How did milkweed become such an important part of your life?

This past midsummer I read a story about the incredible journey the monarchs make during their migration from the mountains of Mexico to the eastern points of New England, some flying up to 3,000 miles. So, being a mapmaker, I really drilled down on that. I went online and looked at a whole bunch of maps, and I found where the preserves were. I had in my mind where they fly to, but then I started reading that their flight patterns are being challenged by urbanization, suburbanization, and the use of herbicides, which kills a lot of the plants that they need. Monarchs are pollinators, and our planet needs pollinators to survive. It became very clear, very fast that monarchs need milkweed to reproduce.

There is a great volunteer-based organization called Monarch Watch, and they talk a lot about how people can help propagate and spread milkweed. I kind of got roped into this magical, mystical idea of a monarch. And I thought, wow, this is something that anyone can do. “Milkweed for the monarchs.” That became my little mantra.

I started walking around Peaks with my GPS, looking for milkweed. I made a base map of the island and spent probably every morning for a month systematically looking on every trail, every corner, every road. I lost about 12 pounds because I was walking so much. I mapped 60 different locations, finding that most of the milkweed was in people’s gardens. Milkweed is a very important component of a pollinator garden. Then I thought, okay, I can collect milkweed [seed] and dry it out and propagate it, spread it around. Also when I was walking around, I started telling people what I was doing, and people started dropping off milkweed in my mailbox, bringing me milkweed pods. Everyone loves to talk about their gardens, so it was very easy to get people to tee off on the subject. Most people just want pretty flowers, and far fewer people plant pollinator gardens. But we need some intent behind what we plant, and educational intent.

“If you don’t have pollination, you don’t have life.”

Can you explain milkweed’s vital importance to the health of our planet?

Milkweed has a toxin in it, and when a caterpillar eats the leaves, their body absorbs that toxin, and other bugs and predators don’t like the taste of it. The milkweed toxin is a caterpillar’s defense against predators. The bright colors of the butterfly advertise that “I don’t taste good, so leave me alone.” There are over 30 different types of milkweed in North America, and in the eastern United States, like Maine and northern New England, there are two primary types of milkweed: common milkweed and swamp milkweed, which, as you might imagine, grows in wetter areas. What I’ve harvested on this island is common milkweed. The whole reason I have an interest in this is to help protect the pollinators because they are dying. And if you don’t have pollination, you don’t have life.

What happens with the harvested seeds?

On their own, the seeds are only going to blow so far. If someone has a garden and the garden is surrounded by two acres of mowed lawn, the seeds are not going to find any place because they need disturbed soil. They need a place to lodge themselves. Americans love mowed lawns, and they’re sterile deserts really, where not much grows. Anyone can plant harvested seeds. People have gardens, and if everyone started planting milkweed and other native flowers, that would really help the butterflies. When the butterflies hatch or crawl out of their chrysalis, they need food, so having flowers in bloom in September and early October is really important. Pollinator gardens serve not only the butterflies and the monarchs; they also serve other insects, and insects are the animals that power our world.

What do you love the most about your new mission?

The choreography. It is performance art in activism, a dance. First, you identify the location of the milkweed. You collect it. You have to ask permission, because a lot of the milkweed will be in people’s gardens, meaning you have to have a conversation with someone, which often can be very positive. You dry the seeds. In my case, I dry them upstairs in the loft of the studio where it’s warm and dry. Then you crack open the pods and perhaps create little seed packets. You can distribute them or plant them yourself, or you can give seed packets to your friends and your friends can spread them, and your garden friends can plant it. It’s another opportunity for you to stand on your stage or your little soapbox and do a show, tell, and sell. You’re telling a story, and hopefully you’re giving your story to someone else, and they can make that story their own. Anyone and everyone can do this. And I think that’s a great way for all of us to save a little bit of our environment and help the planet be healthier.

Read More:

• 
  Milkweed Man
• 
  A Stitch in Time
• 
  Saltwater Classroom Uses Tech to Teach Ocean Conservation
• This Go-To Ice-Fishing Tool was Invented in Maine
• 
  A Q&A with “Best American Essays 2022” Guest Editor Alexander Chee

The post Milkweed Man appeared first on The Maine Mag.

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 idea for Saltwater Classroom came to its 28-year-old founder and executive director, Alexandra Doudera, in 2016, in a fifth-grade classroom in the coastal city of Viña del Mar, Chile. Nearly seven years later, the Camden native has brought her vision to life, teaching weeklong workshops on marine science and ocean conservation to students in third through sixth grade from Maine to Mexico.

The second phase of Saltwater Classroom is an ocean education app, launching this spring, which Doudera developed with Adapt, a Maine-based digital agency. She refined her ideas at the BlueTech Entrepreneurial Trek, a two-week-long immersion focused on startup methodologies and tools at the Darling Marine Center, hosted by the Roux Institute and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. “Lexi is the only one here who is focused on the kids, and that matters. She’s making an impact,” says Patrick Arnold, cofounder and CEO of the New England Ocean Cluster, which owns and operates the Hús, Portland’s waterfront coworking space, from which Doudera runs Saltwater Classroom.

We recently sat down to talk about the app, why embracing technology is crucial to conservation, and how Maine is on the cutting edge of BlueTech industry.

How does your new app differentiate Saltwater Classroom from other ocean education programs?

What sets Saltwater Classroom apart is a global perspective and the idea of bringing people together through education, and this [app] can make it happen. It creates the opportunity for students to connect, regardless of where they live. I also think it’s interesting for people who aren’t necessarily close to the ocean, to open their eyes to different experiences that can be facilitated through technology. In our curriculum, we have a module that speaks to our inland ocean connection to show that, even if you’re far from the coast, you are connected to the ocean through weather patterns, watersheds, or food systems. There are many ways we are all tied to the ocean, even if you live in the middle of America or central Mexico.

Can you tell us a little bit about the app experience?

The app is a platform for students to keep learning about the ocean after our workshops, by engaging with their ocean environment and connecting with one another. There will be a homepage with daily updates and ocean fun facts, but there will also be different missions and badges that students can earn. For example, they can earn their Intertidal Explorer badge by doing activities in the inter-tidal zone, or the Beach Hero badge by participating in beach cleanups. Kids will have a profile where they can share their favorite ocean species or their favorite ocean activity and connect with one another by sending in-app messages—all things that will encourage and incentivize students to get outside.

“We’re all connected to the ocean and have some unique tie to it that transcends cultural or geographical differences.”

So much of Saltwater Classroom is rooted in being physically immersed in the natural world. How do you see technology as complementary to outdoor-centered learning?

Our approach will always be hands-on by encouraging people to get their hands dirty and immerse themselves in the environment, but I think the opportunity provided by technology is to make our world smaller. We want to grow this web of people who are connected by a passion for learning and a commitment to stewardship. I often say that the oceans are our world’s greatest unifier. Really, we’re all connected by the ocean and have some unique tie to it that transcends cultural or geographical differences. I think this technology allows that to happen. The app will encourage this hands-on connection by incentivizing kids to go outdoors. So, I don’t see it as being contradictory. I see it as the next step. Of course, there are challenges. You don’t want people glued to a screen or only connecting online; it’s really something to be cautious about. But I think the opportunities the app provides students to broaden their horizons and perspective of the ocean is unparalleled.

