The Edge of Maine (11 page)

And that was
after
she sank at her own mooring in 1997, in sixty feet of water. The strain of all that work over all those years had loosened
Annabelle
's planks and transom, and her bilge pumps couldn't keep pace with the leaks. You might think it was time to call the insurance agent. Instead, Kenny sent a diver down to attach a hawser to
Annabelle'
s bow bit, and towed her, submerged, at highest tide as close to the beach as he could get her. As told by Captain Jim Moorhead, when the tide ebbed
Annabelle
sat high and dry, resting on her beam. “Kenny then put a few [support] stands on her high side, ran a line from the top of her mast to his pickup truck, pulled her upright, and put stands on the opposite side.” Before the tide flooded six hours later he had patched her up enough to float. “He changed the oil, plugs, and distributor cap, fired her up, and went to work.”

Kenny Eaton's ingenuity is legendary among local boat owners. He is as undaunted by hopeless cases as are those mechanics in Cuba who keep 1948 DeSotos and 1949 Hudson Hornets purring. So his solutions are especially in demand by owners of vintage sailboats. One such owner, a new-minted captain of industry with a summer mansion commanding the heights of Islesboro, a short sail from Castine, ran up a goodly yard bill at Eaton's. The bill, slowly delivered, was even more tardily paid. It mounted. Kenny sent reminders. I'd call them “gentle reminders,” but I know better. (Kenny calls a lot of people “dear,” a Maine honorific pronounced DEE-uh and used, in the description of folklorist Edgar Alex Been, “dispassionately to address anyone, regardless of age or gender.”) It is difficult to get money on Kenny's mind, but I think that once it gets there it stays there. And it's no trick at all to get his dander up. So this was how it happened that—during an Independence Day lawn party at the vintage boat owner's summer retreat, croquet mallets and wickets in place, ladies in sun dresses and gents in white flannels—here came a helicopter, piloted by a friend of Kenny's, and out of that bird stepped Kenny, wearing boatyard clothes and holding in his hand a bill. Mr. Eaton did not have to wait very long at all to have that bill paid in full.

T
here's no end to elegies, of course, and no surprise. After all, this twenty-five-hundred miles of jagged coastline, a drowned mountain range scoured and crushed and ground by glaciers, underwent what geologists term a prehistoric “ordeal.” But in such a setting, so primal and extreme, happened upon by explorers awed by its staggering bounty, the place must have seemed indestructible. Settlers and their progeny clear-cut the virgin hardwoods and then the evergreens. They killed off the wolves and ate the eggs of puffins. They shot seals because the seals competed for the plentiful fish. Then they fished the fish damned near out of existence. They trapped otters on the riverbanks and beaver from their dams. Then they built their own dams to harness the river's energy, and incidentally put paid to the alewife runs and shad runs and salmon runs. They poured their shit into the rivers, and then they invented chemical shit to finish the job. Impacted sawdust and junk flotsam so choked the channels of the Penobscot and Kennebec that river traffic jammed to a halt. The comeoverers and their successors bought cheap from the Abnaki and then sold cheap to the rusticators and hotel owners. It's the oldest story in the books, and as Louise Rich notes, it sure is too bad.

