The Edge of Maine

by Geoffrey Wolff

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Geoffrey Wolff is the author of the acclaimed biographies Black Sun, The Duke of Deception, and The Art of Burning Bridges. His novels include Providence and The Age of Consent. Currently he is the director of the graduate fiction program at the University of California at Irvine and splits his time between Los Angeles, California, and Maine.

  OTHER TITLES IN THE SERIES

  JAN MORRIS A Writer’s House in Wales

  OLIVER SACKS Oaxaca Journal

  W. S. MERWIN The Mays of Ventadorn

  WILLIAM KITTREDGE Southwestern Homelands

  DAVID MAMET South of the Northeast Kingdom

  GARRY WILLS Mr. Jefferson’s University

  A. M. HOMES Los Angeles: People, Places, and the Castle on the Hill

  JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN The Island: Martinique

  FRANCINE PROSE Sicilian Odyssey

  SUSANNA MOORE I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawai‘i

  LOUISE ERDRICH Book and Islands in Ojibwe Country

  KATHRYN HARRISON The Road to Santiago

  ARIEL DORFMAN Desert Memories: Journeys Through the Chilean North

  BARRY UNSWORTH Crete

  HOWARD NORMAN My Famous Evening: Nova Scotia Sojourns, Diaries & Preoccupations

  ROBERT HUGHES Barcelona: The Great Enchantress

  ANNA QUINDLEN Imagined London: A Tour of the World’s Greatest Fictional City

  JAMAICA KINCAID Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya

  DIANE JOHNSON Into a Paris Quartier: Reine Margot’s Chapel and Other Haunts of St.-Germain

  UPCOMING AUTHORS

  JON LEE ANDERSON on Andalucia

  WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON on Western Ireland

  NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC DIRECTIONS

  Featuring works by some of the world’s most prominent and highly regarded literary figures, National Geographic Directions captures the spirit of travel and of place for which National Geographic is renowned, bringing fresh perspective and renewed excitement to the art of travel writing.

  * Samuel Eliot Morison’s European Discovery of America: the Northern Voyages has a learned and charming account of Norumbega.

  * The illusory “Paul,” cobbled together from ones and zeroes, sounded like a Swede. Swedes objected, scoffed that he sounded like a Norwegian. Norwegians said he sounded like a guy from Minnesota. He was replaced by “Donna” and “Craig.” Donna sounds way cooler than Craig, who seems to hail from Allentown, Pennsylvania.

  * “Fog Kills Songbirds in Bay of Fundy,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recently reported. Fishermen tell of sea birds falling onto their decks from the sky; the birds—lost in fog—become wet and heavy, too cold and miserable to fly.

  *The feuds between residents of Ragge
d Island and Matinicus are exacerbated by a natural hostility given their proximity. Perhaps owing to the superior endurance of Matinicus as a year-round community, its citizens have been known to look down on their neighbors as self-destructive. In Islands of the Mid-Maine Coast, Charles and Carol McLane tell of a summer visitor on Matinicus who, “hearing gunfire one day on Criehaven, asked a [Matinicus native] what they were shooting over there and received the laconic reply, ‘Each other.’”

  * People in Maine who fish—according to as celebrated and reliable an authority as Linda Greenlaw—refer to themselves, whichever their gender, as “fishermen” and “lobstermen.”

  * A more welcoming warning on a public dinghy float nearby on Penobscot Bay reads BIRTHING LIMITED TO ONE HOUR.

  * I have modernized perplexing spelling, but left diction and syntax as composed.

  * The “comeoverers,” as they’re sometimes named, were a mixed lot. A principal sponsor of Popham’s venture was his brother, Sir John, a member of Parliament and Lord Chief Justice, an avid advocate of deportation to rid Britain of rogues and vagabonds. Among these were those skilled enough as artisans and craftsmen to build a nice little ship.

