Eastport, Maine
After a brief spell at home in Washington, we were flying up the coast toward Maine, before it got really cold. During the flight we were reminded of one of the truths about air travel that had motivated us in the first place.
Flying across the landscape on a clear day at low altitude predictably reveals things you had not known, or noticed. From 1,500 feet up, about the height of the Empire State Building, you are far enough from the ground to discern patterns not visible at street level but close enough to pick out details that to airline passengers would be just blurs. From 2,500 feet above the ground, nearly the height of the world’s tallest building, you can see far enough in all directions to notice how cities interleave with suburbs, or how the course of a river, a ridge, or a tree line shapes the farmland and settlements around it.
Often the speed and perspective of the aerial view make economic and social gradients amazingly vivid. This was certainly the case on this leg of the journey as we flew, at 2,500 feet, along the full extent of the Maine coast, from the New Hampshire border north. An hour in, when we passed over Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island, it became clear that we were simultaneously crossing not just a geographic but a gentrification line.
Behind us, to the south and west—in Kennebunkport, in the thriving city of Portland, in Rockland and Camden and other well-known resort towns—houses with big porches had faced out toward the sea, the waters had been crowded with sailboats and other pleasure craft, and we could see families with children walking or taking bicycle rides. As the miles past Bar Harbor wore on, the houses got smaller and less summery, the sailboats gave way to commercial fishing rigs, and the major sign of human activity was the occasional pickup truck bouncing down a road. This was too far for most vacationers or second-home shoppers to come. The population of Maine is poorer (and whiter) than America as a whole, and much older. The communities generally get poorer and older as you move north and east, a shift whose effects were quite visible even from above.
We were headed that day to the easternmost point in the state—and, for that matter, the entire country. This was the tiny town of Eastport, population 1,400, which sits across a mile-wide strait from Campobello Island, which is on the Bay of Fundy in the Canadian province of New Brunswick.
The flight up the Atlantic coast was notable mainly for the increasing beauty of the scenery as we moved along the Maine coast. We passed the big city of Portland, the sailboat-studded waters of the coastal resorts along the way, the big airports at Brunswick and Bangor. While we were still about thirty miles from Eastport, the air traffic controller at Bangor said we were moving beyond her radio and radar range. She bid us adieu, and we switched to the local frequency to alert any other planes that might be in the area. There weren’t any—and, in fact, the air strip in Eastport was so uncrowded on our first arrival that, just as we were lining up for our final approach course, someone drove right onto the runway, in front of us, with a rideable lawn mower. It was time to trim the grass at the runway edges: What were the odds, he must have figured, that someone would be landing just then? (He had a headset on and didn’t hear us—until I put in full engine power to “go around” and circled back for another approach.)
Fortunately, someone else in town had been listening for our arrival and rolled over in his truck just as we were getting out of the plane and beginning to tie it down. This was Captain Bob Peacock, one of many outsized personalities in the town. We’d gotten his name from mutual friends; we told him that we’d like to learn about Eastport’s challenges and plans, and through the several days of that visit and our subsequent trips, he took us on his boat, to his house, and to the locations he had known all his life.
Physically, Eastport resembles the more celebrated resort areas along the Maine coast. Rocky fingers reach out into the sea; pine trees line the low hills; and the downtown waterside structures are mainly two- and three-story brick storefronts, most of them built soon after a fire in 1886 destroyed all the wooden buildings of the old downtown. Eastport’s residential areas are mainly classic New England clapboard, at dramatically cheaper prices than in other seaside sites. You could buy a three-bedroom house in town or a nearly three-acre buildable lot for well under $100,000. Eastport is so compact that as we circled over Campobello, famous as the summer home of Franklin Roosevelt’s family, to land at Eastport’s small airport, we could easily keep all its houses, office buildings, and retail shops and cafés in view. That same view took in the twenty large, round enclosures in the bay in which five hundred thousand farmed salmon were swimming in circles nonstop.
