Closing the book on Superfund site
For 100 years, Brooksville hosted mining
BY KATE COUGH/THE MAINE MONITOR
Tiny, bucolic Brooksville is an unexpected place for a Superfund environmental cleanup site. With a year-round population of less than 1,000 residents, the town is perhaps better known as the setting of Robert McCloskey’s 1952 children’s classic One Morning in Maine, or as the homestead of Helen and Scott Nearing, the revered grandparents of the back-to-the-land movement.
Famed organic farmers and authors Eliot Coleman and his wife, Barbara Damrosch, still live nearby, growing hardy vegetables in unheated greenhouses through the unrelenting Maine winter.
Perched on the northwest edge of Cape Rosier in the village of Harborside looking west into Penobscot Bay, Goose Pond spills out into Goose Cove, a small inlet nestled among some of Maine’s most staggeringly beautiful coastline.
Seawater now covers what had been a mine operated by the Callahan Mining Corp., its legacy a tailings pond, a massive pile of unwanted slurry at the mine site’s southern edge, on the banks of Marsh Creek. When it rained or snowed, heavy metals from the pile would leak into the creek and adjacent salt marsh—and into Goose Pond itself.
FARMING FISH—
COURTESY COOKE INC.
Just across the water, with the tailings pond and bulldozers visible in the distance, birders have logged sightings of belted kingfishers, eagles, osprey, spotted sandpipers and hermit thrush. Walking paths thread their way through the woods on the pond’s eastern edge, now a 1,200-acre state park and nature sanctuary.
Fred Beck was chief geologist for the Callahan Mining Corp. He had come to Maine after abandoning a planned sailing trip around the world when his wife learned she was pregnant not long after the couple departed Wales.
continued on page 4
Kelp collapsing on Southern Maine coast
First in-depth study in 20 years surprises
BY LEAH CAMPBELL
Kelp forests are a foundational feature along Maine’s coastline, providing the food,
habitat, and clean water needed for a rich marine ecosystem. But these forests are in flux due to changes in modern fisheries and, more recently, due to rapid warming.
A team of scientists led by Douglas Rasher, a senior research scientist at Bigelow Laboratory in East Boothbay, is illuminating those changes with the first in-depth census of Maine’s kelp forests in almost 20 years.
Their findings show the widespread collapse of forests along the southern coast but provide new evidence for the surprising resilience of kelp forests in eastern Maine, even as warming drives slow but significant declines there.
well as the importance of regional differences in how ecosystems may respond to ocean warming.
“I was floored by how dramatically the seaweed communities had changed and how much warmer coastal waters had become,” said Thew Suskiewicz, a former postdoctoral researcher at Bigelow Laboratory and the study’s first author.
Scientists undertook several detailed dive surveys of kelp forests along more than 200 miles of coast.
“The more we sampled for this project, the more apparent those changes were and, sadly, I anticipate this is only the beginning.” Ecological theory and past observations suggest that kelp forests are controlled largely by changes in the relative populations of
This research, made possible by funding from Maine Sea Grant and recently published in the journal Ecology, highlights just how much climate change is altering long-standing ecological relationships, as continued on page 8
Megan Robinson, front, and Jessica Lindsay weigh fish at a Machias Bay salmon farm owned and operated by Cooke Inc. The New Brunswick-based company has been operating in Maine for 20 years. See story on pages 2-3.
PHOTO:
Downeast salmon business marks 20 years
Canadian-based Cooke Inc. employs 200 in Maine
BY TOM GROENING
The new, cool kids on the sea-farming block get lots of attention—those folks growing mussels, scallops, oysters, and kelp. But there’s a wellestablished aquaculture sector turning out seafood along the Hancock and Washington county coasts.
Cooke Inc. has been operating in-the-water salmon farms in Maine for 20 years. The company was launched when brothers Glenn and Michael Cooke and their father Gifford Cooke established their first salmon farm at Kelly Cove, New Brunswick, in 1985. The company is now based in St. John, New Brunswick. It made forays into Maine by purchasing existing salmon pen operations. The first acquisition was Atlantic Salmon of Maine in 2004.
“There were about four players operating salmon farms in the early 2000s,” says Steve Hedlund, director of public affairs for Cooke’s Maine. Those firms, some of which were internationally based, were struggling financially, he said, and the Cooke family began purchasing those Maine businesses.
The acquisition included a salmon processing facility in Machiasport that still operates.
Today, the company operates in 14 countries and raises and harvests some 25 species, though Atlantic salmon tops the list of products. It runs 30 processing plants and operates several hundred vessels, employing more than 12,000 globally, Hedlund said.
primary net suspended from a floating plastic frame. A second, “predator” net is hung on the outside of the pen to deter seals and diving birds from reaching the fish, and a bird net keeps eagles and ospreys from preying on the fish.
The pens are scattered across a region that extends from Cobscook Bay in the east, through JonesportBeals, to near Swan’s Island in the west. The fish spend about 18-24 months in the pens, reaching a weight of about 12 pounds, at which time they are ready to be sold.
Lease sites range from about 10 acres to about 45 acres, with most 20-35 acres.
“Then the farm site is fallowed for months,” he said. The two-dozen lease sites allow for rotating production. Though the pens might seem to be devoid of much human attention, Hedlund said “There’s a lot of maintenance required.”
In the early stages of the salmon’s life, workers feed the fish by hand at the pens, but later, it’s automated, with workers using remote technology to provide feed.
In the U.S., Cooke operates in Virginia, Louisiana, Washington, and Alaska.
In Maine, Cooke employs 230 in Washington County, making it one of the region’s largest employers, with workers based in the processing plant as well as in locations along the Downeast coast that allow them to operate and maintain the 24 lease sites on which pens are located.
The Maine-raised salmon begin their life in three hatcheries: in Oquossoc (near Rangeley), Bingham, and East Machias. Once they reach a weight of 150 grams—about 5 ounces—they are placed in pens at the lease sites.
“We’re mimicking the life cycle of a wild Atlantic salmon,” Hedlund explained. The pens include a
In the early stages of the salmon’s life, workers feed the fish by hand at the pens, but later, it’s automated, with workers using remote technology to provide feed.
“Each farm has a feed barge,” he said.
Underwater cameras monitor the feeding, and air is used to move it around and suspend it in the water for a time, thereby limiting what ends up on the bottom.
The feed is a blend of fish meal, fish oil, a vegetable protein (like soy), and vitamins and minerals. One ingredient, astaxanthin, derived from shrimp, krill, and other crustaceans, gives the salmon its pink color.
“It’s dry, pelletized,” he said of the feed. Critics say the uneaten feed that falls to the bottom can be a pollutant, but Hedlund counters that, noting “We’re constantly monitoring the environment,” including the sea floor, to ensure that very little makes it to the bottom.
The fish are vaccinated before they’re transferred to farm sites to reduce bacterial diseases.
State law limits stocking density of salmon at 30 kilograms per cubic meter; Cooke’s density is lower than the required density, he said.
In the 1980s, when pen-farming emerged Downeast, there was resistance, for a variety of reasons—impacts to views, concerns about loss of access for lobstering and other fishing, and concerns
about environmental impacts, including the escape of farmed fish.
Hedlund and others in the industry acknowledge that early errors were costly to community perception, and that being responsive to concerns is key to success.
“Social license is everything,” Hedlund said, referring to a buy-in from communities. “It’s so important. We hold a lease. It’s a privilege.”
The company is regulated by the state’s Environmental Protection and Marine Resources departments, as well as the federal Army Corps of Engineers. Escapes must be reported, and the company submits to third-party audits.
Hedlund noted that all of Cooke’s Maine pens survived the January storms.
“They’re pretty weather-resistant,” he said.
Still, “There are challenges to raising animals,” he said, with sea lice and diseases that appear from time to time. “Like any industry, you’re constantly improving and learning,” he said, and the company invests significantly in research and development.
He disputes the idea that lobstermen see fish farms as interlopers.
“Some lobstermen and women work for us in their offseason,” he said. “We’re always helping each other out there,” towing stranded boats and assisting it other ways.
“We’ve been coexisting in Downeast Maine for 42 years now. They set gear next to our [pens].”
Cooke’s salmon is sold under the True North brand in local grocery stores, and in stores across the country. Most of the salmon processed in Machiasport is sold at supermarkets and restaurants in New England and the Northeast, Hedlund noted.
The “made in Maine” nature of the product adds value. Monterey Aquarium rates farmed salmon as a “good alternative”
“It resonates with consumers,” he said, as the marketing touts the pristine waters of the Gulf of Maine as the source.
Atlantic salmon provides a high source of omega-3 fatty acids, which provide a number of health benefits.
“It’s such a consistent source of protein for people worldwide now,” especially when it is farm raised. That steady supply “opened up the salmon market,” he said. Salmon is the second most consumed seafood in the U.S. behind shrimp.
In addition, “Fish is such an efficient converter of protein,” with 1.2-1.5 grams of protein feed resulting in 1 gram of fish flesh.
Susana DeFrank, a fish health specialist with Cooke USA, works with a dip net at a Machias Bay salmon farm.
PHOTO: COURTESY COOKE INC.
Mark Leighton holds young fish at the company’s Gardner Lake hatchery in East Machias. PHOTO: COURTESY COOKE INC.
Workforce, as with many sectors, remains a challenge, but Washington County Community College now offers an aquaculture certificate program.
“We’re always advertising vacancies,” including for deck hands and fish-processing technicians.
About 35 people working for Cooke in Maine were with the companies Cooke acquired, meaning they have been in their jobs for 20-plus years.
Gov. Janet Mills congratulated Cooke on its 20 years in Maine:
“Maine’s iconic seafood industry is a key part of our state’s heritage and a cornerstone of our economy. Cooke has been a leader in seafood production in Maine, employing hundreds of people in highquality, good-paying jobs. I congratulate Cooke as it marks 20 years in Maine and thank this familyowned business for its extraordinary contributions to the Maine economy.”
In a press release, Cooke quoted Chris Gardner, executive director of the Eastport Port Authority and chairman of the Washington County Commission: “Cooke, and salmon aquaculture in general, are woven into the fabric of Washington County’s economy. Not only does the company provide direct employment to people in Eastport and throughout Washington County, but it also supports numerous other businesses that provide goods and services year-round, helping sustain the region’s oceanbased economy,”
Sebastian Belle, executive director of the Maine Aquaculture Association (and a member of Island Institute’s board of trustees), also praised the company’s contributions.
“The company is family-owned, regionally based, and competitive with well-established sales and marketing channels, and that it has operations here in Maine gives the state a seat at the table in the global salmon arena.”
Gerald “Punkin” Lemoine
Bud Staples
Cooke Inc.’s hatchery manager Jen Ford (left) and hatchery technician Megan Cote in Eastport.
PHOTO: COURTESY COOKE INC.
Cooke USA’s Cross Island salmon farm in Machias Bay. PHOTO: COURTESY COOKE INC.
Cooke USA Fish Health Technician Jaelyn Matthews and Alex Johndro of New DHC Inc. at a Machias Bay salmon farm.
PHOTO: COURTESY COOKE INC.
continued from page 1
After first taking a job with the Maine Geological Survey, Beck initially went to work as a consultant for Callahan before being hired as the company’s regional geologist. He spent his days in an office in Blue Hill, poring over old surveys and mining records, searching for unexplored or abandoned deposits and reporting his findings to the company’s office in New York.
Goose Pond was an obvious choice to go looking for a potential deposit, Beck said. The region had a history of mining going back to the late 1800s, and at one point was the state’s leading producer of base metals, with two mines, a smelter, and even a stock exchange operating in Blue Hill.
The zinc and copper deposits in Harborside were discovered in the early 1880s. The Harborside Copper Mine, as it became known, produced around 10,000 tons of ore from three underground shafts between 1881 and 1883. The ore was barged across the bay to Castine, where they were piled on a dock and periodically picked up by coastal schooners to be brought to smelters in the South.
required the company to work with the agency to rehabilitate the land. But the document had few details, requiring only that reclamation be “the subject of further discussion and negotiation between the parties.”