  * Richard Mather was the father of Increase and grandfather of Cotton. “But lest we should grow secure and neglect ye Lord through abundance of prosperity, our wise and loving God was pleased on Monday morning [August 3rd] … to exercise us with a sore storm and tempest of wind … and our seamen were forced to let down all ye sails, and ye ship was so tossed with fearful mountains and valleys of water, as if we should have been overwhelmed & swallowed up. But ye lasted not long, for at our poor prayers, ye Lord was pleased to magnify his mercy in assuaging ye wind & seas again about sun rising….” As the Book warns, what He giveth on Monday He also taketh away a week from Saturday.

  * Sir Ferdinando Gorges was the flamboyant chief among the self-styled “Gentlemen Adventurers” who prompted and invested in the principal explorations of the Maine coast during the early seventeenth century. He had been taken prisoner during the Battle of the Spanish Armada at the age of twenty-one; a year later he distinguished himself with his sword-handling during the siege of Rouen and was knighted there at twenty-three. Having largely financed Fort St. George, he had a dyspeptic opinion of his business colleague: Raleigh Gilbert, Gorges wrote, lived loosely, was “desirous of supremacy in rule, prompt to sensuality, with little zeal in religion, humorous, headstrong, and of small judgement.” Gilbert was in his mid-twenties in 1607, and believed by at least one historian to have high-hatted the elder and bureaucratically superior George Popham. Archaeological explorations of the Popham Colony site have revealed the rubble of Gilbert’s expensive taste: shards of liquor bottles, pieces of a Venetian wine glass, and buttons from a luxurious waistcoat. For his part, the censorious Sir Ferdinando’s fingers remained in many an American pie: In 1635 he had boarded the Angel Gabriel at Bristol to bid farewell to crew and passengers. He was not a good-luck charm.

  * James Davies witnessed this occasion: “There came two canoes to the fort, in which were Nahanada and his wife, and Skidwares [familiar with English church custom: see account below of his kidnap and removal to London], and the Basshabes brother, and one other called Amenquin, a sagamore; all whom the president [George Popham] feasted and entertained with all kindness, both that day and the next, which being Sunday, the president carried them with him to the place of public prayers, which they were at both morning and evening, attending with great reverence and silence.”

  * Three years earlier, during an exploration of Muscongus Bay, just east of Pemaquid, George Waymouth and his crew aboard Archangel had cunningly abused the natives’ hospitality; after trading trinkets for otter, beaver, and marten skins, they hoodwinked them with a spurious display of magic, using a magnetic rock—used to remagnetize the Archangel’s compass—to cause a knife to spin and a magnetized sword blade to lift a stitching needle. This they did to awe the Abnaki, so that they might “love and fear us,” as James Rosier confessed to his diary. On the pretext of delivering some celebrated English cooking as a gift, Waymouth’s crew rendezvoused with a small party of Indians on the beach at Allen Island, where they grabbed by their long hair (the Abnaki warriors were naked) and kidnapped five “savages,” to be carried to England to edify and amuse society. From the point of view of Rosier, these exotic fellows “never seemed discontented with us, but very tractable, loving and willing.” They learned English, enabling them to explain to their credulous hosts how Abnaki made cream and butter by milking deer and reindeer, evidently keeping straight faces during the lecture. A principal Abnaki spirit, feared and revered for his shrewdness, was named Gluskap. The name, as Neil Rolde notes, means in our language “Liar.” Four of the captives were returned to Maine, owing to their utility as guides and translators.

  * Some few mythologizing amateur archaeologists are derided by their sober peers for having suggested that rune stones near Popham Beach, and elsewhere in Maine, might bear the marks of a visit by Leif Eriksson’s crew as early as 1114. In The Story of Mount Desert Island, Samuel Eliot Morison notes that the credulous continue to hunt for Norse treasure with Geiger counters, “which will give them plenty of exercise and do no harm.”

  * The Abnaki, which means “whitening sky at daybreak,” is a confederacy of tribes, including Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Norridgewock, and Malecite.

