The Working Waterfront - September 2022 by Island Institute

News from Maine’s Island and Coastal Communities volume 36, № 7

published by the island institute

september 2022 n free circulation: 50,000

workingwaterfront.com

Shelter from the storm

Jetty would ease beach erosion at Camp Ellis By Clarke Canfield

inancial assistance may soon be on the way for construction of a new jetty off a breakwater at Camp Ellis in Saco in hopes of mitigating severe beach erosion the seaside community has contended with for generations. The U.S. Senate appears poised to pass a bill that would authorize $45 million in funding for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to construct a 750-foot spur jetty off an existing seawall to alter the pattern of waves that have been eroding the Camp Ellis beachfront for decades. The funding would also pay for 365,000 cubic yards of sand—more than 14,000 standard dump truck loads—to replenish the beachfront that has washed away. The funding is included in the Water Resources Development Act of 2022, which has been passed by the U.S. House of Representatives but has yet to be voted on by the Senate. The bill passed the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works by a 20-0 vote in May. A new spur jetty, to run parallel to the shoreline, would deflect a portion of sand-gobbling waves before they reach the Camp Ellis beach. It would

The jetty that runs perpendicular to the shore at Camp Ellis has been blamed for erosion of the beach. ADOBESTOCK/ENRICO DELLA PIETRA

also provide protection from nor’easters and other violent storms that have destroyed more than three dozen Camp Ellis homes through the decades, while also wiping out roadways, seawalls, utility poles and wires, and sewer and water lines.

Nowhere else in Maine has prolonged beach erosion wreaked the havoc it has at Camp Ellis, a small community at the mouth of the Saco River on the southern end of Saco Bay. Studies show that the continued on page 2

New, bigger State of Maine being built Maine Maritime Academy’s training vessel due in 2024 By Stephen Rappaport

arring the vagaries of pandemics, the economy, and politics, Maine Maritime Academy in Castine will have a new training ship

before the end of 2024. Its impacts on both the academy and the town will be hard to miss even before its arrival. To be christened as the next T/S State of Maine, the new ship is the third of five “national security multi-mission vessels” authorized for construction by

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Congress. The ships will be owned by history,” MMA President Jerry Paul the federal Maritime Administration said a few days before heading to a (MARAD), part of the Department Philadelphia shipyard in mid-July to of Transportation, and watch the first steel cut stationed at each of the for the new training ship. nation’s state maritime It’s likely to be exciting for The huge academies to serve both as Castine as well. deckhouse training ships and as emerThe current training ship gency response platforms stretches just a few inches reflects the to be deployed in the event less than 500 feet from new ship’s of natural or other disasters. curved bow to slab-like The new ship will replace stern. The new ship, scheddual mission: the academy’s current uled to arrive in October training future 2024, will measure 525 feet training ship, launched by the Navy more than 30 in length. But that extra 25 mariners and years ago as the oceanofeet just hints at how much delivering graphic research vessel larger the new ship will be. USNS Tanner. MARAD With a beam—or width— emergency began her conversion to the relief services… of 88 feet, 7 inches, the new training ship State of Maine ship will be nearly 17 feet in 1996 and delivered the wider than the old one. The ship to MMA just in time increased beam will be most for the school’s 1997 summer cruise. apparent from the Castine town dock, “This is probably the most exciting the waterfront deck at Dennett’s Wharf time in Maine Maritime Academy’s continued on page 3

The Working Waterfront . september 2022

CAMP ELLIS

continued from page 1 Camp Ellis shoreline extended more than 400 feet farther into the ocean in 1908 than it does today. About 30 property lots that existed in 1908 are now submerged, according to a 2013 document by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Saco Mayor Bill Doyle is confident that a spur jetty will be built in the next couple of years. Studies and proposals have come and gone in the past without action, but Doyle said the current proposal has the backing of the Saco City Council and the state. “We cannot wait any longer,” he said. “We need to move forward.” Camp Ellis has roughly 20 streets with older houses and a smattering of new ones on small lots, a seasonal restaurant, a small barbecue stand, and a gritty feel. A public pier, commercial fishing boats, and a marina are situated on the Saco River. The beach erosion is caused by a riprap breakwater built by the federal government in the 1800s that juts into the ocean. The structure protects the entrance channel to the Saco River, but it deflects ocean waves toward the beach, accelerating the erosion while pushing the sand northward. Two breakwaters are located at the mouth of the river. The troublesome one to the north, which is now 6,600 feet long, was built between 1868 and 1871. The 4,500-foot south jetty was built in the 1890s. Both jetties were extended and altered over the years, and the erosion became particularly bad in the 1950s after the last of a series of extensions. If built, the new jetty would extend perpendicular from the north breakwater, parallel to the beach roughly 1,475 feet from shore. In announcing the $45 million in funding, U.S. Sen. Susan Collins said language in the Water Resources Development Act calls for the Army Corps to “expedite completion” of the project.

The sand beach at Camp Ellis is popular with residents and visitors. PHOTO: CLARKE CANFIELD

Not everyone is convinced that building a new jetty will be enough to take care of the erosion. The organization SOS Saco Bay would rather see “wave attenuation devices” (WADs)—large triangular concrete structures with holes in them—installed closer to shore to deflect waves and slow down erosion, said David Plavin, vice president of the organization. Still, he’s glad to see forward progress. “If it comes down to the jetty or nothing, we take the 750-foot jetty,” Plavin said. “We have to do something. To give up $45 million would be criminal.” When the Senate approves the Water Resources Development Act, the city of Saco will need to enter into what’s known as a “project partnership agreement” with the Corps of Engineers before any work can be done, Doyle said. Proposed projects at Camp Ellis have stalled in the past because of the lack of such of an agreement, but Doyle

said the city is committed to making it work this time around. A new jetty, he said, would be the first step in a multi-step process to slow down beach erosion, provide more protection from damaging storms, and transform Camp Ellis into a destination point. He thinks the community can be an economic engine in Saco with restaurants, bed and breakfasts, perhaps a hotel, gift shops, and more. A dredge and dredge vessel that the York County Commission is considering purchasing for use along the York County coastline would also benefit Camp Ellis, Doyle said. He also thinks wave attenuation devices might play a future role to provide additional relief to the shoreline erosion. “When I ran for office I talked about turning Saco into a destination community rather than a bedroom community,” he said. “Part of that transformation includes Camp Ellis.”

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STATE OF MAINE

continued from page 1 restaurant, and the Castine Yacht Club, because the ship will likely moor with her bow facing the mouth of the harbor, just the opposite of the current ship. And the new ship is just much bigger. The current training ship has classroom space and accommodations for up to 302 crew, faculty, and trainees distributed between two box-like structures reaching four stories above the ship’s main deck. Atop the aft house stands a dark blue exhaust funnel emblazoned with MMA’s emblem. The ship’s air draft—it’s greatest height above the water—is 123 feet. The new ship will have the same air draft, but that doesn’t tell the whole story about how tall, how large, it really will be. Seated in his shipboard office in June, Capt. Gordon MacArthur, master of MMA’s training ship, said “It’s going to change the whole view-scape of the town,” but “the biggest thing is not the length.” The current ship has side decks with the deckhouses inset from the ship’s rails. The new ship has one massive deckhouse extending the full beam of the hull and standing, MacArthur said, “20 feet taller” than the deckhouses on the current ship, to about the height of the top of the funnel. “There will be some shock when the ship pulls in,” he said, “but I think it will die down.” The huge deckhouse reflects the new ship’s dual mission: training future

A view from the current T/S State of Maine looking down at the Castine pier where the vessel docks. FILE PHOTO: TOM GROENING

mariners and delivering emergency relief services when disaster strikes. The ship will have accommodations for up to 1,000 personnel including a mix of crew, faculty, students, and emergency responders, when required, more than three times the capacity of the current State of Maine. The ship will also have state-of-the-art hospital facilities, storage for 60 shipping containers, a helicopter landing pad on deck, and roll-on/roll-off vehicle loading capability via ramps in the hull sides. Those added capabilities, and the size of the ship itself, will require substantial modifications, possibly replacement, of the pier where the training ship is berthed, and the mooring

platforms to which the ship’s lines are attached. The current ship, MacArthur said, uses ten mooring lines. The new ship will require 24. Before leaving for the Philadelphia shipyard, Paul said it was too soon to know what changes to the pier might entail. “Each academy will have to adjust its pier,” he said, but “the moorings, the technical aspect of the pier, that’s all up to MARAD.” MacArthur agreed that the as yet unseen design for the pier—almost certain to be higher to deal with rising sea levels—was MARAD’s responsibility and that it was too soon to predict the scope or timing of construction. The hope, he said, was that the agency

would also help finance the multimillion-dollar project. Whatever the configuration of a new pier, when the ship is in port, the academy will have to deal with its impacts on the town such as more deck lighting and noise from the ship’s ventilation machinery. Town Manager Shawn Blodgett said the impact on Castine “in a macro sense” was likely to be “minimal,” but that “on the micro level” it was too early to tell. “It’s going to be a localized issue, if it’s an issue at all.” That’s the hope, MacArthur said. “We want to be good neighbors. There’s definitely going to be some heartache, but it’s a really good thing for the academy.”

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The Working Waterfront . september 2022

Book Reviews

The view of Maine from the reservation Inter-related stories reveal Penobscot life

Night of the Living Rez: Stories by Morgan Talty Tin House (2022)

Review by Tina Cohen WHEN I STARTED reading Morgan Talty’s debut book, Night of the Living Rez, I saw it as a “coming of age” story, with its focus on a few teenage boys, Native American, growing up in the Penobscot Indian Nation reservation in Maine. Just like the author himself. One of the adolescents, David, narrates the inter-related stories and so it is his perspective and experience that we come to know best through

the book. But it may be that to label it a coming of age story would deny this book some of its particular power. Often a coming of age story is about a “journey” or quest, marked by challenges and acquisition of knowledge or insight. Readers may feel optimistic when the narrator’s resilience and grit allow him to survive and surmount adversity— whether by escape, or hard-earned improvements and change, or gaining some kind of “savior” who adds support. But the stories in Night of the Living Rez don’t lead us to that conclusion or even provide much hope that transformative events could lie ahead. If this were that kind of book, perhaps it would instead be a memoir by Talty, ending with very real achievements in his life including attending Dartmouth College and the MFA program at University of Southern Maine and becoming a successful published author. However autobiographical the life of David and his friends may be, Talty’s focus is on a community where for many, life is shaped by poverty, addiction, and family instability, full of trauma, pain, and loss. The reasons for that aren’t the point of the book. Talty immerses readers in the physicality of that reality rather than through a more detached,

intellectual perspective. For example, what’s it like to worry about a curse, a jar found filled with corn and hair and teeth. What you do when that happens, how it affects you. It’s experiential; no cultural explanation, no history lesson. “Smokes Last” is a story I especially liked. The title, referring to cigarettes, first suggested to me their lasting (addictive) quality that recommends them compared to, say, relationships that don’t come with any such guarantees. The story centers on a night David and a friend ran an errand in the nearby town of Overtown, sharing a cigarette as they walked, one scrounged by David at home. As they pass a bar in the town, they’re accosted by someone bumming a cigarette. There’s one already in his hand, the boys point out, but he claims he’s holding it for a friend. Whether this was true or a pretext to insult them, the man says, “Greedy f---ing Indians, can’t spare one lick of tobacco!” At first the boys reason with the man, but with the racist insults, they reacted physically, tossing a quick volley of rocks towards the bar. Only after a running exit back to the reservation was their last cigarette shared. They’d done damage to the bar, the police ended up involved—as the boys found

out later—but their evening finished on a peaceful note. But that’s not the end of the story. Soon after, David finds in his bedroom a pack of smokes on his bureau, and a note from his mother: “Make them last.” Now the title means something else. I see it as both a request and advice from his mother, not to warn him off nicotine, but to suggest to the child pilfering her smokes that he show some respect and restraint. A lesson also relevant to the incident in town. What if the man bumming a cigarette had shown respect? What if the boys had shown restraint? With a mother’s wish, we’re left to wonder: “Make them last” may be too much to ask, as is expecting that respect or restraint would always prevail. I know there are myriad ways to explicate that story, and of course the rest of the book. Talty is rewarding to read in this way; he doesn’t tell you what it is you have to know or think. I heartily recommend his writing. It is gritty, disturbing, and depressing, but thoroughly compelling and thought-provoking. This is a Maine author to pay attention to. Tina Cohen is a therapist who lives seasonally on Vinalhaven.

