The Working Waterfront - Feb/Mar 2024

News from Maine’s Island and Coastal Communities volume 38, no. 1 n feb/mar 2024 n free circulation: 50,000

publishedby byisland islandinstitute institute nn workingwaterfront workingwaterfront.com .com published

Maine coast could host ‘space economy’

After the Storm—

Industries already investing, innovating here

BY SARAH CRAIGHEAD DEDMON

M

aine’s rocky coastline isn’t only beautiful, it’s the driving force behind some of the state’s most historic, lucrative industries, like shipbuilding, fishing, and tourism. Maine’s south-facing coastline could also become the driving force behind a future—and futuristic—Maine industry, built around, and aiming for, space.

“These tiny satellites…half of them need to go into a polar orbit, going due south, or due north,” said Sascha Deri, CEO of bluShift Aerospace. “Here in Maine we have a coastline that allows us to go due south without going over people or property. You can’t do that anywhere else on the Eastern Seaboard.”

Deri spoke on a panel at the first annual Maine Space Conference, held in Portland last November, where more than 300 attendees listened to dozens of speakers including NASA’s Michael Kincaid, Maine Department of Economic and Community Development Commissioner Heather Johnson, and Terry Shehata, executive director of the Maine Space Grant Consortium.

Remains of wharf and shop picked up from granite piers and mangled by the extreme tidal surge in Carver’s Harbor, Vinalhaven on Jan 10. PHOTO: SHERI ROMER BROCK

Only a month before the event, organizers feared it would be sparsely attended, said Shehata. Then came a surge in registrations. Ultimately, it sold out.

“That shows, I think, that Maine really wants to get into the space economy,” Shehata said. “It’s happening across the world, it’s happening across Maine, and we need to be part of that development.”

And Shehata is right, the space economy is ramping up in Maine. There are already more than 80 Maine companies involved in the aerospace industry, such

as Biddeford-based Fiber Materials Inc., now part of Spirit Aerosystems. FMI manufactured a heat shield used during the Osiris-Rex mission, enabling delivery of asteroid samples to Utah at the end of a seven-year mission.

In early January, Teledyne Technologies Inc., a $5.5billion company headquartered in California, opened an office in Maine, specifically to position itself in the state’s commercial space industry. Teledyne created continued on page 4

Offshore wind’s blustery big picture Nationally, industry is in flux, globally it’s growing ANALYSIS BY STEPHEN RAPPAPORT

A

lmost two years ago the Biden administration determined that offshore wind power would provide a key part of the nation’s clean energy goals.

President Biden himself said that by 2030, a substantial portion of the energy flowing into the U.S. electric power system—perhaps as much as 30 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power, by his estimate, 10 million homes—would come from offshore wind.

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In November, Boston public radio of the U.S.—Vineyard Wind 1—began station WBUR’s program On Point sending a limited amount of power into featured a discussion of how far the the Massachusetts electric grid, with the offshore wind industry in the U.S. promise of substantially more to come had advanced and the many obstacles by the end of this January. And in early that impede more rapid December, a smaller progress. Program host project located off the Meghna Chakrabarti was Rhode Island coast, Worldwide, joined by: South Fork Wind, there are nearly • Ali Zaidi, the White began sending elecHouse national tricity to the grid in the 11,000 “fully climate advisor town of East Hampton commissioned • Kris Ohleth, director on Long Island. of the Special The two projects offshore wind Initiative on Offshore are of significantly Wind, a non-profit different scale. turbines” in think tank When completed, operation.

• Amanda Lefton, vice Vineyard Wind 1 will president of developinclude 62 turbines ment, U.S. East for RWE Offshore placed on towers standing some 800 • and WBUR environmental jourfeet tall and spaced about a mile apart nalist Miriam Wasser. in the waters south of Nantucket Ironically, a little more than a month Island. It will generate as much as 800 after the program aired, the largest wind- megawatts of power, enough electricity farm under construction off the coast continued on page 5

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The Working Waterfront . february / march 2024

Navigating 2024

Leaders identify headwinds, course correction Kim Hamilton President, Island Institute (publisher of The Working Waterfront) As we enter 2024, island and coastal communities face mighty headwinds in securing critical federal and state funding.

Our rural, coastal communities are part of the magic of the Maine experience for tourists and residents alike. Behind that salty, bucolic backdrop lies a profound challenge: securing and managing public funds to keep these iconic towns livable and vibrant.

Town managers, select boards, and volunteers will spend hundreds of hours applying for and managing these awards, with their complex reporting and matching fund requirements and reimbursement schedules. If successful, these communities will reap the benefits of broadband expansion, sea level rise preparedness, access to affordable energy, workforce development, and even basic life-saving equipment like ambulances and fire trucks.

In this new year, with mixed global economic signals and big political stakes, organizations like ours serving these communities will need to increase their technical assistance, ensuring that coastal Maine is not left behind or left out. This includes using local knowledge to improve federal and state processes, building core community capacity to navigate the funding landscape, and piecing together the puzzle of public funding through the lens of local government.

This will ensure that the allocation of public funds is fair, inclusive, and within reach for even the most capacity-constrained communities.

Sebastian Belle Executive Director, Maine Aquaculture Assoc.

More and more coastal community members have no family or historical connection to making a living from the ocean. The ways many new residents view and value the ocean are often quite different from folks whose livelihood depends on the commercial use of the oceans.

As these demographic shifts occur, Maine’s working waterfront communities also find themselves facing a rapidly changing marine ecosystem driven by climate change. Those environmental changes directly affect the resources that are the basis for our working waterfront economy. Traditional working waterfront families and communities are struggling to adapt and find ways to continue their maritime heritage. Navigating a course through these challenges will require new tools and changes in how we use the ocean to provide a viable future for the next generation of working waterfront families.

Aquaculture is one tool that will help coastal communities become more resilient and provide opportunities for the next generation to continue Maine’s maritime heritage.

As a marine resource user, aquaculture permits go through a rigorous public process that ensures they will not damage the environment and create any conflicts with other marine resource users. Put another way, they need “social license” to operate. That’s a good thing and the state’s aquatic farmers support that requirement.

Social license requires that accurate information is available to the public and that resource management agencies base their decisions on good data.

As Maine’s coastal communities consider how to preserve their working waterfront traditions, accurate and objective information about aquaculture will be vital. Maine is lucky that we have some of the

Even before the storms in early January that devastated the Maine coast, our region faced big challenges, or “headwinds” as we’re calling them here. We reached out to some leaders in five key sectors to ask how to best navigate, or plot a course correction for these headwinds.

most qualified aquaculture and marine ecosystems researchers in the world. Their objective engagement will be critical to the sustainable use of aquaculture as a tool to grow local, healthy food and maintain our working waterfront traditions.

Val Peacock Town Councilor, Bar Harbor Acadia National Park recorded 3.9 million visits in 2023. In 2013, the number was 2.25 million.

While not an exact count of visitors to Bar Harbor, it does help us understand that visitation has doubled over the past 10 years.

As a leading tourist destination, increased levels of tourism bring direct economic benefits to Bar Harbor residents and business owners and the state through sales and lodging tax revenues. But, increased visitors also bring challenges, including the expansion of short-term vacation rentals, congestion, and traffic; wear and tear on public infrastructure; and concerns from citizens about whether we can continue to host millions without eroding the coastal community that 5,000 people call home.

Those concerns were clearly articulated as voters passed a citizen’s initiative in November of 2022 regulating the number of cruise ship passengers that can disembark in Bar Harbor. While the fate of the ordinance awaits a ruling on its constitutionality, the Bar Harbor Town Council continues work to set priorities for 2024 including planning and policy work for sustainable tourism, affordable housing, and seeking alternate revenue sources to stabilize property tax rates and offset the cost of tourism to the municipal budget.

Mark Dion Mayor of Portland As with all coastal communities in Maine, Portland faces challenges in retaining access to the ocean for fisheries, businesses, and citizens.

In 2024, we look forward to making landmark progress in expanding physical and functional access in key areas.

We are making progress in our long-term efforts to dredge for the harbor’s piers, marinas, and ramps. We plan to go to bid soon for construction of a confined aquatic disposal cell to dispose of contaminated dredged sediments. Construction of the cell is anticipated for next winter with dredging to follow during the 2025-2026 dredge season. Dredging of the balance of Portland Harbor marine facilities will continue during subsequent years as funding becomes available.

Portland is reconfirming our commitment to the groundfish industry by modernizing the organization and governance for the Portland Fish Exchange and the Portland Fish Pier. Stabilizing the finances and management of these critical infrastructures maintains access to markets for Maine’s struggling groundfishing fleet. We look forward to streamlining governance, budgeting, and oversight for the Fish Pier complex with a goal of continued and improved service to the fishery.

We will greet the 2024 boating season by opening the first new public landing on the waterfront in over 30 years. Mavodones Landing will greatly expand access to the water (and to the Portland downtown from the water) allowing recreational boaters, marine nonprofits, cruisers, water taxis, and islanders affordable transient berthing in the heart of our thriving Eastern Waterfront.

During the upcoming year and into the future, we will need to meet climate change impacts with clear eyed realism. The sobering storms of the last few weeks remind us in certain terms of the magnitude of the effort to come. We are fortunate, however, to have an engaged community and dedicated staff to engage in that work.

Rebecca Hatfield President and CEO of Avesta Housing Maine is experiencing an unprecedented housing crisis and it is a complex issue. The steep escalation of costs over the last several years has created financial barriers that impede housing development, exacerbating the state’s already pressing affordability issues.

This amplifies the struggle for both those seeking quality housing and for developers trying to help.

Zoning and land-use restrictions limit the creation of housing options. The lack of sufficient funding resources further complicates the equation.

Addressing these challenges requires a strategic combination of policy measures, collaborations, and multi-faceted approaches. Solutions like LD 2003, recent legislation aimed at incentivizing higherdensity housing and expediting local approval processes, are essential.

Continued state and federal resources, local funding mechanisms, and public-private partnerships can collectively contribute to a comprehensive strategy. By leveraging the strengths of both public and private sectors, innovative financing models and partnerships can be explored to offset costs and facilitate sustainable housing solutions.

Jeff Putnam Chairman, Maine Lobster Advisory Council As we enter 2024, the industry must be proactive in monitoring the health of the resource. The Department of Marine Resources conducts trawl surveys, a ventless trap program, settlement tracking, and sends staff out on harvester boats to count and measure every lobster trapped.

There has been a decline across the spectrum in recent years that has triggered a measure increase effective Jan. 1, 2025.

Harvesters statewide have participated in these surveys, listened to the results, and provided feedback from their own perspectives. The feedback that many have provided, and what the most recent surveys are capturing, is that there are positive signs in the juvenile lobster stock.

Harvesters and DMR scientists agree that expanding the surveys into a broader habitat and depth range is important to capture the changes that we have seen, such as increased sub-legal lobsters offshore.

Expanding the ventless trap program requires the collaboration of harvesters willing to tend those traps and regulators willing to change the process from random to targeted locations.

The sea sampling program needs more harvesters that are working the offshore waters to participate for the purpose of capturing accurate resource shifts into deeper water. If more data can be gathered from this program, then DMR can cross-check what we are seeing in our traps with the trawl survey, which has its flaws, and provide more information for the indexes that are used to regulate the harvest.

www.workingwaterfront.com . february / march 2024

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Welcoming tourists, joining the community New owners of Castine inn honored by Hospitality Maine Trinovitch are bringing. They painstakingly sanded away the painted trim urchasing and operating a and refreshed it with a dark stain. The 130-year-old inn on the coast front desk, which had been tucked out of Maine would be a daunting of sight of the front door, now is in challenge for anyone. Doing so in the view of the entry. Off the entrance is a midst of a pandemic, in a town that is an cozy room that serves as a pub, dubbed almost three-hour drive from Portland, “Mister’s Pub” after the couple’s miniaat the end of a peninsula well off Route ture schnauzer, and a room with a baby grand piano, donated by the 1 further upped that challenge.

And when the couple who did so town’s Unitarian church. Sheet music arrived in Castine from New York includes the vintage “Pentagöet Waltz,” with no ties to the area, it would composed by a Willis A. Ricker.

“We lead heavily with cocktails,” seem the odds might approach being Powell said of the pub, offering creative insurmountable.

But Matthew Powell, 33, and George and fresh mixes.

“I love the speak easy vibe,” added Trinovitch, 34, seem to have found a secret that is leading to success at the Trinovitch, who is managing the Pentagöet, the town’s historic Main interior design work. “Our tagline is Street inn. Rather than catering only to ‘back in time,’” while Powell suggests those who travel to and enjoy the quiet another descriptor for the aesthetic is corners of the Maine coast, the couple “collegiate.”

In the back of the building are two has made a concerted effort to reach out to and include the community in dining rooms, one more formal, and a porch. The restaurant once seated 94 on their endeavor. a busy summer It’s paid off, and day, though it’s been noticed. The they say 84 is a lodging trade group more comfortHospitality Maine able maximum. named Powell and In mid-summer, Trinovitch its innkeepers three chefs are of the year for 2023. employed.

On a chilly December Currently, the morning before 11 rooms in the Hospitality Maine Christmas, they gave inn along with a tour of the first floor noticed, citing the five in an annex of the inn. Outside, building, easily workers constructed couple’s immersion accessible across a new stairway into into the community… a small patio, the building from the were accounting sidewalk, built on a for about 70% of 45-degree angle to the revenue with Main Street, a more the remainder welcoming entry way, coming from Powell said, and a return the restaurant. to a much earlier version Those elements of the inn. are approaching “It was the first hotel an even split, in Castine to welcome rusticators,” Powell said of the inn, built which has required some effort, in 1894 in the Queen Anne Victorian since food service was for guests style with a turret and prominent gables. only under previous management.

