The Edge of Maine

by Geoffrey Wolff

  North Haven lies across from Vinalhaven on Fox Islands Thorofare, with Eggemoggin Reach and Somes Sound one of the three most cherished cruising grounds in Maine. Because of its narrowness, with large land-masses on both sides, Fox Islands Thorofare is frequently fog-free while Penobscot Bay at either end of the seven-mile passage is socked in. Although Vinalhaven has its own millionaires’ row of waterfront cottages, North Haven is Nabob Central, determinedly unshowy in a Boston/Philadelphia Main Line manner. No fancy cars, and the yacht club, the North Haven Casino, is a good deal more serious about teaching kids to sail than about dancing to Lester Lanin. The Casino, ferry wharf, and grocery store are located on the Thorofare, across North Haven and southeast of Pulpit Harbor. But when the island began to thrive in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Pulpit Harbor was its commercial center, handy to a good supply of fresh water at Fresh Pond, with which it was connected by a millrace that powered sawmills and a gristmill. There was an active and aggressive fishing fleet, most notably of speedy mackerel schooners that expressed fresh fish to Boston’s Catholic immigrants in time for meatless Fridays. Several boatbuilding sheds serviced this fleet. Philip W. Conkling’s Islands in Time quotes a local historian on the industry and prosperity of Pulpit Harbor during the nineteenth century: “Around the Harbor there have been five stores, two fish processing plants, at least six wharves, three boat shops, a cooper shop, four mills, a church, a school, Union Hall, two post offices, and a cemetery.”

  In the late 1880s the mackerel fishery crashed, probably owing to overfishing. The locals began selling their land to those indestructibly rich families whose houses now look down on a harbor without a fish processing plant or gristmill or sawmill or school or—to be sure!—Union Hall. As Conkling writes, during the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries “the rusticators began transforming the harbor into a pastoral landscape by removing its working waterfront.” The icehouse was taken down, the fish house burned; the store was removed to Vinalhaven; the schoolhouse, built in 1867, was torn down in 1918, culminating “three decades of bad years for the North islanders, leaving a bitter legacy that reaches down to the present on the island…. I am aware of no other island where so much cultural history was removed—burned, demolished, and taken away—to re-create in its place a pastoral vision of a preindustrial coast.”

  The ospreys—blessings on them—held out. But what will happen to my coastal Maine—uneasily balanced between outsiders like myself and currently prosperous lobstermen—in the event of a crash of the lobster stock as cataclysmic as the mackerel dropout of the 1880s or the near extinction of the Maine cod fishery a hundred years later? After an up-and-down history of lobster catches, between the late 1940s and late 1980s the annual landing of lobsters stabilized between seventeen and twenty-five-million pounds. Then, suddenly, the harvest began to spike, increasing annually to its historic 2003 high of sixty-two-million pounds. Reasons for this phenomenon have been offered: Big cod, now gone, ate little lobsters. Sea urchins, prized by the Japanese and fished to near extinction, were no longer there to eat the kelp that lobsters use to hide from enemies. No one believed very avidly in these theories.

  Lobstermen, politicians, and scientists are in agreement that a precipitous tumble is coming; the only questions are when and how bad? If the 2005 catch was only half of the 2003 catch, it would still be almost twice the mean of the latter half of the twentieth century. James Wilson, a professor of marine sciences and resource economics at the University of Maine, estimates that the average value of the annual lobster take to each of Maine’s 6,500 fishermen is $100,000. To haul that many requires the interplay of two uncertain variables: stock and effort. The stock—at least above Cape Cod, below which shell disease has decimated the southern New England and Long Island Sound lobster fishery—is almost grotesquely abundant. By videotaping the Gulf of Maine’s bottom in the areas of dense lobster trap concentrations, scientists have learned that crowds of lobsters visit traps, eat bait, shelter themselves from predators, and leave, pretty much at will, to visit another trap. To be caught visiting is evidently a function of bad luck or overconfidence on the part of the lobster. And even if caught, odds are good that the unlucky crustacean will be returned to the sea, because it is too small or too large, or is a female bearing eggs or a female that once bore eggs and whose tail was notched by a previous lobsterman to protect it.

  Lobstermen for the most part have seemed responsive to scientists’ and resource planners’ anxieties. Inuits, centuries ago, honored during times of plenty their tribal historians’ warnings of coming dearth. These cycles of feast and famine were gradual enough in their playing out—perhaps a century and more—that it required faith for a tribe enjoying a bounty of blubber and seal-skins and polar bear hides to begin, at the height of the good times, to tighten their belts and save for the future. There are signs of a similar tribal anxiety along the Maine coast. Increasing their effort to catch more and more lobsters, fishermen are building bigger and faster lobster boats, equipped with more sophisticated bottom scanners, radar units, hauling mechanisms. Such a vessel might cost $250,000; given the current abundance, a fisherman with a license to set hundreds of traps might secure a generous loan—say, $220,000—at low interest rates. As long as the bonanza continued, bank and fishermen would be happy. In fact, fishermen—fearing the coming depression of stock—regularly pay up front cash for more than half the price of their equipment, buying themselves buffer from the repo men.

  Another hopeful component of the curious anxiety provoked by Maine’s overabundance has been increasing communication—and even trust—between lobstermen and marine scientists. It has not always been thus: James Wilson was chased off of Vinalhaven at gunpoint by some mean old cobs who didn’t want to hear his opinions. Years later, when I met him in 2005, Carl Wilson (James’s son), the lobster expert at Maine’s Department of Marine Resources in Boothbay Harbor, had just returned from a fruitful talk with the leaders of the Vinalhaven fleet. Uncertainty has yoked scientists and fishermen: Carl Wilson has said that “we definitely see a storm cloud on the horizon.” These fall-offs happen fast: “You watch a resource build for two decades, and then it just drops.”

  Why? Questions are being asked, the water temperature monitored, the Gulf of Maine’s currents charted, the water salinity measured, the origins of larval lobsters tracked, the practices of catchers and caught observed—all of this is being done, with patience and persistence. With frustration, too, because as James Wilson has testified: “We don’t have (and probably never will have) the scientific ability to know exactly the right thing to do.”

  THE VIEW FROM OUR DOCK

  Just because the kittens were born in the oven doesn’t make them biscuits.

  —DOWN EAST WISDOM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  A NOTE TO THE READER

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