Pull up a lobster trap and have a seat. The weather outside is raw and cold, so the boats are lashed down, and we have time to chat. The tale of the great Maine lobster is as old as Maine itself. It is not just our pastime, it is our state treasure. It is to be revered and respected. To be spoken of in hushed tones and wrapped in the lore of weathered lobstermen and battered wharfs. It’s a story we have heard a hundred times since our childhoods in Maine. Lobster is a religion and we take it very seriously … but with our own spin.
—Cousins Maine Lobster Brand Book
There’s nothing quite like being out on a lobster boat on a beautiful summer morning. You get to the wharf before sunrise, the call of the gulls beckoning you out to sea. You step on the boat and your senses are overwhelmed with smells: the salt, the diesel, but most of all, the bait—the barrels of rotting herring and red fish heads. The stench should repulse you, yet it’s strangely fitting to the surroundings. As you cruise down the Fore River out into Casco Bay, the new sun catches the tree line on the tops of the islands, encasing the whole world in a golden glow. Little Diamond Island is a few points off the starboard bow, Great Diamond Island towering behind. The sea is calm and quiet as the boat glides past Fort Gorges, a Civil War–era stone skeleton, its gun ports and parapets overrun with tall grass. A historic relic with nothing to defend except the peace and serenity of the Maine coast. A gentle spray over the gunwale is the only disturbance on an otherwise perfect day for lobster fishing …
But today is not a beautiful day. The morning dawned cold and wet, the precipitation alternating between rain and mist. Just enough to keep your exposed skin in a permanent state of clamminess. The sea rolls with a heavy swell, rocking the boat to a sickening degree while the fish guts spill over the tops of their barrels. You can feel your breakfast roiling in the pit of your stomach and you only hope it stays there. A drenching October gust thrashes the boat as it heaves and sways toward the buoys that bob in the heavy chop. The captain, Jonathan Norton, pulls up alongside the first one of the day, a yellow-and-maroon buoy, the same colors his grandfather used when he fished these waters decades earlier. He catches hold of the line and hauls the buoy into the boat, placing it in a barrel of heated water. He then laces the line around the boat’s pot hauler, and starts it up. The hauler buzzes to life, turning, turning, turning, each rotation bringing the first of five traps closer to the surface from twenty fathoms, or 120 feet, below. And while it turns, we wait, wondering what bounty will rise from the ocean floor.
We’re out on the bay with our newest franchisees. It’s not our first time on a lobster boat but it is theirs. Call it a rite of passage. No one can become a Cousins Maine Lobster franchisee without first getting out on a lobster boat. But we don’t stop with the boat. The initiation continues to our lobster supplier and processing plant, which are all within a few minutes of the Portland wharves. The lobster industry is remarkable that way. Everything happens inside a relatively small radius, from the fishing to the processing to the shipping. Maine lobster is a global market, but it all starts here, on the water in a single lobster boat.
We also make sure to show them the cultural side of the industry—by which we mean, yes, we take them drinking. There are a few dives off the tourist path in and around the Portland area that only cater to locals. These aren’t just good places to grab a beer; they’re also the best spots to talk to the lobstermen and those whose families have been in the industry for generations. Even the two of us are somewhat out of place in these joints—and that’s the point. The lobster industry, much like Maine itself, is its own culture. You can’t simply adopt it, because it won’t adopt you. The reason we make a point of showing our franchisees this slice of Maine that few see is because it’s the best way to learn about the people who are the lobster industry—and have a little fun in the process.
But right now, the franchisees don’t look too happy. We sympathize. We’re not all that comfortable either. Lobstering is a relentless profession, because each boat is like its own small business on the water. If the boat doesn’t go out, then the captain-owner doesn’t get paid. It’s like if we were allowed only one food truck and had to be on it all the time. How do you run a business that way?
