The Edge of Maine (12 page)

Wise people, conservationists and environmental scientists among them, regret the fate of Maine Yankee, or at least the end of rational discussion of the benefits and risks of nuclear generation of power. Maine is stuck downwind from the toxic clouds that rain acidly on the state from coal-and oil-fired industries to its west. Clean power is in Maine's interest, but not until someone puzzles out how to dispose of the waste. It has been observed that what was built in 1972 was as far-sighted as building a hundred-room hotel without planning a septic system.

 

S
HORTSIGHTEDNESS IS NO LONGER CHARACTERISTIC
of Maine's public policies and private initiatives. The state's voters and rusticators have combined in recent years, in fund drive after ballot initiative after bond issue, to enhance the state's resources. Every edition of a local paper seems to bring news of another rescue. An item in the Brunswick
Times Record
notes the purchase during the summer of 2004 of an eighty-five-acre parcel of wetlands along Whiskeag Creek by the Lower Kennebec Regional Land Trust. This parcel is a small but vital piece of the jigsaw puzzle of stops along the Atlantic flyway, and the payment of $130,000 was itself pieced together by small donations and bequests. Another recent item notes the rescue of the south end of bucolic Barters Island. A subdivision of 128 acres was nearly under way when the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, a nonprofit, bought the parcel with the intention of creating, as they promised, “the finest public garden north of Boston.”

In 2000,
Down East
acknowledged as a “watershed event” the passage of a fifty-million-dollar bond issue to underwrite the state's purchase of land threatened by developers. This referendum was offered in 1999, during an off-year election, and stirred much greater interest than referendum questions on abortion and medical marijuana.
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Of the 410,000 who voted, 69 percent approved the initiative. This was the “largest bond issue ever approved by Maine that didn't underwrite new highways. Moreover, the question passed in every county, north and south. The vote laid to rest any accusation that public-land conservation is a concern only of southern Maine suburbanites who want weekend playgrounds in the North Woods. In fact, the balloting undercut all the tortured theorizing about the so-called Two Maines.”

This view may be excessively rosy. Local friction between boosters of new jobs and defenders of old seascapes continues to abrade coastal communities. During the spring of 2004, citizens of Harpswell—a long, lovely peninsula jutting into Casco Bay—debated whether to approve a $350,000,000 liquified natural gas terminal to be erected on their rocky shore. An inevitable collision occurred between summer residents and underemployed year-rounders who were having difficulty paying property taxes inflated by the value to summer residents of waterfront property. Harpswell has 4,600 voters, and most summer residents aren't included in that number, so the rusticators' campaigns against the erection of the terminal had little consequence, other than to stir the pot of controversy. And that pot came to a boil when Harpswell's lobstermen, fearing pollution of their rich territories and anxious about the cost to safeguard the plant from terrorists and natural disasters and industrial screwups, turned against the proposal. In opposing it, they were rejecting the offer by the energy companies of eight million dollars a year in tax money. The debate grew bitter, with handmade signs and posters simplifying the complicated issues by sloganized insults and denunciations. Family members quarreled with one another and canceled Thanksgiving and Christmas reunion dinners. The morning of the townie vote in March, someone—in an attempt to cancel it—phoned the Harpswell police with a bomb threat. The vote was held and the measure defeated, but bitterness lingers. “It won't be forgotten; it's too deep,” a lobsterman told the
Boston Globe'
s Jenna Russell. He had been hauling traps in Harpswell for sixty-two years, and predicted that if one of his neighbors “says something the wrong way, it's going to bring it out again.” A woman who supported the plant, and whose husband's family had lived in Harpswell since 1650, complained that fishermen wouldn't speak to her, “wouldn't even wave.” Neighbors accused one another of making threats, of lying, of being greedy and/or stupid. A representative of one group, asked whether it was possible to put the dispute behind them, said, “It's their responsibility to apologize.” The pronoun reference is ambiguous.

