In a narrow, windowless office with dark walls and fluorescent lights in the basement of an old building in Hallowell on the banks of Maine's Kennebec River, about a dozen men and women – both chipper and observant – listened intently Tuesday as Trina Olson reviewed the morning lesson: "Don't try to respond to everything ... smile ... tell your story ... it's your credentialing."

Olson's gestures convey a sense of urgency. She points, she underscores, she emphasizes what "you" have to do and what "we" have to do.

In just a few short days, the goal for this office, the Central Maine office of the No on 1 campaign, will be to dial up 4,390 people and knock on 17,211 doors. They are specific numbers that somebody has calculated are necessary to get out the no vote in this area on November 3. That's when Mainers will vote on Question 1: "Do you want to reject the new law that lets same-sex couples marry and allows individuals and religious groups to refuse to perform these marriages?"

After the review session is over and everyone disperses to other parts of the headquarters, a woman in her 60s comes to the door of one of the smaller offices – one with a window, but it's a gray day. The woman, who declined to give her name, said someone at the office called to recruit her as a volunteer.

"I told him, 'I don't think I'm on your side,'" she tells the several volunteers gathered there. There's a subtle but distinct drop to silence in the room. Jacob McClain, a 28-year-old waiter from Cleveland, Ohio, looks up at her earnestly. He was due to go back to Ohio last weekend but decided to stay to the end. This is his first time working on a campaign but watching the loss of Proposition 8 last year in California hit him really hard. He doesn't want to wake up November 4 this year and think, "what else could I have done?"

"I'm doing all I can," he said.

McClain has been put in charge of making sure that the central office has at least 900 volunteer shifts filled with real people during the course of the campaign. He stares at the woman in the doorway and puts his hand to his forehead. Then, he reaches in her direction.

"But then you realized you were on our side," he said, apparently remembering her story from having been told it by the volunteer who had initially recruited her.

"That's right," she said, as chatter in the room resumes.

Like with Prop 8, the ballot choice in Maine is confusing, as it often has been on this issue in other states: Vote yes if you're against gay marriage; vote no if you are for it.

This woman is for it. She wants to keep the law that the legislature just passed this year, allowing same-sex couples to obtain marriage licenses the same as straight couples. She and her husband, who live in a nearby conservative town, have had relatives who were gay and believe people have a right to have their relationships respected and to have their privacy.

Another volunteer, Mary McKeen, a native of Maine of similar age, also married to a man and also from a small conservative town nearby, escorts her to a desk to give her a task.

McKeen is voting no on 1, too. Her husband had written a letter to the editor of a paper, noting that the same arguments used against same-sex marriage now were arguments he heard in the 1960s when a friend of his, who was black, married a white woman.

History, of course, is often prologue.

And there's some history to look to on gay-related ballot measures in Maine to underscore what the polls have been saying: Tuesday's vote will be excruciatingly close.

On the past four gay-related ballot measures in Maine, the pro-gay side has won twice, and lost twice. Of the state's 16 counties, five have consistently voted against gay equal rights and five have consistently voted for them. The remaining six counties have mixed records.

Those six counties with mixed records are next week's wild cards, and they are likely to cast about 30 percent of the votes, either way. Penobscot County, in which lies the state's third largest city, Bangor, is the largest. It has voted against gay equal rights in three out of four ballot measures. But Franklin, Waldo, and Kennebec counties have voted against gay equal rights two out of four times, and most recently, in 2005, they've voted for equal rights.

In fact, Kennebec, the largest of those three and the home of the state capital, might well be the best bellwether of voting in Maine, at least on gay civil rights measures. As Kennebec County has voted, so has the state of Maine in the four gay-related ballot measures since 1995. It voted against blocking civil rights protections in 1995, for repealing sexual orientation protections in 1998, against a pro-active civil rights measure in 2000, and against repealing a gay civil rights protection law in 2005.

The question now, with a record of two and two, is which way will Kennebec and the state of Maine go in 2009.

As head of the No on 1 campaign's central field office in Hallowell, Olson, a senior field organizer from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, is single-mindedly determined to improve that record. She's fresh off the battle over Prop 8 in California, and she has a staff of 15 – "some paid, some not" – and "hundreds" of volunteers. She doesn't promise what the outcome will be; she promises her team will fight the good fight until the last vote is cast.

"We're going to go and talk to voters in the rain all weekend," she said. She said that both because the weather forecast is calling for rain all weekend "and because our volunteers care that much." And they have 17,211 doors to knock on.

The No on 1 campaign's main headquarters, about an hour south, in Portland, lacks the river view of Hallowell. It's in a relatively non-descript brick office building that hardly stands out from the Great Lost Bear beer bar and the Social Security office. It is a maze of offices within other offices all with bare white walls, save for one Lady Gaga poster, and volunteers staring intently at computer screens. Somewhere in this maze, is a large open room abuzz with people coming and going, talking, laughing, studying pieces of paper and computer screens.

Jesse Connolly, the 31-year-old native Maine married heterosexual who heads up the statewide No on 1 campaign, enters and says hello to Pam Perkins, who is sitting at a very small cafe-like table in the center of the room. She's a 50-year-old professional gardener from Hendersonville, North Carolina. Like Jacob McClain in Hallowell, Perkins is a "vacation volunteer." They took the campaign's suggestion to spend vacations in Maine during the campaign in order to help with the effort.

Perkins and her spouse got married in Vermont and had a honeymoon in Maine. But what prompted her to volunteer was seeing the testimony – via web stream – of the public hearing at the Augusta Civic Center. Someone donated frequent flier miles to get her a ticket to Portland and she's staying in the home of a supportive state representative.

Connolly said the vacation volunteer idea has been an especially powerful tool because it's people the campaign really needs more than anything right now. People to canvas, people to make phone calls, people to knock on doors.

Meanwhile, money continues to pour into the state, too, on both sides. As of the latest regular report, filed October 23, the No on 1 campaign organization had taken in $4 million and spent $3.5 million, compared to the Stand for Marriage Maine Yes campaign group, which had taken in $2.5 million and spent $2 million. More than half of Stand for Marriage's cash has come from the National Organization for Marriage. For Connolly and others, it's a haunting reminder of Prop 8. And there's one week to go.