By going out in weather fair or foul, every day of the season. Being a lobsterman means living in a world that is content to remain stuck in the past, sometime between the turn of the last century and World War II. We’ll get to why it’s this way in a moment, but know that it’s not for the tourists. The communities that dot the Maine coast, and the industry that supports them, take their state’s chief export as seriously as Silicon Valley takes its technology. Tourists love to come to the wharves because they want to step back into the past, and the city has responded by beautifying Commercial Street, the main artery running parallel to the water. But Maine isn’t Disney. This isn’t for show, and the lobstermen and their crews aren’t actors. Lobster is how they earn their living, feed their families, build and buy their homes, send their kids to college, and save for retirement.
And, by extension, it’s how we do all those things, too. In that way, the lobster industry isn’t much different than nearly every other natural resource–driven industry on earth. It’s a matter of knowing where your product comes from so that you can appreciate the work of dozens (or hundreds) of people that allows you to make a living. Yet the lobster industry is wholly unique as well. We don’t suspect that a burger franchisor has its franchisees visit cattle ranches and slaughterhouses, but perhaps they do. The lobster industry is one of the few in the world that could hold back the corporate onslaught and homogenized industrial processes that dominate the modern economy.
In the movie City Slickers, Billy Crystal and his friends play at being cowboys for a week, driving a cattle herd across the plains. The horses are real, the cows are real, even the guides’ six-shooters are real; but the whole process is a fantasy. There aren’t any cowboys anymore, at least not ones who drive herds of cattle like they used to. If the beef industry still operated that way, beef would be scarce and prices astronomical. The cowboy died out when the world industrialized and cows could be mass produced—and mass slaughtered—on corporate ranches. We might mourn the loss of the fantasy, but we do love our cheap and plentiful burgers and steaks.
Tourists can certainly pay to have a lobster-boat captain take them out for a day. They can live out a fantasy as a lobsterman, then return to their families, share the pictures, and tell the story years later. But this is where the lobster industry stands apart. The lobsterman is back out on the water, doing the same thing the tourist did, the very next day. And the day after. And the day after that. It’s a routine that stretches back more than a hundred years, ever since the lobster industry began to regulate itself and time stopped.
We don’t bring our franchisees on the water because we want them to play at being Maine lobstermen for a day. We hope they enjoy the experience—some do, some throw up their breakfast over the gunwale—but that’s not our purpose. Rather, we’re out on Casco Bay on a blustery, wet October morning because we want our franchisees to see where their product comes from; how it’s fished out of the water, one trap at a time by one captain operating one boat. We also want them to experience the disappointment of throwing back a perfectly healthy, nice-sized lobster. You can see the anguish on the franchisees’ faces when the captain tells them to toss a lobster back into the ocean. They see dollars sinking to the ocean floor and prices back on their truck rising. But it’s important for them to understand that this is one of the sustainability measures that Maine takes to protect the lobster industry. It’s also important so that when they return to their cities, where food is bought at grocery stores and lobster meat comes packed in neat little boxes, they can remember the captain back on the water, doing the same thing he did yesterday, and the day before that.
We also want them to see the entirety of the supply chain so that they can talk to customers like we talk to customers. We mentioned in a previous chapter that we can’t be everywhere, but that we want our customers to see us everywhere. Our franchisees are the solution. By learning the lobster industry from the inside, they can then talk as well as we do about what it means to be a purveyor of lobster meat. Our goal is simple but ambitious: to have the most-informed, best-educated franchisees in the business.
And perhaps, when they open that box of Maine lobster as they prepare to load the truck, they will know that they’re selling more than food.
They’re supporting a way of life.
FROM SERVANTS TO KINGS
Historians of New England often note that early settlers considered lobster a kind of junk food that was fit only for swine, servants, and prisoners. These claims may be exaggerated. But storms could blow lobsters onto beaches by the hundreds, making them a convenient source of feed or fertilizer for coastal farms, and most scholars agree that lobster was generally considered a low-class dish for human consumption. After their first winter in Plymouth, a group of Pilgrims on an expedition to what is now Boston Harbor gladly helped themselves to fresh lobsters that had been piled on the beach by Native Americans. By the following year, however, the leader of the Pilgrims, William Bradford, reported shame at having to serve lobster in lieu of more respectable fare.