No money or testing of the soils was required in advance, nor was the company required to take any precautions to ensure the waste rock in the tailings pile didn’t leach toxins.
“It did give us some good jobs for three or four years, and that was it,” said John Gray, who worked as an assayer at the mine when it was in operation and whose family has lived in Brooksville for generations. “And then—I don’t think we really realized how much damage was done.”
The zinc and copper deposits in Harborside were discovered in the early 1880s.
But metal prices faltered, and the boom was over almost as quickly as it began, with a final shipment of copper from the Douglass Mine in Blue Hill in 1918 marking the end of base metal mining in Maine for decades.
The Harborside Copper Mine shut down in the late 1880s and lay largely dormant until it was optioned by the Penobscot Mining Co. of Toronto in 1956 and leased to Callahan a decade later.
Callahan determined that the only way to make the deposit profitable would be to extract the metals in an open pit, dug below the pond’s surface.
According to Beck, who is writing a book about the history of the Callahan Mine, the company planned to fund the project with proceeds from its Galena silver mine in northern Idaho, at the time one of the nation’s most productive silver mining operations.
The state of Maine owned the land beneath Goose Pond, which meant Callahan would need permission to drain and excavate it. Four state agencies approved Callahan’s plans and the Maine Supreme Judicial Court also signed off, as did lawmakers and thenMaine Gov. John Reed, citing a promise of jobs and a million dollars in annual payroll. The law declared the mine to be “of public interest to the state.”
The law required Callahan to “return the water to the aforesaid tidal estuary upon termination of mining,” but made no mention of any other reclamation or funds.
A lease signed the following year between Callahan and the Maine Mining Bureau, the state agency responsible for permitting at the time,
Nationwide, mining law at the time was in its infancy. Most regulations applied only to coal mines, which had seen a number of high-profile disasters over the years. It wasn’t until 1966, the year the Maine Legislature gave Callahan approval to drain the estuary, that Congress passed a law establishing procedures for developing safety and health standards for metal and nonmetal mines. It would be another decade before The Mine Safety and Health Act was passed.
Locals in Brooksville were largely supportive of the mine, said Gray, who still lives nearby. An electrician by trade, Gray’s job as the assayer for Callahan saw him submerging ground rock samples in chemical baths to coax the metals out in solution, then drying them under large heaters and reporting back to the mine manager. Assayers could turn around a sample in an hour, if necessary.
“It was a pretty good job,” Gray said, akin to working at one of the larger paper mills. “It was not quite as good pay as that, but it was pretty good for the area.”
Not everyone was excited about the prospect of digging for heavy metals in a tidal estuary.
Opposition to the project was led by realist painter Albert Sandecki, who had purchased a summer home abutting the Callahan property in 1964. In a letter shortly after the company began digging, Sandecki warned of the consequences.
“The future value of the entire area is jeopardized by the fact that the Callahan Corporation has not been required by state or local officials to provide a contract or performance bond to insure restorative measures,” Sandecki wrote.
“It is common documented knowledge from other states that open pit mines present these problems, and there is no reason to assume that this project will be any different in its resultant destruction to scenery, wildlife, and future values of the area.”
After getting approval from the state, Callahan quickly set to work constructing two dams— one at the mouth of the estuary to prevent the tides from entering and another at the head of the pond to divert the fresh water drainage from 1,600 acres of adjacent forest and salt marsh. In early 1968, the company drained the water and set about digging a pit that would ultimately descend 340 feet, covering nearly 10 acres.
scour the cove, silt was settling in the area below the pond, Beck wrote in a paper in 1970.
Residents began complaining of wells going dry in the area around the pond, or being infiltrated with saltwater. Tests of clams and other shellfish in the cove revealed higher than expected heavy metal content, but since the area had not been studied in advance, there was no established baseline.
“It can only be assumed that the mine is one of the contributors,” Beck wrote. Brooksville escaped the scourge of acid mine drainage, which can occur in base metal mines and devastate the surrounding environment, only because the metals in Harborside happened to occur in a matrix of talc carbonate, which immediately buffered any acid produced by the surrounding metals. But this was largely luck, as no testing was done in advance.
“In hindsight, of course, we see things that should have been done that weren’t by both government and industry.”
“In hindsight, of course, we see things that should have been done that weren’t by both government and industry,” Beck said.
“It’s required now by the [Maine Department of Environmental Protection] to do a lot of testing of soils, of water, of groundwater, surface water and so forth before you even dig a shovelful of dirt. But that wasn’t part of the equation back in those days. It’s too bad it wasn’t, but that’s the way it was.”
‘THAT’S THE WAY IT WAS’ It was evident early on that the mine was creating environmental problems. Without tidal currents to periodically
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Callahan built settling ponds and a pipe to help disperse the silt and tried recycling the effluent water in the on-site processing mill, with the hopes of creating a closed system that could be a model for other underwater mines. The company also drilled new wells for those whose wells had gone dry, moving some farther away from the sea.
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But the tailings pond, where unwanted slurry was dumped after metals were floated out, remained unlined on the bottom and open to the elements, allowing zinc and copper and lead to leach into the adjacent salt marsh and soils. Waste rock piles and ore processing areas had no protective lining underneath or caps on top, unthinkable under modern mining regulations.
“I’m sure there are people who think I’m an evil person,” said Beck, whose company, Maine Environmental Laboratory, now helps state agencies and nonprofits test soil and rocks for mineral content.
“I’ve always been a strong environmentalist. Most geologists, I think, are,” he said. “Callahan, I think, did their best under the conditions that existed at the time.”
After operating for four years and extracting 5 million tons of rock (including 800,000 tons of valuable ore), Callahan shut down the mine in Harborside, having exhausted the deposit. The company attempted some revegetation of the site, hiring a landscape renewal specialist who experimented with a variety of plants, including zinc-tolerant red fescue grasses from Wales.
But the plants struggled to take, said Beck, who had been given the unenviable task of managing the cleanup after the mine manager left for a job in Brazil.
wondered whether salmon might do well in the pit’s deep, cold waters.
Bob Mant, a promising young biologist trained at Princeton University and at the University of Maine, agreed to head up the project, which he named Maine Sea Farms.
In 1974, two years after the mine closed, Callahan, which had initially backed the project, struggled to find additional investors, according to documents Beck gave to The Maine Monitor, and sold the site to Mant for $25,000.
The experiment became, for a time, the largest pen salmon operation on the Eastern Seaboard, handling millions of fish, according to testimony Bob’s wife Linda gave to Congress in 1977. The on-site laboratory equipment was repurposed to test for metals in the fish, and Mant hired two local men to help him run the operation.
Companies are now required to conduct years of water and soil testing before applying for mining permits…
Maine passed a law in 1969, a year into Callahan’s operation, requiring mining companies to post bonds and submit a comprehensive site rehabilitation plan before beginning operations. But Callahan had been grandfathered in and was not required to submit any reclamation money to the state.
Callahan offered to remove the concrete dam and dredge the cove as part of the requirements of its mining lease, but state agencies initially refused, fearing that disturbing the area and allowing tidal flow would make any metal contamination worse.
Eventually, Beck said, the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife agreed that part of the dam should be removed to allow for some tidal flow. Photos of the day the water flowed in show the sea cascading hundreds of feet into the mine pit, a towering, ephemeral waterfall.
Once the pond had refilled, Beck wondered whether there was a way to repurpose the mine site. The minerals leaching into the pit from the mine site were sulfides, insoluble in seawater, meaning the water itself was free from toxic metals, which Beck and his team confirmed repeatedly with tests. He
The salmon and oysters were repeatedly tested for heavy metals but found to have escaped contamination, likely because the minerals in which the metals occurred were insoluble in water, settling instead into the silt below, Beck said.
The fish were sold to restaurants as far south as Boston, said Beck, who ate a few of them himself.
But Mant was a better biologist than he was a businessman, Beck said, and struggled to keep the business afloat; Maine Sea Farms lasted just five years before going bankrupt. The equipment was sold off and the buildings eventually torn down.
For years after that, the mine was mostly quiet, Gray said. People would walk through the site and pick up shiny pieces of ore, and children occasionally played on the tailings pond.
“It was kind of fun,” Gray said. “And nobody seemed to get hurt, so it was pretty good.”
A CAUTIONARY TALE
In 2002, three decades after the Callahan mine closed and after many years of testing, the Environmental Protection Agency designated the former mine and salmon farm as a Superfund site. Initially funded by taxes on petroleum and chemical companies , the goal of the Superfund program was to create a dedicated fund for cleaning up hazardous waste, even when a responsible party couldn’t be identified.
Cleanup work began in Brooksville in 2011. Contaminated rock and soil was consolidated, and a
new system was designed and constructed to manage the tailings. The tailings pond was stabilized and lined and a cover was installed to help prevent heavy metals from leaching out when it rains or snows.
Drainage systems were installed and erosion controls put in place, and nearby properties were rid of soil contaminated with PCBs, which are thought to have stemmed from the dumping of electrical transformers on the land after Maine Sea Farms closed.
In the intervening decades, Maine mining law changed dramatically. Companies are now required to conduct years of water and soil testing before applying for mining permits and must set aside funds for reclamation in advance. It has been more than 40 years since the state has had any active metal mines, and many experts consider Maine to have the most stringent mining laws in the U.S.
Those laws were written in large part out of a desire not to repeat what happened with Callahan. During discussion of the most recent mining law changes, which were approved earlier this year, proponents and detractors alike invoked Callahan as a cautionary tale.
The last phase of the cleanup, which the EPA announced in August, is expected to end in 2026 with a final cost of around $55 million, and will include dredging the mouth of the estuary at Goose Cove and covering a large pile of waste rock.
The site is now owned by Smith Cove Preservation Trust, a nonprofit based in Ohio. An officer of the trust, James Beneson, told The Weekly Packet in August that his family has been visiting the area for decades and would like to see the property reforested and restored “to some sort of wild state.”
Today the pond itself bears little evidence of the scar beneath its surface, apart from signs warning those looking to cool off in its waters to swim at their own risk. A pocket wetland has been reestablished near the tailings impoundment.
Visitors to Holbrook Island Sanctuary, which occupies the pond’s eastern shore, could be forgiven for not noticing the Superfund site at all, save for the occasional clink of bulldozers in the distance.
“Nature in many ways is remarkably resilient,” EPA representative Ed Hathaway told a crowd gathered in Brooksville over the summer. “In many cases, if you remove the real toxic threats, nature will regenerate.”
This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from the Monitor, sign up for its free newsletter at TheMaineMonitor.org.
This ‘God-forsaken rock’
Passing of an islander underscores community
BY KIM HAMILTON
WHEN THE DEADLINE is looming for the next edition of The Working Waterfront, I reflect on what I’ve seen, heard, and shared in communities along the coast. Without fail, Tom Groening, our talented editor who has taken the pulse of the coastline for years, has said, “Write about your own experiences.” And I do, but within some self-imposed parameters.
This month, with permission from my family, however, I want to share a much more personal story about loss and love and the power of small communities.
I attended a celebration of life last month for a person that I admired and loved. He wasn’t well-known to many on Chebeague Island, but for those of us who did know him, he was pure life force. Larger-than-life, a raconteur, a truth-teller. He wore his own Irish heritage proudly and wrapped all of us
in a big, warm blanket of Irish blessings and wisdom.
He was the kind of person we all need in our life. Someone who kept us on our toes and whose wit delivered truth and humor in equal measure. Like his infamous cocktail, the Log Cabin Manhattan, he was zesty with a deep soulful finish.
