The Edge of Maine Read online

  THE RAISING AND RAZING OF MAINE YANKEE ATOMIC Power Station is an exemplary Maine progression. Out of nearby Wiscasset’s sight but within the town’s boundaries, the facility began doing its thing to uranium atoms in 1972, heating water to become steam to run turbines and generate electricity. And money, of course. Colin Woodard, author most recently of The Lobster Coast (2004), has made himself an authority on Maine Yankee’s bumpy story. Writing for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1997, Woodard explained that the facility generated 20 percent of Maine’s energy needs and 90 percent of Wiscasset’s town taxes. Who could complain? The facility seemed to have a Midas touch, bringing to reality the dream of perpetual motion and the philosopher’s stone. It replaced a coal-fired (and later oil-fired) power plant; who missed the ashes and smoke? The electricity nuclear power generated would soon be “too cheap to meter,” the boosters promised. A Wiscasset selectman remembered that she grew up referring to Maine Yankee as the “golden goose.” Wiscasset spent ten thousand dollars apiece on its students and treated itself to shiny new fire trucks. The only burr under the town’s saddle was a nagging question asked by a few bitter-end doom-and-gloomers: What was going to be done with the spent fuel? Then came 1979, Three Mile Island. As Woodard—then in grammar school—writes: “Our television screens showed thousands of kids my age being evacuated from their Pennsylvania homes and dosed with iodine in emergency clinics.” Three Mile Island grabbed the attention of seaside residents who had isolated themselves out on the tips of the fingers made by the many rivers in the area—the Kennebec and Sheepscot and Damariscotta—who would have to evacuate along a very few narrow, twisting roads leading to Route 1, jammed at the best of times and very near which Maine Yankee perched. Had the sirens screamed, “nothing short of a wide-scale evacuation by sea could have saved all those people,” as a state senator and resident of Boothbay Harbor told Woodard. Neighboring townspeople turned against the plant. Farmers had their cows’ milk examined for contamination, and some didn’t like the test results. In 1997, Maine Yankee made the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s list of worst-run nuclear plants in the nation. Steam tubes developed cracks. Whistle-blowers warned of maintenance shortcuts, chronic regulatory violations. Forced shutdowns followed; emergency shutdowns doomed the enterprise. Referenda to close it down began. Meantime, the friends and families of those who worked at Maine Yankee were not without their own interest, and Woodard tells that there began to appear in the neighborhood T-shirts with the legend “Keep Nuclear Power in Maine,” above the afterthought, “A Little ‘Nukie’ Never Hurt Anybody.” Uh-oh. There went half the vote. The power plant was taken offline in 1997, and the dome itself was demolished September 2004. Left behind are more than a thousand spent fuel assemblies, almost nine hundred tons of radioactive waste unfit for human handling for the next thousand centuries. Until someone figures out how to get them to Yucca Flats, if Yucca Flats will take them, those isotopes are buried right there on the Back River, and Wiscasset’s property owners will pay taxes double and triple what they had paid comparable to taxes along the rest of the Maine coast.

  Wise people, conservationists and environmental scientists among them, regret the fate of Maine Yankee, or at least the end of rational discussion of the benefits and risks of nuclear generation of power. Maine is stuck downwind from the toxic clouds that rain acidly on the state from coal-and oil-fired industries to its west. Clean power is in Maine’s interest, but not until someone puzzles out how to dispose of the waste. It has been observed that what was built in 1972 was as far-sighted as building a hundred-room hotel without planning a septic system.

  SHORTSIGHTEDNESS IS NO LONGER CHARACTERISTIC of Maine’s public policies and private initiatives. The state’s voters and rusticators have combined in recent years, in fund drive after ballot initiative after bond issue, to enhance the state’s resources. Every edition of a local paper seems to bring news of another rescue. An item in the Brunswick Times Record notes the purchase during the summer of 2004 of an eighty-five-acre parcel of wetlands along Whiskeag Creek by the Lower Kennebec Regional Land Trust. This parcel is a small but vital piece of the jigsaw puzzle of stops along the Atlantic flyway, and the payment of $130,000 was itself pieced together by small donations and bequests. Another recent item notes the rescue of the south end of bucolic Barters Island. A subdivision of 128 acres was nearly under way when the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, a nonprofit, bought the parcel with the intention of creating, as they promised, “the finest public garden north of Boston.”