The perils of love and lobstering Novel recounts details of fishing off Portland

Maiden Cove: A Novel By Roy Knight (2020)

Review by Dana Wilde ROY KNIGHT grew up just about a stone’s throw from Maiden Cove, right on the channel into Portland Harbor between Cape Elizabeth and Cushing Island. As a teenager in the mid-1960s, he learned lobstering in that channel from a school friend barely older than him. He was a good student, a starter on a basketball team that played for the state championship, a graduate of Bowdoin College. After college he spent a while teaching and coaching, but was called back to fishing. He worked on a lobster boat and on a dragger out of Portland, and then as a lobster buyer. He owned

a greenhouse in western Maine, and later was a pipefitter. But if his recent novel Maiden Cove tells us anything about him, it’s that fishing at sea runs as deep as memory will let it. Which is deep. The story’s narrator, Alan White, is looking back across the decades to his teenage years. Young Alan found himself the third side of a love triangle involving a girl just older than him and his precariously trusting friend James Jordan. We follow the development of Alan’s boyhood crush on sexy, flirtatious Barbara Jean, his confusion as she plays him against James, and the inevitable complications that grow serious by high school. While the love triangle is the force that drives the plot, the book’s center is the fishing life Alan learns from James, the youngest in an ancestral line of Maine fishermen. James teaches Alan to bait traps, measure lobsters, tie knots, read buoys. Alan learns the unwritten laws of fishing territories and how to stand up to two stone-faced, gear-tampering lobstermen. A retired fisherman in Alan’s neighborhood, Old Charley, also takes Alan under his wing and teaches him things James can’t yet, including how and when to fish a spot in the channel that only Charley knows about. This all adds up, unless I’m mistaken, to Maiden Cove presenting one of the most

meticulously detailed fictionalizations we have of lobstering on the Maine coast. I make this claim on the basis of personal recognition. For one thing, I had a similar, if far less extensive experience of lobstering to Alan’s. And for another thing, the author and I grew up in Cape Elizabeth at the same time, and knew each other. It may or may not be apparent to general readers that Maiden Cove is not only a coming of age story, but also in part an auto-fictional outline of the story of Roy Knight. Not all of the book’s events actually took place, but readers familiar with Cape Elizabeth of 50 years ago are apt to recognize not only Maiden Cove, but its Casino Beach, Ram Island, Halfway Rock, the Harris Co., the Cookie Jar bakery, St. Alban’s church, WLOB radio, the boys basketball team that played in the state Class B final in the early 1970s. Even the real names of several real people appear slyly in passing. A subtheme involving real social tensions between the generations-old fishing-farming community of Maine’s south coast and the encroaching professional class in 1960s also surfaces: James gets taunted as “lobstah boy,” while Alan grapples with his distance from the pretty, upper-crust girls just beyond his reach. But the book’s elemental force is the shape it gives to boyhood memories of the sea.

“I always knew I’d come back,” the elder Alan reminisces to begin his story as he stands on Land’s End at Bailey Island, “maybe not to this exact spot, but back far enough so that if I could look out on a clear day, I could see across the bay to where everything both came alive and came unraveled. Between here and there lie miles of Casco Bay …” Maiden Cove is not a fully polished book, but it’s a thoughtful, sometimes wry depiction of a young guy’s real life. An authentic evocation of the brine-soaked, bait-stinking, perilous, deeply moving lobstering life along Maine’s coast. Dana Wilde is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Troy.

CORRECTION The review of Ruth Moore’s Speak to the Winds in the August issue stated that Moore and her partner Eleanor Mayo built a home in Northport “and stayed the rest of their lives.” In fact, they bought land and built their home in the village of Bass Harbor in Tremont, which was Moore’s hometown. They lived there the rest of their lives. They never lived in Northport.

www.workingwaterfront.com . september 2022

Lobstermen see ‘dark cloud’ hovering over industry Whale rules add danger, expense to fishing, they say By Laurie Schreiber

obster fishermen continue to grapple with what they say are the cascading consequences of new rules designed to protect the endangered North Atlantic right whale which affect how and where they fish. “It’s this dark cloud looming over us. One court decision could shut the entire lobster fishery down,” said Freeport lobsterman Andrew Spalding. Spalding in July joined Genevieve McDonald, a commercial fisherman and legislator from Stonington, and Scott Kraus, chairman of the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, to discuss the topic, “The North Atlantic Right Whale: Balancing Conservation and Commerce” during a talk hosted by College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. Journalist Fred Bever moderated the session. The right whale population has been in trouble throughout the 20th century, declining to perhaps 100 individuals by mid-century due to global whaling. By 2010, the population was nearly 480 and appeared to be slowly recovering. But a dramatic shift occurred in recent years; the population today is fewer than 400. Regulators consider fixed fishing gear entanglements and ship strikes to be primary culprits in the decline.

Since the 1990s, regulators have leaving behind “ghost gear” that trap instituted restrictions in an effort to lobster for no purpose. “You want strong lines to pull up your make it less likely that whales will encounter gear or, if they do, to make gear,” he said. “Now it has a weak link. it possible for the animals to break That causes concerns among fishermen free. Strategies include swapping out as to how dangerous that can be.” Spalding noted he had floating groundlines— a string of traps break the rope that connects that morning. traps when they’re on the “It gets expensive, sea floor—for “sinking” “It gets expensive, when a new trap goes for lines that won’t float up; when a new trap over $200 each now,” he installing “weak” points said. “You have ten on a in the vertical lines that goes for over string, it starts to really connect traps to surface $200 each now.” add up.” buoys; and closing McDonald said regulafishing areas during tors haven’t done enough whale migrations. The to figure out where federal government seeks to reduce the risk of entanglement by whales get entangled. A system that color codes gear with certain markings, 98 percent in the coming decade. The changes have resulted in costly depending on their area of origin, aims problems for an industry proud of its to fix that situation, but a Maine-specific conservation ethos and unlikely to color code came into play only this year. “As a lobsterman, it’s imperative to encounter the endangered species, know where the entanglements are,” Spalding said. Sinking lines scraping against the said McDonald. “We’re looking down rocky bottom wear out quickly, he said. the barrel of sweeping changes.” Kraus said the number of entangleReducing the number of vertical lines has meant “trawling up”—connecting ments is probably far larger than more traps together on the bottom. those actually observed. And, he Trawling up makes the hauling process said, it’s not clear whether protection much heavier, while weak points make measures had anything to do with it more likely that rope will break, past population increases.

Ideas were implemented “that were never experimentally tested. Everyone was guessing—fishermen, scientists, agency members alike,” he said. McDonald called the 98-percent risk reduction target “a death knell” for the industry—not only for fishermen but for fishery infrastructure businesses. “We need to stop working in unknowns and start working on what we know,” she said. “We need that data on where the whales are.” Kraus said researchers have tried to tag right whales in the past. “Right whales are very grumpy about being tagged” and consistently scrape them off, he said. Even if tags can be made to last, tracking whale locations won’t necessarily solve entanglements. “Guys can’t pull their gear out in a day,” he said. Regulations are less draconian for fishermen in state waters within three miles of shore. But offshore rules could affect the entire fishery, said McDonald. Offshore fishermen could start trapping inshore, resulting in crowded conditions. The fleet could consolidate, excluding traditional small day boats. “How far can we push a fishery based on speculation and unknowns?” she said.

Closing the tap on the plastics problem Oceana staffers speak at College of the Atlantic By Tom Groening

h, no! You got distracted and left the water running in the bathtub. You run into the bathroom, see it overflowing onto the floor, and you turn and run for a mop. A mop? No, you don’t run for a mop, says Jackie Savitz, chief policy officer for Oceana. You turn off the faucet. Savitz and Oceana’s CEO, Andrew Sharpless, were panelists at College of the Atlantic’s Summer Institute series, and the above analogy was employed to make the case that ridding oceans of plastic means stopping production, not cleaning up the mess. The plastics industry, Sharpless said, wants to direct people toward finding “a really good mop,” rather than closing the tap. “That’s the metaphor that makes sense to us.” In their discussion on July 27, Sharpless and Savitz fielded questions from moderator and Washington Post reporter Frances Stead Sellers about emerging technologies that either remove plastics from the ocean or somehow mitigate their effects. They dismissed the ideas as distractions to the actual threat. “They’re just really not practical,” Savitz said. Plastics don’t break down into basic chemical building blocks, Savitz said, but rather, “They keep breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces.” Those particles of plastic—which retain their molecular structure—are being found throughout the marine food chain. “It’s still plastic,” Sharpless said.

“This is a massive crisis,” Savitz said, with 33 billion pounds entering the ocean each year, the equivalent of two dump truck loads every minute. Along with plastics manufacturers opposing restrictions, petroleum producers also are working to divert public attention, they said. Those producers see a shrinking market for their fuel as transportation and electricity generation turn to renewables. “That’s why we’ve seen massive new plastics factories proposed for all over the country,” Savitz said. And in addition to the health concerns for humans—some plastics are estrogen mimickers and cause cancer in reproductive organs—and the harm they cause marine organisms, plastic production is the fifth largest generator of greenhouse gases. The challenge on the policy front is countering the narrative that consumers must take responsibility. “It’s your fault, consumers,” is the message, Savitz said. “There is a big struggle on how to frame the problem,” Sharpless explained, with some arguing that waste must be better managed. But Oceana rejects this approach. “The only way to solve this problem is to frame it as a pollution problem,” he said. Recycling plastic is not a solution, they said, because it degrades in subsequent applications. About 9% of plastics are said to be recycled, but Sharpless said the actual amount may be closer to 2%. “They mislead us on that,” he said. Another reason to be skeptical about efforts to remove, for example, the giant “island” of floating plastic in the Pacific as a solution is that plastics have

been found throughout the water column and on the ocean bottom. Savitz noted that other contaminants in water bodies have been addressed differently than plastics. When mercury was identified as a neurotoxin and laws changed to prevent it ending up in the environment, “We don’t talk about, ‘Let’s go out and clean up the mercury that’s out there,’” she said. Packaging accounts for about 40% of plastic, they said, and therefore is a likely first target for regulation. Two years ago, Maine passed legislation creating an “extended producer responsibility,” similar to what is mandated for manufacturers of tires, batteries, and mattresses. “We want to put this problem back on the producers,” Savitz said. Legislation can force manufacturers to pay into a clean-up fund, collect used plastic, and reduce production. California and Oregon also have passed producer responsibility laws, with the California law requiring a 25% reduction in plastic packaging by 2032. The private sector also may be changing direction. Sharpless said Coca-Cola, which is responsible for 22% of the world’s plastic containers, is aiming to have 25% of its product in refillable containers by 2030. And Amazon is facing pressure to change, with 48% of shareholders voting in April to have the company publish its “plastic footprint.” Oceana, which describes itself as a global advocate for the health of the oceans, has protected 4 million square miles of habitat around the U.S., United Kingdom, Belize, and other nations.

