Visiting Pineland

Over the weekend we took four of our kids and some friends to visit Pineland in New Gloucester, Maine.  The Pineland story is one of renewal and vision, so I wanted the kids to learn about it.

In the early 1900's, Pineland was the Maine state "school for the feeble-minded," a place where those unable to care for themselves could live and perhaps learn some simple farm work or craft. Mental patients, orphans, the poor, and social undesirables also sometimes found themselves shipped to Pineland.,Among those were the African-American families evicted in 1912 from Malaga Island in Casco Bay, as told in the Newbery Honor-winning novel Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy.

Although at one point Pineland had two farms, 28 buildings, and over a thousand residents, changes in standards of care and the de-institutionalization movement gradually led to the school losing residents, funding, and reputation.  Eventually, in 1996, the last residents left, and the school closed.  Many of its buildings were now derelict and its farms abandoned.

In 2000, the Portland-based Libra Foundation, founded by my mother, bought Pineland and 1600 surrounding acres from the state.  Libra's president, Owen Wells, had a vision of building a multi-use campus with commercial buildings surrounded by a farm used for education and for supporting Maine farming as a way of life.  The foundation spent tens of millions of dollars restoring the campus, barns, fencing, and surrounding farmhouses.  We built a world-class equestrian center and 30 kilometers of cross-country ski trails.  We brought in a prize Holstein herd, Angus cattle, and Dutch Warmblood horses.

Today the Pineland campus is a serene and lovely place to work.  Over 300 people in 25 businesses occupy the restored brick buildings.  Farms, woodlands, ponds and gardens now comprise over 3500 acres set midway between Portland and Lewiston.  Visitors come for weddings, for hiking or skiing on  thirty kilometers of trails, for corporate retreats, or for educational events from cheese-making to felting.  We have sheep, chickens, beef cattle, prize milkers, dressage horses, and seasonal pigs.

Saturday night my family stayed in the very comfortable (huge kitchen, two living rooms) five-bedroom Collyer Brook Farmhouse.  Craig Denekas, current president of Libra, along with Owen Wells, gave us the tour Sunday morning.  We bought a pumpkin at the market and Welcome Center, which is stocked full of Maine products and wonderful sandwiches. Downstairs, visitors rent skis in the winter, and just outside, the cross-country trails lead across the fields and into the woods.

We toured the creamery, a state-of-the-art cheese-making facility, which now processes 20,000 pounds of cheese each month.  Mark, the cheese-maker, walked us through the process from pasteurization through adding rennet and bacteria to raking up the curds to stopping the process with salt, squeezing the cheese into bricks or wheels, and finally aging the bricks in the cold storeroom for up to two years for extra sharp cheddar.

Next we visited the hydroponic greenhouse, where without pesticides, and with nutrients dissolved in water, the manager grows fat tomatoes, bean sprouts, lettuce and cucumbers.  From the greenhouse we traveled to the cow barn to see the noble and patient-looking cows chomping and guzzling. In the calf barn we found that a calf's tongue is surprisingly rough, and that calves like licking hands and sucking on fingers. Finally we visited the riding center, a huge indoor arena with two attached fifteen-stall barns.  There a prospective Olympic dressage champion mare went through her paces on a lunge line, switching from walk to trot to canter on signs from her trainer too subtle for me to see.

After our tour (and tours are available to all) we returned to the Welcome Center for lunch.  The kids, intrigued by their grandmother's legacy and the Libra Foundation's unique brand of economic philanthropy and renewal, kept asking questions.  I was glad we had finally found time for this family exploration.

Why so few lobster boats?

lobster buoys on a calm morning

Come July and August, somewhere between six and seven a.m., the growl of lobster boats revving and calming as they move from trap to trap wafts in our windows on Muscongus Bay. A confetti of lobster buoys dots the water of the sound, and when going out ourselves, we have to keep a sharp eye out to avoid fouling our boat propellor in the rope that leads from each buoy to a trap on the bottom.

That's most years.