Recent immigrants to Maine, from the professional classes, can be demanding. In 1999, near the site of Belfast's bygone poultry factories, residents complained to state officials that their tranquility was being disturbed by excessive noise produced by idling refrigerator trucks waiting to load potatoes from Penobscot Frozen Foods. Testing revealed the decibel level at the now-bankrupt company's property line to be less than sixty-five decibels, ten decibels under the permitted maximum. The
Bangor Daily News
reported the story with what it must have taken to be objectivity: “Fifteen years ago, when a chicken-processing plant [produced] offensive odors, the neighborhood was made up of working class folk who complained less; now, the neighborhood consists of more wealthy homeowners who have registered increasing number of complaints.”

Islands in private hands have made for strains and outright provocations between their owners and the putative public interest. Hog Island, an Audubon bird sanctuary in Muscongus Bay popular with visiting boaters, asked that future editions of the Tafts'
Cruising Guide to the Maine Coast
delete their description of the undeniable fact of the island's geographical presence. “Perhaps Hog Island is just too beautiful,” an update to the guide noted. I remember rowing ashore at Butter Island in 1970 from a sailboat we had chartered out of Blue Hill. The island, owned by the Cabots, is as pretty as they come, with meadows and blueberry patches and commanding views from Montserrat Hill of Deer Isle, Islesboro, and North Haven. One of its principal attractions was solitude, and that is what had induced the Outward Bound school over at Hurricane Island to maroon one of its students there for a couple of days. He was meant to scrounge his food from the vegetation at hand, and—when he wasn't gathering victuals—to contemplate the isolation of a single human being among the grandeur of the universe. When we came upon the teenager, sitting cross-legged on the island's Nubble Beach, he looked hungry and forlorn; he seemed at once hostile and resigned to companionship. A parade of cruisers such as ourselves had established a beachhead during the past two days to experience the quiet of the island, and as they had come ashore they had caught the boy up in their conversations and helped themselves to the blueberries he had collected and stored at his side in his Red Sox cap. He requested, politely, that we leave him and his blueberries to himself, but not before conceding that the skipper of a handsome Concordia yawl had replaced a handful of berries with a crisp dollar bill. The Cabot family, whose patriarch Tom had a farsighted and benign appetite for Maine islands, which he bought (forty of them by the time he died at ninety-eight) and shared with sailors similarly attracted, recently shut the circus down. The tipping point came a couple of years ago when his grandson, calling in on Butter one summer evening, counted more than 150 visitors crowding its beaches and trails. Three windjammers lay offshore, giving their paying customers lobster bakes on the beach. The Cabots' sight of that herd closed the door to all commercial traffic and restricted access to everyone except invited guests to most of Butter Island. The family distributed a public notice: “This overwhelming number of people has had a negative impact on everyone's island experience. We are also concerned about the long-term ecological health of the island…. We apologize to all those who have been visiting Butter Island for years and can now no longer hike the entire island, but we had no alternative.”

Fact is, to think of any of Maine's three thousand or so actual islands as off-limits to the public is to practice sentimental nostalgia. It's true that islands are fragile, that it's easy to kill the lichens by trampling them. The soil is too thin to bury human waste, and let's stipulate that the troglodytes who dump garbage and cut branches or even trees to use as firewood are evildoers. But the islands of the Maine coast have been used from the earliest days of the aborigines: as fishing stations, hunting grounds, granite quarries, and beach-party sites. The state owns fourteen hundred of these islands, and is buying more all the time. This is a good thing.

But for my money the best rescue in Maine has been the deliberate breaching and demolition in 1999 of the Edwards Dam in Augusta. The cribwork dam blocking the Kennebec was built of stones in 1837, a thousand feet across, flooding and stilling fish-rich rapids and falls all the way up to Waterville, seventeen miles away. Opening the floodgates drained the dead water; what happened next astonished even the most optimistic of the dam's enemies.

But first a word about the dam's friends and protectors. Built to provide mechanical power to riverside mills, in 1913 the first of what would be five turbines was installed to produce electric power, used initially by Edwards Mill, but after the bankruptcy of that and so many other Maine textile mills, the dam supplied electricity to Augusta, and not much of it, and at an awful price to birds and spawning fish. Even after the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission declared that Edwards didn't produce enough electricity to justify its cost in environmental damage, many locals warned against breaching it, foretelling that the river would fall ten feet, eroding its banks and exposing the toxins impounded on the dead water's bottom and creating a god-awful sulphurous stink.