Some might say that it was only a matter of time before he would find his way to Chebeague Island. The ties that so lovingly connect people to islands and his marriage to an islander—my cousin with her generations-long roots—made his eventual move seem inevitable.
and our communities are enriched by newcomers with new perspectives. He had a few to share.
In jest, mostly, he’d talk about his new life on this “God-forsaken rock.” Had he seen that day, and perhaps he did, the church filled to the brim with people who had come to celebrate, to sing for him, to support his family, and to say his name, our little “rock” in Casco Bay would certainly have felt much less forsaken. Rather, it shone like a homecoming for an honored guest.
He ribbed us about our incessant obsession with local family genealogy...
He ribbed us about our incessant obsession with local family genealogy and reminded us, by his very presence, that our lives
In fact, it struck me that we might all hope to end our days ushered along on a bright, royal carpet of such love and community support, with the saints all marching and the colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky. It was magnificent.
And this is where small, close-knit communities excel. We understand that each one of us is meaningful in their own right and worthy of celebration. In coming together, we create an enviable strength that carries the community forward and connects us, one generation to the next. In the most profound sense, each passing breathes fresh life into our community spirit. To wrap the vim and sparkle of one resplendent individual into the constellation of lives before us and after us is no small thing. How fortunate we are, in all our manifestations of grief, to have so much wisdom lighting our way.
Kim Hamilton is president of Island Institute, publisher of The Working Waterfront. She may be contacted at KHamilton@islandinstitute.org.
Bad news is not often well-received rock bound
Being a messenger is risky business
BY TOM GROENING
I’VE BEEN THINKING about a play I saw on public TV many years ago, and believe it or not, my thoughts had nothing to do with the election.
An Enemy of the People, written in 1882 by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, had been adapted by Arthur Miller, best known for his Death of a Salesman. It was Miller’s version that I saw staged on TV in the mid-1990s.
The plot has a physician discovering contamination in the town’s newly developed spas, whose waters will be used to draw visitors to enjoy their healthy benefits. The doctor’s brother, a town official, wants to see the discovery suppressed, and conflict ensues.
In my recollection of the performance, the doctor meets with the editor of the local newspaper to share his discovery and, his words dripping with false humility, pledges to refuse any honors the town wants to give him. Of course, the viewer readily sees that the discovery of contaminated waters is not being greeted as a bullet dodged, but rather as a fatal blow to the town’s expected economic windfall.
While editor of a weekly newspaper in Belfast in the mid-1990s, I had to navigate the arrival of credit card-lender MBNA, a company that had already landed as an economic colossus in Camden. That MBNA was expanding to Belfast, which was still recovering
from the loss of poultry processing and shoe factories, was mostly greeted as good news—including by me.
But there were those who were skeptical and downright disdainful.
When the news broke, we received letters to the editor and a longer, guest column kind of piece.
One of the letters included a crude allusion to the town acquiescing to the corporation, while the longer one was by a carpenter who’d done work at a property owned by the company’s top executive. It was philosophical, but described the executive as imperious and unrealistically exacting.
In my editorial that week, I urged the community to be more thoughtful, like the author of the longer piece.
MBNA’s top executive was furious that we would highlight the latter opinion, and my boss called to tell me the company was scuttling its expansion to Belfast and, in a press conference, would name me and my editorial decisions as the reason why.
In the final scene of An Enemy of the People, torchcarrying townspeople march to the doctor’s home, chanting “Enemy!” Miller was inspired in his adaptation of Ibsen by the horrors of McCarthyism. I wasn’t stranded on
any such moral high ground, but rather caught between community sentiments. Luckily, MBNA changed its mind before the matter went public and so no torch-carrying folks ever marched down my driveway.
I was reminded of Enemy when I heard former state economist Charlie Colgan speak in Stonington—the state’s top lobster-landing port—asserting that the fishery would be significantly smaller in 20 years. Now an academic, long past his days in state government, Colgan could afford to be blunt.
Still, such “messenger duty” can have one be perceived as an enemy.
I urged the community to avoid responding crudely and antagonistically, and instead be more thoughtful…
Recently, my wife and I saw the 1976 film All the President’s Men (again) on Turner Classic Movies. Presenters Ben Mankiewicz (the grandson of Herman Mankiewicz, who co-wrote Citizen Kane) and Steven Spielberg noted that the film recounted what had been recent news, reported incrementally. Retelling the story of the Nixon administration’s electoral corruption as a procedural drama watered down what was daunting and even risky work by reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
I met Woodward in 2012, backstage at Colby College, which was presenting him with its Elijah Parish Lovejoy award for journalistic courage. Among the stories he told in his public remarks was about sitting next to Al Gore at an event a few years after the 2000 election.
Why didn’t Woodward “go after” George W. Bush, Gore asked Woodward, the way he “went after” Nixon? Well, Woodward explained, journalists don’t go after people; they report.
Despite Gore’s poor understanding of journalism, he did produce the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, sounding the alarm on climate change.
A more recent dramatic telling of that truth is the darkly funny film Don’t Look Up, about an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, whose dangers politicians want to minimize and instead find an economic upside, an allusion to climate change.
Whether it’s torches or asteroids, truthtelling can wear out its welcome fast.
Tom Groening is editor of The Working Waterfront. He may be contacted at tgroening@islandinstitute.org.
BIDDEFORD BRICKS—
This image shows Biddeford’s Main Street in 1913.
Working waterfront tax law is improved
More help for fishing families through amendments
BY JESSICA GRIBBON JOYCE
IT’S THE LETTER no one wants to open—the dreaded perforated envelope from your municipality that comes once a year. Yep, you guessed it, your property tax bill.
Taxes only seem to change in one direction, up, and if you live in coastal Maine, perhaps the slope of this curve is steep. Some coastal landowners can tighten their belts and pay the bill, but this is not the case for everyone. Historically, the fishing families of Maine lived along the coast and had proximity to their vessels and gear storage, and did not travel far to load those lobster traps on and off their boats each year.
That dynamic has changed over the years as more fishermen and their families have moved inland due to the inability to afford increasing taxes while the cost of doing business also increases, and as the catch fluctuates. As coastal property values in Maine have risen, property taxes have increased—even if you haven’t made any improvements or rebuilt your home like your neighbors.
For the fishing industry, the true value of coastal property lies less in the house itself and more in the land
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and the wharf or other water access. However, property taxes may not reflect this distinction. The median home price in Maine in 2020 was $220,000. This year, it’s $391,000. Higher values impact taxes when homes are assessed. Fortunately, there is relief available for working waterfront property owners. It’s one of several offerings within the Current Land Use Programs of the Maine Revenue Service, along with relief offered for farmland, open space, and tree growth. These programs offer a reduction in the assessed value of properties based on their current use instead of the highest and best use.
In 2005, Maine voters passed an amendment to the state constitution allowing working waterfront property to be assessed at current, not highest and best use. Then, the Working Waterfront Coalition worked with the legislature to develop the working waterfront program within Current Land Use, which went into effect in 2007.
Thanks to Rep. Dan Ankeles of Brunswick, and a collaboration between the Coastal Access Strategy Exchange and Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association (MCFA), the Working Waterfront program was amended in the 131st legislature.
The initiative began when a lobsterman from Brunswick addressed his town council to share his newly multiplied tax assessment. When he revealed the number, the crowd gasped.
He has owned the property since the 1970s, and seen family member after family member give up their waterfront property to move inland. The legislation, borne out of this predicament, will help fishermen retain the property that allows them to work and maintain the state’s heritage coastline.
“People moving here from out-ofstate can afford the higher coastal property taxes,” says Chris Warner, a shellfish harvester, oyster farmer, and real estate agent. “But to us fishermen, it knocks us out. The local families selling the working waterfront properties are making hard decisions due to taxes, property values, and storm/ climate impacts. Once it’s sold, the working waterfront is gone forever.”
The amendments garnered unanimous support from the Joint Standing Committee on Taxation, and the regulations were made effective on Aug. 9.
The amendments include:
• A revised definition of working waterfront land that is inclusive of land
THE WORKING WATERFRONT
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used for commercial fishing activities, gear maintenance, and storage.
• Land used predominantly as working waterfront (90% or more for commercial fishing activity) is eligible for a reduction of 30%.
• Land used primarily as working waterfront (50%-89% for commercial fishing activity) is eligible for a reduction of 20%.
• Working waterfront land that is subject to a legally binding right-ofway or easement that permits access to intertidal land is eligible for an additional reduction of 10%.
• A delay in payment of penalties for non-compliance with working waterfront use for up to two years.
For a complete list of revisions and more detail, see MCFA’s blog post. If property owners are already enrolled in this program, the changes will automatically apply in 2025. If properties are not yet enrolled, owners will need to apply at their municipal office before April 1 to qualify for the tax year.
Jessica Gribbon Joyce operates Tidal Bay Consulting in South Freeport. Monique Coombs and Emily Coffin of Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association contributed to this column.
Editor: Tom Groening tgroening@islandinstitute.org
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KELP
continued from page 1
predators and prey in the food chain. In Maine, the collapse of fish populations like Atlantic cod led to a proliferation of kelp-eating sea urchins, which deforested the coast. Starting in the 1980s, though, a sea urchin fishery removed most of these voracious grazers from the ecosystem, allowing
forests to recover along Maine’s coast by the early 2000s.
But kelp forests are now declining again, this time in response to a new threat— rapidly rising water temperatures.
The researchers combined several dive surveys of sea urchin and kelp populations with data on ocean temperature to model how and why kelp forests are changing—and how that varies along different parts of the
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coast. They found that temperatures have become inhospitable, in both the spring and summer, in the southern reaches of the Gulf of Maine where kelp forests have collapsed and been replaced by small filamentous red algae, which form a thick carpet of “turf” on the seafloor.
But they did find some cause for hope. While forests along Maine’s northeastern coast are also slowly declining, they still remain widespread there and continue to provide key ecosystem services. The researchers suggest that these regional differences in forest health, which hadn’t been previously documented, are due to the different ocean currents that run through the Gulf of Maine that make southern waters several degrees warmer during the summer.
“Ocean warming is impacting kelp forests throughout the Gulf of Maine, but absolute temperatures in the south are higher, so forests there have already reached their tipping point,” said Rasher. “The vast forests that still exist in the cooler, northern reaches of Maine, however, are likely to persist for decades, and should receive targeted management so they can continue to provide key ecosystem services.”
To draw out these important but subtle changes, scientists in Rasher’s lab undertook several detailed dive surveys of kelp forests along more than 200 miles of coast. They recreated the last in-depth kelp census completed in the early 2000s by Robert Steneck, another of the study’s co-authors and a professor emeritus at University of Maine.
Those data were, in turn, combined by Jarrett Byrnes, a co-author from University of Massachusetts Boston, with information on temperature and almost 20 years of annual survey data collected by the Maine Department of Marine Resources to track sea urchins.
“Datasets that cover both this much space and time in this habitat are exceedingly rare,” Byrnes said. “This dataset is unique in the Gulf of Maine
and tells a fascinating story about climate change in our nearshore waters. It gives us the power to understand the impacts of global change with nuance and precision in a wholly unique way.”
These findings also have implications for kelp forest management and where resource managers target restoration and monitoring.
“By linking the broad-scale patterns that a generalist survey like DMR’s picks up with the detailed, speciesspecific information, you create a powerful dataset,” said Carl Wilson, director of the Bureau of Marine Sciences at DMR.
“This sea urchin survey is emerging as one of the unique surveys in the Gulf of Maine to document the effects of climate change, as is reflected in this paper,” Wilson said. “For all of our surveys, but especially this one, we’re thinking about how we adapt them for broader ecological monitoring.”
At Bigelow Laboratory, the research has also catalyzed a series of projects examining how species are shifting in response to changing conditions and what impact that’s having on the broader ecosystem. Rasher and his research team have continued to track changes within Maine’s kelp forests, with a focus on revealing the impacts of kelp loss on the broader ecosystem, from microbes to large fish.
