`Maine in Transition’ examines changes during 1960s, ’70s

MAINE IN TRANSITION, by Betty Joyce, Phoenix Publishing Co., 219 pages, $25.

I have heard it said that there are two Maines — one north of Bangor, and the other south of there. I’m not sure with which half Bangor itself would prefer to be affiliated, but that dramatizes the conflict often seen within the state, a conflict that Betty Joyce’s new book of contemporary history and observation, “Maine in Transition,” could mitigate. The book serves as a canvas portraying the change blowing into all of Maine in the 1960s and ’70s by showing just a small corner of the state.

The corner is York County, and, in fact, all the chapters appeared first in a column in the York County Coast Star between 1961 and 1973. The contents range from a half-page treatment of the town of Wells to seven pages about seals on the southern Maine coast.

When one closes the back cover, one certainly will know York County better — whether one lives there or not, I’ll wager — although there is, regrettably, no epilogue drawing the contents together under a common theme. But the people with whom “Maine in Transition” acquaints the reader are people who could be anywhere. They are people like Edith and Ethel, the octogenarian Furbish twins who clung to a 15-acre tract in Kennebunk; Dr. John Kingsbury, one of the creators and the director of a marine laboratory on Appledore Island; Michael Palmer, “a tall man who paints large paintings … in shades of brown and in blues that fade to grey.” All these are characters in the transition, some as part of the old, some part of the new.

Joyce also tells of the awakening environmentalism of the 1960s, and it is in this section one best can see the changes Maine was undergoing during that period. “The unseen forces of atomic radiation attack us twenty-four hours a day. Fight back. Avoid all unnecessary X-rays.

“Learn about starvation in India, China, Latin America, Africa, and don’t think it can’t happen here.”

Some of these “ecologs” are more persuasive than statistically supported, but the essay “The Lost Town of Elms” is the most eloquent statement against development (“progress”) that I have ever read. The book is worth buying for that alone.

Another feature which makes the book a worthy purchase (since the newest portions were written nearly 20 years ago) is the updating material found after many chapters. After a story in the final section about a man finding some puffball mushrooms, for instance, Joyce wrote: “All six characters of this story — Dinty and Esther Moore, Warren Cochrane, and the three mushrooms — have gone to their heavenly rewards. Descendants of the three humans are spread throughout the world. Descendants of the three mushrooms presumably still cling to the home ground in Arundel.”

Joyce’s work is by turns witty, tender, enthusiastic, biting, sorrowful (and only rarely small-town-paperish), but she is never dull. She has done us a good turn in collecting these 66 articles of reflection to see ourselves much as the children in the Palmer painting just inside the cover can see themselves reflected in the water — the water just off the coast of Maine.

Joe Jordan is a free-lance writer who resides in Lincoln Center.