Six weeks after a delegation of Japanese investors made their Valentine’s Day visit to the shuttered Penobscot Narrows Paper Company mill to explore purchasing and reopening the operation, flames engulfed the sprawling property. I was fourteen years old then, and had no idea how that fire was also about to engulf our lives as well.
Years later nighttime walkers, motorists, and stargazers as far north as Kenduskeag would still describe the horrible red wall of dancing heat they claimed they saw devouring the southern horizon that night.
By morning, as the sun crested above the land, a charred palace hung on the banks of the Penobscot River. The caravan of Japanese saviors seemed a vanished dream. A palpable sense of both loss (that mill, the sprawling, environmental monstrosity that it was, had sustained generations of people in the Penobscot Valley) and joy (all vile things have their end too) ran along the police scanners, breakfast counters, harbor front, and general gossiping and gathering spots of Eastport, the small mill town known for its paper production and its dark history. Some five thousand years earlier, the Red Paint People had inhabited the area. Named for their elaborate funeral practice of covering their bodies in red ochre before burial, they settled on Indian Point, a slip of land jutting out into the Penobscot River. The same slip of land was later called T’kope’suk by the Penobscots, and revered as a camping ground because of a spring there. When Colonel Jonathan East and his Massachusetts land grantees arrived in 1762 to survey Indian Point, they were reportedly driven mad. Some thought their lunacy came from Penobscot curses, others, from their own greed, lit by the towering white pines, fish-brimming river, and resource-rich valley that wound all the way down to the deep waters of the bay. When East returned a decade later to colonize the land, building a saw mill, a general store, a massive plantation house, and log homes for twenty more ambitious, land-hungry families, his madness returned as well. East burned his lover in the town square for being a witch. In an awful but predictable American twist, history forgot the name of the murdered woman, while East had a town named after him. Six months after setting his lover on fire, East died alone in the woods in a gruesome logging accident, the first victim of the curse his lover had supposedly laid over Eastport. Now Indian Point cupped the smoking remains of a paper mill, and town residents claimed that the mill was the latest casualty of the curse.
A woman out walking her dog the night of the fire told authorities she had seen a figure pass through a break in the fence around the mill site. Trespass happened fairly often. Shattered glass and cigarette butts littered the ground. New graffiti, phrases ranging from the profound to the imbecilic—“Still Cursed,” “Suck It Eastport,” “What Will Our Sad Fathers Do Now?”—constantly appeared on the buildings, silos, and smokestacks looking down the river. The woman thought something in this intruder’s posture seemed different, though. The figure hid nothing. Standing upright, it boldly walked into the dark collection of industrial buildings. The dog walker stopped and watched. Twenty minutes later, the same short and skinny figure, wearing an oversize green hoodie, came out of the mill, moved through the fence, and turned up the street under the silver light of a clear, full moon. When the woman yelled, the figure turned, just long enough for the woman to determine a few key details. This bold interloper was a girl. And she was young, no more than fourteen, essentially the same age as me and Link and Wren and Galen.
Then the girl in the green hoodie turned and disappeared down an alley that connected to an ATV trail through the town woods.
The ringing phone woke us in the middle of the night.
Moses Jupiter was on the line. “Falon,” he said, “get up here. This is bad.” Not This is going to be bad, or This will be bad, but This is bad.
Our mother had turned on every light downstairs. From outside, in the woods, deep in the night, our little house must have looked like it was on fire as well. My mother was throwing clothes on and scribbling notes down at the same time.
Then she was out the door, driving through the dark in her beat-up Volvo station wagon, following the river north, craning her head at every bend for the sight of flames. Back home, my father, Link, Simon, and I sat at the table, catching our breath and wondering why it felt like a death had hit us.
Though we lived twenty-five miles away, my mother was the first reporter on-site. Truckers and midnight motorists heading upstate had pulled their rigs over on the rickety green bridge spanning the river. They stood along the swaying stretch of asphalt and steel, gawking. Some of them were crying. A pilot coming in to land at Bangor International Airport was so distracted by the intensity of the blaze that he almost missed his descent angle.
Reggie met my mother in Eastport to help take pictures. What Wren and I saw the next day in the darkroom at The Lowering Days was shocking. Flames towering into the night like a column of fire dropped from the sky. Flames dancing with a hundred shades of crimson heat. I didn’t understand how one girl could cause such a thing. The photos that began to circulate on the news in the days after were just as strange. Heaping piles of charred debris. Warehouses torn down to black studs. Windows melted. And in the background: all the green wonder of the narrows as the river funneled through the chute of high, ancient cliffs and tall pines toward the sea.
