The Edge of Maine Read online

  In addition to the bounty it produced, a thousand tons to the acre, the frozen river made for frolic as well, breaking the tedium of a long Maine winter of isolation and cabin fever. The younger children flocked to the river, skating and playing grab-ass in scenes reminiscent of Pieter Brueghel’s—both the Elder’s and Younger’s—winterscapes (even unto the Younger’s depiction of a skater falling through the ice). The Kennebec frozen became a highway, making it easy to visit friends and relatives strung up and down its banks, otherwise accessible only by many miles of snow-covered roads. Sleigh races were arranged. Locals angled through augured holes for smelts; the silvery little fish shoal in huge schools under the ice and a dozen or two taste delicious, bones and all, when fried fresh. Above all they gather talkative friends, in a woodstove-heated shack amply supplied with warming rum.

  They enjoyed the sensual beauty of the Kennebec during what Coffin calls those “steel-bright days”: the sun glancing off its polished surface, the occasional cannon report of shifting ice plates sounding like cracking thunder, the weight yet magical mobility of ice. The ice also gave an excuse to show off toys designed for recreation but more consequentially those ingenious contraptions invented to reap the greatest harvest of ice from the least hours and effort. Scores of tools were provided for the complex task of getting ice out of a river and out to sea. It had to be surveyed and claimed according to customs as mysterious yet iron-bound as those governing the harvesting of lobsters today. First the river was scraped clean of any blanket of insulating snow. The ice was partitioned into checkerboard patterns by scoring grid lines with a parade of horse-drawn groovers, gouging with a blade progressive cuts of five to twelve inches, and then it was cut by various saws, typically crosscuts with one handle removed. Holes were bored in the river by various augers to bring water atop it, a process to add thickness called “sinking the pond.” Picks of various design, “busting bars,” were swung to break apart the cakes. These were dragged or pushed along a chiseled canal to the icehouses where contraptions—typically steam-powered engines hoisting the blocks and moving an endless oak-lugged chain—hauled them up a ramp to be planed and skidded and stacked to the rooftops. Working the icehouse was dangerous: Close attention had to be paid to prevent shifts. The slippery cakes, Coffin writes, “had to be humored in handling, for, in spite of their heft, they were fragile as glass and easily broken. The vast cathedral of ice was full of thunder as the ice cakes came running, full of the thunder of men’s shouts as they coaxed the cakes into place.”

  Because of the hazard and difficulty of loading ice, together with its weight and inherent instability, ship captains didn’t like to carry it. In the earliest days of the trade, they fretted that the ice would melt and—violating the custom that water is meant to be kept on the outside rather than within the vessel—the ship would sink. Captains and crew also resented being warned by the ice’s owners that they’d best keep their hatches sealed. After shrinking ten percent during its storage ashore, the passages by ship—as long as six months to India—caused much more loss, despite enormous quantities of insulation. In a single shipment of two thousand tons of ice to Cuba, two hundred cords of wood shavings were put aboard. Yet, wood chips carried boring insects into the hold of a wooden ship,* and flake charcoal, rice, wheat chaff, silicate cotton, and granulated cork—sealed against the skin of the double-hulled ship by sheet zinc to discourage rats—were expensive insulating alternatives. Ice produced great quantities of freshwater melt, and unventilated fresh water trapped in bilges and saturating planks and timbers is a sure formula for the oxymoronically named dry rot.

  When electric refrigeration burst the ice bubble, the bonanza died not with a whimper but a bang. The bang was the sound of ice warehouses being burned along the Kennebec for insurance payouts, until no company would insure the buildings. These icehouse fires were spectacular and explosive, stoked by sawdust and burning so quickly that they’d sometimes leave great walls of stacked ice that hadn’t had time enough to melt. In 1901, the year following Charles Morse’s peculations with Tammany Hall, no ice at all was commercially harvested on the Kennebec. Now, as Coffin tells in Kennebec, the icehouses that weren’t burned “are rotting and falling back into the earth. Their interiors are taken over by the wasps and the mice. The old piers are sinking into the water…. The gouges and saws are rusted away. For the Kennebec crystals, last harvest of Maine’s finest river, have joined the white pine and the spruce, the sturgeon and shad and salmon. The end is elegy.”