It was first operated by Lizzie Moore, The menu, revamped after surveying a member of a hotel-owning family, guests, features such dishes as Deer he said, and named for a fort built in Isle crab cakes, Maine lobster linguini, and lobster pot pie, and locally Castine by the French in the 1630s.

Powell and Trinovitch have dug into sourced produce.

Trinovitch, who studied art educathe community’s history, too, noting that the Castine Inn, across Main tion in college, modeled for a time in Street, was built in 1898, and another New York and then began working in inn, later called the Manor House, interior design. Powell had worked was added on Battle Avenue, and the in restaurant marketing and at test Holiday House used to operate on kitchens for magazines like Bon Appetit. nearby Perkins Street. The town was a The couple had visited Maine for vacastop for the Boston-to-Bangor steam- tions, but didn’t contemplate the move until they asked themselves, “What ships, Powell noted.

The inn played an important role would it look like if we combined those in 1940 as the country moved toward skills?” Powell explained.

The business was awarded a $40,000 an inevitable world war—shipping and political leaders gathered there grant from the National Trust for to create what would become Maine Historic Preservation, Trinovitch said, Maritime Academy, its campus now a an endorsement of the thoughtful restoration, which will help pay for the stone’s throw from the inn.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that private new sidewalk stairway.

“We’re very excited about that bathrooms were added to each room, project,” he said.

Powell said.

Despite the lean years many The interior entryway reflects the work and the approach Powell and lodging establishments saw during

BY TOM GROENING

P

Matthew Powell, left, and George Trinovitch outside the Pentagöet Inn in Castine.

the peak pandemic years, the Pentagöet has been busy, and now, in winter, is nearly booked for May when Academy students graduate and their families visit.

On Bastille Day last summer—which the town celebrates—the inn hosted 104 for drinks and food, about as many as they and their staff could manage. “It was fun, though,” Trinovich admits.

But what stands out is the couple’s intentional community outreach. A week or so before my visit, they hosted about 125 for a Christmas party which also served to gather donations for the Toys for Tots charity. On a hot summer day, the inn invited children for free popsicles, and at Halloween, a “witch of Pentagöet” performance of sorts, featuring a friend visiting from New York, was offered for children.

“Those moments ingratiate ourselves into the community,” Powell said, though it’s clear they also give them joy. And Hospitality Maine noticed, citing the couple’s immersion into the community, “soft” innovations like popsicles and Christmas parties, and “that we so wholeheartedly threw ourselves int the community,” he said.

That connection continues, as Trinovitch has joined the town historic preservation committee and Powell is acting president of the Castine Merchants Association, which includes managing its social media.

Another outreach opportunity comes on Feb. 24, when the Pentagöet hosts a “Dinner of Five Flags,” featuring courses honoring the Wabanaki,

Matthew Powell, left, and George Trinovitch are the new owners of the Pengagöet Inn in Castine.

French, Dutch, British, and American occupation of the strategically located town to benefit the merchants group.

For more information about the inn and dinner, visit: Pentagoet.com, email stay@pentagoet.com, or call 207-326-8616.

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The Working Waterfront . february / march 2024

SPACE ECONOMY

continued from page 1

infrared sensors critical to the function of the James Webb Space Telescope.

And Maine is betting there will be more. In 2022, the state enacted legislation creating the Maine Space Corporation.

“The legislature has tasked the Maine Space Corporation with developing three legs of the Maine Space Complex: a space data analytics center, a space innovation hub for research and development, and a launch site,” said Shehata. “It’s required by law to establish those.”

The Maine Space Complex will be distributed across the state, with data analytics sites at the Brunswick Landing Center for Innovation, and at universities in Orono and Portland.

Potential innovation hub locations are also planned for the Loring Commerce Centre in Limestone, and for the University of Maine, the University of Southern Maine, and the Roux Institute.

Working with educational institutions and students is a high priority for Shehata, whose efforts with the Maine Space Grant Consortium encourage Maine students to consider careers in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), among other things.

Shehata recounts a recent news story about a 10-year-old Maine boy with an incredible talent for fixing broken machines, like lawn mowers.

“I’m afraid we’re going to lose that kid when he goes to college. He’s going to move somewhere else,” said Shehata.

“It’s our job to create the right infrastructure so that he can use his expertise and his knowledge here in Maine.”

Maine did lose, for a time, the expertise of Phillip Rench, a native Mainer who studied out of state and then moved up through the ranks at SpaceX, rising to the position of director of launch engineering in South Texas. In 2019 he returned to Maine, where he and his wife are in the process of developing the state’s largest observatory at Ossipee Hill Farm. Students in Maine and around the world will be able to

request astronomical observations during the day, then receive them via email that night, fully autonomously.

Rench serves on the Maine Space Corporation’s board of directors, and says he believes Maine’s economy needs something to inspire young Mainers.

“From my perspective there is nothing more inspiring than seeing a rocket launch,” said Rench. “It’s such a powerful thing. And we’re just getting to the point where we’re actively engaged in going back to the moon.

The opportunities coming up in the next decade, the potential is endless.”

The need to retain Maine’s migrating youth is one driving force behind its multi-faceted space complex strategy.

No other state has a space complex, Shehata says, and by focusing on more aspects of the space economy than just rocket launches, the complex could give Maine a strategic and competitive advantage over space ports in other states, or other countries, like the one under development now in Nova Scotia.

“It’s not only about the space port. It’s about engaging Maine in all elements of the value chain, so even if a space port doesn’t exist we can still move ahead,” Shehata said.

If a Maine space port can exist, the corporation has identified three possible locations. For horizontal launches, which use large aircraft to deliver rockets into the air, the former air bases in Limestone and Brunswick both have the necessary lengthy runways. For vertical rocket launches, the type most people are familiar with, although significantly smaller, the corporation hopes to find a site in Washington County.

“These rockets are nothing like what you picture in your mind’s eye. These are not 400-foot rockets. Trees are taller than these rockets,” says Machias Town Manager Bill Kitchen, who serves on the Maine Space Complex Launch Site & Services Working Group, and other development teams. “This is not a sprawling facility, the size of this facility is going to be measured in football fields.”

Whether or not a launch site is located in Washington County, Kitchen

hopes the region will play a role in Maine’s space economy, possibly in the manufacturing and building of rockets.

Maine, and Washington County, are “uniquely suited” to lead, he says, “based on our geography.”

Jourdan Johnson’s Portland-based company, Space Futures Consulting, specializes in guiding companies in matters relating to international space policy, and particularly on matters of space sustainability. She agrees that Maine can be a leader in sustainable space practices.

“That’s the greatest opportunity we have in Maine with policy right now.

We can make policy at the state level that will make us leaders in space sustainability,” said Johnson. “We have a legacy of Maine companies doing things the right way. I don’t see how the space industry in Maine can advance without having some aspect of sustainability. It wouldn’t be on brand for Maine if it didn’t.”

To learn more, visit: www.mainespacecorp.org/, www.mainespace2030. org/ and www.msgc.org

Judi Sandrock of MaxIQ Space, left, with Terry Shehata, executive director of the Maine Space Grant Consortium during November’s Maine Space Conference. MaxIQ creates Space STEM education materials used in K-12 classrooms. PHOTO: COURTESY MAINE SPACE 2030

Michael Kincaid of NASA, left, and MSGC director Terry Shehata.

PHOTO: COURTESY MAINE SPACE 2030

The first Maine Space Conference in Portland in November drew a sold-out audience.

PHOTO: COURTESY MAINE SPACE 2030

Jim Lenke, a science teacher at Machias Memorial High School, center, stands with his students and Machias Town Manager Bill Kitchen, speaking to NASA’s Mike Kincaid (far right). Students from several schools presented research at the first Maine Space Conference. PHOTO: SARAH CRAIGHEAD DEDMON

www.workingwaterfront.com . february / march 2024 OFFSHORE WIND

continued from page 1

for some 400,000 Massachusetts homes. When South Fork is finished, it will include a dozen turbines and generate about 132 megawatts of power.

While those two projects may seem substantial, they are tiny on a global scale. Chakrabarti noted that worldwide, there are nearly 11,000 “fully commissioned offshore wind turbines” in operation.

Currently, there are fewer than a dozen operating in U.S. waters. Why the enormous gap? And why have developers cancelled plans for proposed offshore power wind farm projects in Massachusetts and, just last fall, in New Jersey?

Ohleth, whose think tank is one of many organizations operating under the umbrella of the nonprofit Multiplier, which describes itself as “a 501(c)(3) organization that supports projects that are turning game-changing ideas into planet-saving impact,” pointed to several reasons for the slow growth of the “offshore wind vision” in the U.S. Currently, there are few facilities in the U.S. manufacturing the components required for wind power installations. Until relatively recently, Ohleth said, there was insufficient domestic demand to warrant the huge investment required to build those facilities.

Now, while the demand is beginning to grow, potential manufacturers have been reluctant, or unable, to make those investments in the recent financial climate of inflation and high interest rates.

According to Lefton, head of East Coast operations for RWE Offshore, a major windfarm developer in Europe and elsewhere around the world, those financial issues aren’t unique to offshore wind projects.

“This is actually a challenge that really any large infrastructure project is facing right now,” she said. “I think the difference for offshore wind is because we’re just getting this industry off the ground floor.”

Another issue: like many others around the world, the domestic wind industry continues to suffer from the disruptive impacts of COVID on the global supply chain. Those disruptions are further complicated by the logistical demands of the war in Ukraine that has “misdirected supply chain resources back to Europe” where, at present,

virtually all the equipment required for offshore power generation—the turbine generators, the immense windmill blades that are often longer than a football field—is manufactured.

The war hasn’t affected just logistics. Because European nations have been driven to find alternative energy supplies to reduce their reliance on Russian oil and gas, she said, “there’s a much more sense of urgency” in Europe to increase the amount of renewable energy available.

Other major issues for offshore wind development are the complex, multilevel permitting process required for each project and the need to contract with different state entities to provide electricity and a fixed rate for as long as 20 years.

In a volatile world economy, deals that made sense when they were scoped out years ago may no longer be economically viable. Developers want flexibility to increase rates to reflect their rising costs while state utility regulators want to protect consumers from potentially limitless rate increases.

That kind of fixed rate contract was the principal reason that the Danish developer Ørsted backed out of two New Jersey projects—one of them already well underway—despite reportedly having to write off as much as $4 billion.

The permitting process is no less vexing. In Denmark, there is a “one-stop shop” through which a developer can deal with whatever permitting authorities may be involved for a particular project. In the U.S., a developer might have to deal with two dozen agencies—federal, state, and even local—starting with the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) which has jurisdiction over the siting and development of wind projects in all federal waters (more than three miles offshore.)

Zaidi, the White House climate advisor, said the Biden Administration has adopted the one-stop shop model and has “streamlined our permitting approach” for offshore wind projects. And despite the complex issues and multiple challenges facing the industry, and the Administration in an election year, Zaidi was confident that offshore wind power will be successfully developed.

“We know there are 47 gigawatts that are in the pipeline,” he said. “We know that over 20 gigawatts already have a path to being green lit for construction.”

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letters to the editor High quality education To the editor: I read Kim Hamilton’s “From the Sea Up” column in the October issue, “Rewriting the storyline of island schools” (a great title), with much interest.

I wholeheartedly agree with her observation that “Schools play an undeniable role in the ecosystem of a thriving island community… [they] are essential to sustaining our islands.”

In 1980, as a visiting English teacher, I spent a special day visiting the one-room school on Isle Au Haut and was much impressed and engaged by the high quality of education that the eight mixedage group of students were receiving from their resourceful, devoted teacher.

I noted the cited “interventions” that the research literature advocates to support remote schools. Though my own teaching, research and writings about literacy in rural schools was on a “bridged” island, I found that the same interventions were crucial.

Now retired from the University of New Hampshire, I’d be pleased to give Island Institute a copy of my book, Time to Write: The Influence of Time and Culture on Learning to Write. In an ethnographic study from 1984-2010 (second edition, 2015), I explore the shifting relationships between the time values of a fishing community, those of the school, and of the digital age. I ask how time values inform and shape students’ responses to becoming literate.

I support your own valuable work with small island schools, and I much enjoyed reading about your father’s experience in the Chebeague Island school district.

John Lofty Deer Isle

Native endorsement To the editor: I wish to endorse Tom Groening’s call (Rock Bound, The Working Waterfront, December/January issue) for us to focus on restoring native status. For the life of me, I cannot fathom why our governor wishes to deny the degree of sovereignty to the Wabanaki accorded all other federally recognized Indian nations in the United States.

As a recent study out of Harvard University makes clear, this imposes a hardship on the Wabanaki nations. Sadly, this continues a long tradition in the state of Maine of discrimination against the Wabanaki people.

Bill Haviland Deer Isle

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The Working Waterfront . february / march 2024

from the sea up

The year of the working waterfront Work will continue in 2024 to protect vital access

BY KIM HAMILTON

WHEN ISLAND INSTITUTE began publishing this newspaper, The Working Waterfront, 30 years ago, we picked our name with intention. We wanted to cover local, critical, and the sometimes hidden yet prescient stories that spoke to the economy, politics, and culture on Maine’s islands and coasts.

No other mental image quite captured the space between sea and land, the bridge that connected people to the economy, or Maine’s marine heritage than the iconic working waterfront.

Those same working waterfronts that animated the origins of our newspaper nearly four decades ago have been slowly disappearing, despite investments by the state and others in this critical coastal infrastructure.

Investments by the state of Maine in the 1980s in publicly owned fish piers in Kennebunkport, Portland, Boothbay Harbor, Vinalhaven, Rockland, and Stonington helped secure those local assets. Some of these same piers—and many others along the coast—could trace their origins back to the 19th century granite industry and were deeply and historically embedded in local economic activities.

