October 10, 1979
Page 27625
THE FIVE FACES OF MAINE.
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, the special character of my home State of Maine is appreciated throughout the country, even by many people who have never had the opportunity to enjoy it in person. In the September 23, 1979, issue of the Boston Globe magazine, reporter Peter Anderson offers a kind of guide book to our State. It is a sensitive article which explores some of the problems and possibilities of Maine, as well as reflecting its varied beauty.
My colleague, Senator BILL COHEN, joins me in recommending the article to Senators and to anyone else interested in some of the reasons why Maine is a special place. Together, we request that the following article, "The Five Faces of Maine," be printed in the RECORD.
THE FIVE FACES OF MAINE
(By Peter Anderson)
Timber cruisers went into the forest looking for white pine. They knocked down a spruce, set it against the trunk of a tall pine, clambered up the spruce to the lower branches of the pine and then to the top of the pine itself. From there they could scout the sea of trees, the islands of water.
They cut white pine to float down the Penobscot to the sawmills of Bangor, a frontier town that for a time was timber capital of the hemisphere. The Maine woods was wilderness then, but logging roads go through the woods now, and geographers and foresters and game wardens do not use the term wilderness. They call it the wilds or the wild lands or nothing at all, referring to a specific place as "twelve-five," meaning Township 12, Range 5, Unorganized Territories of Maine. They do not think of this great woods as real wilderness, and yet they know of the young man who was cruising for timber in northwest Aroostook County. The young man got out of his vehicle for some reason and went off the trail on foot. Searchers found his vehicle and could follow his foot tracks. These tracks indicated the young man had become disoriented. People lost in the woods often begin to walk faster, then faster still; if they do not control their panic, they begin to run and thus spend their strength. Tracks of the young man led to a stream and ended there. His body was never found. He had died in what the city would call the wilderness.
Maine has 19.8 million acres. Of this, 17.7 million acres are forest. Maine is as big as Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island put together (a small exaggeration; Maine is 33,215 square miles; the total of the other five states is 33,393 square miles). Maine is not big by America's standards, ranking thirty-ninth among the states. It does not lie quite right — not straight up and down on the map but tilted so that the upper right-hand corner of the state sticks out to the east. The term Downeast doesn't come from the map so much as from the wind. Sailors going from Boston to Eastport had the prevailing south-west wind at their backs and were sailing downwind toward the Northeast — thus, Downeast. Even now a clamdigger in Machiasport will refer to Portland as being on the west coast. A banker in southern Maine talks of going "up Maine," meaning the northern interior.
There are more than 2200 lakes and ponds. Off the coast there are 400 islands larger than 1100 acres, and some of these islands have not yet been touched by the Saltonstalls, the Du Ponts, or the Rockefellers. Mount Desert, the largest of these islands, is the location of Bar Harbor, a place that by 1900 rivaled Newport. Thomas Cole, an artist of the Hudson River School of painting, went to Mount Desert in search of new subject matter, and because he was so lavish in his praise of the place when he returned to New York, the society of that city, including the Rockefellers, followed him there. This upper coast is the land of the pointed fir, a place of beauty that has sharp edges.
There is uncertainty about how Maine got its name. Some suppose it was named in honor of Queen Henrietta Maria, an English queen who also ruled the French provinces of Meyne. The coastal islands were settled first, or at least visited first, by European fishermen. Later, settlers on the mainland took shelter on the islands from raiding Indians during the French and Indian Wars.
It is logical to think the early island dwellers referred to the mainland as "the main," and thus the name of the state. Early spellings were Main, Mayn, or Mayne. While part of Massachusetts, it was called the Province of Maine. In 1820, when Maine joined the union, it became the State of Maine, and natives of the place were State of Mainers, a rhythmic phrase now being replaced by one word, Mainer, an un-lyric term.
Some place names have logic, Presque Isle (almost an island), for instance. Most place names have no historical basis but are copies of European place names. Bangor got its name by accident, if this story can be believed. Bangor was called Kenduskeag Plantation, and the Reverend Seth Nobel was sent to Boston to have the name changed to Sunbury. When in front of the filing clerk in Boston, Reverend Nobel was humming a hymn. When the clerk asked him the name for the town, Reverend Nobel said "Bangor,"thinking the clerk wanted to know the name of the hymn. This was considered a happy error and the name allowed to stand. There is no good explanation why so many places are named Naples, Sorrento, Palermo or Steuben, Dresden, Frankfurt. Swedes settled Stockholm and New Sweden in Aroostook County, but Athens, Maine, was not settled by Greeks.
The best Maine stories require inflection and should be told orally. The best Maine stories are made up and then repeated as truth, but this story is true and happened exactly this way. A reporter from a big city newspaper was talking to a blueberry farmer on the sand plain between Wells and Kennebunk, and the reporter, just making conversion, said that the state's blueberry specialist had an unusual name, Amr Ismail. "Not for an Egyptian, it ain't," the blueberry farmer said.
THE POTATO LANDSCAPE
Fort Kent is a frontier town, and there is an unusual quality to the English spoken there. It is American English, but many people speak it in a foreign rhythm, a French cadence. The bilingualism is remarkable. A man listens to a friend speaking for a minute or two, then answers him in English, then changes to French. A levee protects Fort Kent from the St. John River, the boundary of Maine and New Brunswick, but there is no protection against the winter. It was in Van Buren, not far from Fort Kent, that the state's lowest temperature was recorded, 48 degrees below zero. The growing season is as short as 110 days. This is hard country, and so is the rest of the potato landscape of Aroostook County.
The upper St. John Valley near Fort Kent needs two more weeks in spring, two more weeks in fall, to grow potatoes, but lacking those four weeks, farmers grow potatoes anyway. The texture of the soil is good for potatoes in the upper valley of the St. John, and so it is, too, further south down the potato landscape to Caribou, Presque Isle, and Houlton. In places the soil lies on slopes of up to 10 or 15 degrees, and "We get away with it," says Dwight Stiles, a state potato specialist. Some farmers replace what erosion takes away. The soil washes down the slope into ditches, caking into mud there, and when conditions are right, the mud dried, farmers haul the soil back, some only a couple hundred yards, others a half-mile up the slope to where the Stetson or Plaisted or Thorndyke soil is replaced.
Aroostook potato soils are gravelly, do not pack down much, and dry quickly in spring. Planting begins about May 15, sometimes while drifts of snow edge the fields. It is good soil for potatoes despite the rocks. The rocks used to be picked by hand, and some still are, but mechanical rock pickers are also used. It is because of mechanical harvesters that rocks have to be picked at an. Removing the rocks is not good for the soil, increasing erosion, but rocks plug up the mechanical harvesters, and mechanical harvesters pick about 70 percent of Aroostook's potatoes. Rocks are piled in the corner of the fields, potato-sized stones bleaching in the sun. As these piles of rocks get bigger, the soil gets thinner.