What is it like as an ocean-centric entrepreneur to be doing this work in Maine?

Maine is becoming more of a nurturing environment for this kind of project. We’ve always had hands-on education and connection to the ocean, but now this new emphasis on entrepreneurship, in the blue economy and BlueTech, is a new area where this idea can grow. There are so many like-minded people. The foundation is here, and it’s very supportive. There’s a lot of resources for people who want to start their own venture or nonprofit. Maine will always be home for me, so it’s nice there are more opportunities to connect with people and businesses that share the same values who are able to help make the idea a reality.

Read More:

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The post Saltwater Classroom Uses Tech to Teach Ocean Conservation appeared first on The Maine Mag.

Jack’s Traps founder Tim Jackson has spent over 40 years perfecting these go-to traps, which can now be found on the ice nationwide. For this video we partnered with Rove Lab to tell the story of Jackson, his traps, and his legacy. Jackson’s influence has been especially notable with young anglers, as he has worked tirelessly to ensure the next generation can continue to enjoy this cherished pastime. To learn more about Jackson’s journey see our article from February 2020.

Take note!

• Fishing licenses can be purchased from the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife.
• Take part of an ice fishing derby near you.
• Always be cautious on the ice. Go as a group and be sure ice conditions are safe. Get out there and let the flags fly. Tight lines!

The post This Go-To Ice-Fishing Tool was Invented in Maine appeared first on The Maine Mag.

Rachel Hurn: I was surprised at just how many Maine connections there are within the book. From you, of course, to Robert (Bob) Atwan’s foreword, which discusses E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake,” and then to the writers within—Jason Brown’s “The Wrong Jason Brown” from the New Yorker, and then also Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s “Futurity” from Harvard Review. Were you looking for Maine connections as you were choosing these essays? 

Alexander Chee: Not at all. In the case of Jason Brown, for example, I thought it was uncanny that he was from Portland, but the essay is so overwhelmingly powerful. All of these essays found their way to me in different ways. Jason Brown’s is something that I found on my own, whereas, in the case of Alex’s essay, while I do follow Alex on social media and I follow their career pretty intensely, it was actually a finalist that Bob sent to me. In both cases I was thrilled to find them, but I certainly wasn’t like, “And now it’s time for more Maine representation.” [Laughs.]

RH: Every writer in this selection has not been in BEA before, which is not always the case, as you know. How many of these pieces were ones that you did come across on your own and, and how much of the process was a collaborative effort with Bob?

AC: The process is intensely collaborative with Bob, or at least mine was. He told me up front that I would be able to make my own selections, but that he would be sending me lists. I had the ultimate say over what was included, but there were certain restrictions placed on the collection all the same.

I found myself very disappointed by a lot of what I was reading that year. And by disappointed I mean I felt like most of what I was reading was falling into certain staples of the convention of writing an essay, certain cliches. And then, once Bob started sending me his selections, and it became sort of “go time,” I realized that I had to start thinking about, how do I approach this body of work that I haven’t seen yet? In the anthology’s introduction, I address my attempt to create a criteria for myself, which involved not only doing the reading for the anthology, but also rereading favorites from the past, so as to reestablish some intuitive connection as to what I thought was “the best.” The thing about the adjective “best,” you know, is that it’s both a medal and a target. And what I saw in rereading past editions, was that every editor admitted that this was their own subjective opinion. No one tried to say that they were some kind of objective judge of all essays. 

RH: What were some of the limitations you came across when looking for your selections? 

AC: I was sad that many of my favorite writers had not published essays that year. In a few cases, I was sad they had not published essays in a way that I could find. I was trying very hard to find them, through Google and JSTOR. And at a certain point Bob had asked me, what is a list of writers you really admire? And he tried to keep an eye out also. But there were still essays that I missed all the same. But that’s partly the limits of the process, and it’s why I encourage people to nominate themselves. 

RH: Excuse me for quoting you to you, but I love when you write in the introduction: “Keeping them [the essays] keeps me. They retain a sense of who I was, when I first found them, and the possibilities they offered me returns when I reread them. And so I can follow the trail of those thoughts farther each time, following a sense of who I meant to be, and who I might still become.” 

That reminded me so much of that feeling one gets, especially a young reader and writer, that they have discovered a writer. And that the writer belongs to them. I used to do this a lot in my twenties. I would see the writer’s name all the time and be like, their work speaks to me and I’m the one who appreciates it the most in the world.

AC: [Laughs.] Yes. 

RH: Which is absurd, obviously, because I had thoughts like that about Joan Didian, for example. But what you write is so true about how writing speaks to us. This is your collection and not anyone else’s collection. Each essay that spoke to you will bring you back to a certain time in your life, and you can almost relive your life through that experience. 

AC: I think that speaks to that “private anthology of best essays” I mention in the introduction. It functions as a kind of key to memories of experiences of the self, that intimate part of our reading lives. And that is sometimes otherwise difficult to access.

RH: Yes. You also write about how something you do regularly is to read old literary magazines. That you don’t always read the most up and coming thing, the most recent issue of whatever, to be able to say that you did. That it’s not the point.

AC: Correct. And when I was writing that intro, we were seeing two magazines getting into trouble, possibly in danger of closing, which were Conjunctions and The Believer. Sort of an old school magazine and a newer one. I think of The Believer still as a very young magazine.

RH: Right. 

AC: And it’s why it’s also so devastating to see Astra go under.

RH: I was just thinking that as you were talking, yes. I was a happy subscriber. It’s very sad.

I wanted to also touch on what you mentioned about what kind of message you’re trying to present with this collection of essays. You talk about having lost faith at one point that writing can improve things between people. And how you go from that feeling to persisting both as a reader and a writer, mostly maybe as a writer, that what you write could change someone’s mind. 

AC: Well, I think it can and does. I wasn’t suggesting that I had completely given up. It’s more about how I felt like I had found the urge to give up a little too tempting. And I had come back around because of the essays I had found. But I was also finding myself increasingly wary of the idea that we had to be in service to a particular kind of effort as it were. In the sense that there’s a limit to what this writing can accomplish. Which doesn’t make it unvaluable or less valuable. It’s a way of acknowledging what the actual problems are. 

You know, something I did have to search for was writing by writers of color and marginalized peoples where the essays didn’t feel like they were created only to speak to that. People have talked about it, how white writers get to write about whatever they want to, and writers of color are only ever asked to write about racism. That does add up on a submission level when I’m looking at the finalists. I can see what the editors in a sense were up to. 

RH: Right, right. 

CH: And so finding an essay by Vauhini Vara, something I found on my own that did not come out of the submission pile, where she’s writing about her own difficulties with writing about her sister who died, but none of that is centered necessarily on her experience as a South Asian. It’s coming out of a personal sense of grief, and it’s about the presence of technology in our lives. Which is something that I think is on a lot of people’s minds in general in 2022, especially as we see what’s happening with Twitter. 