“Ecological theory predicts that when you bring herbivores under control, kelp forests should flourish, but what we found is that climate change has rewritten the rules in this system,” Rasher said. “We need to adjust the way in which we conduct science, the questions we ask, and the way we manage resources if we’re going to understand and adapt to our changing oceans.”
Leah Campbell is science communications manager at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay. This story first appeared on Bigelow’s website and is reprinted with permission and gratitude.
PHOTOS BY BRIAN SKERRY/COURTESY BIGELOW LABORATORY
Warming up
Waldo County
Nonprofit provides firewood to those who need it
BY TESS WROBLESKI
As winter approaches, residents in Waldo County may be warmed knowing they have a place to turn if they cannot afford to heat their homes: the Waldo County Woodshed.
The concept for the Woodshed is simple: provide wood to anyone who needs it to heat their homes. The execution is more complex.
“‘How hard can it be?’ should be our slogan,” Bob MacGregor, founder and president of the Waldo County Woodshed, says. “It sounds simple, but then you start and realize it can be very hard. It’s a lot of work physically, and a lot to do all year long.”
MacGregor moved to Belfast more than 35 years ago. He works full-time as a traveling salesman in biomedical research, a job he says allows flexibility for volunteering.
He was inspired to start the Woodshed in the fall of 2014, after reading an article by University of Maine researchers that described how wood banks could benefit Mainers.
MacGregor and several of his friends have backgrounds in forestry and connections to local loggers. With all of this knowledge and experience, he figured, “How hard could it be?”and started planning to open a community woodshed the following winter.
Then, a manager at Bangor Savings Bank offered MacGregor and his friends $750 to buy wood and start their operations. The caveat: they had to spend the money that season.
So they bought the wood and dove in without a plan. They gave away 20 quarter-cords of wood in their first season.
In the decade since, they’ve grown significantly. They still use donations
to buy wood at market rate from local loggers. Next, volunteers process and split the wood at their Searsmont site.
A single volunteer, Sonja Twombly, answers calls from every person inquiring about the service and tells them which of the eight distribution sites across the county they should go to. Volunteers bring the processed wood to the distribution sites and give it away to those in need.
As the Woodshed’s operations have grown, its impact has increased by nearly ten-fold—now giving away roughly 180 quarter-cords last year, and 190 the year prior.
“We’ve had a lot of generous donors who have allowed us to procure the amount of wood we need,” MacGregor says. “We’re fortunate that we’ve been able to grow like we have and produce as much as we do on a volunteer basis.”
Barry Feero is one of the nearly 50 volunteers who contributes to the Woodshed’s operations. A selfdescribed “Mainer all through and through,” Feero graduated from Old Town High School in 1976 and has lived in and around Brooks, in central Waldo County, for more than 40 years.
Like many volunteers, Feero first accessed the Woodshed as a recipient.
“The first time I went, I needed wood real bad,” he says. “It just really helped me out for years, and I figured I should help them out.”
Feero stepped in when the Woodshed moved to close their Monroe distribution site due to a lack of volunteers. Now he coordinates the Brooks distribution site.
What he loves most is talking with people and hearing their stories.
“I listen a lot,” he says. “It’s difficult to see how people struggle, but people do what they have to do. And we try to help out.”
The Woodshed, Feero says, is a reflection of the community. “It’s like a big family,” he says. “The people who use it also help out when it’s needed.”
The community stepped up to support the Woodshed in a critical moment in its first year, MacGregor says. One evening following a massive snowstorm, he went to their distribution site and found all of the wood was gone, save for a couple armfuls.
“It’s 10 degrees below zero and windy, and I’ve got six people coming, expecting wood to keep their homes warm,” MacGregor says. “They showed up, and I had to explain that it was gone. Even in their tough circumstances, everyone was understanding. They each took home an armload of wood.”
When it came out that someone had stolen the wood to sell it, the response from the community was overwhelming. It was the first big fundraising rush for the Woodshed, and the
generous donations helped them finish out their first year successfully.
The Woodshed has changed MacGregor’s perspective on receiving aid.
“It’s a humbling experience to see how people live and to realize there’s an awful lot of people out there who need help. It’s a reminder that the need is maybe your nextdoor neighbor, or people you thought were better off,” he says. “If I needed help someday, I would know now not to be afraid to ask for it.”
If you live in the Waldo County area and need wood to heat your home this winter, learn how to access the Waldo County Woodshed by visiting: waldocountywoodshed.org/services. There’s also information about how to donate.
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Volunteers with the Waldo County Woodshed work on cutting and stacking wood. PHOTO: COURTESY BOB MacGREGOR
Taking the Ellington, Strayhorn train
Newcastle trombonist mines rich vein of compositions
BY STEPHANIE BOUCHARD
In the early years of Novel Jazz Septet’s two-decade history, the band’s founder and trombonist, William “Barney” Balch, made a pilgrimage to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. There, Balch held in his hands a handwritten score of Duke Ellington’s famous hit, “Mood Indigo.”
“My hands were shaking,” Balch recalls from his home in Newcastle. “I mean, this is it. This is where the concept was put on paper.”
The members of Novel Jazz Septet didn’t set out to seek the original scores of the music they play. Formed 20 years ago this year after an invitation for pizza at a home in Pittston that turned into a musical jam, the band started performing jazz standards, including those by Ellington and his longtime musical collaborator, Billy Strayhorn, at Skidompha Public Library in Damariscotta.
At a performance, an audience member requested the band play an Ellington tune no one in the band knew.
“These guys in the band have been playing jazz a long time, so it’s rare that everyone in the band is stumped,” says Balch. “I asked the now momentous question, ‘I wonder how many compositions these guys made?’”
An ocean scientist by trade who retired from Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean
Sciences in East Boothbay last year, Balch loves to do research, so he set out to answer his own question. Combined, Ellington and Strayhorn produced more than 3,000 compositions.
“Maybe 2% of these are the wellknown standards by Strayhorn and Ellington,” he says. “So, then, I started following this lead.”
That lead took him to the Duke Ellington Collection at the Smithsonian. Over the years, he’s made repeated trips there to research Ellington’s
compositions and Strayhorn’s, which were acquired by the Library of Congress in 2018. Before that acquisition, Balch traveled to the University of Chicago to see Strayhorn’s materials.
Much like they didn’t set out to research original music compositions, the band also didn’t aim to focus on these two composers. But the research propelled them.
In addition to the rush of seeing the handwritten scores, the daily lives of Ellington’s band members are
glimpsed alongside the musical notes: a poem by Strayhorn about life on the road written on hotel stationery or a grocery shopping list on the flipside of a trumpet fingering chart.
“It’s stuff like that—the details that make it such a rich story,” says Balch. The stories, as much as the music, are the special sauce that Novel Jazz Septet brings to performing. Alongside largely unknown Ellington and Strayhorn compositions arranged by the band, they share the history they
Barney Balch and the band at Skidompha Public Library in 2018. PHOTO: GERD KOEHLER
uncover in their research, touching on everything from what it was like for a Black band performing on the road to the civil rights movement to the dangers Strayhorn faced being a Black man and gay.
“A typical show will be a story and then the tune, and then a story and the tune,” says Balch. “And they’re unbelievable stories of what these people put up with.”
That Balch talks about the songs and the historic context in which they were created “adds so much to the quality of the concert,” says Matthew Graff, executive director of Skidompha Public Library, where Novel Jazz Septet is sort of the house band, performing several free concerts a year in the library’s atrium.
“I have nothing but superlatives, honestly, for the band,” Graff says. “Their professionalism, their engagement with the crowd was eye-opening—startling to me.” He adds, “To be able to offer something like this—along with some of the other special library programs that we offer—is a great opportunity for people.”
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Looking ahead to the band’s future, they plan to continue what they’ve built on, maybe adding another CD to the four they’ve already released.
“We still have a lot of this jazz iceberg (Ellington and Strayhorn’s compositions) to chip away,” he says.
As they wrap up their 20th anniversary year, there aren’t many opportunities left to see the band perform live. They take a break from performing during the winter months, using that time to “wood shed,” as Balch describes it, working on arrangements of songs for the upcoming performance season.
See Novel Jazz Septet perform live as part of the Concerts for a Cause series on Saturday, Nov. 23 at 7:30 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church, 1 Middle St., Brunswick. Tickets are $20 in advance, $25 at the door, $10 for students/children and are available at the church office, Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick, and online at https:// ticketstripe.com/noveljazz7.
Watch videos of Novel Jazz Septet performing at https://www.mainejazz. net/home/band_video.
View the Smithsonian’s Duke Ellington Collection online at https://sova.si.edu/ record/nmah.ac.0301.
Novel Jazz Winter Solstice Celebration, Saturday, Dec. 21, 7 p.m. at Skidompha Public Library, 184 Main St., Damariscotta. Admission is free; financial donations to the library or food or personal hygiene items for the library’s Little Food Pantry gratefully accepted. Pantry items must not be expired and must be unopened.
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At the Boothbay Opera House in 2023.
PHOTO: ROBERT MITCHELL
Photo of the band in the atrium of Skidompha in 2022.
PHOTO: CATHERINE MITCHELL
UMaine Machias: Science, arts, and more
Downeast campus prepares students for range of careers
PHOTO ESSAY BY LESLIE BOWMAN
Dom Piccuito, from Plymouth, Mass., is majoring in outdoor recreation with a minor in conservation law. He will be working as a marine patrol officer in Washington County after graduation. Piccuito is seen on the UMaine Machias campus in front of the Spirit of the Sea, a sculpture by William Zorach
Bev Miller, from Meriden, Conn, is majoring in integrated biology and minoring in zoology. This semester, she is working on plant surveys and creating management plans.
Sarah Deimel, from Erie, Penn., is an artist and researcher and is majoring in wildlife management and minoring in zoology. Deimel will complete an internship cataloging the school’s insect collection.
Regina McNamara was born in Mexico and has come to UMaine Machias from Texas. She has an interest in cetaceans and has been working closely with Prof. Gayle Kraus as her lab assistant. McNamara is seen here on local mudflats as an oceanography class takes samples for lab work.
Zak Starke, from Montreal, chose UMaine Machias to study marine biology. He is working closely with Prof. Brian Beal of the Downeast Institute on his senior research project studying the relationships between green crab, milky ribbon worms, and clams in a controlled environment. He is pictured here with the pots he constructed for this research.
Doc Martin meets All Creatures Great and Small in Dr. Chuck Radis’s Go by Boat and Island Medicine, stories of his unique medical practice on the Casco Bay Islands.
“With his true-life stories, (Radis) joins the ranks of writing physicians such as Abraham Verghese and the late Richard Selzer.” —Lloyd Sachs, book critic Chicago Tribune and Kirkus Reviews.
Kameron Landry, from Verona Island, is studying fine arts and curatorial science. After their senior art show this coming spring, Landry plans to move to Northern California.
Court got rockweed case wrong
BY ORLANDO E. DELOGU
IN THE AUGUST issue of The Working Waterfront, David Porter’s letter to the editor correctly noted that the 2019 Ross v. Acadian Seaplants case held that “rockweed is a plant.” The Ross ruling also affirmed the 1986 and 1989 Moody Beach cases holding that the 1647 Colonial Ordinance ceded title to intertidal lands in Maine to adjacent upland owners, subject only to the public’s right to engage in “fishing, fowling, and navigation.”
Ross concluded that the public harvesting of rockweed on intertidal land did not fit any of the permitted public uses spelled out in the ordinance. Accordingly, it affirmed the lower court holding that “rockweed growing in the intertidal zone is the private property of the upland property owners… [it] is not public property, is not held in trust by the state for public use and cannot be harvested by members of the public as a matter of right.”
Upland owners are free to permit this harvesting or to prohibit it. Many have chosen the latter course.
The larger question, however, is whether the Ross case and the underlying Moody Beach cases were correctly decided by Maine’s highest court.
