The Edge of Maine

by Geoffrey Wolff

  There are ospreys, eagles, harriers, and once, slanting down on a long diagonal, a peregrine falcon. I saw it disappear into the marsh momentarily, then rise, regain altitude with choppy, powerful strokes, and head for the horizon. I paddled over to where the hawk had stooped and found a hen mallard. She floated high and dry, buoyant as a cork, her feathers unmussed and her head so neatly removed it looked as though she’d been born that way.

  RUSTICATION

  Islesboro is a skinny ten-mile-long island running southwest to northeast through Penobscot Bay, a few miles offshore from Camden at its southernmost and from Castine at its northeast shore. A considerable length of Maine’s upper midcoast keeps Islesboro as a reference point, and it has long been a desirable destination for cruisers and day-trippers, although the island’s first recorded visit by a European, the French explorer and monk André Thevet, was abruptly cut short when his party’s dinner host, a sagamore of the Abnaki tribe, used as decorative ornaments the recently severed heads of six warriors of an enemy tribe.

  Since then Islesboro has been the setting of many a wedding and coming-out party featuring old families from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. It had the first planned development of rusticators at the end of the nineteenth century, subdivided waterfront plots of generous dimension sold for the purpose of having built upon them mansions or, as the previous builders of castlesize cottages liked to sneer, “starter mansions.” The pastoral grace of the island was calculated from the start, and automobiles were barred in favor of horse-drawn carriages until 1934, when the six hundred or so winter residents waited till the summer swells departed after Labor Day to vote to allow cars on Islesboro.*

  During the early summer of 1970 we spent a few weeks on Ducktrap Cove, a few miles up Route 1 from Camden. At nearby Lincolnville Beach we’d drive onto the car ferry with our young boys and enjoy the adventure of a gorgeous crossing of twenty minutes or so to Islesboro, putting us ashore at Grindel Point, adjacent to a pretty white lighthouse with wildflowers growing around it. We’d drive to one end or the other of the island—out to Turtle Head, across from Castine, or past Dark Harbor and down to Bracketts Harbor, overlooking the Camden Hills, humped blue and soft to the west—and eat a picnic lunch. This was when we decided that, however we got there, Maine was for us. I remember beyond everything the quiet. Priscilla and I would perch on the rocks and Justin would dare to put his toes in the icy water and Nick would be bent at the waist, staring amazed into a tide pool, struck dumb by whatever was stirring.

  In subsequent years we sailed around Islesboro’s tortured coastline, threading through Bracketts Channel, past Minots Island and Tumbledown Dick; we anchored overnight at Turtle Head Cove when the wind was southeast and at Gilkey Harbor when it went northwest. We brought the dinghy ashore to eat lunch at Dark Harbor on the stone terrace of the Islesboro Inn, and if renting or buying there was beyond our reach, we thought of Islesboro as a sanctuary, just difficult enough to reach to keep it safe, and we kept a proprietary eye on it. After all, its lighthouse and pebbled beaches, memorializing one son’s earliest steps and another’s seduction by the sea and its edges, was frozen in our family photo album.

  So it was with dismay that I learned that Islesboro in the 1990s had become the object of attention of the Hollywood diocese of Scientology. Actor Kirstie Alley* bought an estate there, and John Travolta** bought the very mansion—forty-two rooms of it, twenty bedrooms on eighty acres overlooking Sabbathday Harbor—that George Washington Childe Drexel had boasted of, with stables. “It’s a retreat,” in the words of Mrs. Travolta, Kelly Preston. “It’s so private and pristine. Our time in Maine is special because it is a very Norman Rockwell existence.”

  Or a Sky King adventure. In 1992, residents of the Spruce Creek section of the island sued Travolta, an avid pilot, to prevent him from continuing to land his Gulfstream II jet on the runway in front of his house. Six years later Travolta buzzed his house in a Boeing 707, making three passes at it, “shaking neighboring homes,” as the newspapers reported. This he had done to please his son, Jett, as his wife explained. “Most of the people we spoke to were thrilled by the experience,” Kelly Preston said. “They certainly didn’t tell us they were terrified. We are under the impression that it was only one or two people who complained. John just wanted to show Jett that he was at the controls of a large jet plane.” In 1998 the FAA assured citizens of Islesboro that it would investigate. Uh-huh. Matt Drudge reported recently that Travolta has bought from QANTAS for eighty million dollars a 440-seat 747 jumbo jet. His spokesman explained that in this way, when the star flies—say, to the coast of Maine—“he gets to choose who gets on board with him.”