  I DON’T THINK SO. SINCE COFFIN WROTE, THE RIVER HAS come alive again. Striped bass abound, dozens of bald eagles are nesting on its banks, sturgeon are again jumping up and down the Kennebec, waterfowl still migrate in their thousands, congregating on Merrymeeting Bay. The Bath Iron Works builds ships; it’s the biggest employer in Maine, and when the shifts change the town’s streets fill with men and women in hardhats and carrying lunch pails. The local sports bar gets a good turnout, but not so passionately dedicated a clientele as a legendary local roadhouse of previous decades, catering to Bath Iron workers who commuted to the job on Harleys. This tavern kept the local clinics and hospitals busy setting limbs and stitching cuts, taking an awful toll on those BIW employees who expressed opinions about the federal government—or the divinity of Jesus Christ, or the Bruins—contrary to the point of view of the guy on the neighboring stool. So many sick days were lost to bar fights at this roadhouse that the Bath Iron Works bought the place, with the provision that its owner could not open any drinking establishment within an hour’s motorcycle ride from the dry dock. Featherbedding has never been a Maine tradition, but local lore has it that when a Navy inspector dropped in on the BIW during World War II to check on the yard’s prodigious production of destroyers, he stood on a platform looking down at the beehive of welders and riveters and asked the plant manager, “How many people are working here?” “About half,” was the response.

  CASTINE (REVISITING)

  EATON’S BOATYARD

  To make do, making a living:

  to throw away nothing,

  practically nothing, nothing that may

  come in handy;

  within an inertia of caked paintcans,

  frozen C-clamps, blown strips of tarp, and

  pulling-boat molds,

  to be able to find,

  for whatever it’s worth,

  what has to be there:

  the requisite tool

  in this culch there’s no end to:

  the drawshave buried in potwarp,

  chain, and manila jibsheets,

  or, under a bench,

  the piece that already may fit

  the idea it begins

  to shape up:

  not to be put off by split rudders,

  stripped outboards, half

  a gasket, and nailsick garboards:

  to forget for good

  all the old year’s losses,

  save for

  what needs be retrieved:

  a life given to

  how today feels:

  to make of what’s here

  what has to be made

  to make do.

  —PHILIP BOOTH, Relations: Selected Poems, 1950–1985

  Kenny Eaton is a character. He’s the most recent in a long line of Eatons who have owned and managed Eaton’s Boatyard, a great shingled barn jutting from the western shore of Castine’s Bagaduce River. Philip Booth’s tribute to the Eaton enterprise conveys formally—with its bits and pieces of lines seeming to lie helter-skelter around the poem’s floor, hung higgledy-piggledy from the poem’s walls and ceiling—the calculated chaos of a business whose archaeological layers are a museum of a community’s maritime history. An anchor picked off the beach in 1952 might be sold cheap fifty years later to a sailor who needs just that anchor. It’s a treat to pick your way through the odds and ends in the huge, dark warehouse, taking not on faith but as verified historical fact that the junk is treasure, such as an old pulling-boat wi
th its transom missing, put up on blocks for Kenny to get to when he has a mind to get to it. In the summer he holds court on the water side of Eaton’s, laughing and teasing and drinking with the whole range of Castine citizens and visitors. He is a man of firm opinions volubly expressed. He keeps an eye on the fuel dock and the floats where boats come and go, taking on ice and groceries and water. Be considerate: Don’t overstay your welcome, or treat any of Kenny’s staff—that’s his daughter over there, assigning slip space to transients—high-handedly. Kenny affects rough manners, but don’t try rough manners on him or his.