RH: Right. [Laughs.]

AC: And that speaks to the value of magazines like The Believer. 

RH: That’s right. So going back to Bob writing in the foreword about E.B. White’s essay “Once More to the Lake,” which was published in Harper’s in 1941. I haven’t done a lot of reading about E.B. White as a person, and I hadn’t realized he had struggled with mental health issues. It was interesting to take that in the context of—this is kind of silly, but there’s this line that shows up around Portland a lot. I don’t know if you have seen these, but there are these posters of Maine with a quote by White printed on top. They’re so prevalent here; they’re in people’s houses, they’re in stores for sale. The line says, “I would rather feel bad in Maine than feel good anywhere else.” Do you know what I’m talking about?

AC: [Laughs.] Um, I have not seen these. 

RH: Well, so, in light of reading more about him, I’m like, Oh, wow, that has such a different meaning now. Because he probably was struggling a lot of the time, which then, you know, makes that poster feel really inappropriate. 

AC + RH: [Laughs.] 

RH: But yeah, it was interesting to get more of a picture of him as a person. Do you have a history with E.B. White? 

AC: I haven’t really thought about E.B. White much in the last couple of decades. I know that Bob always goes back to the classics. That’s his thing, right? He has that really deep sense of the essay as an art form and its legacies and so forth. I think it made for a nice contrast or supplement to what I was trying to do, to take the conversation in a direction I hadn’t seen any previous editor take, which was to address the question of how much should we write about our own trauma and to what end? 

I don’t know if you saw this review of the anthology—in one of the Medium magazines called ANMLY—by Jennifer Chong Schneider, who I really appreciate. In it she talks about how I de-tokenized inclusivity in the way that I did this collection. And then near the end, she says, 

“Like all the volumes in the series, the foreword is by series editor Robert Atwan. For 2022, he writes about ‘Once More to the Lake’ by E. B. White. ‘Open any first-year writing anthology and there it was,’ Atwan writes. I took him up on this challenge, opened the book I use to teach my freshman comp class, and easily found it. In a beautiful essay that is destined to be plagiarized by freshmen for years to come, Atwan offers a well-contextualized close and critical reading of the classic essay. But my recurring thought while reading through this anthology is that, actually, this 2022 collection would be a much better Freshman Comp textbook than almost anything I’ve used in class (I’ve taught intro English for well over a decade). The volume opens with a professor getting arrested. What more could entice a new college student to get lost in these pages?”

AC + RH: [Laughs.]

RH: Right. I guess that’s what I was trying to get at when talking about writing that changes people’s minds, but also just writing that’s good because it’s good, and then there’s writing that does both. Your essay choices make this a very refreshing read. 

I imagine it’s hard not to feel like you’re still reading with this collection in mind, after having been so immersed in it for a time. Who are the people that are still speaking to you now, who you feel readers should check out?

AC: So, Chelsea Hodson was one of those favorite essayists who did not publish an essay that year. And Neema Avashia whose collection, Another Appalachia just came out. Also Lars Horn. They had a book-length essay called Voice of the Fish that was excerpted, and I was very sad to find that it wasn’t eligible as a result. Also Raquel Gutiérrez’s Brown Neon. That’s an essay collection that came out this year also. And there’s a really remarkable book that came out by the writer CJ Hauser called The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays.

RH: This is great, thank you.

So I want to let you move on with your life, but is there anything else you wanted to say about this process and about your choices?

AC: I think what I want to say is, part of what I was doing was trying to welcome into the anthology the people who I thought were really pushing at the limits of what essays can do. Whether it’s Elissa Washuta publishing an essay about becoming sober in Harper’s Bazaar, or whether it’s Brian Blanchfield, the aforementioned professor who was arrested…

RH: Right. 

AC + RH: [Laughs]

AC: Blanchfield is a poet and an essayist, and I thought what he did was so fascinating, the way he arranged it with every paragraph of the essay beginning with the same first line. And writing the essay in such a way that the reader is always playing catch-up to what has already occurred in the events described. It’s a fascinating mix of these kinds of efforts. I was also trying to concentrate on, where are readers finding essays now? And the answers are often social media, whether it is a newsletter like Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, where she publishes new and emerging writers and where this collection’s penultimate essay comes from, or whether it is me finding Tanner Akoni Laguatan’s remarkable memorial essay in Wired. His first ever published essay.

RH: Yes. The first thing I read when I picked this book up was the contributors’ notes. And that stuck out to me immediately, learning that it was someone’s first published essay. There isn’t this presumption that someone couldn’t be included in an anthology like this if they didn’t have an existing book, or several, or whatever.

AC: There’s a long running frustration that I’ve had, for example, every time the Whiting Awards are announced. Where the awards have gone a great deal to support a more inclusive sense of our literature. But it often means that when these writers are being featured, and you go to look for their work online or in magazines, they aren’t there. It took, in some ways, them getting the award to get the kind of attention from literary magazines—or other magazines, period—that they might otherwise get. And that’s messed up. That’s just wrong. 

So I don’t know how that changes at the level of magazines all across the country, but something that was certainly visible to me when I was going around checking the mastheads of different magazines to see what they published last year, was the remarkable lack of diversity still in so many of them. So it becomes more likely that, say, Tanner, working with a black editor at Wired as a freelancer, could pitch and publish that essay than he might have done somewhere else. Which is why we have to, for those of us doing this kind of work, why we have to pay attention to the places where we aren’t necessarily expecting to find this kind of literary writing.

RH: Right. Yes. 

AC: That was a very long answer. 

RH: No, it was great. It was a beautiful answer. Thank you. It’s been lovely to chat.

AC: My pleasure.

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Originally published May 2016

Stephany Guyot was still playing under the stairs at her parents’ watch store when she started fixing timepieces.

“Mom and Dad would set up a little bench, and my brother and I would sit in there and pretend we were watchmakers,” she says. “They always had these boxes of junk watches, and my brother and I would be like, ‘Let’s try to get something to work.’ I guess I’ve always had a fascination with them.”

The fascination runs in the family.

Stephany’s father, Claude, grew up just outside of Fleurier, a small village in Switzerland known for its watchmaking and absinthe. Claude says people in the village either became farmers or watchmakers, so at age 16, he started watchmaking school. He spent the next eight years working on watches in Switzerland until he answered a newspaper ad for a job at the Waltham Watch Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He arrived in New York in 1972 with a duffle bag, a guitar, and a fluency in English comprised of the words “shut up” and a four-letter expletive.

At Waltham, Claude trained workers in the repair department. Even at that time, it was difficult to find watchmakers in America, so it wasn’t unusual for Swiss watchmakers to be recruited from overseas, says Jill, Claude’s wife. Claude planned to stay in America for two years. Instead, he met Jill, who was working at Waltham in the customer service department and also had roots in the watch industry. Her first job was at her father’s watch store in Westport, Connecticut; her grandfather was a jeweler and watchmaker with a store in neighboring Norwalk. Above the door of Swiss Time hangs a sign in the shape of a three- foot-tall pocket watch, passed down from Jill’s grandfather to her father to her.