Thanks, however, to recent legislaIsland Institute undertook a mapping project in 2005 to understand the tive changes spearheaded by the Island dimensions of waterfront access for Institute and other partners, local land commercial fishermen and marine trusts can now hold working waterrelated business. Along Maine’s 5,300- front covenants, thus bringing in more mile coastline, we identified 1,045 private sector money and moving more points of access. Of those, only 81 nimbly when necessary. Maine’s toolkit points included parking, all-tide access, to prevent the conversion of working and on-site fuel. That shockingly low waterfronts to noncommercial uses is number in 2005 has continued to still, however, woefully small.

These tools do little to address the shrink. Considering the value of the lobster industry to the Maine economy other threats to working waterfronts, and the growing potential of aqua- such as storm surge, sea level rise, culture, further losses to commercial and costly and complicated insurance waterfront access are an economic policies that make holding onto these assets ever more calamity in the making. costly. This is Fortunately, there are Maine’s toolkit to especially true as tools now at our disposal.

The Working Waterfront prevent the conversion warming in the Gulf of Maine is Access Protection Program of working waterfronts bringing changes through the Land for to scale, type, Maine’s Future Program to noncommercial and manner of helps put more commerfishing. cial waterfront under uses is still, however, The tools also protection in perpetuity. woefully small. do little to To date, 34 properties have address the presbeen protected. sures on coastal For some this is a great program. For projects that need to housing and on waterfront develophappen quickly or where people don’t ment that are at the heart of a growing want to partner with the state, this is number of community conflicts and costly litigation. not the right solution.

This year, we continue our deep commitment to protecting those unique places that connect our communities to the sea and our economy to the world. Working with our partners in the Working Waterfront Coalition, you’ll hear more from us about the state of Maine’s working waterfronts.

We’ll look forward to sharing more about public and private efforts to secure Maine’s fishing future, and supporting those businesses that, in return for access to the water, provide critical community goods, services, and jobs that make our coast vibrant.

I can’t imagine a better banner for this newspaper today. I hope you’ll join us—as private citizens, businesses, thought leaders, landowners, and fans of Maine—in protecting this extraordinarily important feature of Maine’s coast, the working waterfront.

Kim Hamilton is president of Island Institute, publisher of The Working Waterfront. She may be contacted at khamilton@islandinstitute.org.

rock bound

Working on the railroad Passenger service may extend up coast

BY TOM GROENING

BACK IN MY weekly newspaper days, I worked with an old-timer who, in those years, was responsible for settling up with the stores that carried our paper. Now that I think about it, he was probably the age I am now, so strike the “old-timer” crack.

Bob grew up in Belfast and at an early age, took an interest in the nascent field of home movies. In later years, he owned a drive-in movie theater in town, and if I remember correctly, for a time operated a theater in Unity. His home movies have become important to local historians, and I remember him describing to me, somewhat wistfully, his filming the last time the 320-foot Belfast, one of the Boston boats, as the steamers were known, left the pier in 1935.

The boats called at harbors along the coast and islands, and, as I remember it being explained to me, you could walk aboard in late afternoon and be walking the streets of Boston the next morning.

Even though Route 1 was being improved in the 1930s—the WaldoHancock Bridge was completed in 1931—in many ways, the state became

more insular than during the 60 years railroad to be viable as a form of mass transportation, it has to be fast. And in which the Boston boats ran.

The Maine Turnpike, the nation’s speed is regulated based on the status second “superhighway,” was completed of the infrastructure—the rails, the in 1947, and I-295, following the ties, and the ballast, which is the term coastal route from Portland north, was used for the stone base.

Fifteen years ago, the Downeaster’s completed in the early 1970s.

One mode of transportation that top speed was increased from 60 mph coexisted with these developments to 79 mph, which cut 20 minutes from was railroads. Maine’s first significant the Portland-to-Boston run. Yet in rail infrastructure opened for freight Spain, some rail lines operate at over 190 mph. It’s not and passenger service in the that the Spanish are 1850s. In Belfast, we had Even though reckless; it’s just that a city-owned railroad, the they’ve invested in Belfast & Moosehead Lake, Route 1 was their rail. built in 1871, though it never being improved The federal made the planned connection funding for the in Greenville. in the 1930s, in coastal Maine route In recent decades, we’ve doesn’t necessarily watched Amtrak’s Downeaster many ways, the mean service as far work its way up the coast, and state became north as Rockland recent news suggests the next is imminent. It’s just link will connect Brunswick more insular… another step toward to Rockland. The Downeaster that link. Given that currently provides regular service to Boston, with stops along the Cape Air operates from Knox County Regional Airport in nearby Owls Head, 145-mile run.

The Biden administration has it makes good sense to bring Amtrak provided $28 million to improve service to the region.

Tourists might fly into Owls Head the service, including work on the Brunswick to Rockland section. For and then travel along the coast for

stops at lodging establishments, or they might travel by train and fly home from Owls Head.

The biggest variable, of course, is getting us to forgo the comfort and privacy of our cars. And that’s not an easy task.

I hate driving in Boston, but it would be a hard sell to get me to travel by train to Boston and then perhaps onward by bus or train. But if I were inclined to spend a weekend in that city to see a concert or attend a work-related conference, I could be persuaded.

Given our challenging winter driving conditions and the traffic we’ve begun to see in the summer, rail travel may become more attractive. Opponents to investing in Amtrak often trot out the tired argument that the service doesn’t break even from ticket sales. Does Route 1 break even?

Tom Groening is editor of The Working Waterfront. He may be contacted at tgroening@islandinstitute.org.

www.workingwaterfront.com . february / march 2024

7

MID-CENTURY BOOTHBAY — Information accompanying this image notes that it portrays Boothbay Harbor “before 1951.” Do readers have any more information to share? If so, contact editor Tom Groening at tgroening@islandinstitute.org.

op-ed

Rockweed study not accurately explained Harvesting, recovery controls were not exact

BY DAVID PORTER

ROCKWEED IS A slow-growing, wild seaweed on the rocky coast of Maine.

It is highly valued as a commercial fertilizer and debates about how rockweed harvesting should be managed are contentious.

To address questions about overharvesting, academic researchers collaborated with commercial companies to test for effects of a single harvest on rockweed biomass and height one year later. Their article, “Bed-scale impact and recovery of a commercially important intertidal seaweed,” by Johnston et al., is in the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology (2023).

This study has been widely publicized as evidence for rapid recovery of commercially harvested rockweed beds throughout Maine. For example: • University of Maine press release, Feb. 15: “A study led by the University of Maine captured how entire rockweed beds recover from harvest, and the practice has a smaller impact than previously thought.”

• Mainebiz.biz, Feb. 17: “A new study led by the University of Maine says harvesting has a smaller impact than previously thought, with entire rockweed beds recovering.”

Island Institute Board of Trustees

Kristin Howard, Chair Douglas Henderson, Vice Chair Kate Vogt, Treasurer, Finance Chair Carol White, Programs Chair Bryan Lewis, Philanthropy Chair Shey Conover, Secretary, Governance Chair Megan McGinnis Dayton, Ad Hoc Marketing & Communications Chair Michael P. Boyd, Clerk Sebastian Belle David Cousens Michael Felton Nathan Johnson Emily Lane Michael Sant Michael Steinharter Donna Wiegle Tom Glenn (honorary) Joe Higdon (honorary) Bobbie Sweet (honorary) John Bird (honorary) Kimberly A. Hamilton, PhD (ex officio)

harvesting when they re-sampled each • The Working Waterfront newspaper, impact site shortly after harvesting.

December/January, op-ed by the This could be due in part to the locaMaine Seaweed Council: “The tions where they collected data relabottom line from the University of tive to the locations of the harvesters’ Maine is that rockweed regenerates activities. The authors stated: at a rapid rate, fully recovering its “We did not ensure that there biomass within a year of harvest.”

However, the authors identi- was perfect spatial overlap between fied limitations of their study that harvest and either our quadrats or our are not mentioned in this publicity. transects.

“We acknowledge the limitations Many published studies come with caveats—here, it is especially critical of our sampling design given the fact to understand and acknowledge these that there were several impact sites that limitations when the findings are used increased in mean height and biomass between the pre-harvest and harvested in policy and management decisions.

Briefly, the goal of this study was time periods. This is likely due to a lack of spatial overlap to test for the effects of between transects harvesting on rockweed and harvest at biomass and height at the The authors these sites.” level of entire rockweed Sampling probbeds instead of focusing identified limitations lems may help on smaller experimental of their study that explain why, in the plots. However, no information was provided on are not mentioned in harvest year, no harvesting effects the amount of biomass or this publicity. were detected at area of rockweed that was three of the four harvested at each site. regions. Where Commercial harvesters were asked to cut rockweed at 19 impact the researchers did detect harvesting, sites that could then be compared with they stated that “it is important to note 19 control sites along four regions of that the likelihood of complete height the coast. Surprisingly, the investiga- and biomass recovery after one year was tors did not find consistent evidence of lower at these more disturbed sites. As a

THE WORKING WATERFRONT

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All members of Island Institute and residents of Maine island communities receive monthly mail delivery of The Working Waterfront.

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result, if the goal is to maintain tall algal canopies, resource managers may need to allow longer recovery intervals at sites with higher harvest intensities.”

In summary, it is unfortunate that the extent and impact of harvesting in this study were unclear. Small sample sizes, transects that were not permanently marked, and other issues all contributed to variability in the data.

It is even possible that in some cases one or both transects at the 19 impact sites may not have been harvested at all. Perhaps this was intentional due to focusing on “bed-scale” effects where harvesting is likely to be patchy across the rockweed bed.

However, statements asserting that there was rapid recovery after one year fail to acknowledge many sites where there was no documented impact from which to recover.

Sweeping statements and oversimplified publicity about recovery rates in this study should be viewed with a grain of salt.

David Porter is a resident of Brooklin.

He is professor of plant biology (emeritus) at the University of Georgia.

Editor: Tom Groening

tgroening@islandinstitute.org Our advertisers reach 50,000+ readers who care about the coast of Maine.

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To Advertise Contact: Dave Jackson djackson@islandinstitute.org (207) 542-5801

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8

The Working Waterfront . february / march 2024

ESSAY

Dear diary: 140-year-old journal returns home Flea-market find rich with Deer Isle family ties

BY KATIE LIBERMAN

A

bout ten years ago, my family and I were browsing a touristy roadside flea market in Searsport. As I browsed the booths of books, antiques, and vinyl records, I found a stack of books amid towers of CDs and junk. I gently teased a slim book with gilded edges from the stack. A tattered leather book with colorful flowers and the word “Album” embossed on the cover looked back up at me. I briefly flipped through the album, noting the yellowed blank pages. It looked like it was probably an old scrapbook from the 1970s that someone had failed to use.

Twenty bucks later, I was the proud owner of the worn journal. I gave it little thought until returning home, when I opened the cover to start journaling. I nearly dropped my pen in surprise. Swirling delicate calligraphy graced the title page with the author’s signature: Bertie M. Lowe. So, the journal did have an owner.

It seemed strange that the book would be blank, though. Hurriedly, I flipped through and stopped about three-quarters of the way through.

The book wasn’t empty. An entry in a similar, swirling Copperplate font lay in plain view on the page: “Be sure you are right, then go ahead. Respectfully Yours, S. S. Foster, Deer Isle, Maine. June 6, 1886.”

I flipped through some more, landing on an illustration of a seaside paradise complete with palm trees and a waterfall with the inscription: “Best wishes are gold coin, mine are thine. Your Cousin. Clara B. Torrey, March 9, 1883.”

And: “Scud’s compliments to Biddy, John K. Hooper. Franklin, ME.” Most other entries were by friends and family signed and dated with locations in Maine and Massachusetts.

Suddenly, I realized this was probably the best $20 I’d ever spent.

I had to find Bertie. Multitudes of questions bubbled to the surface. Who was she? Where did she spend her days? Who were the other people in the book? And does her family know that they misplaced this family heirloom?

I dove headfirst into researching Bertie on the internet, with little luck. After a while, I put the project on a back burner as I focused on preparing for college and almost forgot about it.

After I landed at UMaine, I often spent my time in the Fogler library to study. Sometimes, I would go to the

special collections to research Bertie. I felt like I got a little closer. There were a couple of Alberta Lowes in various census records, but I wasn’t sure which one was my Bertie.

More years passed, and I stowed Bertie’s book in the darkest, driest corners at home to preserve it as long as possible. I eventually wandered into an antique bookstore in Hallowell and shared my journey with the shopkeeper. Within minutes, he’d found Bertie in a Deer Isle census, listed with her siblings and father. I felt a zing of excitement as a piece of the mystery unfolded. I learned the names of her immediate family and that she was a Deer Isle resident.

Alberta “Bertie” M. Lowe was born in Deer Isle in 1860 to the retired Capt.

William Parker Lowe and Marietta Torrey. Bertie had four brothers (William P. Jr., Samuel T., George T., and Frank A. Lowe), some of whom were yachtsmen and boatbuilders.

Bertie married Fred Hatch and moved to East Boston, where she had three children: Grace, Robert, and Seth Parker. Fred passed away around 1895 due to “phthisis pulmonalis,” known today as tuberculosis. Bertie ran a boarding house in Boston and eventually remarried into the Watts family. Bertie passed away in 1937.

Last year, I joined the Island Institute Fellows program which placed me in Deer Isle to work with the local afterschool program. It felt as if Bertie was calling me home. My advisor urged me to contact the local historical society.

Dropping by the Deer Isle-Stonington Historical Society after work, I picked up a potential lead for a seasonal resident with the same family name. Further searching led me to a hardware company in Rockland with roots in Deer Isle.

After placing an awkward call to Lowe Hardware (how does one explain that you just happened to have someone’s family heirloom?), I connected with the father and son team who own the company, Bill and Elliot Lowe. As it turns out, their family is the last of the Deer Isle Lowes. We’re making plans to meet soon to look at the journal together.

For the last decade, I’ve journeyed on this quest to return the journal to Bertie’s family. Hours of research, numerous phone calls, trips to historical societies and libraries, and I feel tantalizingly close to this story’s end. I hope this book can land somewhere that it will be appreciated and preserved for future generations.