Questions of intertidal land ownership and permitted public uses are now before the state Supreme Court in the Peter Masucci, et al v. Judy’s Moody, LLC et al case. An extensive record and briefs are in the court’s hands; oral arguments were heard Oct. 10.
The court will render its decision when it is ready. But these issues (ownership, permitted uses) are not the focus of this response to Mr. Porter.
What is important in Ross is that in the line of Massachusetts and Maine cases challenged in Masucci—such as Storer, Lapish, Barrows, Bell I and II and Ross—the Ross case stands alone in that it is scientifically incorrect. In short, even if the court in the pending Masucci case sustains its prior Bell I and Bell II holdings, the Ross case remains unsupportable. The court should see its continued viability as an embarrassment.
The ink was barely dry on Ross when leading Maine marine and plant biologists pointed out that the holding was scientifically incorrect. Rockweed is not a plant—it is also not a “fish.” It is a “marine organism.” As such, rockweed is much like clams, quahogs, mussels, bloodworms, etc., all found in and on intertidal land, all of which are correctly characterized as “marine organisms.” Importantly, it would be incorrect to
characterize any of these “marine organisms” as “fish.” If these organisms are further characterized at all, they are akin to land based birds and wild animals that exist “ferae naturae.” Upland owners in Maine do not own migratory birds, wild turkeys, deer, moose, or bear that may reside for a time on their private property. Nor do they own marine organisms that exist on intertidal land.
Living “ferae naturae” species, whether consisting of birds, wild animals, or marine organisms are universally seen as subject to state protection and regulation to assure their survival, their ongoing benefit to larger ecosystems, and where possible to maximize their economic potential.
Given that Mr. Porter and others see the Ross case as “supporting Maine’s fishing industry” and “unfettered commercial extraction of Maine’s underwater rockweed” as inimical to this industry, several points should be made.
First, commercial rockweed harvesting in Maine is not “unfettered.” This is a scare tactic. All rockweed harvesting in Maine is licensed by the Department of Marine Resources on location, frequency, and technology. All harvesting requires that “the lowest lateral branches shall remain undisturbed and attached to the main stalk of the rockweed” and “a minimum
of 16 inches of the rockweed shall remain above the holdfast.” This facilitates regeneration.
Second, other research by Maine marine scientists makes clear that annual winter freezing and thawing and storm removal of rockweed from North Atlantic shores is as great if not greater than removal by harvesting.
Third: The sustainability of Irish and Canadian rockweed harvesting is particularly well-documented. The key elements are the low exploitation rate of the resource and leaving the basal axis and holdfast of rockweeds intact for regeneration.
In sum, a scientifically unsupportable Ross case will not save Maine’s fishing industry. On the contrary, the Ross holding invites further litigation. The Ross case should be overruled. The long-standing regulation of all marine organisms on Maine’s intertidal lands are appropriate. They are working. They deserve our continuing support.
Orlando Delogu is former University of Maine School of Law faculty member. He also helped found the Maine Civil Liberties Union, and served on the Board of Environmental Protection, the Portland City Council, and Portland Planning Board.
SEAVEY Island Institute
See you in January!
The Working Waterfront prints next in 2025
AS YOU READ THIS, we’re still on the near side of Thanksgiving, but this issue of The Working Waterfront is the final one for 2024. As has been the case for many years, we print this, the December/January issue, then return with the February/March edition, which prints in late January.
With Thanksgiving on my mind, I am grateful for the many people who make our little newspaper possible.
First and foremost, I am thankful for the nonprofit Island Institute, which supports and invests in this effort of telling stories about ourselves to ourselves here on the Maine coast. Not only does the Institute publish this paper, but its staff work hard to keep our communities vital in a fast-changing world, which sustains the special quality of life we recognize and enjoy here.
I am grateful to our regular columnists. Four live and write from islands: Barbara Fernald, Sandy Oliver, Courtney Naliboff, and Phil Crossman. They understand and render to you the colorful and quirky realities of living in a place surrounded by the sea.
In recent years, we’ve added two wonderful takes on the coast’s history. Kevin Johnson of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport and Kelly Page at the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath tell the stories behind vintage photographs,
reminding us of the rich maritime heritage that lies “in plain sight.”
Maine’s preeminent arts writer, Carl Little, gives us his takes on the many talented painters who render our working waterfronts on canvas and paper. We are indeed fortunate to have someone of his caliber.
Readers have gotten to know the Institute’s president, Kim Hamilton, through her From the Sea Up column, as she shares the many ways the organization is working on the islands and along the coast. And our chief programs officer, Jennifer Seavey, has taken on the role of offering readers the latest from the marine science realm. Our Island Fellows also faithfully write about their adventures in community work, which also shines a light on life here.
I’m never shy about boasting about the writers and photographers who contribute to our newspaper: Stephanie Bouchard, Leslie Bowman, Clarke Canfield, Tina Cohen, Sarah Craighead Dedmon, Dorathy Martel, Stephen Rappaport, Kelli Park, David Platt, Catherine Schmitt, Michele Stapleton, and Dana Wilde, among others, have impressive and extensive experience writing about and photographing the coast. They make what they do look easy, but it’s not, and I’m grateful for their consistently excellent efforts.
I’m very grateful also for our sharpeyed copy editor, Lynne Henry, who (mostly) keeps me out of trouble. And of course, the attractive presentation of our stories and photos is the work of our stellar designer, Sharon Pieniak. Lastly, I thank our advertisers, many of whom have used our widely distributed paper to get their message out, and
many of whom do so, in part, because they believe in the newspaper’s and the Institute’s missions.
I hope readers enjoy the late fall and early winter. We’ll be back, because there is no shortage of ideas and images about our world to share with you.
Tom Groening, editor
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PHOTO: JACK SULLIVAN
book reviews
No way in for novel’s protagonist
Native identity, sense of belonging explored
REVIEW BY TINA COHEN
NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY was in the news recently as President Biden traveled to the Southwest to formally apologized for the U.S. government’s treatment of Native people.
As we now know, children were taken from families and homes and placed in boarding schools whose primary goal was to re-educate and stop them from speaking their tribal language, practicing their cultural rituals, and knowing their own history. They were taught to look, act, and speak “white American,” and were subjected to insult, neglect, forced labor, and abuse. Often, they remained cut off from their families afterwards, vulnerable to mental illness and addiction by the trauma they experienced.
Morgan Talty, a member of the Penobscot Indian Nation, grew up on its reservation near Bangor. His first book, out several years ago, was
a brilliant collection of short stories, Night of the Living Rez. As the title implies, the stories described aspects of life on a reservation, families struggling with poverty, addiction, mental illness, and the community’s “painful past and uncertain future,” as liner notes put it.
Talty brought a dry humor to the telling, which resonated with the popular television series Rez Dogs, suggesting Natives have it so bad that finding humor is often the most helpful coping strategy.
Talty’s latest book, Fire Exit, is a novel set in the environs near the Penobscot reservation—in fact, just across the river—in sight of narrator Charles Lamosway. Charles grew up on the reservation, raised by a white mother and her husband, a Penobscot.
father is, and that she is not actually Native at all.
The daughter met Charles once when she was very young. Now in her 20s, it seems she may have severe depression. It runs in Charles’ family and impacts his mother’s life; it seems both women are getting help for the condition.
Charles seems taciturn, withdrawn, unhappy. Some of it, we could guess, is due to the unresolved issue of having a daughter he must deny, banished by his daughter’s mother.
Is his dilemma less about paternity and primarily about identity?
Charles is not a tribal member and had to move off the reservation and now in midlife, he looks longingly across the river to where the mother of his only child lives. That daughter and the Native man who passes as her father provide her with tribal membership. The daughter has grown up not knowing who her real
What does the title, Fire Exit, signal? To my mind, a fire exit means a way out, designated for emergencies, when you think or know the place where you are is dangerous.
Is this a metaphor for Charles, that the fire exit to his situation would be him actually taking action? He smolders with suppressed anger, but would he be better off inflamed? Why interfere with his daughter’s claim to tribal membership when it is something he himself valued? Could he just
Minot’s latest airs unhealthy yearnings
What needs do we carry into adulthood?
Don’t be a Stranger
By Susan Minot (Knopf, 2024)
REVIEW BY
TINA COHEN
SUSAN MINOT, AUTHOR of eight books, including collections of poetry and short stories, has homes in New York City and North Haven. For me, she is most memorable for her first novel, Monkeys.
Don’t be a Stranger, her new novel, does not feature Maine at all; its narrator Ivy lives in New York. Like Minot, she is a writer and a divorced mom. Ivy focuses on the story of involvement with a lover—a musician, Ansel, much younger than she (he in his 20s, while Ivy is in her early 50s with a son in elementary school).
Ansel is sexy and alluring, and he seems to think similarly of her. Physically drawn to each other, they discover their apartments are not far apart, and impulsive trysts can occur.
Ansel is sometimes unavailable for a “booty call,” to Ivy’s distress. She clearly likes the sex they enjoy and becomes reliant on it to feel good about herself and about life.
She obsesses, thinking about the other women she is sure he also sees,
and resents his artistic priorities that interfere, like composing and recording his music.
Ivy suffers their apartness. Ivy’s inner thoughts—fears, desires, cravings, and worries—make up most of this book. Their lovemaking seems transformative; it makes her feel alive, wanted, known, complete.
What complicates the story is that their relationship seems fragile and doomed, and not because of age differences or parenting demands. Ivy’s needs are intense.
I felt it was not so much a book about pleasure but about pain. Ivy foregoes the satisfaction she once found in friendships; she had enjoyed being with other creative and interesting people, friends who seemed to really care about her.
She worries all the time about the quality of her parenting. After experiencing the early loss of her own parents and her divorce after having a child, Ivy feels guilty for her son’s equivalent loss of a mother-father dyad.
showing she’s aware of Ansel’s negative impact. But by the book’s end, we are still left with the possibility she will never really move on.
Last summer, Elizabeth Strout, another Maine/New York writer and astute observer of relationships, visited North Haven for a public conversation with Minot. It was a potent pairing— both writers appreciate emotional challenges in life.
Strout has created characters who can be difficult to like; I’m thinking most of Olive Kitteridge. But Strout also has largely redeemed them in later novels.
She obsesses, thinking about the other women she is sure he also sees, and resents his artistic priorities…
There is therapy in this picture, and other attempts Ivy makes to feel better,
convince himself that he is envious, that he begrudges what his daughter has that he wasn’t able to keep? Is his dilemma less about paternity and primarily about identity?
I am sure Talty wants us to grapple with the tense experiences in this sad story. It is a slog of a read—despite its literary agility—with a contagious mood of depression and inertia.
Charles sees his daughter as lucky, in a sense, that she—unchallenged on her lineage—can live on the reservation. It seems a counterpoint to what we saw in Night of the Living Rez, where a reader could conclude life on the reservation is unenviable: full of risks, dead ends, and feeling second-class.
Here in Fire Exit, leaving the rez is not a way out. Hard lives are everywhere, on the Penobscot River mainland as well as on the island.
If you haven’t read any of Talty’s writing yet, read both books. Talty offers a lot for us think about, and most effective of all, he makes things visceral—we can feel the angst defining lives.
Tina Cohen is a therapist who spends part of the year on Vinalhaven.
What about Ivy? If she had a more mundane existence, would it be a boring book? Is Minot deliberately cooking up something spicy for readers to respond to? Is she proving, through Ivy, that wrestling your “demons”—Ivy’s investment in what seems a hurtful relationship— has its rationale?
Late, and rushing on her bicycle to pick up her son, Ivy’s quick braking on gravel makes her fly over her handlebars. As she assessed her injuries, she reflects: “She was not looking after herself; it was time to make the break. Again. She didn’t need to tell Ansel Fleming
about this. It was simply up to her. She felt clear. Looking at her face in the mirror was a good reminder. She deleted all his texts. She regretted it immediately. She’d just wiped away the history of her heart. So what if it was the history of something made up, it had been a parallel universe where she had liked living.”