After a few years, Jill and Claude left Waltham and moved to Maine. In 1977, the couple opened Swiss Time as a trade shop, doing repairs for local jewelry stores. It was located on the third floor of a High Street building, across from what is now the Westin Portland Harborview hotel. After the couple had operated the trade shop for two years, the building owner asked them if they were interested in moving down to a storefront on the first floor.

“We decided, why not?” Jill recalls. “I know retail; I grew up in it. He knows watches. So that’s when we moved down, and it worked. We’ve just grown from then.”

They moved the business to its present location on Exchange Street in 1994, and the customers followed. Some of them have been bringing their watches to Claude for over three decades. One customer, Paul Pappas, says he’s purchased seven or eight watches from Swiss Time over the last 25 years. Whenever he goes to buy a watch or watch strap or get a timepiece serviced, even if it’s been a year between visits, he is greeted by name. “It’s the Cheers of watch stores,” he says. Pappas, who lives in Yarmouth and owned a tire business and car wash before retiring, understands the value of supporting local businesses, and says the way Swiss Time treats its customers makes it easy to reciprocate the loyalty. “If I don’t buy my watches from them and they go out of business, then they won’t be there to be able to repair them,” Pappas says.

Although the watches Swiss Time repairs can be more than a century old, the equipment required to test them is state-of-the-art. To be certified to work on specific brands, including Rolex, Omega, and Longines, the store must continuously update its equipment and be ready for unannounced white-glove inspections from the manufacturers. Stephany says it’s crucial to keep the work environment clean because “a little speck of dust can float right to a watch you’re working on, and it will just stop the whole thing. It will never run right.”

The store continues to evolve. With the growth of online shopping, the majority of the store’s revenue has shifted from retail sales to repair work, says Stephany, who has been taking over more and more store operations from her parents since 2010. Claude, in his 60s, is still working on the watches, but his daughter is now apprenticing under him, starting out with a couple of pocket watches a week. She will eventually move on to mechanical wristwatches with smaller movements.

A movement is the interior mechanism in a watch. Until the introduction of a battery- powered quartz watch in 1969, all watches had mechanical movements, which don’t require batteries to work and instead rely on manual winding of the watch or, in an automatic watch, the motion of the wearer’s arm. The movement is powered by the mainspring, a coiled piece of metal that, in unwinding, transmits power to the balance wheel, which then rotates to power a series of tiny gears. These in turn move the watch’s hands. Today, mechanical movements are mostly found in high-end timepieces or vintage watches, and require occasional cleaning and servicing. Swiss-made mechanical movements, designed by watchmakers to be repaired, are mostly found in mid- to high-end or vintage timepieces. All mechanical watches need routine maintenance.

To service or repair a mechanical watch, Claude will take apart the entire movement, screw by screw, gear by gear—often over 100 pieces. Claude doesn’t make watches, but he can make the tiny parts, if needed, using a lathe. He does this less than he used to, as it’s an extremely delicate and time-intensive process; some of the parts are smaller than the tip of a pin. “There are very few people who make parts,” says Jill. “It’s a dying trade. It really is.” Still, Claude keeps his lathes in the back of his shop for special cases.

Quartz movements, which are battery powered, revolutionized the watch industry. They’re more accurate than mechanical movements and don’t have nearly as many moving parts, making them more shock- resistant. They can be produced much more cheaply and quickly. But even though there are high-end quartz watches, they don’t require the meticulous craftsmanship necessary to make mechanical watches— miniature kinetic engines built by hand. A mechanical watch, with proper care, will outlive its wearer.

“I like to say a mechanical watch has a heartbeat,” says Stephany. “You can almost always repair it. With a battery-operated watch, you get something that’s more disposable.”

The drive for longevity is reflected in Swiss Time’s retail offerings. While the store carries a dozen lines of new watches like Oris, Ball, Hamilton, and Tissot, its U-shaped display case also features reconditioned timepieces dating back to the turn of the twentieth century, including Hamilton, Omega, Rolex, and Patek Philippe wristwatches, as well as Waltham and Illinois pocket watches.

Recently, a younger audience has discovered the appeal of traditional watches. Swiss Time’s regular customers tend to be older, but Stephany says the last couple of years have seen an uptick in younger visitors to the store. More customers in their 20s or 30s, and even some teenagers, are interested in mechanical watches, both vintage pieces and new automatics, she says. Some find their grandparents’ old watches; others want to look more refined at work.

“It’s always been a way to set you apart, with the variety of watches,” says Stephany. “It becomes part of you, not only to tell the time but to make a statement about who you are.”

It’s a notion Swiss Time has embraced for nearly 40 years—when Jill and Claude ran a third-floor repair shop, when Stephany used to play under the staircase as a child, and now, when Stephany is learning the craft, hunched over a workbench with a magnifying glass in her eye.

The post Timeless Appeal at Portland’s Swiss Time appeared first on The Maine Mag.

Meet Loren Coleman, executive director of the world’s only International Cryptozoology Museum, which he founded in Portland in 2003. He is known as the world’s most popular living cryptozoologist—cryptozoology being the study of hidden, unknown species that are yet to be verified in the field of zoology. Coleman has done over 60 years of boots-on-the-ground field-work tracking Bigfoot, and he also has 40 books under his belt, plus a memoir in the works. As of late, Coleman has been pursuing a new adventure: this time in Bangor, it’s an even bigger museum and bookstore that will also be a home for his archive of over 100,000 books on natural history, UFOlogy, parapsychology, and cryptozoology. I talked to Coleman about a lifetime of tracking—and sometimes finding—the invisible.

How do you think people see you, and how do you want to be seen?

Most people don’t know I’m male. They hear the name “Loren” and they think I’m “Lauren.” I’m talked about online as “she,” as “her.” I have a not-real-deep voice. I present myself the way I am, which is calm, soft-spoken, and with a whole history of pacifism as a conscientious objector. I have a degree in psychiatric social work, was senior researcher at the Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service from 1983 to 1996, and I’m a baseball dad. That’s the most important to me—a lot of my decisions have been based on where my kids are and how much time they need with me. Cryptozoology is the passion that eventually grew into my job, so to speak.

Do you believe in Bigfoot?

I believe in nothing, and I’m open-minded to everything. The evidence that I see: the tracks, the hair samples, the animals that are preyed upon—those are all the physical evidence. I don’t get into the paranormal, and I’m more into my philosophical, internal clock or network of taking information in. I don’t investigate a Bigfoot report and believe that report. Instead, I accept or deny the evidence. I really am very cautious of the two different ends of the continuum; both can be very confusing to the excluded middle that I occupy. There are people who accept everything: they hear a noise in the woods, and they think it’s a flying demon or a dragon or a Thunderbird or a Bigfoot. And on the other end, there are the debunkers, the skeptics with a big S. If someone comes along and says, “that’s foolishness,” or “those replicas that you have at the museum are toys,” it doesn’t bother me. I know why I have them: it’s to represent what they might look like and ask witnesses, “Is that near to what you saw?” I use them as measuring sticks for people to compare their experience with. I really don’t put a lot of energy into arguing with people, and I’m absolutely not evangelical about cryptozoology. Rather, my brain needs to be stimulated and filled with passion, with different stories, with different experiences. I don’t smoke. I don’t take drugs. I have cryptozoology. It’s everything I need.

