10/22: All the Way East 3

Jude met Mary Peabody’s mother, June, in the checkout line at the Calais IGA today. She said we should be sure and see the Tides Institute in Eastport.

Back to Eastport via Baileyville/Woodland (home, you will remember, of Moe of Moe’s Barbe-cue) – a single pulp mill belching away, numerous deserted wood processing facilities, and little else of note, another small town on life-support – and Meddybemp (not much there there.) The Tides Institute turned out to be closed Tuesday.

Baileyville Idyll

Shackford Head State Park: Ernie followed along the mile-long trail out to a fine overlook, trotting along the path like a little dog. On the path we met Sandy who relocated from Lawrence, KS to Eastport via Johnson, VT last year and is finding it difficult to make a place for herself in the community, an odd mix of “artists” occupying pastel-colored storefronts on Water St. (the mixed blessing that is a routine part of the recovery of tired, rundown small towns everywhere) and the old-guard families and their ancient grudges, which go back many generations. Shackford Head looks over a large salmon farming operation in Broad Cove.

Salmon Farm, Eastport

You can see Lubec three or four miles across the water (nearly forty miles around the coast, though.) Washington County Technical College Boatbuilding Program (the oldest in the state) is in Deep Cove. The county had been nibbling away at the college, closing down one program after another for lack of funding, over a period of several years. The little college is still alive and breathing a little easier, though, after its very recent affiliation with Husson University. All the programs, including the systems curriculum, have been restored. A nice young man whose family has fished out of Harpswell for a couple generations gave me a tour. Wooden boat (traditional construction) is year 1, along with drafting/lofting/CAD; cold molding/fiberglass lay-up, diesel & hydraulics year 2. An ex-student of the program has bought the 1908 sardine carrier which has been resting comfortably in the yard across the street for many years, intending to restore it.

1908 Sardine Carrier, Eastport

10/21: All the Way East 2

Cobscook Bay, Pembroke: “reversing falls,” at the end of a long unmarked dirt road. Incoming tide, standing waves formed over a barely submerged ledge. Two draggers were working the quieter water upriver of the turbulence, and a small 22 foot skiff gleaning after the draggers: one guy on board, sorting and holding the boat in a back eddy alongside the 7 knot current, one guy below with scuba in water to about fifteen feet. Six or seven seals were fooling around in and under the foaming current. Stayed about three hours: Ernie’s first extended outing since leaving Suttons. Eastport (nap in late afternoon sun) just at dusk, then quick run to Calais for the night.

Ernie & Friend at Cobscook Bay

10/20: All the Way East 1

Lubec Morning

The harbor of Lubec is neat and the fleet prosperous-looking, yet nearly every storefront on the main street is deserted. McCurdy's Smokehouse sits in the middle, with a pair of terminally-cute hotel/restaurants at either end of the street for summer people passing through. A convenience store and hardware store sit diagonally across Main St. from one another, each with its own philosophical quorum.

Lubec Downtown

Blueberries are no longer processed in Washington Co, but shipped to Canada immediately after being raked. Mexican guest-workers are processing sea cucumbers, a hard and dirty job locals have little interest in, rather than raking blueberries. Draggers go out for ground fish and sea urchins inshore (for the Japanese market exclusively), scraping the bejesus out of the bottom in the process. Commercial mackerel herring smoking operations ceased in 1991 (a small remnant of what was once a thriving sardine fishery up and down the entire Maine coast) in the wake of FDA regulations requiring the fish to be gutted before being hung to be smoked.

West Quoddy Head and the lighthouse, the easternmost point of the continental U.S., is four miles or so south of town.

Quoddy Head Light

10/18: Sardines & Salt

The Giant Blueberry of Jonesboro

Today, a visit to the Main Coast Sardine History Museum in Jonesport, Ronnie & Mary Peabody, founders and curators. The Museum was closed as we pulled up but Mary invited us in for a visit that lasted nearly an hour with her husband and her parents, June and Jack from Calais.

Sardine Museum, Jonesport

The Peabodys are documenting an industry which flourished for well over a hundred years up and down the Main Coast, providing the economic mainstay for over four dozen harbor communities, from Eastport to Portland. At one point, there were fifteen factories in Jonesport alone, each one sending out four fifty- to sixty-foot sardine carriers to work area waters.

