Back to Maine

St. Croix River, Calais, Maine

  

 Back to Maine - Safe Harbor Marina, Rockland

AQUAVIT is often blocked in by visiting mega yachts.

 Foreign flagged to evade US taxes?

Good to see the cats.
Lady Marmalade happy to see us.

 We took a break from our Maine adventure to return to Tallahassee; we missed the heat and humidity – HA! After a week or so at home, we left Tropical Storm Fred in our wake to head north back to Maine. We had no damage from the storm even though its landfall was 150 miles to the west of us. It was a minimal tropical storm, unlike Hurricane Michael that came ashore in the same area in 2018 and did so much damage to Mexico Beach.

 

We hurried north to Rockland because another tropical storm was headed to the northeast U.S. Henri was projected to glance off of the Maine coast as a tropical depression. Instead, Tropical Storm Henri came ashore on the Connecticut coast and hung around raining on Massachusetts for a few days. We had tied up Aquavit anticipating a storm surge, but all we experienced was a couple days of rain. Whew!

What a surprise to find a self-taught Cuban "Son" band playing at Camden Snow Bowl.
We enjoyed the outdoor concert in the cool drizzling rain wearing our foul weather gear!

Our Calais Bed and Breakfast on the St. Croix River with Canada just on the other side. Two border crossing bridges are here,
but not much else at Calais. The B&B at Eastport was nice and this town has so much more to offer.

With the weather clearing off, we decided to take a road trip Down East to Calais and Eastport. The ride to Calais was via the interior road with beautiful iconic Maine scenery of lakes and forests, hills and rock outcroppings.

We stopped at Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge. We were heartened to see kiosks and signs we made decades ago still in service.

Hiking trails; some of which are
paved for wheelchairs

Wildlife Drive

Bad Little Falls, Machais

In Eastport we were able to catch up with our musician/luthier friend, John, and see his latest guitar - a beautiful blond arch top. We got to meet his wife who writes popular mystery novels under the pen name "Sarah Graves".

Eastport is one of our favorite places - about as Down East as one can go in Maine and just across Passamaquoddy Bay from Campobello Island where FDR and Eleanor had a summer home. It was good to see Captain Butch Harris who runs Windjammer Cruises for whale watching. He befriended us when were we at his dock in 2019.

This trip were treated to a couple of Minke whales, harbor porpoises, harbor seals, and birds such as herring gulls, great shearwaters, black guillemots, razorbills, and thick-billed murres. But the highlight was watching a bald eagle fly from a rocky clifftop to within 50 feet of the boat and snatch a lumpfish from the water. Landing on a nearby cliff in the dense forest, it feasted on the catch of the day.

Head Harbour Light Station, Campobello Island, Canada

Aboard Butch's whale watching cruise. His ~150 foot windjammer schooner was sunk in 2014
when the harbor bulwarks collapsed in a freak catastrophic failure.

Generations

 

Our trip back to Rockland was along the coastal route with side-roads to places like Cutler and the beach at Roque Bluffs, with stops in Machias and admiring the bridge at Bucksport.

Rambling around Maine you can see the vestiges of deep tradition. Listening to young voices speak in the vernacular patois of generations past, you realize that stereotypes of regional language are rooted in the soil of heritage.

Better days in the past - at Cutler

Cutler - a lobster-centered community with a Methodist
 church, no stores, and 2 guest moorings

 

In 2019, we thought about going in to Cutler when we were disabled by a lobster float
wrapped on our prop. Instead, we elected to hobble in to Cross Island. There we
observed the light show from the Navy low frequency radio towers, used to communicate
with submarines. Now we've seen it from both sides.

 

Small communities take pride in their history and have some particular superlative to claim like a hero of the Revolution, seafarers, shipbuilding, civic founders, art. Every community seems to have a local museum whether it is an art museum or a museum for lighthouses or maritime heritage. 

 

There is beauty in the natural landscape and the romantic nostalgia of decayed buildings. The architecture of new construction seems to mirror the past. Even when it’s superficial vinyl or aluminum siding, the appearance suggests it is authentic. Some communities that are off the well-worn tourist path are genuinely authentic.

 

One such place is Criehaven on Ragged Island. We puttered into a small cove where the community is the further-most island settlement from mainland Maine. We took a mooring buoy for a quiet lunch in this village of working lobstermen. The few homes and docks around Criehaven Harbor are well maintained and the working boats are ship-shape, as they should be for life and livelihood. 

Criehaven on Ragged Island - a self sufficient settlement of lobstermen and families, complete with their own library.

Happy to have Pat and Judy (of East Blue Hill ME and Sarasota) along for our excursion.

 

A friendly lobsterman eased up to our boat to say hello and asked if we had been out to Matinicus Rock lighthouse to see the puffins. Indeed, we had just been there. He expertly maneuvered his lobster boat to offload a catch into a floating crate to keep the crustaceans alive until collection for market. Pat, a wooden boat expert, chatted him up about the builder of his beautiful wooden downeast lobster boat.