I was called a radical within a radical field, and that makes me comfortable. That makes me happy.

Tell me how you were once a kid who grew up to be a professional Bigfoot hunter.

I read all the time when I was young, more than anybody else in my family. In the late 1950s, I was reading a lot of Roy Chapman Andrews. He was an explorer with the American Museum of Natural History. He went to the Gobi Desert, discovered dinosaur fossils. There was Raymond Ditmars, a herpetologist who wrote books on snakes. And of course, there was Jane Goodall. I was interested in the subject of natural history, but also the individuals who were exploring very much interested me. In March of 1960 in Decatur, Illinois, I watched a film that very much captured my imagination. It was a Japanese science fiction horror film called Half Human, or Beastman Snowman. The director was Ishirō Honda, who also did Godzilla and Rodan, and I found out he had been a documentary filmmaker for years before he got into science fiction films. I went to school the next week after seeing this movie twice and asked my teachers, “What is this?” And of course, there were no books on the Abominable Snowman. There were no, you know, cryptids. My teachers told me these creatures don’t exist, to go back to my homework, and to leave them alone. And so that of course instilled in me a desire to find out everything I could.

Let’s talk about that famous video clip of Bigfoot. What’s your take on that clip?

October 20th, 1967. That’s when the film was taken. And now, with NASA-quality computer enhancement, you can see features in the film. There’s a lot about the film that people missed in the first decade or two. Now, you can see there’s muscle movement in the back of the legs. The muscles contract. A lot of people, when they first saw that film of Bigfoot, they would say, “He did this,” or “He went that way, and he crouched over.” With more developed technology, it didn’t take too long for people looking more closely to see that this is a female. She has breasts. They move. So the most revealing of all of the hoaxes with Bigfoot is that it had been male. That’s something that I’ve documented. Bigfooters used to be male, and now it’s gender diverse, but most of the men that wrote those books could not bring themselves to talk about a female Bigfoot. They talk about males only. But I was trying to document the genders and the sexual evidence in the field, and it got me into all kinds of trouble. I shook them up. I was called gay for doing it. I was called a radical within a radical field, and that makes me comfortable. That makes me happy.

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I have always had this sense that our relationship to the forest needs to be better understood, better explored, so we develop a sense of stewardship and connection to these places,” says Steve Tatko, senior director of Maine conservation and land management at the Appalachian Mountain Club, “so people will invest themselves in keeping them whole.”

This, in a sentence, is Tatko’s life’s work.

Founded in 1876 by U.S. astronomer and physicist Edward Charles Pickering, the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) is North America’s oldest conservation group. Dedicated to the protection, enjoyment, and understanding of the outdoors, the organization maintains 1,800 miles of trails from Maine to Washington, D.C. It supports conservation research, advocacy for the protection of lands and waters, a science-based approach to climate change resilience, and initiatives aimed at making nature accessible to everyone. “Our lens has always been using outdoor recreation and education as a tool to develop relationships with places,” Tatko says. In Maine the AMC owns 75,000 acres of forestland—soon to be 100,000—in the heart of the 100 Mile Wilderness. It also operates three full-service lodges connected by more than 90 miles of trails, which provide public access to fly-fishing, paddling, skiing, and hiking, among other recreational activities. Tatko oversees everything from forest management and timber harvests to road construction and from trail infrastructure to watershed restoration, fundraising, and relationship-building with community stakeholders. “If it happens on the land, I’m either out there with the tools doing it or working with the contractors who are doing the work,” he says.

Tatko is the definition of an old soul. Sure, he may be 35, but he grew up in Willimantic, a small town 14 miles as the crow flies from the 100 Mile Wilderness, listening to the stories of his elders—stories about logging and river driving and even the first electric lightbulb in town. He wears leather boots and wooden snowshoes and cooks over the campfire in a cast-iron pan when he’s working in the field. As a history major at Colby College, Tatko studied the socioeconomic history of the Northeast, which, combined with knowledge of geology and indigenous history, informs his complex and layered understanding of the land he’s working to protect. This core-deep understanding of what Maine was—and what it is becoming—makes him an important bridge connecting local communities to the AMC’s conservation efforts. Whether it’s problem solving with rural communities whose identities have been built around traditional timber harvesting or collaborating with Wabanaki tribes on river restoration and other conservation projects, Tatko believes that listening to community voices is essential to getting any real work done. “The Wabanaki have 12,000 years of forest management, and so that’s a central voice to these restoration efforts,” he says. “You’re talking about people who have experience with this place before it was a forest. They literally watched the forest grow up out of nowhere.”

Maine’s AMC takes a two-pronged approach to conservation, balancing responsible timber harvesting with land conservation, recreational opportunities, and community economic development. Since the organization purchased 37,000 acres of forest at the southern end of the 100 Mile Wilderness from International Paper in 2003, they have been working to develop a new model of landownership for the Northeast. Some wonder why a nonprofit dedicated to protecting Maine mountains, forests, and waters would be in the business of cutting down trees. Wood products have been a staple of Maine’s economy for the past 200 years and remain a main source of income for many communities, including those around the AMC’s Maine Woods property. Together with Huber Resources Corporation, a forestry consulting business based in Old Town, Tatko is working to replace the traditional industrial model of forestry, which often focuses solely on wood production at the expense of ecosystems and communities, with responsible forestry, which balances both.

“I don’t think people in Maine realize that our little Acadian forest variant is very rare,” he says. The last intact piece of a larger forest biome that used to extend like a band around this latitude through Europe, Japan, China, and Korea, the Maine woods are a transition zone between the boreal forest to the north and the northern hardwoods and southern Appalachian hardwoods to the south. For 7,000 years this land has been nothing but a forest, which means that habitat connectivity and natural resilience is still present. “This is one of the few places in the world where you can work with natural systems to address climate change,” says Tatko. “That’s what sets Maine apart.”

In AMC’s responsible forestry process—known as late-successional management—trees are cut selectively with the intention of replicating the same diffuse light of the forest that allows for a natural ecosystem to flourish, maintaining ecological diversity and promoting natural regeneration. Old trees are left to grow big and die naturally, increasing the forest’s ability to sequester carbon. Special attention is given to conserving vulnerable habitats and species, minimizing erosion from roads, protecting rivers and streams, and incorporating community concerns into management strategy. Income from forestry efforts and recreation infrastructure such as the AMC lodges supports programming and helps offset the costs of land ownership. Additionally, Tatko is concerned with encouraging the growth of climate-resilient species like sugar maple, yellow birch, and red spruce. “There’s a recognition that red spruce, in a couple lifetimes, might be gone from this forest,” he says. “White pine and oak will transition farther north as the climate warms. But there’s still value in promoting these species. The advance of climate will take time, and we don’t know what the forest will look like without them.”