—Trevor Corson, The Secret Life of Lobsters11
When a resource is as plentiful as lobster was in those early years of the Maine settlements, it’s only natural that the wealthy would turn up their noses. Of course, this had nothing to do with taste and everything to do with maintaining and adhering to a strict class consciousness. The poor ate what they ate because it was cheap and abundant; the rich ate what they ate because it was expensive and scarce. How times have changed.
But the change didn’t happen overnight. You might recall from the preceding chapter that Maine lobster only developed a market once it was canned and shipped far and wide. We can’t imagine eating lobster out of a can, but an industry needs to start somewhere. Because canning was so cheap, canneries by the dozen opened all along the New England coast as far as Nova Scotia. But they were extremely dirty as well as ravenous. The sheer number of lobsters needed to fill a single can prophesied doom for the burgeoning industry. As Colin Woodard notes:
The process consumed an extraordinary number of lobsters. It took four and a half to six pounds of live lobsters to fill a one-pound can with meat. The bodies were discarded along with the shells, forming great refuse piles behind the cannery shed.… But most canneries simply dumped the refuse off the wharf—hundreds of tons annually at each cannery—transforming each harbor and nearby shores into a smelly mess of putrid shellfish.12
But no one much minded the smell if lobsters equaled money and jobs, which they did. The number of lobstermen skyrocketed from a “few dozen in the late 1840s to 1,843 in 1880.” And it’s no wonder. Between 1850 and 1880, the lobster industry, which at one time was mostly just for bait and fertilizer, was making $430,000 a year—a not insignificant industry in those days.13 As Maine’s other industries withered and died, lobster exploded. But there was a downside to the good times. The fisherman noticed that their hauls, which only years earlier pulled in hundreds of lobsters a day, had begun to shrink dramatically. In the 1880s, Swan Island lobsterman saw their daily catch dwindle from 250 lobsters to 75, while North Haven lobstermen noticed that the lobsters started getting smaller. Previously, pulling up a four-pound lobster was par for the course, but the average size during the heyday of the canneries fell to two pounds.14 The falloff began to affect the canneries themselves, and many began to close due to lack of lobster. But that just made the ones that survived more determined to catch the lobsters that remained.
It didn’t take long before a political scuffle broke out between the canneries and the lobstermen, who lobbied the state government to enact conservation measures. In some ways, it’s a fight that continues to this very day. The suppliers and consumers of lobster always want more than the fishery can sustain. The lobstermen, fully aware that they can easily fish more, also know that they would be fishing themselves out of a job. Besides, a scarce resource with high demand fetches a better price than one that is easily procured. After some dithering, Maine lawmakers responded and by the 1880s the first conservation measures were put in place. Namely, laws were passed that put a limit on the lobster-fishing season and prohibited the capture of egg-bearing female lobsters as well as small, adolescent lobsters less than nine inches long. A few years later, the minimum size was further restricted to ten and a half inches.
Canneries responded to these measures by moving their operations across the Canadian border to New Brunswick. Once out of the Gulf of Maine, the quality of lobster drops dramatically, but the canneries didn’t mind. After all, they weren’t fishing the Gulf of Maine for its quality, but rather its quantity. They just needed ton after ton of lobster meat to fill the cans. Despite aggressive lobbying, the Maine government stuck to its guns, and the last cannery fled the state in 1894.15
Just as the canneries dwindled and the nascent lobster industry wondered if it could survive without them, Vacationland happened. In the years after the Civil War, tourism to Maine exploded. Tourism itself was a bit of a novelty. The notion that one could take off work to spend leisure time somewhere else was not only new, it went against the Puritan values still held by most New Englanders. But the people traveling to Maine for pleasure weren’t exactly from Old Salem. These were the new industrialists and so-called robber barons who had amassed a ton of wealth in the post–Civil War era. Drawn to Maine’s beauty and simple, rustic communities, America’s new wealthy class found this backwater fishing state just the thing to escape the bustle of the cities. Maine swiftly became, to use a term coined in the twentieth century, Vacationland. And while there, the rich tourists developed a taste for fresh lobster.