Only 1 puffin, but cormorants, great shearwaters, black guillemots, gulls, common eiders,
Wilson's storm-petrels, northern gannets, razorbills, seals and harbor porpoise
on Matinicus Rock, part of Petit Manan National Wildlife Refuge.

Matinicus Rock is a remote treeless island location for a lighthouse. It marks the outermost edge of safe navigation of the rocky waters of this part of Maine’s coast. Part of a string of light stations, the waters to the south and east are deep and free of natural hazards. Inside this line of light stations, mariners need to exercise careful navigation to avoid rocks and ledges. The island is also an important seabird nesting location. Puffins, once extirpated in the early 1900s, have been reintroduced by the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Audubon Society’s Puffin Project. A range of pelagic birds nest and frequent the rock.

 

Back in Rockland after our 50-mile round trip to Matinicus, we came upon the most beautiful schooner tied to Journey’s End Marina. It’s a 144-ft replica of a historic wooden fishing schooner called Columbia. The replica was built of steel as a labor-of-love tribute to the hearty Grand Banks fishing fleets. The first Columbia raced against the famed pride of Nova Scotia schooner Bluenose in working schooner competitions. We were surprised to see this replica classic vessel was constructed by Eastern Shipyards - in Panama City, Florida. 

https://panamacityliving.com/homeport-and-destinations-brian-disernias-schooner-columbia/

The owner had the Columbia built in 2014 and was faithful to the original design, but built her in steel rather than wood. He even had much of the work done by the historic Lunenburg NS craftsmen and sail lofts. Clearly, he is smitten with the storied maritime history of a great by-gone era and put his wealth where his interest lies.

 

We got to thinking….

 

Seeing the culture and heritage surviving in today’s world led us to ponder how traditional heritage is perpetuated. How are new generations recruited into specialized occupations? 

 

It’s hard to imagine that someone growing up far away from the Maine shore would even know about harvesting lobster, much less choose to be a lobsterman. Would a young man growing up on an Iowa farm choose a life as a waterman on Chesapeake Bay or Long Island Sound or fish the Grand Banks? Or would a Mainer know about farming in the prairie region and want to be a farmer. Seems to us it’s small town, small community, family traditions and birthrights which sustain these industries. Musing with our friend Pat he proposed “I doubt anyone comes out of high school and decides to be a large-scale rancher, unless that’s the family business.”

 

The small-town family traditions bring us to think of other vestiges of the past that endure. We were thinking of how a caste system would predispose one's fate by the happenstance of the family one was borne in to. Or, how the shackles of enslavement might be removed, but the scars last for generations. Exceptions are the self-made polymaths that start in humble beginnings and soar to phenomenal success. This is the stuff of the American Dream, “puling one’s self up by their own bootstraps,” but it is the rarity, not the rule. The opportunities are enormous but the comfortable, familiar path is the road most chosen. 

 

As America is in divided turmoil between rural and urban cultures, between middle and privileged classes, racial disparity and privilege, left and right politics, it seems the boundaries of the chasm are established by the place and culture into which one is born. Views are shaped by the family and the familiar and become insular. The ethic is sculpted by experience. Religion is passed by parents and grandparents rather than some brilliant epiphany leading to faith and spirituality. All of which establishes a fertile landscape in which propaganda can metastasize and tribalism can flourish. Meanwhile, the essential global issues that are critical to humanity languish in the shadows as idealism. 

 

It is comforting to see that specialized industries are sustained by generations and heartening to see the local and regional foundations that have fostered them. However, it is sad to observe the genuine displaced by the artificial. The working waterfront turned to seasonal second homes and recreation, downtown shops converted to t-shirt peddlers and shops merchandising foreign-made souvenirs. Makes one wonder if this trend is sustainable and if traditional industries will be mere memories.

 

We notice that many Maine businesses are prospering and continue through family lines – eg: LL Bean by conservative activist Linda Bean, Brooklin Shipyard by EB White’s son Steve, the Wyeth whole extended family of artists. It’s not just Maine, throughout the US there are generational traditions in professions too – children of MDs choose careers in medicine, sons and daughters of lawyers become lawyers, kids of tradesmen follow in a trade. Political offices seem to be family legacies. Often where one ends up is informed by where one starts out.

 

Yet in the resource harvest business, those enterprises that are close to the land and sea, family and community recruitment and succession is essential for survival. It is far easier for the young to migrate outside their geography for opportunities, than for those outside these locales to join the local workforce. Perhaps immigrants with parallel skills could infuse energy and diversity if
they would only be accepted and welcomed?

 

 

Roque Bluffs State Park, northeast of Jonesport

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Our thoughts are with the people of southeast Louisiana on this 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and another huge devastating storm, Hurricane Ida, bearing down on them.

08.29.2021