Bertie Lowe’s floral album is a leather-bound journal held together by the remnants of the spine and some tape.

The inside cover includes Bertie’s hand-written name.

Clara Torrey’s entry into Bertie’s journal. Claire was Bertie’s cousin. The page is illustrated with a colorful seaside scene.

Katie Liberman is an Island Institute Fellow serving on Deer Isle and working with after-school and summer programs.

www.workingwaterfront.com . April 2020 www.workingwaterfront.com . february / march 2024

cRanBeRRy RepoRt Peter Ralston honored by Lighthouse Foundation

23 9

Town meeting, painting lines, eating doughnuts, and throwing rocks

Maine Lights Program transferred ownership in 1998 THE AMERICAN Lighthouse Foundation recently presented Peter Ralston with its Keeper of the Light award during the organization’s yearend gala at the Nonantum Resort in Kennebunkport. Ralston was

By BarbaraforFernald recognized his efforts in helping create and guide the Maine Lights ACTIVITY on the at theofend Program on the 25thislands, anniversary its of February and into March, successful completion in 1998. is like a mirror image of the action at the and end In 1998, government entities of August into September.

Just as the nonprofits obtaining one of 28 lightsummer residents of the Cranberry houses being transferred through the Isles end their vacations right on before Maine Lights Program gathered the fall, many year-round residents end lawn of the Samoset Resort to receive their winterdeeds breaks the ceremonial fromjust thebefore commanspring equinox. dant of the U.S. Coast Guard. Thanks to get efforts back toofwork and to It’s thetime visionary Ralston, reconnect. who was working with Island Institute, annual town meeting takes theOur organization he co-founded, this place on the second Saturday in March. unprecedented achievement still shines Formany selectmen andlighthouses town employees, for of Maine’s today. winter has 1989, been anything butkeeper’s a vacaIn April the former tion. They have been steadily, house at Heron Neck working Light Station on gathering information to write the Greens Island, off Vinalhaven, suffered towndamaged meeting. the It’s the time awarrant fire thatforbadly historic of year we come together as a town to structure. The Coast Guard announced decide on projects and spending and plans to demolish the structure. how much money and is to be raised by Preservationists community property taxes. members alike opposed the plan Discussion schoolproperty budget and eventuallyofthethehistoric alone can take well over an hour. was transferred to Island InstituteThe in islands take turns hosting the meetRockland.

Island Institute in turn parting andwith the luncheon.

This year, town nered private individuals who

worked diligently to restore the firedamaged keeper’s house in the years that followed.

The success of this project inspired meeting then will the takeexecutive place onvice-presIslesford.

Ralston, What’s for lunch?

Homemade pizzas, ident of Island Institute, to approach salads, and desserts.

Life gets busier the Coast Guard with a proposal. as we volunteer to help prepare the “Why don’t we draft a piece of legislafirst that community meala of the transfer season. tion would effect mass Town meeting is a great opportuof Maine’s lighthouses?,” Ralston nity to Such hear about winter from friends asked. a groundbreaking idea— and neighbors.

“How was yourinitially trip to thought to be unfeasible when ...?”

“Who knew grand-parenting was proposed, became the Maine Lights so exhausting or that there were so Program. The Maine Lights legislation many cold germs involved?”

“You did was later approved as Federal law on all that painting?” These same quesOct. 19, 1996. tions could be asked in “Keeping Septemberthe at A 2020 story entitled, a school board meeting in a large subLights On,” by former Island presiurb. Philip (Preferably not during dent Conkling noted: the “By meet1994 ing while someone else has the floor!) the Institute and the Coast Guard had In January and February, and worked out a process for the Bruce expedited Itransfer got toofspend a lot of time with eligible Maine lighthousesour to grandchildren in groups Southern Maine. other agencies and in exchange Visiting them was main goaland of for maintaining thethestructures most of our winter travel. providing public access toWe theconsidtransered trying to paint our kitchen, but ferred properties.” weConkling kept catching odd coughing virusalso noted: “Two years es and time after theexperienced completionmore of thedown property than we wanted, so we never got to it. transfers, Congress passed the National Maybe I’ll paint it in May, when I can Historic Lighthouse Preservation have The the windows open.on the Maine Act. act, modeled Bruce saw more than enough paint, Lights Program, established a national anyway, for thistransferring winter. During “time process anyhis historic off” he painted 600 buoys (white and federal properties across the country

As winter winds down, islanders mix prep work and gatherings bright red with a black stripe) and, like piece of purple rope to the end of the every other lobster fisherman in Maine buoy line or toggle, but all attachments this winter, he read about, talked about, must be made with a splice or a tuck.

I know it’s a stretch to compare foland experimented with purple paint.

The latest whale regulations require lowing Maine whale rope requireall Maine lobster fishermen to use new ments with a plein air workshop, but markings on the ropes they attach to a person could return home from eilobster traps. Depending on how close ther and say that they’d been paintPeter Ralston was named American Lighthouse Foundation’s 2023 “Keeper of the Light.” to shore they fish, they will have to add ing in their spare time. If Bruce were From left, the foundation’s Nick Korstad, Alan Ells, Bob Trapani, Jr., Ralston, and Jeremy 2-4 purple marks on each buoy line. writing an essay on how he spent his D’Entremont.

On warps that are 100-feet or less there winter vacation, painting would be a of it. credited Anotherlocal partnonprofits would be and the must be one 12-inch purpleand mark with- part Ralston to government agencies private description I heard him tell his brother in a few fathoms of the trap and a 36host communities with bring the idea nonprofit groups.” about walking to get doughnuts, inch mark within fathoms of Mark to fruition.

In purple part, what made 2the Maine the buoy.

If the warp is longer that 100 in February, our son Robin, and “Although with I conceived of what Lights Program so vital to the wellour grandchildren Henry and Cora. feet, the requirement is for a 12-inch being of Maine’s lighthouses was that became the Maine Lights Program,I purple mark sought near theto trap, a second 12- was with in Portland, and not aaway single bit friends of it would—or could— the process identify longwas away withthefriends in inch preservation purple mark halfway tofor themany buoy, Stephanie have happened without passion, term solutions andthea 36-inch mark near buoy. Florida.

Father hard and son were and in charge. commitment, work, faith of state’s historic lightthe stations got others doughnuts at The Bruceon figures he will be putting 1,500 of“Yeah, a greatwemany who wanted located islands.

Cookie Jar and then walked to lose the to“The 1,800initiative markingswas on his rope in all; two like no other in to ensure that Maine will never beach for a picnic and to throw rocks.” to three weeks of extra work if he does lighthouse history,” said Bob Trapani, its lighthouse heritage, much less the Eating homemade donuts it without hiring help. A number of fish- lighthouses themselves,” he said. and Jr., American Lighthouse Foundation ermen are applying paint to their ropes throwing rocks at the beach—if that “The program initially bore fruit executive director. “It was replete with isn’t a mirror image of many childby resting them in 3-foot long gutters opportunities for preservation, adap- 30 years ago but what really counts madereuse, from lengthwise-halved PVC pipe. hood Islesford, I don’t is the summers sustainedondedication—not to tive public access, and educawhat is. q hours and dollars— Bruce’spossibilities first attemptthat waswere with previously spray paint know mention countless tional but he soon moved to the effi- expended since then. The lights of the unattainable in bothon scope andmore impact. cient brush and latex paint.

Fernald lives onburn Islesford (Little Maine Lights Program brightly to This was especially so for offshore Barbara Some fishermen will add a 3-foot Cranberry Island) with her husband Bruce. this very day.” lighthouses.”

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The Working Waterfront . february / march 2024

Collaboration buoys Downeast communities Cobscook Institute, Caring Collaborative maximize impact

CCC’s executive director, Charley Martin-Berry, says “the ith 180 miles of seacoast and less than mission hasn’t changed a whole 13 people per square mile of land, lot” in the ensuing 17 years, but Washington County’s assets and “the priority populations did challenges are entwined with its geography. Fishing intentionally change. We care and other natural resource-based activities are about the lifespan. And who essential to the economy, which is deeply affected by is at the table has evolved. It’s expanded to include more adultthe vicissitudes of weather and a changing climate.

And relationships—person to person and organiza- serving agencies.

“In Washington County, tion to organization—are vitally important to ensuring collaboration is the name of the people here can thrive economically and socially.

Cobscook Institute and The Community Caring game. It’s bad form if you’re not Martin-Berry Collaborative are two Washington County nonprofits collaborating,” that center their work on social connection and collab- says. “It’s what we do to improve oration. They have very different missions yet share a outcomes. If our partners are commitment to enhancing quality of life in the region succeeding in their missions, Charley Martin-Berry, the Community Caring Collaborative’s executive director. we’re succeeding in ours.” by building relationships that help get things done.

PHOTO: LESLIE BOWMAN Prior to the CCC, there was “I think it’s fair to say that communities that are rural have some unique challenges,” says Kara fierce competition for resources McCrimmon, one of Cobscook Institute’s three among service providers in County.

Deb co-directors. Among the challenges she describes are Washington geographic isolation, fewer options for jobs and social Burwell of Paddling the Rapids, engagement, having to go further for services, fewer who works with organizamental health providers, and limited access to food tions throughout the Downeast and transportation. Addressing these issues, she says, region, notes that when funds potentially become available in requires “a slow, steady building of relationships.”

Cobscook Institute (formerly Cobscook Community an area where resources have Learning Center), located in the coastal town of not been plentiful, there can be Trescott, began as a community development initia- a “piranha-like” response. The tive based on educational models such as the Danish CCC has fostered a more producfolk school, where people of all ages learn together and tive approach, with what Burwell describes as “a deep devotion support each other.

“When Cobscook was founded in 1999, it was to nurturing collaboration, the people who came together and sat in a circle and ethic of sharing what people asked what we could do,” says McCrimmon. One of have” and a recognition that the to-dos was based on a request from a student who “none of us can do this alone. It’s Shaun Haskins, left, and Kara McCrimmon serve as co-directors of the Cobscook asked, “Could this new thing have a way a pregnant too complicated.”

Institute. PHOTO: LESLIE BOWMAN Like Cobscook Institute, the teen can do high school?” In response, in its sixth year Cobscook began offering a public four-year CCC works at maintaining through what high school program in partnership with Calais High connections describes as School. Cobscook’s high school incorporates outdoor Martin-Berry activities, skill-building, and hands-on learning on “formal, ongoing convenings.”

“Convening is so central to the Institute’s own campus.

Cobscook’s other programs include cross-gener- what we do. It’s in the air we ational educational and cultural opportunities in breathe. That’s the space where everything from writing to birding and pottery- partners can come together.”

The CCC Council, made up of making to leadership development.

“Mingling among generations yields huge benefits,” CCC staff and directors of many says Shaun Haskins, another of Cobscook’s co-direc- of the partner agencies, meets tors. “It gives kids anchors in their broader communi- monthly to share information, ties.” This is especially important in a region with an support each other’s work, and increasing percentage of older people. “Where kids align mutual goals. The Work don’t feel valued or feel like they have opportunities, Group, which includes direct service workers and people they leave,” Haskins says.

Cobscook’s programming has evolved based on what they serve, also meets monthly people say they would like to do or learn or teach. But to ensure that the CCC and soliciting meaningful input is not a one-time task. “It other agencies are responsive to Kara McCrimmon, one of the Cobscook Institute’s three co-directors.

PHOTO: LESLIE BOWMAN means inviting people to share their ideas about what’s current needs.

The synthesis happening here, and what’s of organizaneeded, again and again and tional and individual collaboration barriers too,” says Martin-Berry. “They understand the again,” says McCrimmon. is embodied by the Neighbor Group, barriers. It means so much for them to give back.”

Achieving that is an ongoing which has been meeting every other practice and perhaps an everNew initiatives have arisen from the Neighbor “ In Washington County, Friday since 2015. Although it is Group’s input, and Martin-Berry calls the particichanging practice. collaboration is the name supported by the CCC’s offering of pants “the architects of those programs.”

Machias-based The meeting space, food, and gas cards, Community Caring Central to the success the convenings and collaboof the game. It’s bad form it is comprised of nonprofessionals rations, Collaborative (CCC), with says Martin-Berry, are authentic relationships and was instigated by a community more than 45 organizational built on trust and a willingness to be vulnerable. Or as if you’re not collaborating.” member in response to a 2013 antipartners, approaches relationHaskins puts it, “Relationship-building is critical. We poverty workshop. It offers peer-to- kind of live or die based on the relationships we have, ship building at the macro and peer opportunities to help each other like anyone living in a rural community. Through micro levels. The CCC was and to get messages (such as, says repetition, the relationship grows.” founded in 2007 to address issues affecting at-risk infants, young children, and their Martin-Berry, “I can’t get a call back” or “I can’t get a job “I see something similar on islands,” says Burwell. families and to remove the barriers to collaboration because…”) to people who can effect systems change. “If it’s blowing a gale and you can’t get off-island, you “They have experienced a lot of stigma, and logistical have to depend on each other.” among the agencies that serve them.

BY DORATHY MARTEL

W

. february www.workingwaterfront.com 2024 . April / march2020 www.workingwaterfront.com

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Indigenous, U.S., Canadian efforts restoring fish run Alewives on St. Croix River are rebounding, thanks to cooperation

BY CATHERINE SCHMITT

T

en years ago, the run of alewives in the Skutik (St. Croix) River hovered around 16,000. Though that’s more than the 900 fish from a decade earlier, it was not a great total for a river that once held millions of fish. It was, however, the beginning of what many people now consider a successful river restoration.

One of those people is Hugh Akagi, chief of the Peskotomuhkati Nation in New Brunswick. Akagi, 78, told the success story to hundreds of scientists, students, and supporters at the 2024 Atlantic Salmon & Their Ecosystems Forum in Orono in January.