The Working Waterfront . september 2022

Six ‘Brookie’ winners named

Young environmental leaders honored by NRCM

Noela Altvater

Lucas Healy

Kosi Ifeji

#1: Noela Altvater #2: Lucas Healy #3: Kosi Ifeji #4: Kiera Frischkorn #5: Anna Siegel #6: Greg LeClair Kiera Frischkorn

Anna Siegel

ix young changemakers from Maine were honored with Brookie Awards by the Natural Resources Council of Maine for their leadership and effectiveness tackling a wide range of environmental issues. The diverse group includes college and high school student activists and scientists, ranging in age from 16 to 26. Each is implementing solutions to environmental challenges facing Maine ranging from climate action and clean energy to safe drinking water and wildlife conservation. “The contributions these young leaders have already made are incredible and give me great hope for the future of the environmental movement in Maine,” said NRCM CEO Lisa Pohlmann. “We’re grateful to every one of our winners for leading by example and pushing us all to build a healthier, more equitable future for Maine’s environment and communities.” The Brookie Awards is a statewide program hosted by NRCM Rising, the young member arm of NRCM, to elevate and amplify the voices of the rising generation of environmental leaders in Maine. The 2022 Brookie Award winners are: • Noela Altvater of the Passamaquoddy Reservation at Sipayik, an indigenous clean water advocate and community leader who amplified the voices and stories of her family’s struggle with polluted

Greg LeClair

and toxic water. Altvater fought for passage of LD 906 which ensures that Passamaquoddy tribal members will have access to clean drinking water.

Energy Efficiency and Sustainability. She led the campaign to pass LD 99 to divest the Maine public employee retirement system from fossil fuels.

• Lucas Healy of Castine is president of the campus sustainability club at Maine Maritime Academy and advocated for renewable energy curriculum to prepare students for clean energy careers. Healy and his team built an operational wind turbine and testing facility for faculty to integrate into their classes.

•G reg LeClair of Waterville is founder of Maine Big Night, a citizen science project that collects data on amphibian road crossings and mortalities and advocates for solutions. He has collaborated with the Department of Transportation on infrastructure funding and solutions to protect amphibian species.

• Kosis Ifeji of Bangor is a climate justice activist who serves as co-chair of the Nature Based Education Consortium’s climate education policy advocacy group. Ifeji led a campaign to pass LD 1902 which provides grant funding for climate change education in Maine’s public schools. • Kiara Frischkorn of Biddeford is president of the University of New England Biddeford campus sustainability club where she organized a series of beach clean-ups that engaged fellow students and community members. • Anna Siegel of Yarmouth is the Maine Youth Action Campaigns coordinator, a founding member of Maine Youth for Climate Justice, and serves on the Yarmouth Committee for

“Maine has a long and proud history of environmental leadership, and our 2022 Brookie Award winners are building on that legacy,” said NRCM Rising Director Todd Martin. More than 50 young environmental leaders across 14 of Maine’s 16 counties applied for a Brookie Award. Candidates were evaluated on leadership, creativity, collaboration, and positive impact on Maine’s environment. Each Brookie Award winner receives a $2,000 cash prize, a short video about their work, a six-week public speaking and speechwriting training, and an invitation to a nature-based retreat with fellow winners where they will participate in skill-building and engage with other environmental and political leaders. The Brookie Awards were made possible by the generosity of the Quimby Family Foundation and the Louise H. and David S. Ingalls Foundation. To learn more visit: https://www.brookieawards.org/.

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From left: Scott Firmin, Dan Devereaux, Ivy Frignoca, Will Everitt, and Fred Dillon. PHOTO: COURTESY FRIENDS OF CASCO BAY

Casco Bay group honors clean water heroes

Public officials recognized for above and beyond efforts

asco Baykeeper Ivy Frignoca announced the three recipients of the 2022 Casco Bay Awards at Friends of Casco Bay’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act and members annual meeting earlier this summer. Award recipients were recognized for their exceptional efforts to address pollution and climate change in Casco Bay. “On the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, we want to recognize the outstanding contributions of our Casco Bay awardees,” said Frignoca. “All three have helped to address some of the greatest threats to the health of the bay without seeking praise or limelight, driven by a passion for clean water. To all three, I owe a personal debt of gratitude. They each taught and continue to teach me so much about protecting Casco Bay.” Scott Firmin, director of wastewater service for the Portland Water District, received a Casco Bay Award for reducing nitrogen levels in Greater Portland’s wastewater discharges. Wastewater is a major source of nitrogen pollution into Casco Bay. At the East End Wastewater Treatment Facility alone, Firmin has overseen changes in operations in the past four years that have kept over 1.5 million pounds of nitrogen out of the bay. Nitrogen pollution can cause excessive algal growth that has myriad negative impacts on the marine environment, including shutting down shellfisheries, degrading eelgrass beds which are critical fish nursery habitat, and exacerbating coastal acidification. Fred Dillon, stormwater coordinator for South Portland, received a Casco Bay award for his efforts to reduce stormwater pollution. Stormwater is a major source of pollution into Casco Bay and is notoriously difficult to address. In addition to his regular responsibilities, Dillon has worked tirelessly to monitor water

quality in polluted urban streams that empty into Casco Bay. He also helped develop South Portland’s fertilizer and pesticide ordinances, led volunteer water quality monitoring in the Presumpscot River, advanced innovative restoration projects at Long Creek, and co-founded Maine Water Environment Association’s stormwater section. Dan Devereaux, Brunswick’s coastal resources manager, received a Casco Bay award for his efforts to sustainably manage marine resources in Eastern Casco Bay and increase the region’s climate resilience. Devereaux has been integral in creating a network of harbormasters and marine resource officers that collaboratively manage shellfisheries and respond to the impacts of climate change, like coastal acidification. He also has helped expand the use of water quality monitoring to inform resource management decisions. He is a founding member of the state shellfish advisory council, and serves on countless shellfish and coastal resource management committees. He also helped to create a student shellfish license program at the Brunswick school department, which enables students to earn money while learning about and supporting the shellfish industry. Frignoca summarized the broader context in which the award recipients have carried out their work in her remarks. “We humans, are the number one threat to the health of Casco Bay,” she said. “from carbon emissions and urban sprawl, to toxic and plastic pollution, and much more. Yet we also are the ones empowered to nurture and live in harmony with the bay. These award winners exemplify this ethic and should inspire all of us to follow in their footsteps and take on the work ahead of us.”

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The Working Waterfront . september 2022

Rock Bound

When community pillars sink in the sand Recent trends suggest service centers will dominate By Tom Groening FOR THE LAST year or so, Stonington’s Island Ad-Vantages newspaper has been covering the demise of a nursing home on Deer Isle and the efforts to save the institution. It’s not a trivial matter— having a place for residents to be cared for and live their final days near their homes and families is an important component of a healthy community. More recently, I read a short note in Eastport’s The Quoddy Tides newspaper remarking on a decision that meant the closing of the only bank on Grand Manan, the Canadian island that lies off Lubec. Clearly, there are no easy ways to force businesses to continue operating in a community where they may not be earning a profit or able to hire staff. But neither should these developments be shrugged off without reflecting on their consequences. Early in my time at the Island Institute, when the organization’s work was almost exclusively devoted to supporting Maine’s 15 unbridged, yearround island communities, I learned about the three-legged stool concept. The idea, if I remember it correctly, is that an island community needs at

least three basic institutions to remain vital—a school, a store, and a post office. Lose one or more, and the island begins to resemble a seasonal enclave. Schools hold a chicken and egg place on islands. If there is a school, families with children will remain, and if there is a school, families will consider relocating there. Schools also provide jobs and, in most cases, the physical plant allows for community gatherings. A store, even a rudimentary one that sells only food staples, makes it possible to remain on-island between trips to the mainland supermarket. Bad weather stops the ferry from running? At least you can grab some bread, eggs, and milk from the island store. If the store expands its stock during the summer, visitors can extend their stays. The post office may seem like an odd community pillar, but for islands, it’s essential. A post office allows small business owners—artists, craftspeople, tradespeople, boat builders, and mechanics—to receive parts and materials and to ship product. Ferry services, like the private ones that serve Isle au Haut and the Cranberry Isles, land contracts to carry the mail and that revenue makes the passenger service possible.

Considering what makes a community authentic—social and economic diversity and stratification being reasonable measures—has been a concern we’ve returned to in these pages, and I suspect we’ll continue to report and reflect on that idea. I can think of a few coastal communities that have lost any claim to that authenticity. A couple of them, perhaps not coincidentally, are favorite places to visit for a walk. But I can’t imagine those towns holding any appeal for a young family to put down roots. And housing is rarely affordable in those towns. As I’ve noted, it’s not easy to guide a market economy toward sustaining community social and economic pillars. Isle au Haut has taken the unprecedented step of raising money at its annual town meeting to support the island store, and if it’s operated independent of the municipality, I suppose that model could be replicated. Banks are required by federal regulators to make loans available in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Could these institutions be nudged toward operating in rural areas by state incentives? Yet I’m also reminded of learning about the dozen or so grocery stores

that once operated in Belfast. In fact, when we arrived here in 1986, there was still a small food market on Lower Main Street. The business model for it remaining active wasn’t compelling. Who would want to shop among dusty canned food while worrying that meat, fish, and produce may have been kept on hand a few days longer than at a Hannaford or Shaw’s? In the last 20 years, we’ve seen service center economies take hold in certain coastal communities, usually marked by the presence of big-box retailers. The final stages of this evolution, I fear, will be the suburbanization of those communities that lie within the orbit of service centers. Recognizing where this trend can be resisted, and where it is inevitable, is worth our attention.

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

Reflections

Recognizing an island’s landmarks Older generation offers history lesson Reflections is written by Island Fellows, recent college grads who do community service work on Maine islands and in coastal communities through the Island Institute, publisher of The Working Waterfront.

By Hallie Lartius AS AN IOWA NATIVE, I didn’t know there were islands off the coast of Maine before applying to be an Island Fellow. When I accepted the position and agreed to relocate more than a thousand miles to Deer Isle, I was desperate to learn as much as I could about my new coastal community. By early September, I could recite: • the most recent census count (3,250, roughly a quarter of which are included in the 65-plus demographic I work with) • 73 local organizations, most registered with our chamber of commerce • the annual revenues from lobster in 2021 (over $70 million) One year later, I’m thankful to say that I’ve never been tested on any of these statistics.

Fortunately, the Island Institute Oceanville. The tour officially begins at welcomes incoming Fellows with a the jaw-dropping Deer Isle Bridge. I love to imagine the crowds on the surplus of resources to help us acclimate, no matter from how far away we day it was opened in 1939, described to come. My favorite piece of advice came me by someone who was just two years from a former Fellow—take time for old at the time. Many things, like a longpersonal tours with advisors, neighbors, empty storefront in Deer Isle village, are or anyone willing to share a bit of their referred to by what they used to be: “The old fill-in-the-blank.” perspective on life in Just a few minutes coastal Maine. down the road is my office I’ve since had the at Healthy Island Project, pleasure of touring Deer I’ve since had the which had housed a Isle by land, air, and temperance sea, and I always learn pleasure of touring women’s union, a library, and a something new, often Deer Isle by land, parish house over the at the sites I’ve seen a air, and sea… last century. My favorite million times before. stop is the Legion Hall, I’m lucky to work with the setting of many lively our seniors, the experts stories about the weekly on Deer Isle’s history, character, and people. With them by dances held there in the 1950s. There are some very secret places too— your side, a drive to the ice cream shop or a quick walk to the beach can turn like the cranberry bog where a neighbor of mine grew up catching pollywogs and into a lesson on island life. It takes roughly two hours (about 50 tadpoles—and places I’ve never been at miles) to drive the main road, Route 15, all, like the quarry where hundreds cut in a loop around the island, connected stone at Crotch Island. Some places don’t look like much at by its three crossroads, with forays into Little Deer Isle, Sunshine, and all, like “Lover’s Lane,” a sharp bend in

the road known for physically piling passengers on top of one another. My work often takes me around the island all day, whether it’s delivering meals to the 140 “Salt Air Seniors” who receive our weekly lunch program or traveling to just one person at the end of a winding road seeking help with online services. After a year of touring Deer Isle, I’m excited to recognize some of my own landmarks too—houses where I always honk twice to say hello, the best shaded place to sit in the parking lot of the senior living community, and a one-mile path that I walk at least once a day through Stonington’s downtown. However, when I lead tours of the island, I only tell a few of my own stories. More often, I find myself retelling those of others. Hallie Lartius works with Deer IsleStonington’s Healthy Island Project, a nonprofit that provides information, makes connections, and coordinates projects to promote healthy living.

www.workingwaterfront.com . september 2022

SAIL IN— The Sail In and Anchor restaurant in Prospect, photographed in the late 1930s or 1940s, which was on the west side of the Penobscot River. The Waldo-Hancock Bridge, carrying Route 1 across the river, was built in 1931 and demolished in 2013. The restaurant later became known as the Sail In, and it was purchased by the state through eminent domain as the new Penobscot Narrows Bridge was being built.

