I am sitting on the third floor of  Camden, Maine’s lovely public library, looking out on a view of sun-sparkled water and trees flashing green-to-red-to-orange-to-yellow-to-bare in a display not quite neon-sign quick, but close. The Poptech conference gets going in earnest here tomorrow, an annual fall parade of inspired ideas, sobering realities and copious thinking, with round-robin lunches, acoustically-challenged parties and plenty of traipsing up and down the long stairways of this small town’s signature opera house.

Some of the best connections seem to be made on those stairways, especially on days when the weather inevitably turns cold and spitty and attendees instinctively huddle into a mass, the brilliant-and-accomplished shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of us, waiting for the doors to open. Layered in polartec and flannel, wearing hats and gloves pulled from summer storage for the trip, there is a comradery. Inside, the discussions are about problems mostly far away. Outside, we are all ducking the same fierce wind…

And maybe that’s the “why” of Camden – something I have puzzled over for a year now. This is simply not such an easy place to get to for most of us. In fact, it is a schlep with a choice of noisy puddle-jumper plane from Boston, or a car rental and nearly four-hour drive.

Camden is also somewhat remote digitally. Connectivity is a hit-and-miss affair in these parts (hence the day at the library). But even that has its upside. The only choice is to take Ram Dass‘ dictum to heart: “Be here now.”

Dark hair, dark eyes, black jeans, scarf just so, slightly dissatisfied expression and a brisk pace that makes it look like you know where you’re going: Expect to be asked for directions early and often on the streets of Rome.

As long as I kept the dialog to “buon giorno,” “uno” (when pointing to a particularly remarkable pastry), “grazie” (when buying said pastry) and “sera” (turns out “buona” is optional), the illusion was perfect. I was Roman. So what if I had only the sketchiest of mental maps of the city and came across the Trevi Fountain by chance? Or that my  concrete-coddled American legs were no match for the Eternal City’s infernal paving stones? I was Roman enough to have paid my respects at Julius Caesar’s surprisingly humble tomb at the Forum:

Still, two or three times a day, someone would burst my bubble with a babble of Italian, forcing me to admit that I was but a clueless American, likely more lost than they. That was until I met the undaunted Eva, who replied that she was Dutch and spoke English. She  asked one of the few questions for which I actually had an answer: “Do you know the way to the Piazza Navona?” “Si, si! Just heading that way myself…”