When it comes to building houses, you don’t have to be a little pig or a big wolf to know that wood beats straw and brick beats wood. But for the lucky folks of Chester, Vermont, there’s something even better than brick: stone. The town is home to a unique collection of snecked ashlar buildings, whose aesthetic qualities elevate them beyond simply being well-built and strong and into the realm of folk art. Composing the Stone Village Historic District, 10 of them line Route 103, known locally as North Street, with another 40 or more scattered throughout the surrounding area of south-central Vermont.

First, some definitions. “Ashlar” is cut and dressed stone, and it makes sense that the word comes down from the medieval Latin arsella, meaning a little board or shingle, since ashlar stones are usually laid up in horizontal bands. “Snecked” is a bit funkier, if Scottish dialect can bring the funk. In Scotland, a sneck is a latch or small bolt used to secure a door. In a snecked ashlar wall, relatively thin stones of different sizes make up the exterior surface pattern. The smallest ones—the snecks—serve both to fill in the gaps left by the bigger ones and, crucially, to penetrate through to an interior rubble wall, not unlike a series of bolts, acting the way metal ties do in a modern brick veneer wall.

But what, pray tell, is a Scottish word doing in Vermont? Like so many American things, the word and the building technique it describes came in thanks to immigration. Snecked ashlar construction is common in Scotland and the border lands with England, where tough weather and a relative lack of trees make it a natural choice. Scottish masons first arrived in Canada in the early 1800s, bringing their skills to bear on forts and canals, where stone outdid wood. In the early 1830s, some of them were hired to build a large stone factory in Cavendish, Vermont, just north of Chester.

Word must have spread quickly, because in 1834, Dr. Ptolemy Edson, a forward-minded leading figure in Chester, hired local brothers Addison and Wiley Clark to build him a Federal-style home using the new (to the Vermonters) technique. The brothers, part of a family with Scottish roots that had been in Vermont since the 1700s, likely learned snecked ashlar construction from their overseas kinsmen, possibly even on the Cavendish job. It’s been said that Edson paid each of his masons $5 a week, along with a gallon of good rum.

It’s not known whether Edson was taken by the technique’s novelty, its looks, its snugness against the huff-and-puff of Vermont winters, or something else, but he became a snecked ashlar booster to his neighbors. Addison and Wiley Clark—joined by a third brother, Orrison, as well as Arvin Earle and other colleagues—built stone buildings at about a one-a-year clip for the next decade, lining a half-mile stretch of North Street with Federal and Greek Revival residences, a one-room schoolhouse, and the village’s centerpiece, the First Universalist Church of 1845, which seats 300.

The Clarks surely must have appreciated the economic advantage of a building material that was literally underfoot and more or less free for the taking. Nearby Mount Flamstead, where they lived, is rich with gneiss and schist, metamorphic stone that splits relatively easily into angular pieces, better for facing a building than for wall-building. They and their farmer neighbors took it from the surface or from shallow quarries, harvesting it off-season and transporting it over the snow by sled in preparation for the summer construction season.

Modern renditions of snecked masonry adhere to a strict protocol using three sizes of stone. The Scottish master stonemason Bobby Watt describes them as “jumpers” or “risers” (square, or almost square, or up to three times as long as they are high); “levelers” (usually at least twice as long and up to five times as long as they are high); and “snecks”(smaller pieces that enable the mason to make up the differential in height between the top surfaces of the levelers and the risers). Laid up horizontally, the different-height stones key the rows together to make a strong wall.

The work of the Clarks and their friends is far looser and free—and sometimes downright exuberant, with huge risers surrounded by a bevy of attendant levelers and snecks, a pair of triangular stones kissing to form a vertical bow tie, and parallelogram levelers interlocking in a line. Everywhere is the interplay of the stones’ color and texture, with glimmers of mica across every facade. You can almost hear the delight of the crew as they grabbed the perfect next stone from the various piles they’d assembled. (Maybe the rum helped.)

Holding it all together was the mortar, apparently a secret recipe. Some reports have it containing moss; others describe slaking the lime slowly over fires of green wood. Whatever the trick, it worked, as most is still sticking strong after nearly two centuries. When the exterior walls were complete, carpenters moved in to hang timber joists from wall pockets in the interior. Walls were furred out, providing some insulative air space, and lath and plaster made for smoothly finished rooms befitting a prosperous town such as Chester.