  Choosing better friends is the current undertaking of Islesboro’s taxpayers. The meteoric rise of property values has resulted in huge property tax bills, for natives as well as rusticators. More than half a million dollars in county property taxes is paid to Waldo County, which returns very little by way of services. (The county sends only a daytime sheriff’s deputy over on the ferry during summer weekends, but Islesboro is being asked to pay a big share of the county’s proposed eighteen-million-dollar jail. So the voters of Islesboro are seeking to align themselves with Knox County—which includes North Haven, Vinalhaven, Matinicus, and Isle au Haut—if they can persuade Knox County to adopt them. This puts the neighbors of Drexels and such in the plaintive situation of the orphans of melodrama, making themselves cute when the adoption agency brings clients to look over what’s available. From their perspective, the six-hundred natives are being priced out by fourteen-hundred newcomers and robbed by thousands of mainlanders. “Having one John Travolta or Kirstie Alley is a pleasant novelty,” in the words of a recent online editorial in the Midcoast VillageSoup Times. Having an island full of them at the expense of its natives would be to create a gated community. Waterfront property taxes are soaring everywhere along the Maine coast, having more than doubled in the past five years. Islesboro’s share of Waldo County’s taxes has gone up 46 percent since 2002. If “summer money” can afford this, the people employed by summer money can’t. “We’ve got to do something,” the owner of the Bee’s Knees Café told the New York Times in November 2004. “A normal person can’t afford to live here anymore.” The school population—the miner’s canary for Maine’s offshore communities—has already dropped from 106 to 83 children since 2000.

  Secession is improbable at best and probably impossible. State governments—certainly Maine’s—fret openly about the consequence of having communities shop around for the best deal they can broker with an adjacent county. “Opening a can of worms,” one legislator calls it. “Opening the gates,” says another, mordantly evoking a gated community. And as Islesboro’s citizens have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars battling Waldo County in court, Waldo County has fought back with its own lawyers, and guess who pays them?

  THE DIVERGENCE OF INTERESTS BETWEEN NATIVES AND rusticators “from the west’ard” (as natives sometimes put it) rarely comes down to a matter as geographically specific as tax districting. More often relations are skinned by cultural frictions. The grand nabob who doesn’t pay his boatyard bills, the grande dame who upbraided the Bar Harbor local whose mongrel had had his way with her Pekinese bitch, the yachtsman demanding to be rowed ashore—these are cartoons not much different from the canny Down Easters caricatured by Bert and I. What Samuel Eliot Morison nicely terms the “millionaire invasion” of Mount Desert identifies only one aspect of the serial coming over and coming up of visitors with their particular reasons for coveting and exploiting and celebrating the coast of Maine. On Mount Desert painters were followed by clergymen and college professors, who were followed by bishops and college presidents. At first the newcomers and their families indulged simple ambitions: strenuous walks and strenuous conversation. But as far back as 1895, in “The Evolution of a Summer Resort,” Edwin Lawrence Godkin was writing of the end of the simple old days on Mount Desert. These were the days before the proprietors of boar
dinghouses became the owners and managers of grand hotels, those enterprises whose magnificence was soon eclipsed by the Lucullan constructions of the Cottager, “who has become to the boarder what the red squirrel is to the gray, a ruthless invader and exterminator.” Godkin noted the attendant evils of the class system, “one of which looks down on the other.” The Cottager outbuilds his neighbor and clear-cuts his view from the heights to the sea—“Why,” asked the radio tycoon Atwater Kent, “spoil a million-dollar view with a hundred-dollar tree?”

  Of course, even then the two classes looked down on the other. But let Godkin warm to his work:

  More cottages are built, with trim lawns and private lawn-tennis grounds…. Then the dog-cart with the groom in buckskin and boots, the Irish red setter, the saddle-horse with the banged tail, the phaeton with the two ponies, the young men in knickerbockers carrying imported racquets, the girls with the banged hair, the club, ostensibly for newspaper reading, but really for secret gin-fizzes and soda-cocktails, make their appearance, with numerous other monarchial excrescences.

