Most places in Maine, the construction of the Maritimes & Northeast natural gas pipeline is a dim and fading memory. Something about how three summers ago there was a lot of digging going on and how the result was a pipeline that entered Maine from New Brunswick at Baring, just above Calais, and left it way down south at the New Hampshire border. A lot of people got a new source of energy, a few towns even got tax-producing, job-creating gas-fired power plants.

One place in Maine – Washington County – the pipeline project isn’t a dim and fading memory but an ongoing source of aggravation (if aggravation is the best word to describe but one incident in a long history of getting shafted).

Washington County, you see, has more miles of that pipeline than anybody, yet it has no access to the energy and none of those power plants. I’ve spent nearly every weekend this summer out there and after talking to a lot of people who work awfully hard to keep the place afloat, I guess I’d have to say aggravation may not be the best word, but it is one fit for publication.

The story, briefly, is this: back when the plans were made but before the digging started, Gov. King was asked (OK, I asked) if the state couldn’t negotiate with Maritimes & Northeast. In exchange for tearing up the Washington County countryside, couldn’t they be convinced to put a couple of taps into the pipeline above Calais and Machais so that whatever benefits come from access to natural gas would accrue to a region that could use a benefit or two?

Couldn’t, he said. The plans were already made, such negotiations just aren’t done (a pipeline expert at the American Natural Gas Association in D.C. told me they are routinely done, but she obviously was misinformed) and, besides, Washington County doesn’t have the large industrial users needed to make costly taps, at about a quarter-million per, cost-effective. Couldn’t the state offer incentives to steer one or more of those gas-fired power plants out there so they’d have the requisite large industrial users?

Couldn’t – Washington County doesn’t have transmission lines big enough to deliver power to market and, no, the state couldn’t offer incentives to the transmission companies to beef up the lines because … well, just because.

Did I mention that, during those long Washington County weekends, I’ve been catching up on some reading, including re-reading for the umpteenth time “Catch 22,” Joseph Heller’s tragi-comic WWII novel? You remember – the only way the stressed out bomber crews could get out of flying brutal combat missions was to be certified as crazy; the catch – Catch 22 – was that wanting to get out of flying brutal combat missions was proof they weren’t crazy. Washington County’s catch – one that so predates Heller’s it deserves a Roman numeral – is that it can’t have the usual tools for economic development – modern highways, freight rail to a cargo port, top-notch telecommunications infrastructure, natural gas taps, adequate transmission lines or even a new border crossing that will help a town rather than kill it – because it doesn’t have an economy sufficiently developed to justify the investment. Makes you wonder if Joseph Heller didn’t spend some long summer weekends in Washington County, too.

Anyway, I could wrap this up right now and get on with another one of those long weekends but for this – there suddenly are two projects just taking shape that could beef up the transmission lines, put the natural gas that now just passes through Washington County to work and maybe make economic development there something more than a work of fiction. Both are designed to deliver electricity from generating plants in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to the power-hungry Eastern United States. One is a new, 84-mile line planned by Bangor Hydro and New Brunswick Power that would run from, yep, above Calais and all the way across Washington County to Orrington. The other, a fascinating idea with a really cool name, is the Neptune Project, a huge subsea network of transmission lines from Atlantic Canada to the American Northeast.

Charles Hewitt is CEO of Atlantic Energy Partners, the consortium – including Maine’s own Cianbro – that’s behind Neptune. Could, I asked him, either or both of these projects create an opportunity for Washington County to get in the power-generation game?

Absolutely, he said, “a real opportunity.” Yes, an underwater link from a power plant at Calais could run down the St. Croix to connect to the Neptune lines out at sea, but even easier would be to build an overland link back through New Brunswick to a Neptune hub near Saint John. Yes, a similar result could be achieved if a high-capacity transmission line were built from the Bangor Hydro/NB Power hub at Orrington to the former Maine Yankee plant at Wiscasset, which Neptune plans to convert to a hub. And yes, it would be a good for state government to begin working with both projects now, while the planning still is under way, so that this real opportunity is not missed.

Not wanting to put Mr. Hewitt on the spot – he was, after all, very informative and helpful – I didn’t ask him if all this would require somebody in state government actually breaking a sweat for Washington County.

Another favorite I re-read two weekends ago was Camus’ “The Stranger” – there’s some breezy summer reading. You remember – this poor schlub Meursault is convicted for committing a senseless, spur-of-the-moment murder but sentenced to death for basically not breaking a sweat for anybody, even himself. On the last page, as he awaits execution, Meursault reviews the weird sequence of unrelated events that led to his impending end and contemplates, more in admiration than alarm, what he calls the “benign indifference” of the universe. Tell me Camus didn’t spend some long summer weekends in Washington County.

Bruce Kyle is assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.