Dispatch From the Coast
Fort William Henry is a plain round stone tower standing at the entrance to our harbor. It was built in 1692 after the previous unfortified stockade fell to a French and Abenaki raiding party. Arriving by boat you’ll pass it on your starboard side as you clear the breakwater to port. Once inside you’ll see a string of old wooden bait shacks, each on its own dock, lining the southern shore. Many of them border the remains of small marine railways that were used to launch and haul fishing boats. Now the fragments of iron and stone are covered by glistening kelp at low tide and blooms of purple sea lavender that appear in late summer.
From the kitchen table in one of these shacks, converted some years ago to a summer cottage, I’m looking out at a soft fog hovering just above the surface of the water. The harbor is largely empty. Most boats are hauled up on the opposite shore, perched on jack stands in white plastic shrink wrap like so many giant marshmallows. This year the season began with diesel over $6 a gallon, so even with a good price for lobster at the dock, you’d think twice before heading out. A local fisherman told me not so long ago he was out hauling for 15 hours. After fuel, bait and paying off his stern man, he went home with $100.
For the past three summers we’ve had a pandemic, sure, but it’s more than that. Lobsters are heading north and offshore with warming water. New regulations restrict traplines to protect right whale migrations, and Trump had to start a monumentally stupid tariff war with China, then another one with the EU. Just a few years ago those two markets represented a combined six-hundred million dollar demand for Maine lobster.
There’s no profit in nostalgia. The Maine lobsterman is passing into history to join the fur trapper, the cattle driver and the traveling minstrel.
Last year my neighbor Benny Bickford sold his boat to a tuna fisherman. Benny is 71. He pulled his first trap when he was 11, six decades shifting from one foot to the other on a rolling deck. He and Sue are moving to Montana where their son and grandkids live. He’s been telling me it’s beautiful out there. I’m glad for him, but not for me. Even with a full legal allowance of eight hundred traps, he was never too busy for a good chin wag, often when we were in our dories out in the harbor, pulling the occasional oar so we wouldn’t drift apart. But now we have.
Not so long ago the “boys” would be underway every morning by five. We’d lie in bed and know them by their engines. A low pleasant rumble (Cummins diesel) meant father and son Doug and Georgie Foster in Falling Star. Doug died several years ago. He lived on the other side of the road from us. His wife JoAnn ruled the cluster of split levels and shacks around us. She used to yell at anyone who might even look at her apricot trees while they cut a path across her yard. Then she’d show up with a pie from those same apricots. Now she’s gone too. George still has Falling Star, but she’s moored across the bay in the South Bristol gut. That’s the closest source for fuel and bait since the local co-op went broke giving everybody credit. You can’t pay for bait and fuel if you don’t fish, and you can’t fish if you don’t have bait and fuel.
George has a temper often at war with his big heart. He’s the only person I know who’s been frog-marched out of the Walmart in Rockland by security because he got into a heated disagreement over the correct commercial discount for two 12 volt batteries. George also once drove down from Whitefield in a raging storm to shovel snow off our roof because he feared it might collapse.
A medium-pitched chugging would be the brothers Albert and George Boudreau in Second Wind — red hull faded to pink. Our woods back up to their woods. We didn’t know exactly where the property line was until Linda Bulmer, who lives inshore of us, hired a local contractor one winter to clear out some trees along the shore to improve her view. She swore to know nothing about it until George, who delivered the mail in those days, happily violated federal law by opening the bill she got from the arborist and leaving it in her mailbox without the envelope.
A loud old Ford V8 was Michael “Spider” Lee in his black hull, Doctor Doom. Spider also mows lawns and we’ve been his customers since we got the shack. He has a human skeleton hanging off his second story porch, no one knows exactly why.
Boat names are the poetry of the coast. Jason Noyes hauls traps on Restless Nights (“I used to be single, now we’ve got twins — they’re all restless nights.”) Some others you can run across in the Gulf of Maine are Mama Tried, Desolation Row, and Yes Dear. As these suggest, women are a small minority of boat captains. A notable exception is the accurately named Flying Granny that used to haul out of Cutler on the Bay of Fundy.