Rocks are pushed up from the ground by the frost each winter and spring, or so it used to be thought. Now that idea is another item on the list of old wives' tales. Duane Smith, a state potato economist in Presque Isle, explains it this way: About 25 percent of the potato soil is rocks. If a farmer plows 12 inches deep and then removes all the rocks, he has reduced his soil level to 8 inches. The next year when he plows 12 inches of soil he will be plowing 4 inches of ground not plowed before. Twenty-five percent of this new 4 inches of soil is rocks and must be removed. If this explanation is correct, then the famous Caribou and Mapleton loams are thinner each year, a matter of arithmetic.
Rock removal increases natural erosion. An average of 71/2 tons of soil are lost per acre each year. This is more than double the loss considered tolerable by the U.S. Soil Conservation Service. But averages are dangerous. Many farms do not lose this much soil each year. Also, the Caribou Loam is a double blessing for the farmers who have it. Caribou Loam has two topsoils, A and B. Smith, the potato economist, says: "It is very forgiving soil, very productive, and it's deep, so despite erosion we have pretty good depth. Some places you can completely lose the A level and produce higher yields on the B soil." Mapleton Loam is the same as Caribou Loam but has no second level, and in this soil islands of bushes and tall grass grow in the fields about the ledge poking up through the ground.
S. Van Day is the soil conservation specialist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Presque Isle. He says: "A fellow, say, has 100acres of good potato land. He thinks he has to raise 100 acres of potatoes, and that's ridiculous. He should rotate, plant only 50 acres in potatoes, but the farmer says, 'I can't do that — I would go bankrupt.' . . . Every year in Presque Isle it's potatoes, potatoes, potatoes, when they should have two years of potatoes, one year of grain, one year of grass, then two years of potatoes." There is a side benefit to those places in the country where oats and buckwheat are planted to save the soil, he says. Oats and buckwheat bring in geese, and the geese bring in hunters, a tourist of sorts in a land that few tourists ever see. Most tourists prefer Boothbay Harbor, a closer place, and in the public perception, a prettier place, too.
Aroostook is big country, the Texas of New England. Bret Wallach, a geographer at the University of Maine at Fort Kent, describes Aroostook in his article "The Potato Landscape":
"No region of the United States, except Alaska, has towns as raw as Aroostook County. The Historic America Buildings Survey lists nothing — not a single structure in an area two-thirds the size of Massachusetts. Aroostook County's towns are full of monotonous, two-story balloon-frame buildings, painted in severe grays or whites and landscaped without flowers or shrubs. Old timber walls, pegged and dovetailed, have been covered with aluminum siding. Mobile homes abound. Main streets are dusty, shadeless, and lined with Klondike-type false fronts...." Wallach's eye is accurate, but his perception is severe. Farmhouses are often naked beside the road, with no trees for shade or windbreak, no shrubs to hide the foundation. But there are many mining towns and farm towns in other states as raw as any in Aroostook. Wallach would be more correct if he compared Aroostook to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Norman Rockwell's town. Then Aroostook is as raw as he writes of it. Aroostook's potato landscape is not always pretty; it is big. The potato landscape is not supposed to be beautiful; it is supposed to grow potatoes.
Aroostook grows approximately 92 percent of Maine's potatoes; Maine produces only 8 percent of the nation's total. Maine ranks fourth among potato producing states and last year grew 26,180,000 hundredweight on 119,000 acres. Idaho grew 96,980,000 hundredweight on 330,000 acres. Maine grows Abnaki potatoes, Bake King, Caribou, Cascade, Chippewa, Cobbler, Desiree, Green Mountain, Iopride, Katahdin, Kennebec, Norland, Ordmonte, Pungo, Russet Burbank, Sebago, Seminole, Shurchip, Sioux, Superior, Wauseon, and York, among others. Frozen french fry processors like the Russet Burbank because of its shape and consistent cooking characteristics. Kennebecs are preferred by potato chip manufacturers.
Climate turned Aroostook to potatoes: cool nights, days that do not get too hot. The normal mean temperature in Caribou in August is 52.6 degrees. Most years there is enough rain. Caribou gets 3½ inches of rain in a normal August. Potato production was spurred when the railroad reached Aroostook in 1894. This single crop economy boomed during World War II, harvested partly by German POWs and reached a peak in 1946, when 219,000 acres were planted, about double the acreage planted now. Some smaller farmers are going out of business; taking jobs in the paper mill in Madawaska or leaving the county, leaving Maine for factory jobs. There are government regulations, employee restrictions, and a potato farmer needs a lawyer, an accountant. A fellow in Presque Isle says: "It's not farming any more. It's a business."
Land values are not rising much and some are declining in value in the upper St. John Valley around Fort Kent. The poorest lands sells for $250 an acre. In Presque Isle, the best land is about $800 an acre. But even at $800, it costs more to cultivate, rock-pick, seed, fertilize, herbicide, harvest, and store an acre of potatoes than the acre is worth. Economist Smith is not certain this is a significant fact. He agrees with others that starting a potato farm is expensive and gives an estimate for a 100-acre farm: one $40,000 tractor; one $35,000 harvester; one $18,000 planter; one $10,000 sprayer; probably five good-sized trucks at about $12,000 each; plus plows and harrows, and a machine shed with welding equipment and cutting torches to repair equipment. He says: "We're seeing a turn to multifamily farms, sons and fathers in business together so actually there are three farms operated as one. They can build storage buildings together and share equipment [but] there is very little corporate farming in the county." Many farmers prefer preseason contracts for their potatoes and deal in potato futures to hedge against the price. The smaller farmer is not so well prepared. He is apt to gamble on a good yield, a good price. Some farmers say they like the gamble.
The potato landscape has had two bad seasons in a row. Last year it was too little water; the year before the price was low. Potato farmers are like fishermen. They talk more about bad years than good, but they have good years or they could not continue to farm. A fellow in Fort Kent says: "After a couple or three good years, the corners of their mouths turn up. They fix up their house, trade in their car, maybe take the wife on a vacation, go to Florida." If it is another bad year, the farmer can winter in his wood lot, pulping for the paper companies or piling up firewood for himself. A typical Aroostook farm has 105 acres in potatoes plus a wood lot, about 300 acres in all. Where the potato field ends, the wood lot begins, and where the farm wood lots end, the big woods begin.