  The great Bar Harbor fire of 1947—begun evidently by the malign focus of the sun’s rays through the windshield of a car abandoned at a local dump—brought to an end the “monarchial” pretenses of one part of coastal Maine. And indeed, for every overreaching Martha Stewart in Seal Harbor there have been a dozen Rockefellers buying up the best of Mount Desert to give to the public. The Rockefeller family’s most recent undertaking in Maine has been to preserve coastal farmland. A couple of years ago I attended a benefit barbecue on the family’s Bartlett Island, in Blue Hill Bay. In 1973, David and Peggy Rockefeller had bought the island, adjacent to Mount Desert, to save it from development. Now it’s a working farm, impeccably unpretentious, with a herd of Simmental cattle grazing to the water’s edge. The barbecue was a soft sell, very farmy and sweet, but a visitor might notice that the valet parking on Mount Desert was managed professionally by parkers from Rockefeller Center, and that we were ferried to Bartlett Island aboard Hinckley picnic boats that can be bought for as little as half a million dollars. And the Simmental bull had been shampooed.

  Cultural—as opposed to class—tension between rusticators and natives will not ease without effort. A promising initiative has been tried Down East in a little pamphlet published in 2004 by the lobster fishing communities of Beals and Jonesport on Moosabec Reach. It is addressed to those from away, and declares itself at once with a title: “This is not a promotional brochure.” It disavows apostrophes to “sparkling water and the imagined taste of fresh lobster on the plate.” It invites visitors and would-be landholders to use their senses, to learn to distinguish (as they’re wakened before daybreak by the lobster fleet) “the difference between the high whine of a Detroit [diesel and] the low rumble of a Caterpillar.” These newcomers are warned that the diesels may set dogs to barking, “and then your dog to respond.” Gulls will shriek and later “pull apart your compost pile, steal chicken off the outdoor grill … while depositing their ‘business’ on your deck furniture.” The view of the working waterfront will be cluttered with traps and lines. “Also, in front of costly shorefront property, the clam and worm diggers will be working the flats when the tide is out.” It smells unattractive when the tide is out. “To fishermen the smell of bait is the smell of money.” Diesel fumes have their bouquet, as do lobster pounds and salmon pens. Of course, on many if not most days the visitor can touch the thick fog and will feel the unpaved roads “after a few wheel alignments, cracked windshields,” and loosened fillings. “The tang of the salt air reaches your lips while you comb the beach for shells, but if you do not conserve fresh water, salt water will be pouring from your tap as well.” No suburban lawns or daily car washes along Moosabec Reach. If that’s okay—if you’re willing to wait without honking behind a truck stopped “yes, in the middle of the road for a quick chat, to discuss the catch, to plan the next morning’s departure”—then give Moosabec Reach a try.

  CRUISING: PULPIT HARBOR

  If one were to single out one perfect anchorage along this coast, the default destination of anyone traveling for pleasure in a boat between Casco Bay and Mount Desert, Pulpit Harbor—a hidey-hole on the northwest coast of the island of North Haven—would be that anchorage. Since the 1930s all revised editions of The Cruising Guide to the New England Coast have commended the star-shaped harbor: “When the skipper from busy Long Island or sandy Cape Cod furls his mainsail in Pulpit Harbor and contemplates the granite shores, the skyline spiked with spruce, the sunset behind Pulpit Rock and the Camden Hills, he can say he has truly arrived.” The muddy ground holds as many as a hundred boats. The entrance, difficult to spy approaching from Penobscot Bay, is seemingly blocked by Pulpit Rock, on whose peak perches an enormous and well-inhabited osprey nest, in use for more than two centuries, sheltering one of the oldest families in Maine. This nest has been tended by successive generations of vigorous leaseholders, each faithfully repairing and improving its inheritance, holding on for dear life in the depressed years before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring came to the rescue. The Embassy Cruising Guide to the Maine coast is downright poetic about the site, noting reassuringly that the “summer population has stabilized over several generations. This quiet harbor with elegant houses is the perfect place to watch the sun set … while the nesting ospreys preach a whistling sermon from the guardian Pulpit Rock.”

  Continuity is one of the more compelling pleasures of Pulpit Harbor. Anchored here and there around the harbor are displayed recently launched examples of boatbuilding arts that were thirty-five years ago as near to extinction as Maine’s raptors. With World War II had come the mass production of vessels, and after the war standardized tubs of plastic and plywood threatened to put fine woodworkers out of the boat business. Thank capitalism, I guess, for pumping enough discretionary money into big spenders’ hands, beginning in the 1980s, to revive the market for huge sailing yachts and wooden boats of all sizes. There are now scores of boatbuilders thriving along the Maine coast, and the Wooden Boat School in Brooklin is only one of many institutions teaching the fine arts of bending and fitting and joining. Builders use steel and aluminum, cold-molded wood, epoxies, and traditional strip-planking to build sailing and powerboats that would inspire envy in a robber baron. When the stock market suffered its hangover following the dot-com binge, my second pang (after self-pity waned) was to lament what must surely be the end of the renaissance of ruinously expensive craftsmanship that had been commissioned while the party raged. Not at all, I learned: The patrons of yacht builders are what one boatbuilder termed “indestructibly rich.” What young Maine workers learned as apprentices just in time, before their grandfathers retired, seems safely booming.