Op-Ed

In praise of tree-lined streets Leafy downtowns a way to fight warming By Sarah Miller

The cooling effect is as great as 20-45 degrees Fahrenheit, according to U.S. government studies, THERE IS NO shortage of appropriate responses and major energy savings can result from reduced to climate change and global pollution—walking use of air conditioning. Just as important, trees are beautiful and help bring instead of driving, insulating your house, trading your leaf blower in for a rake. You can doubtless a sense of calm and well-being to the increasingly unstable and agitated worlds we inhabit. Indeed, this think of many more yourself. But planting a shade tree along your street, pref- may be the most important thing of all. Trees once lined Elm streets in towns across erably in your own front yard America. They mostly died or, if there isn’t room or you from Dutch Elm disease in the don’t have a front yard, as part decades after World War II. of a neighborhood or town Other trees were planted in campaign to get trees along Such trees also cancel out their place, not initially as large nearby streets is a great gesture toward planetary salvation some of the blistering radiant and elegant as the ones they of course, but many that’s too often ignored. heating effects of pavement replaced, have grown to be very beautiful The benefits of trees close and help cool sidewalks… in their own non-elm-like ways. to homes are multiple. “Street Those trees are now themselves trees,” those planted in public aging and, sadly, many either rights of way, absorb as much have diseases of their own, are carbon as other trees—what’s stressed by changing climatic known as mitigation in the conditions, or are simply viewed language of climate conferences. But the benefits don’t stop there. Such trees as being “in the way” by the owners or by many towns also cancel out some of the blistering radiant heating and electric utilities. Many of these could and should be saved. More effects of pavement and help cool sidewalks, houses and other buildings that are beneath them, an “adap- than 20 years ago, Camden, where I live, adopted an tation” measure that will become increasingly impor- ordinance requiring that anyone wanting to cut down or even prune a “shade tree” in the public right of way tant as the planet warms in the years ahead.

Island Institute Board of Trustees Emily B. Lane, Chair Kristin Howard, Vice Chair Charles Owen Verrill, Jr. Secretary Douglas Henderson, Treasurer, Finance Chair Carol White, Programs Chair Megan McGinnis Dayton, Philanthropy & Communications Chair Shey Conover, Governance Chair Michael P. Boyd, Clerk Sebastian Belle David Cousens Michael Felton Nathan Johnson Bryan Lewis Michael Sant Barbara Kinney Sweet Kate Vogt Donna Wiegle John Bird (honorary)

along streets and roads must first get the consent of the town’s tree warden. Many states, cities, and towns in this country have similar laws designed to help save street trees and shade trees more generally. More of our towns in Midcoast Maine should have such laws or if, like Camden, they already have legislation of this type, should consider whether a stronger law and stronger enforcement might be appropriate. If the trees are terminally ill, though, they have to be cut. And many have already been downed. What is needed in their place are not small ornamental trees. Those are lovely and can grace our lives from further back in yards and other places where we want sunshine. But not along sidewalks, where we want to encourage more walking and biking. There we need large, leafy shade trees that will cool our streets for decades to come. Maine is relatively cool by U.S. standards, but even so, those who have walked around downtowns in summer will know how welcome the shade and graceful beauty provided by a canopy of leaves high above you can be. Sarah Miller is a semi-retired international energy and business journalist and editor who lives in Camden. This column first appeared as a blog on the Penobscot Bay Pilot website.

THE WORKING WATERFRONT

Published by the Island Institute, a non-profit organization that works to sustain Maine's island and coastal communities, and exchanges ideas and experiences to further the sustainability of communities here and elsewhere. All members of the Island Institute and residents of Maine island communities receive monthly mail delivery of The Working Waterfront. For home delivery: Join the Island Institute by calling our office at (207) 594-9209 E-mail us: membership@islandinstitute.org • Visit us online: giving.islandinstitute.org

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The Working Waterfront . september 2022

Mrs. Maine is the real deal

Hodgson fishes, fights cancer, and revives Jonesboro Grange By Sarah Craighead Dedmon

n Rebekah Hodgson’s earliest memory of lobstering, she’s on her father’s boat and they’ve just anchored off of Jonesboro’s Looks Point to visit her great uncle Scott, who gave her a banana. “I must have been about four years old,” recalls Hodgson, now 32. “I remember getting back on the boat, going up in the cabin, and sitting in the thick fog with my father.” Hodgson’s first memory from the clam flats includes a cut finger that almost put her off clamming altogether, but it didn’t. Today she’s a lobsterman, a clam harvester, a military wife, a mother, and Mrs. Maine International 2022. In her day job, she can be found in classic Downeast attire—jeans, T-shirt, boots, and a ponytail. But last month she was on the runway of the national Mrs. International pageant in Kingsport, Tenn., wearing evening gowns, high heels, and her signature sparkling lobster earrings, purchased especially for the occasion. “I almost didn’t buy them but I’m glad that I did because they really brought the Maine brand to life,” says Hodgson. “All the girls commented on the lobster earrings. I said, ‘Would you expect anything else from Mrs. Maine?’ Everyone knew me as the lobster fisherman by the end of the week, which was the goal, to bring us recognition.” Hodgson’s love of pageants began at a young age in Eastport, when she became Junior Miss Fourth of July, and grew during high school when she chose the International pageant system. “Each pageant is like a brand of clothing,” she says. “You pick your favorite and you run with it. I chose this one because everyone has a story to tell and they want to hear that story. It really wasn’t hard to prepare for because I live the life I want to project.” Because of the pandemic, Maine didn’t host a statewide pageant this year. But after meeting with the

John Martin, Bud Staples, and Elsie Gillespie chat around the woodstove at the annual town meeting.

Rebekah Hodgson poses at the Maine Lobster Festival in Rockland. PHOTO: COURTESY HODGSON FAMILY

pageant board, Hodgson received a phone call saying they wanted to send her to the national competition. “My jaw literally dropped,” says Hodgson. “I said ‘Yes, let’s do it.’ It’s my dream to represent this state, and to break that mold, to show that you don’t have to be a ‘Pageant Patty’ to do this.” Levi Moulden Hodgson is more of a hands-on pageant queen.

Her love of family and community has drawn new life into her Washington County hometown of Jonesboro, and created widespread support for her two biggest passion projects—defeating cancer and saving the Jonesboro Grange Hall. Two years ago she organized the first Crush Cancer 5K using the Grange as a homebase. The road race Bud Staples

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raises funds for the Ellsworth-based Beth Wright Cancer Center, where she now serves on the board of directors. The race was a way for her to deal with her father’s cancer diagnosis. “Instead of being mad and stuck in self-doubt, I had to channel my anger and sadness into something,” says Hodgson. “My father has always told me, you always help the next person—it’s not about yourself, it’s about the greater good of the community.” Hodgson’s father, John Cox Jr., is cancer free today and still clamming in Jonesboro where he’s the town-appointed clam manager. He also serves his community as Grange master, leading the local chapter of the national Patrons of Husbandry, founded in 1867. Hodgson’s mother and brother are also members. To save the local Grange from extinction, last year Cox succeeded in convincing his daughter and 12 others to join him as “They wanted members of Jonesboro Grange No. 357, which to know if it was had undergone a long period of dormancy. Not anymore. dangerous and With Hodgson’s help, this year the Jonesboro what got me into Grange has already hosted 14 fundraising events. The Grange now has a well but no lobstering.” plumbing and money for a new roof. During the national Mrs. International pageant, Hodgson says the judges weren’t as interested in her work to crush cancer as they were in her work as a lobsterman. “I knew I would get questions about that, and I did,” said Hodgson, who did not win the national title, but made friendships to last a lifetime. “They wanted to know if it was dangerous and what got me into lobstering. They even asked if it was like what we see on The Deadliest Catch, with the waves.” From Monday through Thursday, while her husband Garrett is at work on the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Tackle in Rockland, Hodgson is a full-time Mom to Jase, 4, and Kennedy, 3. But when he returns to Jonesboro, she heads out to pull traps from her boat, F/V Last Two Cents, or to the Jonesboro clam flats, where she and her brother Andrew are often working near their father. “It really took him getting cancer for me to see how truly blessed I am. Without Dad, I wouldn’t be the lobsterman or clam harvester I am today,” she says. “He gets it—don’t be greedy, always help the person behind you, give because you can’t take it with you when you go. Leave a legacy that may not make you famous, but be remembered for the impact you made on your community, family, and friends.”

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Kimberly Wagoner, manager; Christopher Jacobs, the fourth generation of the family that owns and operates Waltz Soda Fountain; and Dean Jacobs, owner.

Downtown Damariscotta A healthy waterfront business district

amariscotta is one of those coastal towns you have to make a concerted effort to visit. Route 1 makes a swing past the downtown, but it’s a short hop off the highway, coming from the north or south, and in doing so, you discover a waterfront business district that is neither pretentious nor sleepy. There are plenty of places to eat, but the essential shops also seem to be thriving. And the waterfront view is easy to find, just south of the main drag.

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www.workingwaterfront.com . september 2022

The Working Waterfront . september 2022

Our Island Communities Sprague doesn’t mail in the ‘Joy’ of her job Joy Sprague honored by postal service group By Tom Groening

er given name is Florence, but having arrived in the world five days before Christmas, her parents had the seasonal spirit when they gave her the middle name Joy. In a phone conversation, Florence Joy Sprague wonders about the idea of people living up to their name. No wondering for me. Sprague exudes joy as she enthusiastically discusses her work as postmaster on Islesford (Little Cranberry Island), a job she has held for 45 years. Earlier this year, she was named Postmaster/ Manager of the Year at the Maine State Convention of the United Postmasters and Managers of America at an event in Skowhegan. The plaque presented to her reads: “In appreciation and recognition of commitment to excellence, contributions to community, to the USPS, and to others, thereby reflecting credit upon themselves and the entire USPS organization.” In addition to her nearly half-century as postmaster, Sprague is an island native. Born in the hospital in Bar Harbor, she arrived on the island five days later and never left. Well, she did the four high school years offisland, at Lee Academy, coming home every two weeks, and then at Mount Desert Island High School in Bar Harbor, staying at the home of the Rev. Stan Haskell. “I just couldn’t stand being away,” she remembers, and so she returned to the island where she hustled to make a living, doing everything from painting lobster buoys to baking and selling bread. When the island postmaster Natalie Beal sought someone to fill in for her, Sprague jumped at the opportunity. “I thought, ‘That sounds like fun!’” The part-time work meant Beal was able to train her for the job, and when Beal retired, Sprague applied. But so did others. “A lot of people wrote letters supporting me,” she remembers, and on Dec. 3, 1977, she was appointed postmaster for Islesford. At 17 days shy of her 21st birthday, she was the youngest postmaster in the U.S. Does she regret never leaving the island? “No, no, not at all!” she says. She did complete a 25-day Outward Bound course—“To see if they could teach me anything I didn’t already learn from living on an island”—and attended the Haystack Mountain School for Crafts on Deer Isle to learn quilting. Those island roots run deep. Her father was a lobsterman who served in the U.S. Marines during the Korean War. He was on leave and visiting Myrtle Beach, S.C. and noticed and introduced himself to a young woman who was vacationing there from Virginia. “They exchanged letters and fell in love through the mail,” Sprague says, even becoming engaged by letter, a detail that makes her smile given her career choice. The story doesn’t have a happy ending, though. Her father, Roland, and his sternman, Fred Fernald, perished while moving lobster gear during a storm in 1959. Her mother Betty’s family back in Virginia urged her to return there with her two young daughters. No, she decided. Roland would’ve wanted the girls to be raised on the island, so she stayed. “My mother was so strong,” Sprague remembers. Though she has remained on the island all these years, her work at the post office has traveled the world.