In the face of a changing world, Tatko sees his role as preserving as much of the forest ecosystem as he can for future generations to enjoy. “There’s a wake-up call for all of us,” he says. “People are starting to realize that the actors have already changed on the stage. But if the stage isn’t here, the play can’t go on at all.” He envisions a future where wood products play an even more central role, one day replacing oil-based synthetics. “We’ve known since World War II that you can make almost anything out of wood that you can make out of plastics,” he says. “That’s a much better climate outcome than continuing to rely on fossil fuels for our clothing, for our insulation, and for our throwaway goods. If we’re going to go wholeheartedly into taking into consideration our material culture and where it comes from, then we need to start thinking about what we do take from the forest, and how to utilize it more efficiently.”

The critical point of AMC’s work is to help people understand why the forest is a resource worth protecting—something Tatko, who grew up nearby, has always understood. He knows every tree by name. When they’re cut, he counts their rings. Walk with him into the woods for an afternoon, and you’ll leave knowing the local history; you’ll start to feel the passion he has for the place he’s always called home. “It was inherent in how people talked to me about the forest, and how people taught me about how it works, that it’s a fragile thing,” he says. “And whether we explicitly state it or not, we have dominion over it. People have converted forest to other uses for generations. I’m just constantly reminded that that sense of dominion over a place creates a barrier, as do constructs around wilderness. Forests shouldn’t be put in a glass box. People’s ability to experience those places is central to their ability to function.”

The AMC encourages adventurers of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds to engage and connect: volunteer for a trail workday or lead a local outing; stay at an AMC campsite, cabin, lean-to, or lodge; paddle one of the wild lakes or fly-fish a running stream. And when you’re out there, take a look at the trees. Late-succession forestry takes nearly a century to reach effect, and Tatko won’t live to see the fruit of his efforts. “This is a really long-term restoration project that I’ll spend my working career on, but it’ll be my successors that will actually see the results,” he says. Yet, he understands his place in history, and how the actions we take today lay the foundation for future generations to have access to the forest and all it provides. “Everybody loves the forest, but I think we don’t realize just how amazingly unique Maine’s forests actually are,” Tatko says. “No one else has this. It’s here. This is our gift to the world.”

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The snow gets deep up here in Fort Kent. On a visit in early March to northern Maine’s Aroostook County, while the Can-Am mushers are still in town after the annual international sled dog race, local residents shovel snow from rooftops before the next flurries hit. A few miles from downtown and from the frozen St. John River, heaps of snow cover the yard outside of the rambling workshop and shed. This is where Brian Theriault keeps the snowshoe-making materials and tools that he and his family have collected since he was a kid in the 1960s.

Another snowstorm is forecast for the weekend. But this afternoon, Theriault is spending a couple of hours with 13-year-old Bret Babin, whose family lives nearby. Babin notes it’s his fifth visit so far to the workshop, where he learns from the master snowshoe maker about the history of snowshoes—and how to craft them of freshly cut wood and rawhide using traditional methods. It’s an apprenticeship made possible through an award from the Maine Arts Commission.

On this day, the two have brought several pairs of snowshoes to a nearby snowbank to examine them in the bright winter sunshine. Looking at them propped in the snow, Theriault talks about their lasting usefulness. “Remember when they found a 6,000-year-old snowshoe in a melting glacier in the Alps?” he asks, recalling a story reported from Italy several years ago.

In Maine it was common for families to make and use snowshoes well into the last century, and the Theriaults adapted their designs from snowshoes made in the St. John Valley by First Nations people and early French Acadian settlers—both cultures that the family descended from. Theriault notes it was snowmobiles that led to a decline in snowshoeing as the favored way of getting around when a blanket of snow covers roadways and trails. (But he still champions snowshoes as the better option: no gas is needed, and you can get to places snowmobiles can’t.)

Babin, who says he’d like to be a game warden one day, attaches a pair of snowshoes to his boots with leather straps and ventures across the untrammeled snow of the sideyard, each footfall breaking a trail. He goes slowly at first and works up to a trot, making a few loops and big figure-eights. Then, his face flushed from the exercise and chilly air, he calls over his shoulder, “It feels like I’m floating.”

That’s good. Theriault, who’s been watching, explains that a well-designed snowshoe should have “excellent flotation” on snow and shouldn’t become weighted down with clumps of snow on the webbing. “You want the snow to go right through,” he says. That way, “snowshoeing is like walking on a cloud. It’s a great feeling.”

Theriault, 65, is the third of 11 children and learned the craft more than 50 years ago working alongside his father, Edmond Theriault, who celebrated his 99th birthday this year and now lives in Scarborough. “My father and I still talk about snowshoes all the time,” says the younger Theriault. Wanting to help preserve the know-how of snowshoe making, the father and son have self-published several highly detailed books and videos about the process, including an illustrated, 278-page volume titled Brown Ash Snowshoes: A North American Tradition that they sell online.

Green, Not Steam

First, find a tree to harvest. That’s the start of snowshoe craft-ing, according to Theriault. He surmises that only about one in a hundred brown ash or white ash trees has the right characteristics: strength, a straight trunk, and the flexibility to be bent into the wooden frames of the shoes. “A good-bending tree is hard to find,” he says, “and it needs to be green wood. We don’t use steam, because if you use green wood, you can bend it.”

This is done by bending strips of the freshly milled wood around a mold and using clamps to hold the bent wood in place. Theriault shows us around the workshop and tools the business has used through the years. There are vices and hammers, drills and metal spikes, and a worktable made from a modified sewing table. Lately he’s been teaching Babin to stretch the rawhide—Theriault prefers rawhide from cattle rather than deer, moose, or beaver. It’s a thicker rawhide that, once stretched, he says is more durable for lacing and knotting around the snowshoe frames and for weaving webbing that’s open enough for snow to fall through.

Among the snowshoes arranged in the deep snow, Theriault points out the two common shapes of traditional snowshoe frames. The cross-country style (also known as the pickerel or Alaskan) is rounded in the front and finishes in a pointed tail at the back; it’s good for breaking trails in deep snow. The popular “modified bear paw” is not as long and is rounded at both ends.

Theriault is passionate about sharing his knowledge. He leads workshops, creates exhibits, and gives demonstrations. And he teaches apprentices like Babin—typically one youth or adult each year. “I want to let people know how to make snowshoes,” he says. “I’m looking to help keep this alive.”

Snowshoes & Snowbirds

Potato fields stretch out to the horizon, buried in white. After the Theriault visit, photographer Peter Frank Edwards and I drive out along Route 1, which follows the St. John River; the Canadian province of Quebec is on the opposite shore. This is one of the snowiest corners of Maine this season, and I’m ready to find a trail to try. There are ample choices. In downtown Madawaska, several men have just parked, pulling their snowmobiles in trailers. “It’s been raining in Freeport, so we made the five-hour drive here,” one man says. “We’ve found the snow.”