  * Local natives, having bought the novel merchandise, left it in the sun to show it off to jealous neighbors, and demanded a full refund when the inevitable occurred. Still, the English in India quickly took to ice, and to the Baldwin apples shipped from Boston buried in the refrigerated holds. Ice became the foundation of the lively New England–India trade, a trade so valued (note the ubiquity of India Street and India Wharf in local seaports) that Samuel Eliot Morison reports that “it used to be said of a pretty, well-bred girl, ‘She’s good enough to marry an East-India Cap’n.’”

  * When the ice broke up in the spring, ships and barges came alongside the icehouses to load up. Longshoremen set a record loading four hundred tons in a single day. On another day in midsummer of 1880 an observer counted 113 schooners loading ice north of Bath.

  * Corrupt manipulation of the source and cost of ice aped the machinations of John D. Rockefeller, the robber baron of Standard Oil. Bath’s own Charles Morse merged Knickerbocker Ice Company into Consolidated Ice, and Consolidated into the American Ice Company. The mergers in New York were strong-armed by Tammany Hall goons, who vandalized the property and persons of those in the ice business reluctant to be bought out cheap. With a monopoly from Boston to Baltimore, Morse promoted a capitalization of his company at sixty million dollars in 1899. The stock was ludicrously overpriced, even allowing for the revenues to be extorted when the Ice King hiked the price of one hundred pounds of ice from twenty-five to sixty cents less than twenty-four hours after cornering the market in April 1900. He achieved this audacious scandal by bribing Robert A. Van Wyck, the Tammany Hall mayor of New York, and the Tammany Hall dock commissioner, and the Tammany Hall boss (who bore the Dickensian name Richard Croker). The bribe took the form of a gift of many shares in the Ice Securities Corporation, a holding company, following a wintertime visit by the Tammany Hall boys to the icehouses along the Kennebec River as Morse’s guests. The New York World calculated that Mayor Van Wyck’s salary brought him $41.09 per day; his interest in American Ice earned $95 per day. William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal stoked the fire of scandal as only Hearst could, with daily applications of kindling, and the paper filed an injunction against Morse’s company on May 8, little more than a month following the price hike, “to relieve the poor and suffering from the soulless greed and grip of one of the meanest forms of monopoly.” With trust-busting Governor Teddy Roosevelt taking notice, the price eased. Morse’s next enterprise was the manipulation of coastal shipping. Finally he was himself shipped to Atlanta, to federal prison, convicted of financial irregularities.

  * Admiral Morison’
s Maritime History of Massachusetts notes that it was assumed that a crew member returning from Calcutta was wise to wear his shoes to bed: “Whoever left his boots outside his bunk (it is said) found nothing in the morning but the nails and the eyelets.”

  *Nearby is set a more minimalist plaque, noting: BURIAL PLACE OF FIVE DUTCH SEAMEN AND THREE FRENCH SOLDIERS KILLED DURING THE ENGAGEMENT AUGUST 10, 1674. A roadside marker in Bar Harbor declares, ON THIS SITE IN 1897 NOTHING HAPPENED. But the Bert ’n’ I silver cup for taciturnity goes to a hand-lettered roadside sign I saw east of Schoodic claiming: NOTHING HAPPENED AROUND HERE. EVER. Honorary mention surely is due the American Legion’s Smith Tobey Post in Bath, whose front-lawn sign—the kind found in front of churches, quoting scripture, and announcing next Sunday’s sermon—asked the runic question: IF A MAN ALONE AT SEA SPEAKS WHILE HIS WIFE IS ASHORE, IS HE STILL WRONG?

  * On the op-ed page of the New York Times of November 20, 2004, the president of the Trust for Public Land, a national conservation organization, notes that unremarked among postmortems of the Bush-Kerry contest was the triumph among voters of all parties of ballot measures calling for taxpayers to spend their money buying local land in order to conserve it. “Of 161 conservation ballot measures, 120—or 75 percent—were approved.” (Will Rogers, p. A31)