mostly shrugs.
“You leave a trail wherever you go,” he said, “so I try to be good to people.”
But, as his music career blossoms and takes up more time, Adam has a decision to make. A recent bout of pneumonia exacerbated by exhaustion made it even more clear: one job or the other has to give.
Right now, he’s leaning toward full-time music. There isn’t anything which makes him feel more alive or in the moment.
“There’s nothing like it, even in a small pub. It feels incredible when people sing along. It’s almost like they’re part of the band — it’s magic,” Adam said. “I feel like I was made for this.”
TOPSFIELD, Maine — Jenna Stoddard is not sure where her son will spend his days when he starts preschool next fall.
Sending him to East Range II School would be convenient and continue a legacy. Stoddard lives just down the street and her husband graduated eighth grade there in 2007, one in a class of three. Topsfield’s population has dropped since then. The school now has five students, two teachers, few extracurricular activities and nobody trained to teach music, art, gym or health.
Stoddard’s son is too young for her to worry about that now. But the school may not be open by the time he is ready to go. Topsfield, a town of just 175 residents, will vote on whether to close the school on April 30. If it closes, the boy would likely be sent to preschool up to 30 minutes away in Princeton or Baileyville.
“That’s a pretty fair distance for a kid, a 4-year-old, who is now on a bus all by himself,” she said. “[If] school starts at [7:45 a.m.], what time is the bus picking 4-year-olds up here? And what time is he going to get home at?”
Topsfield is an extreme example of how an aging, shrinking population and rising property taxes are forcing Maine towns to make difficult choices about their community institutions. Just over a dozen people came to a Wednesday hearing on the idea of closing the school. The crowd was mostly in favor of it.
“It is emotional to close the school in a town,” Superintendent Amanda Belanger of the sprawling Eastern Maine Area School System said then. “But we do feel it’s in the best interest of the students in the town.”
Teacher Paula Johnson walked a reporter through the building, which is small by Maine standards but cavernous for its five students. It has four classrooms, a small library, and a gymnasium. There is also a cook and a custodian for the tiny school.
A hallway trophy case serves as a reminder of when the school was big enough to field basketball teams. Topsfield’s student population has never been large, but the school’s population has dropped dramatically over the past few years. It had 25 students in 2023, with many coming from nearby Vanceboro, which closed its own school in 2015.
As the student population dwindled, the cost of sending students to Topsfield climbed. With fewer students to defray the costs, Vanceboro officials realized they would be paying $23,000 per student by the last school year. So they opted to direct students to nearby Danforth, where tuition was only $11,000 per student.
East Range lost seven students from Vanceboro, bringing its enrollment below 10. Under Maine law, that means the district may offer students the option to go elsewhere. Parents of the remaining students in grades 5 through 8 took the option and sent their kids to Baileyville. This school began the year with eight students; three have since pulled out.
In Topsfield, Johnson teaches four of the remaining five, holding lessons for pre-K through second grade in one classroom. Another one down the short hallway is home base for the other teacher. She focuses on the school’s lone fourth grader and occasionally teaches one of Johnson’s first graders, who is learning at an advanced level.
The other teacher, who holds a special education certificate despite having no students with those needs, plans to leave at the end of the school year. If the school stays open, that will leave Johnson responsible for educating Topsfield’s youngest students, though the school will need to budget for a part-time special education teacher just in case.
After 11 years at the school, Johnson is not sure what she will do if voters shut it down.
“We’ll see what happens here,” she said.
Topsfield’s school board, which operates as a part of the Eastern Maine Area School System, is offering its residents a choice: continue funding the school only for students between preschool and second grade at an estimated cost of $434,000 next year or send all students elsewhere, which would cost less than $200,000.
At Wednesday’s hearing, the attendees leaned heavily toward the latter option. Deborah Mello said she moved from Rhode Island to Topsfield years ago to escape high taxes.
“It’s not feasible for the town of Topsfield,” she said. “We cannot afford it and it’s not like the children don’t have a school to go to.”
Others bemoaned the burden of legal requirements for the small district, including the need to provide special education teachers even if they don’t need one. Board members also mentioned that in 2028, the district will become responsible for educating 3-year-olds under a new state law. That adds another layer of uncertainty to future budgeting.
“It sounds like we’ve been burdened something severely by this program and that program by the Department of Education, to the point where a small school can’t even exist,” resident Alan Harriman said.
“And that’s been happening for a long time,” East Range board chair Peggy White responded.
Daniel O’Connor is a Report for America corps member who covers rural government as part of the partnership between the Bangor Daily News and The Maine Monitor, with additional support from BDN and Monitor readers.