THE BIG WOODS
The timber cruisers found tall white pine in Aroostook and cut trees 150 feet tall and 6 feet through at the butt. A pine cut at Telos Lake in 1842 was said to measure 7 feet through 4 feet from the ground. Once cut, these Aroostook white pine did not regenerate themselves because the spruce and fir, the under story of the forest, took the sun, leaving none for the pine. White pine is not extinct in Aroostook but is not a major product. As remote as the northwest woods of Aroostook are, there is little land that has not been cut over. Not counting an isolated bog, there may be no virgin timber standing. Says Robert Locke, the state's regional forester at Presque Isle: "When I first came up here in 1954 you might find some small [virgin] areas which I was told had not been logged because they were too far from the water, couldn't get the trees to the water with horses or oxen." Now there are mechanical harvesting techniques, and wood is no longer run down the river and the lake, and bulldozers make paths for lumber tractors called skidders, and these skidders drag out wood from most anyplace. Locke says he could not show a visitor virgin trees now because he knows of none. Logging roads cross the big woods, roads so well built that heavily loaded lumber trucks roll through the woods like an 18-wheel tractor-trailer down the Mass. Pike. These woods highways of Aroostook and Piscataquis, Penobscot, Somerset; and Washington counties reduce the wilderness to wild lands because wild lands are where people do not live and have left no sign.
All 16 counties of Maine produce lumber and pulpwood; Aroostook produces the most, about one-fourth. The Aroostook product is spruce and fir, mostly. Spruce is used for papermaking and is very strong, used for dimension stock, 2 by 4s, 2 by 6s. It doesn't work as easily as white pine; that is why colonial lumbermen and the lumber barons of the nineteenth century preferred pine. Fir doesn't have the strength of spruce and is used more for boards than for dimension stock. It is also used for pulp. Maine produced 5.3 million cords of wood last year, and 1.3 million cords of this total were cut in Aroostook. The potato landscape occupies only a corner of Aroostook, not because the wild lands are not arable, but because lumber companies, paper companies, bought the land before settlers could. Forester Locke: "The other day I was up west of Allagash and the land was just as level as this airbase [Locke's office is at the Presque Isle airport]. And the soil was good...."
The settlement at Allagash has 456 people. It is an irregular string of buildings along one paved road near the junction of the Allagash River and the St. John. In early summer, evening grosbeaks, yellow as parrots; flutter waist high across this road, and the bodies of many of them, hit by cars, lie squashed on the asphalt or on the dirt shoulders of the road, a wilderness bird inept at living this close to civilization. Wallach, the geographer at the state university's Fort Kent campus, says of the Allagash River: "It connotes wilderness. People in the city want to believe there is a wilderness out there. It gives them a natural baseline against which to measure urban life, that nature is strong enough to withstand all assaults and that rivers will always rush to the sea." These sentences came out of his mouth quickly, as if he had formed and memorized them in the days he has spent traveling the lumber roads of the Allagash woods. He says: "The soul of this region is the wood that comes out of it."
A spring fire is a running fire, says Albert Gibson, the assistant unit ranger at the Allagash station. "Where you've got heavy slash (cut-over land) and two or three hot days to dry it out, you can get fire and it runs like a son-of-a-gun. But the fire won't go deep (into the ground as it does in summer). A spring fire is more a running fire. May 28 two or three years ago, up on twelve- fourteen somewhere, around 1400 or 1500 acres burned."
Townships such as twelve-fourteen are generally squares on the map, 6 miles to a side, 24,000 acres each. The settlement at Allagash is called Allagash Plantation because it is inhabited, has selectmen, and thus is more than a numbered square. The crew at Gibson's fire ranger station uses 300-foot hoses carried in a man's backpack. Usually the hoses are hooked to one another, a 600-foot line from a brook or pond to the fire. "We take a crew according to the size of the fire. Say a 40-acre fire, we put in 15 men, a couple bulldozers to put a (firebreak) line around it."There are three rangers at the Allagash station. The others of a 15-man crew would be deputized from lumber camps or from the settlement itself. Without the revenue of the woods, Allagash Plantation would disappear. It will disappear if the Dickey-Lincoln Dam is built on the St. John River, a short distance away. But, Gibson says, if the dam is built and floods Allagash, Allagash would move to dry grounds; its inhabitants would continue to work in the woods.
It is 29 miles from Fort Kent to Allagash, a long way to go to buy a pair of socks. Allagash has a lunch counter, a pool hall, two grocery stores. People there are aware of how far from town they live, how much the woods envelop them, but they do not consider themselves isolated, not even in winter. Says Gibson: "There's never a time you can't get out (to Fort Kent) unless it might be a night where it snowed so hard people wouldn't get out other places." He thinks of the big woods around Allagash as the "wild land" because the paper companies own the land and nobody lives there "except for a few forestry people . . . like at Clayton Lake. IP (International Paper) has some people at Clayton Lake because they're cutting there now."
Ashland is a much bigger place than Allagash. Ashland is a real town and sits on the edge of the big woods; it is not surrounded by the woods as Allagash is. Potato fields stretch west from Presque Isle to Ashland. After Ashland is the woods, and in these woods is the panther, maybe.
Kevin Stevens is a wildlife biologist at the state's fish and game station in Ashland and questions that the panther has returned. "It's quite a controversy up here," he says. "We believe that two hundred or three hundred years ago it was a resident but disappeared. A few people think some panthers remain. There are quite a few sightings reported, but how do you prove it? Tracks? Tracks could be bobcats or lynx, though lynx are rare. What you really need is a piece of hair for proof. Probably, historically, there never were that many panthers because their range is so large."
Timber wolves disappeared about 1860, Stevens says, and the caribou were exterminated by 1890. Moose were almost exterminated but have regenerated themselves under state protection to such numbers that there will be a limited hunting season on moose this year. Coyotes were first reported moving into Maine in the late 1930s and are well established now. There are black bear. The woods of Aroostook is a habitat for beaver, fisher, otter, red fox and mink, and an animal uncommon south of Aroostook, the marten, also called the sable. None of these animals has the mystery of the mountain lion. This panther is the snow leopard, the Yeti, the Big Foot of the big woods.
"Last winter a fellow saw a panther crossing the road and reported it to Ashland [to Stevens' station], and a biologist went back there and found the tracks were made by a fisher. You can't mistake a fisher track for a panther. Maybe you could mistake a bobcat track. . . . Clayton Lake is a hotbed [of panther reports]. Maybe I shouldn't tell you this, but there was a guy who worked for IP [International Paper] and the superintendent of the Allagash Waterway stopped on the road talking to each other a year ago. They swear right up and down that this mountain lion crossed right in front of them in daylight." In Stockholm a reputable person said he saw a panther in the snow, lying down the way a cat does, but he reported this sighting two weeks later, after the tracks had disappeared. Game warden Allan Rider makes a skeptical face when asked if he believes in panthers. He has never seen one.
