March 28, 1974
Page 8705
MAINE
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, this morning's edition of the New York Times contained a sensitive short essay on what my home State of Maine means to one refugee from urban America. Her thesis, "Maine makes sense," makes sense to me and to share her wisdom with my colleagues, I ask unanimous consent that her article be Printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
MAINE MADE SENSE
(By Sandra Garson)
FIVE ISLANDS, MAINE.– People kept telling me I had guts to move to Maine. Frankly, I thought I had common sense, for I wanted to play where I understood the rules of the game.
I had already tried and abandoned a gaggle of life-styles: my Philadelphia heritage, the bittersweet Big Apple, world travel and expatriation (not glamorous but depressing, even if you speak the language) – so at a ripened 29 it seemed time to stake my claim to being what I was: an American, whatever that meant.
The nineteenth-century passion for going West didn't move me, for I, born in the mid-twentieth, suspect that God strategically placed America's major geological fault in California in order to replay His wipe-out of Gomorrah easily. So I went East to a state of mind, and landed in the state of Maine. Suddenly the jigsaw locked. Maine made sense.
Recently Bridgton voted to reduce to almost zero the taxes on land left untouched for the appreciation of passing townspeople when it was learned that local landowners had been forced to sell or develop land merely to bear the tax burden. A human being understands that.
The comfort of comprehension, something mid-nineteen-seventies Americans fear they have bartered to Beelzebub to get away from it all, has not been lost up here because Maine has never tried to get away.
As adamant as the tall pines and time-washed cliffs of her spine, it refuses to be moved one millimeter from the human condition.
Some people call its residents Mainiacs, but they are intensely sane. They know there is no getting away and so they adapt to life, setting out humane values and goals. They are the tortoises in the great race, but it is perhaps their Yankee genius that by not moving one inch they have gotten away from all that is troubling everyone else.
With less civilization there are fewer discontents. There are more chances to get in touch. Up here on this hardline landscape, nature whittles life down to human scale, peeling off the question marks.
Guerrillas in a war of attrition against the highly charged forces of nature and the well-equipped arm of "progress," Maine's people live in that constant state of alert that novelists say is exhilarating. When they lie down to sleep at night they know what it means to survive the measure of a day. Nothing is more worth knowing.
I understand better what it means to be human when I have to spend three hours chopping wood for a fire to keep warm than when I have to drive six times around the block trying to park and then get a ticket because it's the wrong day for the right side of the street. The other day a woman came into the general store and handed Ray a dollar. She had just gotten home and noticed that he had given her too much change.
Maine is what this country must have been all about once. I was an immigrant to this land, a single woman homesteader. Yet nobody posed tacky questions. Rather, they let me hang myself out and seeing that my pursuit of happiness wasn't inimical to their life or liberty they called me "friend" and "neighbor."
Democracy grows here because people need each other to survive. Here the town meeting is a bridge between neighbors. Decisions are not relegated to politicians. Self-determination is the Yankee way, and in Maine I have come to learn what that means.
On the agenda of my last town meeting were votes on a moderator, $500 to retain counsel to determine the rights of townspeople to certain water access, and $378 for transportation services for the elderly.
I have seen the past and it works. The present is out of order. Maine satisfies my human longing for consistency. I live now in a house that has stood by the sea for 150 years, in a village incorporated since 1718 and among people who still do what humans are supposed to do. Maine people not only endure, they prevail. On this terrain they have no choice. And they have chosen this terrain.
In moving here from New York to join them, I did not abandon a sinking ship as some thought. I merely satisfied my own needs. Maine, the vast undeveloped country making possible the exploration of human alternatives, was not out of the question for the urban me because in desperation I dared pose the big question: Do I want to lead and understand my one and only life?