Joy Sprague in the golf cart she uses to pick up mail. PHOTO: COURTESY BARBARA FERNALD

Mindful of ways to increase revenue, she expanded the “stamps by mail” program begun by her predecessor by which customers can order stamps from an individual post office—in this case, a small island one. Islesford was fourth in the state in stamp sales by mail. She started a monthly newsletter sent to those stamp-by-mail customers. Down East magazine wrote about her and the newsletter in 1974. “I started hearing from people in Turkey, Nassau, Saudi Arabia.” And those stamp customers would actually travel to the island. “There would be someone over there grinning at me,” she explains, and when she greeted the person, he or she would say, “I came to Maine just to meet you!” With stamps selling in packs of 200, the revenue adds up. “I feel like I’m the unofficial ambassador for the U.S. postal service,” she says, a role she embraces. She also injects fun into the job. On the 50th anniversary of the first manned moon landing when the postal service issued a commemorative stamp, she dressed up like an astronaut and picked up mail at the landing in costume, enjoying the raised eyebrows. When the Woodstock music festival was commemorated with a stamp, she dressed like a hippie. When a stamp honored Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sprague recited her poetry. “This is almost like a stage,” she says. But the work, of course, is real, and involves lugging bags of mail and packages from the dock to the post office. An old station wagon and a golf cart have helped, but Sprague still has to wrestle with arriving freight, like the recent delivery of a composting toilet.

Sprague poses in front of the Islesford Post Office. PHOTO: COURTESY BARBARA FERNALD

Her approach is simple: “My philosophy is I treat every customer the way I would want to be treated. I just want to give high quality service.” And since the postal service is essential for many on-island businesses, she makes a point of explaining shipping options to her customers. Sprague also is invested in the community, now serving her third term as a member of the select board, served as president of the island church, and is active with the historical society. Sprague, who with three other women fully immerse themselves in the ocean each month of the year, spent one summer swimming every day. She also has run a half marathon on the island. But the joy Sprague finds in her job comes from people. “They fill my heart.”

www.workingwaterfront.com . september 2022

PHIL AND MILLS—

Gov. Janet Mills, who had been vacationing on North Haven in late July and early August, was joined at Waterman’s Community Center by Phil Crossman on Aug. 4. Crossman, who writes the Observer column for The Working Waterfront, sat at the piano for this photograph taken by William Trevaskis while the two dueted on such songs as “Ain’t Misbehavin.” Crossman added that the governor is an enthusiastic performer, as evidenced by the photo. Trevaskis lives on North Haven and is the music teacher at the Vinalhaven school.

A bold mission—saving the Atlantic cod DNA in the environment can reveal spawning secrets

uke Goldman was working as a lifeguard on the Jersey Shore when he decided that he wanted to study ecology. He now is a marine protector of a different sort—a researcher at the forefront of using eDNA to try and save the Atlantic cod. Goldman came to University of Maine, attracted to the ample natural spaces for a budding ecologist to study and explore, as well as the interdisciplinary nature of the Ecology and Environmental Sciences Program. Goldman was first introduced to the concept of eDNA, where DNA in the environment is used to study the organisms living there, through a research learning experience course. The cutting-edge scientific technique immediately piqued his interest. “It’s a field in its infancy. It’s really only been around for ten years, and for more specific fields of study like marine biology, it’s only been used for like five years. It’s a frontier field in the sciences right now,” Goldman says. At the end of the course, he asked about research opportunities to study eDNA and learned that Erin Grey, assistant professor of aquatic genetics and manager of the Grey Aquatics Lab, was seeking someone to work in the lab.

Goldman’s background in both ecology and molecular biology made him a great fit for the eDNA project, Grey said. “You need to be able to understand both,” Grey says. “He had that unique combination.” Goldman is working on a project that uses eDNA to determine cod spawning locations in the Gulf of Maine. Atlantic cod have been functionally extinct since the late 19th century due to overfishing and ocean warming. The loss of cod was devastating economically and ecologically for the Gulf of Maine, and the populations haven’t been able to rebound like some other over-harvested species in the region once regulations were put in place. Marine scientists aren’t sure why, but one theory is that something is going wrong with their spawning. The exact locations and times of cod spawning are not well known in the Gulf of Maine, but may be easier to find with the help of eDNA. “We don’t really know where they spawn,” Grey says. “We know a couple of areas, but it’s a big gulf and they spawn near the bottom. Since it can be easier to collect eDNA from water samples it might be easier for us to detect it.”

Goldman uses a process called qPCR, or quantitative polymerase chain reaction, to pick out specific genes only found in cod. Depending on how long the DNA takes to amplify, Goldman can figure out whether the sequence he is looking at is “background noise” or significant enough to be related to spawning. Cod release great quantities of DNA into the water when they’re spawning, after all. Eventually, researchers aim to have fishermen collect samples and send them to a lab to conduct eDNA assays to find cod in the field. Goldman hopes to continue using his eDNA skills to solve complex environmental and ecological problems. His eventual goal is to use eDNA to study fungi in soils, specifically how fungal communities have shifted in response to applications of synthetic fertilizer and the natural recovery that has occurred since fertilizer application has ceased. “I’ve always been passionate about growing things and gardening and I want to have a farm some day. I took soil science last semester and I really fell in love.” But first, he says, “We’ve got to save the cod.”

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www.workingwaterfront.com . April 2020

cRanBeRRy Guest Column RepoRt

Town meeting, painting lines, eating Column prompts ‘ledge bound’ memory doughnuts, and throwing rocks Around-the-world sailor had problems in Maine

As winter winds down, islanders mix prep work and gatherings

By Bob Gerber RETURNING TO MY new home ByPennsylvania Barbara Fernald in hill country from a two-week visit to my daughters and ACTIVITY on the islands, the end friends in Maine, I was at pleasantly of February and into March, is surprised to find in my mail the like latesta mirror image of the action at the end issue of The Working Waterfront with of August into September. Just as the several articles that intersected with summer residents of the Cranberry my history in Maine. Isles their vacations right before Theend review of the new book, Sideshots, fall, many year-round residents end by John Mann and illustrated by Earle their winter breaks just before the Mitchell, forced a recall of my long spring equinox. friendships with both men as we It’s timeFreeport to get back to work and attended schools together reconnect. in the 1960s. John and I collaborated annual meetingprojects takes onOur several of mytown consulting place on the second Saturday in March. for wealthy coastal landowners over For years—John selectmen and town employees, the providing me survey winter has been anything but a vacaback-up to my engineering work. tion. They have been working steadily, John and Mitch are both great gathering information to remember write the storytellers, and like me, warrant for town meeting. It’s time Freeport when you still had to the walk up of year we come together as a town to two flights of steep wooden stairs to decide on projects and spending and get to the L.L. Bean showroom. When how talks muchabout money is to be raised by one “Maine—the way life property should be,taxes. ” those are the days I recall. Discussion of the The other article thatschool sparkedbudget a lot alone can take well over an hour. The of memories was the Rock Bound islands take turns hosting the meetcolumn on the Maine Times. Back in ing and the luncheon. This year, town

1969-1970 I dated the step-daughter home in Freeport to take my 30-foot meeting will take who placewas on aIslesford. bright up red with a black stripe)island and, like to my summer in of Ken Morrison, feature sloop What’s for lunch? Homemade pizzas, every otherBay. lobster fisherman in Maine I stopped for the night writer for Maine Times. Ken and I sat Penobscot salads, desserts. getstable busier thisthe winter, he read about, talked about, southern cove at Damariscove up manyand a night at his Life kitchen in in as we volunteer to help prepare the and experimented with purple for a Freeport discussing those social and Island, off Boothbay. Unusual paint. first community mealthat of the The latest whale require night,regulations I was the only boat environmental issues the season. Maine mid-summer Town is a atgreat opportuallthe Maine lobster to useright new harbor and fishermen I set my anchor Times wasmeeting so good bringing to in nity to hear about winter from friends markings on the ropes they attach to light. It was brave work in those days in the middle of the small cove north of and neighbors. “How was your trip to lobster traps. Depending on how close the stone pier. and only a veteran ...?” “Wholike knew grand-parenting was to shore they fish, they will have todark, add Just before newsman John Cole so exhausting or that on eachtwo-masted buoy line. a small and publisher Peter Coxthere were so 2-4 purple marks many cold germs “You did On warps thatschooner, are 100-feetthe or lessEagle, there seemed to have theinvolved?” forti- Dodge Morgan set all that painting?” These same quesmust be one 12-inch purple mark withentered the cove, sailed tude at the time to chaltions the could be quo. asked in September at records in a few fathoms of the and a 3613 world up my easttrap side, around lenge status a school board meeting in a large subinch purple mark within 2 fathoms of me to the north, and A tangential memory sailing solo and urb. (Preferably not during the meetthe buoy. If the warp is longer that 100 then anchored off to related to Maine Times is ing while someone else has the floor!) around nonstop feet, the requirement a 12-inch my west.is Iforrecognized that Dodge Morgan In January and February, Bruce and purple mark near trap,(solo a second 12the the captain again) became its publisher the world... I gotintothe spend a lot of time with our inch purple mark halfway to the buoy, as Dodge Morgan from late newspaper’s grandchildren in Southern Maine. and a 36-inch mark Inear the buoy. pictures had seen. life. Dodge Morgan, Visiting them was the main goal of Bruce figures he will be putting 1,500 I was in a quandary author of Voyage of most of our winter travel. We considto 1,800 markings on his rope in all; because I had beentwo in American Promise, set ered trying to paint our kitchen, but to three weeks of extra many work iftimes he does at 13 world records sailing his Ted Hood Damariscove Harbor we kept catching oddnonstop coughingaround virus- all it without number fishstages hiring of the help. tide Aand knewofthere monohull solo and es and experienced down Itime ermen are applying paintwhere to their ropes a ledge right under Dodge’s the world in 150 daysmore in 1985-86. had was than we wanted, so we never got to it. by resting them in 3-foot long gutters eagerly followed the news accounts schooner had anchored and that given Maybe paint May, when II had can the made from pipe. state oflengthwise-halved the tides, he wasPVC likely to and wasI’ll a big fan itofin his, although have the windows open. Bruce’s first attempt was with spray paint never met him until July 11, 1987, two ground out about 3 a.m. But who was I Bruce sawhis more than paint, to buttell heDodge soon moved onwhere to the he more effiMorgan should years before book wasenough published. anyway, this winter. During his “time cient brush and latex paint. On July 10 of that year, I left my winter anchor? So I let it be and we jointly off” he painted 600 buoys (white and Some fishermen will add a 3-foot

acknowledged each other with a brief piece of he purple rope to the end of the wave as set his anchor. buoy or toggle, but all in attachments Sureline enough, sometime the middle must be made with a splice or a tuck. of the night I heard a commotion over I know it’s a stretch to compare on Eagle. I got up, popped my headfolout lowing Maineslide, whale of the cabin and rope couldrequiresee his ments withleaning a pleintoairthe workshop, but mastheads west. I called aout person could return home from eito ask if he was OK and I got a gruff ther and say that they’d been paint“yes” in reply. ingI got in their spare time.and If Bruce in my dinghy rowed were over writing essay who on how spent his next to an Dodge, washeperched on winter vacation, painting would be a the port rail, waiting for the tide to float part of it. Another part would be the the Eagle again. description I heard him tell hisbybrother I started the conversation asking Mark about walking get doughnuts, him, “You’re Dodgeto Morgan, aren’t in February, with our son Robin, you?” He looked around furtivelyand as our grandchildren Henry and Cora. I if someone else might hear, then said, was with friends in Portland, and “Yes.away ” Stephanie was away in I asked, “Didn’t you with knowfriends that there Florida. Father and son were in charge. was a ledge here?” Answer: “No, I don’t “Yeah, we” got doughnuts at The have a chart. Cookie Jar and “Did then walked to the I then asked, you check the beach for a picnic and to throw rocks.” depth under your keel when you Eating homemade donuts and anchored?” throwing the beach—if that Answer:rocks “No, at I don’t have a depth isn’t a mirror image of many childfinder.” hood summers on Islesford, I don’t I then asked, “Didn’t you know there know what is. q was an extra low tide tonight?” Answer: “No, I don’t have a tide Barbara table.” Fernald lives on Islesford (Little Cranberry Island) with her husband Bruce.