It was a perfect storm of events for the lobster industry. Just as the population decline and conservation measures began to make lobster relatively scarce, the rich showed up with wads of cash. Scarce lobster means more expensive lobster and anything expensive to these newcomers was good. It turned lobster into a dish only they could enjoy and so enjoy it they would. The wealthy would arrive for the summer, and stay on vast estates they had bought and developed from native Mainers at rock-bottom prices. Woodard recounts the story of a property speculator who purchased a Bar Harbor lot from a local family for $200, only to sell it a few years later to George Vanderbilt for $200,000.16
And as vacationers are wont to do, when they showed up in Maine they wanted to “experience” all of Maine, which included foods that were once the fare of the lower classes. It wasn’t just lobster; even clams, which had been sold only for bait, were suddenly a hot commodity. At the end of the summer, when the rich left the resorts and their spacious estates for the city, they took with them a newfound taste for Maine’s seafood, sparking a market for live lobster and other New England fish in the great eastern cities, such as Boston, New York, and Baltimore. It stands as one of those curious little twists of history. The canneries had introduced Maine lobster to the world, shipping their tin cans as far as China. But the rich turned up their noses at anything that came out of a can—and we probably shouldn’t blame them. Canned lobster meat, even from Maine, doesn’t sound all that great. But put a full lobster on a porcelain plate with a bowl of melted butter and a parsley leaf for garnish, and, suddenly, our once-derided crustacean has become a luxury dish. So, while the old canneries died out, lobster, once the food for servants, prisoners, and the poor, had transformed into a dish fit for kings.
As Woodard writes: “The arrival of the summer people would forever alter coastal Maine society, economics, and land ownership patterns. Their effect on the burgeoning lobster fishery was immediate and profoundly invigorating.”17
THE DEATH OF AN INDUSTRY
In 1905, Boston’s Bay State Fishing Company introduced the first otter trawler in the Gulf of Maine. The 115-foot-long steam-powered vessels could catch one hundred tons of fish through their 80-foot-wide mouths, which were used to scoop up entire schools. Trawlers themselves had been invented by the British, but were mostly derided by New England fisherman, who still relied on the “tub trawling” method—essentially a way to catch a large amount of bottom fish with the traditional line and baited hooks. But with New England bottom fish such as cod, haddock, and halibut suddenly in high demand, and with the New England coast being the world’s number one spot for catching large amounts of these fish, it was only a matter of time before the European-style trawlers began to cruise the coastal waters.
Woodard provides an account of the gruesome aftermath of the trawlers’ introduction to New England’s fisheries. Between 1902 and 1936, he reports, the New England halibut catch fell from 13.5 million pounds a year to 2 million pounds. Also, between 1929 and 1936, haddock catches fell by two-thirds. Even clams, at one time believed to be useful only as bait, saw their numbers dwindle by three-quarters between 1928 and 1930. But the worst was yet to come.
By 1935, fisherman could find no cod or haddock in the upper half of Penobscot Bay, where they had once been prevalent. They continued to fish in the outer bay, first with small boats rigged with little otter trawls, later with larger draggers. By the late forties and early fifties, commercial quantities of cod and haddock could no longer be found in Maine’s largest embayment. The story repeated itself up and down the coast and, in every instance, the cod and haddock never returned to their spawning grounds.18
In short, New England’s groundfish industry was on its deathbed.
By the 1950s, European, Russian, and Japanese “freezer trawler” fleets—so-called because they could store the enormous quantities of caught fish in freezers—had started to fish the waters farther out in the Atlantic, near the Grand Banks, but soon turned their sights on what was left on Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine. Because of its storage facility, the freezer trawler could fish twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, or until her two-thousand-ton load was filled.
It was during this time that American households had begun to gobble up cheap, frozen fish caught by these foreign behemoths. It didn’t matter if the fish was of a lower quality than what the New England fisherman offered; it was cheap and would keep in the freezer box. This foreign-fish invasion further undercut the New England fishermen, who were already having a hard enough time finding the high-quality catch. And because these fish were caught in international waters where there wasn’t any law, there was little the US government, much less the Maine government, could do to help.