A century ago, Eastport was a center of the Atlantic Seaboard’s sardine-canning industry, and its population was more than 5,000. The population has decreased in every census since then, and Maine’s state economist recently projected that if current trends prevail, by 2025 it will fall below 1,000. The people who remain in town are old even by Maine’s standards, with a median age of fifty-five. (The national median is thirty-seven.) By national standards they are also quite poor: across the country, the median household income was about $50,000 in 2012; in Eastport, it was less than $27,000. The income is even lower in the adjoining Passamaquoddy tribal reservation.
We had come to Eastport because we had heard that this little hard-pressed town was the scene of an audacious and creative recovery attempt.
Maine’s fjord-like coast gives Eastport the deepest natural harbor in the lower forty-eight states. (Valdez, in Alaska, is slightly deeper.) As the easternmost point in America, it is set apart from the rest of the country and the state. It’s well over four hours by car from Portland, at least two from Bangor, with mainly woodland in between. “We like to think we’re ideally positioned,” remarked Chris Gardner, a lifelong Maine resident and former policeman who, as the Eastport Port Authority director over the past five years, has overseen a major increase in shipments through Eastport. Gardner spoke very quickly and kept up a jaunty wisecracking patter, noting, for example, “We’re a day closer in sea time to Europe than New York is.” (He says this with a wink, aware that the other transport and commercial connections coming into Eastport are, to put it mildly, not comparable to New York’s.) As the melting Canadian Arctic permits more northwest passages to Asia—such passages were not possible without icebreakers ten years ago, but they are expected (or feared) to be routine ten years from now—Eastport becomes by far the closest U.S. Atlantic Seaboard port to China, Korea, and Japan, Gardner told me. “We automatically wake up with an advantage.”
Depth and location do not in themselves ensure a port’s commercial success. Eastport’s lack of a rail connection to the rest of North America is a major handicap to the port. The money that shippers save in sea-freight costs because of Eastport’s favorable location is often less than the extra money they have to spend to bring cargo in on trucks. The city has been lobbying hard for state and federal help in restoring the rail link that connected Eastport with the Maine Central Railroad until it was abandoned in 1978. But even without a rail connection, Eastport steadily increased its shipments by sea. One of its specialties is container ships full of (live) pregnant cows, bound for Turkey.
Pregnant cows? European beef and dairy herds, reduced by mad cow disease and other factors, are being replenished, largely with American stock. When cows make the sea voyage while pregnant, their calves can be born on European soil and have the advantages of native-born treatment. To put it in American terms, the mother cows would not be eligible to run for president of Turkey, but the calves would. A company called Sexing Technologies, based in Navasota, Texas, devised a sperm-sorting system to ensure that nearly all of those calves will be female, a plus for dairy herds. Chris Gardner convinced Sexing Technologies that Eastport would be an ideal transit point, and since 2010 some forty thousand cattle have been loaded aboard ships there. “When they asked if we could handle it, I immediately said yes,” Gardner told me. “My answer to everything is yes. Then we work out the details of what it would take.”
Nearly every person we met in Eastport had a tale about cows that escaped their shipping containers and galloped through town, pursued by the Texas cowboys who accompany them on the entire trip. The cowboys ride with the cows on their truck journey from farms across America. When they get to Eastport, the cows are loaded fourteen at a time into modified shipping containers, with ventilation ports, fans and cooling systems, and openings where the cows can look out. The cowboys continue to chaperone them on the ship and shovel wood chips into the containers each day to absorb the cows’ excreta. On arrival in Turkey, I was told, they pass through something like a cow car wash to get cleaned up.
Captain Bob Peacock took us on a tour of the port, one of the many spots in Eastport he knew intimately and where he was greeted like a family member. Captain Bob is a native of nearby Lubec who worked around the world as a tanker captain starting in his twenties and, in his sixties, serves from Eastport as the chief operating officer for a global fish business whose main facilities are in Norway and Vietnam. He is also one of two local pilots who guide enormous cargo ships through the tricky straits off Eastport to their docking point in Eastport. He seems to be everywhere.
