n many ways, Madawaska High School and Trinity School could not be further apart. The former is a public community school in a small, northern Maine mill town along the banks of the St. John River. The latter is a private preparatory school in an upscale neighborhood on New York City's Upper West Side. The Madawaska school is a rectangular, blond brick building surrounded by a gravel parking lot; Trinity's gray stone edifice could pass for another fashionable apartment building on its tree-lined street were it not for the school name engraved above the entrance. Madawaska's athletic teams play on fields that offer panoramic views of southern New Brunswick; Trinity teams play on artificial turf on the roof of their building. But these two schools have one thing in common. Both supply Colby with top students. In the span of a few weeks last fall, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Parker Beverage visited Madawaska and Trinity, as well as several other schools in Aroostook County and in New York, during trips that showcased the challenges and successes of Colby's recruiting efforts. How does the College attract sons and daughters of rural Mainers as well as children of Wall Street executives? Spend a few days on the road with Beverage and you begin to see. Route 11 is a hard road. It swoops and swirls, rises quickly, bottoms out. Every 10 miles or so you meet a car, or, more often, a logging truck, teetering ominously around a corner or over the crest of a hill as it fights the momentum of its load, straddling the center line. Interspersed along the highway's path between Bangor and the Canadian border are a sprinkling of outposts just big enough to warrant spots on the map--Sherman Station, Knowles Corner, Winterville. It is fair to suppose that Route 11 is not on the itinerary of most college admission representatives. And it certainly is not the kind of road upon which one would expect to encounter the dean of admissions from a top-20 college. Unless that dean is Parker Beverage. Beverage has been navigating the route for many years to visit high schools in small border communities in extreme northern Maine. Far from considering such journeys hardship duty, he looks forward to them, because at the other end of that long road are talented, hard-working students who may be members of a future Colby class. Beverage's three-day swing through northern Maine included stops in Fort Kent, Fort Fairfield, Limestone, Caribou, Presque Isle, Houlton and Madawaska. After an early morning stop at Bangor his first day out, he began the long drive up Route 11, catching an occasional glimpse of Mount Katahdin, its head in the clouds. Three hours into the journey, he stopped in Ashland to refuel and eat. Options were limited; in fact, there was only one--Lil's, a square, squat roadside cafe surrounded by mud-caked pickups. Beverage ordered the specialty, shepherd's pie, and let the waitress talk him into a bowl of Grape Nuts pudding for dessert. He enjoyed the reverie of the midday crowd, mostly men in ballcaps with insignias of agricultural companies. "The people in this part of the country are wonderful," he said after getting back on the road. "They're really salt of the earth." The remainder of the day was consumed by a visit to Fort Kent, where both teacher Owen R. Haley '58 and the guidance counselor, Garland Caron, have strong Colby connections. Caron sent two daughters, Vickie '88 and Kellie '92, to Colby, and Haley's daughter Kristen is a first-year student, following the path of her sister, Laurie '87. Beverage sat in Caron's office as Haley leaned in the doorway and the three men chatted casually. "Kristen loves it down there," said Haley. "Seems like all of the students we send you do well." Fort Kent has provided Colby several outstanding students in recent years, including Kathie Pooler '94, who is currently studying medicine at Johns Hopkins University, and Traci Marquis '92, now a student at Dartmouth medical school. Beverage says this points out why statistics do not always indicate the quality of Colby's relationship with a particular high school. "Fort Kent is a good example of a school where we may only get one or two students every couple of years. But usually they are number one or number two in their class," he said. It was late in the afternoon when the visit was completed, and Beverage drove to Madawaska to spend the night. He dined in Edmundston, Madawaska's sister city across the river, picked up a pint of Ben & Jerry's ice cream at Bob's Neighborhood Store and settled in at his room at the Gateway Motel to watch a Mariners and Indians playoff game. The next day's itinerary was more typical--four schools along 40 miles of the border, beginning in Madawaska and ending in Limestone. At all of the schools, guidance counselors spent a few minutes catching up on new developments at Colby, then a handful of students gathered to listen to Beverage. He gave a general overview of the College, describing new construction projects like the Olin Science Center, talking about faculty and their rapport with students and touching briefly on extracurricular activities and off-campus opportunities. At the Maine School of Science and Mathematics in Limestone, a magnet school for the state's most gifted students, Beverage held an engaging conversation with eight students who assembled haphazardly in, on and around classroom desks. Among the group was Alicia Sears, a 15-year-old senior from Alexander. Nicholas Watson, an early decision applicant from Bar Harbor, told Beverage that he chose Colby because of its economics faculty. These students, because of their access to advanced placement courses and an environment that values academic achievement, are highly sought after, Beverage says. If Colby can establish a foothold here, he says, the school could become a valuable source of students for Colby in the future.