This year, buoys are scarce in the shallow waters near Hockomock Point.  Early mornings are quiet.  Even the gulls hush their raucous cries without the attraction of stinky bait being scooped into nets and tied into lobster traps.  And this is in a year when a glut of lobsters has driven prices paid to lobstermen down to a forty-year low.  What's going on?

eggs on the tail of a female lobster

First, the lobster glut. Lobster landings have been rising steadily for the past ten years, but this is the biggest year yet.  Why?  Most fishermen and scientists believe that lobstering in the Gulf of Maine is a well-managed fishery.  Lobster licenses are limited.  Only lobsters of a certain size--between three and five inches from behind the eye to the end of the back--may be kept. The others must be thrown back, the smaller ones to grow more and the larger ones to serve as (presumably robust) breeding stock.
Any egger--a female with 10,000 eggs clinging to her tail--must not only be thrown back, but her tail must be notched so that every fisherman forever knows that as a breeding female, she's off limits.

Another factor in the recent rise in lobster catches may be the decline in the population of groundfish, the major predators of young post-larval lobsters.  Only now, after years of vigorous management, is the population of cod beginning to rebound.  As for how cod affect young lobsters, I can vouch for that: this weekend we landed four cod, more than in decades, and three of the four had young, three-inch lobsters in their throats.

cod

In theory, a third factor is found by looking at lobster fishing as a great, opportunistic aquaculture project.  Most lobsters have moved in and out of traps, eating bait fish, many times before they're finally large enough not to fit out the special escape hatches built into each trap.  Most have probably been caught and thrown back many times before they're large enough to catch and keep.  Lobsters have even been filmed moving in and out of unbaited traps to check the kitchen.  Maybe we have so many lobsters because we're feeding them well.

But why the special glut this year?  The reason seems to be an especially warm winter. One effect was an earlier and more productive lobster fishing season in the Canadian part of the Gulf of Maine.  Coupled with that, plentiful shedders or soft-shell lobsters, those that come closer inshore to molt, arrived in Maine waters about six weeks earlier than usual, at a time when the Canadian processing plants, which take about 50% of Maine lobsters, were still full with the large Canadian take.  Soft shell lobsters, which are the usual summer variety, are difficult to ship long distances in the shell, so the local market is full, and lobstermen are getting only around $2 per pound.

Why then, are lobster boats so scarce in Muscongus Sound?  I can offer a couple of hypotheses.  One reason may be an unofficial lobster strike. Up and down the coast, lobstermen have organized hasty protests by staying in, not going fishing, in hopes that prices will go up.  It hasn't worked yet.

The problem with this hypothesis is that none of the lobster strikes have lasted more than a week.  Besides, in the next bay east, or farther out in deeper water, pot buoys are still numerous.

idle lobster traps with growing weeds

So my second hypothesis is that lobsters have moved offshore or Downeast to cooler waters.  I can't remember a year when jumping off our dock at Hockomock Point has been less chilling than this year.  Swimming off the dock used to be so cold that the only reason to do it would be to feel good when you got out.  This year it's just a pleasant cool-down on hot, muggy days.

So maybe the same warm waters that brought the lobsters in to shed early has now driven them farther north and east to escape waters that have become unseasonably warm.  Meanwhile, another lobster season is about to open in New Brunswick, and the Canadian lobstermen are already grumbling about the glut of Maine lobster driving down the market.

At a time when it's hard to keep up with what fish it's "green" to eat, which species are well-managed and which are in decline, it's good to know that this summer, at least, eating lobster as fast as we can may be a patriotic act.

Alewives on the Damariscotta River

Over Memorial Day weekend, Damariscotta Mills, Maine, held an alewife festival to help raise money for restoring the fish ladder that leads from the Damariscotta River to Damariscotta Lake.  I've heard about the alewife run for years, but this is the first time the family has ever attended.

Alewives are herring, and they are anadromous, meaning they spend part of their lives in fresh water and part in salt water.  Born in lakes, they spend several years at sea and return to their native rivers and streams to spawn.  Unlike salmon, who spawn and die, alewives can make the run to their mating ground as many as eight times, as long as they can avoid seabirds, fishermen, and exhaustion. Gulls, ospreys, and great blue herons feast on them, while fish that die of exhaustion feed scavengers like raccoons and bald eagles.


[These photos came from a blog by A. Phillippi http://www.unity.edu/facultypages/aphillippi/alwife.htm]

The fish ladder at Damariscotta Mills eases a 42-foot climb around a dam from river to lake.  It consists of a series of rockbound pools separated by small water runs about a foot high.  The pools wind through a wooded dell like the decorative stream of a miniature golf course.  The difference is that these pools and the runs between them are clogged with fish, resting and then swimming madly upstream.  The adult fish make the migration in late May, and around October or November, the fry let themselves return to the river, tail-first (I suppose they're swimming in place to keep themselves oriented correctly.)