I’ve brought a pair of snowshoes that are the modern variety, made of lightweight aluminum and vinyl. After a cozy overnight at the Inn of Acadia in Madawaska—the building was originally built in the 1950s as a convent—photographer Peter Frank and I go for a snowshoe hike on the Four Seasons Trail Association’s property, about a half-mile up one of the town’s hillside roads. He rents a pair of well-worn snowshoes in the lodge for five dollars, and we hit the trails. It’s an extensive network with groomed trails for skiing and narrower woodland trails for snowshoeing. We see several skiers glide past, and a few others on the snowshoe trail.

In my modern, machine-made footgear, I don’t feel the sensation of floating on the snow. In fact, we both sink, deeply, whenever we step off the trail that’s been broken by other snowshoe hikers. But it’s a remarkable excursion—especially in a winter that’s been lacking in snow on the coast. Deer and rabbit tracks weave through the snowshoe trail most of the way, and we cross glades and dip into woods and follow the three-mile Middle Loop trail to higher elevations, passing under birch and spruce trees.

When I begin to hear bird chatter, it sounds almost as if spring itself is awakening. We’ve reached the Bird Feeder section of the Four Seasons Trail system. Several feeders are set up here at an intersection of ski and snowshoe trails. There’s a flurry of wings and beaks and birdsong—and several squirrels foraging the seed hulls scattered in the snow below. I see chickadees, nuthatches, and evening grosbeaks the color of a banana peel. I watch awhile, realizing what a gift it is to snowshoe recreational trails on a singular, snow-deep morning.

“What a beautiful day,” I say to a man trekking up the hill when we eventually make our way back down toward the Four Seasons lodge. He’s wearing snowshoes, too. “Yes,” he says, smiling as he steps. “It’s perfect.”

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The post A Master and His Apprentice Keep the Art of Snowshoe Making Alive appeared first on The Maine Mag.

Four English cocker spaniels are running in front of us, blurs of fur and flapping ears disappearing in the woods for a few minutes before reemerging to cross our path. The dogs appear to be following an invisible thread that weaves back and forth through the brush and bare saplings.

It’s late November and barely over freezing. I move the 20-gauge over-under shotgun to my left hand so I can blow warm air on my right, trying to return feeling to my fingers and thumb. We’re about an hour northwest of Bangor, walking on an offshoot of an offshoot that spiders out from Stud Mill Road, a well-maintained gravel logging road that runs parallel to Route 9 from Milford to Washington County.

Jeff McEvoy, the owner of Weatherby’s hunting and fishing camp in Grand Lake Stream, is guiding this trip. He doesn’t have a gun, but he’s armed with a whistle around his neck that he blows to give directions to his dogs—one note to stop, two to move or change direction. McEvoy keeps his eldest dog, Molly, a chocolate cocker spaniel, close because she’s lost her hearing. She isn’t much help, but he still takes her out because this is what his dogs love most: hunting for grouse.

Known by most hunters here as a partridge (or pa’tridge), the ruffed grouse is a plump, brownish gray bird with a ruff of dark feathers around its neck, a black stripe across its tail, and feathers pointing up on its head. It’s the most widely distributed game bird in the United States, but its population has shrunk across the eastern part of the country. Maine is still a stronghold for ruffed grouse, so people travel here every fall to try their luck at shooting the elusive bird.

We’re joined by McEvoy’s son, Carson; client-turned-hunting-buddy David Swayze; and photographer Michael D. Wilson. Swayze is running his own dog, Ellie, a blond English cocker spaniel that’s the daughter of Gus and Curly Fry—McEvoy’s other dogs out with us today—and granddaughter of Molly. English cocker spaniels are flushing dogs, meaning they flush birds, or drive them from their cover. When these dogs catch the scent of a grouse, their nose will be on the ground, and they’ll stop, backtrack, and run in tight circles.

One of the dogs appears to smell something, and suddenly a whoosh of feathers and air shoots out of the brush to our left. Carson, who is walking in front, pulls his gun up and fires a shot, then another. But in a few seconds, the grouse is gone. On our drive in, McEvoy points out habitats that may contain grouse. The forest here is actively managed; trees are regularly harvested, creating early-successional habitat. We’re looking for forests around 10 to 15 years old, with trees as wide as a fist, he says, as he holds up his clenched hand.

Ruffed grouse depend on the food and cover provided by forests that have recently grown back after a disturbance like a cutting or fire. Early-successional species like aspen, birch, alder, and pin cherry tend to grow quickly in areas with a lot of sun, but over time they get taken over by shade-tolerant species like spruce and fir, McEvoy says.

McEvoy has been hunting in this area for decades. He’s seen the forest go through its lifecycles as it’s cut and grows back, all the while waiting for the sweet spots when it’s full of ruffed grouse. “In the moment, an area seems like it will be good forever, but in reality it will only be good for a few years,” he says.

Elsewhere in the eastern U.S., grouse populations have fallen precipitately—at least 50 percent over the past two decades, according to a December 2020 report from the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies’ Eastern Grouse Working Group. In the mid-Atlantic region, populations have declined by an average of 84 percent, according to the report, which blamed loss of young forests as the primary driver. Development has fragmented and eliminated habitat across the eastern U.S., while a reduction in forestry management, leaving only mature forest in some areas, has further reduced habitat.

Another emerging threat is the mosquito-borne West Nile virus. States like Maine that still have quality grouse habitat (especially true in Maine’s millions of acres of undeveloped North Woods) can rebound from years with high virus numbers, says Kelsey Sullivan, wildlife biologist for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s Migratory and Upland Game Bird Program.

How you should shoot grouse is a matter of debate among hunters. Some believe that the only sportsmanlike way to kill a grouse is to shoot it when it’s in flight, but there’s a long tradition of driving logging roads in search of grouse and shooting them as they stand. The cultural divide extends to the nomenclature—there’s a saying that it’s “partridge” if shot on the ground and “grouse” if shot on the wing.

The stereotypes of the out-of-state wing-shooter, decked out in pricey gear with an expensive bird dog and expensive side-by-side shotgun, and of the flannel-shirted road-shooter, with an old 12-gauge and a pickup truck, are both grounded in reality, but most hunters don’t fit neatly into those boxes.

“You’re able to put your wits up against the king.”

Sullivan says the long-argued debate comes down to personal preference. He recently stopped hunting for grouse, but when he did, he would just hunt from the road. “I’m hunting for the food, so I take what’s available to me, whatever means necessary,” Sullivan says. “If you kill something on the wing it is no different than killing it on the road. To me, it’s the same—you’re killing something.”

McEvoy doesn’t have a problem with ground-shooting, but hunting for him is more about working with his dogs and being outside than killing birds. Most of the time he’s guiding—running his dogs for others—and not hunting. “Raising the dogs, living with the dogs, and sharing my passion with the dogs is what really works for me,” he says. “Now it’s rare I even carry a gun.”

Sam Day, an avid hunter who recently joined the Natural Resources Council of Maine’s board of directors, says he isn’t a purist when it comes to grouse. He’s fine with taking one off the road, but that’s not how he usually hunts. Day grew up grouse hunting but didn’t go more than a few times a year until he got his dog, a German wirehaired pointer named Hank, in spring of 2020. Since then, he’s been hunting with Hank as much as possible, 100 to 120 days a year, for a variety of game, including rabbits, ducks, and upland birds. For Day, getting a grouse is just a cherry on top of a day outside working his dog.