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I was in a quandary because I had been in Damariscove Harbor many times at all stages of the tide and knew there was a ledge...

At that point I was about out of questions except for the logical one: “How does a man who can sail around the world in record time come to run aground in your own home waters of Maine?” but I didn’t ask it. Instead, Dodge broke the ice by offering, “I’ve run aground quite a few times on the Maine coast. It is not like sailing on the open ocean. So I just wait for the tide to float me off again.” I had run aground a few times myself, so we then spent a half hour or so sharing stories of running aground on the coast of Maine. I came away with the feeling that although Dodge was willing to fit out American Promise with the best instrumentation that money could buy, he was a gambler

at heart and just liked the challenge of trying to sail the Maine coast like the sailors did in the 1800s. I guess it was his gambler’s instinct that caused him to buy the Maine Times. Bob Gerber grew up on Peaks Island and in Freeport. Now retired, he was a consulting environmental engineer and geologist, specializing in complex groundwater, riverine, and wave modeling. He spent his first 20 years of summer after college sailing the Maine coast. He and his wife built a summer house on a small island in Penobscot Bay which they shared for 20 years, then he moved his summer residence to Isle au Haut. He now owns homes in Cape Elizabeth and Eagles Mere, Penn.

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Quartermaster Seaman Niamh Foley, from Montville, Maine, folds an American flag aboard amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli (LHA 7), April 18, 2022. Tripoli is underway conducting routine operations in U.S. 3rd Fleet. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Christopher Sypert)

Ticks surviving cold, UMaine research finds

Leaf litter insulation, other factors studied WINTER COLD may not be what’s keeping ticks from spreading north in Maine, a new University of Maine study finds. The research shows that blacklegged tick nymphs are able to survive inhospitably cold winter temperatures with insulation from leaf litter and snowpack, which may lead to an expansion of their range into Northern Maine as climate change leads to warmer and wetter winters. In the past few decades, ticks have expanded in both population size and range throughout the state of Maine. Nymphal and adult blacklegged ticks are of particular public health significance as they transmit a diverse array of pathogens, including the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. Northern Maine has been considered a safe haven, though, with low tick population density compared to other parts of the state. Previously, scientists assumed that this is due to the freezing winter temperatures in northern areas of the state. As climate change brings warmer winters to northern Maine, it has also brought anxiety about whether ticks will soon settle there and cause the myriad public health concerns that they have in other parts of the state. “Conventional wisdom is that cold winter temperatures kill ticks, but this rarely has been tested experimentally in the field,” says Allison Gardner, assistant professor of arthropod vector biology and co-author of the study, published in the journal Ticks and Tick-borne Diseases. “We designed our study to test the hypothesis that insulation protects ticks from the most extreme ambient temperatures, “ she said, “potentially enabling blacklegged ticks to survive even in the coldest parts of the state.” A team of researchers from the University of Maine School of Biology and Ecology, the University of Maine at Presque Isle, and the Vector-Borne Disease Laboratory at Maine Medical Center Research Institute set out to see whether the cold was to blame for the

current low concentration of blacklegged ticks in northern Maine. The researchers established enclosures from one-gallon plastic buckets containing blacklegged tick nymphs at four sites across Maine that were chosen to span the state’s full temperature and snowfall gradients: Cape Elizabeth, Orono, Brownville, and Presque Isle. From 2018–20, the scientists observed whether the tick nymphs were able to survive the winter, ensuring that some of the subjects’ enclosures were covered in snow or leaf litter as they often are in the wild while others were cleared. The results showed that overwinter survival was consistent across the sites—even in Northern Maine. Snow and leaf litter cover contributed significantly to the overwinter survival at sites in both southern and northern Maine. In 2019, the scientists also collected host-seeking blacklegged ticks at seven sites across Maine to compare their experimental results to real-world conditions. They found higher densities of blacklegged ticks in coastal and southern Maine than inland central Maine—and, perhaps most importantly, no blacklegged ticks in inland Northern Maine. “The findings of this study suggest that the impact of low temperatures on overwinter survival may not be the single factor limiting blacklegged tick populations in northern Maine,” Gardner says. “While climate change likely has some role in the geographic range expansion of ticks in the state, the ecological mechanisms limiting the spread of the blacklegged tick likely are very complex.” On a small scale, manipulating the availability of insulation at different sites, though—for example, reducing leaf litter or snow cover through the fall and winter—could help manage tick populations in Maine. However, as climate change is expected to both increase northern winter temperatures and precipitation in the northeastern U.S., the future of blacklegged tick populations in the region will have to be even more closely tracked.

The Working Waterfront . september 2022

Saltwater Cure

A sense of place

Band tour offers insight into community pride By Courtney Naliboff FOR THE SECOND half of July, I, a 41-year-old woman, mother, and teacher, went on tour with my band. Bait Bag, which I’ve written about before, is comprised of me (bass and vocals), Fiona Robins (guitar and vocals), and Claire Donnelly, formerly of the Island Institute (drums and shouting). We’ve been together for four years and have put out a handful of EPs and singles, but released our first fulllength album this summer, and hit the road to support it. We mostly self-booked, with some help and connections from friends, and while we played in Boston, Portland, and New York City, the majority of our 11 shows were in somewhat less cosmopolitan locales. Since our tour was devoid of press junkets and television appearances, we found that once we arrived at our next stop, we often had a lot of free time to fill. We also traveled through the bulk

of a really nasty heat wave. So the only logical course of action was to ask our contact in each town where the best place to swim would be. Guided by local knowledge, we found ourselves at Split Rock, in New Paltz, N.Y., featuring cool water, beautiful rock formations, a natural slipand-slide, and a huge water snake. We found the Gorge, in Troy, N.Y., with laddered pools and waterfalls, blasting dub-step music, and a very large and well-camouflaged snapping turtle. We spent hours in the Deerfield River, near Greenfield, Mass., replenishing with maple creemees at a farm sweet shop afterwards. We decompressed with a starry night swim in Stone Pond after our only truly unpleasant show, in Keene, N.H., and chased baby trout at Swiftwater Bridge outside of Littleton, N.H. With each swimming hole recommendation, we started to develop a sense of place. This is a quiet spot, with paddleboards and kayaks slipping by. Or here’s where the teenagers go

to hurl themselves off high rocks into the water. A family is here, complete with their grill and hot dogs and giant inflatable raft. More surprisingly, we started to understand the uniqueness of each town as its own entity. Here’s where to eat. Here’s where to take a walk. The sense of pride we felt in the people sharing their favorite things about their town, why they choose to stay there, what it has to offer. We felt this in the cities, too, even when we were the ones with the sense of familiarity. Here’s where I ate as a college student in Providence. This restaurant in Manhattan was recommended by a friend ten years ago, and I try to eat there whenever I come to the city. Here’s where my bandmates and I ate in 2003 because it was cheap, vegan, and across the street from the venue in Allston, one of the few still standing in a city that used to be replete with bars hosting local musicians. In New Haven, we got more recommendations

for pizza places than we could count, each one coming with a brisk defense of the pizza, the service, the hours, and whether they offered slices or just a full tomato pie. As I write, it’s the last day of tour. We’ve played ten shows, sold a good number of shirts and cassettes, replaced the brakes on Claire’s car, gone swimming most days, and gotten commemorative tattoos (my first!). We’ll take with us a sense of each place we’ve played, and a deep curiosity about those other thousands of towns we haven’t yet seen —as good an excuse as any to start planning next summer’s tour. Courtney Naliboff is a teacher who lives on North Haven. She may be reached at Courtney.Naliboff@gmail.com.

Journal of an Island Kitchen

Farming from the porch The view is a kind of ‘deep reality’ By Sandy Oliver TAKE A BUCKET of shell peas you’ve just picked and a basket to heave the pods into, and a bowl to collect the little green wonders, then go sit on the porch where it is cool and shady and shell them all out, eating some as a snack, and anticipating simmered peas with butter, salt, and pepper. It might be that at supper time, you’ll take the peas on your plate back to the porch to eat them, because in summer the porch, besides being a kind of kitchen annex, is also a bit of dining room, a place to have drinks with friends, and a nature observatory, too. The porch is a good reason to grow shelling peas. The rise of snap peas, which are delightful in their own way, has overshadowed the pleasure of slowing down, sitting quietly out of the sun, and doing something useful. While some folks meditate, I shell peas, or pluck berries from stems, or hull strawberries, or snap green beans for freezing, and I do it on the porch while monarchs flutter and swoop among the milk weeds in the front and side yards, making visible unfelt drafts of air. It’s a blessing to have milkweed which doesn’t grow just anywhere; it likes certain soils, and we have its favorite kind, thank goodness. The blackberries also like it, and a huge

patch has grown up in front of the another biennial—one of the very house shielding the porch from the common early yellow ones with pink road, and making a kind of privacy freckles—shows fruit this year. For now the porch, whose roof is held screen. This is its third summer and lots of berries have set; if they ripen up with Italianate-style square posts and the birds don’t get them all, we embellished with enough molding to might keep the patch which definitely keep them from being starkly plain, rerouted the deer who used to cross and whose ceiling is painted sky blue, the yard diagonally and take a nibble is lined with rocking chairs. I rescue chairs the way some from the cedar tree at people rescue dogs. the driveway’s edge, Reglued, reseated, before they crossed and painted back into over the road. usefulness by our From the porch I Meanwhile, beyond friend Cris, and intercan watch progress the porch, nature does spersed with small, on four apple trees. The old crab in front pretty much whatever randomly collected tables, the chairs is a biennial and this isn’t an apple year for she wants without me… give us a comfortable place to rest a while. it. Last year it yielded I stop for lunch basketsful of apples sitting on the porch. which in turn yielded Sometimes I take a chutney, jelly, and homemade pectin. I probably should quick snooze there. We put a cutting have pruned the Baldwin planted in board full of charcuterie on the ’91, which is setting a fair amount of little tables when friends come over fruit. I’ll refresh myself on apple-thin- for drinks in the late day. We eat supper with our plates on our laps. ning with a squint at YouTube videos. A Black Oxford, observable from the Meanwhile, beyond the porch, nature porch at the side of the house, gave me does pretty much whatever she wants sufficient fruit last year for a single-tree without me, and I’ve grown accuspie, its first, hugely thrilling. It, too, tomed to being ignored. During the first pandemic summer needs thinning, and this might be a two-pie year! On the very edge of the I alternated between the garden and cleared yard another very old apple, the porch. The vegetables I planted

didn’t know people were struggling to breathe in hospitals. Weeds sprouted and I was grateful to pull them up because at least I, not confined to a small apartment in some concrete canyon, could go outdoors to weed. So leaves sprouted, grass grew, flowers bloomed, insects buzzed, and birds scooted into trees and bushes to feed their young and the view from the porch never acknowledged the pain and chaos of the human world. While war rages and politics appalls, what I see from the porch is deep reality, one that that needs us to give up self-centered living. I pray it will outlast old mortal me. I keep wishing the actors in the weirdly disassociated world that comes through my cell phone could spend a few hours on my porch observing the persistence of a world of life outside of themselves, one that could care a fig about human self-importance. Sandy Oliver is a food historian who gardens, cooks, and writes on Islesboro. She may be reached at SandyOliver47@ gmail.com.