And so, the overfishing continued. The trawlers would literally fish a particular species to near extinction, then move on to the next. The other problem with trawlers, other than that they pick up massive quantities of fish with no regard to conservation, is that they also scoop up other marine wildlife. As Woodard notes, “The United Nations later estimated that for every four tons of fish that were landed worldwide, another ton or more of other creatures were discarded as by-catch.”19 There was nothing to stop them and the few voices calling for some measure of conservation were ignored.
Meanwhile, back in Maine, the inshore fisherman bore the brunt of the decades of overfishing. With the cod, haddock, and halibut fisheries gone, they had turned to pollock, herring, and whiting. Different fish, same story. Even though the trawling was happening farther offshore, it captured the same schools of fish that would find their way to Maine—only, they never made it. In 1960, Maine fisherman caught four million pounds of pollock, but only eight hundred thousand pounds in 1970. Herring fell by 80 percent in the same period. In the 1950s and ’60s, Mainers would catch fifteen to twenty million pounds of whiting, but only 250,000 pounds in 1977.20
Eventually, the world community responded to the foreign trawlers that indiscriminately cruised the oceans by expanding national sovereignty out to two hundred miles at sea. This pushed the trawlers far away from Maine and helped to reduce the damage they did to the fishery and to Maine’s economy. But the damage had been done and much of it was irreversible. New England’s groundfish industry, once the envy of the world, was in tatters. The more marketable fish—cod, haddock, and halibut—had all but disappeared, taking jobs and entire fishing communities with them. Up and down the New England coast, the ravages of the decline and fall of the groundfish industry could be seen in deserted wharves, closed shops, and displaced families. Many New Englanders, whose families had fished the coastal waters for generations, had to give up the sea and turn toward the factories. It was a painful end for an industry that had once defined an entire region of the United States.
Amid this economic carnage, the lobstermen had watched in dismay as they saw their sister industry fall apart. Many had split their time between catching groundfish and lobster anyway, but there was a limit on the number of lobsterman on the water. Which meant that many of the groundfish captains had to find other work. They wouldn’t be back, because the fish weren’t coming back. The lobstermen themselves, feeling fortunate that the great foreign trawlers hadn’t developed a taste for lobster before they departed, saw in their jobless brethren a warning: greed and shortsightedness had doomed the groundfish industry. Unless they were smarter, the fate of New England’s fishermen would be their fate as well.
LIFE ON THE WATER
“Even your bad days are better than sitting in an office.”
Steve Train has never known any other life. Nor did his father. Or his grandfathers. Follow the generations of Steve’s family until they fade into the Maine mists and you’ll find little else but lobstermen. A father himself, Steve says that children of lobstermen grow up with one overriding ambition, to pursue the family trade. Other kids play with LEGOs and action figures; Steve grew up fashioning forts out of lobster traps. It’s no surprise then that his eldest daughter, who’s studying marine science at the University of Maine, wants to come home and become a lobsterman—er, lobsterwoman.
“I’m not discouraging it,” says Steve. “But I don’t want her to think she has to.”
But that’s the thing: no one has to be a lobsterman. Sometimes you wonder why they do it. As we mentioned earlier, a lobsterman is limited to one boat and he or she must be on it to fish. It all starts with the much coveted and highly regulated Maine lobsterman license. There are only about 6,000 licenses available, and the wait list for getting one can last years. Moreover, licenses are managed by individual counties, as opposed to the state government. To get one, you need to be a resident of that county, and must have logged a certain number of hours on a lobster boat. And each county only has a hundred or so licenses to go around. This doesn’t even get into the cost of purchasing your own boat, which fetches a price of a couple hundred thousand dollars.
There are clear conservation motivations behind this policy, since it limits the number of boats on the water. But the real conservation measure is that it basically prohibits any corporate takeover of the industry, which is exactly what happened to the groundfish industry. There is simply no way for any company to get a foothold anywhere in Maine lobster, because every lobsterman is in the same boat, so to speak. The flip side is that a lobsterman can’t scale his business. He is utterly dependent on what he brings in on his single boat and the price fluctuations of the market. Which isn’t to say that lobstermen are destitute, but they live on very thin margins.