If driving down Millinocket logging roads and shooting “road chickens” is one end of the spectrum, hunting with pointing dogs is the other end. While flushing dogs like McEvoy and Swayze’s spaniels try to get the birds to take to the air, pointing dogs find the grouse and then freeze, or point, with one paw tucked to the side and nose aimed toward the bird. The hunter then must approach where they think the bird is and put themselves in a position to shoot once the grouse takes flight. “It is by far the most technical,” Day says. “Your dog needs to be in their greatest state of critical thinking. To have success they need to analyze their senses in a more nuanced way than anywhere else.”

One of Maine’s most prominent pointing dog experts is Jason Carter. His day job is teaching physical education for Regional School Unit 1 in Bath, but he also runs Merrymeeting Kennels in Topsham, which specializes in breeding and training German shorthaired pointers. He’s a judge for the North American Versatile Hunting Dog Association and writes hunting articles for USA Today and other publications. When I told a friend I would be hunting grouse with someone who had German shorthaired pointers, he asked if it was Carter.

The ruffed grouse season runs from the end of September to December 31; most hunters will stop once deer season begins, at the end of October or beginning of November. But, for many bird dog owners like Carter, grouse hunting is a year-round commitment. The hunters are training the high-energy dogs throughout the year, starting when they’re puppies. They’re scouting possible habitats before the start of the season. And, once the season begins, they’re hunting as much as they can and for as long as they can.

“A road hunter is investing in one month,” Carter says. “We’re investing in 12 months.”

Carter’s passion for hunting is based on his love of the grouse, a passion passed down by his mother who, when he was a boy, would pull apart the feathers of birds they shot to show him how to identify the sex. Carter says grouse tend to live in a fairly small area, so they know every possible avenue to escape when you approach them. While the dog stays still as it points to where the bird was, the grouse isn’t going to do the same. You must figure out where the bird most likely is and position yourself to have an unobstructed shot when it takes flight.

“You’re able to put your wits up against the king,” Carter says. “One of the hardest birds to shoot is the grouse. They have amazing survival instincts.”

That’s why Carter feels shooting a grouse in any other way than in flight would cheapen the memory. He was raised to view shooting birds on the ground or in trees as taboo. “There is a lot of value in the process,” he says. “The product of harvesting a grouse is just icing on the cake. We’re more into the process than harvesting the game.”

Carter’s family has had a hunting camp in St. Albans for decades. On former paper company land, the property began as a deer hunting camp for his father, but once his mother and other women started visiting to hunt grouse, everyone else followed suit, and it’s been a grouse camp ever since.

In early December, Carter invited me and Wilson there to hunt with other members of North American Versatile Hunting Dog Association’s Yankee chapter, including Day, whom Carter taught how to train his wirehaired pointer, Hank.

We head out to logging roads to hunt, but before we split up, another hunter, Sarah DeVan, joins us with her one-year-old daughter, Annie, and her German shorthaired pointer, Comet. DeVan and her husband, Stuart, own the 1774 Inn in Phippsburg, and she grew up bird hunting with her parents. When she says she’ll put Annie in the stroller and then grab her gun, I think she’s joking. She’s not, and soon she’s pushing the stroller down the logging road with her gun in hand.

DeVan, who also has a three-year-old son, says Carter taught her how to hunt with her kids because he did the same. When her dog’s collar beeps that he’s on point, she’ll park the stroller and go take her shot. “Being in the woods with them, that feeling of being with your friends and family watching the dogs work, I wanted them to have that from the beginning,” DeVan says.

Carter, Wilson, and I split off to hunt with Carter’s dog, Autumn. Hunting with a pointing dog is different from hunting with a flushing dog because where the dog goes, you go. Instead of running back and forth on the edge of the road like McEvoy’s cocker spaniels, Autumn is going deep into the forest.

The only path we’re following is Autumn’s, and the thick covert of this young forest makes for a challenging hike. After an especially difficult spell of bushwhacking, Carter points out that trees grow toward the sun and create natural corridors. We turn slightly to the left, and I discover he’s right: a path appears in front of us from what was previously a dense mass of trees and brush. “The woods will tell you everything,” he says. “If you walk right, it’s easy.”

At one point, the trees open to an expansive bog. Yellow, elevated tufts of grass stick out from the frozen water and mud and spread out in front of us. “There’s an allure to being out here,” Carter says as he looks out at the landscape. “You’re all alone, and you feel like the only one who’s ever been here before.” He’s right, and as I catch my breath, I think about the journey that brought me to this untouched beauty: leaving my house in southern Maine before the sun rose, driving to Carter’s camp and down logging roads, and following Autumn’s nose through the woods.

We keep walking, and soon Carter’s control beeps. Autumn’s on point. When we move ahead, we see her facing the edge of a massive log—more than 20 feet long and a few feet wide. Carter whispers to me to take a counterclockwise circle around the log so I’ll be able to shoot when the bird flushes from behind it.

As I walk around the log, I feel my heart beating beneath my jacket. My right thumb is firmly pressed against the safety, and my index finger is extended straight against the trigger guard, the shotgun pointed slightly upward, ready to mount it against my shoulder and swing toward the bird.

My ears are alive, and I hear every piece of underbrush and twigs crunching under my Muck boots. My eyes scan the widest field possible while minding the branches and trees around me and trying to keep a clear shooting lane. Then I hear it: the explosion of flapping wings as the grouse takes flight. But it’s coming from behind my right shoulder, not the log in front of me. I spin as I raise the shotgun to my shoulder, sweep the barrel toward the flash of gray, and squeeze the trigger. It’s too late. The grouse escapes by one of its numerous exit points.

When, months later, I talk to Carter about the day, he recounts it as if it happened yesterday. He tells me that hunting is about the process, not the product. For me to have the opportunity to shoot at that grouse took years of Carter training Autumn, and Carter’s decades of experience in the woods. “Seeing that dog work that grouse so well and being able to put you in the position to shoot a ghost of the forest, that’s everything,” he says.

A week after my hunting trip with Carter, I’m walking my dog, a stocky black Lab named Moose, through a nature preserve in southern Maine. The scenery looks similar to the hunt—smallish, bare trees, a thin layer of crunchy snow beneath my feet—and there is no one but me and Moose on the trails.

I think back to that time in the bog and what Carter told me. Despite my years spent exploring Maine’s outdoors, it’s rare that I “feel like the only one who’s ever been here before”—even now, alone in the woods with my dog. No one else is around us, but there are signs of the people who have been here before me: the worn path beneath my feet, the trail markers on the trees, and the cut logs along the trail.

I miss that time cutting a path through the woods with Carter and his dog. Walking through forests where no one has made a trail, guided by an animal’s nose, following the scent of a bird. A feeling of being the first to discover a place. Except for, of course, the grouse.

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The post On the Prowl for the Elusive Ruffed Grouse appeared first on The Maine Mag.