In colonial times, villagers could scoop up enough fish in the two-week run to feed the village for the winter.  Alewives were preserved by smoking, and there is still a small, surprisingly sweet-smelling smokehouse. Today, alewives serve as bait for Maine's lobster industry, which brings in close to one million pounds of lobster in a good year.

To count the alewives, volunteers stand with a clicker at the narrow top chute into the lake. For the first ten minutes of each hour, a volunteer counts the fish as they shoot through the last opening.  Standing nearby, I counted 30 fish in one minute.  A fish every two seconds for two weeks would be just over 600,000 fish, but the actual estimate for this year is about 350,000.

Maine has long cold winters and rocky soil, but seeing the alewife run gave me an insight into the marine riches and steady protein source that might have made the midcoast an attractive place for colonists to settle.

Irene in Maine

Hurricane Irene has passed, dropping devastating floods in Vermont and parts of upstate New York; She only brushed against midcoast Maine. People here were prepared for tropical storm force winds and a downpour. By Friday, six or eight lobster boats had steamed at high tide into the Mill Pond, a quiet pool beyond a small inlet at the very most inland point of the bay. Normally the Mill Pond is known mainly for its clam flats, and the lobstermen beached their boats at high tide and presumably walked away through the marsh grass.

We decided to keep our two boats, a lobster boat and a fourteen foot sailboat, on their moorings. We brought the canoe up under the deck, hid the swim ladder under a small rowboat turned upside down and lashed down on the dock, and carriedin all the chairs from the terrace.

Saturday night it rained hard, and the wind rose, forming whitecaps on the bay. Sunday morning broke foggy but not raining. The wind roared in from the east, a most unusual direction. A large island protects us to the east, but the short still built up a chop. Over the course of the day, the wind slowly mounted as it veered from east to southeast to south.

Still no rain fell. High tide arrived at 10 pm. It was a moon tide, already the highest tide of the month; and on top of that came the two-foot remnant of the storm surge and the driving wind. Waves broke at the edge of the lawn. Spray flew over the top of the pier. The ramp leading down from the stone pier to the float, which varies between about a ten percent grade and a forty percent grade as the tide rises and falls, was now almost flat. In the middle of the ramp, a juvenile herring gull huddled against the wind, looking at us, too exhausted to fly away as we approached. Another hovered about six feet off the dock, unmoving in mid air, like an aerodynamic airplane hull passing standard in a wind tunnel.

The night passed, and the tide fell. Today dawned as bright and glittering as only a late summer day on the coast can be. A short chop and a long swell still agitated the water, while driftwood and rafts of rockweed littered the surface. Nobody seemed to be out lobstering. One of our floats and one of our moorings had shifted several feet downwind, and the lawn was covered with oak leaves--no birch, pine, maple, or beech leaves, only oak leaves.

Irene is gone, but if predictions of climate change are right, as the ocean warms, we will have more extreme weather events, as unexpected as a hurricane in Vermont. Fifty years from now, the ocean may lap the edges of the lawn at every high tide, and the trees that now line the shore may well have washed away, not just here, but all over the world. It's a sobering thought.

Wiscasset: most annoying village in Maine

Wiscasset calls itself "the prettiest village in Maine." The motto is emblazoned on a sign you encounter when entering the town along Route One. By the time you see it, however, you have already waited in stop-and-go traffic that stretches back along the highway three and a half miles. You're hot, bored, and annoyed as you creep down the hill through the two blocks of downtown.

And there you see it, the reason for your delay. Traffic immediately stops for every pedestrian who wants to cross the street. At high traffic times, there is one traffic cop at each of the two blocks, stopping miles of traffic to let a tourist walk twenty feet.

At least two thirds of these pedestrians are crossing the street to wait in line at Red's Eats, a lobster shack that has somehow acquired the reputation of having the best lobster rolls on the coast. The New York Times touts it for its lobster rolls and local color. People cross the street to wait in long lines at Red's even though there's another, somewhat larger lobster roll place on the other side.

