Steve Brettell : Maine Guide, Captain and Carver
- Brick + Tides
- 5 hours ago
- 6 min read
Driving through Biddeford, you can tell something about a house by how close it sits to the road. The older the house, the less it seems to care about being polite. Steve’s house sits so near the intersection it feels like the road had to adjust its plans. Not the other way around. Steve's house was constructed when the 8th US President was serving, Martin Van Buren.
The workshop is not where you expect it. To reach it, you have to step outside and walk around the rear of the garage. On the morning I visited, January 6th, a light snow from the night before still clung to the ground. The garage is not insulated. We knocked the snow from our shoes, did not bother closing the door behind us, and tracked white prints halfway up the stairs toward his workshop.
Inside of Steve's house, there is a fireplace in the kitchen. The floors are wide and worn. Birds appear throughout the rooms, not displayed like trophies, but resting where they seem comfortable. A screech owl near a window. A grouse on a shelf. A bluebird catching light where morning settles.
Steve will be 70 in June. A bachelor. No kids. Retired, technically. Still living the same life he has lived since 1978.
A Life That Never Split
Steve’s life never split into chapters.
In 1978, Steve became a registered Maine Guide and a licensed boat captain, and he has been moving between woods, rivers, and ocean the same way ever since.
For many people, the thing they loved became something they used to do. A story they tell. A skill they revisit on weekends. For Steve, hunting, fishing, carving, guiding, watching birds, and living with the seasons have always been one continuous motion.
Throughout the year, he works upstairs in his wood shop. When winter settles in, he paints in a small corner of the living room. Above the paint table hangs a deer head. Outside, his truck sits with two sets of binoculars on the dashboard.
He looks for birds the way other people check the time. Without urgency. Without expectation. Simply because that is how his eyes have learned to move.
“This is life,” he said, simply.
The Long Practice
Steve has been carving birds since 1978. He does not say this with pride or nostalgia. He says it the way someone mentions a direction they have always been facing.
Upstairs, birds exist in different states of becoming. Some are finished. Some are waiting. Some are still hidden inside blocks of pine. Decoys meant to touch salt water rest near pieces meant to stay still for decades.
He does not rush light. If the room is wrong, the work stops. Not because he is precious about it, but because after decades of watching birds, he knows when seeing clearly matters more than finishing.
The pine stacked around the shop has been waiting longer than most people realize. Some of it for years. Ends sealed. Grain opened slowly. Nothing hurried into becoming something else.
This is how his days move. Not by schedule, but by readiness.
When people ask him about secrets or technique, he does not protect them. He answers plainly.
Generously. And then he keeps working.
Experience, he knows, cannot be handed off.
What He Did Not Step Into
There was another life once.
After college, Steve was hired by the State of Maine as a game warden. The job stalled before it ever began. State of Maine budget issues stretched the process into years. By the time the call finally came, his hands were already full.
He had started carving his own decoys because he could not afford plastic ones. He was solving a problem, not choosing a career. When the game warden offer arrived, it no longer fit the life he had built around it.
He did not reject the job. He simply did not step into it.
Tide After Tide
For years, carving shared space with another devotion. Steve ran a charter fishing business out of Kennebunkport, seven days a week, often two trips a day. Summer after summer. Tide after tide.
Most of his customers returned year after year.
He retired from charter fishing two years ago. Now he still takes the boat out, but only when conditions feel right. No wind. No cold. No rough water. No need to prove anything.
Knowing when not to go is its own kind of skill.
An Invitation to Look
After we finished making photos, Steve stood near the door and looked outside, the way people do when they are already half somewhere else.
“Do you have time for a 5 minute ride to the coast?” he asked. “We can look for snowy owls.”
I said yes without thinking.
Climbing into his truck, I told Steve it felt as if Arnold Palmer asked me to play a round of golf. He laughed and started the engine.
We drove roads I have been on my entire life. The difference was not the route. It was the way the world appeared from the passenger seat.
I used the second pair of binoculars from the dashboard. Steve pointed as we went. Ducks. Seagulls. Cormorants. Hawks. Things I had passed a hundred times without knowing what they were, or why they mattered.
He talked about snowy owls the way you talk about someone you respect. Not as something to find, but something to understand.
“They’re rarely in trees,” he said. “There are no trees on the tundra.”
We passed a large rock sitting alone in a marsh. He nodded toward it.
“One day,” he said, “I hope I’ll see one sitting right there.”
Later, he said the same thing about a monument on Stage Island. About the tower rising from it.
Not expectations. Just possibilities. Markers he had been carrying in his mind for years.
As he drove, he shook his head slightly and smiled.
“I don’t check the power poles enough,” he said. “If there’s one sitting up there, you’ll hardly notice it.”
That was the lesson, whether he meant it to be or not. Even after a lifetime of looking, the world still requires humility. Still asks you to slow down. Still rewards the quiet places you pass by.
After Steve said it, I noticed every power pole. I've never seen so many power poles in my life.
Some days, nothing appears.
Some days, something rare does.
Driving with Steve felt different because it was different. He was not looking for proof. He was living inside a
conversation he had been having with birds for decades.
Accepting the invitation was never about seeing an owl.
It was about learning how to look.
Five Weeks North
Every year, Steve leaves Biddeford and heads north for weeks at a time. Five weeks. Sometimes six.
The place he stays has no phone. No internet. No noise beyond wind, water, and the occasional movement of something unseen in the woods.
He hunts. He cooks. He carves. He paints. He walks. He watches light move across the lake.
Peaceful is the word he uses. Enough is the one he means.
His life has remained his own.
A Bird That Mattered
One bird carried a different kind of weight.
Four friends had hunted together for years. One of them was dying of cancer. They wanted a carved wooden grouse for him.
By chance, Steve already had one carved and ready to paint. He painted it at camp. Wrote a handwritten note on a scrap of paper about where he was when he made it. He found a shipping box and drove more than a hundred twenty miles to ship it.
The man lived a few months longer than expected.
Steve never framed the story as charity or legacy. It was simply something that mattered, done when it mattered.
No Finish Line
Winter light still dictates the day. The sun drops behind the hill early. When the house falls into shadow, Steve stops working.
Tomorrow, he will drive a couple of miles for coffee. He will keep binoculars on the dashboard. He will look for birds. Some days he will see nothing. Some days he will see something rare.
That has always been enough.
For many people, the thing they loved became something they remember.
Steve never set it down.
Birds wait quietly in different rooms. Outside, the road moves past without asking anything of him.
Steve Brettell will wake up and do what he has done since 1978. Carve and paint birds. Move through woods, fresh water, and salt water with the ease of someone who never needed to be anywhere else.
Some people spend their lives searching for what they love.
Steve never stopped once he found it.
Many thanks to Steve for allowing us to photograph and interview him on January 6, 2026. Normally, we leave a website or social media channel to see more work. But not with Steve - Once he "retired," he removed his website. He also deleted his email.
PS. If you see a white truck pulled off along the Southern Maine coast and someone quietly looking through binoculars, you’ve likely found Steve.
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