The constants in Ivy’s life—anxiety, the threat of loss, regret, and blaming herself—benefit from her alternate universe. Feeling wanted was what she craved, even if a more physical than emotional affirmation. But always, there was the possibility of being left. I think of the title, Don’t Be a Stranger. The cliché seems to refer to status. We are no longer strangers, so don’t act like one. Stay close, stay in touch.
For Ivy, there wouldn’t be anything more heartfelt she could say. I think Minot has portrayed an elephant in the room: we all look for what will fill our primary needs, the unfulfilled ones brought to adulthood from childhood. All of us want to feel cared about.
Though her palpable anxiety can be exhausting for the reader, Ivy helps us picture life when security feels uncertain.
Tina Cohen is a therapist who spends part of the year on Vinalhaven.
Fire Exit: a Novel
By Morgan Talty (Tin House, 2024)
book reviews
Stephen King likes it darker
New collection of short stories include wit
You Like It Darker:
Stories
By Stephen King (Scribner)
REVIEW BY
CARL LITTLE
THE TITLE OF Stephen King’s new collection of stories, the author notes in an afterword, is a tweaked line of a Leonard Cohen song, “You Want It Darker,” a somber and somewhat disturbing address to the Lord that appeared on the Canadian singer/songwriter’s last album. The invocation makes sense: King not only wants it darker, he likes it darker too.
King gathers 12 stories, some brand new, others rescued from the archives (he began “The Answer Man” when he was 30 and finished it two years ago after a nephew, Jon Leonard, brought it to his attention).
His cast of characters includes aliens (“Two Talented Bastids”), a deranged detective with counting issues (“Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream”), people who can predict CAT—clear air turbulence on airplanes (“The Turbulence Expert”)—and a (mad) gentleman scientist (“The Dreamers”).
One through-line is mistaken identity: King likes to mess with the lives of innocent bystanders.
The pace is mostly brisk, the narratives generally sinister but often witty. Here’s a bit of dialogue from “Two Talented Bastids” that highlights King’s sense of humor:
“Maybe what you wanted is something that can’t be found. Maybe creativity is supposed to remain a mystery.”
She wrinkled her nose and said, “Save your metaphysics to cool your porridge.”
“On Slide Inn Road” recounts the misfortune that befalls a family of five when they pile into Grandpop’s “dinosaur of a Buick” to visit his dying sister. The GPS isn’t working and the shortcut they take proves to be, well, problematic when the kids encounter a couple of scary young men near the old inn. With brilliant storytelling skill, King brings out the evil—and the good: chalk one up for an aged Vietnam vet.
The story reminded me of Flannery O’Connor’s famous story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” featuring the murderous Misfit. King confirmed this impression at the end of the story with a simple statement: “Thinking of Flannery O’Connor.”
letters to the editor
To the editor:
The photo on the op-ed page in the October issue of The Working Waterfront shows Lindsay Road, which is a right turn off York Street in York. You can’t see First Parish Church, but it is directly across the street. The old burial ground is to your right. There are plenty of trees still standing. That watering structure is still in the same spot.
—Cindy Bufithis, York
Remembering Prof. Hutchinson
To the editor:
I was somewhat dismayed with the topic of Tom Groening’s Rock Bound column in the October issue of The Working Waterfront about the University of Maine’s attempt to sell the Hutchinson Center in Belfast.
I have no background knowledge about the center, but during my days as a grad student in the Plants & Soils Department at the University, Prof. Hutchinson was the department head. He later became the University of Maine at Orono’s president.
What a nice man, and what a character! It is distressing that the University will ditch the center. How do the two Hutchinson daughters feel about this move? Perhaps the University should place more emphasis on real education and less on sports.
—Amos J. Gay, Dayton, Class of 1964 (‘67G)
Keep on paddling
To the editor:
Thank you for the nice column in the The Working Waterfront on kayaking (Rock Bound, November issue). As a note of encouragement for Tom Groening’s future, I’m past the halfway mark of my ninth decade and had a fine afternoon of kayaking just two days ago. Also, a belated thank you for the kind words of several years ago about my book, Salt Water Town. I’m still writing and believe that proper aging involves remaining active, both physically and mentally. — Don Small, Castine
King gives a similar shout-out to John D. MacDonald at the end of “Rattlesnakes,” which takes place in the Florida Keys, the crime writer’s territory (my mother turned me on to his Travis McGee novels, which I whipped through as fast as the Hardy Boys). According to the headline of a recent article in the New York Times, MacDonald “knew a hurricane like Helene was coming.”
This mid-COVID story features some classic King motifs, including demonic twins. Those ghost boys prompt me to admit I didn’t read this book, I listened to it.
Over the years, King has been fortunate to have some excellent interpreters, including actor Will Patton, who might be the best of the bunch. Listening to him perform “Rattlesnakes” is to admire his vocal touches, from the sound of an unoiled double-stroller—“Squeak, pause. Squeak, pause. Squeak, pause”—to the twins’ repeated request (which reminded me of a Who song): “See us. Roll us. Push us.”
King has never shied away from commenting on politics, especially when it comes to 45 (“Since I write horror novels for a living, I feel I have some authority when I say that four
more years of Donald Trump in the White House would be an absolute nightmare”).
These stories offer opportunities to take jabs at the zeitgeist. In “Danny Coughlin’s Dream,” for example, he cites a sign on a water tower in “deadred center Kansas”: “WELCOME TO CATHCART WHERE ALL LIVES MATTER.”
After reading King, one cannot look at, say, a crowd scene in Times Square or a house on a back road without wondering what darkness lurks there. He adds an edge to one’s outlook on life and relishes doing so.
“Great thanks to you, dear readers, for allowing me to inhabit your imaginations and your nerve-endings,” he writes in the afterword, adding, “You like it darker? Fine. So do I, and that makes me your soul brother.”
According to Lit Hub, the odds of King winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2024 were 50/1. With this new collection of stories, I’m not sure those odds improve, but to quote a Vietnam vet in “The Dreamers,” “Semper fi if you like it and semper fi if you don’t.”
Carl Little lives on Mount Desert Island.
Photo ID
saltwater cure
Democracy at work
Student mural project a political lesson
BY COURTNEY NALIBOFF
THE FITNESS CENTER was full, but the treadmills and weight machines were empty. Instead, community members, from elementary students through older adults, filled chairs and stood around the margins of the basketball halfcourt.
The occasion was a special town meeting, called to seek approval for a work of public art—a mural to be painted on the side of the newly refurbished fitness center. Last year’s fifthand sixth-grade students had proposed it as a way of beautifying and enlivening the town’s outdoor basketball court, a social hub for that demographic.
Last spring and over the summer, muralist Alexis Iammarino met with the students to discuss feasibility and to do some initial brainstorming for the mural’s design.
There was a sense from the students and teachers that the plan would meet with instant approval from the town, but because of the upgrades to the fitness center, which were very welcome, it created some hesitation around the idea of painting on the wall. The board of selectmen were deadlocked when
it came to a vote. Therefore, a town meeting was scheduled.
With their teachers’ support, the student stakeholders did substantial groundwork to build awareness of the meeting, which certainly contributed to the robust attendance. Alexis made the trip to the island for the meeting as well.
The moderator and the town representatives made it abundantly clear what was being decided—whether permission would be granted to paint a mural on the side of the building. The design was still in progress and would be subject to later approval by the board. The floor was opened for discussion.
The questions came fast and furious. Why didn’t the students want to paint a mural at the school? Why not paint on panels and attach them to the building? Or to the fence around the basketball court? Who would maintain the mural? What would the effect of painting on the new metal siding be? What if the neighbors hated it? What if the current neighbors moved out and the new neighbors hated it?
The teachers and Alexis responded as best they could. The students felt ownership over the town court and wanted to beautify the space. The
wellness committee had committed funding for the project.
Attaching panels to the building would be more expensive, would likely cause more damage to the building than painting on it, and wouldn’t actually constitute a mural.
The school does already have a beautiful Alexis Iammarino-helmed mural in the high school commons. Alexis described her previous projects, many of which can be seen enlivening Rockland’s Main Street, highlighting her expertise as both a fine artist and a house painter.
The moderator attempted to bring the discussion to a close several times, but it rambled on. Finally, a community member suggested the students themselves might take the floor.
After a moment’s hesitation, one seventh grader stepped forward.
“I just want to know—which would you rather look at? A boring gray wall? Or a beautiful mural?”
The constituents applauded. His peers clapped him on the back. The moderator opened the vote.
Seventy-four voters filled out blue paper ballots, nearly a quarter of the entire island’s population, and a high
journal of an island kitchen
Food for the finicky feline
The endearing way our cats eat
BY SANDY OLIVER
IN THE KITCHEN, on the floor next to the cookstove, Yandro finds his food. Before this pale orange, furry little being came here to live, he sat on a stool at a dining table, on which he was allowed to put his front paws, and only his front paws, to eat from his bowl. He was often treated to little bites from his doting mistress’s plate.
Yandro has come down a peg or two from those halcyon, spoiled-cat days even though I love him and his unbelievably soft fur, his annoying companionable ways (like walking on the computer keyboard), or when he climbs onto my lap in the evening as I knit, twitching his ears in irritation as the yarn flicks over his head.
Johanna, sadly deceased, spoiled him very much and even in this house, where one of the operating principles is “Don’t disturb the cat,” as in, if he is sleeping on an unmade bed, I don’t push him off in order to make it, he still doesn’t get all the privileges he was used to.
Feeding him, of course, ends up being a kind of exception. My former husband who worked in veterinary hospitals told me once that even though owners came in with their cats
and the cats’ preferred food, the cats would actually eat whatever crunchies the hospital doled out. I suspect we cat lovers feel a surge of smug pleasure when little Muffy laps up whatever we have chosen for her because we know dogs will eat anything, unlike our more discerning pets.
We are, of course, aided and abetted by cat food makers who know how to nudge us into our choices with words like “paté” instead of ground up paste, or “shreds” for undistinguished fragments floating in “gravy” which is some kind of thickened water, and even using the word “grilled.”
Seriously? As if the cat food company has a whole bunch of barbecue grills in its backyard. Hey, Yandro, want some ketchup with that?
One I saw picks up human desire for good health with the line, “Plus the gravy for cats provides plenty of moisture to help keep your pal hydrated.”
Yandro, whom I trust to know when he is thirsty, likes exotic water. He’ll leap into the bathtub in hopes that someone left the faucet dripping. He finds a pitcher set on the floor with water intended for houseplants very appealing. He’ll sneak into the cellar to sip from the sump pump basin. If nothing else is available,
percentage of the registered voters. In the end, 61 votes were cast in favor of the mural, 12 against, and one ballot was spoiled.
Once the results were announced, many of the families who had come to support the students’ initiative filed out. My own kid had some questions on the car ride home.
“If so many people want the mural, why did we spend so long talking about it? Why did a lot of people want to be heard saying they didn’t want the mural?”
I thought before I answered.
“That’s democracy. We get the opportunity to say what we like and what we don’t like, to ask questions, to voice our fears and concerns. Change is hard sometimes. But this way people were heard, and now everyone knows that most people are excited about the mural and that it will happen.”
And as frustrating as the process can be sometimes, it feels like it works exactly the way it should.
Courtney Naliboff teaches on North Haven. She may be contacted at Courtney.Naliboff@gmail.com.
he’ll finally drink out of the bowl next to his food dish.
Whatever did cats, who’ve kept humans company for millennia, do to keep fed before canned cat food? Well, mice of course, and other small creatures. Scraps of fish or meat from human hands.
