Welcome back, great proprietors Flatlanders love to eat Maine lobsters — but they’re also gobbling up the last of the Lobster Coast and the culture it defines BY ALEX IRVINE

District 5 State Senator Dennis Damon tells a story about when he was a teenager in Northeast Harbor, on Mount Desert Island: "I was sitting on the bench in front of the firehouse. This was probably in the early ’60s. I was sitting there with a fellow who had just moved to town. He was an author of children’s books. And he said, ‘You know this is all going to change, don’t you? This whole town is going to change.’ And I said, ‘No, no, it’s not going to change, it’s been this way forever, and it will be this way.’ He was maybe in his fifties at this time, and he said, ‘No, I grew up on Cape Cod, and in my lifetime my hometown changed.’ So that stayed with me, and as I watched I could see the change creeping up the coast."

In 1941, Damon’s father bought the family home for $3500. "That house is on the market now," he notes, "for $850,000. It’s the same house, and it’s the same land."

This story has been told in Hot Springs and Orange County, Missoula and Telluride, Key West and Seattle. There’s this beautiful place; people find out about it; it’s so captivating that they all move there and wreck what made it captivating in the first place. And along the way they thoughtlessly bulldoze the lives of the people who had been living there all along. The last 50 years in Maine, it seems, has been one long repetition of this same story.

In fact, that time frame could be extended all the way back to the European settlement of what became Maine, when powerful landowners from away controlled the patterns of settlement and migration; and, then as now, the people who bore the brunt of this remote manipulation were fishermen and other inhabitants of the Maine coast. As chronicled in Colin Woodard’s excellent and sobering new book The Lobster Coast (Viking), the Great Proprietors of yesteryear — men with names like Waldo and Bingham and Knox — gave way in the nineteenth century to lumber barons, and in the early twentieth to paper companies.

Today’s Great Proprietors, on the coast anyway, are young retirees or the owners of second homes, who stash their money in Maine real estate and, in the process, squeeze out traditional land uses.

Not that summer people haven’t always been part of Maine’s fabric. Tension between year-round residents and their more affluent seasonal neighbors is part and parcel of the Maine experience, and the money those annoying latter-day Great Proprietors pump into our towns is a healthy chunk of the tourist economy, which constitutes 15 percent of the state’s Gross Domestic Product. However, Woodard in The Lobster Coast sees a difference between the summer people of the 1870s and those of today: "Before, most came to embrace and revel in Maine’s unique character, albeit sometimes an idealized version of it. There’s much less of that today . . . Many are coming not to embrace Maine, but rather to remake it in the homogenized image of Suburbistan."

That’s certainly been the experience of Winter Harbor fisherman Bill Crowe, who also edits the newsletter Fisherman’s Voice. Crowe cites the example of a new arrival who came to town and started filing complaints that the lobster boats were too loud as they left the harbor in the morning. This same person complained that his well was contaminated by "fecal matter from scallops," despite the fact that Crowe’s scallops are processed on the boats before they ever get to shore. The state sent trucks out to regrade the road between Crowe’s property and the complainant’s, at town expense, only to discover that the well was contaminated by the neighbor’s own septic system.

"There’s a lot of people coming here because Maine was rated as one of the best places to raise your kids," says Crowe. He has lived all over the country and seen communities change, but Crowe says it’s particularly bad in Maine because of the direct conflict between traditional waterfront/shoreline access and new landowners’ inflexibility. This new generation of in-migrants, he says, "come here to get away from the shitty places where they live, and they bring all the crap with them."

"There was — and in many places still is — an imperial dynamic in the relationship between Mainers and summer people," Woodard writes in The Lobster Coast. And sometimes the imperial subjects get fed up and revolt. Elizabeth Sheehan, Fisheries Project Director of Coastal Enterprises, Inc. (CEI), ticks off a number of stories of vandalism following access cutoffs: slashed tires, telephone poles cut down, and so on. "There’s a term, Downeast Lightning," Bill Crowe says. Twenty, even 10 years ago, "when the people were big enough assholes, their house would disappear." This hasn’t happened in a while, but "people’s houses have been trashed. No one can prove anything."