The port is breathtaking in its magnitude and larger-than-life operations. On our first visit, we watched a steady stream of eighteen-wheeler trucks, each laden with tons of white, high-quality paper pulp made from the Maine woods, roll toward waiting freighters at the dock. As each truck neared, local stevedores attached lift chains around the edges of the truck bed, and after an all-clear signal, a crane lifted the entire load into the ship’s hold. Then the truck rumbled out, and another rolled in to take its place. The pulp was bound for China and Korea, where it would be used for glossy magazines and books.
The decline of the newspaper-publishing industry is reducing demand for some kinds of wood products from Maine. The onslaught of global warming has increased demand for low-carbon fuels. Torrefaction—the technique’s name was taken not from a person but from the Latin word torrefacere, meaning to heat and dry (as in “torrid”)—is a process designed to convert pulp and wood by-products, including stumps, into briquette-like pellets. European utility companies substitute these for coal in electric-power plants, which allowed them to meet European standards for reduced coal consumption. With state and federal aid, the Eastport Port Authority invested $9 million in an enormous conveyor-belt system that will make Eastport the fastest, cheapest site for sending pellets and wood chips to Europe.
“A group of consultants looked us over long ago and said we would be lucky to do 50,000 tons of cargo a year,” Chris Gardner said. “It’s a good thing we didn’t listen to them, because now we have done about 450,000 tons of wood pulp alone in a year.” The port’s sixty-plus stevedores are unionized, but they work on an on-demand basis for an average of a week or two a month. The other days, they run lobster or sea urchin boats, work as lumberjacks or handymen, or care for their families. The port jobs are some of the most sought-after in town because, even for part-timers, the union deal includes health insurance.
The Bay of Fundy is famous for some of the world’s most powerful tidal forces. The volume of water that flows in and out each day is equivalent to that of all the world’s rivers combined. In the early 2000s, a group of engineers and investors decided that Eastport should be one of two places (the other is Cook Inlet, off the coast of Alaska) to test, design, and develop tidal-power electricity-generating systems made by their Ocean Renewable Power Company. “Generating electricity in seawater poses some obvious challenges,” noted Bob Lewis, an Eastport native who has been with the company since its start in Eastport. “But it has great advantages. Water is so much denser than air—832 times as dense!—for turning turbines. And it is predictable. You can’t look out a year from now and know which way the wind will be blowing or how hard. But you know exactly what the tide will be doing.”
The company was funded by private investors and research grants from the Department of Energy in roughly equal amounts. Since 2012, it has run multi-month trials of a large turbine in Cobscook Bay, off Eastport. The carbon-fiber foils were arranged to keep turning in the same direction, even as the tide ebbed and flowed. The initial trial confirmed the concept: the system fed power into Maine’s electric grid and survived the harsh undersea environment. The company has refined its technology with subsequent trials and projects in Alaska, Ireland, Canada, and elsewhere.
“We like to think we are the Kitty Hawk of hydrokinetic power,” Lewis told me. “I don’t know that the Wright brothers could have envisioned today’s Boeing and Airbus. We are trying to stimulate people to tinker and experiment and improve on what we’ve done.”
The town is developing another kind of renewable energy as well, through its arts. Eastport native Hugh French with his wife, Kristin McKinlay, returned to town in 2002. Hugh and his brother Ed, the editor of the weekly Quoddy Tides with his wife, Lora Whelan, grew up in the town; their father was one of two doctors, and their mother had started the newspaper. The population of the town has been declining since 1900 and was nearly three times bigger when the French kids were growing up than it is now.
Hugh and Kristin purchased the old Eastport Savings Bank and painstakingly transformed it into a town museum, which they called the Tides Institute & Museum of Art. “Tides” was chosen to signal the broad reach of both the United States and nearby Canada, and “Institute” to announce that their vision was for something bigger than a museum. The building is just across the street from the Peavey Memorial Library, where I stopped in to see a copy of the just-published Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Dictionary, of the language of the local tribe. The dictionary, with its side-by-side English explanations, was thirty years in the making, and with eighteen thousand entries filling twelve hundred pages, is more intimidating than my unabridged Oxford English Dictionary.