Warden Rider found five or six lost hunters last year. "Most were carrying compasses, but they didn't know how to use it, and they usually think up an excuse for being lost. They follow a deer track a long way, they look at their compass (and have no reference point and no skill at using a compass). This guy from Pennsylvania went hunting at seven o'clock and they (his friends) told him to go so many degrees west and so many degrees north (to find a good hunting area). So by 2 p.m. he was lost, and he sat down. lit a fire. We searched for him all night. I was close to him at one time. I started at 7:30 that night, left the siren going in the pickup. (Sometimes Rider uses a chain saw to make noise to signal a lost hunter.) And he came down the brook in the morning." Rider says the hunter had been in the vee of two logging roads with a brook nearby, good landmarks for a lost person, but this didn't help the hunter because he didn't have a map.
Rider and two fellow wardens found about twenty lost hunters each season. Rider told of one person who was not found in time. "I think it was in fourteen-five." A teenage boy had gone hunting behind his house, it was cold; there was snow on the ground. The boy was missing three days before he was reported lost because it was thought he had left home. "He (the warden) followed his tracks for two days. The tracks circled, he crossed his own track. Finally the warden followed (the last) track and found him in a blowdown (fallen trees). He had only a light jacket on and had tucked himself in there. He was hopelessly lost, scared. and he shot himself (dead). He was frozen when they found him."
BETWEEN THE COAST AND THE BIG WOODS
In the beginning, the French and English settled on the coast and from there moved up the river valleys of the Androscoggin, the Kennebec, and the Penobscot, first to hunt and trap, then to lumber, then to farm, then to work in the mills that were turned by the Androscoggin, the Kennebec, and the Penobscot. Geographers call this the transition zone between the coast and the wilds; government economists call it the Maine corridor, a swatch of land on each side of the Maine Turnpike from Kittery to Old Town. About 60 percent of. Maine's one million people live in this transition zone. They work in different industries, but there is a paramount industry, the paper mill, such as the Boise Cascade mill in Rumford, where the Androscoggin makes a bend and falls 165feet in one mile, a rush of water power.
One hundred fifty trucks a day are driven to the Boise mill; they transport about half a million cords of wood a year, wood that is broken down into fiber and made into paper for TV Guide, McCall's, Ranger Rick, the National Geographic, and other publications. The trucks carry 4-foot hardwood logs of maple, birch, beech, elm, ash, oak and cherry and tamarack; they also carry poplar, basswood, and balm of Gilead; they carry some pine but not more than 15 percent because the pitch in pine is difficult to break down for papermaking. They carry no cedar because cedar doesn't chip well and cooks up into a weak fiber. Papermakers used to think poplar was equally useless, but now it is ground up and mixed with other wood fibers. A hybrid poplar can grow 30 feet in seven years under good conditions, three times faster than spruce or fir or the hardwoods. A poplar can be cut several times, and each time a new tree grows from the old trunk, like a picked dandelion.
Paper and lumber companies own about half of Maine's 17 million acres of woodland.The product value of the forest industry is about 35 percent of everything produced in Maine. The value of the paper companies' product is $1.6 billion a year; the lumber industry product is worth $470 million a year. There is no power in the State of Maine to match the power of the paper companies; critics say they have inordinate power. A group of independent loggers, the Maine Woodsmen's Association, has claimed that the paper companies build up mountains of logs cut by alien labor from Canada and thus deprive Maine loggers of a livelihood. However, the paper companies pay the highest average wage of any Maine industry, $16,439. The Boise mill in Rumford runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, employs 1,700 people, and pays them $25 million. The smell of the paper mill is considerable, a stench to outsiders, but one old-timer says people in Rumford like that smell because it means the mill is running and there is work.
At a distance, the mountainous pile in the Boise yard looks like sawdust, but it is wood chips cut from the 4-foot logs delivered by truck. The chips, the size of a half-dollar, are cooked in an alkaline liquid under pressure to dissolve the resins that bind wood fibers together. These fibers are mixed with starch and latex and clay and put through large rollers and dryers, producing a beautiful product: smooth, white, coated magazine paper. The exact procedure for the product made for the National Geographic is secret, and plant officials won't say how much they make.
Ernest E. Von Tobel is a forest supervisor for Boise Cascade, responsible for 56,000 of the 365,000 acres of timber owned by Boise. Boise cuts selectively, does not clear cut, and Von Tobel and the other company foresters mark each tree to be cut with paint on the trunk and on the exposed part of the root. The marking on the root tells a forester if the logger has followed his instructions. Von Tobel's quota is 17,000 cords of pulpwood for the mill and 13/4 million board feet of saw logs this year. Some of this wood will come from the 3,000 acres on a steep hillside
in Roxbury, a hillside Von Tobel calls the Noisy Brook Drainage, after the brook that runs down the hill.
The lumber road up the hill has a 17-degree grade in places, and a road like this costs about $12,000 a mile. It leads up to where the northern hardwoods grow, the beech, maple, and birch. Softwoods, the spruce and fir and pine, tend to grow at the bottom of a hill and again at the top. In between is the hardwood. Cutters or choppers — the terms are synonymous — prefer to cut hardwood because there is less limbing to do once the tree is down than there is with spruce and fir and pine. John Percival, the logger on this hill, is a private contractor who owns heavy equipment, hires the cutters, and sells the 4-foot logs to the Boise mill, about 18 miles away in Rumford.
Percival's cutters are young men. One was trained to be a schoolteacher, another is qualified as a hospital technician, but they both prefer working in the woods. They use European chain saws, Stihls and Husqvarnas. They get paid by the cord; in good weather they average about $250 a week. An ambitious man working a 40-hour week could earn close to $400. The work is strenuous; men age quickly in the woods, and few stay once the strength of their youth is spent.
Percival says: "I think the oldest fellow I had working for me was in his late forties. He made every move count — everybody watched him to find out how he cut so much wood." They work in two-man teams. One man cuts, the other drives a skidder, dragging logs behind it to a yard, a clearing in the woods where the trees are stacked. In the yard, both cutter and skidder operator buck the logs into 4-foot lengths. Woods work is high risk work. Men wear hard hats and steel toed safety shoes, but this protective clothing does not prevent all accidents. Says Percival : "A young fellow about three months ago was killed near here. A tree fell on him. No one knows [exactly] what happened."
Cutters use plastic wedges to try to fell a tree in a certain place. Some old-timers make their own wedges, cut them out of wood. The idea is to make the tree fall where it is easy for the partner on the skidder to get a chain on the tree and drag it out to the yard. "Out West they fell a tree where they want because softwood has even limbs, but hardwood up here [on the side of Noisy Brook Drainage] is not that even," Percival said. The big hardwoods have more branches on the side that faces the sun. A good cutter can look at a tree, see how it is leaning, and be nearly certain how it will fall. If the wind is blowing the wrong way, he may wait until the wind is blowing the right way. Even with wedges, a man cannot make a tree fall exactly where he wishes. Says Percival: "A big tree will just come down the way they will."