Between 1876 when the first sardine factory, the Eagle Preserve Fish Company, opened in Eastport and 2000, when the last independently owned factory, the L. Ray Packing Company of Milbridge closed, 418 sardine factories operated along Maine's coast. The last surviving factory, Stinson's Seafood in Prospect Harbor, is now a division of Bumblebee LLC.

Several years ago, Ronnie and his wife, Mary, began to make phone calls to friends and acquaintances, particularly to people of their parents’ generation who had been employed or some way involved in the sardine industry. Once people heard they were collecting anything sardine-related, they were willing to donate or loan the museum photographs, billheads and hogsheads (large barrels), sardine cans (some with fish still in them after forty or more years), hairnets, oilskin aprons, braille nets, dippers, half-models of work boats by a local boat builder, business letters and contracts, paper labels, tools and machinery, giant cast iron retorts used for sterilizing the canned fish (“They’re just oversized pressure cookers.”), trays for steaming and moving the fish from one work station to another, a can sealer, a couple automated label makers, factory whistles, and entire wall of “ladies’ scissors,” each one with the name of its former owner carefully identified. (The scissors were used for snipping off the heads and tails of each fish, and kept razor-sharp.)

-I remember I could hear the Underwood (Eastport) whistle all the way over to Perry, a distance of five miles, June noted. Of course, it depended on the way the wind was blowing.

The work of cataloging and displaying the artifacts has become a full-time job for Ronnie and Mary.

-We've got our life savings in it, Ronnie says. And until recently, they haven’t been able to put their hands on any grant assistance since they were caught in the chicken-and-egg situation familiar to many small nonprofit organizations -- being turned down for assistance because they couldn’t provide matching funds. Mary proudly noted that they had received a seed money grant from Stephen King and his wife, and that the museum had recently received 501(c) 3 status.

"Sardines are in my blood."

Next, we visited the Maine Salt Company of Marshfield (owner/founder, Stephen Cook, aka "The Salt Man"), a 100% passive evaporative operation at the tidal head of the Middle Machias River, site of the first naval battle of the Revolution.

In May 1775, the armed English 100-ton schooner Margaretta under the command of James Moore, anchored off the Machias town wharf. Local feelings were already running high, fueled by recent news of the skirmishes around Boston, and settlers had set up a Liberty Pole at the water’s edge. A prolonged quarrel followed. This subversive and defiant act infuriated the British commander, James Moore, and he threatened to shell the town if it was not immediately removed. Armed with muskets, pitchforks and a single small cannon, settlers overran the Margaretta, though, killing the officer and at least four others in the process and then hauled the ship up to the head of the tide in Middle River, to a locale later known as Marshfield. A month later, Machias men captured a second British armed schooner, the Diligence, that happened to dock at Machias during a mapping expedition along the coast.

During the war, Machias crews re-fit and armed several ships -- including the Margaretta -- and sailed forth looking for battle with the British. In 1776 and 1777, several British officers received orders to bombard and level Machias. The residents of Machias, however, withstood these efforts so fiercely that the town became known as the "Hornet's Nest" to the British admiralty. One officer noted, "Those damned rebels at Machias were a harder set than those at Bunker Hill."

Stephen Cook’s Sea Salt Farm sits right across the road from the head of the tide in Marshfield.

The Salt Man

Later on, we nosed around Beals Island, Great Wass Island, Machiasport and Bucksport ending up at sunset at Jasper Beach.

Jasper Beach

10/16: Leaving Sutton

Yesterday, we left the island for good. A little chilly, with a good chop on the open water.

Sutton Farewell

We moored the little motorboat inside, then picked up sandwiches and brought them over to Merrill, visiting with him for several hours in his kitchen while it rained on and off. Richard Stanley came by to pick up Percy. As we were about to leave, Merrill had one last present for us – a weathered wooden mule cart, about 12 inches by 5 inches.
-You could paint it, he said, use it for a planter.
After leaving Southwest Harbor, we continued down east for a week or so, poking around tiny little harbors, meeting people, climbing cliffs, greeting seals, comparing different versions of halibut stew (best in show: Riverside Cafe, Main St, Ellsworth)