French and McKinlay started populating the museum with their family’s collection. They encouraged others from the area—many of whom knew and trusted the family name—to contribute their treasures as well. Today, the holdings include architectural drawings, maps, furniture, musical instruments, and a forty-five-hundred-volume library. Also Native American basketry, ceramics, boat models, portraits of ships, and photographs from the old sardine canneries.
In 2011, French and McKinlay purchased Water Street’s twin buildings, the former clothing factory and retail store, to create an artists’ studio, with working space, common areas, and lots of both elaborate and basic equipment. During our last visit, we strolled down Water Street and went in through the studio’s wide-open door to meet Richelle Gribble, the young California artist-in-residence at the time, and hear about what she was up to. In the back room, Richelle showed us the fruits of her scavenging around the water’s edge and hikes overland. (The Tides Institute also owns shoreland in Eastport.) She had laid out netting, shells, bits of driftwood, plastic, and glass, with the care and categorization of an archaeologist.
Part of the idea behind the studio is that the artists who work there will engage with the town to help the residents and visitors feel close and connected to the art being made there. The studio’s open door did exactly that for folks like us, who were strolling nearby and walked right in.
The institute has expanded into a half-dozen nineteenth-century buildings around the town, including churches, a Civil War veterans hall, and a private residence, where the visiting artists live. Some were purchased, and some were donated.
Hugh French handed us the keys to the institute’s Free Will North Church one morning and suggested we walk over to take a look at the new installation there. We fiddled with the side door’s key for a while, then finally let ourselves in to prowl around the empty church, dusty with the trappings of installing the amazingly giant sculpture. It was called Undertow; its creator, Anna Hepler, describes it as “the hull of an empty ship in…the nave of an empty church.” We peered at it from all angles—underneath from the pews, up above from the balcony, along the sides by the stained-glass windows.
The Tides Institute anchors one end of Water Street. You can’t walk to the other end of Eastport (it’ll take you about five minutes) without spotting Don Dunbar’s photo gallery across the street, and then passing several art galleries and gift shops that display and sell all kinds of creations from local artists. More than thirty buildings in the Eastport Historic District have been transformed. We stopped by wine-and-cheese openings at galleries on several nights, and attended a performance of The Glass Menagerie by the local theater group at the Eastport Arts Center. The ticket taker that night was none other than newspaper editor Ed French. And the stage manager, Jenie Smith, was by day the barista at the coffee shop, the nephrologist at the town clinic, and the new owner of a dog kennel. Everyone in Eastport seems to be a multitasker and an artist.
The fish-farming industry had a rough start in the Eastport area some thirty years ago. Diseases swept through the overcrowded pens, and the large corporations that then dominated the business pulled out of the local operations. A family-owned Canadian firm, Cooke Aquaculture, set up salmon farms around Eastport and has been more successful.
“We have come so far since then,” Dave Morang told me. Another local native, he became director of Cooke’s salmon-farming operations around Eastport. These days, he said, fish are segregated by age group, so that diseases will not spread from one generation to another. The fish are fed at dawn and dusk through a computer-controlled system that resembles a lawn sprinkler, shooting out pellets as it rotates. Each of the pellet shooters is in the center of a circular net enclosure one hundred feet across; within each of these enclosures, some twenty-five thousand salmon grow to roughly ten pounds apiece. From a nearby floating control room on a barge, a Cooke employee monitors underwater cameras showing the fish as they eat, so that he can turn off the sprinkler before the fish have had their fill and start letting the pellets drift down.
On our flights into and out of Eastport, our approach and departure routes would usually take us over the fish pens in the water. From above they looked like a cupcake-tray array, five rows of four pens each. You could tell when it was feeding time in one of the pens by the frothed surface of the water there, as fish snatched for their food.
As needed, fish are sucked into a tanker boat and exposed to water treated with hydrogen peroxide. This kills some of the “sea lice”—a kind of parasitic crustacean that occurs in the wild but can be a problem in concentrated populations of farmed salmon—and makes most of them fall off the fish. (The peroxide dissipates and does no known environmental harm.) When the fish are about eighteen months old, they are pulled out, killed, and processed. Then that pen is left fallow for two months to a year before the next crop of fish arrives—and, yes, people in aquaculture do use these farming terms.