  The crew hanging out on Kenny Eaton’s dock are Castine’s inner circle. You wouldn’t mistake the place for a yacht club, though the Castine Yacht Club offers the Eaton Cup as one of its treasured annual racing prizes. For a couple of years we kept Blackwing at Eaton’s. He put down a mooring for us on the east side of the harbor, hauled our boat in the fall, to hibernate in inside storage through the winter, prepared, rigged, and launched her in the late spring. These labor-intensive acts of preparation and repair took place as though by magic. No formal instructions were demanded—or welcomed—by the proprietor. Yard bills—which, in the fancier-looking venues along the New England coast, resemble hospital bills following major surgery—came late and were poorly itemized and charged at rates that couldn’t have increased since I first visited Castine in 1953.

  In many other ways the town has not changed in half a century. It is still orderly, a collection of quietly opulent Georgian and federal houses, with an occasional colonial here and there. As you approach the town from Battle Avenue, you pass a pretty public golf course with a modest clubhouse. Turning toward the water, along Main Street, the prospect pleases. You may have noticed—especially if you live in Hummerland, whatever southern California or Connecticut suburban address that may suggest—a paucity of SUVs. You may have noticed leisurely pedestrian traffic along what must be as pretty a Main Street as exists anywhere. You’ll see, predictably, a couple of inns, antique stores, real estate offices. And Main Street isn’t even the best of it! Water Street, along the campus of the Maine Maritime Academy and Perkins Street out to Dice Head light, has handsome old shingled cottages fronting the harbor. Inland, along Court Street, is a gorgeous common, bordered by houses joined with the care lavished on the 121 tall ships built here in the nineteenth century. Robert Lowell lived in one of those houses and wrote “Skunk Hour” about the experience. Castine is no boutique; it’s the real deal prosperous Maine town, soaked in history (and in history’s blood).

  If not for the bloodshed, the centuries of squabbling over this patch of Maine would resemble a comic opera. The first Europeans to find it were the French, in 1604, guided by Samuel de Champlain. Nine years later the French established a trading post, and the following year John Smith sailed in, noting with dismay the presence of Britain’s despised antagonists. In 1626 the Plymouth Colony, in need of quick money, established its own fur-trading post. These colonists were systematically robbed and burned out by the Abnaki and the French. As soon as the Plymouth expedition was driven off in 1635, the French set to quarreling among themselves, the La Tours versus the d’Aulneys. During these times the town and region were known as Pentagöet (by the French) and as Majabagaduce (by the English, who—in the custom of place-naming only—honored the Indian version). Then came from the Basque region of the Pyrenees one Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie de St. Castin, a soldier discharged as a teenager from the French Army in Quebec in 1667, at the conclusion of one of the wars between France and England, settled by the Treaty of Breda. On his way from Quebec to Pentagöet, guided by Abnaki, Castin developed a passionate interest in the culture and language of the Indians. He settled far enough up the Bagaduce to escape the scrutiny of such missionaries as Brother Leo of Paris, who had established a mission in Pentagöet in 1648. The young gentleman’s interest in the natives was regarded as unwholesome by local holy men, and Castin was arrested and pent up in Pentagöet for a couple of months owing, as he explained to the governor of Canada, to “a little weakness I had for some women.” He rescued the honor of one of these women by marrying Mathilde, daughter of Madockawando, a sagamore of the Tarratines. Happily ever after with an Indian princess? Not quite. Here came the Dutch, attacking Fort Pentagöet twice, once in 1674 from the sea and then, two years later, coming ashore and turning the fort’s defensive cannon on the town. They couldn’t hold the fort, however, and the French regained it and held it until the British retook it in 1759. Settlers moved in, declared their independence in 1776, and held on (with the exception of some Loyalists, who had to move out, floating their houses to Canada) until 1779, when the British retook it. The Americans sent an expeditionary force from Massachusetts to kick the Brits out, and in the worst naval defeat of our country’s history, the English feinted and counterattacked, driving eighteen armed vessels and a thousand recruits up the Penobscot River, trapping them just about at Norumbega, where Commodore Dudley Saltonstall and Colonel Paul Revere—both of whom were subsequently court-martialed—scuttled the fleet. Never mind: America wouldn’t be America if we hadn’t regained control of Castine. Remain in your seats; this lesson is not finished. We still have to cover the War of 1812, when the British occupied Castine until 1815.