BANGOR, Maine (WABI) – Good morning and Happy Sunday everyone. Skies are cloudy with fog across much of Maine this morning. Rain has entered locations along the interstate and to the northwest. Temperatures vary from the upper 30s to mid 40s. Winds are out of the SE between about 5-15 mph.
Today will be a wet and impactful day with rain and even snow anticipated as a large cold front passes through Maine. Skies will be cloudy with plenty of fog lasting through the morning. Rain will expand across the interstate by the late morning hours, reaching Downeast locations by midday/the early afternoon.
By the early to midafternoon, temperatures will start to drop across northwestern locations as the cold front passes through Maine. This will result in rain turning over to mixed precipitation and eventually snow across the Western Mountains, Moosehead region, and Northern Maine. Rain will continue steadily and at times heavily across the foothills, Interstate, Coast, and Downeast. A few thunderstorms are even possible closer to the coast.
Snow will expand across areas to the northwest of the interstate this evening, reaching all the way down to Interior Midcoast communities, the Bangor region, and Interior Downeast areas by sunset and into the start of the night. Precipitation will taper off across Western Maine shortly after sunset, before exiting the entire state around midnight tonight. High temps today will vary from the low 40s to low 50s with SSE to NW gusts reaching 20-25 mph.
Snowfall totals will vary under 2 inches across Western, Northern, and Interior Downeast locations. However, a few pockets of 2-4 inches are possible, mostly in higher elevations across the mountains. Rainfall totals will accumulate around a half inch to three quarters of an inch when all is said and done.
Precipitation will be out of Maine by midnight tonight, with cloudy conditions giving way to mostly clear skies by sunrise. Lows overnight will dip back below freezing across much of the state, from the low 20s to mid 30s tonight, so cover up any plants or flowers outside. WNW gusts will reach 20-25 mph. A Small Craft Advisory is expected offshore.
Skies will be partly to mostly sunny across the interstate and coast on Monday morning. However, by the late morning to midday hours, clouds will build with a few scattered rain and snow showers in spots. Conditions will remain on the cloudier side in the afternoon before clearing up around sunset into the start of Monday night. Highs will be chilly on Monday, from the low 30s to upper 40s. WNW to SW gusts will be a bit breezy, reaching 20-25 mph, which will add to the wind chill factor.
High pressure will build on Monday night, remaining overhead on Tuesday. Skies will be sunny in the morning, becoming partly to mostly sunny in the afternoon. Highs will remain cool, in the 40s across the board with North to SW gusts only reaching 15-20 mph.
A weaker low-pressure system could bring showers across Maine on Wednesday and Thursday. There is a bit of model uncertainty on exactly when it will impact Maine. The GFS has impacts on Wednesday, while the EURO, GRAF, and GDPS models have most of the impacts on Thursday. We will continue to monitor this system and potential impacts. All it looks to provide as of now are cloudier skies and rain showers, with some snow shower chances farther to the North.
By Friday and Saturday, conditions are trending on the drier side with sunshine and average temperatures returning to the forecast.
SUNDAY: Highs from low 40s to low 50s. Cloudy with AM fog. Rain becoming widespread throughout the day, turning over to snow to the north & west during PM. SSE to NW gusts reach 20-25 mph.
MONDAY: Highs from low 30s to upper 40s. Partly to mostly sunny early. Developing clouds with scattered rain/snow showers by midday/afternoon. WNW to SW gusts reach 20-25 mph.
TUESDAY: Highs throughout the 40s. Sunnier AM. Partly to mostly sunny PM. North to SW gusts reach 15-20 mph.
WEDNESDAY: Highs from low 40s to low 50s. Mostly cloudy with a few rain showers. Few AM snow showers possible North. SSE to SSW gusts reach 20-25 mph.
THURSDAY: Highs from mid 40s to mid 50s. Cloudier skies with rain showers possible. Some AM snow showers possible North. NW gusts reach 20-25 mph.
FRIDAY: Highs from upper 40s to mid 50s. Partly cloudy. NNW gusts reach 20 mph.
Copyright 2026 WABI. All rights reserved.
Editor’s note: This story was originally published in September 2022.
When it comes to Maine hiking, summiting Katahdin is the ultimate achievement.
Maine’s tallest mountain stands at 5,269 feet, and there are a number of different trails hikers can take to get up and down Katahdin. And while some are harder than others, none are easy.
But the views are incredible.
Whether it’s the rugged terrain of the Knife Edge or the vast landscape of the 200,000 acres that compose Baxter State Park below, here’s a look at what it’s like to climb Katahdin.
Hunt Trail
Abol Trail
Chimney Pond Trail
Cathedral Trail
Saddle Trail
Northwest Basin Trail
Knife Edge
Tablelands
South Peak
Hamlin Peak
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