How, I asked Morang, should consumers feel about farmed fish? “Myself, I’m a beef eater,” he said. “But the reality is that Americans import ninety percent of our fish, and we’re the third-largest consumer of seafood in the world. The wild catch is not there, so we need to grow the fish.” One of Morang’s sons works at the salmon farm, and Morang said his goal was to make the business sustainable enough—economically and environmentally—that some or all of his six grandchildren would have that choice.
Lobsters are another important part of the marine economy. It’s a seasonal business, so the lobstermen of Eastport are also the stevedores, and the clammers, and the boatyard workers. Depending on the season, they supply the Asian markets not just with lobster but with sea urchins and sea cucumbers.
Whenever I asked any lobstermen—they were all men—how business was going, each complained about the plummeting price per pound. When I asked other people, they said, “There’s never been so much money coming in over the docks.” I didn’t know which observation was more true—worst of times, best of times—but two other relevant factors are the steady warming of the seawater, which is drawing lobsters north, and the devastating overfishing of Atlantic cod. Cod, I was told, had been the main predator of juvenile lobsters; now more lobsters survive to feed the current predator, man.
Was the current boom in abundant, cheap lobster the prelude to another overfishing disaster? I asked Captain Bob Peacock. He and others contend that, for the moment, and in the absence of the cod, the increased lobster catch was sustainable.
Another local fishery focuses on scallops. The typical North Atlantic scallop boat might spend two weeks at sea and return to port with a catch that has been on ice for many days. The waters in Cobscook Bay are the last good scallop grounds in Maine, and the local fishermen (some of them are also the stevedores, et cetera) can bring in their catch each day. But until now, they had no way to distinguish their fresh day-boat scallops from the commercial norm on the market. Will Hopkins—who grew up on a Maine island, went off to and dropped out of Harvard, ran a variety of businesses in Boston, and came to Eastport twenty-one years ago—headed a community organization called the Cobscook Bay Resource Center. When we visited, he was getting ready to open the group’s latest facility: a dockside processing house and distribution center, which would get Eastport’s scallops marketed as a premium brand. It was also designed as a community center, for the hoped-for future in which more visitors would bring more business, which, in turn, would draw more residents and more activities.
This is not even to mention the locavore farmers; the new boat-making company; the quiet defense contractor I kept hearing about (but was never able to visit) that makes hazmat suits for the Pentagon and police departments all around the country; or the century-old Raye’s Mustard Mill, which ships jars of specialty mustards all around the country. All of this in a city with fewer inhabitants than one wing of an apartment building we lived in while we were in Beijing.
After a few return trips to Eastport, we felt like we knew most of the residents. They certainly knew us. One day, we hiked out to Raye’s shop to purchase a heavy case of mustard to take home and asked if they could deliver it on a trip into town. The next morning, we found it at breakfast at the WaCo (pronounced wack-o) Diner, right next door to where we were staying. The waitress said Raye’s had dropped it off; they didn’t want to wake us with the delivery, and they guessed we would be coming by later.
Right in front of the fishermen’s pier on Eastport’s Water Street stands a larger-than-life twelve-foot statue of a bearded sailor that strongly resembles the captain on the box of Gorton’s frozen fish sticks. The statue was erected for a Fox reality-TV show, Murder in Small Town X, whose crew had arrived in the winter of 2001 to do some filming. The crew literally lit up the quiet town that winter, especially at night. Everyone enjoyed it. When the crew members packed up, they left the giant fisherman behind. The Eastport residents decided to preserve the kitschy statue in place as a reminder to themselves of what’s possible and to believe in your dreams.
Enter, then, the Women of the Commons. Six women—Linda Godfrey, Nancy Asante, Meg McGarvey, Sue Crawford, Alice Otis, and Ruth Brown, longtime friends and residents of Eastport—got together one morning in Eastport and decided that they wanted to “make something real happen to benefit the community of Eastport.”