Akagi wore a thin black headband around his shoulder-length gray hair and a black, red, and white ribbon shirt. He walked back and forth at the front of the room.

“The problem,” he told the rapt audience, “was that people had been going at the restoration from the wrong end.

They thought they would go to the top and work their way down.”

Akagi, other Passamaquoddy leaders, and allies knew they had to do something.

“Governments aren’t doing it,” they told themselves. “We have to do it. But we are small. How can we do it?”

They did it together—Akagi, and Dale Mitchell, and Brian Altvater, and Vera Francis, and the rest of the Schoodic Riverkeepers. Scientists supported Indigenous knowledge with conventional research to show that native, sea-run alewives are a beneficial source

of food and nutrition for other river River Restoration Plan. Migration routes closer to incorporating other species inhabitants, native and non-native. are impeded by five major dams, and the into the salmon recovery process.

Officially endangered since 2000, Ed Bassett debunked the myth that reservoirs in between are full of hungry, alewives never traveled above Grand non-native smallmouth bass. Though salmon were not among the “success Falls and created a video of the river salmon are present in the lower tribu- stories” told to celebrate the 50-year that made members of the U.S.-Canada taries, none have been documented in anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, marked in 2023.

International Joint Commission cry. Ever the mainstem since 2006.

But success depends on the measure, the runner, Bassett collected signatures Attendees at the meeting were also and who is doing the when they were needed and brought reminded that measuring.

To the them to Maine’s capital in Augusta, where climate change is The current alewife people gathered at the he found other people in the hearing the single biggest population is but University of Maine on room—from the Penobscot Nation, threat facing the eve of what would Atlantic Salmon Federation, environ- Atlantic salmon. a fraction of what turn out to be yet mental groups—who supported getting Researchers are another damaging storm little fish up the river. It was grassroots. increasingly trying has been called “the of warm wind and rain— Once they knew there was a truth to to understand the greatest production people who collectively be heard, said Akagi, the government consequences of represented centuries started to move, opening the fishway warming water, potential of any of knowledge about the at the Woodland dam in 2008 and especially in headwatershed in Maine…” “salmosphere”—success Grand Falls in 2013. Alewife numbers water streams might be measured not increased; 800,000 returned to the and the upper Skutik in 2023. reaches of rivers where persistent by flow charts and Venn diagrams, Sarah Bland, deputy administrator of patches of cold water can offer refuge strategies and plans, but by the very the NOAA Fisheries Greater Atlantic for salmon at all life stages and seasons. fact that Atlantic salmon with wild Region, called the St. Croix restoration Identification and protection of these ancestry are still making their way a success of salmon recovery efforts. cold-water streams is a priority for thousands of miles to Arctic waters “Restoration of fish passage on the salmon researchers. But they know and back to Maine, as they have done for thousands upon thousands of years. river is largely attributable to the lead- they can’t focus only on salmon.

Millions of alewives returned to the ership of the Passamaquoddy.”

Salmon habitat does not function Chief Akagi, who has a degree in math properly without alewives, sea lamprey, Kennebec, the Penobscot, and the St. and physics and worked for Fisheries and and other migratory fish, said Tim Croix in 2023. This is success story.

But, as Chief Akagi noted, it is not a Oceans Canada, reminded the crowd Sheehan of NOAA Fisheries. story. at the annual town meeting. that success is not the same thing as Bud Staples, “The native suite of sea-run fish thegreat John Martin, and Elsie Gillespie chat around woodstove “We’ve done incredible things on the greatness. The current alewife population convey specific benefits to Atlantic is but a fraction of what has been called salmon, including delivering marine- river,” he said. “It’s not enough.” Not “the greatest production potential of derived nutrients, providing prey items, enough fish, and not enough people.

“I can’t do it by myself, we can’t do it any watershed in Maine, the Northeast, conditioning habitat, and likely reducing as a people, we’re too small. We need the United States, and probably North predation risk via prey buffering.”

America,” according to the 2022 Skutik While this knowledge is not new, everyone.” Take these stories, he said. Tell Watershed Strategic Sea-Run Fish and Sheehan described how they are getting them to others. Tell your river story.

Aquaculture training offered for women THE MAINE Aquaculture Hub is accepting applications through Jan. 26 for a new aquaculture training series for active and aspiring aquaculturists who self-identify as women or nonbinary.

This 2024 Women in Aquaculture series is hosted in partnership with the Aquaculture in Shared Waters training program, which has helped commercial fishermen and farmers start and improve their aquaculture businesses in Maine for over a decade. The series focuses on targeted skills for women on the water, drawing directly from emerging social science research on the training needs for women in aquaculture. By empowering underrepresented “Punkin” aquaculturists to build skills and Gerald Lemoine meaningful connections, the Women in

Aquaculture series aims to foster greater diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in Maine’s aquaculture sector.

The six-part series will run from February to May 2024, focusing on seamanship and maritime skills, gear and labor practices for different bodies, self-advocacy and safety, community relations and marketing, business financing, and more. In addition to skill-building, the series integrates knowledge-sharing and co-learning to empower participants and build community for women and nonbinary aquaculturists.Levi Moulden “Empowering women aquaculture farmers to diversify their income and innovate on Maine’s working waterfront not only ensures their success as farmers

but also promotes economic growth for the industry as a whole,” said Anne Langston Noll, Associate Director of the Maine Aquaculture Innovation Center.

“Women have always been an integral part of Maine’s working waterfront, and we’re seeing more and more women enter the aquaculture sector,” says Annie Fagan, a marine extension associate with Maine Sea Grant and one of the directors of this year’s workshop series. “Available research tells us that access to training opportunities can be a barrier for women looking to enter the industry or grow existing businesses. We hope to meet some of their unique training needs while building community for long term support,” she continues.

These workshops will be run by women instructors and topical experts, and are free of charge to participants.

Applications are encouraged from selfidentifying women and nonbinary entrepreneurs who operate or work for an aquaculture business, those with working waterfront backgrounds who are interested in getting more involved in aquaculture, and participants of previous Aquaculture in Shared Waters courses.

Applications are open now and close January 26th.

More information about the upcoming series, including how to apply, is available on the Aquaculture in Shared Waters website. This series is funded by NOAA Sea Grant Budthrough Staples the Maine Aquaculture Hub.

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The Working Waterfront . february / march 2024

Jonesport’s shore.

Debris is removed from the Deer Isle causeway by a plow truck.

January storms: Two gut punches to the working waterfront

S

torms that coincided with high tides on Jan. 9-10 and Jan. 13 pummeled the coast and did devastating damage to working waterfront infrastructure.

Most of our readers will have seen the images shared by news media and on social media by those witnessing the carnage, but we feel it’s important to print these as a matter of historical record.

The Lobster Pound restaurant in Lincolnville Beach. PHOTO: JACK SULLIVAN

North Haven along the Fox Island Thorofare.

www.workingwaterfront.com . february / march 2024

Eaton’s Boat Yard in Castine.

The Bernard town wharf on Mount Desert Island.

Belfast’s city landing.

Camden’s town landing. PHOTO: JACK SULLIVAN

Grindle Point Lighthouse on Islesboro.

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The Working Waterfront . february / march 2024

Our Island Communities The sad tale of a religious charlatan In 1890s, Sandford preyed on Chebeague islanders

BY TOM GROENING

H

e must have been charismatic. He must have been passionate. And he must have been persuasive. The open question is whether or not his faith was sincere.

The late 19th century was an era now known by religious scholars as the Third Great Awakening, a period when Christians expected the return of Christ. Frank Sandford, a preacher active during those years who drew followers from Chebeague Island and nearby Durham, according to a presentation by Chebeague historian Donna Damon, was influential, but reckless and dangerous.

Part of Damon’s online presentation—“A Charlatan, A Con Man, and a Saint—Religion on Chebeague, 1895-1905”—told the story of how Sanford (18621948) recruited residents to join his mission and perhaps was responsible for the death of an island resident. Not only did Sandford persuade some islanders and residents of nearby mainland communities to join his commune-like church, but the group traveled with him to the Middle East.

Sandford, a graduate of Bates College, lived in Durham, a town in Androscoggin County just west of Brunswick, and it was there that he hosted his first tent-meeting revival services. He launched his ministry announcing that he wanted to establish 100 “tents” and to recruit 100 evangelists, Damon said.

Eventually, his charge to those evangelists was “to spread the word that he was Elijah and King David,” key figures in the Bible’s Old Testament.

“He advertised for 100 ministers and 100 singers because he figured music was a way to get through to people,” Damon explained. “I don’t know if they ever got 100.”

After establishing a “tent” in Durham, and eventually a temple there, which he dubbed Shiloh— part of which still stands, at 260-feet long and 40-feet wide—Sandford sought to site one on Chebeague Island.

In the late summer of 1895, the preacher took his “gospel boat,” as he called it, to the island. The tent there “drew islanders, night after night, to hear Frank Sandford,” Damon said. Ashby Trafton, the minister on Chebeague at the time, “may have been sympathetic to this cause,” she said.

By mid-October, Sandford had 18 converts on the island.

He told his followers they needed to sell 30% of their real estate, crops, and worldly goods. “Eventually, it

became everything,” with their money going to fund Sandford’s work.

One follower, John Douglas, faked being sick so Sandford could “heal” him, she said, “because he was a wise guy,” and apparently thought it was a funny prank, but he later felt God had spoken to him and he joined the effort.

A local newspaper of the time, the Six Town Times, chronicled Sandford’s rise and reach and it, along with Shirley Nelson’s book Fair finding that Sanford’s claims of channeling David Clear and Terrible: The Story of Shiloh, Maine, were and Elijah was beyond reason. Sandford progressed sources for Damon’s presentation. from claiming to speak for the Old Testament men “They’d run out of food [at Shiloh] and Sandford to claiming he and they were one and the same. would say, ‘OK, for 36 hours, nobody eats. God Doughty was convinced to return to the flock. doesn’t want you to eat.’”

Twice, he actually fell ill and Sandford was supposed Chebeague residents Hudson Emmons and J. to have cured him. But “Seven days after Sandford Frank Curit attended the “World Evangelic Crusade,” had declared himself David,” Doughty died, perhaps as it was dubbed, in Durham. Other recruits from the from typhoid. island were Rose Emmons, “a pretty school teacher;” “Some of the medical professionals were aghast Edward Doughty, a farmer when they found out the condiand coastal sailor; and Minnie tion this guy was in,” she said, Grannell Bennett. Bennett later described as “a perfect physical told her family that “all she did giant reduced to a skeleton.” was wash dishes,” Damon said.

Sandford wrote Doughty’s mother, Hudson Emmons, Rose’s father, Mary: “Your boy died gloriously.”

“They’d run out of “eventually decided he would sell Several years later, a young man all his worldly goods. He sold his food and Sandford told Mary that Sandford had house and moved up to Shiloh.” poisoned Eddie. would say, ‘OK, for Emmons’ other daughter, Leona, Rose Emmons ended up staying joined them. in Jerusalem long enough to have 36 hours, nobody When the tent meeting shut three children there when the eats. God doesn’t down for winter, islanders were group finally made the intended sad, she said, though Sandford destination. want you to eat.’” did preach twice on the island In 1910, the ship the group in February, and just 90 minutes was on wrecked off North Africa, after one of the sermons, $10,000 Damon said, and they boarded was publicly pledged to his cause. another vessel which led to a “quiet But what followed in his ministry mutiny,” with the group wanting to brought more than sadness. sail for Portland. But “God said to “This is the part of the story that can be disturbing,” continue,” Sandford insisted. “God was sending him Damon warned. to Greenland, he said.”

Sandford formed a “chosen 12” group, six young When they did arrive in Portland, “people were men and six young women, to send out across the horrified. Six sailors had died of scurvy,” the sails U.S. and the world. And were in tatters, and Sandford was imprisoned, “but a voyage to what was he continued to lead from there.” then Palestine—now Sandford had been convicted in 1904, impliIsrael—was undertaken cated in the death of a 14-year-old boy, probably in 1902. for starving him, but it was overturned by a court.

One of the chosen 12 He was convicted again on returning to Portland, declined to make the trip, and after being released, he moved to the Catskill and so Sandford took his Mountains area in New York and continued to be 6-year-old son instead. supported by followers.

Palestine was suffering “It disturbs me, thinking about it, even now,” with an outbreak of Damon said. “It’s very sad.” She took comfort in bubonic infection, and finding a critical comment made by the Chebeague so the mission trip was correspondent to the Six Town Times. diverted to Egypt.

“So somebody on Chebeague had a half a brain.

Eddie Doughty That made me feel better.” defected during the Damon’s presentation is available for viewing at voyage, Damon said, chebeague.org.

www.workingwaterfront.com . february / march 2024

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Peaks Island-based illustrator Scott Nash created the banner for the newspaper.

Peaks Island launches newspaper Objective, fact-based reporting needed, say founders

BY TOM GROENING

R

oss Sneyd is diplomatic in explaining why he and others have launched the Peaks Island News, subtly alluding to the perils of what passes for reporting on social media platforms.

The community, he says, needs fact-based information to effectively navigate the many and fast-changing developments that impact Peaks Island, a part of Portland in Casco Bay. “We’re trying to give a little bit of context,” he explained, which is often missing on social media, where “people talk at each other instead of to each other.”

The goal, according to the website PeaksIslandNews.org, is to provide “objective reporting, focusing on the issues that matter most to our community.”

In recent years, the community seems to have embraced Nextdoor, Sneyd said, an app that serves individual neighborhoods and where chatter can turn to local political matters.

Rhonda Berg, a real estate agent and member of the Peaks Island Council, a local advisory body, and Stacey Kors, who has worked as a journalist, wondered aloud: “Wouldn’t it be great to have a newspaper again?”

The Peaks Island Times had served the community, but shut down about a dozen years ago, Sneyd said.

Scott Dolan, a former reporter for the Portland Press Herald, now an attorney, agreed to head up the board of directors of the nonprofit endeavor—which has secured 501(c)(3) status—with Berg serving as vice president.