10/8: Mo and Merrill, part the last

Over to Southwest and Ellsworth for a little shopping and a follow-up for Jude with the ophthalmologist. While waiting to be seen, she read a magazine article about “tail-gate barbecue” which mentioned Moe’s Bar-B-Cue & Grill of Ellsworth, ME.
We visited Moe at his converted cook-trailer, a permanent set-up in the Ellsworth town beach parking lot on the Union River just south of Main Street. A pair of bald eagles slowly circled in the thermals above the boat launch. People were sitting on benches by the boat launch, eating lunch in the unseasonably warm sunshine.
Moe offered full- and half-racks of ribs ($25/15), pulled pork sandwich ($5), and spaghetti with bar-b-cue chicken sauce ($5). He is originally from Boston with family from the deep South, and he moved up to Baileyville, two hours further north on route 9 near Calais, several years ago to “get away from the madness.” He says you have to get down to simple things, things that make you happy, like good food and time to use as you please. He was about to close up, turn off the gas and drain the trailer for the season, so we were just in time.
The pulled pork melted in your mouth, sweet with a little heat, but I could have done without the ShurFine hamburger roll. Next time, just a bowl of pulled pork.

Moe and His Barbe-Cue

We stopped by to see Merrill on the way out to Sutton. He was minding Percy again, who turns out to belong to Richard Stanley. Percy comes to visit a couple times a week while Richard is working at his boat shop down the street.
Merrill lives in a large two-story home with a Tudor roof that sits on what must be one of the most desirable lots in Southwest Harbor, a half-acre or so with views of the harbor on three sides of neatly kept property. There is a meticulously piled set of four dozen or so wooden lobster traps in the backyard which haven’t been fished since the last time the Phillies won the World Series. You find traps like these sitting in front of seafood restaurants and junk shops, but nobody’s fished wooden traps for twenty years. In fact, I don’t think you can even find anyone who can still get the cedar slats to build them. They are valuable artifacts, though, and Merrill has small troop of plastic superheroes there to keep an eye on things. He has other superheroes inside, sitting on tabletops and cabinets, hanging from the ceiling, perched on the antenna of the weather radio.

Merrill’s Traps with Guardian Super Heroes

There is a red Nissan pickup parked in front of a small tar-papered garage. In back are the traces of an old set of wooden ways below the bank in the backyard on which Merrill’s father used to haul up his boat, many years ago, and “the dead dinghy,” half-buried and rotting in the mud.
Merrill’s parents were born, as he was, on Great Cranberry. They met there, married and came over to Southwest in 1936, when they bought the house he is now living in, on Clark Point Road. Everyone on Great Cranberry had a nickname. His father’s nickname was Boots, so Merrill naturally became Sonny Boots.
Merrill’s parents died many years ago, his mother in 1974, his father a number of years earlier, and he has lived alone in the house ever since. Many things in the house seem unchanged, and in some cases, untouched, over the last thirty years, and there is a heavy patina on all the walls from the tobacco smoke from Merrill’s cob pipes. You can see the negative outline of a cuckoo clock on the wall behind him in the picture of Merrill and Percy taken in the kitchen. He spends much of his time indoors sitting in the kitchen in much-repaired rocking chair his mother bought in the 1950’s, the arms of which are secured with many turns of kitchen string.
-This chair’s about had it, he remarked at one point.
-Merrill, where’d you go to high school?
-Right here, in Southwest.
-Are there many of your schoolmates still living in town?
-No, not too many. I hardly know a hundred people in town any more. Not many people working on Mt. Desert Island live here anymore – people drive a hundred miles a day round-trip from off-island to get to work.

Merrill & Percy

The taxes on Merrill’s house had been climbing for years as local properties were bought up by off-islanders. This was worrying him quite a bit since his income is limited to the modest retainers he gets for minding the summer homes on Sutton plus a little social security. He watched as his neighbors were displaced as “rich people from away” bought one modest working-family property after another in Southwest, in the process driving his taxes from $650 in the early ‘nineties to over $10,000 today.

Last winter, Merrill’s cousin in North Carolina bought the house and made provision for Merrill to live there for the rest of his life. This took a heavy weight off his shoulders. The house was sided with vinyl then and he removed all the pictures from the outside walls of his house before they started hammering. They are still waiting to be re-hung.

The furniture and knick-knack cases in the front sitting room are also pulled away from the outside walls, sort of piled in the middle. There is a silhouette cutout drawing of him from grade school hanging on the inside wall and Jude picked up a framed black&white high school yearbook photo of a handsome young Merrill she replaced on the shelf. Merrill had taken us into the sitting room to show us a ship’s clock he was very fond of he had gotten from his aunt. At the foot of an ancient recliner was a box of liquor he had picked up when one of the homeowners on Sutton sold his place, five or six years ago.