When all the wakes had lapped against the pilings under our house, and the engines were fading beyond the breakwater, we’d go back to sleep. Now Benny’s and George Foster’s boats are gone, Spider’s boat is on the hard, and I don’t know what happened to Second Wind or, another long-timer, Old Glory (stars on the bow, red and white stripes down her topsides — named and painted years before the flag became a passive-aggressive symbol of hostility).
Every once in a while memory pulls me awake at first light. But most of the time now we sleep through.
I wear my “from-away” badge proudly, and take pleasure in the amount of abuse it generates. When Kathleen and I ran docking drills in a newly acquired motor skiff, Benny came out of his shack with two large cards, marked with numbers. Holding them up he bellowed across the water, “We gave yoah wife a nine, but had ta give yaa three.” I told him for me it was a personal best. He liked that.
Our boats winter on the other side of Ocean Point in Linekin Bay at a second-going-on-third-generation yard. Some old-timers have inevitably gone missing in the process. The woodworking shop, sawdust on the floor, is mostly vacant. The wall above the workbench still has postcards and pictures tacked up, faded black and white prints with serrated edges. Pictures of girlfriends, wives, but mostly boats. Boats on the coast of Maine, boats on the west coast, boats from all over, boats left behind in Indonesia and South America and the tropics.
It’s been the pandemic, sure, but it’s more than that. Working in boatyards or as hired crew doesn’t tend to draw people in search of routine or security. There’s always someplace else to go. For the time being there’s enough work remaining for the few locals who grew up here and didn’t leave. There’s also Desmond, a jack of all trades, who wandered into the yard from Jamaica one spring many years ago. Now he’s a local too, even if his truck’s license plate says Jah Rul.
Boating in general, like lobstering, is on the generational ebb. Along the coast, excepting VHF or satellite radio, coverage is spotty. If you need to google or tweet, text, or zoom, you’re better off at home. Once you get offshore you can call for help and hope it arrives in time, but that’s about it. The good news is that quiet anchorages aren’t so hard to find.
My boat was built in 1929. When I first brought her up from the Chesapeake I expected our neighboring lobstermen would rightly consider me half stupid and half a show-off. But mostly we share the same weakness for the old designs. About half the boats here are wood — something you don’t find so much if you travel further south until you get beyond Washington D.C., where the Chesapeake and the low country have some traditional pockets. The fact is that anyone who spends time on the water has done more than one foolish thing and knows, given half a chance, they will again. It can be a lot worse than falling for an impractical boat. Going out alone to haul traps, for example, when you can’t afford a crew. Benny’s uncle Roy did that until, one day, he didn’t come back.
For most of the 1990s I ran a 65 foot steel Schooner, Appledore V, out of Boothbay Harbor. All five Appledores were named for one of the Isles of Shoals where Herb Smith, who built them, met his wife Doris. Herb and Doris did two circumnavigations while raising and home-schooling their three kids. We took turns running tourists, summer people, and even locals out into the Gulf of Maine. He’s produced several books, big coffee-tablers, about his trips. The pictures are spectacular. Herb himself is fairly salty.
Herb (in his customary low growl): “You know why I called this book Dreams of Natural Places?”
“Uh, no Herb, why did you?”
“ ’Cause there aren’t any.”
Contesting Herb’s point of view, the pandemic reminds us that Nature always bats last. It’s nothing personal. After infecting our bodies and distressing our minds, she’s been swinging for the bleachers all summer. The lupine and buttercups are abundant, a riot of purple and yellow. Peepers are loud in the woods, chipmunks party late in the crawl space above our bedroom, doves coo in the morning. Bald eagles are back and the Great Blues seem somehow to know that the inlet on one side of our house is called Heron Cove. We’ve been seeing mist in the morning, long sunny afternoons sometimes punctuated by thunder and lightning, followed by extravagant sunsets. The message is clear. No matter how much of a mess we make, we’re just skipping across the surface, just visiting here.
Andrew Grainger is a retired Associate Justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court. He has been designated a Fulbright Senior Specialist by the U.S. Department of State. He and his wife, Kathleen Stone, have taught courses and seminars on U.S. law in numerous countries in Europe and the Far East. His writing has appeared in WBUR’s Cognoscenti and the Boston Globe.