Almost the entire team, including Sneyd, who will edit the new publication, is serving on a volunteer basis. The copy editor and page designer will be paid.

The goal is to print bi-monthly, with an initial press run of 4,000, and perhaps by 2025 be publishing monthly.

“We aim to create a true community newspaper, delivering news about our schools, businesses, local government, and organizations in every issue,” the website notes, “featuring current events, arts, history, people, and island culture, all sharing space with an advertising platform to connect businesses with locals and visitors alike.”

Sneyd, who has lived part of the year on the island for 12 years, and full time for the last three years, has an extensive journalism background, having worked for the Associated Press for 18 years, and public radio in Vermont for eight years.

The island has some news outlets, he said, including a low-power radio station, and the Peaks Island News will supplement that work.

“We’re not looking to replace any of them,” Sneyd said, and in fact, Bridget Joyce, who works with the radio station, will write a column for the Peaks Island News.

The plan also calls for the paper to be print-only, though completed pages will be available on a website. The newspaper will be available for pick up in person at multiple local drop points, on-island and near Casco Bay Lines. The paper will be mailed to seasonal residents of the island who subscribe, though that likely won’t be possible until 2025.

The paper secured $8,000 from the Peaks Island Fund, and a donation from the Zimmerman Foundation, operated by a couple who live on the island.

The paper will be printed in South Portland by the National Trust for Local News, the nonprofit that last year

purchased the Portland Press Herald and other newspapers.

Sneyd said the group that worked to create the new publication studied the Harpswell Anchor, a nonprofit paper covering that community, and The Working Waterfront to arrive at organization and content elements.

The volunteer staff is soliciting stories, photos, and illustrations for the newspaper. Advertising partnerships are also being sought; email Rhonda Berg at brhonda1@gmail.com.

Contact the staff at: news@peaksislandnews.org, and Peaks Island News, P.O. Box 26, Peaks Island, ME 04108.

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Top Left to Bottom Right: Swans Island, Lisa Gent, Shanna Wheelock, Island Institute, Margaret Olson, Hearth & Harrow, Nancie Morgan, Kelly Luger, Pam Cabanas, Island Institute, Zootility, Kurier

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The Working Waterfront . february / march 2024

book reviews

When the helper needs help

Novel follows troubled young woman in counseling role

Sunrise and the Real World

By Martha Tod Dudman (2023: Islandport Press) REVIEW BY TINA COHEN

MORE THAN once, Martha Tod Dudman’s Sunrise and the Real World sent me back to its earlier passages and had me asking, “Really?” and “What the...?”

Lorraine, the novel’s narrator, recounts her time while in her early 20s working at a residential therapeutic school near Northeast Harbor. In the 1970s and 1980s programs like the novel’s “Sunrise” often served to corral teens with nowhere else to go. Even with no training and no discernible qualifications, Lorraine’s hiring would not have been an anomaly.

Some of the teens come from homes where parents were overwhelmed by the behaviors and could afford the tuition. But most were “state wards,” as Dudman calls them, children for whom

the state holds custody. Rather than living in foster care, these teens are one step away from jail or hospitalization.

As described, Sunrise doesn’t seem to house those with addiction or on psychiatric medications; at least those problems and possible treatments aren’t mentioned. Sunrise does have children with histories of abuse and neglect, and angry, impulsive, aggressive behaviors. The Sunrise approach is common to “wilderness” programs, using time outdoors to give students a different setting, stimulation, and distraction, and ideally providing a sense of accomplishment in meeting challenges.

That programs and problems like that exist (hopefully now better regulated and staffed) didn’t prompt my questions. I struggled with Lorraine’s cluelessness and lack of self-preservation. She stays in compromising situations, tinged with real harm. Things that didn’t worry her should have.

It made me wonder if she were comfortable with risk and danger, as if she’d already been exposed to it and it was “normalized.” She offers clues to that possiblity when she refers to a past abusive partner but avoids sharing family or childhood details.

Lorraine likes the natural beauty of the Acadia area but the school job seems primarily about the paycheck.

Chaperoning kids is something she is able to do, like babysitting.

Her future seems mostly oriented to finding a husband, and as the book begins, there is a nice young man she has started to get to know.

Her general anxiety is palpable, and she seems naïve, immature, and judgy, sizing up people up based on appearance. Tall is great, thin is excellent. Clothing, shoes, and hair styles are treated as a reliable measures. It seems Lorraine’s rigidity in standards might be a way to feel more secure; she never realizes the superficiality it rests on.

What Lorraine needs is kind support, someone mentoring her, giving her helpful feedback. But only if she would be able to trust that someone was trying to help her.

Aside from a few friendly staff, Lorraine feels thrown to the wolves, a way she referred to students but could have applied to at least one adult—Elliott, the almost psychologist. Instead, she flirts with Elliott and sleeps with him at work, knowing he has seduced other women on staff.

There are other vulnerable roles she accepts, like being lifeguard on the lakefront without any rescue skills, and chauffeuring groups of students on trips in unpopulated areas with no staff support (or cell phones).

That institutional irresponsibility certainly isn’t Lorraine’s fault. Ironically, the very setting of this book—Sunrise as a place where children are denied choices and freedoms—is where the adults would clearly benefit by having better boundaries. As workers complaining about chaos sometimes lament, “Monkeys are running the zoo.”

Lorraine survives the job long enough to quit and get married, have a child, divorce, and eventually write for a newspaper in the Bar Harbor area.

The second half of Real World follows Lorraine to an artist retreat in Virginia where she secures a residency and works on a book. The writing is her opportunity to investigate a double murder on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia, with the victims her former co-workers at Sunrise. Lorraine seems to want to explore the injustice that innocent, kind, good people are senselessly killed.

There are key plot points I am omitting. I do want to save for readers the opportunity for unexpected questions and reactions. You may not know what to make of the ending, and how to account for it. And this, perhaps, is the novel’s strongest recommendation—not what we know, but what we don’t.

Tina Cohen is a therapist who spends part of the year on Vinalhaven.

Kristen Lindquist’s haiku island Poet finds broad ideas in narrow form

Island

By Kristen Lindquist Red Moon Press, paperback, 104 pages REVIEW BY CARL LITTLE

OVER THE PAST decade-plus, Camden-based poet Kristen Lindquist has become a formidable and muchpublished and admired writer of haiku, that poetic form in which brevity is, well, the soul of writing. Her three-liners, between eight and 14 syllables each, are lyric gems that underscore the wonderful paradox of the form: how compression leads to expansion—like seeing a world in a grain of sand as William Blake put it in “Auguries of Innocence.”

Each of the four sections of Island features a prose opening accented with haiku. These contextual warm-ups to the haiku that ensue are related to another poetic form Lindquist practices, haibun, also Japanese in origin.

The haiku form is marked by correspondences, among other signature characteristics. Thus, the vision of an island sunset aligns with this image: “someone rows a red dory / out of the harbor.” That humble dependable boat is as grounded in the real world as the red wheelbarrow in William Carlos Williams’ famous poem.

Leaps also occur in haiku, the opening line often serving as springboard for a surprising image. Here’s an example of “I didn’t see that coming”: autumn gale a crowd of propane tanks huddles on the wharf The fact that Lindquist is a passionate naturalist makes her a perfect fit for the haiku, which is traditionally connected to nature. Her bond with all things avian—she is an avid birder—leads to many appearances by feathered friends. Here’s a beauty:

beach peas in bloom a bunting whistles up the sun An intimacy marks many of these poems, offering the immediacy of a moment in time. Take this gem: harbor moonrise a voice in the dark whispers whoa Lindquist makes use of alliteration, consonance, and other traditional prosodic tools in her poems. Note the use of “f ” throughout and the broad a’s in the final line of this haiku: this slow forgetting… a gull’s feather flags the wrack line The book is dedicated to the poet’s grandparents, Ruth and Wally Lindquist, who took her on childhood trips to Lime Island, Monhegan, the Isle of Skye, and Orkney. The firstnamed place, in western Penobscot Bay, is part of a string of islands the couple could see from their saltwater farm in Lincolnville.

These visits inspired a lifelong love of islands and, most particularly, of Monhegan.

These visits inspired a life-long love of islands and, most particularly, of Monhegan. This past summer Lindquist worked at that island’s museum of art and history. That’s where she found the image on the cover of Island: a delightful black-andwhite photograph of one Alice Brown standing atop a slightly tilted navigation buoy. The figure might be the poet herself, seeking haiku inspiration in the wide world around her.

Carl Little’s latest book is The Art of Penobscot Bay, published by Islandport.

www.workingwaterfront.com . february / march 2024

book reviews

Explorers inked their deals with the press North Pole expeditions courted and won newspapers

Battle of Ink and Ice: A Sensational Story of News Barons, North Pole Explorers, and the Making of Modern Media

By Darrell Hartman Viking (2023) REVIEW BY DANA WILDE

ONE OF THE things you come to realize as you learn how history unfolds is that everything is connected. In fact, the interconnections are so complex that eventually you realize history isn’t even linear, as you’re innocently led to believe in grade school.

A new book that clearly illustrates these notions is Battle of Ink and Ice by Maine native Darrell Hartman. On the face of it, the book’s two basic subjects seem unrelated: the quest of explorers to reach the North Pole in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the history of newspapering around the same time. It turns out the two strands are intimately interconnected.

There were many ill-fated attempts to reach the North Pole around the turn of the century. But the main story came to revolve around two explorers in particular, Robert Peary, a Maine native and Bowdoin College graduate, and Frederick Cook.

In thoroughly researched detail, Hartman describes the journeys north from outposts along barely charted island territories inside the Arctic Circle and across sheer ice pack.

Whole expeditions were reduced to a few haggard survivors or disappeared completely. Peary himself in one illadvised winter trek suffered frosbite that resulted in the painful loss of his toes, nearly preventing him from further pursuing his burning ambition to be the first to stand on the North Pole.

In these expeditions, taking and even recording latitude and longitude readings to prove locations were forbiddingly difficult. When Cook suddenly returned in September 1909 from his last effort to reach the pole, a reporter for a London newspaper noticed with suspicion that the renowned explorer answered questions vaguely about, not only the journey, but also his documentation, which should include descriptive journals as well as detailed logs of the expedition’s geographic location. Cook told reporters he had stashed his books at an outpost and would be retrieving them later. It was a long time before Cook came up with his evidence.

That Cook spoke with reporters was no coincidence. For intimately connected to the story of Arctic exploration were newspapers. Publishers and editors in the mid-1800s discovered they could not only report events, but actively create them. Hartman recounts in some detail how Stanley’s famous search for Livingstone in central Africa was organized by newspapers to gain stories they could splash over their front pages.

The race to the North Pole was promoted and to different extents funded by The New York Times, which threw support behind Peary, and by the New York Herald, which backed Cook.

The Herald’s flamboyant publisher, James Bennett, followed risky whims, sometimes succeeding wildly, as when he turned the new telegraph technology into a boon to breaking news, and sometimes failing horribly, as when an effort to manufacture polarquest stories led to a terrible, avoidable disaster for an entire expedition.

In Hartman’s skillful telling, we see how the news media whipped up the popular appetite for stories about the pole despite the fact that many turnof-the-century scientists regarded the efforts of the explorers as more or less irrelevant. Along the way, we get deft portraits of all the players, including the egotistical Peary, the evasive Cook, the mercurial Bennett, and the Times’ stolid Adolph Ochs, as well as Joseph Pulitzer, who recognized that his New York World and other papers such as the New York Sun were dancing with what he called, shortly before the turn of the 20th century, “fake news.”

In the end, it was never established that either Cook or Peary had actually stood at the North Pole. Probably neither did. The claims, it turned out, were a concoction of the news media and gigantic egos.

History circles back on itself.

Battle of Ink and Ice provides the illuminating backstory of the news media we know and feel ambivalent about today.

The race to the North Pole was promoted and to different extents funded

by The New York Times…

Dana Wilde is a former college English professor and newspaper editor. He lives in Troy.

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The Working Waterfront . february / march 2024

saltwater cure

Take a break, or it takes you Resting rewards with a refreshed mind

BY COURTNEY NALIBOFF

AS I BUSTLED down the school hallway between dropping students off at their elementary classroom and eating a quick lunch before recess duty, something unusual caught my eye.

A sea urchin, a resident of the ocean tank outside the kindergarten room, had pinned a piece of rockweed between the aquarium wall and its underside. I paused, curious as to whether it had snagged a snack or if it would continue on its way.

As I watched, the tiniest, sharpest teeth slowly appeared around the circumference of its mouth. Like needles in a sewing machine, they lengthened to pierce the rockweed, then retracted back into the mouth’s edges. The action repeated. The margins of the rockweed began to narrow as the urchin ate its fill.

I continued down the hallway, days after, I returned to work with an intrigued and refreshed. The minute excess of optimism.

Eleven days post-procedure I was I spent watching the urchin’s eerie, amazing lunch break buoyed me for back on the couch with my heating pad, sleeping through Halloween after the rest of the day.

Taking a break—a short one to observe I discovered too late that getting up and the wonder around me, or a long one down off the floor for my elementary to relax—isn’t always something that music classes was actually very challenging and painful. comes easily. I’m in thrall Penrose and I to Newton’s laws: if I’m in As I watched, the endured round two motion, I stay in motion. of COVID after Conversely, if I’m at rest I tiniest, sharpest Thanksgiving, like tend to stay at rest, which teeth slowly much of the state, means that if I have although neither of us things to do it’s better to appeared around felt very ill. This made avoid it all together. rest challenging, Of course, avoiding a the circumference but still necessary, break for too long usually of its mouth. as I found out after means that a break will Zooming in to several come to me whether I want it or not. This fall I had a minor music classes and then immediately surgery, and while I did take a few rest lying down and falling asleep.

This year’s Christmas and New Year’s holidays provided a welcome break.

