The Edge of Maine (14 page)

W
e have sailed Maine often enough to know how little of it we'll ever know. Before we got
Blackwing
and began coasting regularly, we chartered sailboats out of Camden and Blue Hill. We chartered the lobster-yachtish
Skyfair
out of Bucks Harbor on Eggemoggin Reach in order to cover more water, to poke our noses east of Schoodic. We bought a twenty-one-foot Boston Whaler to go up and down its glorious rivers. We reasoned we were doing research, exploring for some perfect place someday to settle. Several years ago we began to think seriously in the present tense about living in Maine. We rented, always on the water and always beyond our means: at Ducktrap Cove and on North Haven (a house with a dock on Fox Islands Thorofare). I've mentioned the summers in Castine, a town that cast a spell. One of its many virtues is its setting so far from the clotted traffic and cheapjackery of Route 1. One of its vices was the same: It requires a drive of forty-five minutes each way to buy a pipe wrench to tighten
Blackwing'
s stuffing box. Nevertheless, we almost made an offer on a tiny house set right on the beach at Wadsworth Cove, like a serf's dwelling in the shadow of the very house—grand on a bluff above the cove—where I had spent my first night in Maine. (We couldn't afford it.) We rented a great ark of a Victorian, with its own boathouse, in East Boothbay, on the west bank of the Damariscotta River, looking across to South Bristol and Christmas Cove. We rented a cute little house on Barters Island, perched above the Back River of the Sheepscot, across the street from the bridge keeper's shack on the west end of the swing bridge to Hodgdon Island, the very bridge featured in Todd Field's 2001 movie based on an Andre Dubus story, “In the Bedroom.” The best lobster rolls I've ever eaten come from the Trevett Store (which also figures in that movie), at the other end of that bridge. Priscilla sometimes helped the bridge keeper lower the warning gate and stop traffic when the keeper had to turn the crank that swings open the contraption.

Justin and Nick went to Bowdoin, and both lived in Maine after they left. Nick lives there now, first renting along the Damariscotta River in Boothbay and later buying in Bath. He and Heidi are marine biologists: He does research at the University of Southern Maine in Portland on lobsters in their larval stage, and she works at Bigelow Marine Laboratory in Boothbay Harbor on an innovative sea-data collection system of moored buoys, GoMoos (Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System). Both my sons and their wives tried San Francisco, and Justin and Megan settled for a time in San Diego. But they were pulled back east, Justin and Megan to Cambridge, and they mean to stay east. I can't resist believing that Nick's calling was settled back when he turned three, out on Islesboro, bending over those tide pools staring and staring. Justin is an art historian, interested especially in American painting of the nineteenth century, and I believe that the pictures he looked at in Maine—the impressions made on him by Winslow Homer and Thomas Cole and Frederic Church and Edward Hopper—these sights took his heart.

The mid-coast of Maine gradually became our family's gathering place, and when Heidi and Nick had Ivan—named for Kenny Eaton's sidekick, Heidi's boat-deprived grandfather Ivan Nelson—Priscilla and I bought a little house on the river north of Bath on the west side of the Kennebec. The idea is that we'll roost there. But as for claiming kin with Maine, assuming deed to a piece of its heart? Not likely. A couple of summers back, I walked downriver to the Bath Iron Works for the launching of the yard's twenty-third Aegis Class destroyer, the
Momsen
(DDG 92), named for a legendary World War II–era submariner, Charles Bower “Swede” Momsen. These destroyers are ferally graceful, and scooting past it in our outboard, keeping well outside the security perimeter patrolled by harbor police, I had admired its evolution from stark plates of steel and aluminum to sea-ready ship of the line.

A few blocks north of BIW I came across picketing protesters from several church and antiwar disarmament groups. It was August 9, 2003, the fifty-eighth anniversary of the date we dropped “Fat Man” on Nagasaki. One of the leaflets I was given by a picketer explained that “we raise our voices in opposition to the ongoing preparations for war in Maine. We know that we do not need to go to Iraq to find Weapons of Mass Destruction.” The U.S.S.
Momsen
would be equipped with fifty-six Tomahawk missiles, and each missile, if nuclear-tipped, could visit destruction equivalent to sixteen Nagasaki bombs. In addition, the
Momsen
would be armed with Harpoon surface-to-surface missiles and with the Evolved Seasparrow defensive missile system. With her depth chargers and big guns and tracking systems, this was a serious destroyer. Previous Bath-built warships were among the armada that began the “shock and awe” bombardment of Baghdad five months earlier.

