A book to boost Maine through its identity crisis

THE LOBSTER COAST; REBELS, RUSTICATORS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR A FORGOTTEN FRONTIER, by Colin Woodard, Viking, New York, 2004, 372 pages, $24.95.

Near the end of his thought-provoking examination of the Maine coast, Colin Woodard asks a troubling question: “I wonder if, twenty years from now, Maine will look and feel any different from any other low-density suburb in the great East Coast megalopolis. I wonder if anyone will even remember what came before.”

That’s a tough thought to take for any of us idealistic souls who came here to live a life far from the phenomenon that Woodard calls Suburbistan and the degenerate thought processes centered around greed and apathy that accompany it.

Of course, like any good journalist, Woodard knew the answer to his question before he asked it, and the news isn’t good: “We know it’s coming. It’s spreading out from Boston, absorbing southern New Hampshire and slipping over the Piscataqua to plant subdivisions along the southern coast. It’s engulfed Greater Portland, swallowing farms and fishing piers from Scarborough to Cumberland, and hopped up the expanding commuter ways to Brunswick, Augusta, Belfast, and beyond We even have our own term for it: ‘Massification.'”

There’s a new kind of immigrant moving into Maine, argues the author. Often retired, young and wealthy, they like the scenery and they know a good real estate deal when they see it.

“Unlike the rusticators, artists and back-to-the-landers of the past, the newcomers haven’t come in pursuit of the Maine Myth, for that fleeting summer-warmed taste of New England’s lost agrarian past. It’s not that these newcomers reject this Maine Myth; they aren’t even aware of its existence,” writes Woodard.

Such provocative analysis is what helps the reader get involved emotionally while reading this primer on one of the most beautiful and productive coastlines in the world. Do we appreciate it enough? Do we care enough about those values Woodard writes about? The answer has to be a resounding no for most of us.

Woodard is a talented writer, a skilled journalist and a knowledgeable synthesizer of scholarly research. Plus he’s talked to a lot of people, including biologists, lobstermen and other coastal working folk.

The impact of sprawl on Maine’s eternal identity crisis is only one of his themes. He spends a great deal of time tracing the various strands of migration into Maine, from the Scotch-Irish of the 1700s to the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s to the real estate speculators of the ’80s and ’90s.

Particularly knowledgeable in ecology, he devotes a good deal of space relating the history of fishing here and the results of current efforts to rejuvenate decimated stocks or, in the case of lobsters, to preserve the amazing resource we have.

Woodard begins by focusing on Monhegan to give readers a booster shot of idealism. We’re told the tiny island and its few-dozen year-round inhabitants are “an embodiment of Thomas Jefferson’s utopian vision for this country: an egalitarian republic of small self-sufficient producers, where democracy is practiced directly by the citizens, and aristocratic privilege is unrecognized or unknown.”

Most of this has to do with the island’s fierce protection of its lobster resource by sea and pristine beauty by land. Too bad it’s just a little island with almost insignificant relevance to mainland communities.

On this jaunt, the reader does get to meet Zoe Zanidakis, the lobsterwoman turned reality-show character with one foot in her boat and one in celebritydom. The trip is worth it just for this bit of local color.

Woodard devotes the next 100 or so pages to the founding and development of Maine up through statehood. All the familiar folks are there, from Sir Ferdinando Gorges to the Great Proprietors. This makes for lively reading for history buffs who are not already familiar with the tale. The whole section, however, can be skipped with ease if one’s time is limited.

Of much greater interest to me was the story, told in the next few chapters, of Maine’s modern boom-and-bust economy beginning in the 19th century, when much of our current Maine Myth originated. The rise and fall of the offshore fishery and other boom industries such as lumber and ice is one of our great morality tales. The story of decline involves the Civil War, the great shift in the country’s population West and the advent of rail transportation.

The rise of Maine’s lobster industry is perhaps the most interesting part of the book. Lobsters were once considered poor man’s food. Nobody spent much time lobstering.

Mainers were convinced to go lobstering only after the rise of the canning industry. Lobstermen sold their catch to smacks, or floating lobster pens, that sold it to canneries. Only many years later would summer people be sitting around at dockside eating the boiled crustaceans after a day of sailing.

Woodard traces the rise and fall of various fisheries, pointing out that only the lobster appears to remain unscathed today despite the warnings of some scientists that it is being overfished. This “Great Lobster Mystery” represents the “triumph of the commons,” not the tragedy predicted by experts who see unbridled greed as the governing force in such situations. Of course, Maine’s traditions and laws deserve the credit. But keep your fingers crossed anyway.

Woodard has produced an important book for any Maine lover’s bookshelf. I hope now he will work on part two about the economic upheaval that is dismembering and reinventing The Other Maine – the great forest economy north and east of Bangor. That’s an important part of our Maine Myth, too, and it’s slipping away.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.