  In 2000, Down East acknowledged as a “watershed event” the passage of a fifty-million-dollar bond issue to underwrite the state’s purchase of land threatened by developers. This referendum was offered in 1999, during an off-year election, and stirred much greater interest than referendum questions on abortion and medical marijuana.* Of the 410,000 who voted, 69 percent approved the initiative. This was the “largest bond issue ever approved by Maine that didn’t underwrite new highways. Moreover, the question passed in every county, north and south. The vote laid to rest any accusation that public-land conservation is a concern only of southern Maine suburbanites who want weekend playgrounds in the North Woods. In fact, the balloting undercut all the tortured theorizing about the so-called Two Maines.”

  This view may be excessively rosy. Local friction between boosters of new jobs and defenders of old seascapes continues to abrade coastal communities. During the spring of 2004, citizens of Harpswell—a long, lovely peninsula jutting into Casco Bay—debated whether to approve a $350,000,000 liquified natural gas terminal to be erected on their rocky shore. An inevitable collision occurred between summer residents and underemployed year-rounders who were having difficulty paying property taxes inflated by the value to summer residents of waterfront property. Harpswell has 4,600 voters, and most summer residents aren’t included in that number, so the rusticators’ campaigns against the erection of the terminal had little consequence, other than to stir the pot of controversy. And that pot came to a boil when Harpswell’s lobstermen, fearing pollution of their rich territories and anxious about the cost to safeguard the plant from terrorists and natural disasters and industrial screwups, turned against the proposal. In opposing it, they were rejecting the offer by the energy companies of eight million dollars a year in tax money. The debate grew bitter, with handmade signs and posters simplifying the complicated issues by sloganized insults and denunciations. Family members quarreled with one another and canceled Thanksgiving and Christmas reunion dinners. The morning of the townie vote in March, someone—in an attempt to cancel it—phoned the Harpswell police with a bomb threat. The vote was held and the measure defeated, but bitterness lingers. “It won’t be forgotten; it’s too deep,” a lobsterman told the Boston Globe’s Jenna Russell. He had been hauling traps in Harpswell for sixty-two years, and predicted that if one of his neighbors “says something the wrong way, it’s going to bring it out again.” A woman who supported the plant, and whose husband’s family had lived in Harpswell since 1650, complained that fishermen wouldn’t speak to her, “wouldn’t even wave.” Neighbors accused one another of making threats, of lying, of being greedy and/or stupid. A representative of one group, asked whether it was possible to put the dispute behind them, said, “It’s their responsibility to apologize.” The pronoun reference is ambiguous.

  Recent immigrants to Maine, from the professional classes, can be demanding. In 1999, near the site of Belfast’s bygone poultry factories, residents complained to state officials that their tranquility was being disturbed by excessive noise produced by idling refrigerator trucks waiting to load potatoes from Penobscot Frozen Foods. Testing revealed the decibel level at the now-bankrupt company’s property line to be less than sixty-five decibels, ten decibels under the permitted maximum. The Bangor Daily News reported the story with what it must have taken to be objectivity: “Fifteen years ago, when a chicken-processing plant [produced] offensive odors, the neighborhood was made up of working class folk who c
omplained less; now, the neighborhood consists of more wealthy homeowners who have registered increasing number of complaints.”