-I tell him, Tom Cox, I’m still holding it for him, this liquor, when I see him. He says he’ll stop by and pick it up next time he’s in Southwest, but so far he hasn’t. Mr Cox is very generous to me, he still sends me $6000 each year, same’s he did when I was taking care of his place out on the island even though he hasn’t owned it for some time now.

There is an extensive collection of little metal and plastic cars on the shelves of a small bookcase in the living room. His kitchen is a jumble of canned beans and Campbell’s soup cans he eats for dinner while standing over the gas stove he’s heated them on. He says he heads over to the lunch wagon in Bass Harbor most days for a couple lunchtime hot dogs.

Merrill is a keen reader of history of all periods and a devoted viewer of the History Channel.

Each time we visited Merrill he had a little treasure waiting for us, usually something he had found in the consignment store or the dump. The town of Southwest Harbor, by the way, maintains one of the last dumps of the old kind, where you can go and nose about for perfectly useful items and catch up with local news and gossip. One day, he sent us back to Suttons with a tin coffee pot (minus percolator) for Jeb and Betsy, who were working on the house next door, and a yellow plastic shoehorn for Jude. Another day, it was a slightly distressed blue-enamelled affair that looked like an ibrik for making Turkish coffee. A couple days later, he sent a copy of the Charles W. Eliot pamphlet, “John Gilley of Baker Island” out for us with Betsy.

Merrill Stanley

9/29: Ernie’s Excellent Adventure (Wherein We Bravely Outsmart Hurricane Kyle by Driving Someone Else’s Boat in an Unfamiliar Harbor)

Ernie and we had quite an adventure which involved a motor boat, an oncoming tropical storm, and fog so thick you could not see another ten feet beyond the bow of the boat.
Cousin Elizabeth, a 18-foot putt-putt, had been moored quite safely below the house on Sutton, in a southwest-facing cove, 100 feet or so below the ridge of the island. Although heavy winds had been forecast for Sunday night (30 to 40 knots, with gusts in excess of 50), they would have been from the northeast as the storm passed through, coming from behind ridge. But Ted, the boat’s owner, called up on Saturday and urged us to take the boat to its snug mooring inside Southwest Harbor. He called at two in the afternoon, though, which meant we wouldn't be able to return to the island by ferry, since there would be large minus tide by four pm and the ferry wouldn't be able to clear the shoal to land us at the island’s common dock.
So we grabbed Ernie, packed in his travel pod, a pair of underwear each and headed out into a very thick fog in fairly quiet seas. We took off from the mooring on a heading of 290 degrees, theoretically dead-on for Southwest Harbor, saw a seal or two close by on the way, and hit right on buoy #6, then bell #8, theoretically 200 yards or so from the coast guard station and the harbor entrance within 30 minutes. Just where we should have been. The last time we had been in the harbor, however, had been the Wednesday before, when there had been maybe 150 or so fancy-pants boats at mooring in the outer harbor, and a 120-foot three-masted white monstrosity anchored just off the coast guard station.
Easy on, throttle way down. We’ll be in the harbor in minutes now. What terrific navigation.
Meanwhile, the fog thickened and Somes Sound was quietly but thoroughly emptying out its 300 foot depths, flowing north to south at right angles to our supposed track. Because of the fog, however, there were no visual clues to remind us of the falling tide or to tell us of our sideways drift.

Somes Sound Works Its Sneaky Magic

But what’s this? Where is everybody? No boats, no mooring balls, no hulking white three-master, and no intimation of any land mass behind the fog. What do you think about that, Ernie?
Moments pass. More moments pass. Where is the coast guard station? Where is the sky, the shoreline, where is anything? Quis me locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?
The boat continues at a crawl, giving an occasional hack from deep in its diesel insides. Phantom buildings seem almost to loom out of the darkening fog then fade. Nothing is familiar. A trio of dolphins play so close to the boat you can hear them exhale.
-Come this way, follow us, they may be saying.
But where are we heading? We pass a mooring ball or two, a field of lobster buoys. Which is good. It means we are, at least, still inshore. But then, suddenly...no buoys. Now what?
The fog thickens even more. We have a cell phone, luckily. And it is still partially charged. We call Ted who calls the Southwest Harbor Coast Guard. The dispatcher calls us and asks,
-Sir, do you have GPS, radar, sonar, etc, etc?
-No, no, no. A chart and a compass is what we have.
-Sir, can you describe your progress?
We do so. There is a thoughtful silence.
-Sir, can you describe your boat?
-Well, it’s red, about 18 feet long, beam of about 6 feet, with a canvas dodger. And we’re towing a dinghy.
-You say you’re towing a dinghy.
-Yes, we’re towing a dinghy.
Silence. Clearly, he has no idea where we might be. And what would the dinghy have to do with it?