Except here I am living on the Kennebec River, and I'm in my right mind. I swim in the river a mile north of Bath, and so do sturgeon and striped bass. We see eagles every day. A few years ago, just after we bought our house, I got a letter from a friend with whom I've sailed forty years, and many days in Maine. He spent his boyhood and adolescent summers just east of Camden, on Ducktrap Cove in Lincolnville, and he built a house on Vinalhaven overlooking Hurricane Island. Much of what I first experienced in Maine I learned from him. He's a taciturn fellow, with a dry sense of humor, and when I boasted of setting down shallow roots on the Kennebec I didn't expect him to go sentimental on me, to break a bottle of Mumm's over the doorsill. But what I got in place of congratulations was a clear-eyed report about what Bath might have become. Until it was dismantled this past summer, the Maine Yankee nuclear facility was one river over and a few miles east by road in Wiscasset, the “prettiest village in Maine” (measured by its own aesthetic standards), the “worm capital of Maine” (measured by its impact on the live-bait business), and site of legendary traffic jams on Route 1 (owing to its pedestrians' sullen, leisurely insistence on availing themselves of the right-of-way in several crosswalks on the town's main drag). My friend reminded me that Maine Yankee and the Bath Iron Works were likely targets of al Qaeda and still “ground zero for some old 3M25 Scorpion class nuclear-tipped missiles now under the supervision of Uzbeki rebels who don't know how to retarget them and figure, what the hell, let's light them off and see where they go.” He neglected to mention Brunswick Naval Air Station, a few miles south, center for anti-submarine warfare during the Cold War and currently the second largest employer in Maine. Continuing his assessment of my real estate investment, my dear friend wrote that “as far as the waterfront aspects are concerned, surely you must never have visited the place at low water springs, when the sulphurous mud flats combined with the PCBs dumped up there in the sixties, creates an air quality to which no decent grandfather would ever expose an heir. Of course you might ask, ‘an heir to what?' Good point.” He closed by assuring me that in Bath I should be able to find retail outlets for numerous manufacturers of Hazmat gear. “These protective costumes have the added merit of keeping more or less at bay the swallow-sized mosquitoes.”

In fact, the mosquitoes aren't so bad on our patch along the river. Maybe the cardinals and chickadees eat them, maybe the eagles and ospreys scare them off, but we endure. My old friend must be referring to Vinalhaven, infamous breeding ground of the Maine state bird. And Ducktrap Cove: I remember a Memorial Day week we spent there in 1970 when we hid in his driveway, cowering in our car from the black flies that would carry us away if we made a run for his parents' casually screened house. Polluters didn't bring bugs, but they nearly killed off the eagles and ospreys trying to get rid of them. And if DDT had done its work to the very end, the mosquito-less Maine coast would be infested with rusticators, and Fox Island Thorofare might look like Myrtle Beach, with miniature golf courses, a roller coaster, and cotton candy stands. If there's such a vice as an attractive nuisance, there's such a virtue as a repellent nuisance. In the seventeenth century, John Josselyn noticed the pests:

The disincentive to rusticators of biting insects may seem petty—an instance of what Albert Camus termed the “fleas of life”—but the pollution of the Maine coast might have been calamitous. Belfast, one of the Maine coast's most economically and culturally prosperous cities—where a governor chose to build his mansion and shipbuilders and whaling captains settled during the nineteen century—was a sick joke when I first cruised Penobscot Bay in the late 1960s. After the town's busy docks fell into desuetude and ruin, a sardine processing plant on Belfast Bay gave way to a couple of huge chicken processors. The bay turned bloodred, and gizzards floated on the surface. “When you sailed up Belfast Bay on the swan-crested waves,” advised Don Johnson's
Cruising Guide to Maine,
“it was neither sea-foam on the crests, nor was it swan feathers.” You wouldn't expect a depressed community to recover from such a decline, and when the poultry processors left for the South, Belfast might have slipped into terminal decay. But that's not what happened. MBNA, the credit card company, came to an unlikely rescue, and Belfast is now an ace attraction of the coast. What drew MBNA to Maine was what drew many businesses to Ireland: a well-educated population of underemployed citizens with a cosmopolitan history of shipping out and a rooted history of staying put. It didn't hurt that the state—with its tradition of lumbering, farming, fishing, and shipbuilding—had a legendary work ethic. MBNA first wooed Belfast—promising and delivering on their promise to fund libraries, harbor cleanup, architectural restoration, college scholarships—and then won it. It built a credit card processing facility—the place you get when you phone 1-800-COMPLAIN—and hired fifteen hundred local workers.

It is the kind of initiative that Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a three-term governor of the state during the late 1860s and early 1870s, wanted so desperately for the state and despaired of ever attaining. Chamberlain was Maine's great moral and intellectual hero, the Civil War general who won the Congressional Medal of Honor and took Lee's surrender at Appomattox. He taught at Bowdoin—as a faculty member and president—every subject in the college's curriculum save math and physics. Well he understood his natal state's perilous dependence on perishable natural resources. “What this state needs is capital, money in motion” he said at his 1870 inauguration. “Our material is stagnant, our industry crippled, our enterprise staggered for want of money, which is power.”