  Islands in private hands have made for strains and outright provocations between their owners and the putative public interest. Hog Island, an Audubon bird sanctuary in Muscongus Bay popular with visiting boaters, asked that future editions of the Tafts’ Cruising Guide to the Maine Coast delete their description of the undeniable fact of the island’s geographical presence. “Perhaps Hog Island is just too beautiful,” an update to the guide noted. I remember rowing ashore at Butter Island in 1970 from a sailboat we had chartered out of Blue Hill. The island, owned by the Cabots, is as pretty as they come, with meadows and blueberry patches and commanding views from Montserrat Hill of Deer Isle, Islesboro, and North Haven. One of its principal attractions was solitude, and that is what had induced the Outward Bound school over at Hurricane Island to maroon one of its students there for a couple of days. He was meant to scrounge his food from the vegetation at hand, and—when he wasn’t gathering victuals—to contemplate the isolation of a single human being among the grandeur of the universe. When we came upon the teenager, sitting cross-legged on the island’s Nubble Beach, he looked hungry and forlorn; he seemed at once hostile and resigned to companionship. A parade of cruisers such as ourselves had established a beachhead during the past two days to experience the quiet of the island, and as they had come ashore they had caught the boy up in their conversations and helped themselves to the blueberries he had collected and stored at his side in his Red Sox cap. He requested, politely, that we leave him and his blueberries to himself, but not before conceding that the skipper of a handsome Concordia yawl had replaced a handful of berries with a crisp dollar bill. The Cabot family, whose patriarch Tom had a farsighted and benign appetite for Maine islands, which he bought (forty of them by the time he died at ninety-eight) and shared with sailors similarly attracted, recently shut the circus down. The tipping point came a couple of years ago when his grandson, calling in on Butter one summer evening, counted more than 150 visitors crowding its beaches and trails. Three windjammers lay offshore, giving their paying customers lobster bakes on the beach. The Cabots’ sight of that herd closed the door to all commercial traffic and restricted access to everyone except invited guests to most of Butter Island. The family distributed a public notice: “This overwhelming number of people has had a negative impact on everyone’s island experience. We are also concerned about the long-term ecological health of the island…. We apologize to all those who have been visiting Butter Island for years and can now no longer hike the entire island, but we had no alternative.”

  Fact is, to think of any of Maine’s three thousand or so actual islands as off-limits to the public is to practice sentimental nostalgia. It’s true that islands are fragile, that it’s easy to kill the lichens by trampling them. The soil is too thin to bury human waste, and let’s stipulate that the troglodytes who dump garbage and cut branches or even trees to use as firewood are evildoers. But the islands of the Maine coast have been used from the earliest days of the aborigines: as fishing stations, hunting grounds, granite quarries, and beach-party sites. The state owns fourteen hundred of these islands, and is buying more all the time. This is a good thing.

  But for my money the best rescue in Maine has been the deliberate breaching and demolition in 1999 of the Edwards Dam in Augusta. The cribwork dam blocking the Kennebec was built of stones in 1837, a thousand feet across, flooding and stilling fish-rich rapids and falls all the way up to Waterville, seventeen miles away. Opening the floodgates drained the dead water; what happened next astonished even the most optimistic of the dam’s enemies.

  But first a word about the dam’s friends and protectors. Built to provide mechanical power to riverside mills, in 1913 the first of what would be five turbines was installed to produce electric power, used initially by Edwards Mill, but after the bankruptcy of that and so many other Maine textile mills, the dam supplied electricity to Augusta, and not much of it, and at an awful price to birds and spawning fish. Even after the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission declared that Edwards didn’t produce enough electricity to justify its cost in environmental damage, many locals warned against breaching it, foretelling that the river would fall ten feet, eroding its banks and exposing the toxins impounded on the dead water’s bottom and creating a god-awful sulphurous stink.

  None of these side effects occurred. Moreover, the demolition and cleanup created jobs. Ice-fishing outfitters and bass guides were back in business. Almost immediately after Edwards was breached, grass and wildflowers grew from the mud along the Kennebec; paid workers and volunteers hauled away the accumulated litter of pulp logs and truck tires that had been exposed. Aquatic insects came back immediately, followed by the little fish that eat them, followed by the big fish that eat them. Here came the birds: eagles and egrets, herons and ospreys and cormorants and even peregrine falcons. Make way for seals and otters and muskrat. All this in five years!