A skidder on this hill normally drags trees only about half a mile to the yard. At Noisy Brook there was timber a mile back, and a winter road was the economical way to get at it. Trees were cut, stumps and rocks removed, the dirt smoothed, in preparation for cold weather to freeze down a road. Forester Von Tobel says: "Normally a good freeze freezes to a certain depth. By putting the weight of a bulldozer on it, you drive the frost down." This winter road was packed over the frost, and when it snowed the road was plowed, the snow itself smoothing the road surface, but last winter there was too much snow. The hill is 2,700 feet high, and at 2,200 feet there were 51/2 feet of snow. There was so much wind that the road had to be plowed continually, but the snow drifted back onto the winter road when the plow had passed. Last February, Percival had to pull out of Noisy Brook. He says: "A man can crawl in snow, but it stops the equipment."
Ken Jodrey, an independent trucker, takes the 4-foot logs down the steep, dirt logging road of Noisy Brook. He owns a wheeler. Any single truck (body and cab attached) on a logging job is called a wheeler, and Jodrey's wheeler is a 1969 C-60 Chevrolet. The cab looks new on the outside where the paint has been refinished. All 14 wheels have been newly painted with aluminum-colored paint.(The 10-wheeler has 4 extra wheels on the third axle, used only for exceptional loads.) This morning, Jodrey is carrying about eight cords, about 60,000 pounds. He keeps his foot on the brake nearly every moment down the trail. The truck is in low gear, moving about four miles an hour. He only watches the RPM gauge, not the speedometer. "If it goes over four thousand RPM, the engine will blow," he says.
Jodrey indicated where his truck slid 60 feet last winter. A slide scares him only "the first time each winter." After that he gets used to it. If he were to lose his brakes going down, he would steer for the bank of the road and jump out before the truck hit. He had brake trouble on the paved road last winter in Andover. His brakes got hot, but Jodrey stayed with his truck, was able to stop it on a flat stretch. He works for himself and has pride in his ability. He and the cutters kid each other about which job is tougher. "But the cutters bring only their saw and lunch pail. I bring my lunch pail and my truck." His old truck, the 10-wheeler Chevrolet, has over 300,000 miles on it, but he has a new one, also, and the new truck cost $35,000. Jodrey says: "Anybody can drive a truck, but the trick is to get it down the mountain without wrecking it."
In 1929 in Farmington a farmer could earn $1000 a year if he had 10 dairy cows, 3 acres of sweet corn, sold $200 worth of wood, and got $150 from working an outside job. The figures are outdated, but the relationship of farming to woodcutting to outside job is similar to what it is today in Farmington, a town in the transition zone between the coast and the big woods. Despite its name, Farmington was not a major farming area, not since 1815, when Ohio fever struck and farmers went where the land was flatter, more fertile, and where there was a lot of it.
Nevertheless, the river bottom land here was famous for growing sweet corn, and the canned product was called Sandy River corn.
The last sweet corn canning plant to close was in Starks, a town near Farmington. It closed this decade because of competition from Florida and the farms of the Southwest. After World War II, other corn canning plants moved to the Middle West, where the growing season is longer. The flood plain of the Sandy River has good soil, the rocks covered by dirt. There is a lot of part-time farming here still. Myron Starbird, a retired professor who lives in Farmington, says: "A lot of people talk about farming, but 'they really cut more wood than they farm." Others do some farming and work for the state or the town. Ray Orr, for example, raises some cattle and is Farmington's chief of police.
In a recent Franklin County census, only 19 of 200 farms produced over $60,000 in gross sales. Even some of those 19 are marginal farms. The families of these bigger, but still marginal, farms depend on a father who works in the paper mill or a mother who teaches school. There are exceptions. L. Herbert and Brenda York of Farmington run a big, full time farm, 1500 acres. He works it 14 hours a day.
The Yorks' cat was intruding on the conversation in the parlor of the big farmhouse, turning the conversation to animals. York said animals can communicate with each other. "You take a vet drawing blood and the cow makes a sound, and all the cows in the barn know, tense up. I don't get philosophical about it [animal communication], but I can shout at a cow when milking her, and they tense up because she knows she'll get a slap if she doesn't straighten up."
York has 300 acres of bottomland along the Sandy River across the road from his farmhouse. "We call it the intervale and we will grow beans, squash, corn, turnips, and a rotation of hay crops, alfalfa, and the grasses. This is a completely diversified farm. I try to utilize the ground to the best advantage . When the sweet corn factories went out, it left a void for row crops, cash crops." One crop York tried was sugar beets, and was successful at it. However, the processing plant went bankrupt. He grows turnips now in order to use the sugar beet equipment.
His intervale land was never built on and never will be because periodic flooding of the Sandy River protects it from development. He has 57 acres in squash this year and 77 acres in corn and 250 acres in hay. He has grown beans for two years; this year it was time for squash and corn. Crop rotation reduces insect and disease problems, he said. His 300 acres of intervale were built up one inch every 500 years. He is careful with it.
"We try to start planting the tenth of May and try to get done by the end of May. ... Usually about the fifth of June we start haying right through to about the middle of July. At that time she (his wife Brenda) takes off for the shows." Mrs. York is a judge of show cattle.
He has only one outlet for the 700 tons of squash he will grow, the pie mix factory in Winslow Mills. There are two or three outlets for beans in Maine. "I do my own thrashing (of beans). I take 'em out (of the field), take 'em into a cleaner that blows air through 'em, cleans 'em. We bag 'em there in 80- or 90-pound bags and store 'em on pallets. The buyer comes out and says you got so much pick-out (beans split or discolored). It varies from 3 percent to 23 percent. So I sell 'em so much a pound. It's been 40 or 50 cents a pound."
The corn is ground up, cob and all, and used to feed dairy cows. He uses about one third of the corn for his own herd of 100 cows, selling the other two thirds. He grows about 20,000 bales of hay and sells about half of it. There are two markets for his milk, the Maine market and the Boston market. "Usually the Maine market is better because of the transportation, maybe up to 50 cents a hundredweight. That's not a great margin but a help." His cows will each produce about 14,000 pounds of milk a year. In June he was milking 37 of his 100 animals.
If York were farming in Ohio he would probably concentrate on corn or soybeans, but, he says, "a Maine farmer has to be independent. You have to scratch to find a market (at a price). Out there in Ohio prices are dictated." York has assembled seven small farms to form his 1500-acre farm. About 1000 acres of the 1500 are woods. His prime land is the 300 acres on the river. There is pressure on prime land in Maine. "Not so much around here as farther south and near the coast, for shopping centers, house lots. Usually, farmland is best for putting in houses (but) our intervale land down there will never be developed because it is flood plain, self-protected."