What this demonstrates to me is that people who go to Red's Eats don't mind waiting in line. In fact, they seem to like it. Therefore, why not let them wait on the sidewalk until several groups have aggregated before stopping the traffic to let them pass?

When Route One was being constructed, the option was raised of having a bypass around Wiscasset. But according to the story I've heard, Wiscasset merchants didn't want a bypass. They wanted people to drive past their stores. And drive past they do, far too annoyed to stop. This is in contrast to the tactic followed by Damariscotta and Newcastle. The main highway bypasses them, but a loop called Business Route One passes through the two towns, which now have thriving businesses and crowded parking lots and restaurants. Local traffic passes through the towns, taking five minutes tops.

Sitting in traffic south of Wiscasset this afternoon, I had time to do a little math. Say that on average, for ten hours a day in high season, north-going traffic stretches back three miles from Wiscasset. I counted, and there are probably about 150 cars per mile. Because they're vacationers rather than commuters, let's conservatively assign two passengers per car. It takes half an hour for a car to move the three miles. That means that each day, Wiscasset annoys 18,000 people trying to drive north.

Ah, but what about the people who stop in the prettiest village and get to cross the street without ever having to wait for a WALK signal? How many of them are there each day?

Making a lobster roll probably takes thirty seconds, and Red's Eats isn't big enough to have too many sandwich makers. Plus there are drinks, making change, passing out napkins... So let's generously say 200 people per hour are delighted by the charm and deliciousness of the lobster roll experience. And let's double that for the fifty percent of visitors who may cross the street for other reasons. In a ten hour day, that means 4000 people are happy about Wiscasset's policy.

Now let's imagine that Wiscasset decides to implement a new policy, where traffic cops wait for three separate parties to gather on the sidewalk ready to cross the street before they raise their hands and stop the miles of traffic. A little thought convinces me that such a move would reduce the length of the traffic backup by two thirds. Instead of waiting thirty minutes to make it through the prettiest village in Maine, drivers would have to wait only ten minutes. 18,000 people a day would be twenty minutes happier, while 4000 people a day might be two minutes unhappier. The happiness advantage of the new policy comes out to 352,000 people-minutes. That's a lot of happiness.

Of course, maybe Wiscasset doesn't care about the happiness of those driving through. But it should care. Some of those drivers are people who stop and shop in places they like. Some are taxpayers. Some are philanthropists. Some are legislators. What village, no matter how pretty, can afford to annoy them all?

Biathlon World Cup in Northern Maine

Biathlon, such a popular televised sport in Europe that it's sometimes called Europe's Super Bowl, is little known in the United States, but that is something a dedicated group of coaches, athletes, and volunteers in Aroostook County are working to change. Biathlon combines cross-country skiing and target shooting, a pairing that seems random until you consider its roots among the infantries of Scandinavia. Although those enthusiasts who first promoted biathlon for the winter Olympics talked about its origins in winter hunting, in fact it began a few centuries ago as a competition between Swedish and Norwegian soldiers guarding a border.

This past weekend, Leo, Damian and I flew up to Presque Isle, Maine, not far from the Canadian border, to see a World Cup competition in biathlon. There are only three World Cup certified competition courses in North America at the moment. Two are in Aroostook County, Maine, and the third is in Vancouver, too far from Europe to be convenient as part of the World Cup tour. This week the athletes and coaches and waxers descended on Presque Isle; next weekend they'll be even farther north in Fort Kent, Maine.

In a biathlon competition, skiers race around a course of 2-3 kilometers, arrive at a shooting range, and shoot at five targets the size of a coffee saucer. They usually make four race circuits with shooting followed by one final circuit sprinting to the finish line. Missing a shooting target is penalized either with time or with a small additional loop to ski for each target missed. Skiers shoot two of their four sets from a prone position and two sets standing.

At the Presque Isle Northern Heritage Center, the stands are set up at the shooting range, but by walking around to the lodge balcony you can also see the start; by walking along a catwalk you can stand on a bridge under which the skiers pass as they race around the course. Spectators cheer indiscriminately for competitors of all nationalities. For some reason, fans also ring cowbells. When a shooter hits the target, the bells ring; when a shooter misses, you can hear a collective sigh.