Like ardent art enthusiasts, today’s residents cherish and celebrate their pieces of folk sculpture. Nicholas Boke, former minister of the First Universalist Parish, happily shows the spot in the side pews where a farmhand used to lean his freshly bear-greased head against the stone wall. A square piece of wallpaper would be put up to cover the stain, only to be quickly soaked through. It took a full renovation to conquer the problem.

In 2019, Joanne Young and her husband, Mike, moved into the belfried schoolhouse at 186 North Street that she had attended back in the 1950s, converted to a home by a previous owner and complete with the 48-star flag she pledged allegiance to as a first-grader. Just across the street, at 189, Polly and Ian Montgomery have restored the Gideon Lee House into a five-star Airbnb outfitted with solar panels and Tesla batteries.

And at 146 North Street, Jon Clark, president of the Chester Historical Society, shows off the room where the original owner once sold sheepskin boots and moccasins he made on-site, his sheep on the hillside behind the house. The 14-stone arch over the front door commemorates Vermont’s place in the Union.

“I love the Stone Village,” Clark says. “And my next project is to finally figure out if I’m related to the guys who built it.”

Visiting Chester, Vermont

Exploring on foot: Walking-tour brochures created by Chester Townscape, a committee of the Chester Community Alliance, can be found at many locations around town as well as by going to chestervt.gov.

Staying overnight: The writer and the photographer for this story each spent the night in a historic stone building in Chester: the Gideon Lee House and the Cairn of Vermont cottage, both of which can be found at airbnb.com.

The post The Stone Houses of Chester, Vermont appeared first on New England.

I first visited Stonington, Maine, in the summer of 2003 to write a story for Yankee about the community’s proudly held identity as a fishing town. Even then, Stonington was an anomaly. While other main streets and harbors along the Maine coast had become the shiny domain of tourist shops and pleasure boats, here, on the rocky outermost tip of remote Deer Isle, lived just over 1,000 people whose lives were still largely built around what they hauled from the sea.

The challenges Stonington faced back then—tighter regulations, increasing costs, wild swings in the price of lobster—still confront the town more than two decades later. But now it’s increasingly feeling the threat of climate change, too. Early last year, two powerful storms slammed into the island, cutting off Stonington from the mainland, devastating businesses, and swamping the public pier. The Gulf of Maine’s warming waters, meanwhile, are putting the very survival of the state’s signature lobster industry at risk. Even for a community long accustomed to dealing with headwinds, these latest developments beg the question: What will it take for New England’s largest lobster port to endure?

Last June, I returned to Stonington to find out.   

* * * * *

Robbie Eaton is ready to get on the water.

It’s pushing 5:30 on a Thursday morning in early June, and for the past half hour the 24-year-old has been prepping his boat, the Legacy, a mint-green 35-footer docked at the Stonington Fish Pier. It’s not quite summer but it’s starting to feel like it, warming up even at this hour, and the surrounding harbor is quiet, a testament to just how early the workday starts around here. In Maine’s largest lobster port, many of its 350 boats motored off nearly two hours ago.

If Eaton were intent on chasing some of the season’s very earliest shedders, he would have joined them; however, his focus these past few weeks has been the state’s short halibut season. He’s licensed to catch 25 fish for the month, and with half of them already landed he’s determined to finish strong. The $12 a pound he’s fetching is decent, but the real value of the work is that it’s something different. When you lobster most of the year, it’s nice to break up the routine.

“I ain’t even got any of my traps set,” confesses Eaton, and takes a final swig from his can of Full Throttle energy drink. “I’ll start doing that next week.”

Eaton is a big guy who moves with the unrushed pace of someone who has spent most of his life working the ocean. Eatons have plied Stonington’s waters for generations, and in this tight-knit community of familiar names, theirs is one of the most well-known.

As Eaton prepares to launch his workday, his father, Mike, sits behind the wheel of his idling truck parked nearby, chatting with Casey Soper, a local bait dealer.

“I’ve not stopped this week,” Soper says. “Spruce Head three times. Rockland three more times. Boothbay. All over. I’m running bait everywhere.”

“At a high price,” says Mike, with a laugh.

“Goddamn right!”

Mike turns his attention to his son. “Hey, Robbie! Grab another fish box in the back of Casey’s truck.”

Eaton lifts out a final batch of bait and climbs down to his boat. Soon, he’s cruising the still waters of Stonington Harbor under a streak of sun that has finally broken the clouds. The two older men take in the moment.

“I’m staying put today,” Mike says, as his eight-week-old black Lab climbs over his lap. “I’m just going to play with her. I’m sort of semi-retired at this point.”

“More like just tired,” Soper cracks.