Beans and squash are harvested in September. The harvest usually ends with corn the first week in November. Then York cleans up his machines, "buttons up" the farm. About December 1, he and his two hired hands work in his woods, selling both saw logs and pulpwood. He is seldom idle because he must make his land produce. "We have the ability to produce more per cow per acre, but after a point even the best methods won't solve the increases in overhead.
"To be a farmer you've got to be an optimist. It's a 100 percent requirement. . . . If everything bothers you, you'd be a nervous wreck. Like the river down there. I've got $20,000 or $30,000 invested there, and the river might rise and flood it."
York's wealth is in the land, and the land is valuable only if it produces. He says: "If I can't make a living on this land, who can?" If he should fail to make his land produce, "my entire equity is in jeopardy. We have no retirement, nothing to go back on."
He and his wife have no sons. He wonders what will happen to the farm if one of his daughters does not marry a farmer, Meanwhile, he and his wife look very healthy, and in the pictures set on the parlor table, so do his three daughters.
SAND OVER CLAY, THE SOUTHWEST COAST
The weight of the glaciers depressed the Southwest Coast. When the melting water from the glacier poured into the ocean, the ocean level rose, flooding the coast, and when the flood receded, a layer of sand was left over the clay. Some places inland from Wells and Kennebunk, on the sand plain where the jackpine grows and the land looks like Georgia, the sand is 70 feet deep. This landscape is gentler than other landscapes in Maine, and is where the state's only long. sandy beaches are, including the longest of them, Old Orchard. Portland is about half-way up this Southwest Coast of sand over clay. Portland is the largest city in the state, 65,116 people, and is unlike any other city in Maine. Even in hunting season the pickup trucks on Congress street do not have rifles on the rack behind the driver.
Portland has a good opinion of itself. It has a civic symphony, a theater company, a new and handsome convention center for hockey and rock concerts. Warehouses down the hill toward the waterfront have been turned into antsy and craftsy shops and brick and beam restaurants. For the doctors, the lawyers, the insurance men, and the bankers who practice in Portland there are suburban towns such as Falmouth, Yarmouth, Cape Elizabeth, places as toney as Weston or Cohasset. Portland also has urban crime and prostitutes who solicit, if not in broad daylight, at least in twilight on the corner of Congress street.
In tone and in trend, the Southwest Coast is part of southern New England, the only part of Maine that is. Dr. Victor Konrad, of the Anthropology Department at the University of Maine at Orono, says Portland is an outlying city of Boston "in the way Providence or Worcester is, almost a satellite." Some towns of the region are prospering with new industry like the towns across the New Hampshire border. Sanford is one of these towns and is "the town that refused to die."
Sanford, 17,214 people, is 34 miles from Portland. The Mousam River runs right through town, and a woolen mill prospered on the river, the Goodall mill. It produced Palm Beach label clothes, among other products. In 1954 it was sold, the mill moved out of town, and 3500 of the town's 3800 jobs were lost. Today it has new industries, a low unemployment rate. It is an inland town and so has no fishing industry; there is no paper mill and almost no woods industry. Sanford has industries of the new age, such as Sprague Electric Company, a manufacturer of capacitors for television sets and computers, and Cy/Ro, a producer of acrylic sheets, a glass substitute.
There are six banks with nine offices. "The town is well banked," says G. Wallace Ackroyd, president of the Northeast Bank's branch in Sanford. The reason, he says, is anticipation of fast growth, more growth than in any other part of the state. When the mill left town, business leaders formed a group — "a traveling road show," Ackroyd calls it — and sought industries that would produce jobs to replace those lost at the woolen mill. "It was a rough time. It just about cleaned out the town (of jobs, not people). Most people stayed, though some went to places like Connecticut." The solicitation effort brought results, new industry and national publicity on television and in national journals.
Sanford is not pretty — no mill town is — but it looks more prosperous than towns of similar size farther upcountry. Town leaders like the feel of growth and the money it brings. They supported the unsuccessful efforts of an outside group to build an oil refinery here. The town pays 70 percent of the chamber of commerce budget, $49,000 of the $67,000 total. James Wallace, director of the chamber of commerce, says: "I'm not sure people in town realize it, but southern Maine is about to experience the expansion of the megalopolis. We are about to see something similar to what happened in southern New Hampshire."
When banker Ackroyd was showing visitors from Europe through the old woolen mill, they said: "Our old mills were bombed, and that was a good thing." The Europeans could do better with new buildings. Sanford seems to be doing better with its new industries than with its single old industry, the mill. A spirit of boosterism produced jobs for people who did not have them and saved the town. This spirit seeks more industry. Gerard P. Savage, chairman of the selectmen, and several business leaders were asked why the town continues to solicit industry now that its employment situation is stable. All said that new industry would be better for the tax base. Apparently; Sanford's growth requires new growth; success must be fed with more success.
DOWNEAST
Downeast begins wherever one says it does. The state planning office divides the coast about at Camden, where the southwest coastal area of sand over clay ends. A lobsterman in Stonington says Boothbay Harbor is a dividing line because about there lobstermen are apt to take vengeance upon one another for unfair fishing practices. Sardine men say Downeast is above Mount Desert, for no special reason. Thick tourism ends at Mount Desert. From there on up the towns are poorer, coastal Washington County towns that suffered when the sardine industry declined.
The sardine is not a fish. Herring is the fish, sardine the product. The sardine industry is not dead, and a good stop seiner with fair luck can make a big strike still. Stop seining is night work, mostly, because small herring, the size appropriate for sardines, are apt to come to shore on dark nights. For that reason stop seiners look for the "darks" of the moon, especially the August darks, especially when the darks occur with a southwind and a flood tide. However, stop seiner Clarence Lunt of Bass Harbor got into a good bunch of fish early in July during a week of bright moons. Lunt came to the Stinson Canning Company in Southwest Harbor on a Thursday, said he was looking at two good bunches of fish, one in Blue Hill Bay, the other in Toothacre Cove at Swans Island. Friday he got word to the cannery that he had shut off Toothacre Cove with his nets. He had trapped about three hundred hogshead of herring, a really good shutoff.
A hogshead weighs 1225 pounds and is worth $75 this year. Lunt's shutoff held the herring all day Saturday, and during this time the sardines purged their digestive tracts and were ready to be canned. Lunt got the Stinson cannery's carrier vessel on Sunday morning, and this vessel, the Joyce Marie, took off 77 hogshead of fish in 11/2 hours, fish worth $5775. Fish were pumped from Lunt's net through a 6-inch tube into the hold of the Joyce Marie, and as the fish were falling into the hold, crew members shoveled salt, about one 80-pound bag of salt per hogshead. Says Ron Hunter, a manager at the Southwest Harbor cannery: "That's how you get the nice salty taste. They take in the salt through their gills while they're still alive. You could tell a vast difference in unsalted sardines, the big herring that are fileted without salt. Salt also helps preserve them."