  A mile or more up the Kennebec from my house in Bath, just above Lines Island and The Chops, we enter the shallow water of Merrymeeting Bay, a drainage of the watersheds of six rivers, of which the Kennebec is the largest. Because its fresh water is churned by tidal action, fed by fertile currents, the bay’s abundance was once upon a time extravagant. The thriving crop of wild rice attracted huge congregations of wildfowl. While Edwards Dam stood, by the 1970s Merrymeeting Bay—one of the richest flyways and fishing grounds in New England—was declared dead, terminally polluted by industrial excess, so starved of dissolved oxygen that everything in and on its turbid water had suffocated. Scummy and stinking, the nine-thousand-acre bay came to be referred to casually as a “cesspool”; it repelled even the old-timers who remembered its glory days, when it was alive with striped bass, alewives, Atlantic sturgeon, smelts, shad, salmon, eels, and who knew what more?

  I’ll take the horror stories on faith, but when I run my Boston Whaler up the river to Augusta I can hardly believe that the Kennebec and Merrymeeting Bay were ever less than teeming with irresistible life and plenty. We never fail to see eagles, and all summer the sturgeon jump, most of them shortnose but now and again Atlantic sturgeon, the grandest sea-run fish in eastern North America, twelve feet long and weighing up to eight hundred pounds. Other than a few fish remaining in the Delaware and Hudson Rivers, the Atlantic sturgeon in the Kennebec are the species’ final stand against extinction, and the news is getting better. (Should a sturgeon—driving from the muddy bottom to the surface and going airborne—chance to land on your dock or in your canoe, better put it back pronto, or pay a five-thousand-dollar fine. That’s fine caviar running upstream again.) After Edwards Dam went down, brown trout and blueback herring came again to the river. Atlantic salmon rebounded, and we see them jump now and again in the tributaries below Augusta. Owing to its great freshwater tidal estuary, Merrymeeting Bay has the only spawning population of striped bass in New England. The record catch in the Kennebec was sixty-seven pounds, but now the really big ones and little ones are put back. Striped bass fishing for sport is again booming on the Kennebec, and getting better all the time. Edwards Dam and those above on the Kennebec almost finished off American shad; the river used to host a run of a million or more shad, which spawned in June. The final word isn’t in yet on the river’s shad recovery. Alewife runs in May and June—landmark events in Abnaki culture—once numbered six million and more of the foot-long adults, prized also by eagles and great blue heron. These staples on the food chain were nearly goners, but they’re back, running a million or so.

  Franklin Burroughs, one of the best nature essayists—in a line that goes back to John Josselyn and Thoreau, unto Edward Abbey, John McPhee, and Edward Hoagland—grew up on the rivers of South Carolina, with a special fondness for the Waccamaw. He came to Maine many years ago to teach English at Bowdoin College and fell in love with Merrymeeting Bay, where he lives. The banks of the bay remain sparsely developed; perhaps the toxic stin
k of the bad old days was an effective deterrent to developers. The bay is dotted with little islands and medium-size islands. Population centers tend to be old-fashioned summer camps for kids. Meadows, bound by stone walls and interrupted by woodlots, checkerboard the shore. Vistas shift quickly, and parts of the bay are as perplexing as a maze: That deep-looking river or inlet over there will dry out at low tide, revealing a sandbar or mud-flat growing yellow and pale-green grass. Other than the flop of jumping fish or of a seal sliding off a rock into the water, other than the indignant call of an osprey pissed off that some thieving bandito of a cheep-cheeping eagle has swiped a fish right out of its talons, the bay is serene.

  So Burroughs, with many another like-minded admirers impatient with nostalgia, joined the Friends of Merrymeeting Bay. Burroughs doesn’t need to imagine what Merrymeeting Bay was to the Red Clay People or the Abnaki or Raleigh Gilbert. He writes seeing what it is: