Here is Peter Dorman, 87 years old, still standing. He sews moccasin-style shoes in Lewiston, 40 hours every week, earning $20 an hour. He doesn’t get sore anymore, he swears. “After doing it for 60 years? My muscles are pretty well trained,” chuckles Dorman. Callouses tell the story of his work: the tops of his middle and ring fingers are scuffed and bright, like freshly sanded pine furniture. The sides of his pinky fingers bear deep notches where he uses them to pull his threads taut, carrying the tension across his hands lest the stress break his needles.

Dorman learned to sew shoe leather by hand in 1962. In those days, Bass made a moccasin-style loafer called the Weejun—a name that evoked traditional Norwegian fishermen’s shoes—that was all the rage in preppy America. Dorman sewed as many as 45 pairs a day for around 75 cents a pair. The mills bustled. Across the river, Auburn shipped leather and canvas shoes worldwide, as it had since the days before the Union Army marched south in boots made in Maine. By the early twentieth century, the town manufactured millions of pairs of shoes and boots every year.

The mills from those days remain. So do the old-time methods, carried on by the shoemakers who park their pickups and SUVs behind the loading docks today. Once upon a time, most workers walked. Leaving their three-story walk-ups on Ash and Cedar and Walnut Streets, passing Chapel Street and onto Canal, thousands of them filed into the hulking industrial castles on the Androscoggin River at the start of every shift. Now, the few commuters who still clock in arrive by car, clustering their vehicles on any flat patch of gravel or cracked asphalt that works.

Dorman meets me at the loading dock and ushers me past a “passenger use prohibited” sign and onto a freight elevator. The clanking green metal doors close, then open, and as we step out onto the sixth floor we are staring down the vanishing point of a vast and very empty hallway a hundred or so yards long. Cheerily, Dorman walks all the way down to the hallway’s other end, turns left, and opens a door. Inside is Easymoc, an independent shoe company that was founded by a 34-year-old but bills itself as old-school. In here, the industry’s past orchestral scale has been arranged for a string quartet: there’s the percussive tap of the machine sewer, the rough brush of sandpaper on an insole readied for glue, the rumble of the air compressor in a heel laster. And then, above it all, the elegant thwip sound of a hand-sewer’s needles pulling waxed thread through leather, time after time.

Leather arrives here as it always has, smooth and tanned in a stack of “sides.” To the untrained eye, they’re amorphous, like 20 square feet of rolled-out gingerbread dough. But of course, you can see that’s a cow there: You can make out shapes of head, legs, haunches. There’s the scar where maybe she snagged her hide on barbwire as a calf. Farther down, there’s a section of wavy fat wrinkles she gained from grazing away her adolescence in full sun. These blemishes reduce a hide’s value and vex the cutter, who must devise clever ways to hide the bad marks—under buckle straps, between the insole and plug—in the finished shoes. The cutter solves hides like puzzles, arranging die molds of a shoe’s component parts close together and shoe by shoe, heel-to-toe across the cow. Each hide has its own personality, which can vary as much as the personality of its erstwhile cow (which is to say, somewhat). Leather stretches; placing the component parts together ensures that the shoe will stretch uniformly. In this way, under a capable cutter’s ministry, any decent-living cow can be delivered a new life as 28 size-nines (give or take a shoe).

But if the cutter gets sloppy, the leather won’t stretch properly, and before long he’ll have a hand-sewer cursing his name. “Hand-sewers are not shy people—I’ll tell you that right now,” says Kevin Shorey, co-CEO at Quoddy, which makes custom boots, shoes, and slippers on the second floor of the old Pepperell Mill on Lisbon Street. They’re ornery, and they’re older, Shorey explains, and there aren’t enough of them to go around—one of the reasons he’s been lobbying the City of Lewiston to add hand sewing to its vocational programs or introduce high school students to shoemaking in class.

Even on the day he first took the job, Dorman was an ambivalent shoemaker. “I didn’t have feelings one way or the other about it. I had to have a job.”

He had grown up in Canaan, Vermont, the youngest of 13 kids. Only 10 survived infancy. When Dorman was two years old, a piece of furniture crushed his ankle. When he returned home from the hospital, his mother was gone—committed to an asylum, he was told. His memory of it all is fuzzy, but the siblings became wards of the town, and Dorman and an older brother were sent to live with a prominent couple who lived downtown. He says he has only one memory of his mother: A sunny day in June after his high school graduation, the car taking her back to the institution stopped next to his house. He walked out onto the lawn. The driver rolled down the back window. They looked at one another but said nothing. “I guess neither one of us could think of anything to say,” he says. It’s still hard for him to talk about.

After high school, he worked carpentry and house-painting jobs in Connecticut for two years, then joined the navy, sailing the Mediterranean on the last tour of the USS Salem (CA 139). “CA stands for cruiser attack,” he says. But being the relatively peaceful years of the late 1950s, “for us, it was all cruisin’.” After his tour, he married his girlfriend from Connecticut. “I never got a Dear John letter,” he says, “so I figured this is the girl for me.” They moved to be closer to her family in Maine. A brother-in-law there sewed shoes and offered to get him a job at G.H. Bass in Wilton. He figured he’d better take it.

Dorman learned hand sewing at the Bass mill the way they’d always taught it, standing in a line of a dozen or so men, watching an instructor demonstrate the basic stitches from several feet away as the factory bustled around them. Most trainees quit in the first few weeks. Hand sewing can be tricky, tedious work. It’s also, for lack of a better word, pokey—even now, Dorman jabs his own fingers with his needles or diamond awl about once a week. In those days, only one in five trainees graduated to the production floor. Dorman refused to give up. “I was a stranger here. I had to make it.”

The waste and neglect of the training process frustrated him. “The trainer would be off somewhere else, and this guy is sitting there with a totally perplexed look on his face.” Dorman kept his frustrations mostly to himself for three decades. When the head trainer finally retired in the late 1980s he piped up and applied for the job, offering a revised training program he’d gone over and over in his head for years. He’d train hand-sewers one at a time, in a dedicated part of the mill away from the other hand-sewers, giving them the individual attention and quiet he believed they needed to get the hang of the job. In short order, Bass Shoes went from 80 percent attrition among hand-sewing trainees to less than half, according to Dorman. His success gave him a sense of meaning and purpose, and his trainees felt bonded to him.

If a white-collar executive had overhauled the training program at a manufacturer of Bass’s size, they might expect six or seven-figure bonuses for an improvement as substantial as Dorman’s. But Dorman and his men got a different reward: in 1991 the shoemaker all but quit hand sewing shoes in Maine, laying off all but ten hand-sewers and moving operations to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

“This is the funny thing about business that I don’t understand,” Dorman says, shaking his head. “They trained all these people to do the job, and then they shipped it offshore.”

After Bass left, Dorman jumped from job to job for almost 20 years—attending automotive technician school, tuning skis at Titcomb Mountain in Farmington, working on marine engines at a boatyard on Lisbon Street in Lewiston, and eventually working in insurance customer service at an ICT call center. Ironically enough, ICT had its call center in the old Bass headquarters in Wilton. And the job was steady, with a 401(k).

While Dorman was working at ICT, his wife got sick and he quit to take care of her, shuttling her to doctor’s visits and hospital stays. Time passed, hospital bills piled up, and her health got worse. He cashed his retirement savings to cover the costs. He was broke when she died. This is how he found himself sewing shoes again in the Pepperell building in 2012, renting a small room with a hot plate and a cot for $300 a month in a part of the mill everybody called the Dungeon.

But Dorman found a little magic in that dungeon. One of the other millworkers was being picked up every day by his girlfriend named Joyce. Joyce and Dorman caught one another’s eye. When he heard the two broke up, he decided to show up at the Acme Social Club on Park Street, where he knew she liked to go. That’s how he, at the age of 77, met the love of his life.

“I saw him walk through the door,” Joyce says, recalling the day. “Offered him a place to sit. One thing led to another.” She tells me the story after church on a Sunday—Joyce and Dorman faithfully attend Pathway Vineyard in Lewiston—the three of us chatting over brunch at Governor’s Restaurant down the road. That night, she says, she invited him to go dancing with her and a friend at Mixers in Sabattus. “Now this place is a pickup, okay?” says Joyce, raising an eyebrow from behind her plate of eggs and hashbrowns. “If you wanna get picked up, you get picked up.” She smiles. “But Peter just sits there! I say, Peter, don’t you dance? Come on, then!”

“I gave her the opportunity, and she took it!” He shrugs and smiles craftily. “She picked me up! Oh, man.”

Dorman moved out of the dungeon and in with Joyce shortly after that. Three years later, he asked her to marry him—so they wouldn’t be “living in sin,” he says, grinning.

Dorman’s ship from his navy days is a museum relic now, open to the public in Quincy, Massachusetts, where it is billed as the last ship of its kind in existence. G.H. Bass left Maine decades ago. Dorman’s one living sibling moved to warmer Florida. He’s grateful his five children by his first wife still live in Maine.

But new signs of life are sprouting up in the mills: artisanal companies like Easymoc, which was founded in 2020. Easymoc’s founder, Greg Cordeiro, is one of a wave of disaffected millennials—the children of the generation that shipped all those jobs overseas in the first place—who aim to bring U.S. manufacturing back to its roots.

While growing up in the 1990s in the suburb of Pembroke, Massachusetts, Cordeiro says, he never realized he could simply make stuff for a living. Nobody he knew went to vocational school. Cordeiro’s father had a degree in architecture and loved computers. He was even featured on the cover of a 1980s Brøderbund Software computer catalog for his creative use of an early drawing program, but he got “stuck in sales,” Cordeiro says.

After Cordeiro graduated he marched into the corporate world as well, working as a design director for Timberland, where he made patterns to be assembled in factories out of the country. It wasn’t until 2012, when he purchased his own industrial shoe-sewing machine, that he realized he could make products and found a company.

“There’s a reward, a catharsis,” in manufacturing, says Cordeiro. “I can see the fruits of my labor. There’s a physical end—I see it on people’s feet.”

Cordeiro believes the postpandemic era presents an opportunity for artisanal manufacturers like his. The white-collar world is full of disenchanted desk workers seeking meaning and substance like he once did—and like his father still does. “He’s 65 this year, and he’s counting down the days” until he can retire from his corporate job, says Cordeiro. But he’s fighting an uphill battle, even on the home front: his father’s division sells manufacturing robots that automate factory work in North America. “Of course he’s trying to sell me a robot. I’m like, Dad, really? Your own son? You are a salesman through and through! Can you imagine us putting a robot next to Peter here?” Cordeiro laughs, gesturing at Dorman. In this mill, Dorman himself constructed many of the tables and workbenches by hand—“We call ’em Peterbuilt,” Cordeiro says—including the double-bench teaching station where he currently works.

Cordeiro introduces me to his newest trainee, whom I’ll call Evan, who graduated in 2015 with a degree in mechanical engineering and moved home to Maine during the pandemic.

“He’s just like me,” says Cordeiro. “He had a desk job, hated it, and decided to come in here.” Cordeiro says he views Dorman as a sort of secret weapon, whose charm and deep knowledge can inspire his next generation of hand-sewers.

“This man is a wealth of knowledge,” gushes the newest trainee, beaming at Dorman. “He’s got me all worked up!”

But six weeks later, Evan has all but quit too. His poorly cobbled moccasins are jumbled in a bin beside Dorman’s teaching work-bench. Dorman is frustrated with the man’s lack of stick-to-it-iveness.

“He can’t focus and just do his stitching,” Dorman says. He gestures at a pile of moccasins next to his workbench. “These are the three best shoes he did. And he did those two weeks ago. Oh boy, since then? He’s been going downhill.”

Dorman’s seen it plenty of times: a trainee makes progress and has a magical, masterful day when the needle grooves and every stitch lands just right. But then they go in the next day, and it’s a mess again. The backslide happens to everyone. That’s when most decide they’re going to quit—Dorman can see it in their eyes—even if they don’t say so out loud. “He’s done it. He didn’t recover,” he says. “100 percent of people have that rollercoaster. There’s good days and bad days. It’s human nature.” Yet others persevere, as Dorman did. “They would all make it if they’d stuck with it.” He wishes he could get everyone to see that.

With no one to teach, Dorman turns back to his sewing. He pulls the vamp around a size-8½ wooden dummy foot, known as a last, and hammers metal tacks into the heel and toe, holding it in place. He does the same with the smaller top piece of leather—the plug—so they sit loosely alongside one another. The leather and the last are cozily warm, fresh out of a makeshift toaster-oven/heat-lamp rig that Peter calls his hot box. He punctures the vamp and plug together in one smooth motion with his diamond awl, then slips two needles through the newly made holes in tandem, in opposite directions, and pulls the threads tight, raising his arms wide. As the waxed thread zips through the firm leather and goes taut, it’s satisfyingly audible from yards away, even as the heel laster’s air compressor goes full bore.

He gingerly tucks a needle in the crook of his thumb and forefinger. Switching back to the awl, he places his index finger firmly against the side of the shoe—the same distance from the seam every single time—and repeats again, and again, and again. The meditative rhythm of Dorman’s work makes it look easy, but it belies the complex calculus at play in his hands. In 2023 computers can best humanity’s chess champions and peer into the universe’s far reaches through the infrared astronomy of the James Webb telescope, but no machine can efficiently make an elegant and even moccasin seam, as Dorman does now with his needles and diamond awl. His fingertips sense the pliant leather—its warm, animal idiosyncrasy—and from those small touches, he knows its needs. Deftly, imperceptibly, his fingers adjust the angles of his needles to stitch an unpredictable hide into a smooth and perfect curve, one that will someday cradle an individual foot. A sturdy shoe.

They call it muscle memory. Dorman’s got six decades of it. He swears six weeks is enough to do the job. Just don’t quit on him.

Dorman sews the seam until he reaches the tacks hammered into the toes of the last. He pries them out. He keeps sewing.

If a shoe remains unfinished at the end of a workday, so be it. “When it comes time to quit? I quit. I might have one needle through the hole, the other one’s danglin’, all right?” But really, Dorman has no plans to be done. He wants to put his own sturdy shoes to good use. He’s taken up hiking and is eyeing the Appalachian Trail. The dream came to him one day in church, he says. He wants to hike the entire trail by the time he turns 90. Sure, it’s not easy. But it’s simple: you put one shoe in front of the other.

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The post A Stitch in Time appeared first on The Maine Mag.

The honeybee is adaptable. It knows how to survive frigid winters, how to extract food from unlikely sources, like the mouths of blueberry blossoms, and how to navigate using the light of the sun and the magnetic pull of the poles. The honeybee can fly, dance, and hold its breath underwater for five minutes. It can move house, if necessary. It can move from climate to climate, and often has. The honeybee has thrived on every continent save one—but then again, we can’t blame it for not loving Antarctica. Few species do.

Good beekeepers are, like their wards, adaptable. Not just because they’re stewards of swarms, a famously strange phenomenon that we only partially understand, but because the Earth’s ecosystems are both delicate and resilient at the same time. One small change—a single-degree rise in ocean heat, for instance—can cause a cascade of disasters (which we still term “natural,” even though it’s becoming clear they are consequences of human activity). And yet, massive, sweeping changes can occur—animals can lose food sources, plants can invade and take over, storms can strip trees and fell giants—while life continues on. The system shifts, accommodates, adapts.

We’re living in a period of rapid change. In the 1960s, a group of Soviet scientists proposed the theory of a new geological epoch, which has been termed the Anthropocene. The name follows the pattern of previously named epochs (the Holocene, the Paleocene), with the root anthropo- meaning “of or related to human beings.” There is no specific date for the dawn of the Anthropocene; it began when people started having large-scale effects on the various systems of the globe. While it’s not universally recognized—according to most geological scientists, we’re still living in the Holocene epoch that began after the last ice age—the idea that our time on Earth is unique feels true to me on a gut level. I believe that climate change is happening, that people caused it, and that we’re also causing all sorts of transformations in the material world. Bees are just the tip of the (melting) iceberg.

But our world is changing in other ways, some of them positive. Let’s start with a feel-good story, one about the people who tend hives and harvest honey, before we dive into the plight of bees. “When I first started beekeeping, the folks who got the most attention were always that Burt’s Bees type,” says Thalassa Raasch, who has been keeping bees since they were a teenager living in rural Minnesota. “My view of the industry was limited, but it seemed male-dominated to me. And I think they encouraged that—there was a certain image of who a beekeeper was.” While I’m sure there are many lovely gentlemen beekeepers with bushy beards and locomotive hats, it’s heartening to hear that centuries-old agricultural traditions are welcoming in new blood.

“People think of beekeepers as old guys with a hive,” agrees Meghan Gaven of the Honey Exchange, a Portland-based business she co-owns with her husband, Phil. When we spoke, the Gavens had recently returned from the Maine State Beekeepers Association annual conference, where they had a chance to survey the crowd, mingle with newcomers, and discuss advances in bee science. Meghan and Phil have been beekeeping for 15 years, running the store for 11 years, and teaching beekeeping classes out of their Portland shop for a decade. Recently, they’ve noticed both an increase in would-be beekeepers and a shift in the classroom makeup. These days, their classes are female dominated by an estimated three-to-one ratio. “2020 was our biggest year in terms of interest in beekeeping,” Meghan says. “But 2021 was a close second.” During the pandemic, many people came to the Honey Exchange looking for a new hobby, a new way of interacting with the natural world, maybe even a new community to make up for the ones that broke down out of necessity and caution.

Beekeeping is a science and an art, a place where human intervention bumps up against animal instincts.

According to Meghan, this changing of the guard isn’t merely good for optics. It’s a much deeper shift than that, one that resists easy identification or description. “There are teenagers keeping bees now. Nine-year-olds. Women, men, older people, parents. It’s everybody, anyone you can imagine,” she says. “Every county in Maine has a beekeeping club. It’s a huge cross-section of people. You may not have anything in common except for bees, but it’s a great way to connect.” I’ve heard similar sentiments from passionate hunters, fishers, hikers, and gardeners. Spending time in nature allows for easy connection to others and the forging of bonds that cross tricky political lines. Nature can be a healthy “third space,” one that exists outside typical social boundaries and norms. Plus, research has shown that diverse groups are better at problem solving, and there are always problems to solve when it comes to bees. Experienced beekeepers can mentor the newly passionate, and beginner beekeepers can bring fresh eyes to entrenched problems.

In 2022 the biggest problem facing farmers was the summer drought. Ponds, rivers, and lakes around the globe dried up, and Maine, a place famous for its abundance of fresh water, wasn’t entirely spared. The drought was less obvious than in other places, but our soil dried out, our rivers sank low, and wells rang empty. Without water, flowers continued to bloom as they always did, but they didn’t produce enough of the sweet, complicated, enzyme-rich nectar bees adore.

Honeybees can survive for some time without nectar. In fact, it’s common practice for beekeepers to supplement the diet of the hive with trays of sugar. Bees aren’t making their honey for us; they’re making it for their superorganism, their colony. When we remove their food, we have to give something back or they’ll starve, and the beekeeper will have to start again with a new swarm. Thus, beekeepers stock up on syrup and sugar cakes, the two best delivery methods for sweet, simple calories. While some studies have suggested that bees overwinter better on a diet of cane sugar than they do on reserved honey (it has something to do with their poop schedule), they don’t like to eat it all the time. It doesn’t have the same amino acids, proteins, ions, and lipids that bees find in nectar. It isn’t good for the baby bees, and bees that are consuming it don’t make very good honey. Some beekeepers don’t even consider this thin, watery yellow liquid honey at all, it’s such a pale imitation.

This is one reason Maine’s beekeepers have been embracing an unlikely ally: invasive plants. Knotweed, hated by many gardeners for its impenetrable root system and tendency to overwhelm local plants, blooms in the fall at precisely the time when foraging honeybees are in storage mode, gorging their two tiny bee stomachs in anticipation of winter. “For bees in this area, knotweed is the plant that gets them through winter,” says Meghan. “And it makes great honey.” She offers me a spoonful of knotweed honey, dark and thick. It has a faintly nutty aftertaste—it’s less herbal than the wildflower honey I’m used to, and somehow sweeter than the Ohio honey my father-in-law makes each summer. It’s not better, but it’s a different flavor, rather buttery and less botanical.

While it’s normal to talk about the terroir of wine, the placeness of that beverage, it’s always been easier for me to taste the specifics of land in honey. As the climate of Maine changes, the plant life will shift, the honeybees will find new food sources, and our honey will change its flavor to reflect this new world. Yet Maine State Apiarist Jennifer Lund cautions that knotweed may be doing more harm than good. “It outcompetes our native species,” Lund explains. “For two weeks, it provides good food for insects, but because it’s pushing out other plants that would flower throughout the summer and fall, it’s creating gaps that bees have to struggle to fill.” It may not seem like a big deal to have dense clumps of knotweed growing alongside telephone lines or in highway ditches, but that same soil would have once been home to a variety of flowering weeds, grasses, and bushes. Though it has to be said: not all of them are native to Maine, either—nor are honeybees themselves.

If I sound a bit torn about invasives, that’s because I am. Some invasives are delicious to forage, like Japanese silverberry, while others look gorgeous, like rambler rose and burning bush. The golden knotweed honey was delicious, and I understand why beekeepers are happy their bees are fed, even if they’re feasting on an intruder.

It’s harder to be sanguine about the prospect of frozen honeybees. Ironically, colonies are dying of cold thanks to global warming, and the way in which this happens strikes me as nothing short of tragic. Historically, honeybees kept warm in cold weather by clustering together and vibrating to generate heat. Thanks to some evolutionary magic, the clump of bees knows how to rotate its members. Everyone gets a turn to flutter in the warm middle of the clump, and everyone gets a turn cooling off on the outside. The size of this group depends on the weather. Cold days require big, dense clumps of bees. On warmer days, the hive can spread out and move around. They can even go outside to relieve their guts, maybe forage for food, get a little breathing room—whatever it is that bees do on their time off.

But when the weather turns on a dime, plunging from balmy 70s to frigid 20s, honeybees don’t have enough time to regroup. “It used to be that January was cold, with a few slightly warmer days,” says Lund. “But now we have wide fluctuations where we are rapidly changing temperatures. And the bees don’t know how to accommodate that.” Their instinct is to cluster and form smaller buzzing balls with whomever is nearby. Some die outside the hive, others die inside. They get cold, sickly, ill. Their lives are cut short, and the beekeeper is left wishing they’d known to insulate their boxes or remove an excess frame.

Drought, cold, unseasonable warmth, lack of food—all these issues get exacerbated by the presence of mites. It’s one of the leading causes of colony collapse in Maine, yet many beekeepers (particularly the traditionalists) don’t treat or test for them. Mites are the first challenge mentioned by every beekeeper I speak with, and perhaps that’s because it’s such a frustrating topic. “It’s mites, mites, mites,” says Meghan with exasperation. “That’s the biggest problem beekeepers have. They bring disease, they weaken the colony, and they make bees less capable of surviving cold seasons or lack of food.” Thao Kieu, a South Portland–based beekeeper and visual artist who once worked at the Honey Exchange with Meghan, echoes her mentor: “My bees have been weak this year, and I wonder if it’s because of new beekeepers. If the people who just started don’t treat for mites, that would explain why my colony is suffering.” It’s frustrating, agrees Lund, to see so many people disregard the opinions of the apiary experts, who recommend treating for mites before they appear and regularly testing hives. “People often say, I don’t see them, so I don’t have them,” says Meghan. “By the time you see them, it’s too late.”

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Beekeeping holds all the drama of the globe, writ small. There’s an increase in diversity among beekeepers, a decrease in diversity among plants, new viruses, old prejudices, droughts and famines and danger of collapse. It’s a traditional practice that is only just recently becoming truly inclusive. Beekeeping is a science and an art, a place where human intervention bumps up against animal instincts. For people like Kieu, it’s more than just a hobby. It’s a philosophy. “I’ve become a bee nerd, and I take so much pride in that. It’s a way of living, to understand how everything is interconnected,” she says. From Phil and Meghan and her other beekeeping friends, Kieu learned to see her hives as something to emulate. “A honeybee hive is badass,” she says. “It’s feminist. It’s so interesting, the dynamics of a hive and how it translates back to our functioning.” For beekeepers to thrive, the insects have to be healthy, the plants have to be watered, the atmosphere must be considered, cleaned, healed. It’s part of a whole entangled system, one we’re still learning how to navigate—one we may never completely understand. “But that’s the joy,” says Lund. “With bees, there’s always something new to learn.”

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The post Wisdom from the Backyard Beekeepers appeared first on The Maine Mag.

Every dog has its day

For our second annual Maine’s Top Dog contest, we asked our readers to submit iconic photos of their favorite pooches and pups from across the Pine Tree State. We received an influx of entries including huskies, heelers, and hounds (plus one confused cat) from Ogunquit to New Canada and everywhere in between. The one thing they all have in common? A love for adventuring in Maine. Let’s see who came out on top of the dogpile.

How we did it

To determine the Editors’ Choice winner, each member of the Maine magazine editorial team whittled down the list of dogs to their personal top-five picks based on photo quality, creativity, and editorial suitability. These selections were cross-referenced to establish the overall winner.

Editor’s Pick
Best in Show

Argos
Brittany Spaniel // Gray

Argos was an eight-year-old Brittany who recently passed away from cancer. Maine’s wilderness was the ultimate playground for him and his owner, Registered Maine Guide Christi Holmes, and they loved to fish, backpack, and hunt together.

Runners-Up

Class Superlatives

Take a Hike

Nova
Cardigan Welsh Corgi // Brunswick

Corgi or hobbit? Turns out they are made of the same stuff. Nova is a rough ‘n’ tumble three-year-old cardigan Welsh corgi who lives in Brunswick. She’s a carrot-crunching, ball-herding howler and a total petite sweetie.

Life’s a Beach

Acadia
Golden Retriever // Brooklin

Dia (short for Acadia) spends endless summer hours chasing the splash of rocks in Brooklin, Maine, where she races along the shore and dives wherever a stone is thrown. A dream day for Dia includes extra biscuits and the unequivocal attention of someone willing to throw rock after rock.

Best Fetch

Julie
English Springer Spaniel // South Portland

Julie is as sweet as they come. She enjoys long walks on the beach and playing fetch, and she’s never met a dog or person she didn’t like!

Best Dressed

Izze
Bernese Mountain Dog // Bar Harbor

Izze is a six-year-old Bernese mountain dog who loves cold weather more than anything. When the snow starts falling, she happily spends her days outside. She is an active hiker and spends her free time enjoying Acadia National Park.

Best Buddies

Remy + Taj
English Springer Spaniel + Border Collie // Monmouth

Remy and Taj have been buddies for 12 years. Like all friends, they take care of each other, they argue, and they make up again, but they always stay true. Every day, they teach us humans (the lesser animals) what real love looks like.

Best Portrait

Arlo
Golden Retriever // Portland

Arlo is a Canadian golden field retriever who recently moved to Maine. On the weekends, he can be seen walking around the Old Port in Portland, and you just might see him posing as an extra in bachelorette party pictures.

Class Clown

Otto
Great Pyrenees // Blue Hill

Otto joined his family two and a half years ago and is affectionately known as Otto, The Greatest of Pyrenees. He is a gentle giant and a crowd-pleaser who puts a smile on the face of everyone he meets.

Readers’ Pick
Best in Show

Jackson
English Cream Golden Retriever // Cape Elizabeth

“Bad Boy” Jackson (nicknamed with affection but a name well earned by his mischievous antics) found his forever family after being rehomed at age one. He enjoys the constant tease of squirrels in Robinson Woods, wrestling with his little sister, Nora (an Aussie), and the rare white paper napkin, much preferred over any dog treat!

Runners-Up

Sponsor’s Pick

Lenny
Chihuahua-Dachsund // Camden

Lenny is a rescued Chihuahua-Dachshund tri-pawd who moved to Maine in 2022 and is working hard to gain his Mainer status. Some of his pastimes include hiking Camden Hills State Park and scavenging at the beach.

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The post Maine’s Top Dog 2023 appeared first on The Maine Mag.

Emily and Nate Peterson have a problem. The couple, who moved to Bucksport and had their first baby just before the pandemic hit, discussed childcare when preparing to start a family, but they had no idea how obsessive they would become about the topic. “We’d heard so many horror stories, even before the pandemic,” says Emily. “Our friends in southern Maine would tell us about having to get on wait lists as soon as you decide that you want to have kids. It was the first question everybody asked when I got pregnant, and it was something we really worried about.”

Chances are, if you’re one of millions of Americans living with young children, or you’re in the process of adding children to your household, the Petersons’ problem is also your problem: reliable, affordable childcare is something many families across Maine and the nation can only dream of.

A version of the wait-list story unfolded for the Petersons as they began searching for infant care in Bucksport. As soon as they decided to move, Emily began scouring the internet, and talking to whomever she could about options. She said that in a way they were lucky the pandemic hit when it did. Emily found zero infant care in the Bucksport area, but with the announcement of the statewide shutdown, they were able to take that worry off their plate for a while. Eventually, Emily’s parents decided to move to the area part-time to help with taking care of their new grandson.

This kind of patchwork childcare is all too familiar for families in Maine. A few hours of time with the grandparents here, a trade-off between Mom and Dad there, maybe a meal together at the end of the day between loads of laundry and diaper changes. The Petersons’ son started at Bucksport Area Child Care Center when he turned 18 months old, and the center offers the safe, nurturing environment that Emily was so anxious about finding. Their daughter will start in the spring, but the anxiety remains. “I worry every week about staff turnover, and what we would do if something happened,” she says. “It’s happened a number of times in our community. Childcare centers just close all of a sudden, and it’s such a gnawing anxiety, that if something happens there, we’re all totally screwed.”

Emily says the childcare issue has been a big factor in her and Nate’s decision not to have any more children. “The logistics of living in rural Maine make it too hard—how to have another kid and keep everybody moving and happy and in the right places at the right time—we couldn’t do it even if we wanted to,” she says.

On the corner of Cumberland Avenue and Preble Street in downtown Portland sits a gabled building with a cherry-red front door. The former church is small compared to the eight-story giants it neighbors, but it offers a robust potential solution to the problem that the Petersons, and thousands of other Maine parents, face.

“A board member recently described us as ‘scrappy,’” says Camelia Babson-Haley, “and it’s true. We’re scrappy.” Babson-Haley is the director of Youth and Family Outreach (YFO), an early childhood education center that serves 60 families in the greater Portland area. The center places an emphasis on supporting homeless, teen, and immigrant parents, with more than 60 percent of the families it serves at or below the poverty level. Babson-Haley goes on to explain how “scrappy” accurately explains the characteristics needed in order to survive in the world of childcare these days. “We’re drowning. We’re broken. We’re crumbling. That’s what it feels like when you’re on this side of it,” she says.

The “it” Babson-Haley refers to is the national crisis facing childcare centers. After her 33 years in a field she describes as never not struggling, she says childcare providers are now more desperate than ever: desperate for better funding and more teachers, but also desperate to offer relief to burned-out parents.

In 2020 Babson-Haley was awarded the Maine Children’s Alliance’s “Giraffe Award” for her many years of advocacy in the field. The award also recognized her leadership at YFO through the COVID-19 pandemic. But as the pandemic continues to wear on, childcare’s already chronic difficulties have evolved into a critical workforce shortage. “Childcare is just going away. It’s diminishing, and if we don’t do something soon it’s going to completely disappear,” she says. Perhaps “completely disappear” is hyperbole, but if certain changes aren’t made, childcare will come to look drastically different, losing the diverse, vibrant educational and nurturing experience that many centers currently offer.

YFO is a good example of the kind of childcare organization that’s running short in Maine. It ranks a level four on Maine’s Quality Rating and Improvement System—the highest possible rating for a Maine-based childcare center. Highly ranked childcare centers employ trained educators to teach vibrant curricula that are designed to meet the needs of each child as they progress through developmental stages. Staff members are experts in social-emotional development, trauma-informed practices, and assessment. According to Zero to Three, a Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit working to translate the science of early childhood development into programs, resources, and policies, a whopping 90 percent of brain development happens between birth and age five. Without dedicated teachers and carefully designed curriculum, early childhood education will be lacking in the diversity, equity, and quality that are crucial for a rich learning experience during a child’s most formative years. Without places like YFO providing high-quality learning, a caring environment, and important foundational experiences, children can face significant learning delays that can have lifelong effects.

Efforts to bring new childcare providers into the field are underway in the state. The University of Maine at Farmington, for example, offers a robust early childhood education program in which students get hands-on experience at the college’s on-site center for teaching and learning. The center will see a major upgrade in the next two years as it expands to make room for more students and more children. Governor Janet Mills has proven to be a champion of early childhood education, committing more than $100 million of the state’s budget since March of 2020. A portion of that funding has made the UMF program expansion possible, but it still can’t necessarily change bigger-picture problems, like salary discrepancies, that make teaching the youngest children a hard sell, even for motivated caregivers.

Teaching in general is a lower-paying field, but teachers in charge of children from birth to four years old are paid the lowest of the low, on average making 59 cents less than people who take care of animals and 73 cents more than fast-food workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even among those who work with young children, there are disparities. According to a 2019 episode of Maine Public Radio’s Deep Dive that explored childcare issues in the state, a certified teacher who works with kids between birth and three years old makes $12,000 less annually on average than a teacher who works in a public-school pre-K or kindergarten class.

Brianna Maxim, an early childhood education student at UMF, is earning a certificate that qualifies her to teach children from birth to five years old. She’s one of the people who could help meet the need for childcare providers working with kids aged zero to three at centers such as YFO, but she also has the option to become a teacher at a state-funded preschool or kindergarten. “I want to be that teacher that the kids remember years later,” she says. “I think about the structure, and the goals, and curriculum planning. Public school programs seem a little more structured. But I do like helping kids develop and become their own person, which is what childcare education is all about.”

“Childcare workers were forgotten as essential workers at the beginning of the pandemic. They weren’t recognized alongside the doctors, the nurses, even the restaurant workers who were identified as essential,” says Babson-Haley. “When they were finally recognized, it was as a need for parents and the companies those parents worked for, not as professionals.”

That recognition, however, did result in federally funded hazard pay raises to YFO’s teachers. Those funds have expired, but Babson-Haley says she couldn’t let her employees go back to what they were earning prepandemic—wages that, after the recent historic inflation rates, would create an untenable situation for most.

YFO is currently operating at a significant revenue loss due to salary increases to maintain the hazard pay rates. Those salaries make up 90 percent of YFO’s operating budget. The 18 staff members, most of whom have at least a two-year degree if not a bachelor’s or master’s, have received 40 percent pay increases over the past two years, but Babson-Haley says her organization still can’t compete with companies like Starbucks or Target, which have ramped up wages to $24 or more per hour in an attempt to attract employees. “We cannot pay that, not even to our highest-paid staff,” says Babson-Haley. “So, teachers are leaving us, and why not? Those jobs are easier.”

In Babson-Haley’s ideal world, everybody would care about her workforce. Target should be paying their employees $24 per hour, she says, but they should also be offering childcare vouchers to working parents. “They’re wondering why they can’t find employees, or why they don’t have as many employees who are women? It’s because parents can’t find childcare. This is every employer’s issue, too.”

Babson-Haley says that public funding for birth-to-age-three classrooms would make a big difference for organizations like hers, and for the families she works with. Tuition was raised 18 percent over the past two years, and families are the ones who foot that bill. If YFO were publicly funded, parents could get a break, and Babson-Haley could offer competitive salaries that would help attract highly qualified teachers. With more teachers, she wouldn’t need to sub in the classrooms, and could spend her time expanding programming, including increasing available slots, a precious commodity in any community. And if there are more available spots for kids, more kids will come, and more parents will be available to work. “It’s a completely connected web. And childcare is at the center for working families,” she says.

Babson-Haley is quick to recognize that she is not the first advocate for this cause, noting that thousands have been running against walls trying to get public support for early childhood education almost since its inception in the mid-nineteenth century. There have been wins, but not enough wins. During World War II, the first federally funded childcare centers opened to support mothers heading into the workforce, but they closed with the end of the war. “We’ve seen this happen throughout history,” she says. “When times are tough there’s all this focus because it’s needed, but when things start to get better people forget about us.”

If there is going to be lasting change, there needs to be a fresh approach; otherwise, the same brick walls will keep popping up. To push the needle locally, Babson-Haley and her team have dreamed up an improved, expanded program at YFO, one that will help connect the dots for parents and community members, including things like additional classroom space, community education rooms, and affordable housing units for area residents. A successful capital campaign that concluded last March and a partnership with the Portland Housing Authority have brought the $18.35 million project within a few months of breaking ground. The expanded center will not only double YFO’s current capacity for childcare spots—addressing their waiting list of over 100 families—but also provide 60 apartments for income-qualifying families. Babson-Haley believes that the new model’s wrap-around services offer a potential answer for supporting families in need.

Here in Maine, the “oldest” state in the country (with a median age of 44.7 years), where deaths still outnumber births, improved and expanded programs such as the one YFO is working toward would not only lessen the burden for families like the Petersons but make it possible for more young families to choose to grow, or to relocate to Maine. Ironically, according to the Bangor Daily News, Maine was also the only state in the country to get younger between 2020 and 2021, seeing more in-migration during the pandemic than almost all other states. Investing in childcare is a no-brainer in Babson-Haley’s opinion, but it should be a no-brainer for every Maine citizen who wants to see the state become a vibrant, supportive place to live, work, and grow.

How can Maine begin to let its grandparents be grandparents instead of childcare workers? How can it allow parents to have careers they are passionate about? And how can it pull early childhood education teachers up the ladder in terms of both pay scale and respect? With organizations like YFO and UMF leading the charge, it seems possible that the next generation of working Mainers, both parents and teachers, might be able to find the holistic support they so desperately need.

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A flannel-shirted skier gripping a rope pulled by a white horse carves around markers in the snow and flies over a series of jumps.

“That’s the time to beat, folks,” shouts a man in a cowboy hat over the loudspeakers at the Skowhegan Fairgrounds. “I don’t think we’ve seen a sub-25.”

This is skijoring.

When most racers and their horses arrive this morning, the temperature is in the single digits. Some horses are standing outside their trailers in the parking lot, getting acclimated to their surroundings. For animals that haven’t raced before, this may be the first time seeing people on skis or wearing goggles.

Hannah Novaria is riding Kazuki, a tan horse still in its trailer, and will pull her uncle, Bill Poulin. Novaria and Poulin have been racing in the Skijor Skowhegan since its inaugural year in 2019. Just a couple weeks before this race, they finished second in the Topsham Fair Association’s first skijoring event.

Novaria, who grew up and lives in Lisbon, has been riding horses her whole life, but she says nothing compares to skijoring. “I love the thrill of it, the adrenaline rush,” she says. “You get there, and there’s really no care other than to run your course as fast as you possibly can go.”

Typical equestrian events can be competitive and intense, while skijoring is just for fun, Novaria says. It also gives horse riders something to look forward to in the doldrums of winter. And unlike the structured, serious events of dressage and show jumping that Novaria participates in, competitors in skijoring can wear whatever they want—as evidenced by a racer in a red tutu and another in a get-up of metallic gold cape and briefs, tank top, white helmet, reflective ski goggles, gloves, and nothing else.

“As long as you cross the finish line, you’re good,” Novaria says.

The first recorded instance of a person being pulled on ski-like objects happened thousands of years ago in the Altai Mountains of Central Asia, according to Skijoring International, an organization founded in 2012 to promote the sport of equine skijoring. In more recent history, the Sámi people of northern Scandinavia have been harnessing reindeer and riding on Nordic skis for hundreds of years, according to the association.

Equine skijoring reached the United States in the early 1900s, and there are now around 30 racing events held in the United States and Canada each year.

When Skijor Skowhegan held its first race in 2019, it was Maine’s first and New England’s only equine skijoring event. Topsham now has the second.

At the Skowhegan event, horses pull skiers or snowboarders down the 1,000-foot groomed track at up to 30 miles per hour, and racers must navigate a series of gates and—if they’re in the pro division—jumps. Novice and junior novice racers are penalized for missing gates, and pro racers get a five-second penalty for missing a jump or gate. Teams can also earn a half-second deduction off their run time for each of two rings they can grab.

It’s part of the weeklong Somerset SnowFest, a celebration of winter activities in the Skowhegan region organized by Main Street Skowhegan and Lake George Regional Park. Along with skijoring, there is an ice-fishing derby, a kite-flying derby, a downhill kayak race, and a winter triathlon. Hight Family of Dealerships is the festival’s major sponsor, and Baxter Brewing Company sponsors the skijoring event.

The man in the cowboy hat talking over the speakers is Sam Hight, from the family-owned auto dealership group. The master of ceremonies for the event, Hight narrates the action and provides words of encouragement—“DQ, but not DQ in our hearts,” he says after a racer drops the rope on the final three jumps and is disqualified.

Along with the hat, Hight is wearing Wrangler jeans and cowboy boots with spurs. He announces locals he sees in the crowd as if they’re celebrities and then talks to them like they’ve just run into each other at the grocery store.

There are 46 teams competing today, up from 37 the year before and more than double the number of teams in the first year. By the time the pro division begins, the grandstands at the fairgrounds are starting to fill up. Kristina Cannon, executive director of Main Street Skowhegan, says the race has grown significantly since 2019, when around 500 people attended the inaugural event. About 2,000 attendees are here today, including out-of-staters and community members. “It’s something that locals can be proud of,” she says. “We hang our hats on it being one of our coolest events.”

Mary Haley had pitched the idea of the event during her interview with Main Street Skowhegan after seeing the popularity of the sport in Colorado. Haley now contracts with the town revitalization organization to run the event through her company, MXH Marketing. She also helped organize the Topsham skijoring event.

Grace Hilmer, a rider who won the Topsham race three weeks before with skier George Yodice and horse Hildi, first raced in 2021. She recruited her friend and fellow horseback rider Harry Akkerman to join the Topsham and Skowhegan races in 2022. Akkerman says he didn’t anticipate the events being so fun. “When you do that run, it’s like taking some kind of weird drug. You fly by the grandstand, and they just erupt,” he says. “For those 30 seconds, you’re one with the horse.”

2023 Skijor Skowhegan is scheduled for February 25, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. at the Skowhegan Fairgrounds as part of the Somerset SnowFest, which runs February 18-26. | somersetsnowfest.org

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On the stage of the auditorium at Lewiston Middle School (LMS), seventh graders are becoming statues. A girl in a hoodie winds up a punch while a boy in another hoodie crouches, hands spread to cover his face. A girl in a headscarf cups her hands around her mouth as if calling for help. They are telling their middle-school stories with their bodies, and with each other.

The students are participating in a program led by Maine Inside Out (MIO), an organization with a long history of creating dramatic performances along with incarcerated people. In recent years the organization has been doing more work in the community, collaborating with formerly incarcerated people to share and process their experiences and advocate for change in the justice system. The LMS program is a new venture. “Middle school is where kids start to ask all the questions: they start saying, ‘What is it that I’m missing?’” says facilitator Adan Abdikadir, who attended LMS himself. “They’re not the way they were raised anymore; they’re their own person.” Noah Bragg, another facilitator, explains that the idea came from some of their incarcerated participants. “We heard many stories of people getting system-involved in middle school. They would say, ‘This is a point when life really changed. I wish I had Maine Inside Out then.’”

Middle schoolers can be a challenging audience, but Maine Inside Out is used to working through challenges. They recruited participants by performing a seven-minute scene during a school assembly in March. More than 70 students signed up, and from that pool LMS faculty selected a group of 26. “There was something about seeing this very simple but strong scene around a middle-school experience, knowing actors had created it themselves, that drew the students in,” says MIO cofounder Chiara Liberatore. “Whatever it is about our theater spoke to the students. They saw the scene once, and they still will refer back to it. What that says to me is that they want this format to tell their own stories, and to work through what they are experiencing together.”

Unlike most of the plays performed on school stages, Maine Inside Out productions don’t come with a script. They are created by the actors, through a process that encourages participants to seek not only the expression but also the root of their experiences. On the wall of MIO’s Lisbon Street office, a drawing of an iceberg on an oversized Post-it illustrates the group’s process. At the top are issues the students have identified in their school: bullying, bystander behavior, targeting, snitching, and so on. Below the surface of the water are two more layers: the structures that create the patterns and, at the bottom of the iceberg, the beliefs—sometimes unrecognized, often complex—from which the problems grow.

Working through those layers with seventh graders isn’t easy, says Liberatore, but with continuous, gentle encouragement, they eventually deepen their thinking. The LMS students describe structures ranging from xenophobia and poverty to teenage hormones, resting on beliefs that include “fear of standing up,” powerlessness, homophobia, and the concept that some people are “bad apples.” All of this informs the creation of their early June performance—itself the small tip of a much larger process full of experimentation, practice, and reflection.

Twice a week, for an hour at a time, five facilitators—Abdikadir, Bragg, Liberatore, Tyler Jackson, and Darryl Shepherd, Jr.—divide themselves between two groups of students, working on scenes to be performed for parents and friends. There’s lots of creativity, but progress is slow. A few weeks before the performance date, the show hasn’t yet cohered. The students come up with scenes, but instead of building on them in subsequent sessions, they tend to drop their former ideas and start over. And not everyone stays involved. A student refuses to put away his (prohibited) phone, and a teacher is called in. “There’s a long list of students who wanted to get into this program,” she tells him. “You need to decide. Do you want to be here, or do you not want to be here?” He chooses to leave, and she escorts him out of the room. The facilitators regroup the rest of the students and keep working until the end of the period.

Back in their Lisbon Street headquarters, the group settles in to share highs and lows of the day. The incident with the student on his phone is troubling Bragg. It had been a hard moment, but afterward the students had done better work. For the first time, a student had returned to a previous scene, exclaiming, “I know what happens next!” Bragg and Abdikadir make a plan to follow up with the student who left the group (he would later return, freshly committed to the performance). The conversation continues to a discussion of structure and freedom: how can the facilitators provide enough of a “container” to help students stay focused while leaving space for them to make their own choices?

This is an important problem for an organization with freedom at the root of its mission. The organization started small, when Liberatore moved to Maine and met Margot Fine and Tessy Seward, who shared Liberatore’s commitment to creating change in the prison system through the arts. Their first project together came to life in 2008, when they worked with residents at the Women’s Reentry Center in Bangor to create an original production. They were able to gain the necessary approvals to hold the performance off-site, at the University of Maine’s Black Box Theater, for an invited audience. “It was really solidifying for us as a team,” says Liberatore, and the three committed to growing the organization. At first they had no budget; they sought grants and fiscal sponsorships to cover snacks and travel. All three had other jobs and were new parents, so progress was slow but it continued. A contract with Long Creek Youth Development Center put youth programming at the center of their work for several years. In 2013 they held a series of events titled “Culture of Punishment: From Parenting to Prisons,” including an original work by seven residents of Long Creek. Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, was a keynote speaker. The events attracted press attention and accelerated the organization’s growth. In 2014 MIO was organized as a nonprofit, and in 2015 Liberatore, Fine, and Seward became its first employees. Today there are 12, 8 of which are people with a lived experience of incarceration.

MIO’s slow, determined growth has brought changes: more stability, more recognition, and an evolution of their message and mission. “As we grew, and the young people grew in their experience and their artistry, the message got a lot bolder,” says Liberatore. “When the participants reentered the community, they had more opportunities to share their experiences from prison, their traumas.” The group’s philosophy is rooted in what the Brazilian playwright Augusto Boal named the “theater of the oppressed,” in turn influenced by the methods of educator Paolo Freire. At the heart of this model is a shift from authoritarian power structures to collaborative understanding—from monologue to dialogue. “We’re creating theater to find out what communities need, for prisons not to exist,” explains Bragg. “We’re using theater to balance out power dynamics, so we can have a real conversation about how to change those structures.”

MIO’s mission now incorporates work both inside and outside of prison communities. The group facilitates projects in which people can work through their experiences with incarceration while sharing those experiences with the larger public. This summer, they launched a new project inside Mountain View Correctional Facility in Penobscot County, and have begun the process of creation and reflection that will build into a new performance over several months. In the fall they will begin hosting public events at their recently opened Lewiston community site. And they’ll be returning to LMS to continue working with the same students as they move into eighth grade. “I have a vision that we will be in every prison in Maine, and some jails, some group homes,” says Liberatore. “Our vision is to be in the communities where the most people have been impacted by incarceration: Lewiston, Waterville, Biddeford, Portland. We want to have teams of facilitators who are from those communities.”

Many people who spend time with the prison system—whether as residents, employees, or interested citizens—find hope hard to maintain. To continue to work for change over years and through difficulties takes patience, care, and an unshakeable belief in humanity. “I want people to feel in their hearts how we’re all impacted if someone’s incarcerated,” says Liberatore. “Unless you’ve been incarcerated yourself, or spent time with someone who has been, you don’t really know how that feels. Being touched by an artwork can give people a way to share in that experience. Maybe it’s a little cliché, but no one is free until we are all free. I want people to feel that in their body and their heart, so that they will join a movement to change things. It won’t work if it’s just some of us. We need everybody.”

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The post Shifting Dynamics Through the Power of Theater appeared first on The Maine Mag.

If you were to stand on Washington Avenue in Portland right where it feeds onto I-295, the Eastern Prom rising over your left shoulder and the crown of East Bayside to your right, Back Cove glittering in backdrop, you would be well positioned to take in some representative changes to the city and, in turn, the state. In front of you, brochure-ready storefronts describe the fore in consumer culinary trends: a kombuchery, a vintage VW bus-turned-charcuterie-board truck, a hoagie joint hat-tipping in high-gloss branding to a bygone Philly, a natural wine store where on weekends you can taste the “nurtured” (not “processed”) vintages under button-shaped sconces set into storm gray walls. And, among this clamor of commerce, is a curious number of cannabis retailers. Weed, aka cannabis, is the new kid on the block.

After a slow march from law to bill to code to rule in the last twenty-odd years, we have reached a new era of postprohibition cannabis in Maine. The experience of living with this freedom, however, is complex, and may require a little reeducation.

Cannabis has a wild history. Once upon a time it was legal in Maine, even back when alcohol wasn’t. (Did you know that Maine was the nation’s leader in alcohol prohibition?). Later, cannabis was outlawed and then criminalized (see the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the “war on drugs”), and for a good while it was a felony to possess any. In 1999 Maine became the fifth state in the country to legalize cannabis for medical use—“medical marijuana,” it was called, but we’ll get to that later. So, cannabis was legal again, kind of, but without directives on how it could be legally purchased, sold, or carried. It took another decade (and a citizen-initiated bill) for the impact to seem real, and for dispensaries to start opening up. Recreational, or “adult-use” was legalized statewide in 2016, and again it took a couple more years to mean what we might think of when we hear “legal.” In 2020 licenses for selling adult-use cannabis were issued at last. (For a full rundown of what happened and how, visit the websites of the Maine state legislature and the Office of Cannabis Use [OCP] at maine.gov.)

Now the legal cannabis industry is booming. In monetary value, as reported by Jennifer Rooks for Maine Calling in July, it “rivals or exceeds many of the industries people think of when they think of Maine, including potatoes and blueberries.”

Here’s what all this means for consumers: If you’re over 21 years old, you can purchase weed from a licensed retailer anywhere in the state. There are two types of programs: medical and adult-use. Some municipalities in Maine can elect to remain “dry,” meaning each town decides whether or not to allow the sale of legal, adult-use cannabis. You can use it in private, but you can’t use it or carry it on federal land or over state lines. If you have a Maine medical card, you can buy weed from medical-use outlets. Medical cards from certain other states are accepted as well (see Maine.gov’s “Visiting Patients: Approved List of States”). You, as a nonlicensed cannabis grower, can carry up to 2.5 ounces of weed or 5 grams of concentrate and can grow up to three mature plants or twelve immature plants (though your neighbors aren’t supposed to be able to see them, and they must be tagged in a specific way; see the OCP’s FAQ’s). If you’re caught driving high, you can be charged with an OUI (operating under the influence), and you can be assessed $100 fine if caught smoking/eating/vaping/ what-have-you in public.

Cannabis also has an established vocabulary. Those who are licensed to grow and sell medical weed are called caregivers, medical outlets are dispensaries, and the people working there are budtenders. The stuff you buy to put in paper and smoke is called flower (or bud). THC, CBD, and terpenes are the “effective compounds” in the cannabis plant, and they are what’s extracted to make tinctures, edibles, and drinks (and so many other things). Though there’s a ton to know when it comes to the taxonomy of the plant and how it’s made into various consumables, what you should know is that THC is the psychoactive element that makes you high. And, though we used to widely refer to the plant as marijuana, that word has been replaced by cannabis (in Maine the change was official in 2022), which is the plant’s genus, or scientific designation. “Marijuana” is considered to be a made-up word of indeterminate etymology that was attached to cannabis through powerful, political, and overtly racist marketing campaigns (see NPR’s 2013 Code Switch article “The Mysterious History of ‘Marijuana’”).

A lot of stigmas associated with cannabis are tied up in the history of the word marijuana. But not all of them. And the stigmas, no matter what we’re calling the plant, remain potent. As Cabrini University’s assistant professor of sociology and criminology Matt Reid, PhD, put it in a 2020 paper for the Journal of Cannabis Research, there is a problem referred to in the field as “blurred boundaries”: cannabis may be a medicine but it’s also a drug, and those who use it as medicine could sometimes also use it as such. And we don’t like recreational drug taking in this country. As Dr. Reid writes, there’s a strong Puritanical thread in U.S. culture that aligns pleasure derived from anything other than hard work with amorality. So, while there are camps that will argue weed has been normalized, those camps are, to paraphrase Dr. Reid, out of touch and privileged. Where cannabis is unequivocally destigmatized is situational. “After all,” writes Dr. Reid, “is not every deviant activity more or less normal depending on the social setting? Cannabis consumption is normal at a Cannabis Cup competition, just like public nudity is normal at a nude beach.”

There are a lot of people working hard to break through the stigma and give weed its due as legitimate medicine, used to help with chronic pain and nausea among many other things, and a safe intoxicant on par with, say, a glass of wine. I have friends who grow, trim, and of course consume. I grew up in Northern California, and as an “unschooled” teenager I wore the hemp-leaf symbol as a projection of my politics: liberal, sustainable, pro-decriminalization (long before I had dabbled in hemp’s mind-altering sister), so I was sort of surprised to feel nervous the day I went on my journey to visit the slick cannabis retailers in Portland. Granted, I’d never been to a dispensary before, and to be honest I rarely consume cannabis products other than CBD gummies for sleep or anxiety. I was all too aware of this as I slid my ID through the mouse-hole in plexiglass, as required to enter one recreational retailer, and then again as I stared cluelessly at a menu of flower strains in another. But in each shop I visited, the budtenders and caregivers were welcoming, informative, even conspiratorially chatty, as if my crossing the threshold had put me on the right side of the right issues.

The thing is, no matter your personal politics, when you’ve known a substance to be culturally deviant and illegal, it takes work not to associate it with illicit behavior; it’s next to impossible not to sense the stigma lurking beneath the newly Etsy-fied decor, with cannabis flowers pinned inside bell jars like butterflies and post-girl-boss slogans glittering up everything from rolling papers to T-shirts (“It’s called self-care, sweetie”). The guards at the entrance of certain stores are part of it. So are the printouts littering counters (“Need a medical cannabis card? You only need to make a phone call!”). It’s all really new: the rules, the retailers, the way customers interact with the product, the way budtenders don’t always seem to know exactly how the business they’re working for operates, the way trimmers often don’t know where the weed they’re getting paid by the pound to harvest will end up. There’s a gray market. Medical weed is cheaper than adult-use, and it’s not tested and regulated to the same degree, which may seem a little backwards—and many think it is—but overregulation could drive up the price and force growers “back underground,” all of which has contributed to what is currently a culture of caveat emptor, with requisite faith in rational actors. As a consumer, the onus is on you to do your research and develop a relationship with a particular caregiver or dispensary to find a strain that works the way you want it to. Naturally, people have favorite growers; they also follow Reddit threads to learn when product will be available and where to get it.

The number of dispensaries and stores continues to grow. According to the OCP open data portal as of this writing, there are 261 pending and active licenses for adult-use stores, 39 pending and active medical dispensary licenses, 2,758 registered caregivers, and 201 caregiver applications in Maine. Though the question on the street is whether there is enough demand to sustain all of these stores and dispensaries, Erik Gundersen, director of Maine’s Office of Cannabis Policy, told Rooks that there is. Demand is high, but what sticks long-term will depend on the market, once it’s had a chance to self-regulate. According to industry chatter I have heard, prices are currently not so high as they once were, and a pound of cannabis is fetching significantly less than it was in 2020. Granted, all of this can change in a flash.

The greater money issue facing the industry at the moment seems to be the banks: by and large they don’t deal with the cannabis industry, which is still illegal at the federal level. At most shops you pay in cash, though not all. There is at least one in Portland that has a relationship with a credit union, which I know because I used a credit card to buy an edible. How that relationship was established, however, wasn’t totally clear—or maybe just not something they wanted to share with me).

All this to say, the industry is—forgive the expression—still in the weeds. But there’s evidence that our state is making strides ahead of others. The percentage of illicit use in Maine is thought to be comparatively low; the price gap between illegal and legal weed is not wide. And now that I broke the seal, I am pretty stoked to go back to the stores. I’m thinking a mellow, Maine-grown, CBD seltzer would make a nice addition to my next garden party.

With over 20 years of experience in the legal cannabis industry, Matt Hawes is the CEO of Novel Beverage Company, a licensed cannabis-infused beverage manufacturing facility in Scarborough. Bringing superior emulsion technology to the table, Novel Beverage has teamed up with trusted brewing companies like Shipyard Brewing and Sea Dog Brewing to create a beverage option for cannabis consumers. We spoke with Hawes to get the scoop on the brand-new market for THC beverages, and where he sees it going next.

What you’re doing with Novel is new (no pun intended) to a lot of folks. What sets, say, a Novel Beverage Pumpkinhead apart from a regular Pumpkinhead?

MATT HAWES: For people who are averse to alcohol—I’ve been one of those people—it’s a great alcohol alternative. There’s no odor, there’s no smoke; there’s also no alcohol. These products are low-dose THC, and it’s much easier to control the experience. We have a couple of 5 milligram products on the market that are safe for almost anybody who is seeking to have a cannabis experience, whether it be their first time or their thousandth.

Adult beverage products are no longer limited to alcohol, and I think over time that’s going to become a much more common ideology in our culture. It’s an entirely different biological experience.

How have you seen the public opinion shifting around cannabis?

MH: Brand names bring with them consumer trust. We found that, particularly with Shipyard and Sea Dog’s products, people who would not necessarily have trusted a cannabis product found it much easier to believe that it was a safe thing for them to experiment with. These trusted brands are entering the space, and I welcome their participation because of the awareness that they bring. It would have taken us decades to break through to some of the people who struggle to see cannabis as a safe and viable alternative to alcohol.

You’ve been in the cannabis industry for 20 years. What about it draws you in on a personal level?

MH: For me, it started as an accident. Coming out of high school, I was a guy who had a hard time connecting and identifying with a peer group or cultural set. Cannabis provided that for me, which I think is common. Later in my life, I actually developed a pretty serious drug and alcohol addiction. I got sober eleven-and-a-half years ago. I didn’t use cannabis for seven years, but I have found that I can have a healthy relationship to it. As a non-drinking person, a sober person, it feels really great for me to be a part of putting alternatives out into the world.

Part of my journey has been trying to contribute to putting the social aspects of [cannabis] back on a fair track. I do a lot of policy work, and I’m a founding director of the Maine Cannabis Industry Association. A lot of my motivation is rooted in advocacy. I’m a white guy running a business, but I have a lot of awareness around it. My first legal cannabis business was in Oakland, California, when I was 22 years old, and I watched my neighbors being treated differently than me. Even as a privileged person, I suffered from a perception standpoint. Not being able to tell my neighbors what I did for a living meant I could never integrate into a community, which was lonely. I felt like my country was wrongly labeling me as a criminal, and not thinking beyond this preconceived notion [of cannabis] that is rooted in propaganda. So, all of these things are a big part of what motivates me to stay in this space.

For those of us who haven’t tried a Novel Beverage before, can you talk a little bit about taste?

MH: Technology has come a long way. We’re extracting all the cannabinoids off the plant material entirely and then refining them, so we’re working with a pretty clean input that has almost no aroma or flavor. At Novel Beverage, we are currently primarily focused on bringing simple, familiar flavors to market. If you look across the globe, a lot of THC beverage companies seem to feel like they have to be doing something kind of extreme to justify their existence in this space and to get peoples’ attention. What we’ve found is that people seem to be more comfortable drinking something that they’re familiar with, like root beer or cider. We are very fortunate to have had a guy named Andrew Sheffield join our team. His last position was the head of brewing operations for Baxter Brewing Company, and he’s a certified sommelier. He simply will not make a drink that doesn’t taste good.

I think over time you will see cannabis drinks becoming more differentiated, probably following along the lines of alcohol, where you can have craft cocktails, domestic beer, micro beers, and wines with white, red, and sparkles. But in this early phase, we’re really focused on simple, familiar, yummy drinks.

If you were to introduce a friend to one of these beverages for the first time and they weren’t familiar with the cannabis experience, what would you tell them?

MH: Five milligrams for your first experience. These are good products for experimentation because they are low-dose. We know what the actual concentration of THC is in all of them. With smoking, it’s much more challenging to control your dose. I think that the future of this category is continued lower and lower dose, to the point where people can have two or three of them. A consumption experience is something that humans seem to enjoy. Having something to hold in your hand that you can sip on— cannabis drinks are the answer to that for the cannabis consumer.

What’s the price for one of these beverages right now?

MH: Most of them are $7 a bottle. The cost of a fancy Starbucks latte or a craft beer.

What is your vision for the future of Novel Beverage?

MH: As a cannabis advocate, I’m naturally an access advocate. One of the things that I appreciate about the beverage category is that I think it does break down a barrier to getting conventional sales channels opened up to cannabis. It fits very well into the convenience store model, and I think that can get the conversation going around THC.

For me personally, I can bring some of my ideals to the business and try to be a more responsible corporate citizen and corporate neighbor, which I think is something we’re really lacking in this country. Cannabis businesses are in a unique position to lead the way on that because we are such a well-capitalized market, we have such a growth opportunity, and we represent huge economic impacts in the areas where we operate, but our leaders are typically pretty forward-thinking folks. I’m hopeful that cannabis as an industry can try to have some small but beneficial impact on capitalism as a whole.

Is there anything else you want to say?

MH: I think the most important message for me right now is that we have real statistical data to show that regulated cannabis markets displace unregulated cannabis markets. And, with all the love that I have for the unregulated markets or what a lot of people call the “legacy markets,” it’s a place where you don’t have to be ethical to survive. I think most about our young people. I feel much better having cannabis in the world through a network of sales channels, where everyone’s checking IDs and they’re not selling any other substances. I think that is a healthier way for cannabis to live in our world, and regulated markets are the only thing that has ever effectively accomplished that.

Regardless of how you feel about cannabis, one thing that everybody can know when they look at these regulated cannabis operators is that we all chose to be regulated. I think that the fact we’ve all made this decision should give everyone a great deal of confidence in believing that our intentions are authentic, and that we are in this to put cannabis in our communities in a much safer and healthier way.

There are few things worse, in my opinion, than being too high. You wonder how you can leave the party without anyone noticing, so you creep out a bathroom window and scuttle home without your jacket. You spend hours trying to locate a mole that you know—you know—is somewhere on your foot and is definitely, without a doubt, cancerous. You scream in terror at the sound of a police siren coming from the television playing your eighth episode of Law and Order, which you forgot you were watching. I will not reveal how often I’ve had this type of harrowing experience, but suffice it to say: I know what I’m talking about.

Fortunately, I’ve been free of THC freak-outs for over a decade. I still imbibe occasionally, but it never gets out of control, thanks to the wonder of a microdose.

What is a microdose? The definition depends on whom you ask. For growers and sellers, a microdose of THC is typically between 1 milligram and 5 milligrams. “In medical, 25 milligrams is considered a low dose,” says Matt Hawes of Novel Beverage Company. “I have industry friends who are business owners who have said they can consume 100 milligrams and go to work.” At that point in our conversation, I am unable to hold back my shock. “I know,” Hawes laughs. “It’s wild how high the tolerance is for some high-dose consumers.” But like me, Hawes prefers to sip on a lower-dose drink. A couple of milligrams here, a few there, building slowly to the sweet spot. For me, it’s marked by the gradual softening of my neck muscles and the steadying of my gaze. I look away from screens and see the colors of the world around me.

This is a common effect of microdosing, says integrative medicine physician Dustin Sulak. The Portland-based founder of Healer (a line of medicinal cannabis products) doesn’t like to measure microdoses by the amount of THC, but rather by the effect it has on the individual. “There can be a dose of cannabis that helps you feel better without causing impairment,” he says. While he notes that impairment isn’t always a bad thing—“in the right setting, people like to get high and feel euphoric”—microdosing isn’t about getting lit. It’s about treating a symptom, like my lifelong anxiety or my aggressive migraines, without decreasing one’s ability to function. A microdose should be perceptible to the user, but barely.

In order to help users get the right microdose for them, Sulak offers worksheets with his line of low-dose hemp and cannabis tinctures, edibles, and vaporizers. These questionnaires are designed to help users slowly work their way up from 1-milligram drops. Some patients report that marijuana use has enabled them to reach their peak performance levels. “Let’s talk about the enhanced performance aspect,” says Sulak. Microdosers report feeling more creative, more resilient to stress, less reactive to negative situations, and more accepting. While few people will admit to using THC at work, Sulak says some of his patients have used it to feel “more empathetic” and “better able to relate to the people they’re working with. It can also help you stay in the present moment.” He continues, “If you look at everything I just described, these are major attributes of the flow state.”

While many people become more creative, empathetic, or engaged while properly stoned, this has never been the case for me. Personally, I find that higher doses of marijuana are anxiety triggers and creativity blockers. I’ve also discovered that smoking weed is rarely pleasurable for me. Instead, I like to mix a drop of tincture into a seltzer. Or even better, I sip a low-dose, session-style THC drink purchased from a recreational dispensary.

Unfortunately, while every gas station in the state has a rack of White Claws, it can be hard to find a cold cannabis seltzer. Hawes identifies several headwinds pushing against the swell of micro-dose products. Not only do many dispensaries lack beverage coolers, but there’s also a real cultural barrier when it comes to low-dose use. “You need budtender buy-in,” says Hawes. “Think of it like this: low-dose products are Vespas. The recreation places are Harley-Davidson dealerships. You’re trying to buy a Vespa from the Harley-Davidson shop. It’s a culture thing.”

This is changing—slowly. Damon Holman of Wind Hill Growers here in Maine says he’s noticed a rising interest in low-dose products, which is why they’ve just introduced a new 2-milligram bonbon. “For many people, microdosing is more effective than larger doses,” he says. “One can achieve many of the medicinal benefits of cannabis, such as pain relief, stress relief, or improvement of sleep, without impairment. This is of particular benefit for older patients who often aren’t interested in feeling high but need relief.” He also points out that these products can be “great for daytime use.”

A little chocolate after lunch? Don’t mind if I do.

A Growing Business

Words and photography by Michael D. Wilson

When I was nine years old, my grandparents had a tiny greenhouse on their small family farm. That playhouse-sized glass structure was where I can first recall learning the true smell of good, rich soil. I remember one summer afternoon, as the Midwest sun was bathing everything in a warm glow, walking through the sliding door and being washed over by the candy-sweet fragrance of healthy dirt. In my own home garden here in Maine, when I am turning the land with my hands, the smell can bring my mind floating lazily back to that moment in my childhood.

Though I’ve been gardening for years, last year was the first time I had the chance to nurture cannabis. A kind and generous friend gave me a small clone of his favorite plant and asked if I wanted to take it home with me and try raising it. Not sure what my new buddy would want, I decided to pot it in a small, repurposed planter so that I could move it around the yard until I could find a spot that would perhaps allow it to flourish.

I set to work making what I hoped would be the best bed for it: some home compost, soil from the yard, and dried leaves. Once I mixed it all up, my hands coated in the earthen dust, I was hit with that same beautiful sensory memory of my grandparents’ greenhouse. I felt a sudden and complete sense of ease and comfort in this newfound hobby. The harvest was very small but felt like the richest treasure to me because I had coaxed it into existence. My little plant had not only survived, but had made its own thriving ecosystem of worms and happy bugs, all nestled in harmony.

This brings me to my new joy and hobby: soil. After my plant went through its lifecycle, I spent the following winter reading about living soil and watching soil documentaries. I started to think about how soil like this could possibly be used in larger growing operations. I feel like there is a lifetime’s worth of information to learn, but have been amazed with how different Maine cannabis growers manage their soil and growing environments, and how joyful those growers often are. Kids revel in the delight of being dirty, of coating themselves in earth and finding beauty in the smallest cities of nature. It has been one of the greatest pleasures of my life to learn that grownups can to do the same, if they allow themselves the freedom. There are few things from childhood that we get to hold onto as adults, but strangely and beautifully enough, soil has become one of them for me.

Feeling Good

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The post High Country appeared first on The Maine Mag.

Twelve miles out to sea from either Port Clyde or Boothbay Harbor in the lobster fisher’s paradise and artist colony of Monhegan Island, cast away from almost everything, even the houses have big personalities. They hold stories of generations, some that are still being written.

Up a dusty narrow road, a bright blue door pops out from an old white cottage, the only house around, and upon walking up I realize I’m entering a gallery once owned by Thomas Edison’s son Theodore and his wife Ann, a painter. From low on a studio shelf, tucked away from the mosaics and the stately sculptures cast in bronze, I pick up a tiny, well-loved flip book with curling corners and rough illustrations of playful little goats. It’s a family relic brought over from Monhegan’s mostly uninhabited little sister, Manana Island, where the owner of Edison Studio, artist Daphne Pulsifer, has lived for decades with her husband, Danny Bates, in what’s got to be the most peculiar and fascinating house of them all.

Its dizzying octagonal roof is an enigma to newcomers waiting for the ferry workers to tie up to the dock. Tourists have wondered about this whimsical house at the center of Danny Bates’s herd of goats, which are not only illustrated in the book but still grazing Manana’s rugged green hills and steep rocky outcroppings. Practically every year, Monhegan’s 59 year-round residents and the summer swell have watched Danny paddling back and forth in the harbor, hammering away, and adding new angles to the home.

Only two families are known to have lived on Manana, and the fairytale story of its oddball house begins with a hermit, Ray Phillips, whose obituary landed on the front page of the New York Times in 1975. Phillips had built Manana’s first home, the original driftwood shack, and as hermit life goes, he mostly kept to himself until eventually islanders watched the kerosene lantern burn out in his window. With the hermit gone and his shack beyond repair, his friend Danny began building a house near the same spot, raising one round of kids there, and then another after he married Pulsifer. To me and anyone who’s been to Monhegan’s Fish Beach or Lighthouse Hill, Danny’s goats and some sheep look like specks of dust; to this family they’re practically pets.

The same day when I walk into the Edison studio, I also meet one of the kids who grew up in the house: Danny’s son— Pulsifer’s stepson—Orca Bates Melenbacker, now 46. Orca is on his annual visit to the island from his home in Pine Island, New York, and he and I strike up a conversation about life on Monhegan 30 years ago.

If the name Orca Bates sounds familiar, maybe you’ve seen his portrait hanging in museums and national galleries. Orca Bates was once the favorite child subject of Jamie Wyeth, Maine’s most famous living artist, who still summers on Monhegan.

Orca points to the spot on the dirt road by the woods where Wyeth first approached him in 1988 about posing for a painting. He was 13 at the time. Orca agreed, and the next day he went to Wyeth’s house on Lobster Cove, where he asked Orca to put on a paint-splotched Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt (a gift to Wyeth from Arnold Schwarzenegger) and handed him a taxidermy seagull. Wyeth stayed through the winter just to finish that first oil painting of Orca, which he had him sign a year later when it was complete. Portrait of Orca Bates, a work in contemporary realist style depicting an island boy clutching a seagull, hangs in the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland.

“Everything on the island belongs to someone, unofficially—even the seagulls.” I remember my neighbor telling me this when I stayed on Monhegan a few years ago. A seagull had turned up outside the door of my rental house with a broken wing. I understood what she meant—that the people of Monhegan consider themselves stewards of their beautiful rolling land ending at the tallest cliffs on the East Coast. It filled the canvases of Jamie Wyeth’s famous father, Andrew Wyeth, a watercolor painter; his grandfather, the illustrator N.C. Wyeth; and every artist from George Barrows to Edward Hopper. Theodore Edison took the responsibility seriously in 1954 when he bought 350 undeveloped acres to form the first land trust in Maine. But seagulls will do what they want, and it was the freedom of Monhegan’s seagulls that inspired Wyeth to approach Orca in the first place. He called him “more of a seagull than a person.”

“My friends and I were terrifyingly unsupervised growing up on Monhegan, climbing cliffs on the backside of the island,” says Orca. As a teen, he was always getting into trouble. Back then the island was a different place with fewer rules.

“You just sort of knew everybody. My dad and mom knew Jamie— that whole generation grew up together. They went to the same parties,” says Orca, whose great-grandmother had started summering on Monhegan, followed by his grandmother and an aunt. Danny Bates and his stepmom were the first of the family to live there year-round. “It was a wild place back then,” says Orca. In many ways, it still is: there’s still no real law enforcement or healthcare.

With limited electricity and only a boat or two a day going out in winter (if you’re lucky) there wasn’t much for a kid like Orca to do but haul traps from a skiff—Monhegan is the only spot in New England that requires year-round residency to qualify for a lobster license—run around Manana with the goats, and party with the island kids in a shack next to the pizza joint.

When the summer islanders went home and Orca was left with the few remaining kids in a one-room schoolhouse, he was happy to sit for Wyeth, sometimes for four or more hours a day. Wyeth paid well—better than mowing lawns—and the days turned into months, then years. As he grew up, he became the subject of many paintings, and Wyeth’s muse and friend. The two would talk for hours, taking breaks to fire guns off the porch into the Atlantic—“right over there,” Orca points to Wyeth’s “Kent House,” depicted in the 1971 painting. The gray shingled cottage was built on the southern tip of the island in 1906 by the landscape painter Rockwell Kent for his mother. Wyeth purchased it in 1967 at age 21 with the money from his first public exhibition, and there he began to paint what he called “the less-celebrated aspects of island life.”

Next to me on a rocky hill, gazing out at the waves from under swooping gulls, Orca went back in time. “I spent a lot of hours with Jamie over those years. I remember there wasn’t much of a break between paintings, maybe a month or two, and then he’d have another idea with a bunch of props, like his whale jaw still hanging on his living room wall,” he says.

When school started back up, Orca took the seaside path every day to the home of his new artist friend, where he got to watch screenings of prereleased action films on VHS, like Cobra starring Sylvester Stallone, and Red Scorpion. “Jamie had this wall of tapes sent from the directors that were worth like hundreds of dollars apiece,” says Orca. His weathered off-in-the-distance gaze disappears behind a boyish smile, and I see Wyeth’s fascination. Quiet. Reserved. Raw, and rough by now. Hard to reach, but you feel like you’ve won the lottery when you finally get him talking. You see his depth. “That water is no joke. It’s beautiful. It’s powerful. It’s cool looking. And it will kill you,” says Orca, who lost a friend off the cliffs.

Five years later, the painter had finished four works with Orca’s name in the title, his signature on each painting, and numerous others in the permanent and temporary collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Delaware Museum of Art, Seattle’s Frye Art Museum, and others. When Orca attended high school off the island at Gould Academy, Wyeth flew his helicopter in to hand Orca his finished portrait and hosted an art show for him and his classmates. And they still meet up on the island to catch up when Orca is in town.

“Jamie and I were always buddies. He’s definitely eccentric. He speaks his mind, no apologies, and is very to the point. He’s just a good guy to hang around,” says Orca, who was used to tripping over artists at their easels and inside their studios, starting with his mother, then Pulsifer, and later his sister and younger brother Cat, a Maine jeweler who also modeled for Wyeth once or twice (in “Cat Bates of Monhegan,” 1995). It should be no surprise, then, that Orca’s wife is an artist, too.

For many years Orca, who now owns a shipping container company called Box4Grow, hated coming back to the island: it felt small and “everyone was in your business.” But eventually, he came back to the goats and to the only home on Manana, and to conversations with his old friend, Jamie Wyeth, inside his cottage by the sea.

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The post A Wyeth Muse, 30 Years Later appeared first on The Maine Mag.

Each year the Maine Better Transportation Association holds a contest to honor the worst road in Maine. Past winners include potholed stretches of Route 201 in Moose River, Route 15 in Camden, and Spring Street in Dexter. In 2019 roads in Waldo County were so bad that residents of the town of Freedom attempted to recall two of their selectmen.

Complaining about Maine’s roads is a tradition as old as Maine roads. In 1909 Maine’s first commissioner of highways, Paul D. Sargent, lambasted the prevailing attitude toward road maintenance, which amounted to “working a section here and a section there when we can find nothing better to do.”

Back then, Mainers could travel from Portland to Caribou and all points between via passenger rail. For everything else they had horses, stagecoaches, and their own two feet. At the time, 86 percent of the state’s roads were dirt, and there was little reason to challenge the almighty railroad, which for decades had ferried wealthy vacationers from the south to the pastoral realms of rural Maine.

The personal automobile changed all that. The car expanded mobility and transformed the economy in the process. It opened the state to a new market of middle-class tourists—people who needed reliable, well-paved roads to reach the beaches, mountains, and woodlands of their beloved vacation lands. Commissioner Sargent saw the change coming, writing, “There is a growing sentiment in many sections of the state that the future development of our tourist and summer resort business depends largely upon the development of our system of trunk line highways.”

As the car became the dominant mode of transportation, the tourist sector became the state’s largest industry. By 1930 two-thirds of rural families in Maine owned automobiles. Gone were the fabled railways that trafficked Mainers from Portland to Boston or Montreal and beyond. Trolley lines went out of business. Roads carved the state into prepackaged consumer vistas, molding regional identities and emblazoning license plates with the slogan “Vacationland.” As E.B. White wrote from Maine in the 1930s, “Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.”

Today, you can reach pretty much anywhere in Maine by car, but the infrastructure is fraying at the seams; 44 percent of major roads and highways are in poor or mediocre condition, according to the National Transportation Research Group. The most recent Maine Infrastructure Report Card issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers gave Maine’s state roads a D grade. A 2019 study estimated the state needs $198 million in additional funding—roughly a third of the annual highway budget—all to serve an automotive infrastructure that some say simply feeds on itself, sucking more and more resources the bigger it gets.

Maine needs cars, but it also needs others ways of getting around. As climate change stresses the need to revolutionize or, at the very least, decarbonize transportation networks, the state finds itself in the position of being able to afford neither the status quo nor a complete overhaul. Other catalysts like the COVID-19 pandemic, changing commuting trends, and shifting demographics are forcing a reckoning with the personal automobile, putting Maine in the same fateful position it was in a century ago.

It’s been seven weeks since Fawn Burnette went grocery shopping. Disabled and without a driver’s license, she is an hour’s drive from the nearest bus stop, so she’s unable to get to the store to buy food. She hasn’t seen her therapist since before the pandemic. The MaineCare shuttle that services remote Houlton, which requires a day’s notice, is often already booked solid.

“I’ve missed a lot of medical appointments,” she says. “And I don’t always have the money to get around.”

When her nephew last visited, he got stranded in Bangor overnight because the last bus to Houlton left before he arrived at the station. “And I couldn’t get him,” she says, with a chuckle. The frustrating transportation options leave Burnette, 61, missing her native California, where even hitchhiking, she says, used to be easier. She’s not alone.

Over in Bar Harbor, state representative Lynne Williams knows well the trouble with Maine’s public transportation system, especially in rural areas. She used to practice law in Rockland and would pick up hitchhikers on her way to the courthouse. Most often, the hitchhikers were on their way to see a parole officer, visit a recovery group, or go to the doctor.

“Literally 90 percent of the people I picked up over the course of maybe five years were doing these positive things for their lives, things they needed to do,” Williams says. “And they didn’t have a car.”

Even in the Portland area, with greater access to train and bus services, getting by without a car isn’t easy. Transit agencies don’t coordinate with one another, so getting from one town to another is often a multimodal odyssey of fits and starts. “We haven’t changed routes based around the needs of the twenty-first century,” says Chris Chop, transportation director at the Greater Portland Council of Governments (GPCOG). “These agencies have modified routes over time, but they’re not always in line with other systems.”

But the demand is there. According to a recent study by the regional planning organization, ridership on public buses in the Portland area grew by 24 percent between 2013 and 2018, even as nationwide public transportation usage declined over the same period.

Buses can help ease congestion, but they still depend on a road system built for cars. The catch-22 is that, the more roads you build, the more funding you need to maintain them. Studies show road construction has the counterintuitive effect of swelling usage and adding to congestion. In Maine 65 percent of transportation spending goes to road maintenance and construction, covering some 8,200 miles—a public portfolio larger than all but six states in the country. The state’s public transportation budget, meanwhile, is among the lowest in the country—just 17 percent of the national average.

Before COVID, it was perhaps easier to look at the funding imbalance and recommend a more train- and bus-friendly budget. But the pandemic really gummed up the works of transit systems everywhere. Ridership and traffic revenues dried up almost overnight, partly due to fears of infection in close quarters, but also because of a general shift toward working from home. Some officials worry ridership figures may never fully recover. “There may be a permanent reduction in overall mobility,” says Kristina Egan, executive director of GPCOG. “That means less cars on the road and less people using public transportation.”

Complicating the postpandemic recovery is our looming environmental crisis. United Nations scientists estimate the world has until 2030 to take meaningful action to combat climate change. In Maine, cars and trucks are responsible for more than half of the state’s carbon footprint. While emissions from power plants in Maine have fallen in recent decades, emissions from vehicles have only risen. Empty roads might signal a sluggish economy, but they also might be needed to limit emissions.

So, how do we get out of this pickle? How does a scattered, wintery, rural state with a below-average median income overcome its inertial dependence on cars?

Egan is optimistic that the growing focus on climate change will attract federal dollars for big transportation projects. The national infrastructure bill passed last summer is set to bring some $2.4 billion in funding for Maine’s roads, public transit systems, and broadband networks over the next five years. That’s in addition to the $100 million transportation bond Maine voters approved in November. But for people like Tony Donovan and Paul Weiss, it’s all about a return to the old ways: trains.

Donovan and Weiss head up the Maine Rail Transit Coalition, which for over a decade has been advocating for expanded passenger rail service in southern Maine. Their principal project is to repurpose the St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railroad between Portland and Lewiston-Auburn, which is currently a freight line, with the eventual goal of extending service to western Maine and Quebec. The project would resurrect a famous passenger line that, 100 years ago, connected Boston, Portland, Lewiston-Auburn, and Montreal.

“We need to start to connect our cities back to the way they were,” says Weiss.

Rail services account for less than 2 percent of the Maine transportation budget. Nationwide, railroads likewise receive about 2 percent of the federal budget. For much of the country, trains have been banished to the realms of novelty and nostalgia—except for those who actually use them. Poll after poll show broad support for expanded passenger rail service, and Maine has the advantage of already sitting on a vast, untapped infrastructure. The state currently owns more than 300 miles of railroad, on some of which new passenger lines are already being planned.

Last summer, the state legislature approved funding for two planning studies: one for the Portland-to-Lewiston/Auburn railroad and another for a proposed line between Portland, Waterville, and Bangor. Both would extend the highly popular Downeaster line that runs between Boston and Brunswick. The Downeaster has been one of Amtrak’s most successful projects in the country, reaching record ridership in 2019 with over 500,000 passengers.

Key to the challenge of expanding rail service, however, is a cultural dependence on cars and an aversion to big spending projects. The cost of the proposed Portland-to-Lewiston/Auburn line, for example, is estimated to be around $250 million.

“It does cost a lot of money, and people are always scared of spending money,” Weiss says. “But right now we’re spending money on the wrong things.”

For comparison, Maine’s annual highway budget is $675 million, a figure that has proven insufficient for meeting the state’s maintenance backlog. While road maintenance is more of an ad hoc expense, allocated to buttress existing demand, rail projects demand a more overhead view involving higher upfront costs, risk assessments, and ridership projections: how do you get people from point A to point B? Taking this perspective, the Department of Transportation commissioner, Bruce Van Note, cites high capital and operating costs as reasons why flashy rail projects often look like misshapen pieces of the puzzle.

Rail advocates may be further outflanked by another, even greener, segment of the transportation infrastructure: cyclists. For as long as Maine’s railroads have been out of use, they’ve been the target of cyclists, hikers, and pedestrian advocates who want to see those idle tracks reengaged as multiuse trails. “Rail trails,” as they’re called, create a web of nearly 400 miles of old tracks throughout Maine, and efforts now before the state legislature would add hundreds more. From an environmental perspective, the argument is sound: rail trails are as carbon-friendly as the people who traffic them. The problem is, their use comes at the expense of prospective rail projects. Unless a rail trail runs alongside an existing passenger line (as does with the proposed trail between Portland and Auburn), the choice is binary: rail or trail.

While the Maine Trails Coalition has called for the preservation of some tracks, rail advocates are far from convinced. “To have this state resource sitting there, being destroyed every year by another mile of trail, is like having a grand piano and using it as a coffee table,” says Weiss.

Rail proponents are optimistic that the Lewiston and Bangor extensions will happen despite the cost. Some, like Weiss, believe the project is more than just a good idea: it’s necessary. Connecting all of Maine’s major cities via passenger rail could take hundreds of thousands of cars off the road. The railroads that connect Maine’s cities can hold more passengers and freight than the Maine Turnpike. And the maintenance is much simpler. Roads, on the other hand, are repaved on average every seven years, and still Maine’s rural roads rank among the worst in the country.

Rail advocates, like cyclists, are nothing if not passionate. Last year, at a meeting of the Transportation Committee of the state legislature, a bit of drama unfolded as commissioner Van Note accused representative Williams of being a mouthpiece for the Maine Rail Transit Coalition. The commissioner later apologized to Williams in private, but the spat reflected the larger disagreement over how to best modernize the state’s transportation infrastructure.

The state’s four-year climate action plan unveiled by Governor Janet Mills in 2020 offers the building blocks for a modern, clean energy economy but doesn’t mention trains. With regard to the state’s biggest carbon emitters, cars and trucks, the plan depends entirely on electrification.

“It’s all about an asphalt system of transportation that they hope to be operating electric cars on,” says Donovan. “They hope that they can move the needle from 1 percent ownership of electric cars to 100 percent.” No one—including Donovan, Weiss, and Williams—opposes electric vehicles. Weiss says he owns two himself. The problem is the time frame. The most rosy projections estimate electric vehicles will make up only a little over 40 percent of global road traffic by 2050.

For the Maine Department of Transportation, the imperatives of climate change, COVID-19, and new vehicle technologies have to be filtered through the lens of funding. Is there enough of it?

The state can only afford to do so much by way of big infrastructure projects, and to advance one mode of transportation often comes at the expense of another. From that perspective, focusing on the car—which is, at the end of the day, the dominant mode of transportation in the world—makes sense. Electric vehicles are mostly privately owned, and thus reflect an independent sector of potential progress on emissions. The idea is that, through incentive programs, land-use policies, and a modernized infrastructure, Mainers will eventually make the transition to EVs on their own.

“The electrification of the personal automobile is not the thing that’s talked about the most,” says Commissioner Van Note. “But I think it’s the most meaningful,”

Of course, plenty of Mainers can hardly afford gas-powered clunkers as it is, and not everyone has a driver’s license. Others are wary of arguments that hinge on consumer discipline as the best way to avert global environmental catastrophe.

“EVs are not the solution to Maine’s transportation infrastructure,” Weiss says. “They’re part of it. We’re now at that point where we have 15 years to do these huge climate initiatives to take 50, 60, 70 percent of the emissions out of our transportation methods, and if we don’t make the right choices, it will not be sustainable.”

But carbon-friendly transit options are not necessarily mobility-friendly. The $250 million Downeaster extension, for example, isn’t going to do much for people like Fawn Burnette who just need to get to the grocery store.

Some transit planners look to charitable groups and public-private partnerships for solutions. In Millinocket, a coalition called Mobilize Katahdin serves up volunteer drivers for the Katahdin region, helping people get to medical appointments, grocery stores, and social gatherings. Around a half-dozen regional groups, like the Kennebec Valley Community Action Program in Augusta, offer MaineCare-covered rides and other transportation services. Many of the people using those services live in rural areas and have no other way to get around.

One thing everyone seems to agree on is that there’s no silver bullet. There’s no one mode or system that’s going to unify and solve Maine’s myriad transportation problems. Van Note, GPCOG, and transit engineers are all fond of the term “mode-agnostic” to describe this thinking. Instead of assuming which mode of transportation is best, the idea is to look at all the available service models—be it bus, train, or ferry—and then figure out how many riders will be using it, what the total cost of building the infrastructure will be, and how much it will cost to maintain and operate. Transit planners like GPCOG often deliberately avoid recommending specific modes for that reason, and the state’s transportation department maintains a similar approach.

But the position of being modally agnostic doesn’t rescue Maine from its catch-22: the state can’t afford to maintain its present course of car dependency, nor can it afford to revolutionize its primary means of getting around. “We’re stretching the pavement thinner and thinner,” says Van Note. “We’re putting out contracts now that need funding to be delivered in the current legislative session for projects being done this year. Think of it as ‘just-in-time capital funding delivery.’ That’s not normal.”

The state is changing. Over the past two years, Maine saw its largest population growth in two decades, thanks entirely to migration into the state. Remote work is allowing people to move here, and throwing the future of commuting itself into question. Climate change and a generational shift in attitude away from car ownership has many Mainers looking for other ways to get around. For some, a bicycle-friendly rail trail is cheaper and more convenient than an intercity rail system. New urban transit technologies, like electric bikes and driver-less ride-share programs, will raise even more questions about who owns the road.

In the early years of the twentieth century, when Model Ts and Cadillac Tourings were dethroning the horse and buggy, some Mainers worried the changes brought by the automobile would be for the worse. Journalists touring cities warned of a growing “auto terror.” Some towns, like Bar Harbor, attempted to ban cars altogether. One 1905 missive in the Ellsworth American warned that motorists were “taking away the liberties of the people and should be looked upon the same way as any other class of robbers and murderers.”

Despite efforts to control the terror, the future couldn’t be stopped. As the infrastructure changed, so did Maine. Creating new divides along class lines, the car split access to the state’s verdant parks and landscapes while increasing its dependence on visitors from elsewhere. The almighty car quite literally shaped Maine’s economy into the one we know today, and brought about the Sisyphean road network we love to hate.

Now the state faces a new transformation, one with higher stakes and a blurrier prognosis. Given the complexity of Maine’s transportation infrastructure and the weighty forces laid upon it, it’s not surprising the prevailing attitude is one of disagreement. But no one believes the future is set in stone. As a public good, the transportation system is accountable to all of us. It is ours to enjoy, ridicule, and criticize. It is also ours to reimagine. Maybe the road ahead is less crowded than we think.

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The post Has Maine’s Transportation System Reached the End of the Road? appeared first on The Maine Mag.

The coronavirus pandemic has been the dominant through line in all our experiences over the past year and a half, and few aspects of our lives have been spared disruption or strife. In our inaugural Mainers of the Year feature, we are recognizing the individuals who didn’t shy from challenges, who made our lives better. From around Maine and across five sectors—public service, business, science and medicine, art and culture, and the environment and outdoors—these Mainers embody the state’s motto: I lead. They did so with resourcefulness, compassion, and creativity. They provided steady leadership while others were stoking fear and confusion. They reinvented their businesses and organizations to keep Mainers employed. They cared for our children and kept us healthy. They provided escapes to the outdoors and other worlds when we needed them the most. They elevated marginalized individuals and demonstrated the power of art. They showed us a path forward.

Health + Science

Dr. Nirav D. Shah
Director of the Maine Center for Disease Control

Less than a year on the job as the director of the Maine Center for Disease Control, Dr. Nirav D. Shah found himself as the face of Maine’s response to a global pandemic. In the early stages, while some politicians in Washington, D.C., were downplaying the dangers of COVID-19, Shah was trying to establish through daily public briefings a common understanding of what was happening in Maine, including how the virus was transmitted and who was at risk. “We can’t talk about what we can do until we agree on what’s going on right now,” he says. In a pandemic that has killed nearly 1,000 Mainers and more than 4 million people across the world, Shah often must deliver bad news, but he never sugarcoats or obfuscates it. His clear-eyed delivery of information—good and bad—and calls to action are often peppered with allegory and humor to better connect with the public. “If I just get up and read a litany of numbers, they’re not going to listen to the rest of it, which is to help people stay safe,” Shah says. He faced some pushback as a result of the state’s vaccination strategy—utilizing a handful of large-scale vaccination sites around the state and an age-based eligibility schedule—but it helped make Maine one of the most vaccinated states throughout the process. “Given the state’s rural nature and the fact that our vaccination efforts started in the dead of winter, getting so many shots in arms here was a major accomplishment,” Shah says. In late June, at the end of Maine’s state of emergency and before public briefings returned with the emergence of the Delta variant, Shah reflected on his role since March 2020. “I don’t know most of you, but I feel like I do,” Shah told viewers. “The most meaningful piece of this to me is the fact that someone new to Maine, a guy from another state who has only been here for two years, could come to be viewed as someone to tune into.”

Dr. Steven Diaz
Chief Medical Officer of MaineGeneral Health

As chief medical officer at MaineGeneral Health, the healthcare system serving the greater Kennebec Valley, Dr. Steven Diaz has worked throughout the pandemic to keep his community safe. Networking with chief medical officers throughout Maine, Diaz acted as an advisor on COVID-19-related issues to the state, area colleges and businesses, and, perhaps most important, grade schools. “Delivering just-in-time, key public health messages via Zoom, radio, and other platforms has helped the public to make the best decisions for themselves and their families, and has hopefully helped people understand the ‘why’ of many initiatives,” says Diaz. In addition to his work at MaineGeneral, he is also the chair of the Maine Hospital Association and is an EMS medical director for Delta Ambulance, which provides full spectrum emergency medical services. “The Delta Ambulance partnership with area hospitals and nursing homes has been a key component of our community weathering the pandemic so well,” he says. Diaz’s belief in coordinated care has only grown since the pandemic started. He is proud of having helped MaineGeneral to launch an addiction medicine practice. “The opiate epidemic continues to ravage our communities in Maine,” he says. “We have long recognized that coordinated care is important to meet people where they are and provide them individualized care.”

Dr. Dora Anne Mills
Chief Health Improvement Officer of MaineHealth

In late January 2020, just days after the first confirmed COVID-19 case in the United States, Dr. Dora Anne Mills posted a message on her Facebook page about what health officials knew about the novel coronavirus. By March 2020, her lengthy posts, prefaced with “Not-So-Brief COVID-19 Update,” had become more frequent. They covered everything from why the small numbers of cases in Maine indicated concerning exponential growth to stories about how her own family was dealing with fear and uncertainty. Throughout the pandemic, Mills has continued her regular Facebook postings explaining different aspects of COVID-19 and providing encouragement and hope to her thousands of followers. As the chief health improvement officer for MaineHealth, Mills is especially proud that the healthcare system organized ten mass vaccine clinics, administering more than 420,000 COVID-19 vaccinations, and is partnering with the Good Shepherd Food Bank to open three food pantries in communities with unmet needs: Portland, Farmington, and Norway. Mills, former director of the Maine Center for Disease Control, says she writes almost all her Facebook posts on the weekends when she’s at her “happy place”—her camp on a lake in western Maine—and not at her office immersed in solving that day’s pandemic problems. “Being on the lake provides a long view,” Mills says. “After all, the lake, trees, eagles, and loons all seem oblivious to the pandemic, and that reminds me that this pandemic storm will pass, and we’ll be okay.”

Thomas Judge
Executive Director of LifeFlight of Maine

Thomas Judge, executive director of LifeFlight of Maine, says his proudest accomplishment from the past year has been the work of his team, which has been on the front lines responding to vulnerable patients every hour with grace, compassion, and skill. LifeFlight was founded in 1998 to provide transport for gravely ill and injured patients from every community and hospital in Maine. In the past 12 months, that has meant 2,400 patients from every corner of the state have been given a second chance at life. As the scientific understanding of COVID-19 has continued to evolve, LifeFlight has had to rewrite its airway management and ventilation guidelines nine times since March 2020. Despite the demands of the pandemic, the organization has continued to grow, with additional staff as well as new aircraft and medical technologies. They are at work with the Federal Aviation Administration to develop precise performance-based navigation flight routes, in which air traffic controllers use satellites rather than ground radars to follow and instruct aircraft. They’re also adding to the fleet with “next-gen” helicopters, building new medical simulation labs, and introducing new high-tech medical equipment like new ventilators and neonatal transport systems. “Medicine is constantly changing, and we work hard to be at the cutting edge of new care modalities for patients,” says Judge. “We bring an intensive care unit to the patient’s side to continue the work our EMS and hospital partners have initiated on behalf of critically ill and injured patients needing care far away.”

Dr. Edison Liu
President and CEO of the Jackson Laboratory

The Jackson Laboratory (JAX), a biomedical research institution in Bar Harbor, focuses on finding genomic solutions to cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, addiction, diabetes, and more. Last year, with the coronavirus spreading across Maine and the world, the institution created a COVID-19 testing program that ultimately performed 1.5 million tests for its employees and the citizens of Maine and Connecticut, where JAX also has a campus. Last year it also launched an in-vitro fertilization program to rapidly produce a mouse colony for COVID-19 research, including for vaccine development. “Leading JAX through the gauntlet of the COVID-19 pandemic has been both my greatest concern but also produced among some of my proudest moments,” says Dr. Edison Liu, president and CEO of the institution, which employs more than 1,700 people in Maine and generated an estimated $630 million in economic activity in 2020, despite the economic downturn. During the pandemic, the institution led by Liu since 2012 reorganized its finances to not only avoid any layoffs, but to maintain merit wage increases. Its researchers contributed significantly to the scientific understanding of SARS-CoV-2 virus, including of why people have such varied responses to being infected. “While we are not over the pandemic,” says Liu, “the end is in sight, and JAX is returning stronger than ever.”

Public Service

Abdulkerim Said
Executive Director of New Mainers Public Health Initiative

When Maine had its first incidence of COVID-19, Abdulkerim Said, executive director of New Mainers Public Health Initiative (NMPHI), organized immigrants, community leaders, faith leaders, health professionals, and civilians into a task force to tackle the virus in the New Mainers communities. Said says his organization was essential in getting the Maine Center for Disease Control to provide statistics broken down by race and ethnicity. As the pandemic worsened, it became clear that people of color were disproportionately affected by COVID, with Black people infected at almost 2.5 times the rate of white people. In addition, NMPHI organized community health workers to give food to individuals who were in need, provided the community with hand sanitizer and masks, and empowered people to follow the Maine CDC guidelines by interpreting and translating for those who needed it. Under Said’s direction, NMPHI was honored by the Maine Public Health Association with this year’s Public Health Program of Excellence Award, which recognizes evidence-based public health programs. “With patience, persistence, and vigilance,” he says, “we can find the solution to COVID-19.”

Ingrid Stanchfield
CEO of Boys and Girls Clubs of Kennebec Valley

Besides a two-week stretch in March 2020, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Kennebec Valley has remained open throughout the pandemic, providing critical childcare and remote learning assistance to kids in the greater Gardiner area and beyond. While its capacity has been limited, the Gardiner-based nonprofit has still been serving around 180 to 200 students from as far away as South Portland and Boothbay. Ingrid Stanchfield, who has led the organization for more than two decades, says that the childcare they provided was especially important early in the pandemic for parents who worked at hospitals or other frontline businesses. “We want essential workers to be able to go to work and maybe deal with COVID day in and day out and know that their children are safe and taken care of,” she says. When schools were closed to in-person learning, some kids who would normally be in childcare at the club for 15 hours a week were there for more than 40 hours each week, she says. The organization also provided a weekly food delivery program for area seniors and families in need for the first several months of the pandemic. In addition to adapting its programming and providing services, this year the organization broke ground on a new $10.1 million facility, which is scheduled to open August 2022. Stanchfield directed a capital campaign that raised over $2.5 million in the past year for the new clubhouse. Despite the economic downturn and uncertainty, fundraising during a pandemic wasn’t a challenge, she says. “People were more attuned to the basic needs of other people,” Stanchfield says, “just because we were all forced into caring about humanity surviving.”

Janet Mills
Governor of Maine

Governor Janet Mills has faced some criticism for the pandemic restrictions her administration implemented over the past year and a half, but numbers don’t lie. Despite having one of the oldest populations in the nation, Maine has been among the states with the lowest rates of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths per capita throughout the pandemic. By late August, when 80 percent of its eligible population had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, Maine was tied for the third best state in the nation in the percentage of fully vaccinated residents. “We’ve suffered losses—as a state, as individual communities and families,” Mills says. “But we have conquered them because we are a strong people, born of the western foothills, the northern potato fields, the bold, rocky coasts, and the tall pine and spruce forests. We are lifted up by the courage, conviction, and resilience that come from loving a place and its people.” At the start of the pandemic, with the global economy beginning to crash and fear of traveling threatening to cripple the state’s tourism season, Mills spoke with Eric Rosengren, president of the Boston Federal Reserve, about how to stabilize Maine’s economy. His advice was straight-forward, Mills says: you cannot have a healthy economy without healthy people. Getting the virus under control became the state’s guiding principle. “None of us wished for this pandemic, but that is not for us to decide, what fate hands us,” Mills says. “All that we can, and all that we must, do is decide what to do with the time that is given to us. Our state, like the rest of the nation, was dealt a bad hand by this pandemic. But we are pushing through and getting to the other side, becoming undoubtedly the safest state in the nation.”

Susan Collins
Senior United States Senator

Last year, knowing the catastrophic damage small businesses, nonprofits, and employees faced because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Senator Susan Collins developed the idea of a forgivable loan program to help small businesses survive and continue to pay their employees. Along with three of her colleagues—a fellow Republican and two Democrats—she authored the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which over the course of just a few weeks in March 2020 went from an idea to a massive relief effort. As the virus continued to spread, Collins led a bipartisan group to write a fifth COVID-19 relief law that included a second round of PPP funds. “These forgivable loans served as a lifeline to five million small employers and helped to sustain upwards of 50 million jobs nationwide in 2020 alone,” Collins says. In addition to advancing business aid, Collins convened the first congressional hearing on COVID-19 and nursing homes, ensured that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines didn’t impede access to dental care, and helped pass legislation that delayed reimbursement cuts and made it easier for seniors to access home health care. Collins also joined a group of ten senators, evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, who created a landmark infrastructure package that would invest approximately $1 trillion into the United States’ roads, bridges, airports, seaports, railways, water treatment systems, and broadband. “One of the most significant provisions for Maine is the $65 billion investment to expand high-speed internet access to unserved areas of our country, mostly in rural areas, and improve service in underserved communities,” says Collins. “It has become increasingly clear in recent years—and especially in light of the pandemic—that broadband is no longer a luxury but a necessity.”

Kristen Miale
President of Good Shepherd Food Bank

In a normal year, Kristen Miale, who has been at Good Shepherd Food Bank for over a decade, faces onerous challenges. The Food Bank’s charitable food network, originally built for emergency relief, helps to feed 13 percent of Maine’s population. COVID-19 has amplified hunger and poverty in a way the organization’s president says she has never seen before, with unprecedented demand in the face of a reduced volunteer corps, disruptions in the supply chain, and the logistical challenges of delivering more food safely to all who need it. “Yet, 95 percent of our partners remained open and operational throughout the pandemic and welcomed more people than ever before—including many people and families who visited a food pantry for the first time in their lives,” says Miale. With its partners, Good Shepherd Food Bank distributed 31.3 million meals throughout 2020, a 25 percent increase over the prior year. While scrambling to respond to this increase in need, Miale and her team also went to work redistributing funds to other nonprofits led by and serving Black, Indigenous, and people of color through a low-barrier grant program designed to increase access to culturally important foods called the Community Redistribution Fund. “Here in Maine, 28 percent of households led by a person of color are food insecure, which is more than two times the rate for all Maine households,” says Miale. Since April 2020, Good Shepherd Food Bank has granted nearly $500,000 to more than 20 organizations across the state, forming invaluable new partnerships that will help inform and grow this area of its work in the future.

Environment + Outdoors

Drew Dumsch
Cofounder, President + CEO of the Ecology School

On Earth Day of this year the Ecology School, a nonprofit environmental education program for students of all ages, celebrated the completion of its new $14.1 million residential environmental learning center at River Bend Farm in Saco. The project, which includes a 144-bed dormitory and 7,000-square-foot dining commons, is significant on its own, but what is more impressive is that it produces more energy than it uses, thanks to 712 solar panels installed by ReVision Energy. The campus is one of 25 projects in the United States, and the first in Maine, to be built to the specifications of the Living Building Challenge, the world’s most rigorous green building certification. “As an environmentally focused organization that prioritizes innovative education,” says cofounder, president, and CEO Drew Dumsch, “if we don’t work with the building industry in Maine to do better, how can we authentically be a catalyst for sustainability, resiliency, and change?” With the Ecology School’s residential environmental learning programs put on hold for over a year due to pandemic restrictions, the staff developed all-new environmental education programs, such as a series of videos created for parents and teachers that eventually, with funding from Poland Spring, led to an online learning platform. “Now that Maine has a living, breathing, and thriving example of what a sustainable community can look like,” says Dumsch, “I hope River Bend Farm will become known as a place where people of all ages come to learn and live together through comfortable living in beautiful spaces, eating delicious food that is being grown on our own agroecology farm, and having fun exploring the nature trails on our 105-acre farm.”

Bri Dostie
Founder of Confluence Collective, Maine Guide, Illustrator + Writer

The mission of Bri Dostie’s social enterprise, Confluence Collective, is to create a space for fly-fishers who don’t match the traditional archetype: straight, white, male, able-bodied. “We do this through experiences, advocacy, and education,” says Dostie, who founded the group in 2019. In the past year, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, Dostie has deepened local connections and formed new collaborations with Maine outdoor entities like the Adaptive Outdoor Education Center and the Nature Based Education Consortium, as well as with Portland-based social groups. “I’m proud we could leverage education and art-based learning in new ways that ultimately will improve how we approach our work from now on,” she says. This meant instead of learning stations at outdoor events, Confluence Collective brought learning into the home, through shareable coloring pages and virtual learning series, for example. “It also meant being really flexible and thoughtful about what people needed,” Dostie says, “and leaving lots of space for emotionality and pain, and normalizing all of it—well beyond the typical ‘feel good’ fishing vibes.” Dostie believes that Maine has played an important historical role in expanding fly-fishing as a way for people to connect with nature. “Unfortunately, fly-fishing remains predominantly white and male, despite a growing diversity in identities that call Maine home,” she says. “I think our past uniquely positions us to be a part of defining more expansive and inclusive possibilities for the future of fly-fishing.”

Brian Skerry
Photojournalist + Film Producer

Brian Skerry has spent decades photographing the world’s oceans for National Geographic and other publications, but his most recent assignment has brought him home, in the cold waters off the coast of Maine. Skerry, who lives in York, pitched the project because he’s long been interested in producing a body of work on the Gulf of Maine, where he first began diving decades ago, and the region now finds itself as an epicenter of global oceanic climate change. The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than 99 percent of the world’s oceans, and Skerry says the changes occurring here are a harbinger of things to come worldwide. He’s published four online pieces about the Gulf of Maine for National Geographic over the past year and will continue to create online stories leading up to the print project, which will likely be published in 2023. “If in fact we are the tip of the spear in terms of climate change and all the changes that may occur as a result of it, how we deal with it could be a model for the rest of the world,” Skerry says. “That’s the hope, that we figure things out and do a reasonable job to survive.” This year also marked the release of Skerry’s most ambitious project yet: a documentary series, Secrets of the Whales, which he filmed over the course of three years, along with a companion book and National Geographic print story. The series, which James Cameron produced, and Sigourney Weaver narrated, was nominated for three Emmy Awards.

Ethan Hipple
Director of Parks, Recreation, and Facilities Department for the City of Portland

As a teenager, Ethan Hipple, director of parks, recreation, and facilities for the city of Portland, took part in a youth corps program that he says changed the course of his life. This year, with funding help from the Portland Parks Conservancy and Maine Audubon, Hipple’s department started a similar program. Portland Youth Corps (PYC) allows a diverse array of young people aged 14 to 17 to participate in service projects in Portland’s public parks. Along the way, they also take part in career exploration, first aid training, environmental education, and outdoor adventures. “I’m so glad our department can now offer that same opportunity to kids who are eager to be part of positive change in this world,” Hipple says. The department has also done much to create new open spaces, particularly at the Park at Amethyst on the eastern waterfront, where a former 1.5-acre parking lot is now a green space with a waterfront bike lane and promenade. “While people may take a vacation or a once-in-a-lifetime trip to go visit a national park, our local city parks and trails are the bread-and-butter places that we visit every day and impact our quality of life,” Hipple says. He’s also proud of the Park and Play program, in which recreation staff visit a rotating list of playgrounds in low-income areas where the local kids may not be able to afford to go to camps. With a van full of fun activities, the staff offer games, craft projects, and free snacks. “The program doesn’t bring in any revenue for our department,” Hipple says, “but I think it represents the heart and soul of the impact we can have on the public.”

Briana Warner
CEO of Atlantic Sea Farms

Atlantic Sea Farms started off 2020 strong. The kelp farming company launched a collaboration with chef David Chang and Sweetgreen in February, and it had pre-sold its upcoming kelp harvest to food service outlets and fast casual chains throughout the country. “Then, it all evaporated,” says CEO Briana Warner. Heading into the harvest season in April, the company had 16 partner farmers—many of them commercial fishermen and lobstermen trying to diversify their incomes—and no buyers for hundreds of thousands of pounds of seaweed. “We didn’t know exactly what we were going to do with the kelp, but we knew we needed to uphold our word to our partner farmers and find another way to come back stronger,” Warner says. “We brought on new team members to help grow our retail presence, and we not only lived to see another day, but we thrived.” In just one year, the company transitioned its sales model from food service to retail, and has placed its products in more than 1,300 retail stores nationwide. This year Atlantic Sea Farms’ 24 partner farmers grew twice as much as they did last season; the company produces more than 80 percent of all the line-grown seaweed grown in the country. “Maine is now not only the epicenter of U.S. line-grown kelp but also the proof of concept to which the rest of the country is looking to see how to help diversify their own coastal communities,” Warner says. “We need kelp aquaculture on the coast of Maine for a better future, and the future is looking bright for kelp.”

Business

Whitney Reynolds Waxman
COO and President of American Roots

First and foremost, Whitney Reynolds Waxman is proud that she was able to save her family’s business this year. American Roots, an apparel company based in Westbrook that crafts 100-percent American-made, union-made, customized apparel, watched 70 percent of its potential sales for the year disappear when COVID-19 hit. “I didn’t know if we were going to lose everything we had spent the last five years building,” Reynolds Waxman says. But then the textile company pivoted its production line to a product that was in desperate demand: face masks. “Growing our business from 25 employees to 125 during a pandemic offered a real sense of accomplishment,” Reynolds Waxman says. “Creating jobs in our community is what our little company is all about.” On top of the challenge of being a business owner over the past year, the chief operating officer and president is also the mother of two toddlers, and pregnant with her family’s third. “Trying to balance family and business, while one of my biggest accomplishments, has also proved to be one of my biggest challenges,” she says, “but it’s one that I’ve gladly accepted and hopefully conquered.”

Ilma Lopez
Co-Owner of Chaval

Around the time the pandemic forced Chaval to close its doors in March 2020, co-owner Ilma Lopez received a call from John Woods, who was president of Full Plates, Full Potential and has since passed away, asking if she could help feed 3,000 Portland students who would be without meals after schools suddenly closed. “I turned around and called my friends”—Paige Gould of Central Provisions, Bryna Gootkind of LB Kitchen, Ian Malin of Little Giant, Jordan Rubin of Mr. Tuna, and Cyle Reynolds of Crispy Gai—“and between us we got it done,” Lopez says. That was the first but not the last call Lopez received to help others while she and her husband, Damian Sansonetti, tried keeping their business afloat. Chaval was one of the first restaurants to join Cooking for Community, a grassroots organization that has been having restaurants prepare healthy meals for people in need. Whether they would step up to help people in their community was never a question, Lopez says. “If we don’t take care of our home, how are we expecting it to survive?” In June 2020 she organized a local effort that raised $8,000 for Bakers Against Racism, a national movement of chefs selling baked goods to fund organizations helping Black people. After operating as a takeout-only restaurant with a skeleton crew, including Sansonetti and chef de cuisine Kirby Sholl, Chaval reopened its in-person service in July 2020 with outdoor dining. When winter rolled around, Chavel continued outdoor dining to keep its employees and community safe. In addition to a patio with heat lamps and heated seat pads, Chaval built private, heated greenhouses for diners to enjoy a sense of normalcy with their meals. “When it’s so cold and it’s snowing and people show up to eat outdoors in their ski gear, it’s a wonderful feeling,” Lopez says. “When you see people enjoying it in extreme conditions like that, it’s pretty magical.”

David Roux
Managing Partner of BayPine

At the beginning of last year, Northeastern University announced it was partnering with entrepreneur, investor, and Maine native David Roux to launch a graduate education and research campus in Portland. The Roux Institute, which was envisioned by Roux and his wife, Barbara Roux, and kickstarted with a $100 million gift from their family foundation, aims to bring Maine into the advanced technology economy and provide sustained economic growth. The state-of-the art graduate education program blends academic instruction with advanced research opportunities and work experiences at the institute’s business partners. In its first year, the Roux Institute enrolled more than 500 students and attracted 45 corporate partners, raising the profile of the state as a source for advanced computing talent and an appealing location for corporate research labs and new business initiatives, Roux says. “The response of the workforce has demonstrated the wisdom and reinforced the soundness of the core strategy, which is that people want to participate in an advanced economy but have more geographic diversity of how to do that,” he says. Roux, who spends summers in Maine and has extended family here, says he wanted to establish the institute in Maine because he loves the state and wants to make sure as many people as possible have a chance to live, work, and prosper here. “Eventually, in life,” Roux says, “you look ahead and hope the next generation and the generation after that have an opportunity to grow and prosper in a place you know and love.”

Kerem Durdag
President and Chief Operating Officer of Great Works Internet, Founder and Managing Partner of Indus Fund

Great Works Internet (GWI) is “maniacal” about having all Mainers connected to broadband Internet, says Kerem Durdag, president and chief operating officer of GWI, which last year became the nation’s first telecommunications carrier to be certified as a B Corporation. “It is a question of inclusion, equity, and complete participation in the 21st century.” Reliable and affordable broadband infrastructure has been largely absent in rural Maine, Durdag says, blocking many residents from participating in remote work, distance education, and telehealth, as well as accessing business opportunities and services, participatory government, and other benefits. “If Maine is to prosper, broadband has to be one of the anchor points,” he says. Toward that goal, this year GWI received ConnectMaine Authority funding to expand its high-speed fiber-optic network to the community of Northport and is busy coordinating with municipalities across Maine. It also worked with the Finance Authority of Maine and Arctaris Impact Fund to finance a $11 million project to bring high-speed fiber-optic internet to South Portland and Belfast. After years of planning, Durdag helped launch the Indus Fund in October 2020. The program works with cPort Credit Union to provide below-market interest rate loans to the immigrant business community in Maine. “Immigrant business owners have to have the access to the banking infrastructure in order to grow their businesses, contribute to the overall economic development of the state, and participate in creating generational wealth,” Durdag says. “This is a call to knit the fabric of human society that allows for the fullest participation in our democracy.”

Shawn Gorman
Executive Chairman of L.L.Bean

Last year L.L.Bean did something it had only done four times before in its century-plus history: closed its Freeport flagship store. The result of the pandemic shutdown, the two-and-a-half month shuttering was the first time the store had been closed for more than 24 hours. But despite the closure of its retail stores around the country, L.L.Bean saw its biggest revenue jump in nine years. “As a 109-year-old company, we have weathered a fair number of economic and other storms over the years—World Wars, the Great Depression, and, more recently, 9/11 and the Great Recession,” says Shawn Gorman, executive chairman of the company. “A global pandemic was altogether different, with the convergence of both a public health and an economic crisis at the same time.” The company also lent its resources and facilities to assisting Mainers in need. Early in the pandemic, L.L.Bean began manufacturing medical-grade masks for healthcare workers at its Brunswick facility. The outdoor retailer also partnered with Good Shepherd Food Bank to use its shipping hub in Freeport to pack food for pantries across the state.

Art + Culture

While the pandemic has overshadowed life over the past year and a half, the combined creativity of Ryan Adams and Rachel Gloria Adams has been a bright spot. Their murals and other public art have proliferated throughout Portland, shaping the look and feel of the state’s largest city. “With our country going through a racial and cultural awakening, along with not having the opportunity to gather in places like galleries and exhibition spaces, public art took a new role within our communities over the past year,” Ryan says. “A lot of people used public works of art to express themselves and open a dialogue within their community.” His work has included a temporary mural on the Portland Museum of Art’s facade, a mural of George Floyd behind the nightclub Aura, completed within 10 days of Floyd’s death, and his largest project to date, an 8,000-square-foot mural outside the Gem Theater in Bethel. Last year Rachel launched Tachee, her line of hand-printed home goods and kids clothing, and this year she completed two colorful, geometric murals at the new Children’s Museum and Theatre of Maine, her first solo mural project. Bringing their two young daughters to the ribbon-cutting ceremony to see the murals is one of Rachel’s proudest accomplishments. “Watching them play in the space and recognize their mama’s work is something I will always remember,” she says. The couple collaborated on a pair of murals in East Bayside honoring two prominent members of the neighborhood, Nyamuon Nguany Machar, a community organizer, and the late Alain Nahimana, who cofounded the Greater Portland Immigrant Welcome Center. “I’ve always loved how exterior art pieces can bring people together in a unique and positive way,” Ryan says. “There have been so many times where I have watched neighbors that had previously never spoken, stop and discuss the mural that I am working on. I think that this sort of unique connection is even more important during collective turbulent times like we all just experienced.”

Con Fullam
Founder of Pihcintu Multicultural Chorus, Greenlight Maine + Elevating Voices, Composer + Producer

Con Fullam, who was born on a farm in Sidney to a musically minded family, has been playing and performing since he was five years old. Today, Fullam is an award-winning producer, musician, song-writer, and five-time Emmy Award nominee. In 2006, driven by his deep concern for the effect of war, famine, and political turmoil on children, Fullam founded the Pihcintu Multicultural Chorus, a multinational immigrant and refugee girl’s chorus. “Over 300 girls have participated, and of that number 100 percent have graduated from high school, and 85 percent have gone on to post-secondary education,” Fullam says. Just before the pandemic hit, Pihcintu performed for Bono at a meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations; last year the chorus marked the end of lockdown with YoYo Ma accompanying them onstage at a concert in Bar Harbor celebrating Juneteenth. On top of Fullam’s work bringing attention to the difficulties of refugee children, he is also the creator and showrunner of Greenlight Maine, a series designed to expose and elevate the thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem that is ever-expanding here, as well as Elevating Voices, a series created last year that celebrates diverse businesses and their importance to Maine’s economy. “It has provided the viewers of Maine Public Television with a multitude of ‘aha’ moments,” says Fullam, “highlighting the contributions by so many talented entrepreneurs, from Somali farmers in Wales, Maine, to Wabanaki makers of fine jewelry, haute couture, and Native American music.”

Dinah Minot
Executive Director, Creative Portland

Last year, in response to COVID-19, Creative Portland executive director Dinah Minot established the Portland Artist Relief Fund, which has raised $95,000 in funding and has disbursed stipends of $500 to over 100 local artists. The city’s arts organization, which is entrusted with growing and sustaining Portland’s creative economy, also hired three dozen artists to create public health banners, which served to promote community resilience during the pandemic, to educate people on mask wearing and social distancing, and to provide artists with work in an otherwise deflated gig economy. Ultimately Minot, who is a former TV and film producer, sees her job as building partnerships among arts groups and private enterprise. Creative Portland’s bus shelter initiative, which funded art installations on city bus shelters by local artists, three of them immigrants, came out of Minot’s personal priority of finding more opportunities for public art. In addition to these initiatives, Minot and her team are at work developing a free cultural mobile app, which will be launched in February 2022 and will include filterable maps, guides, and self-guided tours of galleries, murals, cultural organizations, and public art by local artists. “Imagine everything that you want to find in the local arts scene in the palm of your hand,” says Minot.

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