It was also a beautiful ship, rakish and handsomely proportioned, with a sharp bow entry and lissome beam and a superstructure bristling with mysteries. I wanted to see her up close. As I approached the main gate, picketers were chanting from the sidewalk across the street, and a guard at the gate pointed across the street, as though to tell me to go to them. At first I didn't understand. In an earlier life I was a journalist, and I was accustomed to covering protests rather than joining them. I explained to the guard that I lived in Bath, but he didn't believe me, and when I showed him my ID, a California driver's license, he believed me even less. He told me to cross the street or leave. Very polite he was, but willing to point out that my green T-shirt (my navy blue shirt was in the washing machine) and my white beard were all the ID he needed. So there in No Mans Land it dawned on me that I was destined to be no one's man.

 

N
OW
I'
M DOWN AT MY DOCK, BEFORE BREAKFAST.
M
Y
grandson Ivan's with me. I don't know whether he'll become a biscuit. He's two, Maine-born and Bath-raised. He does what the other kids in this town—the children of pacifists, police officers, BIW welders, and armorers—do: listens to stories being read aloud at the Patten Free Library, watches Little League games at the Lincoln Street field, dreams of belting a frozen-rope liner over the fence. Ivan sits on Santa's lap at City Hall and marches in the Halloween parade. He runs along the tideline at Popham Beach, and bends over to stare at something stirring in the water.

After the tourists leave, and the leaves fall, and the snowbirds line up at the post office to send cartons to Punta Gorda and Bradenton, the winding-down is a novelty. The cold turns sharp and it hurts some mornings to breathe. The first snow falls in October, and then November makes you recollect what you learned about the Pophamites who wintered over just downstream a bit. You buy insulated Sorel boots at Reny's. The gray sky presses down on the gray river, like an iron lid on an iron kettle. Sleet drums against the windows. Night falls a few minutes after lunch, and you begin to miss the Red Sox. There's not much to do except read and talk and listen to jazz, and you wonder whether it might not be foresightful to reserve tickets in Fort Meyer during spring training.

But this morning it's freezing. Capt. Dave Dooley, who built our dock, removes its float and ramp in the winter to save them from the depredations of Kennebec ice. From the dock's platform I can see across to Days Ferry. It's pretty on the east side of the river, pacific. It's hard to imagine the misery over there during the bad old days of the French and Indian wars. I think I understand why a band of Abnaki warriors crept up on the Hammonds—the natives were aggrieved, of course—but my grandson is standing right here, pointing at something, and I wish the braves hadn't killed the Hammond father and son right over there across from my house, and then marched the mother and her little kids to Quebec to sell as slaves to the French. I wish a lot of things hadn't happened along this pretty river, and to my country at Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center, and to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Iraq in my country's name.

An American of my generation—born shortly before World War II and growing up with industrial progress, housing developments, highways, billboards, toxic rhetoric, unfelt compassion, dead rivers—is unaccustomed to happy stories about our treatment of our planet. It can become a reflex to assume the inexorability of abuse, that our backyards will surely go to hell or be condemned, maybe because they've gone toxic or because they'll be useful to a shopping mall. To think of the commons is too easily to think of its tragedy. It's difficult to break these cheerless and depreciating habits. But I know that Captain Dooley takes fishing parties out every summer day, usually twice a day, and that he and his guests can't stop catching stripers and throwing them back for someone else to catch. More dams will come down on the Kennebec, are coming down on other rivers in Maine. I know this, but I still can't credit my senses. It will be different for Ivan; his senses will be trained by this wonderful, repaired river.

He's pointing with his mitten to something out there. Something's moving; it's not a skater, because there was a thaw a couple of days ago, and the ice has fractured into floes ebbing down toward Doubling Point and Popham and out to Seguin. Something's stirring on one of the floes, a menacing shadow, and then another shadow, and then—gliding in for a landing—our very own eagles, one of them with a fish. And on that chunk of ice they float, like summer idlers on a party boat, languidly dipping their white heads as they tear into their smelt, breakfast on the Kennebec, at home in Maine.

F
or titles of some books, the definite article is a presumption if not a falsehood. I'll concede that
The Edge of Maine
is such an instance. Not principally because this state has three edges in addition to its coast, but because the jagged line I've tried to draw through space and time is so bent and discontinuous. Even to assign an indefinite article—an edge—is a reach. An edge of
my
Maine would approximate accuracy, but with such a solipsistic title what book could have brought you as far as this confession? Maybe if I admit to having had a bad dream in which my title became
My Dull Edge of Maine,
reviewers will leave that arrow in their quivers.