www.workingwaterfront.com . september 2022

Cranberry Report

Sorting out the meaning of summer Busy, yes, but making time for people is OK By Barbara Fernald IT’S THE MIDDLE of summer on Islesford and while COVID is not yet off our radar, the month of July has been bursting with activity. This hectic pace throws me off balance but there is something reassuring about how normal the discomfort feels. The islands are once again full of people coming and going. The weather has been glorious. Who wants to sit and write a column when the beach is calling and there’s family to visit and friends to see? I looked at past columns to recall what summers were like before I became a grandmother, before our high speed internet, before everyone had a smart phone, and before I owned a golf cart. Up came a story from nine years ago. Minus the changes in technology, I could have written this last week: “It’s an August phenomenon in the Cranberry Isles that you cannot travel on foot from point A to point B, without seeing at least three people you know with whom you’ve not had time to catch up. Either they are leaving soon, or you’re leaving soon, or

you’re both leaving soon, and this may be your only chance to see each other. “They may have an invitation for you, or you may have a message for them and neither of you has been home to check your answering machine. There is no cell coverage at your house and no internet service at their house so you miss making the modern connections with each other. You take the time to stop and visit. “One afternoon Bruce went for a walk while I stayed home to fix dinner. Two hours later he was not yet home so I figured he had run into someone he hadn’t seen for a while. I was almost right. He had been approached by a woman running down the street toward him asking, ‘Are you Mr. Fernald?’ “His answer was, ‘I’m one of them.’ “‘But are you this one?’ she questioned as she pulled from her bag a copy of Trevor Corson’s book, The Secret Life of Lobsters. “She and her husband had sailed across the Atlantic from Holland and were staying on their boat in the Islesford harbor. She was looking for Bruce to sign their copy of the book. Bruce and his new friends ended up

Tales of a schooner Readers respond to photo

IN OUR APRIL issue, we ran a photo of what appeared to be a crew member working on a schooner. Written across the image was “Swift’s Windjammer Cruises, Camden.” Reader Paul DeOrsay of Rockland wrote: “Looks like spring for Capt. Frank Swift’s Maine Windjammer Cruises fleet. A deckhand is painting the forestaysail club on the bow of the schooner Clinton, moored alongside the schooner Lois M. Candage in Camden harbor. No sails are yet bent on, and the anchors which held the schooners secure against winter storms have been weighed, but not catted. Sailing season approaches!” DeOrsay confessed that he volunteers at the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport and has been cataloging the Carroll Thayer Berry collection, “which includes thousands of images of Swift’s operation. Perhaps unfair advantage,” he wrote. Elizabeth Hutz of Kennett Square, Penn. and Kennebunk also wrote, and after speculating about the work being done, noted that the image, being close to square, was made with a “2 ¼ or larger format camera, so could not zero in on the subject. It is not a very good photo.” She also shared some personal history: “I was lucky enough to spend a week on the Mary Day under the auspices of Capt. Havilah Hawkins many years ago. I had the port bow berth, which was very tight! The starboard one was housed by a lady from California, who later moved to Maine with her (now deceased) husband.” The two stayed in touch for years, Hutz wrote. Thanks for reading and responding! —Tom Groening, editor The Working Waterfront welcomes letters to the editor. Please send them to editor Tom Groening at tgroening@islandinstitute.org with LTE in the subject line. Letters should be about 300 words and address issues that the newspaper covers. We also print longer opinion pieces, but please clear them first with the editor.

sharing stories over a few beers at the Islesford Dock Restaurant, an opportunity he would have missed if he hadn’t stopped to talk. “There are times when it’s necessary to get down the road without the interruption of a conversation. This is when having a car or truck comes in handy. You can nod and wave to your friends and get where you’re going in predictable time. A bicycle is the next best thing, allowing one to whiz by purposefully with just enough time to say an earnest, ‘Hey! Let’s catch up soon!’ “In the summer of 2006 I was baking and needed milk to complete the recipe. I had already seen all the people I cared to see for the day and I really couldn’t stand the thought of interrupting my solitude. Out of desperation, I got out a paper bag, cut holes for my eyes and my mouth and wore it. I rode my bike to the store and back in total anonymity and record time. I removed the bag while in the store and Soos exclaimed, ‘I really had no idea that was you!’ “I’m pleased to say I have not felt the need to use it since, but the idea lives on in my introvert tool box.”

How ordinary it feels to again be overwhelmed by summer and the bounty of people with whom I could interact. After two quiet summers there is something reassuring about my irritation with “too many people.” In a world that seems to be getting crazier by the minute, I take comfort in the familiar. I’ve been here before and I know how to deal with it. I’m going to remember my own advice from the last paragraph of that nine-year-old column: That summer, “I made an effort to allow extra time for people when I left my house. I still felt frazzled and overwhelmed on occasion, but I enjoyed my summer more than I have in a long time. It’s actually a lot more fun to laugh with a friend over the fact that it takes an hour and a half to get down the road, than it is to wear a bag over your head.” Barbara Fernald lives on Islesford (Little Cranberry Island). Our bet is that her bagover-the-head days may not be over. She may be reached at fernald244@gmail.com.

Letters to the Editor A new kind of reading

Politician says, does

To the editor: Writing has always interested me. Ever since I was five years old, strong opinions and emotions in books have made me want to do something. A book about a mermaid: go swimming! Harry Potter: make-up my own fantasy world! But not until pretty recently did I actually care about reading and learning about real events. It all started when my best friends and I started a newspaper which made me want to read more about real events. I started reading newspapers like The Courier Gazette, and The Working Waterfront. I started out by just reading “Saltwater Cure” by Courtney Naliboff, she being my neighbor and teacher. I liked to see her thoughts about our island community out in the world. It made North Haven seem less like an isolated paradise. Once, when I was flipping to “Saltwater Cure,” I got caught on a different story, “Music sounds the alarm” by Alice Cornwell. It was about the Halcyon string quartet performing “Rise Up,” a multi-media presentation about climate change in Midcoast Maine. The article started like this: “The seven North Haven students in combined grades 4, 5, and 6 carried in cushions and arranged them on the floor…” I was one of those fifth graders carrying in a cushion, expecting a boring presentation. I was also one of those fifth graders who walked out understanding that we have to take action to protect our home.

To the editor: In the June issue of The Working Waterfront letterwriter Bruce Fagley takes you to task for “publicizing misinformation” with regard to former President Trump’s stand on legal immigration. Blaming “the left-biased media everywhere” for portraying Trump as being anti-immigration when “the actual truth is that Trump and most conservatives are actually pro-immigration” and only against illegal immigration. The inconvenient truth is that “Trump entered the White House with the goal of reducing legal immigration by 63%,” according to the conservative think tank Cato Institute (founded in 1977 by Charles Koch), and by July 2020 was on track to reduce legal immigration by 49% by the time his four-year term was up. That’s on the record stated policy and easy to find actual results of that policy. Mr. Fagley continues that “you can find many times on record with Trump saying he supports legal immigration.” Perhaps he did say that, but the record proves otherwise, and Mr. Fagley ought to take notice. Mr. Fagley would do well to understand the difference between what a politician says and what he does, and get his own facts straight before criticizing what he read in The Working Waterfront. I am glad to hear that he “and most conservatives”—if not Mr. Trump—are in favor of legal immigration. It’s time to make that clear to recently immigrated Americans

Elsie Mann North Haven

Richard Mersereau Brunswick

The Working Waterfront . september 2022

Field Notes

Eastport, Lubec banking on the arts Passamaquoddy Bay communities seeing revival By Lisa Mossel AT THE END of June, I was lucky enough to visit Eastport and Lubec. I’ve been meaning to return since my first visit in 1996. Remembering hidden artist studios, downtown galleries, and a dynamic working waterfront drew me to plan a trip. As director of Archipelago, the Island Institute’s Rockland store and art gallery, visiting artists around the state is a welcome focus. This was my first overnight trip since fall of 2019. Eastport was putting on its red, white, and blues in preparation for July 4th weekend when I arrived. A large flag was being installed down by the dock. I met up with Alex Zipparo, a community development officer for the Island Institute, and we began our tour. Eastport has the usual assets of a small town, including a diner, pub, hardware store, and people who offer friendly greetings on the street, but it also boasts of art galleries, art apprentice studios, gift shops, and not a chain store in sight. We met downtown shop owners who shared their deep knowledge of the 1937 Quoddy Tidal Power Project, planned to harness the great tides for generating

electricity. We enjoyed fulfilling meals, quietly awaking from winter as shops chats with waiters, and morning views and restaurants were being spruced up for summer, the library was having from our motel over Cobscook Bay. Eastport Arts Center anchors the a book sale, and lunch was a bit hard area’s cultural events with a gallery to find. The working waterfront with its red lobster boats and space, summer concert navy waters is a stunning series, theatre and film spot for a bite to eat. events, as well as educaThe arts are On the way out of tional and community Lubec to Quoddy Head outreach programs. The woven into the State Park, don’t miss EAC rocks its mission “to fabric of these Crow Town Gallery, the stimulate and nurture an working studio and gallery appreciation of the visual communities of Shanna Wheelock. She and performing arts and alongside was crafting bowls when the creative process, and their working we visited; the gallery also to provide a home and an exhibits a dozen other environment within the waterfronts well-known artists and community where they crafters. It’s a beautiful can prosper.” Eastport is and surprising mix of blessed by this commutextures and subject matter that engaged nity center. The Tides Institute and Museum our attention. At a visit with artist Laura Pierce of Art is investing in reviving downtown buildings and infrastructure, of Iris Designs jewelry in Whiting, I an approach supported by ArtPlace reflected on how the arts are woven into America funding which aims to posi- the fabric of these communities alongtion arts and culture as a core sector side their working waterfronts. From of equitable community planning and my trip in 1996 to now it continues development. I can’t wait to see how it to be clear that working waterfronts, natural resources, and creative busishapes Eastport down the road. Lubec, linked by the FDR Memorial nesses work together to make these Bridge to Campobello Island, was areas special destination places.

In the summer it’s clear that creative entities can drive local economies which is sure visible in Eastport and Lubec. In Archipelago, we feature over 300 artists from around the state. I wish I could be on the road more discovering more and providing resources to help them succeed. As part of our business resilience team at the Island Institute, Alex and I are making more plans to learn what artists need. The arts and culture sector contributes $1.55 billion to Maine’s economy, or 2.5% of GDP. Those figures don’t include self-employed artists or makers or part-timers; imagine how much greater it actually is. Where are you heading this summer? What studios, craft fairs, shops with local artists and makers can you find on your trip? Maine’s artists and makers would love to see you. Lisa Mossel is director of Archipelago, the Island Institute store and gallery. She may be reached at: lmossel@islandinstitute.org.

Fathoming

Reviving lobster pounds as oyster farms Bremen’s Community Shellfish shows way forward By Ruby Krasnow FEW PLACES exemplify the resilient and sustainable coastal communities than the aptly named Community Shellfish in Bremen. The seafood distributor connects local independent fishermen to a wider market hungry for highquality lobsters, clams, and oysters. The harbor, fueling station, and fully equipped dock at Community Shellfish’s facility on the Medomak River support over 50 small-scale lobstermen, providing waterfront access and infrastructure to sustain Maine’s marine economy. The facility is centered around two lobster pounds, enclosed areas that were used for decades to store lobsters to manage seasonal market fluctuations. With changes in both the climate and lobster supply chain technology, most of Maine’s lobster pounds fell into disuse. However, Community Shellfish has preserved these structures by repurposing them for oyster aquaculture, an industry undergoing rapid expansion as demand grows for Maine’s high-quality shellfish.