"Yes, we are towing a dinghy."

-Sir, we'll honk a horn on the big boat…Can you hear it?
-No.
-Hmmm. We'll honk it for 10 seconds. Can you hear it now?
-No.
Idea: we call 911, get a GPS fix on the cell phone signal (this is good to remember) from the State Police, who will be able to relay it to the Coast Guard.
OK. Now they can fix our position: 2-3 miles off-target to the southwest, between Manset and Great Cranberry, according to the coordinates he relays to us. We are apparently heading for New Jersey at a speed of approximately half-a-knot. You can swim that fast on your back. Larger swells are beginning to roll in.
-Sir, can you deploy your anchor? he asks.
Only if there's an anchor, we mutter. Ahah, there is an anchor, buried in a locker under an incredible accumulation of boat junk which has not been disturbed for many years. (Remember the prime directive of summer camp and anything having to do with it: Don’t Change Anything. Ever.)
But can I deploy the anchor? The anchor, when I finally unearth it, looks like something you would buy for a garden ornament, missing only the gnome. The anchor rode is maybe 60 feet long, tangled in an abominable, yellow nylon rat's nest. The bottom of the channel looks to be about 45 feet, by the chart. After much swearing, the rode is finally untangled, and deployed. It doesn’t hold, but we tell him it does so he won’t think we aren’t cooperating.
I pull up the anchor to try again, grabbing a lobster trap in the process. This is not a good way to make new friends.
I deploy the anchor again and this time it holds, sort of. And fifteen minutes or so later, a 40-foot coast guard cutter looms up in the fog, about forty yards off our stern, carefully picking its way through what seems to be a featureless channel. Jude is meanwhile blowing on a plastic "fog horn" she found in the engine box, which sounds like a flatulent duck (she has been doing this regularly for some now.) We note later the reason for the Coast Guard’s caution -- there is apparently a nasty ledge stretching much of the way across the channel, submerged at this stage of the tide only a couple of feet.
-Hello, boys, nice day for a boat ride, eh?
We follow them slowly back to Southwest, back past bell #8 and, the fog being slightly less opaque than an hour before, the coast guard station is right there where it should be, 200 yards off the bell. There is no monstrous white 120-footer at anchor, though, as it pulled out earlier in the day to a more protected inlet somewhere. There are no mooring balls anywhere in the outer harbor, and no fancy-pants Hinkleys or wooden boats, either. They were pulled out, all of them, within the last 36 hours. Rich people all over the world calling on the telephone: You must take my boat out of the water at once, there is a big storm coming. That travel-lift must have been smoking.
It is about 4:30 pm and it has been misting for the last two hours or so. Now it starts to rain for real. Ernie is still asleep. Petty Officer Sand comes aboard to make a regulation safety inspection as part of our daring rescue at sea. Our flares prove to be a year out-of-date, and there is no type-4 flotation device aboard. Jude apologizes for state of the boat.
-If this were our boat, she says, it would look a lot more shipshape.
-Yes, ma’am.
-You should have heard my husband swearing when he was trying to untangle the anchor rode.
-Yes, ma’am.
Finally, we make our way to the inner harbor mooring, tie up, and row to the town dock in the dinghy. We meet the harbormaster there, securing his boat.
-Nice day to go for a row, he says.
-Yes it is. We're going fishing. Like to come?
He says he has to get home.
The monster storm never did pan out. The NOAA automated broadcast continued to intone dire, monotone warnings, concluding each with the slightly smug refrain, “Smart sailors will remain ashore.” Local radio stations seemed to ignored it except to note there might be some rain in the evening. The end of the world was elsewhere. Ernie was still asleep.

After the fog.