Reviewers are on my mind. I think of any Maine-experienced reader of this book as a reviewer, a person having strong feelings about the words a visitor chooses to describe what he sees. And of what that visitor has seen, what does he choose to describe? What has he seen but failed to observe, or observed but failed to comprehend? Even the most liberal of readers will notice what I've sailed past in the fog: The Isles of Shoals, Casco Bay, Portland, Muscongus Bay, Eggemoggin Reach, Winter Harbor, Roque Island. And of course much of what captured my interest in the telling of this story I got at second-and third-hand, from books and magazines, photos and newspapers. Having been drawn to this project by personal encounters, I often found the accounts of others more invigorating than my memories.

Some reviewers are professional guardians of Maine, or perhaps their “edge of Maine.” Thus, for instance, Sanford Phippen, born in 1942 in Hancock, on Frenchman Bay near Mount Desert, worked as a boy for summer rusticators, mowing lawns and delivering milk and eggs. He went to the University of Maine at Orono and stayed put. As a Maine writer he has undertaken to review books about his state, some written by natives who might nonetheless be sightseers to the time in history their books explore, or to the exotic offshore island they describe. Louise Dickinson Rich was one such. E. B. White, removing his attention from Manhattan to Brooklin was another. Having reviewed “several hundred books either about Maine or by Maine writers, or by people who consider themselves Maine's spokesmen,” Phippen writes that he feels akin to Federico Fellini, who remarked that he read books about Rome to “forget what Rome was like.” And this condemnation doesn't even include the efforts of out-and-out strangers from away.

Phippen complains that the superficial Maine that he reads is the fabulation of “Maine Mythologists” and “Year-Round Summer People,” prettied and patronized, lacking in realism, lacking the “poverty, solitude, struggle, lowered aspirations” of “living on the edge.” His proprietary dismay is amplified by George H. Lewis, a professor of sociology and anthropology who makes a systematic tour (in
The Journal of American Culture
) of “The Maine That Never Was: The Construction of Popular Myth in Regional Culture.” Having studied brochures and pamphlets from tourist bureaus and railroads and resorts and chambers of commerce, Lewis contrasts the rouged and powdered and jolly and sunstruck postcards with the punishing statistical realities of daily life in year-round Maine. Unsurprisingly, Maine, like everywhere else on the planet, is not fun for all, or even for most. The license plate that celebrates our territory—“Vacationland,” adorned by a driver's choice of pinecone, lobster, or loon—advertises a myth.

Let me stipulate that the Maine I have experienced and attempted to record is partial, as in biased and incomplete. Carolyn Chute's
Beans of Egypt, Maine
represents, I concede, a brutish reality. The Know-Nothings burned the Catholic church in my own Bath in the mid-nineteenth century, while over in Ellsworth they tarred and feathered the Reverend John Bapst and ran him out of town on a rail. In 1924, when the Ku Klux Klan had the largest membership of any state in our nation, Maine's voters elected a Klansman governor and twenty thousand citizens marched the streets of Portland to celebrate the event. Today, OxyContin abuse is alarmingly common among subsets of Maine lobstermen. The class divide is spectacular near lakes and along the coast, though Helen Yglesias, in
Starting,
surely exaggerates in claiming that the “spread between the poor and the rich is as wide as that in any undeveloped country.” Let's agree too that Maine suffers its share of Yglesias's inventory of vices and sorrows: “alcoholism, incest, illicit love, illegitimacy, … madness, … couple-switching, … vandalism and rebelliousness among adolescents.” (The final defect strikes me as piquant.) Yet to insist, parochially, that Maine is specially cursed seems to me merely the mirror image of the distortion that has romanticized the state.

The Edge of Maine
owes huge debts to writers who, for the most part, have been astonished by the place. Sometimes their astonishment has been provoked by dismay. To read of the tragedy that befell the infant son of the sagamore Squando, who was drowned when English trappers—testing their hypothesis that Indians swam naturally, like some animals—overturned the canoe in which the baby was being paddled by his mother, is not to experience nostalgia for a simpler time. To read about the slaughter of settlers by Squando's tribe, in retaliation, is not to romanticize the Noble Savage.

Among the many writers cited in the text, some were inspirational in tone and emphasis as well as indispensable for events, dates, and circumstances. Philip W. Conkling's writings on the islands of Maine are monumental and elegant. The Duncans—Robert and RogerS.—have made literature of cruising guides, as have the Tafts, Jan and the late Hank. Samuel Eliot Morison humanizes history on every scale, whether in his majestic view of the early explorations of North America or his intimate account of Mount Desert Island. Colin Woodard's
The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier
is the most recent of at least half a dozen serious studies of the persistent mystery of those cycles of feast or famine that have dramatized Maine's flamboyant history, from chimerical Norumbega through the shipbuilding bonanza and ice rush of the nineteenth century unto the current cliffhanger of next year's uncertain lobster harvest.