What gives biathlon its excitement is the shooting. A skier may have fought her way to the front of the pack, but one missed shot suddenly gives the person behind her a chance to take the lead. Skiing at higher speed leads to a higher heart rate and a greater chance of missing a shot. These factors, combined with vagaries of wind and weather, make frequent lead changes an expected part of the game. During the women's pursuit yesterday, the wind came up and threw almost all the athletes off their shots. At one end of the shooting range, flags billowed eastward; at the other end, the flags fluttered westward. Only in the middle was there relative calm, and that was probably delusory.

Still, my readers may wonder, why this sudden interest in biathlon? The truth is, I'm very proud of biathlon in Maine because the trails, the lodges, and the Maine Winter Sports Center that runs them are a creation of the Libra Foundation, founded by my mother. Libra is dedicated to improving the life of Maine residents, and two of our areas of focus are the well-being of young people and economic development. Owen Wells, our visionary president, looked at Aroostook County and determined that its most reliable assets were potatoes (we helped turn around a farmer-owned packaging company called Naturally Potatoes) and snow. Northern Maine had a Scandinavian heritage and a lost tradition of cross-country skiing; Owen proposed that we try to bring that tradition back by creating the Maine Winter Sports Center. We hired great people, starting with Andy Shepard, who has built a constituency for skiing in Maine towns. We built lodges and world class trails at two venues and other trails at high schools across Aroostook County. We brought in European coaches, and we started a training program.

The US team still has a way to go before it can truly challenge the Europeans, but the tradition is building. Schoolchildren who otherwise might have spent the winter vegetating indoors are getting outside and training for a sport where they can excel. And Maine is benefiting from the international visitors, the publicity, and the television revenue that comes from hosting some of the world's most popular sporting events, even on Super Bowl weekend.

Katahdin II

Here's a guest entry from my husband Leo:

Damian & I took a quick trip up to Baxter State Park in Maine with Eric and Lian to climb Mt Katahdin. We arrived late Friday night, staying at a bunk cabin in Millinocket, then getting up at 4am to get to the park entrance in time to secure a parking space at Roaring Brook campground (since we didn't purchase one of the 40 parking permits in advance, it was first-come, first-served).

We set off on foot at 8:40am, hiking the Roaring Brook trail to Chimney Pond, then up the Saddle Trail to the Baxter peak plateau. It was a beautiful day - sunny, breezy, 65F - so different from the sleet conditions we encountered in summer 2007! We were up at the top by 2pm and treated to wonderful views in all directions, the leaves just beginning to turn in some areas.

Given the ideal conditions, we decided to hike along the Knife Edge to Pomola Peak. This was a hairy experience of clambering over boulders, with the average width of the crest only about 30ft, and in some sections as narrow as 12 ft, requiring hand-over-hand climbing for much of the way. Damian and Lian, despite their apprehension, were real champions, brave and mutually helpful. Eventually we got to the Helon Taylor trail, descending after sunset and using flashlights to get back to Roaring Brook at 7:40pm - in all it was a 10 mile, 4000 ft, 11 hour hike.

Fairy Houses on Monhegan

I don’t know when the fairy houses first started appearing on Monhegan Island. Monhegan is the farthest east of the islands on Muscongus Bay in midcoast Maine, ten miles offshore and only a square mile in area. It’s one of the last Maine islands still inhabited year-round. The island economy is based on lobsters and summer tourists. A one-room schoolhouse contains eight grades. Next to the lighthouse, there’s an art museum; painters such as Rockwell Kent and Edward Hopper have loved coming to Monhegan for over a century.

One of the many Monhegan hiking trails passes through Cathedral Woods, where towering conifers filter the sunlight, and it’s there that the fairy houses began to appear: little houses built of sticks or bark, decorated with fragments of shell, bits of string, or patches of moss, surrounded by pebbled walkways and tiny walls. The fairy village grew each summer, sprouting new houses overnight. Passersby were inspired to innovate, with houses built in the hollows of trees, decorated with berries and flower petals, furnished with acorns.

But the surrounding ground was being denuded of moss. Bar peeled off trees. The village was unsustainable. Eventually, the residents posted signs prohibiting the construction of any more fairy houses, and for the most part, the fairies complied. I didn't get out to Monhegan this summer, so I don’t know what’s left.

Still, in a limited place like your own backyard, there’s nothing wrong with starting to construct a fairy village. Just a house or two here and there. After all, people plant butterfly gardens to attract butterflies, and fairies are much more rare.