They set their sights on an abandoned building between the WaCo Diner and the pier, just next to the fisherman’s statue. Because of the building’s unbeatable water view, the women saw it as a fine place for a gallery that could showcase local artists’ work and a space that would offer small public programs and lectures. There would also be enough room on the second story for two small apartments for tourists or visitors to rent, and a storefront with community edibles for sale. So the six women pooled their resources and bought the building. They resolved to name it the Commons, in the democratic spirit of their vision.
The Women of the Commons intended a profitable venture for themselves and an inspirational one for the town. While others might look at a town with the size and economic state of Eastport and think “scarcity,” these women instead thought about what they had learned from Stephen Covey (The 7 Habits of Effective People) and focused on “abundance,” in deference to the town’s people, attitudes, networks, and potential.
Three additional partners were invited to complement the thinking and reach of the Commons: Alice Gough, from across the bay on Campobello Island, in Canada, would be their “international partner”; Vera Francis, a poet and a leader in the Passamaquoddy tribe, down the road, would be their “wisdom partner”; and Anna Baskerville, a southern black woman who had moved to town, would be their “spiritual partner.”
A crew of men came on board to renovate the building, seasoned craftsmen as well as apprentices from the Passamaquoddy tribe. The women set the ground rules for how the show would go: No smoking, drinking, drugs. No inappropriate language and no comments about women. Show up on time, work a full day. Period. Paragraph.
The workers might have wondered what hit them, but the operational rules had strong upsides: this wouldn’t be the standard piecemeal or seasonal work; it would continue year-round inside the building, which would be shrink-wrapped and warmed during the winter months. All this, the women intended, would translate into the workers’ feeling of “ownership” of the project and the town’s sense of the seriousness of the women.
It worked. The building was completed, and local artists, about 90 percent of them women, poured in with their work. There were traditional woven baskets, burl bowls, jewelry, photographs, note cards, paintings, hand-knit sweaters, creative collage art. The apartments became popular as rentals, including as sabbaticals for writers and artists. A small number of programs were held in the gallery.
Next up is the renovation of the currently derelict Seacoast Canning Company building, which, during Eastport’s era as a capital of the sardine industry, housed a tin-can-producing factory. The women plan to develop the old factory into a multiuse downtown center for retail, entertainment, office space, meetings, and hotel and apartment use that could make Eastport attractive for many people and purposes.
I asked the Women of the Commons what I should understand, if anything, about their being a women-only endeavor. Their answer was quick. Each of the baby-boomer-generation founding women came from households of strong women—mothers, aunts, grandmothers, sisters. Some went to all-women’s colleges and found strong mentors there. Many were political activists themselves, working for the Equal Rights Amendment. The role of prominent Maine women, including their senators and congresswomen, was impressed upon them. And they lived in the lee of the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt, whom you could channel visibly across the sound at the Roosevelt summer home on Campobello. Further, they explained, a historical factor was the seaporting heritage of Eastport. This is a town of fishermen, who are on the water for long periods of time, and thus have always left the women onshore, charged with keeping everything together, under harsh circumstances, with no promise of their men’s return. This deal-with-it sensibility doesn’t leave a lot of room for softness or moseying around in Maine, in Eastport, or among the Women of the Commons.
Language has always been important to the Women of the Commons, partly in a branding sense, but also in a sense of self-reflection and self-consciousness. They were open to changing their lexicon to pay new attention to things they considered worth spotlighting. For example, they swapped the dreary word “fog” with “seasmoke,” especially in winter. They enhanced the name of the “Old Sow” tidal whirlpool by calling it an “aqua vortex.” And they expanded the familiar description of Eastport as “land of first sunrise” to include “first moonlight” and “first stars.”
The people of Eastport, Maine, have turned local language into a power tool of their development. Usually, a language change in the spoken vernacular happens in response to something in society. Maybe people mimic a new hero or superstar. Maybe a new concept goes begging for a word, like “locavore.” Maybe the meaning of a word waxes fat or thin, like “quality,” which has in my lifetime absorbed the entire semantics of “good quality.”