  Windjammers—restored or replicated coastal schooners, mostly home-ported in Camden and Rockland—invariably make their way here for an overnight visit. These vessels, taking aboard paying passengers for a cruise of a week or less, are inelegantly known as “head boats.” A cynic might resent the sound of enthusiastically off-key sea chanteys wafting from the cockpit of the Victory Chimes, or “Red Sails in the Sunset” whining from a squeezebox. (The jazz tenor saxman Al Cohn once defined a gentleman as someone who can play the accordion, but doesn’t.) But the pretty schooners Mary Day, Surprise, Mistress, Nathaniel Bowditch, and Stephen Taber are pretty difficult to work up a case against.

  So it came as a surprise a few years ago to learn the story of the unhappy and luckless Neal Parker, 45, captain of the sixty-seven-foot head boat Wendameen, out of Rockland. He spent fifteen thousand dollars in legal fees successfully defending himself against Coast Guard charges, threatening his commercial license, of carrying black powder aboard his ship without proper authorization and of discharging a blank charge, directed at the water, from an antique starter’s pistol. Witnesses agree on the following: During the early evening hours of July 25, 2001, while the passengers and crew of the Wendameen were enjoying a pre-sunset supper in the cockpit, there came into Pulpit Harbor, ridi
ng an Arctic Cat 770 Jet Ski, one Ryan Maves, twenty years old. Since the principal attraction of Pulpit Harbor is its tranquility, a Jet Ski is an unwelcome intrusion. Mr. Maves, frustrated in not finding a companion in a neighboring harbor for the purpose of “super-tubing” (towing someone hitched to an inner tube at high speed and high decibels and creating tsunami-scaled wake), descended in ill-humor upon the bucolic scene in Pulpit Harbor. He “flew” in, did some doughnuts around other anchored vessels, and—noticing Captain Parker gesturing to him to slow down—buzzed the Wendameen. Mr. Maves then turned his attention to a low bridge near the head of the harbor, near which several children were swimming, and he “plowed” under its span back and forth, in general frightening the horses and raising strong feelings among the Wendameen’s passengers. He then turned his Arctic Cat toward the Wendameen and throttled right up to the red line, bearing down. Captain Parker, feeling his vessel and her passengers to be in distress, fired a blank round at the water (see for plausible justification Rule 7 of the Coast Guard’s Navigation Rules for International Inland Waters), and Mr. Maves gave way, thinking, as he later reported to the Bangor Daily News, “Oh my God, I better boogie.” The warring captains exchanged words. “He told me I was a menace and a nuisance,” Mr. Maves said. “We made quite the threats to each other.”

  Captain Parker recollected in court that Mr. Maves shouted at him over his shoulder: “This is my harbor. I live here.”

  So many collisions in this little encounter: between classes (emblemized by Jet Ski versus stately schooner), what is meant by an “old family,” what is meant by “my harbor.” Pulpit Harbor has a lively history of who lived there before the people who now live there. The cruising guides unfailingly applaud the anchorage for its attractive setting among gorgeous summer cottages, bigger than they look, placed artfully among meadows, covered with clapboards or shingles, white or gray or a soft, weathered yellow, with dark green or black shutters; there’s a red house with a red barn that photographs especially well. Adirondack chairs have been placed with calculated randomness around the meadow’s wildflowers to favor a view to the west. As the Tafts’ Cruising Guide to the Maine Coast remarks of one of the harbor’s inner reaches, “The land surrounding this cove has been owned for generations by the Cabot family, and it is known locally as Cabot Cove.” This seems just about right: If it weren’t spoken for by Cabots, it might be the summer compound of Lowells or Biddles or Cadwalleders or Codmans or Crowninshields, the dilatory domicile of those who look down their noses at those who look down their noses. Pulpit Harbor is just about as tasteful as an upper-class nest can get. But hidden in the Tafts’ “for generations” is a question: How long ago did this old family settle here? Cabot Cove was previously known as Wooster Creek. Where’s Wooster gone to? Do you think Mr. Maves might be descended from a Wooster?