The other effect of the one-boat-one-owner policy is that it keeps Maine’s coastal communities alive and not wholly dependent on the “summer people,” as they call tourists. It’s true that Mainers have a love-hate relationship with the vacationers, but it’s more love than hate. After all, it’s the vacationers who bring the dollars to buy the lobster, stay at the resorts, tour the islands, and give teenagers jobs working on ferry boats, which is what Jim did for a few summers. But Mainers love their independence more, as four hundred years of history have made abundantly clear. It’s not in Mainers’ nature to rely on the whims of the tourist industry, as many beach communities without any local industry must do. Mainers would rather have a say in the direction of their lives.
Lobster gives them that voice. Lobster is independence, because it means that if all the vacationers never came back—a calamity, to be sure—Mainers would still have that one resource no one else in the world has. Draw this sentiment out across the dozens of thriving fishing towns that dot Maine’s coastline and islands and you can appreciate why the one-boat-one-owner policy was put into effect. It allows each community to have its own fishery, its own raison d’être. If an owner could own more than one boat, then what would stop someone from launching a fleet of them from Portland? In no time at all, that fleet would be able to outfish the single-boat guys, who would likely have to find jobs working for the Portland fleet. The result? The lobstermen leave their coastal and island towns for the big city. So, Portland grows, while the tiny communities wither—or barely hang on, waiting desperately for the next wave of vacationers.
Opponents of the law say it’s merely an outdated protectionist measure. To which we would reply: yes, it is; but it’s also a survivalist one, and very much part of Maine’s economic policy. That policy appreciates that Maine’s quaint coastal and island communities are rare and highly sought after by tourists. But these communities wouldn’t exist without the one-boat-one-owner policy. The policy itself forms the link between Maine’s world-renowned resource and its tourism industry. If the link was severed, then the circle would break and Maine would lose one of its primary sources of income, the tourists.
Still, these policies are also in place for conservation reasons. The population, while healthy and strong today, has gone through its own moments of scarcity and concern. As lobster science has improved over the decades, lobstermen have had to contend with fairly restrictive policies regarding their capture. Today, the minimum size of a legal lobster, measured from the eye to the end of the carapace or body shell, is three and a quarter inches. This is to protect the adolescent lobsters, giving them a chance to mature and procreate. Lobster traps are designed with the minimum-size restriction in mind. Each trap has a set of holes that allow smaller lobsters to exit. They don’t always make it out, and thus must endure a trip to the surface, followed by a plummet of a hundred feet or so to the bottom again.
But there’s also a maximum size of a legal lobster that is set at five inches. Why the maximum? Because large male lobsters are the alphas in any population; they’re the ones who have the pick of the females by asserting their physical (and sexual) dominance over their lesser male neighbors. In other words, the lobster population would take a severe hit if all the alpha males were captured. Then there’s the restrictions regarding female egg-bearing lobsters. If one is caught, the lobsterman makes a v-shaped notch in the tail, alerting the next lobsterman that this is an egg-bearing female who must be released.
What these size restrictions mean in practice is that every Maine lobster is inspected before it’s captured. It means no indiscriminate trawling—or dragging—of the ocean floor, then dumping whatever is caught in some tank. That lobster on your plate or in your lobster roll was sized and inspected the moment it was retrieved from the trap by the captain himself. Clearly, this isn’t the most efficient or economically viable way of doing things. Even if draggers were legal in Maine—they’re not—a captain would still have to take time to inspect each lobster he caught.
So, again, why would anyone want to be a lobsterman, given all the uneconomic restrictions and inefficiencies baked into the business? Because it’s the life they know and love. Every morning, Steve takes his boat out to do the same job he’s done his entire life, since he first stepped foot on a lobster boat when he was eight years old.
“We’ve had a pretty good run the last ten years on weight,” Steve tells us. “But on price it’s different. The price has been depressed, because there’s been a volume increase down east. So, I’m carrying a lot of debt right now. Also, bait prices have gone through the roof.”