Hunter wanted the 77 hogshead of fish Sunday in preparation for Monday's pack that begins with the arrival of approximately 65 women packers at 7 a.m. Monday. Hunter sent the carrier vessel Edward M. back to Lunt's shutoff at Toothacre Cove and took 62 hogshead more of fish. Tuesday the plant took another 30 hogshead, stopping at that figure because the plant could not pack more that day. Stop seiners can hold captured fish inside the nets in the water. Lunt would have to wait to unload the rest of his valuable catch.
There are 70 or 80 stop seiners on the Maine coast working out of Jonesport, Prospect Harbor, Vinalhaven, Harpswell, Tenants Harbor, Southwest Harbor, Stonington, and, as James Warren says, "most any place you might name." Warren is director of the industry's sardine council. There were 50 sardine canning plants in 1950. Now there are 15 plants: in Eastport (2), Lubec, Machiasport, Milbridge (2), Prospect Harbor, Southwest Harbor, Stonington, Belfast, Rockland (3), Bath, and Yarmouth.
A fully grown herring is 15 to 17 inches long. Only fish 41/2 to 8 inches long are canned as sardines. Four is the minimum number of fish in a sardine can; if less than four fish fill a can, the sardine is a herring. The heads of small sardines are cut off; the heads and tails are cut off larger sardines. The industry started in Eastport in 1873, an imitation of the French practice of preparing the fish. The Mediterranean sardine of the Spanish, Portuguese, and the French is a different fish from that caught off Maine. Norwegian sardines are the same herring caught in Maine, but the Norwegian brisling is a different fish. Maine's industry declined in the 1960s when foreign fleets began fishing the North Atlantic for herring, taking the adult fish that spawned the sardine-sized fish caught by coastal seiners. In 1950, 200 million pounds of herring were landed in Maine, almost all of it sardine-sized fish. Last year, 67 million pounds were landed, 30 percent of them adult herring, and not good fish for sardine making.
Sardines were caught by Indians using weirs, stakes in the mud of coves, one stake joined to another with brush to form a barrier to trap the fish. This method is still used, especially along Perry road between Eastport and Calais, where there are approximately 15 weirs along 7 or 8 miles of shore. There may be 28 or 29 weirs along the whole coast; at one time there were 300. Weirs are effective but cannot be moved.
A stop seiner uses the principle of the weir, closing off a cove, but he can move his nets to where the fish are. A highliner, meaning the best stop seiners, use aircraft to spot schools of herring moving into a cove. The stop seiner and his crew draw a net across the cove, trapping the sardines. A second net is put inside the first net in the deepest water, and the herring, constrained by instinct to move to deeper water at daylight, are caught in this second net, a pouch. From this pouch the carrier vessel pumps the sardines aboard and then goes to the cannery. At the cannery dock a state inspector is responsible for testing fish before they are canned. Warren says: "They see there's no feed (inside the sardine). Usually they take 100 fish, pull the heads off, and usually the poke (stomach) comes off with the head, and the inspector can just squeeze the poke to see if anything is in it. . . . Sometimes there is feed (in the poke) and they'll have to go for fish meal. That's why the fisherman and the skipper of the carrying vessel are careful."
A good catch is about 60 hogshead, Warren says. At the current price of $75 a hogshead, the fisherman would earn $4500, often in one night. "But sardine fishing is just like going lake fishing," Warren says. "You might be out one night or go two weeks and not catch anything." Stop seiners are independent fishermen. Many of them also lobster, or gill net for cod and haddock, but with a couple really good bunches of fish, they might not lobster in winter. Most have an arrangement with the cannery. The cannery loans an individual money to fix his gears, perhaps even money to buy his boat, and, in return he agrees to sell his sardines to the cannery.
Warren says: "Usually he fishes one year, gets the debt paid off, but is back the next year for a loan to buy new gear. Most are verbal contracts." He may take out 20 percent of the price of a catch to retire the cannery loan for his boat or nets; 30 or 40 might be applied against the boat for fuel, food, gear; the rest is divided equally among the fisherman and his three crewmen. If he is a highliner and uses a spotter plane, the pilot customarily gets 10 percent.
The scales are scraped off with hardware cloth as the fish are being pumped into the carrier vessel. They are sold to manufacturers of artificial pearls, lacquers such as nailpolish, and plastic. Heads and tails are sold for lobster bait. The sardine itself is put into a can by hand. Stinson's Southwest Harbor plant packs about 115,000 cases a year, one hundred 4-ounce cans to the case.
All the packers are women at Southwest Harbor. Two buses transport the women to the cannery each day. One bus leaves at 5:40 a.m. from the Maine Coast Mall in Ellsworth, where it picks up about 5 women, then goes to Southwest Harbor, stopping along the way at Trenton, Somesville, and Town Hill, delivering about 20 women to the plant. A second bus leaves Bass Harbor on a route to Manset, Seawall, West Tremont, and Seal Cove and has about 25 passengers at the plant in time to begin packing sardines at 7 a.m. Some are girls, some are young women, some are elderly — at least one women is over 80.
Most work is from June through October, but there is some work most months. They worked 15 days in January, 9 days in February, 10 days last November, 2 days last December. In slack times they receive phone calls, as early as 5 a.m., as late as midnight, about work the following day. There are about 65 women packers in the Stinson plant, and Hilda Merchant is fastest of them all.
Hilda Merchant lives in Hall Quarry, a town on Mount Desert not far from South-west Harbor. She started packing sardines in 1943 at the plant she now works in, and except when her children were small, she has worked there ever since. Her husband works at the golf course in Northeast Harbor. Most days she gets a ride to work with him rather than on the cannery bus. She can cut the heads off sardines and place them into a can so fast that the eye cannot follow the procedure. Her hands are like those of a card cheat, faster than the eye. She can pack 20,000 sardines into a can each day, cutting the heads off with scissors in her right hand, placing the sardine in the can with her left.
The women are paid $1.53 to pack a case of "fives and sixes," large sardines that pack five or six fish to a can. They receive $1.85 for "eights," smaller fish that pack eight to a can. Mrs. Merchant says: "On fives and sixes I can do 40 or 50 cases a day [100 cans to a case]. Yesterday on eights I got 28 cases ... You pick 'em up with your scissors hand, put 'em in the other hand to cut, and while I'm crackin' that one that I've got, I'm picking up another one." She appears to have three fish in control at a time, like a juggler with three rubber balls. She grades the fish by size as she goes. "I don't stop to think which [are big fish or small fish], but I put the eights to one side until I get enough to fill a can."