None of these side effects occurred. Moreover, the demolition and cleanup created jobs. Ice-fishing outfitters and bass guides were back in business. Almost immediately after Edwards was breached, grass and wildflowers grew from the mud along the Kennebec; paid workers and volunteers hauled away the accumulated litter of pulp logs and truck tires that had been exposed. Aquatic insects came back immediately, followed by the little fish that eat them, followed by the big fish that eat
them
. Here came the birds: eagles and egrets, herons and ospreys and cormorants and even peregrine falcons. Make way for seals and otters and muskrat. All this in five years!

A mile or more up the Kennebec from my house in Bath, just above Lines Island and The Chops, we enter the shallow water of Merrymeeting Bay, a drainage of the watersheds of six rivers, of which the Kennebec is the largest. Because its fresh water is churned by tidal action, fed by fertile currents, the bay's abundance was once upon a time extravagant. The thriving crop of wild rice attracted huge congregations of wildfowl. While Edwards Dam stood, by the 1970s Merrymeeting Bay—one of the richest flyways and fishing grounds in New England—was declared dead, terminally polluted by industrial excess, so starved of dissolved oxygen that everything in and on its turbid water had suffocated. Scummy and stinking, the nine-thousand-acre bay came to be referred to casually as a “cesspool”; it repelled even the old-timers who remembered its glory days, when it was alive with striped bass, alewives, Atlantic sturgeon, smelts, shad, salmon, eels, and who knew what more?

I'll take the horror stories on faith, but when I run my Boston Whaler up the river to Augusta I can hardly believe that the Kennebec and Merrymeeting Bay were ever less than teeming with irresistible life and plenty. We never fail to see eagles, and all summer the sturgeon jump, most of them shortnose but now and again Atlantic sturgeon, the grandest sea-run fish in eastern North America, twelve feet long and weighing up to eight hundred pounds. Other than a few fish remaining in the Delaware and Hudson Rivers, the Atlantic sturgeon in the Kennebec are the species' final stand against extinction, and the news is getting better. (Should a sturgeon—driving from the muddy bottom to the surface and going airborne—chance to land on your dock or in your canoe, better put it back pronto, or pay a five-thousand-dollar fine. That's fine caviar running upstream again.) After Edwards Dam went down, brown trout and blueback herring came again to the river. Atlantic salmon rebounded, and we see them jump now and again in the tributaries below Augusta. Owing to its great freshwater tidal estuary, Merrymeeting Bay has the only spawning population of striped bass in New England. The record catch in the Kennebec was sixty-seven pounds, but now the really big ones and little ones are put back. Striped bass fishing for sport is again booming on the Kennebec, and getting better all the time. Edwards Dam and those above on the Kennebec almost finished off American shad; the river used to host a run of a million or more shad, which spawned in June. The final word isn't in yet on the river's shad recovery. Alewife runs in May and June—landmark events in Abnaki culture—once numbered six million and more of the foot-long adults, prized also by eagles and great blue heron. These staples on the food chain were nearly goners, but they're back, running a million or so.

Franklin Burroughs, one of the best nature essayists—in a line that goes back to John Josselyn and Thoreau, unto Edward Abbey, John McPhee, and Edward Hoagland—grew up on the rivers of South Carolina, with a special fondness for the Waccamaw. He came to Maine many years ago to teach English at Bowdoin College and fell in love with Merrymeeting Bay, where he lives. The banks of the bay remain sparsely developed; perhaps the toxic stink of the bad old days was an effective deterrent to developers. The bay is dotted with little islands and medium-size islands. Population centers tend to be old-fashioned summer camps for kids. Meadows, bound by stone walls and interrupted by woodlots, checkerboard the shore. Vistas shift quickly, and parts of the bay are as perplexing as a maze: That deep-looking river or inlet over there will dry out at low tide, revealing a sandbar or mud-flat growing yellow and pale-green grass. Other than the flop of jumping fish or of a seal sliding off a rock into the water, other than the indignant call of an osprey pissed off that some thieving bandito of a cheep-cheeping eagle has swiped a fish right out of its talons, the bay is serene.