Flashes of Panic

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been reading Colin Woodard’s The Lobster Coast, another birthday present from the aunt who has been directing my non-technical reading for several years now.

Woodard starts out looking like he’s writing an ethnography of lobstermen, but he’s not; the territory has been covered before, and well, he says, citing examples. Instead, he provides a survey history of the development of the Maine coast, including the political machinations behind its sporadic waves of settlement in the 17th and 18th centuries and the struggles with the “Great Proprietors” in the years after the American Revolution, and how these factors combined to develop a state-wide distrust of anything and anyone “from away.” (Yes, we really do use that term.) As an example: one of the motivations behind Maine’s eventual secession from Massachusetts to become its own state was the behavior of the Boston merchant class in the War of 1812: while British troops occupied eastern Maine as far as the Penobscot River, calls to the Governor of Massachusetts for aid went unheard; in fact, the Governor was sending emissaries to the British garrison in Halifax asking if the British would offer military assistance to Massachusetts if they seceded from the Union! In the years after the war, this sort of behavior was the fuel for calls of separation which were eventually agreed to by Massachusetts (which thought it might have an easier time electing a government it liked if the “ornery” Maine voters had their own state.)

Woodard also presents an economic history of the coast, noting the poor farming conditions which led coast settlers to fishing for survival in the spectacular fisheries of the Gulf of Maine. He describes a cycle of exploitation where technology opened up new means of harvesting particular species which were then fished to near collapse, prompting the fishermen to move on to other species. He also provides some explanation for the lobster fishery, the one stock which has yet to collapse and, thanks to some awareness of the disasters which have met other species, may yet survive.

I was particularly interested in Woodard’s explanation of the Maine native’s mistrust of people “from away.” I inherited this mistrust myself (which can lead to interesting self-image situations considering that with my Massachusetts license plates, I myself am now “from away,”) but it’s always been something of a knee-jerk reaction. (My family has been in Maine for more generations than I can easily count, but we’ve largely been ship-builders, mill-owners, and traders, rather than fishermen and farmers; I can’t claim much kinship with the fishing community, though I went to school with them.)

Woodard isolates the issues, including income disparity (Maine, historically, has been among the poorest states in the country, seldom suffering much in economic depressions because their economy doesn’t have much room to go down,) and outsiders’ disregard of the existing community and its traditions. Waterfront property on the coast is vanishing, bought up by part-time residents who, in turn, have driven the price of the land up beyond what families who may have been on that land for generations can afford. Clammers and other “diggers” find themselves fenced off of water access they need to maintain their income by “No Trespassing” signs; Boothbay lobsterboats are operated by lobstermen who commute to the expensive harbor from as far up-state as Augusta, where they can afford housing. People are coming to Maine, in other words, looking for some kind of community and escape from the rush of the cities they left behind, but in the process they’re unconsciously destroying the very things they thought they were pursuing.

And it’s not even that simple; often the development that comes along is welcomed by the longtime residents, and it’s the recent transplants who are resisting it. Different people in my family have mentioned, at different times, how some transplants want to move to Maine, then freeze it the way it was when they first came and keep anyone else from coming in once they have their piece.

It’s a fairly depressing viewpoint, but one I’m hard put to argue with. Woodard has an article in the July issue of Down East Magazine detailing two such developments in my own home town, one of which bought out nearly all of one of the fishing villages that dot our peninsula and replacing it with polished new houses, most of which, one remaining resident notes, are “dark all winter.” What are the landowners supposed to do, though? Turn down good offers for land they may no longer be able to afford keeping?

My state is going somewhere, and like James Stevens, the Boothbay landowner quoted extensively in The Lobster Coast, I doubt that when I die, the state will be anything like the place where I grew up. I hope there’s a way to make it a place that’s still good to live.

Now Playing: Everytime from You Were Here by Sarah Harmer