Stuck berry truck cuts off village Driver goes a mile in reverse after wrong turn near Bucks Harbor

MACHIASPORT – The driver of an 18-wheeler loaded with blueberries got his truck stuck in mud and blocked a narrow road leading to a village at the tip of the peninsula for a few hours Tuesday morning.

He was peering into Machias Bay, blocking the way out for everyone else and wondering how he ended up so far from U.S. Route 1.

The unidentified driver had just loaded up with blueberries heading for Nova Scotia at the Maine Wild Blueberry Co. in Machias, located less than a mile from Route 1.

When he missed a turn, he stayed for another 11 miles on the Port Road – until it turned from tar to dirt and dead-ended at the ocean.

“There’s a sign that says there’s a dead end in nine miles,” said Margaret Flaherty, the town clerk who recounted the incident Wednesday. “But these poor devils, they just don’t seem to see it and just keep going.

“This is the second driver who has ended up down on the beach in the last four or five months.”

The driver found himself in Starboard, a village below Bucks Harbor of fewer than 60 people. Access there is by the single, two-lane road that the driver had completely blocked.

But the driver of the tractor-trailer couldn’t turn around as cars can. He needed more than two hours to back up ever so slowly, more than a mile, until he managed to get backed into Paul Holmes’ driveway.

From there he could get himself and his 100,000 pounds of berries going the right way again, toward Canada.

“What was this man thinking with his big rig,” said Rose Arseneau, who lives in Starboard and who caught the stuck truck on her digital camera.

“I was thinking as he tried to wiggle backwards, that if he tipped over, we just might have the blueberry festival early this year.”

The driver got a helping hand when George Henderson, another Starboard resident and the pastor of the Machias Valley Baptist Church, called Harold Sprague at the town garage. Sprague plows the town roads, and Henderson thought Sprague might have a solution.

“He was in a soft, soupy area and his wheels kept spinning,” Sprague said.

Sprague arrived soon afterward with the town’s sanding truck, but ended up simply helping guide the errant truck driver backward up the road.

Residents of Starboard and Point of Maine, the island with just a handful of houses, were blocked below Bucks Harbor until the rig was headed in the right way again.

The town clerk said the trucker wasn’t an experienced driver.

“He’s a lobsterman,” she said. “He was only doing this trip for some extra money.”