For a franchisee, the fluctuations in price can come as quite a shock. We prepare them for this as best we can, but have found that the best lesson is experience. When the price jumps, we all must scramble—the franchisees as well as those of us in the corporate office. With new franchisees, a price jump usually elicits a call to one of us, who must talk down the panicked voice on the other end of the phone. We get it, because we’ve been there.
When a business says it’s going to serve no other lobster but Maine lobster, it’s assuming a certain amount of risk. Not only is the price for Maine lobster generally more expensive than its closest competitor, the Canadian lobster, but its fluctuations are also greater. This makes it difficult for a Maine lobster business to plan, not knowing what the price will be in six months. For this reason, a lot of businesses that start out selling Maine lobster bow to economic pressures and opt for its cheaper cousin.
Yet, side by side, there is simply no comparison in taste between Maine and Canadian lobster. A lot of businesses convince themselves that they can simply augment their Maine meat with Canadian to save a little bit. Who but a lobster connoisseur could tell the difference? Well, you’d be surprised. But more important than that, you’re lying to your customers. If you want to sell Canadian lobster, go right ahead. But don’t you dare call it Maine lobster.
Because you’re not just tricking your customers; you’re selling out the lobstermen, who makes a living selling the Maine lobster they catch. Charlatans who steal the name but sell a different meat tarnish the brand and make it harder for guys like Steve, and perhaps his daughter one day, too, to make their livings and feed their families.
The lobstermen haven’t been immune to the challenges of overfishing. Several times since the nineteenth century, the lobster population has sunk to dangerous levels, causing some scientists to predict the imminent demise of the fishery. But in every instance the lobsters came back, through a combination of science-backed conservation measures and, vitally, the cooperation of the lobstermen. Those first conservation measures mentioned above were on the right track, but a lot of lobstermen simply ignored them. Moreover, the laws created a black market for illegal lobsters that the independent lobsterman was only too happy to sell to.
Until they saw what was happening to the groundfish industry. Around the time of the Great Depression, the lobstermen reversed course and began to police themselves on adhering to the conservation measures, not for any esoteric virtue like conservation and sustainability, but for basic survival. The choice was simple: if you want this life, follow the rules.
Now in his sixties, Steve’s answer to why he does it is straightforward: “I’m worn out every night but I can’t wait to do it again every morning. This keeps you alive.”
LESSON
KNOW WHY YOU DO IT
We’re starting our day on the lobster boat by walking down a Portland wharf to one of the docks, where we’ll wait for Captain Jonathan Norton to take us out. A pickup pulls up next to us and the driver rolls down his window to bid us good morning. Jim exchanges some pleasantries with the driver, one of the wharf employees, and mentions Jonathan’s name as well as the name of Jonathan’s father, John. The driver smiles and wishes us a good day of fishing before driving on. To the franchisees, what they just witnessed was nothing more than a friendly chat, but to Jim it was a checkpoint.
Every wharf in Maine is privately owned. There aren’t gates or guards at the entrances. Anyone can take a gander down the little alley to the docks to check out the boats and the mountains of lobster traps, even if they’re not supposed to. But this friendly, inclusive club of lobstering is also very protective. When one of its members sees a group of strangers—obviously tourists, by their clothes—where they shouldn’t be, they’ll check it out. At the same time, it’s a club that is also very welcoming, particularly to those whom it considers friends of the trade. By mentioning Jonathan’s and his father’s names—John Norton—Jim was signaling that our purpose there was legitimate. All the driver had to do was call up John to know we were vouched for—we were friends of the club. But he didn’t. Jim’s word was enough for him.
It also helped that Jim knew the driver from childhood. The two had worked together on the ferries that shuttled tourists between the islands and the mainland during the summer. Jim’s friendship with the driver alone might have been enough, but combined with Jim’s knowledge of the owner of the wharf and his son, the driver knew that Jim and his friends posed no harm. The suspicion turned immediately to trust and respect.
We’re not lobstermen. Our franchisees aren’t lobstermen. We’ve never had to make a living hauling up sixty-pound traps, stinking of brine and rotting fish heads. We’ve done it, as have all our franchisees, but doing it for a day doesn’t give one honorary membership. It takes years to become a lobsterman: first as an apprentice, then as a captain-owner, one of the world’s few proud holders of a Maine lobsterman license.