I’ve heard of barn cats who knew how to drink milk shot into their mouths by the person milking a cow. While watching Ana Bush Craft, a YouTube video made in southeast Asia filmed by a tough and determined young woman, I observed her mix up fish and rice for her cats, the same dish eaten by the lady herself.
Yandro is remarkably uninterested in my dinner. Some cats in my past relentlessly circled my feet when I cooked, entranced by the smell of cooking meat. One learned how to knock over a milk carton to spill some out; he’d also jump on a table to dip his paw into the cream pitcher and lick it clean.
Yandro’s exception is Philadelphia cream cheese (he doesn’t like the store brand) for which he will actually let you shake his paw.
Like a lot of islanders, I suspect, I order cat food from a famous internet pet supply house because shipping is
cheaper than a ferry ticket and buying large quantities is handy. After one shipment, I received an invitation to review my purchase experience. One question asked me to rate the quality of the food.
Excuse me? How would I know! I’m not the one eating this stuff, a point I entered in a comments box.
That elicited a concerned query about how they could improve my experience. I suggested they figure out how to survey cats, which eventually devolved into a sincere hope from them that they could finally help me with my problem.
When I responded that it wasn’t me with the problem, I ended up with an offer in my inbox to review the quality of their help.
Maybe I’ll send them a picture of Yandro with his nose in his food dish, happily hydrating himself from a serving of ocean white fish shreds with tomato. In gravy.
Sandy Oliver is a food historian who gardens, cooks, and writes on Islesboro. She may be contacted at SandyOliver47@gmail.com.
Take time to notice delight
Journaling helps refocus away from anxiety cranberry report
BY BARBARA FERNALD
WHEN I WAS FEELING kind of down at the beginning of October, I thought, “Why so blue? October can be such a delightful time of year on the island.”
To perk up my mood I set an intention for myself to keep track of the moments of the day when I felt charmed by something. It wouldn’t have the soberness of a gratitude list but at least once a day, for a month, I would keep an inventory of delights.
Each entry could be as short or as long as I wanted. No rules or expectations to keep me from wanting to jot down positive information.
I found an old journal with the most recent entry from six years ago. There were other entries from earlier years, but I had not stuck with writing anything for more than two weeks at a time. The book had plenty of space left. I really enjoyed reading those entries and wished there were more, but I seem to wander away from this kind of writing before it becomes a good habit.
Maybe keeping daily track of delightful things could get me back to writing more regularly. Even if it didn’t, I would still have the
satisfaction of having stood by my 30-day commitment.
The definition of delight is “something that gives great pleasure.” I also think of it as something fleeting. If I don’t notice it the first time around it might be gone the next time I look.
On Oct. 1, with my eyes wide open, I couldn’t wait to start the journal. Six items made my list. Among them were: watching the last round of cardinal fledglings under the feeder, finding a pair of starshaped earrings I hadn’t seen for a year, and chatting with my neighbor Cindy about saving seeds from the garden.
The nigella seeds were perfect for harvesting. There were many birdrelated, light-related, and garden-related entries as you would expect from me. It was such a gorgeous month to be on the island.
confines of the boat schedule that I’m only focused on my list, the traffic, and the time.
After one day of writing “nothing delightful to say about this day,” I resolved to have at least one thing to list for the remaining days of my challenge. I guess that’s the thing about delight. It can be easy to miss when you are distracted.
I’m usually so driven to get everything done within the confines of the boat schedule...
On the days I went off island to get groceries and do other errands, I had little to record. I’m usually so driven to get everything done within the
observer
From experience I know that a 30-day challenge is not an overwhelming promise. I have participated for the last three years in an online drawinga-day group in February. There is a wide range of talent in the group and we’re all supportive of each other’s efforts.
A bleak winter month goes by quickly when I carve out space every day for creativity. At the end of the month, I have the satisfaction of having steadily shown up for myself as I had hoped I would do, and I am back in the habit of working in my studio.
Completing the 30-day “delight challenge” has also given me a sense of
accomplishment and hope that I will keep up with journal writing and keep looking for those delightful moments that happen all the time.
When I become overly worried about the world around me—the hate, the election, the wars, my ongoing bout of “walking pneumonia” that feels like it will never get better, I now have a month of journal entries to help balance my anxiety and to remind me that there are also wonderful little things happening right under my nose every day. I just need to pay more attention to the good.
That’s it for 2024. Thank you to everyone who reads and supports The Working Waterfront. My wish for us all is that we stay healthy, have relatively smooth holidays, and that the universe grants us the peaceful means to deal with our joy or disappointment in the election results.
Barbara Fernald lives and writes on Islesford (Little Cranbery Island). She may be contacted at Fernald244@gmail.com.
Giving Vinalhaven’s downtown its due
Historic district would recognize our past
BY PHIL CROSSMAN
HISTORIC DOWNSTREET, a registered nonprofit on Vinalhaven, began in 2011 when a dozen concerned citizens embarked on an effort to save an archaeological historic Main Street structure on Vinalhaven from being lost at auction. The former Knights of Pythius Hall at 30 Main Street had been foreclosed upon by a bank and the date of the resultant auction announced.
At the last minute, those who owned it at the time managed to avoid foreclosure and Historic Downstreet, having raised significant money for its acquisition, turned its attention to a less litigious artifact, The Old Engine House, which was very much in need of restoration.
Built in 1886 on land made available by a local icon, Reuben Carver, it was to house our first steam fire engine and served as the town’s fire station for 100 years or so until the town built a larger (and not nearly as appealing) structure elsewhere.
We did research, obtained estimates, raised the necessary additional funds, and immediately undertook the work,
with one of our own serving as clerk of the works.
On the Fourth of July 2014, we presented the finished product to the town at a lovely and fitting ceremony in honor of Bodine Ames, who had devoted many selfless years to keeping the fire hall—and other island properties—presentable. The Engine House still houses “Old Reuben,” the original steam engine, which is now and then hauled out for the Fourth of July parade. Idle then for several years, Historic Downstreet regrouped some time ago and our perspective has broadened. We’d like to create a Historic District to recognize, honor, and raise awareness of the unique historic significance of our downtown area—the Main Street neighborhood roughly bounded by the Union Church to the east and the Legion Hall to the west—and to encourage the preservation of certain distinctive properties within that area by documenting their history and relevance.
Five downtown structures have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places for many years. They are the Star of Hope Lodge, The Galamander, Vinalhaven Public
Library, Union Church of Vinalhaven, and the Moses Webster House.
Recognition requires that such a district be an area of historical importance to the town and to the property owners within that district.
Too many of us are unaware of the island’s intriguing history, particularly as it relates to this area that has our attention. After all, the island’s history, like much of municipal history elsewhere, is not taught in school and not nearly enough or nothing is often learned at home.
To be aware of all that, and all who came before, and all that was overcome and accomplished, leaves one with an entirely new and valuable perspective and a precious appreciation for all that was accomplished to make it possible for us to be where we find ourselves today.
While official recognition will come from the Maine Preservation Commission and the National Register of Historic Places, such designation is entirely honorary and does not restrict the rights of property owners in any way. In fact, the opportunity for certain tax incentives are often a benefit of such a designation.
Such recognition requires the endorsement of 51% of the property owners within that district but Historic Downstreet would feel much better with 100% support. There are 30 individual landlords involved and so far, we’ve made contact with over half. Each of those has given their enthusiastic approval.
A few of the properties within the district are owned by the town. They are the War Memorial, the aforementioned engine house, the old jail, the former net factory site, the Vinalhaven Public Library, the Galamander, and a portion of “Ray’s Field.”
As soon as the opportunity presents itself, the town intends to present a warrant article calling for community approval of this effort. We ask that our fellow islanders give us that endorsement.
Phil Crossman lives on Vinalhaven. He may be contacted at PhilCrossman.vh@ gmail.com.
fathoming
Climate plan: What you need to know
Savings, economic development, and hope included
BY JENNIFER SEAVEY
LAST DECEMBER, Maine rolled out its updated state climate action plan, “Maine Won’t Wait.” The plan is the result of input from thousands of Mainers and it will shape the state’s climate actions and strategies for the next four years. So why should you care about this new plan?
For starters, if you’re wondering how Maine’s climate will evolve over the next decades, this plan has the latest science on air and ocean temperatures, storm frequency, and more. Rather than focusing on global predictions, the plan presents data specific to Maine, so if you work in natural resources, tourism, or enjoy outdoor recreation, this section offers valuable insights.
Many of us have seen firsthand how climate change is already affecting Maine—whether through last winter’s severe storms or shifting weather patterns. If you’re wondering what you can do to help mitigate climate change and better prepare, the plan is full of practical ideas.
From making your home or business more energy-efficient to helping your
community build resilience through improved public infrastructure, the plan provides concrete steps and funding to take action.
For example, the plan will enhance the support for Maine’s Efficiency Maine Trust, which promotes energysaving programs. This includes offering rebates, loans, and educational resources to help homes, businesses, and institutions lower their energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.
These actions not only reduce environmental impact but also boost local economies by promoting job growth, improving energy reliability, and increasing energy independence.
Last winter’s coastal storms alone cost Maine an estimated $70 million in infrastructure damage. Nationally, the 2023 East Coast floods incurred damages of over $1.3 billion. Clearly, preparing for climate impacts now is an economic necessity.
If you’re looking for hope, the plan offers plenty. Maine has already seen significant progress in climate action over the past four years. As of December 2023, 175 towns have developed climate resilience plans, over 15,000 clean energy jobs have been added, and more than 100,000 heat pumps have been installed.
For every $1 spent on disaster prevention, $13 is saved in damages and recovery costs.
If you’re concerned that climate action is a luxury Maine can’t afford, consider this: a study from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that investing in climate preparedness saves money in the long run. For every $1 spent on disaster prevention, $13 is saved in damages and recovery costs.
reflections
These achievements show that action is possible and effective. The science of hope tells us that learning about the issue and ways you can take action can help us feel empowered and optimistic about the future.
The plan includes inspiring success stories from communities and individuals who are already making their
A community recovers by realignment
North Haven’s waterfront is finding resilience
BY CLAIRE OXFORD
Reflections is written by Island Fellows, recent college grads who do community service work on Maine islands and in coastal communities through the Island Institute, publisher of The Working Waterfront.
SCAR TISSUE, I’ve been told, takes time and conscious effort to heal.
I learned this lesson gradually after I tore my achilles last December during a pick-up basketball scrimmage against the North Haven girls team. I had surgery to repair it later that month, with the daylight waning and the deep rest of winter beckoning.
It meant months of massaging the rigid scar tissue that had formed around my tendon—a gradual regaining of strength buoyed by the support of others, from family who looked out for me in my immediate recovery, to the community on-island which lent supportive shoulders when I needed to navigate my apartment’s stairs during a slick, damp Maine winter. Seeing my formidable recovery boot, people in passing disclosed their previous injuries—broken bones that left lingering arthritis and ache whenever a storm
approaches. Repeatedly, I was reminded that healing is a collective effort, intimately tied to our surroundings.
My physical therapists explained that our body’s instinct is to form scar tissue around the site of an injury. The body calls in reinforcements in a moment of crisis, and the scar tissue knits together a stiff, unnatural pattern that offers temporary support.
But when scar tissue is not realigned in the flow of recovery, the surrounding muscle groups weaken, natural movement patterns are inhibited, and the site becomes increasingly prone to re-injury.
In other words, when scar tissue remains, what suffers most is your body’s resilience—its ability to return with renewed strength and capacity.
Resilience is a term I hear in my work for the town office of North Haven, supporting various community-climate projects. Often, I come back to questions of how the concept of resilience plays out in practice, and whose obligation it is to prove resilient in the face of increasing climate-related pressures.
I’m thinking not only about immediate rebuilding after events like the January storms, but also how communities cultivate collective endurance for longer-term issues like the risk of
homes, infrastructure, and public health programs more climate resilient. By following their example, you too can take steps toward a climateready future.