She puts a filled can into a case with her left hand, at the same time taking fish off the conveyor belt onto her table with her right hand. She says her hands work automatically without any command and that she is able to think about the housework facing her when she gets home "or whatever else comes into my mind." Some new women get the trick of canning quickly, she says. "But they ask a lot of questions and are always watching me. That makes me nervous."
Mrs. Merchant is a thin woman. She was wearing slacks and sneakers and was smoking a cigarette after her lunch as she tried to explain her remarkable speed. She wears bandages on the thumb and first and second fingers of her left hand ("Everyone does it different"). She tapes all five fingers on her right hand in front of the middle knuckle to prevent blisters from the squeezing of the scissors. She and the other women talk to one another over the noise of the conveyor belt carrying the fish. The packers stand at their work. She aches at the end of the day, especially her back. "My back hurts more on small fish. Only thing I can figure is you get to move more on big fish." She does not know how she is aware when a can is full without looking at it. She is not conscious of feeling the fish in the full can because her hands are moving too fast. "I don't know. I do a lot of things I don't know what I'm doing .. . just the feel of it, I guess." Empty cans cut her left hand at times, but there is nothing to be done about it. She says she can't be careful enough to avoid those cuts, can't take the time.
Edward Blackmore lives in Stonington, a town at the ocean end of Deer Isle. He has fished for lobsters for 30 years and says: "Just about the time when you think you know what the lobster is doing, they do something else. They don't do the same thing two years in a row. You never outsmart the lobster ... "
There are about 9,000 lobster fishing licenses in Maine, but Blackmore says: "Those that fish at lobster [meaning serious fishermen] are probably just under 4000." A man starting out has a big investment to make. "It's getting so if you've got enough money to go lobster fishing you've got enough money not to work . . . A boat, 36 to 38 feet, properly equipped, good depth recorder, VHF radio, a small boat radar, a pot hauler, costs about $35,000. The boat is probably Maine built, either fiberglass or wooden hull, the Jonesport hull [a traditional hull made of cedar planking, oak frame].
"A wood boat lasts about 30 years with care. I don't know about fiberglass, they're still going and they're 16 years old, could very well last longer (than wood). The difference between a glass boat and a wood boat is the motion. Wood is slow, an easy motion, but glass is quicker. For me, glass is harder on the knees, legs, and back. Glass is easier to maintain. The first 8 years you own a wood boat it gets heavier and sinks a little lower in the water. A glass boat doesn't get heavier one year to the next. You have to raise the water line twice in the first 10 years on a wood boat, 2 inches each time.
"When I started lobster fishing 30 years ago I had 130 or 140 traps. That was average for a man starting out. We used to start in August with hurricanes, get about five hurricanes. It was hard to get many traps (collected) — you'd lose so many. The second or third year I was fishing, and we'd been through a few hurricanes, I was down to 120 traps, and I think it was Thanksgiving Day, the most beautiful day you ever saw. You could see your face on the water like a mirror. Then we had a sou'easter lasting three days and three nights. When I (finally)got out, I sailed all day long and found 7 traps. That was the end of fishing that year. I remember my grandfather dipping his heads (the twine netting that keeps a lobster trapped) in hot tar and putting them on rocks to dry. Then he'd grease his arms up to his shoulders before putting the heads inside the traps. . . . We used to have a winch to haul traps, but you had to pull some with it. By the end of the day there was miles of rope you took in hand over hand."
Blackmore's grandfather was using line of manila or sisal. Nylon is used now; it is cheaper and requires less repair. A man can keep a bigger gang of traps in the water because of nylon. Hydraulic pot haulers require almost no effort. A man can fish 500 to 600 traps if he is willing to start out at 5 a.m., not return to harbor until 3 or 4 p.m.
Maine lobster is heavily fished. Some biologists believe that close to 90 percent of all legal-sized lobsters are caught each year, leaving little margin for regeneration. Yet 19 million pounds of lobsters were caught in Maine last year, the highest total since 1969. There has been a fluctuation in the catch of only a half-million pounds from year to year for the last three years. Blackmore is president of the Maine Lobstermen's Association, a group representing about 700 men. He thinks the state's conservation measures are working.
"Maine is the only state that has a 5-inch maximum measure. Canada doesn't even have that." The minimum size for legal lobster in Maine is 3–3/16 inches measured from the eye socket to the end of the body shell. Maine lobstermen are required by law to put a vee on the tail of egg-bearing lobsters."This lobster can never be sold (in Maine), but some crawl to New Hampshire and Massachusetts and are caught there and sold," Maine lobstermen don't like that, but, Blackmore says, if lobsters crawl out of the state there is nothing to be done about it.
It was believed that offshore lobsters had no bearing on the inshore stock, but Blackmore and some of his association members now agree with biologists that there is a link. Blackmore says: "In the Gulf of Maine, the motion of the current is counterclockwise. The eggs laid offshore are suspended in the water for a while, then those eggs, a certain amount of them, are deposited along the coast by the current." Supply affects price. If the supply is up; the price is down.That is the hell of being a fisherman. "But we're a little better off than fin fishermen.Whadda you going to do with dead fish? You got to sell 'em. We can put lobsters in cars (storage pens in the water) but there is some shrinkage in the cars. And you have to feed 'em. You take crabs, smash 'em up. Lobster loves to feed on crabs. And you can use fish racks (skeletons of fileted fish) but if they shed they get just like jelly. Lobsters in captivity will eat the others as fast as they shed . . . It takes a month to grow a new shell if they shed on you. But you can store them in November (not a shedding time) and keep 'em all winter."
No Sunday fishing is allowed from June 1 to September 1, and during these months no fishing is allowed on Saturday after 4 p.m. There is no restriction on the number of traps a man may fish. There is some poaching (selling undersized lobsters), Blackmore says, and there is some stealing from the traps. "But fishermen have a way to take care of them. You can tell if someone is acting suspicious. They're in the area before you, move out when they see you coming. Your traps don't seem to be located where you put 'em." A suspected thief gets his gear cut.
"In Portland, they tell me, anyone can fish, but you couldn't do that here in Stonington. You wouldn't have half your gear left. You have to be known, have to have some connection with the industry . . . have been a sternman with someone else. You have to have acceptance from the fishermen (or) they'll pick you to death, one to ten traps a day. Even a native might have to serve an initiation. Someone might lean on him a bit, a token, not to drive him out but to show he cannot drive anyone else out, that he has to fit his gear in (with the gear of others). There are certain areas right here (in Stonington) that I can't fish now, would cut my gear, and I've been fishing herefor 30 years, and I'm a native-native
"They start to feel this way about Boothbay, and they feel strong about it the farther east you go. I understand it. It's our livelihood. If someone hurts the industry, there's no place to go, no mill, no industry. You got to sell your home and go."