We didn’t once leave the island, but we did go for walks, eat meals with friends, have a Bait Bag photoshoot, and put together an 1,810-piece Lego version of The Great Wave of Hokusai.

It felt great. A little indulgent, maybe, but not too slothful.

Now I’m back in the thick of it, bouncing from class to class to meeting to deadline.

Maybe this time I’ll remember to take a little break here and there? I suppose if not, a break will come to me.

Courtney Naliboff teaches writing, theater, and music and plays in a band on North Haven. She may be contacted at Courtney.Naliboff@gmail.com.

journal of an island kitchen

The toil and time of breakfast ‘A lot of work’ includes the wrong factors

had a dishwasher, the machine would take it from there.

Briefly, I toyed with the idea of imagSOMEBODY RECENTLY told me that millennials weren’t eating as ining I had to race to the ferry or miss much packaged cereal as they used to the boat, but decided not to, at the risk because pouring milk into it and then of making myself unwell by gulping cleaning up the bowl afterwards took the cereal. As it was, rather than use too much effort. I thought, surely that’s my spoon to get the last mouthful, I opened wide and dumped it in, probapocryphal. Nope.

In 2016, the Washington Post ably saved two seconds, thereby. Lot of reported that cereal sales were lagging us islanders have eaten our breakfast while sitting in line; and by various means the cereal it’s a time-honored makers determined that a whole practice. generation of Americans deterLot of us Had I stopped mined that pouring cereal into islanders at the market and a bowl, adding the milk, then picked up a breakeating it, and then (egad!), have eaten fast sandwich, it washing the bowl afterwards would have taken was more effort than grabour breakfast more time to park, bing a breakfast sandwich or while sitting get out of the car, a disposable cup of yogurt to go inside, select the woof down while on the way to in line; it’s a sandwich, stand work or school or whatever. The time-honored in line at the cash main obstacle here seems to be register, swipe a washing the bowl. practice. card, and go back I wondered how much time to the car. Maybe it would take to perform the I’ll give that a try act of eating cereal. My experiment took me four minutes and 43 soon, just to see.

Of course, I wouldn’t have to wash seconds to complete, from opening the package and pouring crispy rice anything except maybe wipe grease and the milk into a bowl which I had off my chin afterwards; and I’d add a left in the cupboard on purpose to helpful bit of crumpled foil to the load add verisimilitude to my experience. at the transfer station.

Because I like to grow a lot of my own Collecting the bowl and handling the cereal and milk alone took 56 food, prepare it for eating (like peel seconds. It took more time to eat it carrots), do a fair amount of cooking than anything else I did, then I went to from scratch—that is, not opening the sink, and rinsed the bowl out. If I packages of pre-made this and that

BY SANDY OLIVER

to toss together into a casserole—but actually chopping vegetables and meat, sprinkling seasonings and grating cheese myself—I often hear, “It’s a lot young ones bounce up and down in of work.”

Sometimes it is. I think making the kitchen saying, “Can I do it, can I ravioli is lots of work. Preparing a do it?”

Anything we don’t do for ourselves multi-course dinner, carefully fixing several dishes so they all come out at still needs doing, so the next question the same time, takes steady activity is how does that happen? Well, we and attention, but it isn’t like hauling do have robots, various mechanized lobster pots, spending hours on your servants like vacuum cleaners, chain feet with patients in an understaffed saws, and food processors. If we buy hospital, or creeping on your stomach pre-washed lettuce, someone or something had to rinse it, dry in creepy crawl spaces it, package it. repairing plumbing.

Here on Islesboro Sometimes “a lot of Anything we fellow-growers Pam and work” is code for “pay don’t do for Michael offer a popular attention.” Being mindful, pre-washed salad mix. observant. ourselves still Michael plus a couple The question still is needs doing, of gadgets do the work; what else can I do with the effort chips away at the four minutes and 43 so the next an already slim income seconds I spent getting a margin. Seriously, is cereal breakfast together? question is washing your salad how I suppose comforting a how does you want your farmer to sobbing child, embracing spend time? a loved one, telling a joke, that happen?

You better be working or actually, all three! Or towards world peace with doomscrolling.

One missing piece is whole-house- the ten or so minutes you save. Just don’t hold help. Even of households shared let me catch you on your phone. by a couple with kids, few required young ones to pitch in. A couple I know acknowledge a bit of push back, but find, ultimately, that the young- Sandy Oliver is a food historian sters learn how to appreciate a sense who gardens, cooks, and writes on of accomplishment. How many times Islesboro. She may be contacted at have you observed that even very SandyOliver47@gmail.com.

www.workingwaterfront.com . february / march 2024

19

cr anberry report

Christmas expectations are child’s play Grandchildren set the pace at the Fernald place

BY BARBARA FERNALD

AFTER THREE YEARS of missing out on being together for the holidays, I asked our sons and their families if they would like to come home to Islesford for a family celebration. They agreed, as long as they could still be in their own homes for Christmas morning.

One family arrived at 3:30 p.m. on Christmas and the other family arrived the next day on the 11 a.m. boat, along with a goose to cook for our big dinner that night. I was ready!

In the weeks before, I spent days sorting through decorations I hadn’t used in years. I decorated a Christmas tree. I set up three little table-top scenes with my collections of gnomes, penguins, snowmen, Santas, and a variety of tiny trees. I lit up various spots around the downstairs with all the tiny lights I could find.

My expectation was that our grandkids, ages 5, 5, and 7, would walk into our house and be mesmerized by the decorations and lights. I wanted it to be magical for them. I hoped they would find the table-top tableaus irresistible. I pictured us creating stories and talking with their daddies about Christmas memories from when they were that age.

Talk about a set up! I was so busy at Grampa and Gramma’s: the large set getting everything “just right” for my of cardboard blocks about the size of own vision that I never even consid- shoe boxes and the old Playmobile toys ered everyone else’s reality. As soon with horses and figures and a tremenas the first two grandchildren arrived, dous number of tiny accessories.

On every visit these two sets of toys they asked to get out the old Playmobile are used to create toys. I said, “Um, OK, but complicated tales, look at these little Christmas As the from fights over forts, figures. I was thinking these to escaping floods would be really fun to play grandkids on barges, to moving with and kind of special everything to a new because they’re old and I only progressed territory to build a have them out at this time of with their new fort. year. You each could claim As the grandyour own spot and make little creative play kids progressed scenes and the figures could all through with their creative visit each other.” play all through the “No thanks, Gramma. Do the living living room, a line of you mind if we get out these gnomes and snowmen blocks?” room, a line shed tears of dashed Inside my head I alternated of gnomes expectations from the between silent screaming windowsill. I was the at the amount of toy and and snowmen only one who noticed. holiday clutter and repeating shed tears…

Looking back, it was a mantra of love and accepa great Christmas with tance. I still had a chance to family. How lucky we impress my third grandchild are that our sons still want to come the next day…

Upon the arrival of family No. 2, my home to the island with their families? third grandchild blew right past me It’s not easy uprooting kids during the without even saying “Hi,” so excited holidays.

The goose was smoked to perfecwas she to get to see her cousins.

After lunch and presents, out came tion and the family dinners were the same old toys that always come out everything I had hoped they would

be. We all ate extremely well. We had exuberant games of “telephone” and “killer winker” and all of the grandkids ate enough dinner to have dessert.

It seems the familiarity of Grampa and Gramma’s house is what is special for our grandkids. The cardboard blocks and the busted up Playmobile set are always there waiting. They are the toys their daddies played with, and they are not something the children have at home. All I have to do is sit back or participate to observe their creativity.

At the same time as I was learning my lesson about expectations, I came upon a poem entitled, “A New Year’s Blessing for Realists” by Nadia Bolz-Webber on her blog The Corners. (https:// thecorners.substack.com/) One line, especially, stood out to me: “May you expect so little of the people in your life that you actually notice and cherish every small, lovely thing about them.”

Sounds like a plan for 2024 to me!

Barbara Fernald lives on Islesford (Little Cranberry Island). She may be reached at Fernald244@gmail.com.

observer

A card for you

Island tradition marking passings remains

BY PHIL CROSSMAN

AMONG OUR many interesting island traditions is one that’s wonderfully functional. Before one of our favorite institutions, The Paper Store, closed, whenever an islander died, or someone with an island connection—a seasonal resident for example or even the mainland relative of one or the other—a little basket appeared on the counter there at Carlene Michael’s Main Street newsstand, stationer, and gift shop emporium.

I assume it was provided with “seed money” when first placed on the counter because the basket, at least whenever I first encountered it, was already full of cash, mostly singles, some fives or tens. A generous slip of paper—an 8-inch by 11-inch sheet folded twice and cut to provide eight surfaces—invited me and others, having made a contribution, to sign our names.

The discovery of a basket on the counter was—more often than not— how most of us discovered that one of our fellow islanders or an acquaintance

More often than not, there was no had passed away and it certainly seemed to many of us that the Paper basket on the counter because, of course, days when there is a death Store had celestial foreknowledge.

I can’t remember ever having heard among our thousand or so are far less of one of our own passing, without frequent than the alternative. There finding that the Paper Store knew were rarely ever more than two baskets already, or, in fact, I found out myself on the counter at a time; and days by discovering “the basket” on the when there are two deaths were and are counter. In fact, though, we all knew, rare but one day, back in the ’90s, there upon learning someone had passed on, were four baskets on the counter.

An elderly that we had an oblilady, not exactly gation to let Carlene an island native know right away.

She had learned to but one of those She and earlier Paper “trust but verify” and rare and stalwart Store proprietors, persons who however, had learned, that rule had resulted in could easily and over the years, to “trust there having been very did convince but verify” and that one otherwise, rule had resulted in few instances of death passed away at there having been very 93 having given few instances of death wrongfully reported. us three sons, wrongfully reported, one of those to only one I can think of and that was really just the result of the Vietnam conflict. Discharged, he’d suffered way too long before wishful thinking on someone’s part.

More often, we knew that the succumbing to his wounds.

As it happens, his name was added deceased had been ill, or simply elderly and failing and so the passing came as to the Vietnam Memorial only after my brother determinedly petitioned no surprise.

the Department of Defense to have that done.

Two other folks, one an islander, one seasonal, died way too soon of cancer, each having fought long and hard, and another elderly lady, an indefatigable island institution, fondly hoped we who remained would celebrate her 90th birthday the following spring. And we faithfully did precisely that at a waterfront island fish-house offered then and regularly, and frequently catered, for such occasions by a generous and community-minded fisherman and the Vinalhaven Lions Club.

The “basket” tradition continues, thankfully, today at Island Closet.

Phil Crossman lives on Vinalhaven where he owns the Tidewater Motel.

He may contacted at: PhilCrossman.VH@gmail.com.

20

The Working Waterfront . february / march 2024

fathoming

The forgotten sea mink Large animal once populated our shores

BY OLIVIA OLSON

A SPECIES KNOWN as the sea mink (Neogale macrodon) went extinct in Maine only 150 years ago. Never heard of it? You’re not alone. Most Mainers haven’t.

Though it held immense cultural significance for indigenous communities (called supeqi-ciyahkehsuwok, or saltwater mink in Passamaquoddy) and European fur traders before its extinction, it has since been forgotten.

And scientists want to know why.

How different was the sea mink from the still-living American mink? What does its extinction mean for the coast of Maine today?

The sea mink, once found from the Isles of Shoals in New Hampshire to New Brunswick, went extinct in the mid-1800s due to over harvesting for their fur. Twice the size of today’s American mink (their closest living relative), the sea mink was highly desired for its expensive pelt. Reddish in color, it smelled like the fish it hunted. The sea mink lived in rock dens along the shore and spent most of its time hunting in the frigid ocean water or sleeping in dens.

Brewer fur buyer Manly Hardy described in a 1903 report to the Smithsonian Institution how the

mink were hunted. Rather than being in the thousands of archaeological sites trapped as mink are today, sea mink that dot the coast of Maine known as were prodded out of their dens with shell heaps (or middens).

Archaeologist Dr. Bonnie Newsom crowbars or dogs and then shot.

During the 1800s, the popularity of (University of Maine) leads excavamink coats in Europe and America tions at a site near Machias as part of soared. Depending on size and style, the University of Maine archaeological field school. These huge one coat required 60-200 shell heaps—piles of shells individual minks. Being left behind after shellfish twice the size of interior Today, all that were harvested—were minks, the sea mink’s created by the ancestors of remains of pelt cut this number in Wabanaki people, of whom half, which made them the sea mink Newsom is a descendant. the preferred quarry.

Common items found Hardy reported that: are its bones in middens include stone “In the old days, when and teeth, tools, charcoal, potsherds, mink were judged by and animal bones, size instead of fineness found in the including those of the sea and color...these mink mink. In the early 1900s, thousands of used to bring considerarchaeologists noticed that ably more than others archaeological the sea mink was huge— on account of their great twice the size of American size. On this account sites that dot mink. And while some they were persistently the coast of believed the sea mink is a hunted.” distinct species based on Hardy also noted that Maine… its teeth and bones (signi“As the price of mink fying what it ate and how it rose, they were hunted more and grew scarcer, till in the lived), others believed that the differ[1860s], when minks brought $8 or $10 ences between sea mink and American apiece, parties who made a business of mink were not enough to call them a hunting nearly or quite exterminated new species.

Today, a group of scientists and the race.” Today, all that remains of the sea mink are its bones and teeth, found community members supported by

the National Science Foundation are working to understand the role the sea mink played in Maine and what its extinction meant for the coastal ecosystems. By combining genetic information from the bones found in shell heaps with chemical information about diet, bone and tooth size, historical documents, and modern ecological knowledge, the collaborators are unraveling the sea mink’s mysterious life and extinction.

As an islander myself, I care deeply about the human and non-human communities that call the coast home.

I hope the story of the sea mink will inspire my neighbors to learn about the world around them and to prevent future coastal extinctions.