  This story is told in what must be the busiest roadside plaque I’ve ever read, one of more than a hundred along the byways of Castine, many contradictory and all arguing a particular point of view. You’ll find this one on Perkins Street and, please, no skipping:

  FORT PENTAGOET

  Originally a trading post built during the Winter of 1613—by SIEUR CLAUDE DE TURGIS DE LA TOUR

  It became, with its accessions, through nine change of regime and of successive but continuous occupation the first permanent settlement in NEW ENGLAND and its actual POLITICAL & COMMERCIAL BEGINNING

  Captured and rebuilt by SIR DAVID KIRK in 1628—transferred by GRANT to the PLYMOUTH Colony in 1629—and restored to FRANCE by Treaty of St Germain and by force of arms in 1635—it was entirely reconstructed 1636–1645 by SIEUR CHARLES DE MENOU D’AULNAY DE CHARNIZAY who made it one of the LARGEST and Most FORMIDABLE FORTIFICATIONS in the NEW WORLD.

  Named by him FORT SAINT PETER and by the English the PNOBSCOT FORT—under the Dominion of FRANCE—1613-28—1635-54—1670-74—1676-1745<>of ENGLAND 1628-35—1654-70 and of the UNITED NETHERLANDS 1674-76.

  It became the SEAT of GOVERNMENT for ACADIA in 1670 and four years later of the Province NEWHOLLANDIA, the capture of which by BARON DE ST. CASTIN—Nov. 1676, ended DUTCH authority in AMERICA.

  It was five times carried by assault—twice surrendered by royal decree and once by Treaty of Breda—twice raided—once unsuccessfully besieged—once invested and its truck house plundered by three-hundred Mohawks in 1662—and once partially and once completely destroyed.

  Rebuilt much smaller in 1677 by BARON JEAN VINCENT D’ABADDIE DE SAINT CASTIN and thenceforth known as CASTIN’S FORT—It was again raided by Sir Edmund Andros in 1688 and by Col. Benjamin Church in 1704—and was finally DEMOLISHED by Castin’s sons in 1745 to prevent its coming under English control, Possession of the locality thus retained until 1760.

  During the One hundred and thirty-one years of its existence, its Strength, Strategic position and Enormous Revenues commanded constant Old and New World recognition as factors always to be Reckoned With in Inter-Colonial political and commercial affairs.

  Its story is the most varied and dramatic of any American Fortress of its time.*

  During the two summers Priscilla and I spent in Castine we’d often walk past that marker and study it, and give each other snap quizzes on its names and sequences, and essay questions touching the partisan subtext of its narrative. We rented a cabin on the Penobscot River and a boathouse perched on a dock in front of the Castine Harbor Lodge. Our favorite dwelling was loaned to us by our daughter-in-law and her family, their house on Water Street across the street from the Castine Variety Store, which sells … well, a variety of things: the N
ew York Times and notions ’n’ lotions and fishing lures and the best crab rolls ever. Living in that house, in the red-hot center of town, made us honorary citizens of the town. My daughter-in-law’s grandparents, Minnie and Ivan Nelson, had inherited the house from Minnie’s aunt, Mrs. MacLeod, who had run a year-round sandwich shop and soda fountain next door to her house, Ma MacLeod’s, an attraction much favored by the students at Maine Maritime Academy. Ivan Nelson loved boats. Minnie believed boats to be damned foolishness, and told her husband so, and if he even suggested that he might like to own a boat, the hammer came right down on him: “You’ll just get yourself drowned!” So he’d wander over to Eaton’s Boatyard to watch Kenny assemble an outboard motor that had only yesterday been a random scatter of parts in a carton, or to see Kenny clamber up the mast in a bosun’s chair to rewire an antenna. He would help Kenny or Kenny’s dad with projects on the water, such as moving boats from their slips to moorings when weather threatened trouble; taking boats over to the Penobscot River to bring them home in the spring; putting moorings down or pulling them.