The principal means of escape from the area's serial economic depressions has always been the quick fix of creating energy—Maine Yankee followed a long history of damming Maine's historic rivers—or running the risks of refining and conveying oil and gas. The cover story in the June 2001 issue of
Down East
magazine is titled “What If?” It should have been published on Halloween; it's a scary story of a horror show that didn't happen. The magazine selected ten watershed votes and decisions that turned Maine's course as consequentially as turning an oil tanker on a collision course with a reef. Two catastrophes averted were dams. The Dickey-Lincoln Dam along the St. John River, to be built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, would have despoiled that river's wildness. The hydroelectric project would have created a recreational lake of 134 square miles, aimed to encourage motorized water sports and RV camping. This project was killed by the U.S. Congress in 1982. At about the same time Great Northern Paper Company proposed building a hydroelectric plant and dam—known by friends and foes as the Big A—at Big Amberjackmockamus Falls, on the West Branch of the Penobscot and a few miles from Millinocket, the company's headquarters. Environmentalists rated that site the “most significant stretch of river in Maine,” a world-class white-water run. For this and other reasons a coalition led by the Natural Resources Defense Council of Maine fought Great Northern remorselessly, and so pestered the huge, influential company that it threw up its hands in disgust and quit the field. As
Down East
is scrupulous to report, having Great Northern take its business elsewhere was good for Maine, but it was mighty hard on those Mainers who lost their jobs, sending Millinocket into a “downward economic spiral that has not yet bottomed out.” The giant company, Maine's greatest landowner, sold out and broke up the pieces; the population of Millinocket has declined since the defeat of the Big A by one-quarter; fourteen hundred jobs were lost and have stayed lost.

Down East
frames the counter-conservation argument colloquially: “You can't eat the scenery,” “It's pickerel or payrolls,” “My kids are more important than your trees.” In these matters the long view seems almost always to be the better view, but in the short run losing a job or a decent tax base is pretty much without consolation. Some of the ten rescues listed by
Down East
had a slight and maybe even nonexistent downside: Maine's anti-billboard law, hard-fought and hard-won, resulted in the dismantling between 1969 and 1984 of eighty-five-hundred roadside signs as egregious as any in the nation, eyesores competing with one another for garishness and scale. Who's the poorer, other than the outdoor advertising business? Shame on me, but about them I feel as I do about telemarketers and spammers who lose their source of income when regulation constricts their mischief.

The rescues along the Maine coast are unambiguous victories. The scariest of them all was a proposal in the 1970s to build in Eastport an oil refinery and super-tanker port. The company who made the proposal was Pittston, a Virginia-based coal business named for the town in Pennsylvania, set between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, in a blighted pocket mining anthracite unto its final feeble vein, until the 1959 Knox Mine disaster in next-door Port Griffith put an effective end to that particular exploitation. “Eastport was a depressed, economically battered little city … that had two things Pittston needed: deepwater access for huge supertankers and local officials eager for new jobs and industry.” Passamaquoddy Bay and the waters on the approaches to Eastport have other qualities as well: They are fogbound, with narrow tide-ripped passages through cuts of granite teeth. An oil spill—so incontestably likely that even while the project was being pitched it was a
when
rather than an
if
—would have propelled millions of tons of crude, driven by ferocious tides, up and down the fecund, wild coast. The scheme was finally killed in 1979 by the Environmental Protection Agency, which refused to grant a permit to proceed because the projected refinery would threaten bald eagles and their aeries.

That the eagles were there at all to prevent the Pittston refinery is owing to another of
Down East'
s celebrated rescues. This stemmed from the creation of a Board of Pesticide Control, created by the state legislature in the immediate back draft of Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring
and left unfunded until 1970, when its persuasive chief persuaded blueberry and potato farmers, not to mention citizens attached to the custom of outdoor grilling, that there were even worse things in their world than potato bugs and mosquitoes, and even if there weren't, DDT sprayed from airplanes was not the most rational means to attack them. The Maine Board of Pesticide Control saved Maine's raptors (together, I guess, with Maine's mosquitoes).

Since Eastport couldn't have its tanker port and refinery, how about Sanford, eighteen miles west of the Bush cottage in Kennebunkport? “Sanford was once the model of a modern New England mill town, but, as the factories closed and moved south, the city had slipped deep into economic doldrums. The new refinery, which would have exceeded the combined output of all six refineries then operating in New Jersey, promised hundreds of jobs.” Let's pause here just a sec. Have you ever driven the New Jersey Turnpike south from the Lincoln Tunnel or George Washington Bridge? Sure you have. If you're a writer you've probably written about it, everybody's favorite valley of ashes, where Tony Soprano has bodies planted and fiery smokestacks spew toxic fumes. The Gibbs Oil Company, whose bright idea this was, meant to pipe the crude from the Portland waterfront to Sanford and then pipe back the unrefined waste and dump it into Casco Bay by way of the Fore River. That would be the Fore River where an Audubon Bird Sanctuary is now located, just about where the pipes would have been laid. This craziness was beaten back by coalitions of York County residents—natives and newcomers in harness together—and by organic gardeners and environmentalists who have learned that if the law is, as Dickens tells us, an ass, why not ride it through meadows, while breathing fresh air?

 

T
HE RAISING AND RAZING OF
M
AINE
Y
ANKEE
A
TOMIC
Power Station is an exemplary Maine progression. Out of nearby Wiscasset's sight but within the town's boundaries, the facility began doing its thing to uranium atoms in 1972, heating water to become steam to run turbines and generate electricity. And money, of course. Colin Woodard, author most recently of
The Lobster Coast
(2004), has made himself an authority on Maine Yankee's bumpy story. Writing for the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
in 1997, Woodard explained that the facility generated 20 percent of Maine's energy needs and 90 percent of Wiscasset's town taxes. Who could complain? The facility seemed to have a Midas touch, bringing to reality the dream of perpetual motion and the philosopher's stone. It replaced a coal-fired (and later oil-fired) power plant; who missed the ashes and smoke? The electricity nuclear power generated would soon be “too cheap to meter,” the boosters promised. A Wiscasset selectman remembered that she grew up referring to Maine Yankee as the “golden goose.” Wiscasset spent ten thousand dollars apiece on its students and treated itself to shiny new fire trucks. The only burr under the town's saddle was a nagging question asked by a few bitter-end doom-and-gloomers: What was going to be done with the spent fuel? Then came 1979, Three Mile Island. As Woodard—then in grammar school—writes: “Our television screens showed thousands of kids my age being evacuated from their Pennsylvania homes and dosed with iodine in emergency clinics.” Three Mile Island grabbed the attention of seaside residents who had isolated themselves out on the tips of the fingers made by the many rivers in the area—the Kennebec and Sheepscot and Damariscotta—who would have to evacuate along a very few narrow, twisting roads leading to Route 1, jammed at the best of times and very near which Maine Yankee perched. Had the sirens screamed, “nothing short of a wide-scale evacuation by sea could have saved all those people,” as a state senator and resident of Boothbay Harbor told Woodard. Neighboring townspeople turned against the plant. Farmers had their cows' milk examined for contamination, and some didn't like the test results. In 1997, Maine Yankee made the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's list of worst-run nuclear plants in the nation. Steam tubes developed cracks. Whistle-blowers warned of maintenance shortcuts, chronic regulatory violations. Forced shutdowns followed; emergency shutdowns doomed the enterprise. Referenda to close it down began. Meantime, the friends and families of those who worked at Maine Yankee were not without their own interest, and Woodard tells that there began to appear in the neighborhood T-shirts with the legend “Keep Nuclear Power in Maine,” above the afterthought, “A Little ‘Nukie' Never Hurt Anybody.” Uh-oh. There went half the vote. The power plant was taken offline in 1997, and the dome itself was demolished September 2004. Left behind are more than a thousand spent fuel assemblies, almost nine hundred tons of radioactive waste unfit for human handling for the next thousand centuries. Until someone figures out how to get them to Yucca Flats, if Yucca Flats will take them, those isotopes are buried right there on the Back River, and Wiscasset's property owners will pay taxes double and triple what they had paid comparable to taxes along the rest of the Maine coast.