Olivia Olson is a graduate student at the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine working under the supervision of Dr. Bonnie Newsom studying the zooarchaeological record in Acadia National Park. She grew up on Islesboro and spent her college career in Vermont before returning to Maine.

reflections

Regional work challenges idea of community Hancock County commission tackles big issues

BY ALICE COCKERHAM

Reflections is written by Island Institute 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.

I BEGIN MY day in a Hancock County Planning Commission staff meeting.

Following this meeting, I attend Sorrento’s comprehensive plan meeting online, where we discuss the upcoming public engagement session.

Next, I am digging through Blue Hill’s housing data to determine how many additional units are needed to accommodate the predicted rise in population. Finally, I hop into the car and drive to Castine to sit in on a planning meeting to help determine appropriate growth areas.

Not to be dramatic, but this is a typical day in my life as an Island Institute Fellow. At the time of writing, I am involved in eight different comprehensive plans, four committee groups, three regional planning groups, and two community resilience partnerships.

I’ve quickly realized that the work I in Maine and HCPC is helping spearhead am doing in this fellowship will not be the organization of formal partnerships confined to one municipality or one between municipalities. This work entails having our hands in many different pots topic area.

The Hancock County Planning and consistently travelling from one town Commission (HCPC) advocates for to the next nearly every day.

When I accepted the position as an a regional approach to rural development and planning. This means it Island Fellow, I assumed the bounddraws from all communities in the aries of my community would be g e o g r ap h i c a l l y county to approach major defined. Living on problems like sea level rise or When I accepted an island makes affordable housing. Because the position as drawing the lines municipalities in the area are of a community sparsely populated and town an Island Fellow, simple, but this offices typically understaffed I assumed the has not been and overworked, it makes my experience. sense to combine resources boundaries of Every day I work and work together towards with diverse these collective goals. my community groups of people This type of regional would be who engage in collaboration provides a different types of vehicle for improving social geographically work, come from and economic opportunity defined. different backby ensuring rural and smallgrounds, and are town interests and perspectives are at the table to set priorities and drive at different levels of involvement.

I am actively unlearning the notion change. HCPC works with and supports that my community is defined by physall 33 towns in Hancock County.

Working at the regional level is ical and tangible barriers of separation. becoming more popular among planners My community does not have physical

limits, it crosses town boundaries and manifests in more ways than one. I find I am applying the same concepts HCPC supports in its work to my personal life in this unique position.

Even though I am not living on an island, and the people I see in the grocery store aren’t the same people I am working with day in and day out, I still feel a sense of community within an area as large as Hancock County. I’ve learned that when people have the opportunity to work together and collaborate on things we all care equally about, meaningful relationships tend to form quickly.

Making what might seem like a large and overwhelming area to cover, a much more attainable and organized space.

Alice Cockerham works with the Hancock County Planning Commission to make resources digitally available and to assist towns with comprehensive and resilience planning. She graduated from Bates College with a B.A. in anthropology and religious studies.

www.workingwaterfront.com . february / march 2024

21

in plain sight

Steamboat days in Stockton Springs Action photograph captures start of day trip

BY KEVIN JOHNSON

THREE YOUNG women pose nervously for the camera in our image this month. They are dressed for an outing and are holding parcels, maybe containing their lunch. Their chaperon, a spinsterly-looking character, is clearly not amused at the spectacle they are causing on the busy steamboat wharf at Sandy Point in Stockton Springs.

The slow shutter speed blurs the young boy entering the frame on the right along with the people “photobombing” the shot behind the women.

This contrast of stillness and movement gives energy to the photograph and draws the viewer into the scene.

One can imagine that they are going to Bangor or Belfast to shop or to have a picnic at Penobscot Park.

High above the scene, the mustachioed captain of the steamer looks toward the camera through the window of the ship’s cabin. The vessel is the steamship Rockland, not to be confused with the much bigger (274foot) City of Rockland.

Locally known as “the little Rockland,” she was built in 1883 in Boston with materials leftover from the SS PENOBSCOT. At 98.9 feet and 135 gross tons, she was nimble enough to service the smaller wharves along the Penobscot River and the Blue Hill line.

This lively scene was captured by young Harriet Hichborn of Stockton Springs.

Harriet was born in that town into a large and notable family in late August of 1869.

Her father, the accomplished shipbuilder

Three young women pose for a photograph at the steamship wharf at Sandy Point in Stockton Springs.

PHOTO: COURTESY PENOBSCOT MARINE MUSEUM

Hon. Nathan Griffin Hichborn, was descended from Robert Hichborn, one of the original Cape Jellison settlers and a cousin to Paul Revere.

She grew up in a large house in Stockton Village, which most recently has been the fine dining restaurant The Hichborn. Harriet’s photographs capture Stockton Springs at a time of great growth as the railroad connected Cape Jellison with Searsport and the building of the great wharf in Stockton Harbor. She lived for many years with a domineering older sister whose

health was poor. Her darkroom was her sanctuary. She suffered from extreme depression that some blamed on the exposure to the photography chemicals.

She ultimately took her life in December of 1923, at the age of 54, by jumping from the Brewer Bridge. The Waldo Hancock bridge wouldn’t be built for another 10 years.

The Harriet Hichborn Collection consists of 391 glass plate negatives. It was donated to the Penobscot Marine Museum in 2015 by the Stockton Historical Society.

The photographs were researched and described by Stockton historian Kathy Harrison. The collection is one of four significant collections by female photographers which are part of the msueum’s photo archive and available for exploration online.

Kevin Johnson is photo archivist at the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport. For more information about the museum’s exhibits and its extensive maritime photography collection, see PenobscotMarineMuseum.org.

guest column

Goodbye Pandalus borealis Losing a species is to lose Maine

BY STEVE ZOLOTH

MANY YEARS AGO, my family and I began to spend summers on Vinalhaven. Over the years, first we were summer people, then longer term visitors, and now fortunately homeowners; much has changed.

Not the island so much, although it has.

But the oceanic world surrounding us.

First to go were blue mussels, a true delicacy grilled over apple branches.

They were eaten by invasive green crabs and disappeared almost overnight.

Around the same time starfish or sea stars, once a treat to see clinging to rocks as we kayaked by; they vanished too.

The ocean itself changed, our cove became noticeably warmer, no longer a quick jump in followed by a screaming, laughing exit, now you can swim leisurely back and forth.

But what might be the one thing that left before we even knew it was Pandalus borealis, the northern shrimp. Or as my children called them when they

appeared in the December fish markets, “tiny little pink Maine shrimp.”

What a delicacy they were with a sweet, sweet flavor and hints of the deep ocean. They said Maine! when we were back in suburban life, a joyful harbinger of the summer to come, reminding us of the beauty of the rugged coast, tall pines, and ocean waves.

In December, the shrimp fisheries annual moratorium was extended, not for a year, or even two or three but indefinitely. A fishery that in its heyday landed 28 million pounds and provided much needed winter income for Maine’s fishers.

What happened? First you must know the amazing biology of these little creatures. One to two inches long, quite pink. They are true northerners, preferring deep cold water and a relatively narrow temperature range between 32 to 37 degrees Farenheit to spawn.

They are also hermaphrodites, starting life as males, and then transforming into females to lay eggs. The transition needs

that perfect temp range. Maine was at the southern edge of their range, but the water was just cold enough to support millions of these shrimps.

By 1980s the Gulf of Maine began to warm, and soon the fishery began to suffer. Once it was clear the fishery was in trouble regulations were put in place hoping to forestall the decline.

First seasons were restricted, then in 2013 the stock declined so much that in 2014, the fishing was suspended.

First one year of suspension went by, then two and three, and now the fishing moratorium has been extended indefinitely. It wasn’t a matter so much of “fishing pressure” decimating the shrimp, it was biology, pure and simple. As the water warmed, the population declined.

Compounding the problem was an increase in longfin squid which liked the warming waters. They moved in from the south and were major shrimp predators. The same thing happened on the West Coast, too; after the Gulf of Alaska began to warm, the western species, Pandalus eous, began to decline.

Of course, there are other signs of climate change around us, rising seas, drenching downpours, strengthening hurricanes, but I think the tiny Maine shrimp are my personal canary in the coal mine. The shrimp are responding to a shift in temperature that is occurring across so many miles of ocean, ocean that I love, that I cannot ignore their wake-up call.

They are my personal call to action, a call to redouble my efforts as an individual and to work collectively to meet UN climate goals. I doubt the fishery can ever return, but hopefully working together we can prevent further warming in the Gulf of Maine. There are great groups out there, like Island Institute, working on behalf of the Gulf. Join one!

Steve Zoloth teaches public health at Northeastern University in Boston.

Curiosity brought him and his wife Cathy to stay at the Tidewater Motel in Vinalhaven in the mid-1970s. They fell in love with the island and along with their two children have never spent a summer anywhere else but Vinalhaven.

The Working Waterfront . february / march 2024

22

art of the waterfront

John Wissemann stencils Friendship Dynamic renderings of harbors draw on multiple media

BY CARL LITTLE

IN A SCENE in Jeffrey Mathias’s 2014 video “John Wissemann: Stencils & Pencils & Working Harbors of Maine,” the artist visits Friendship Harbor with fellow painter Sam Cady who lives in the neighborhood. As they admire the configurations of sheds, docks, and boats, Cady notes that Friendship has made “a real point” of maintaining a working waterfront, with few fancy shops and limited services for cruising boats.

Such a place, he says, is “fairly rare these days.”

As they talk, Wissemann points to a section of the waterfront and declares, “There’s ten or 20 compositions right there.” He shares his love of the prospect, declaring it his “favorite working spot,” with all the shapes and colors he wants to use “right here.” He wonders at how everything constantly changes and never stops fascinating him.

Wissemann’s “Friendship Harbor 2013” exempliCHASLE21.PLT 2/10/2021 2:43:50 PM fies his complex renderings of Maine waterfronts.

Using a labor-intensive process that includes printmaking, stenciling, and colored pencils, he represents by dynamic means the assemblage of wharves, ladders, ropes, ramps, and other elements of the marine scene, topping it off, as it were, with a sailboat crossing the water.

Friendship Harbor was among the first waterfronts to entice Wissemann after he and his wife, painter Nancy Wissemann-Widrig, started coming to Maine in the 1960s (she was a friend of Helen Langlais and her husband, sculptor Bernard Langlais).

Scale: 1:12.83 H: 36.252 L: 96.247 in

John Wissemann at an exhibition of Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Tate Modern in London, December 22, 2015.

PHOTO: MELANIE ESSEX

They eventually settled in Cushing, near the Langlaises, for seasonal stretches. Over the years he explored other shorefront sites, including Rockland, Belfast, Bath, Boothbay Harbor, Port Clyde, and Portland.

That fascination with the waterfront began early in his life. Wissemann, who passed away last year at age 97, grew up in Southold, N.Y, on the North Fork of

Long Island. In nearby Greenport Harbor he found subjects for some of his earliest paintings. Following his service in the U.S. Navy from 1943 to 1946, he went on to earn a BA and MFA from Syracuse University, committing himself to a life in art.

Wissemann’s artistic endeavors went hand in hand with his career as an art teacher. He taught at the

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www.workingwaterfront.com . february / march 2024 Southold Union Free School from 1953 to 1986 and was adjunct professor at Southampton College where he taught watercolor painting.

Wissemann worked in series, latching onto an idea/concept/subject and pursuing it with rigor and inventiveness. Over the years, he often turned to art history for inspiration, including large-format colored pencil drawings based on Japanese woodblock prints which caused a sensation when they were shown at the Farnsworth Museum in 2001.

Writing about the exhibition in the Maine Sunday Telegram critic Philip Isaacson referred to the effect of the work as “incendiary.”

When Frances Hodsdon (1926-2022) invited Wissemann to use the printing press at the Round Top Center for the Arts in Damariscotta, he added printmaking to his artistic repertoire. Monotype became a go-to format.

In 2014 the Gold/Smith Gallery presented “The Working Waterfront,” an exhibition of Wissemann’s improvised renderings of various Maine harbors.

Writing about the show, Karen Vander compared the artist to “the conductor of a jazz ensemble, improvising the variations to change the mood, tonality, atmosphere, and emotion of each piece.”

The following year the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath hosted “In Sight: Prints by John Wissemann of BIW and Bath’s Working Waterfront.” His colored pencil on monoprint views of Bath Iron Works from the Sagadahoc Bridge encompass the complexity of the shipyard: cranes, derricks, stanchions, and the like.

Wissemann’s 2020 exhibition at Caldbeck Gallery offered stunning floral images inspired by the garden of a neighbor, the famed horticultural writer and author Leslie Land (1947-2013). The pieces are “equal parts homage, reflection, and exploration,” the artist noted.

For his last solo show at Caldbeck, in 2022, Wissemann revealed a new vein of abstraction, presenting brilliant crazy quilt-like compositions made from stencils, spray paint, and watercolor. The

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John Wissemann’s “Friendship Harbor 2013,” mixed media on paper, 22 by 30 inches PHOTO: JEFF FULLER

work underscores something his longtime friend and dealer John Vander expressed in the aforementioned video: the amazing way the artist managed to combine technical precision with “a kind of spiritual openness.”

Wissemann is represented by the Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland and Gold/Smith Gallery in Boothbay Harbor. One of his pieces will be featured in a show honoring photographer Peggy McKenna at Waterfall Arts in Belfast this coming summer.

We’ve traveled the back roads, we’ve navigated the waters, and we know Maine.

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The cape is a classic center chimney with 4 bedrooms, 2 full baths, great kitchen opening onto a screened porch and living room with original beams and brick, wood burning fireplace. Perfectly sited, the cape has a clear view of the bay to keep watch for the returning captain. This unusual property, built to the highest specs with top-quality materials and an eye for detail is the way to experience life on the Maine Coast at its best. $1,775,000.

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The Working Waterfront . february / march 2024

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