In his American travels in the early nineteenth century, Tocqueville, not the easiest travel writer to read, reported with shades of astonishment how frequently Americans shaped and reshaped their language, unlike their British forebears (and certainly unlike the French).
Tocqueville ascribed the shifting of American English to American democracy, writing that “the continual restlessness of democracy leads to endless change of language.” He meant that new ideas pop up, old ones are chopped up, and the language reacts. Because of democracy? Well, maybe. But the interesting point to me was that Tocqueville noticed this trait of American English back then, just as he might have noticed a twist on it two hundred years later.
In Eastport, the language change was a little different and less organic. With a number of examples, the townspeople set out with a self-conscious and deliberate effort to engineer local language usage to create a positive energy for their town.
Linda Godfrey told me how she and some other women noticed several years back, when Eastport was beginning to show its colors, that the media seemed stuck in how they were referring to Eastport.
She pointed to what they called the de- words: “The most-used de- words were words like: ‘depressed,’ ‘dependent,’ ‘decline,’ ‘despair,’ and were usually used in comments about economics, services, schools, population.” Godfrey continued: “It just seemed the de- words were ever-present, even if a story about Eastport was a positive one.”
So, the group set forth to crowd out the de- words with re- words, words like ‘rebound,’ ‘rediscover,’ ‘redesign,’ ‘reverse,’ ‘renew,’ ‘reenergize,’ ‘reemerge.’ They encouraged reporters and politicians to substitute the more positive words.
Gradually, Godfrey reported, their campaign seems to have worked. She recently harvested a few dozen Eastport stories written in the last several years, and not a single one ended in a downer with one of the de- words.
Eastport residents told me versions of another deliberate vocabulary shift, this one involving their nearby neighbor Canada, an important partner to this region for trade, culture, tourism, and recreation. Putting a positive spin on how they refer to the dividing line between the two countries, they said, “We don’t call it a border, we call it an opportunity.”
At the end of each conversation we had in town—at least fifty in all, a statistically significant sample in a town this small!—I asked whether Eastport seemed to still be declining, to have leveled off, or to have begun an ascent. “We’re beginning the ascent,” people told me, or “We’re poised.” “We’ve always thought of this as a twenty-year effort,” Hugh French said. “We’re ten years in.”
Can Eastport make it? If it does, one of its keys will be civic boosterism, a central part of American culture since long before Sinclair Lewis wrote a whole book about it, Babbitt. But if willed optimism sometimes deludes people, it can also empower them. “I think it was Henry Ford who said, ‘Whether you think you can do something, or think you can’t, you’re right either way,’ ” Chris Gardner told me. In practical terms, a belief that you can shape your fate is more useful than a belief that you cannot.
Captain Bob summed up Eastport for us one day. So, I asked him as I looked around at his minuscule hometown, why are you living here?
“This is where I’m from,” he said. “Where the hell else would I want to be?”
It’s no fun to fly on the East Coast in the winter. You’re out on the runway; the wind is cold; the days are short; you’re more likely to have to worry about ice when you’re in the air and about starting a chilled engine after it has sat overnight on the ground. So we returned to Washington after the exposure to Vermont and Maine.
We thought about what we had learned, which began with momentum and extended to the power of the local.
We realized, of course, the limits. “Positive attitude,” civic responsibility, and what I have come to think of as local patriotism matter only so much when matched against the largest forces of geography, of demographics, of economic change.
In Eastport, the location on the Bay of Fundy was a fundamental plus, because of its unique tidal flows. But the town’s distance from centers of wealth was a perhaps insuperable challenge. Could younger, better-educated people really be lured that far away from the benefits increasingly concentrated in larger cities?
These limits are real: no amount of positive thinking can change a city’s location or, at least in the short run, offset its demographic or transportation obstacles.
But—and here we come to the positives—the farther we went on this journey, the more impressed we became with the importance of the stories people tell themselves about their city’s or region’s success.
They have to think of themselves as a city—a distinct region and culture, not as part of an urban sprawl. The places we’ve been most definitely have a sense of themselves as distinct entities, with their own traits and strengths.