Ultimately, the “Maine Won’t Wait” plan is essential because it guides the state’s approach to critical issues like climate change, economic resilience, and community well-being. Whether you’re concerned about the environment, Maine’s economy, or the future of your community, this plan is a vital tool for ensuring that the state’s policies reflect the needs of its residents. By staying informed and engaged, you can contribute to shaping Maine’s climate future.
The plan is expected to be published Dec. 1. For more information, see: maine.og/climateplan/.
Jennifer Seavey is chief programs officer for Island Institute, publisher of The Working Waterfront. She may be contacted at jseavey@islandinstitute.org.
saltwater intrusion, aging infrastructure in low-lying areas, and supporting livelihoods affected by climate.
Over the span of the initial data and information gathering phase of the Thorofare Waterfront Project—intended to preserve and adapt North Haven’s response to a changing climate—my role largely has been to listen and organize insights through meetings, workshops, and a community survey.
As I’ve listened, patterns have emerged, along with concerns, memories, and questions for the future of the island:
The tide never used to come up this far when I was growing up. The season for southeasterly storms is getting longer. The water is warmer, and new species are turning up in Penobscot Bay. Are there solutions to sea level rise? What options do we have, and how could we make them happen? We need long-term solutions, and to address the flooding happening today. Raise what we can. Adapt. Preserve. Fortify. Flow.
These sorts of reflections have been stitched together with actions of collective grit and reciprocal care on-island, in response to shared challenges and losses. Resilience cannot
exist in isolation. It is an exercise in interdependence.
Without addressing the scar tissue —the impulse to become more rigid, to retreat from one another, to stay static in the face of a rapidly changing climate—we become increasingly prone to re-injury.
Though North Haven has completed the first phase of the Thorofare Waterfront Project in collaboration with GEI Consultants, in many ways the work has just begun.
The issues are not straightforward; there is not a predetermined, one-size-fits-all solution. As we transition to the designoriented stage of this process, all I know with certainty is the best answers will come through the voices of those rooted in and committed to this place, guided by the relationships and daily efforts that make this island a living, breathing place of memory and potential.
Claire Oxford works with North Haven to shore up its working waterfront in the face of storm surge and sea level rise. She graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies.
in plain sight
Ice made historic floods worse
Rivers would become hazardous from floes
BY KELLY PAGE
LAST WINTER IN Maine was relatively mild in terms of snowfall and low temperatures. However, the season was marked by extreme weather patterns, including high winds, heavy rainfall, and flooding that affected both coastlines and inland waterways. When winter brings a combination of deep freezes followed by sudden warming, the hazards can become even more disastrous.
Ice has long posed significant dayto-day challenges in harbors and major waterways like the Kennebec and Penobscot rivers.
Into the 20th century, the transport of goods and people heavily relied on navigable waterways. The launching of vessels, as well as ferry and passenger steamer services, depended on favorable ice conditions, while woodenhulled merchant ships faced the risk of damage in icy waters.
In the right conditions, ice can create serious problems when it melts and breaks up. Ice floes can jam in rivers, acting like dams that lead to upstream flooding. When the ice jams break, they cause secondary flooding by unleashing a sudden surge of water.
During flooding events, ice floes can collide with structures, causing additional damage. This was notably the case during the historic Great Flood of 1936.
FIELD NOTES—
The accompanying images depict the aftermath of this devastating flood that struck Maine and the Northeast in March of that year. A combination of ice floes, melting snow, and several days of heavy rain created a catastrophic scenario, resulting in the damage or destruction of 26 bridges across Maine. The images, taken in Gardiner on the Kennebec River, show large chunks of ice on the streets approximately where Hannaford Supermarket currently stands.
To mitigate the impact of ice on commerce, transportation, and public safety, icebreaking has been an official duty of the U.S. Coast Guard since 1936, although the practice had been in place for decades prior. Breaking up ice before a spring melt allows for more ice to flow out to sea and reduces jams.
The first purpose-built icebreaker, the Androscoggin, was assigned to Maine waters in 1908 and was operated by the Revenue Cutter Service, one of the predecessor organizations that merged to form the Coast Guard. Today, icebreaking efforts in Maine are carried out by U.S. Coast Guard vessels homeported throughout the state: Thunder Bay, Shackle, Tackle, and Bridle. Their primary focus is on the Kennebec and Penobscot rivers, working to prevent ice-related flooding and ensure safe navigation.
Kelly Page is curator of collections at Maine Maritime Museum. The museum’s newest exhibit, “Upon That Isle in Maine: The Story and Works of Chris Van Dusen,” opens Feb. 8. Explore resources and plan your visit at: www.mainemaritimemuseum.org
Brenna Cohen makes electrical connections
Energy efficiency work builds resiliency
JOB TITLE: Community development officer in Island Institute’s Center for Climate and Community
FOCUS: The Energy Transitions Team collaborates with state and national experts to help island and coastal communities build energy resilience. We work to reduce power outages, boost the local energy supply to support electrification and minimize storm impacts on the grid to ensure islanders can thrive.
We’re partnering with 15 communities across the Eastern Coast and Great Lakes to create affordable, reliable electric and heating systems through microgrids, energy efficiency measures like energy audits and heat pumps, and solar arrays. I serve as the liaison between national renewable energy labs, community teams, and utilities.
IN THIS PHOTO: On Wednesday, Oct. 30, I assisted Islesboro’s Energy Committee and other residents with a Window Dressers build at the Community Center, where we crafted window inserts to provide extra protection from cold and wind in homes. Islesboro, as part of the first group of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Transitions in Partnership Program, developed a roadmap to energy independence that includes weatherization.
NAME: Brenna Cohen
Ice on the streets in Gardiner, approximately where Hannaford Supermarket currently stands. PHOTO: MAINE MARITIME MUSEUM
Lora Whelan’s travel lift
Eastport-based painter intrigued by industry
BY CARL LITTLE
MOOSE ISLAND MARINE on Deep Cove Road in Eastport, writes painter Lora Whelan, “is a wonderful place to walk by, with clanging lines on the masts, the sounds of boatyard work going on, and all those different boats up on supports to admire.”
One day, while recording some of those mast line sounds for a niece, “a musician who uses found sounds,” Whelan photographed some draggers, drawn by their connection to the lives of local fishermen. As she did so, she felt something “looming” behind her. Looking up and back, she found the yard’s 60-ton travel lift towering over her.
The painting “Travel Lift, Moose Island” captures that dramatic perspective Whelan evokes. A mighty triangle of crane, cables and winches—like the arch of a marine cathedral—reaches into the sky.
“If you like industrial equipment, and I certainly do,” Whelan writes, “a travel lift is hard to resist.” She calls it “the lifeblood” of a boatyard, moving vessels from the water onto land. “I had never given it a good look-see to understand how it worked,” she relates, “so I did, took photos, and decided I needed to paint it.” She adds, “They are very cool pieces of machinery.”
The painting is part of Whelan’s “Echoes of Place” series, shown at the Eastport Arts Center this past summer. She exhibited abstracted views of blueberry barrens, clam flats, and the solar eclipse along with more representational works, such as the travel lift
• One of the most
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Lora Whelan: “Travel Lift, Moose Island,” 2024, acrylic on canvas, 19-inches by 24-inches. PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
painting and renderings of draggers, wharf remnants, and the smoke house in Lubec.
She hoped these images “of our beloved landscape and built environment” would resonate “for different reasons with different viewers.”
Whelan’s journey to Eastport began on the Upper East Side of New York City where, in the 1960s and ‘70s, her family lived on the edge of Spanish Harlem, in a rich mix of cultures. She recalls a contingent of Hell’s Angels one block away and youth gangs roaming Central Park, but also small neighborhood stores “run by owners we knew by name or who knew our faces.”
With a “fair amount of autonomy,” Whelan and her siblings explored the neighborhood, mesmerized by “the changing landscapes of human work and lifestyle.” She also spent time on her grandmother’s farm in Vermont, “a blissful change” that ultimately shaped her understanding of the kind of environment she needed, “with the space and quiet to think and work.”
Whelan went on to receive a BA. in creative writing at Bennington College where she also dabbled in electronic music. At Mercy College, she earned an
M.S. in organizational leadership and development, a degree that came in handy when she moved to Maine to work for Eastport for Pride, a new Main Street Maine historic preservation program.
Around 2007 Whelan joined the staff of The Quoddy Tides newspaper. She has worked nearly every job there: copy editor, full-time reporter, and “employee of all works,” including driver and bookkeeper. “On one day I’d be zooming down to Machias to attend a county commissioners’ meeting, then up to Calais for a council meeting, then back to Eastport to write or edit,” she recalls.
Working for a community newspaper, Whelan notes, can be all-consuming and, by its nature, tightly rule based.
“You also suppress many of your own beliefs and opinions in order to listen and record accurately,” she writes.
In response to this intense job, in 2014 Whelan decided to teach herself to paint, with the only parameter being that this work was to be entirely for herself—“anything could go, no other rules and no lessons.” What she hoped would be “a joyful exploration” continues to be so ten years later. “I cleared a space by the front door, tacked paper up on the wall, and started with chalk pastels.”
From pastels, Whelan moved to oil but soon discovered that in a small house with limited space the drying time made the medium “difficult.” She found herself rushing it, “turning colors to mud,” so she switched to
the State St. building has a first-floor entry and reception area, a conference room, office spaces and a kitchen. The second floor houses several office spaces, some with original tin walls and fireplaces. The most notable feature is a third-floor ballroom with original domed tin ceiling and walls and a fireplace. The Main St. building has more office space with a graceful, curved wall on the corner adding architectural interest on the brick exterior as well as the interior spaces. There is a large storage area on the third floor and on the fourth floor the attic space has brick walls and original exposed framing. The ground floor corner space tenant owns a very successful restaurant. At the rear of the property is ample parking with 80 ft. on Union River and a few steps from the River Walk along the shore. With endless possibilities and a prime riverfront location in the heart of downtown Ellsworth, this property offers a rare opportunity for investors or businesses to be a part of the town’s interesting past and its vibrant future. $1.6 mil.
acrylic, which dries fast but also allows for some “play” as regards absorption and evaporation.
In January, Whelan pulled back from her editing and writing roles with the newspaper. These days she mostly focuses on the publisher function, “which doesn’t have that much to do with my artwork.” That said, her reporting has been instrumental in her painting.
“Almost 20 years’ worth of attending Eastport City Council meetings, not to mention the countless other municipal and county meetings, human interest stories, articles about energy, climate change and more,” she writes, “sharpened my eyes to what’s around me.”
Whelan’s decision to paint coincided with a blossoming art scene in Eastport. She points to the city’s long history of the arts, from the Passamaquoddy’s rich cultural traditions to back-to-the-landers who arrived in the 1970s seeking inexpensive places where they could pursue art and other endeavors.
The Eastport Arts Center, now almost 40 years old, “was the result of many of those people in the ‘70s who moved here,” Whelan explains. “They created a ground up approach to the arts by providing a nonprofit home for people with an interest in a specific area of the arts, such as a choral group or theater, to form, rehearse, and perform.”
The founding of the Tides Institute and Museum of Art more than 20 years ago expanded the city’s cultural offerings through artist residencies, educational programs, and exhibitions of established and emerging artists with connections and/or artwork of the region.
All these happenings, Whelan notes, “helped to develop a city that continues to mix an active working waterfront with an active arts community.” Her paintings reflect this dynamic combination.
Whelan is represented by Full Fathom Five Gallery in Eastport and Gallery Sitka in Shirley, Mass, and Newport, R.I. You can see more of work on her website, www.lorawhelanart.com.
Whelan meets with a group of summer camp children at the Eastport Arts Center to talk about her show “Echoes of Place,” her life as an artist and reporter, and to show them how to make rubbings of found textures using scraps of canvas and crayons. PHOTO: LAUREN KOSS