Damon is more genteel, but makes much the same point. "We had had on Mount Desert Island a stable summer community for generations, and then it changed. They didn’t have the same sense of history." This new generation spends outlandishly to build on unbuildable lots. They buy turn-of-the-century "cottages" for millions and raze them to erect something properly palatial. And they write letters to the editor about noisy lobster boats.

Maine humorist Tim Sample also adds his take on the changes wrought in coastal communities over the last 50 years. A native of Boothbay Harbor, Sample remembers the town before it was devoured by tourism. "I’ll say to people I’m from Boothbay Harbor, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s a lovely town,’ and I’ll wince," Sample says in a 1989 Down East interview quoted by Woodard. "I feel like saying that in 1957 it was a lovely town. Going back now — it’s just ravaged."

Fisherman’s Wharf, once a fish market, burned and was rebuilt as a motel in 1958; other fish processing plants were torn down and replaced by hotels, and Sample’s own family history was erased in this process. "The land on which his father ran a shipyard," Woodard writes, "was covered in condos in the mid-’80s, denying his father’s explicit dying wish."

Inevitably, commercial fishing access disappeared as a result of the town’s new emphasis on tourism. Boothbay’s original waterfront is now a parking lot, and commercial activity there has all but disappeared. According to "Preserving Commercial Fishing Access: A Study of Working Waterfronts in 25 Maine Communities," a 2002 CEI study done for the State Planning Office, only eight percent of Boothbay’s current boat access is used by commercial fishermen. Of the town’s 30 waterfront facilities, only five are dedicated to commercial fishing, and half of the available access depends on lease agreements with private landowners. And, in Boothbay Harbor, there is not a single remaining non-facility access point, such as a beach or private-property crossing, available to fishermen — meaning shoreline workers like clammers and wormers have nowhere to go.

Waterfront access is, if not the single most imposing problem facing Maine fishermen, at least in a dead heat with collapsing groundfish stocks and sharply curtailed days at sea. "Probably the biggest threat is loss of the working waterfront," says Bill Crowe. Even as far Downeast as Eastport? "It’s already there. Speculators buy a piece of land, sit on it for a couple of weeks, jack the price, and someone else will roll into town and buy it. It’s out of control."

Ah, land speculation. This is what made the Great Proprietors despised in the eighteenth century, and Mainers aren’t any happier about it now. "Traditionally, when a local family owned property, there was always access," Crowe says. "They’re losing that."

The CEI study creates a "commercial fishing access vulnerability rating" for each of the 25 towns surveyed. The resulting picture confirms the popular understanding of coastal in-migration pressure: The three southernmost towns — Kittery, Kennebunkport, and Biddeford — max out the vulnerability scale, and the pressures ease slightly as the study moves up the coast. Each town was asked to identify the primary obstacles to waterfront access; with only one exception, high property taxes were identified as one of those obstacles. Other problems included development pressure, declines in commercial fishing, and competition from tourism and recreational uses of the waterfront. Elizabeth Sheehan says that in the 18 months since the study was published, a number of the towns have lost even more access due to the problems they cited, "and in St. George, every expressed concern" has come to pass.

In The Lobster Coast, Woodard has his own problems with shoreline access when he decides, after spending time on the much-painted shores of Monhegan Island, to go and see the Prout’s Neck landscapes immortalized by Winslow Homer. Driving down to the end of the road, he comes to a dead end: "The road was barred by a gate with an electronic passkey reader" and a large "Residents Only" sign. What the heck, Woodard thinks. It’s winter; who will notice?

The Scarborough cops, of course. As Woodard "was contemplating a march over a nearby snowbank, a police cruiser pulled up behind me and flashed his headlamps. Move on, they said. He tailgated me right off Prout’s Neck."