With help from the Maine Aquaculture Association, Maine Sea Grant, and the Maine Aquaculture Innovation Center, initiatives like the Maine Oyster Trail highlight local businesses and attract tourists to coastal farms across the state. In 2017, funding from the Island Institute helped Community Shellfish restore the pier and purchase equipment to begin cultivating oysters in the previously-vacant Bremen lobster pounds. The potential benefit of an oyster farm was clear from the beginning: aquaculture is a powerful tool to diversify revenue sources for fishing communities and increase resilience to social or environmental disruptions. Oyster aquaculture is an especially promising climate solution. The filterfeeding bivalves improve water quality by removing pollutants and pathogens while oyster “gear” (the cages and bags used to hold oysters as they grow) provides habitat for marine organisms and helps restore aquatic ecosystems. Research has found that oyster aquaculture is more environmentally friendly than other forms of aquaculture. Oyster farms that use floating gear

located close to shore mean low overall fuel usage (like Community Shellfish). Preserving working waterfront, supporting local fishermen, increasing climate resiliency, and restoring ecosystems: if the story ended here, Community Shellfish’s decision to repurpose lobster pounds for oyster aquaculture would already be a resounding success. However, a unique collaboration with the University of Maine’s nearby Darling Marine Center has also made the Bremen docks a place for scientific innovation and career development. Led by Cassandra Leeman, students at the center studied the “socio-environmental advantages” of repurposing lobster pounds for oyster aquaculture. Following the publication of their work in the internationally esteemed journal Aquaculture, and additional research by the Downeast Institute in Beals, several more Maine lobster pounds have been converted into successful oyster farms. Scientific discovery continues to take place at Community Shellfish. Farm manager Robert Cuddy, a graduate student at the Darling Center, uses an experimental approach to identify

which procedures will work best for Community Shellfish’s unique location while conducting research on oyster feeding characteristics that will benefit the industry as a whole. If you wander down Cora Cressy Road on a summer morning, you might see me taking a break from recording the shell dimensions of thousands of oysters to chat with one of the lobstermen associated with Community Shellfish since its early days as a fishing cooperative. The people you’ll find at Community Shellfish are working together to help Maine’s coastal economy, united by shared interests to make Community Shellfish just that—a community. Raised in Alabama, Ruby Krasnow is a biology major at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. She spent the summer studying sustainable aquaculture at the University of Maine’s Aquaculture Research Institute and plans on making Maine her home after finishing her education.

www.workingwaterfront.com . september 2022

In Plain Sight

Harvesting the ‘fish that feeds all’ Image captures changing technology By Kevin Johnson IN THIS MONTH’S image, Harlan Hurd sits in his dory wearing a ball cap and a heavy flannel jacket which is covered in fish scales. His son, Karl, stands at the other end of the dory wearing a jeff cap and an apron over his own flannel coat. They watch as a bailing net filled with Atlantic herring is raised out of their purse seine in the Wadsworth weir in Rockport Harbor, circa 1949. Native Americans called herring the “fish that feeds all.” Hurd was one of the last local fishermen to use weirs rather than more mechanized forms of fishing like the trawl nets that decimated the herring population. It was not long after this photo was taken that herring carriers started to use pumps which could suction herring out of a weir or seine and dump the catch into the hold of the carrier, saving hours of work. Harlan Hurd died on Christmas Day in 1981 at the age of 90. His son Karl died in 2021 at the age of 94. They are both buried in Ash Point Cemetery near Owls Head. The photo was taken by Rockport artist and photographer Carroll Thayer Berry. Using a medium format camera, he carefully composed the scene, using the square shape to neatly frame all the components. While Berry is more known for his wood block prints, he was

also an avid photographer and member of the Knox County Camera Club. Rockport Harbor was one of his favorite places to photograph, and he made thousands of photographs there. Berry was a founding member of Maine Coast Artists, now Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and worked with photographers Kosti Ruohomaa and Jim Moore to publish Maine Coastal Portrait in 1959. He donated his photographs and negatives to the Penobscot Marine Museum in 1977. He died at the age of 90 in Rockport in 1978. The Penobscot Marine Museum on Route 1 in Searsport has 500,000-plus historic images in its photography archive. Composed of scores of individual collections, it’s the largest in Maine. The content ranges from late-19th century cyanotypes of the Boxer Rebellion in China to the launching of new lobster boats in tiny harbors on the Maine coast. The archive documents decades of progress in fishing technology that depleted the fish stocks of New England. The photos make connections: logging camps to lumber schooners on the coast; Maine shipyards to views of a crowded Hong Kong harbor; farming to the ice shipping industry that required hay for insulation; and fishing nets teeming with herring to the 2010 closing of the last sardine cannery in the U.S. The

A photograph composed and made by Carroll Thayer Berry shows a soon-to-vanish method of herring harvesting. PHOTO: PENOBSCOT MARINE MUSEUM

power of the images is enormous. They teach, inspire, infuriate, and amuse. The Penobscot Marine Museum is open daily through Oct. 16. The Stephen Phillips Memorial Library at the museum offers an overview of the major photography collections and

photographers. A large digital display features a slideshow showing highlights from the archive. On weekdays, visitors are welcomed into the photo archives where there are additional displays, and they can observe and interact with staff and volunteers.

Observer

Janet Mills, my singing partner Governor has reversed mistakes of the past By Phil Crossman GOV. JANET MILLS can sing. I don’t mean to imply that simply because she can sing, she should be re-elected and neither do I mean to suggest that the ability to carry a tune be a prerequisite for holding office. However, she can sing, does so enthusiastically and I have found, since once finding myself momentarily in her company enjoying a few impulsive and melodic moments as we rendered “Ain’t Misbehavin’”, that the same joyous and unbridled enthusiasm is manifest in nearly everything she does and has done as governor of the great state of Maine. Former Gov. Paul LePage’s life story is one of truly extraordinary achievement in the face of daunting obstacles. Unfortunately, although certainly understandably, those achievements came with baggage. That baggage, while finding comradery with some of Maine’s voters— as crass behavior and language becomes sadly fashionable—did not serve Maine well during the chaotic years he was our chief executive. And it lingers.

In February of 2016 LePage denounced candidate Trump. A week later he endorsed him and then he spent $22,000 of our tax dollars on accommodations at a Trump hotel, all while railing against wasteful spending. Such indecisiveness and conflict were a real concern. He found fault with Obama’s presidency but rather than—or perhaps because he couldn’t—give voice to the particulars of those concerns, chose instead to tell our president to kiss his ass—much easier than trying to present a coherent argument—effectively casting Maine as the crude and uncultured relative in our family of states. Our governor, any governor, is obligated, as provided by the construct of our democracy, to give serious consideration to bills offered by the legislature for his signature and, of course the opposite is true. In the last 100 years Maine governors have found reason, after careful deliberation, thoughtful consideration of the positive or negative impact on Maine citizens, and after accounting for their own, perhaps adverse, political persuasions, to veto

469 such bills, an average of 15 vetoes per term. LePage vetoed 642 bills in his term as governor, not after careful consideration of the pros and cons, not after pondering the effect on Maine citizens but in angry and resentful retribution for one after another perceived slight or offense or simple disagreement. One of those vetoed required that childcare workers undergo a background check. In 2015, after House Speaker Mark Eves disagreed with LePage on a particular issue, LePage threatened to withhold funding for Good-Will Hinkley, a charitable organization for at-risk youths, unless they fired Eves who’d just been chosen as its president. During his administration, LePage had several extended meetings with the sovereign citizen movement, a fringe organization that asserts that the U.S. dollar is not legal tender, Maine courts are illegitimate, citizens need not obey the law, and that then-Senate President Alfond and House Speaker Mark Eves and others were guilty of treason and should be executed. In 2017 a majority of Maine voters passed a referendum expanding Maine’s

Medicaid program, but LePage refused to sign it and that program, one that ultimately benefited thousands of deserving and long-expectant Mainers, was not signed into law until Mills took office. Mills has taken the issue of climate change and our depreciating environment as seriously as any and has taken decisive action to achieve a carbon neutral Maine by 2045, far more ambitious that nearly any other U.S. governor and certainly more so than the federal government. LePage characterized concerns about climate change and our infested atmosphere as foolishness. I suppose LePage might sing Ain’t Misbehavin’ as well, but not convincingly, not here in Maine where he used to live and not in Florida where he moved to avoid paying Maine taxes. Phil Crossman lives on Vinalhaven where he serves on the town select board. He may be reached at philcrossman.vh@gmail.com.

The Working Waterfront . september 2022

Art of the Waterfront

Tina Ingraham paints the Custom House Wharf Fixed architecture evolves with light and waterfront work By Carl Little

different places, the docks moved around, changing tides in the morning and afternoon light.” Such alterFOR THE WATERCOLOR class she taught in the ations have kept her engaged. In Harbor Fish Market, Portland Pier, 2005, shadows continuing studies program at the Portland School of Art in 1987, painter Marsha Donahue took her play across the running façade. The humble sunlit strucstudents to the Custom House Wharf, a venerable part tures come alive through Ingraham’s lively brushwork. While she takes great care in drawing the architecture of the city’s working waterfront. “Because I had never seen it before, hidden amidst the Portland buildings,” in perspective, she notes idiosyncrasies in the windows’ Tina Ingraham recalls, “it felt like I had walked into a lineup. She works with high contrasts, “keeping the darks under the dock transparent, so one can different world.” Ingraham fell in love see into the depths under it,” and uses with the place and has now painted layered pentimenti of transparent it many times—more than any other oil washes over an egg-oil emulsion subject in her repertoire. The humble sunlit grisaille to get the right atmospheric Ingraham began her long-time light. Her palette includes Flake White, romance with the wharf in 2004 structures come Cadmium Yellow Medium, Cobalt or when she returned from living and alive through Ultramarine Blue, Raw Umber, Raw painting in Italy for several years. She Sienna, and Ivory Black. had remembered her 1987 watercolor Ingraham’s lively Part of the attraction of the subject painting experience and when she brushwork. lies in Ingraham’s love of fishing. was invited to paint for the biennial “While painting I witnessed the Portland Show at Greenhut Galleries, working aspects of the industry,” she returned to the pier. she notes. She watched the lobster The facade of the south side of catchers come and go, the busy fishthe Harbor Fish Market reminded Ingraham of the Italian architecture she had seen in mongers, with “the salt smell in the air, the gull cries, Perugia dating back to Etruscan times, “historical struc- street people and tourists.” Ingraham has never actually met the fish market tures built upon, not destroyed for something new.” She folks, although she has waved to them. ended up painting several small oils. “I was always intent on my drill, and at the end of Although the wharf is very old and worn, Ingraham notes, every season reveals changes: “a new facade, a the day, exhausted, it never occurred to me to search new paint job, new clapboards, the lobster traps in anyone out.”

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Tina Ingraham’s Harbor Fish Market, Portland Pier, 2005, oil on canvas, 30 x 74 inches. PHOTO: DENNIS GRIGGS

The only people Ingraham consistently encountered were the homeless. “We’d chat briefly. They were kind and very interested in my work.” She tells a story of leaving her painting gear on the pier one day. The next morning an elderly poorly dressed man approached her and guided her to her easel; he had found it and put it in a safe place for her. He said he hoped that she didn’t mind but he had borrowed her paper towels. “His thoughtfulness humbled me.” Ingraham first came to Maine in 1969 to fish. She and her former husband spent time on Lake Sysladobsis in Washington County. Later they moved to the Philippines where they were stationed

at Subic Bay Naval Base for two years during the Vietnam War. In 1977 the couple decided to move to Maine based on their camping, fishing, and vacation memories and a desire to raise their family there. Ingraham began watercolor painting: the barn, lodge, surrounding cabins, the sunrises and sunsets on the lake. These days, she works from her studio in Fort Andross in Brunswick. Asked if she will be painting the Harbor Fish Market again, Ingraham calls it a tough question to answer. She notes several challenges, including the difficulty of setting up in what is a highly congested area. She also wonders what more she can bring to the subject matter that is hers and not repetition.

In November 2021 several news outlets, including the Portland Press Herald, reported that the owners of the Custom House Wharf had found a buyer for their property. Whatever becomes of this iconic place, we will have Tina Ingraham’s paintings to remind us of its complex beauty. You can see more of Ingraham’s renderings of the Harbor Fish Market and watch a demonstration of her painting process on her website www. tinaingraham.com. She is represented by Greenhut Galleries in Portland and the Somerville Manning Gallery in Greenville, Delaware. Carl Little latest book is Mary Alice Treworgy: A Maine Painter.

The Working Waterfront . september 2022

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