When we get on the boat, the Isla Dawn, we learn that Jonathan, a thirty-four-year-old family man who’s just built a home on Long Island—Maine, not New York—waited seven years for his license. Despite his family connections and his ancestry, he got no special privileges. He had to put in his time just like everyone else.
“Many guys just give up,” says Jonathan as he takes us past his home on Long Island. “I’ve heard of wait times of ten to fifteen years.”
Jonathan isn’t exactly happy about that. He feels that the profession needs more young guys like him, but he understands why the process is the way it is. Particularly now that he’s an official member, he’s as protective of his fellow lobstermen—and of the curious crustacean on which they build their fortunes—as any old-timer.
As is most anyone who spends any significant time with lobstermen. We didn’t start out feeling as protective of their interests as we do today. In our early days, we were more concerned with providing customers with as genuine a Maine lobster experience as we could. But we made a choice even before our first truck was on the road to sell no lobster but Maine lobster. This decision brought us into the fold of the Maine lobster industry—this vibrant, sensitive, highly independent group of fishermen whose concern for their resource is nothing short of inspiring. And the more time we spent with these captain-owners, the more we felt pulled by the history of their profession, which, as you’ve seen, is also the history of our great home state.
And now we’re a vital part of that history. We don’t say this to be boastful or to assume a level of privilege we know we haven’t—and couldn’t ever—earn. We say this because our success has provided us with a certain level of responsibility. Our growth helps guys like Steve and Jonathan and also helps the Maine lobster industry as a whole. Isla Dawn is more than a typical lobster boat; it’s the name of Jonathan’s daughter. He gets up every morning hours before dawn to spend twelve hours on a small boat baiting lobster traps with rotting fish heads for her. He wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Not too long ago, we were landing about eighty million pounds of lobster,” Steve tells us. “Today, we’re landing around one hundred and twenty million pounds.”
Of course, this surge in business isn’t tied to our own, but we have had a small part to play in democratizing lobster, taking it off the porcelain plates of kings and putting it back on the picnic table for servants—or at least the nonwealthy. Every Friday, our suppliers put their entire team to work loading their Cousins Maine Lobster order. We are one of their biggest clients, far larger than the fancy restaurants that used to be the sole purveyors of lobster not so very long ago.
This sense of responsibility for an industry that provides us, our employees, and our franchisees with a living now informs everything we do. It’s why we do it. We have been extremely fortunate in becoming part of the great circle of Maine’s lobster industry. It’s a small part, to be sure, but our sense of accountability is no less for it. Without lobster, Maine wouldn’t be what it was when we were kids; it wouldn’t be what it is today, which thankfully is almost identical. We want it to be that way tomorrow, and next month, and next year, and ten years down the road. And we will work every day to protect and sustain the Maine we love, because it is darn near perfect the way it is.
Best of all, our support is reciprocated. They also support us, and give us a chance to make a living our chosen way. The respect, the handshakes, the familiarity—these are the things that make this industry special and something we are proud to not only call our own, but also to promote and protect.
For an entrepreneur, knowing why you do it is the true spirit of creation. At first, you build something because you have a great idea or a marketable product. You do it because you want to be your own boss or you want to make more money. You do it because you’re tired of your day job and want to wake up every morning with a passion for your work. These are all valid, normal reasons for becoming an entrepreneur, ones which we shared and which still inspire us today. But we’ve discovered another reason, one we couldn’t have predicted, but which has been far more motivational than any selfish desire to build and manage a company.
We have found a purpose in what we do. We do it for guys like Steve and Jonathan. We do it for Maine’s coastal and island communities that have withstood economic despair and the demise of one of history’s great fisheries. We do it because the families that live on these pristine yet often inhospitable bits of land have been given the gift of a resource that is desired all over the world. But that resource is fragile; it is a gift, a treasure, that can easily be lost, if it is not respected and protected.
That is why we do it. We can only hope that you find your purpose like we found ours.