It took twelve hours to put out the fire. Later, when asked why it hadn’t spread or caused a greater environmental impact—the mill, while closed, was still filled with stores of chemicals—the state fire marshal was honest. Instead of the heroics of the firefighters who had responded, he credited the intentionality of whoever set the fire. The arsonist knew the mill—the facilities, the machinery, the layout, the operation—and had managed to start several fires in specific locations that would damage key buildings and machinery without igniting chemical or flash fuels. According to the marshal, the fire starter had used the river on one side as a control line and the machinery as a dozer line, essentially boxing the fire in to various areas. Furthermore, the state police had received an anonymous call about a mill fire in Eastport at 1:35 that morning. His investigation put the fire’s official ignition time between 1:45 and 2:15 a.m. “The warning helped,” he said.
In the days after the fire, speculation about the girl’s whereabouts began to consume us. We thought she must not be alone. “How does some kid disappear when a whole state is hunting for her?” Link asked one night.
“Hunting,” my mother repeated the phrase. “That’s exactly what this is. A hunt.”
I pointed out that, officially, she was “wanted for questioning.” My father shook his head, but then stopped short of saying anything.
“Don’t be as callous as the rest of them,” my mother snapped. “Look in the mirror some morning and think about how little you actually have to lose in this world.”
Shame and anger turned about the room with silence, and that silence seemed to go on and on. I vaguely understood that her “them” covered two categories, men in general, and more specifically European men, many of whom were my ancestors, who had overrun places like Indian Point, taking this river valley as their own and turning it into something very different from what it had once been.
“Those mills have been using the Penobscot as a sewer for a hundred years,” my mother said. “Maybe this is how it starts to stop.”
A week after the fire, a letter arrived in the mail at the The Lowering Days. It was written on a brown paper bag, instead of dioxin-bleached white paper.
Dear Readers,
This paper is run by a white lady, but she’s a white lady who cares. Her heart is in the right place. She gives us the space to be seen and heard. Wə̀liwəni.
This paper has also shown it cares about truth for everyone, whether human, white, Penobscot, mountain, tree, river, or air. So this paper gets the truth.
Kənótamən? Wiseləmo sìpo, wiseləmolətəwak ahč nətalənαpemak pαnawαhpskewəyak. Kis αpαčihle αkələpemo. Apčiláwehle. Wekalohke. Nlátəpo pαnawαhpskewəya. Ata sésəmihle, nič kəwičintohətinena, nič kolitəhαsolətinena. Nič ničkin kki. Nič wəničkisolətinα awenohčak nαkα pαnawαhpskewəyak.
The fire I started was meant for the mill only. Not to hurt anyone else. I acted alone. To the mill: this is for the river who you harmed, my people who you poisoned, and all the men and women who had to make themselves into machines to keep you alive. I think it’s good you’re gone. Some things have to stay dead so others can come back to life.
To my people: nənotélətamən àhči nəpαlítəhαtamən. The river is us. We are the river. I couldn’t listen to your crying anymore.
My mother hid the letter in her coat, closed the office, and came home that afternoon. With shaking hands, she set the letter on our kitchen table, where it sat like a bomb. None of us dared touch it.
I suppose she showed us the letter because she had to show it to someone. I was amazed it had come to The Lowering Days, not the big daily paper in Bangor. But it made sense as well. Over the years my mother had become something of an ally to the Penobscot Nation, the river, and the land. Furthermore, she was tenacious, arguably reckless even, with the truth, believing that it deserved to be heard at all costs. She had often run articles and editorials by tribal leaders and sought to give white issues and indigenous issues equal space.
So it had been arson in the name of a river under centuries of assault. The weight of that truth began to settle over our household as we all stood in the dimming April light eyeing the letter and listening for cars we knew were not out there and footsteps we irrationally feared might be coming. That night my father locked our door for the first time I could remember.
And what of the arsonist? If she was indeed a teenager, she was a precocious one, and chillingly direct. Yet she seemed unsure as well. I think it’s good you’re gone. I wanted to know how she had done it. Had the decision been quick and rash? Or had she agonized over the choice? What I was sure of was that the mill was not an innocent victim. The Penobscot Nation had long claimed that the narrows mill knowingly discharged toxic chemicals and wastewater products from the pulp and papermaking process into the river, poisoning its fish and plants. They had data to back their claims. My mother wrote about it all, of course, from all angles, and the environmental debate had filled my childhood. Now, on the eve of its potential reopening, the mill had been burned flat. The girl had directly addressed the paper mill, animating it in the process. From then on it would forever be a living, breathing entity in everyone’s eyes. Of course it had always been alive, filled with the lives of those who lived and worked within it, a moving, evolving system, not unlike a body. An ecosystem, Wren had pointed out to me when we looked at Reggie’s photos a week earlier.