The mythical beauty of Maine hides some very hard truths. Photo by Jack Farrell
May 2023
By Jack Farrell
After some early misadventures in our newly-purchased O’Day Day Sailer in the summer of 1982, we soon began to venture out from the harbor at Kittery Point, Maine. A round trip to the Isles of Shoals would take a whole day in that little boat. We had a one- and-a-half horsepower outboard mounted on a bracket which would push her 17 feet along nicely, but the goal was always to make our slow progress under sail as much as possible. Sailing so close to the water, and sometimes actually in the water, we had more fun pound-for-pound in that boat than in the larger ones that followed.
Out at the Shoals there was often an ocean swell running. There were big cruising boats laying over on their way eastward and back. Once inside Gosport Harbor, we would anchor in the kelp by Cedar Island at the southernmost spot in the State of Maine, often alongside Capt. Rutledge’s rugged green Friendship sloop, the Coast of Maine. That coast was calling me.
That same year, in the company of a youthful Catboat Bob, we loaded gear, food and beer into the small cuddy of the O’Day, filled a gallon can with gasoline at Frisbee’s Wharf, sailed left at Whaleback Light, and headed North by Northeast along the Coast of Maine. I remember ducking into Perkins Cove at sunset on the first day out, where there was no room for us to stay the night. We anchored out in the open water off the famous Cliff House to sleep under the boom tent as a steady rain began to fall. Cruising the coast at last.
All was right with the world until the long swell threatened seasickness for Catboat Bob in the confined space. So, we furled up the tent and slept in the rain. During that five-day cruise we made it all the way to Portland and back, reaching triumphantly back to Kittery Point on the tailwinds of an offshore hurricane.
A few years later, the Day Sailer was replaced by a 26-foot cutter with a proper cabin. This new boat could take us further faster, so we bought charts covering the coast past Monhegan Island and headed off again, this time on a course a little more to the east.
Catboat Bob and I sailed in light winds and fog without seeing land or another boat for a day and a half. The new cutter had a good compass, and I’m pretty sure we had a VHF radio. We kept a careful dead-reckoned plot in pencil on the full-size chart, and when we judged ourselves to be somewhere off Muscongus Bay, we turned left again and sailed among the ledges and puffins until we came upon a nun buoy which fixed our position at New Harbor Sunken Ledges on the outside of the Bay.
The sky cleared some in the late afternoon and the wind strengthened from the southwest. By sunset we were swinging proudly to a mooring off Port Clyde.
On our living room wall is a copy of Andrew Wyeth’s watercolor which shows fisherman Henry Teel bent over a bait bin in the stern of his Banks dory, oars shipped in the tholepins as he works. He is somewhere off the island which bears his name- a few miles out of Port Clyde. I came to these waters as a very young boy, and learned to row and fish for mackerel here among Henry’s descendants.
For me, the very idea of Maine has always had an irresistible appeal. My father was a Bowdoin man, and we traveled to Brunswick often for reunions. My Uncle Bob lived outside of Portland and kept a skiff on Casco Bay. It was so exciting to me that someone in our family had a real boat on the big ocean in Maine. My weeks in Port Clyde with the Teel family sealed my fate. We were allowed to explore alone but in sight of the island in a proper lapstrake skiff, as windjammers dropped anchor in the harbor and the iconic Laura B plied its way back and forth to Monhegan in the August sunshine. I have never been the same.
I know I have fallen hard under the spell of the myth of Vacationland. Officially adopted by the State of Maine in 1936, the concept was created in the 1890s by the Maine Central Railroad to promote tourism, much as Coca Cola’s ad men defined our concept of Santa Claus. One of the early advocates for tourism to Maine was Henry David Thoreau whose vision of unspoiled natural beauty and the utopian lives of the First Nation inhabitants in “The Maine Woods” inspired a New England mythology for its newest state. These efforts largely succeeded, and today tourism is the biggest industry in Maine, its coast a refuge for the rich, the famous and the powerful . . . with over 20% of the homes in the state owned by people from away.
But the view of the Maine we love, seen through the rosy glasses of Vacationland as we range along its striking coast, is in large part mirage. Maine’s demographics exemplify the growing dichotomy between rich and poor in our country today, including some of the richest and poorest counties in America. And Maine’s population is the oldest in the nation.
A more nuanced view would recognize the challenges and indignities born by the people, the landscape and the waters themselves since the days of Thoreau, and those that challenge them today in the face of an unpredictably changing climate and globalization. I recommend “Mill Town,” the recent memoir by Mainer Kerri Arsenault, for those who dare to rip the Band Aid from Vacationland all at once. Her story of life in Rumford, where the burdened Androscoggin spilled mill waste and dioxin all the way down to the sea, is one written in the long dark shadow of industrialization and pollution. It reminds us that life just beyond the bucolic coast, with its hard and dangerous work, cancer clusters, environmental degradation and a sad history of bigotry is as important to an appreciation of the real Maine as its perennial natural beauty.
In the digital age, the remaining paper mills struggle as does their former work force. It wasn’t until Senator Edmund Muskie, also from Rumford, championed the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972 that rivers flowing into the Gulf of Maine received federal protection, reversing the tide of pollution and exploitation that dated to the earliest settlements. Even some of the mill dams are coming down, and the great Maine rivers from the Saco to the Penobscot flow cleaner every day.
Another of my favorite paintings, echoing those formative days on Muscongus Bay in the 1960s, is one by Andrew Wyeth’s father, N.C. Wyeth. Entitled “Island Funeral,” it shows a gathering of neighbors in the midst of arriving at Teel Island for a funeral. The rocky golden fields, the stone wharf, the little cottage by the shore and the cape house on the hill are just as I remember. The beach is packed with an array of colorful skiffs and dories. Two gaff-rigged sloops, jibs already furled, prepare to anchor. In the distance a schooner works its way in from Monhegan. The blue water sparkles. But there are clouds gathering over the backside of this breathtaking place, darkening the spruces. The eye is drawn along the path to the throng of mourners dressed in their finest and clustered in the shadows by the front door, speaking of pain, loss and the possibility of rebirth.
Jack was the manager at Star Island for many years. He currently manages major construction and utility projects there and provides all-season boat service to the island (average 250 trips per year) for luggage, food, employees, supplies and guests. He also runs Seacoast Maritime Charters, LLC providing year-round private charter boat service and marine logistics to the general public, now in the Shining Star. He still enjoys cruising in his classic Ted Hood sloop, Aloft, and teaching skiing at Sugarloaf Mountain in Maine.