Even amid the men’s banter about this year’s incredible pogie run, and chopping it up over Mike’s father’s once-dominant lobster boat racing (“He had big horsepower and the balls to drive it,” Soper recalls), more serious topics can’t be avoided. A decade ago, Mike was regularly fishing six days a week, hauling 800 traps. Today, he’s reduced his schedule by a third and cut his trap load to 600.

“Honestly, I hate lobstering,” he says. “It’s become such a cutthroat business. The price of bait is high. Fuel is high. And the atmosphere around it has changed. People have gotten greedy.”

Soper jumps in. “How long have you been on your own?”

“Thirty-five years.”

“And how much has the price of lobster changed in those 35 years?” (Though the figure has, in fact, gone up and down over that time, Soper’s point is well taken: In 2023, the most recent year for Maine’s catch data, lobster averaged $4.95 a pound—a little over 30 cents more than what it fetched in 2005.)

“Everything else has gone through the roof,” Mike says. “We can’t set our own prices, because it’s considered price fixing. If you said, ‘I’m not selling my lobsters for that amount,’ the buyer would just say too bad and go on to the next boat. But then when the pandemic hit, it got to be $8 a pound. They showed their real hand.”

These are hard facts that complicate what Mike wants for his son, Robbie, and his older daughter, Sara. Both are committed to making their living on the water. But perhaps for the first time in the family’s long Stonington history, the older generation would prefer the younger one didn’t follow in its footsteps.

“It’s not like you get to really enjoy your time on the water,” Mike says. “You have to fish hard all summer and through the fall just to make it through the winter. When I look at the kind of future my kids may have, I’m not sure they have one.” He sighs. “But it’s all they want to do. There’s no sense in talking to them about doing something different.”

In one of the last working fishing ports left in the Northeast, the very identity of Stonington is being put to the test in both familiar ways and new ones. By a housing shortage and the increasing real estate prices it helps fuel. By wealthy second-home owners. By climate change. So, what becomes of a community when its core industry can no longer support the families that depend on it?

“I have nothing against a place like Boothbay, but when you go there it’s not even the same place that it used to be,” says Stonington’s longtime town manager, Kathleen Billings. “Same thing with southern Maine. Did [a tourist economy] really benefit Maine much? I just don’t think it did. When you start losing your natural-resource-based economies, you lose so many other things, whether that’s inland or on the ocean. I think Maine needs to take a really hard look at itself and decide if it still wants to be Maine or Vacationland.”

* * * * *

For much of its existence, Stonington’s remoteness has been more of a virtue than an impediment. This is not a town you just stumble across. Three hours north of Portland and 60 miles from I-95, Stonington sits on the southern half of Deer Isle, an island about two-thirds up the Maine coast and the gateway to Merchant’s Row, an expanse of water running five nautical miles long and one of the centerpieces of Maine’s $400-million-a-year lobster industry.

“Being nestled between Bar Harbor and Camden, we often get skipped over,” says Travis Fifield, a town selectperson and the fourth generation to run the family seafood dealer, Fifield Lobster Co. “You figure when it comes to a coastal town this pretty, you’re going to drive down a Main Street filled with gift shops and bright signs. But it’s really unexpectedly quiet and it feels manageable. At times, when you’re driving around, you’re on this remote stretch by the water and it can feel like you’re at the edge of the world.”

In recent years, though, that allure has reached a broader audience, and Stonington’s rising profile has affected who can now call it home. Median house prices, fueled by the weekly-rental market and second-home ownership, have shot up to over $400,000. The lack of affordable housing has gnawed at the community’s very ability to sustain itself: Contractors are starved for local plumbers, electricians, and carpenters. The local schools struggle to retain teachers. Meanwhile, the predawn hours bring a steady stream of commuting lobstermen from the mainland.

On a prime summer morning, often as early as 3 a.m., Richard Turner Jr. is a part of that commuter traffic. During my first visit to Stonington in 2003, I spent a full day on the water with Turner, then 36, and his father, with whom he’d worked since age 13. Turner spoke with awe of men like his father, hardworking captains who’d built successful lives and raised families doing the only thing they ever wanted to do. “All my heroes were fishermen,” he told me then. “Sometimes I wish I had done something else, but as a kid I couldn’t stay off the water.” He was skeptical, however, that the same life his father had forged would be accessible to him. “In 20 years, I don’t believe working people, normal people, will be able to afford to live here,” he said. 

He had no idea how right he’d be. He’s 56 now, and in the warmer months he lobsters with his cousin, Hilton, before hooking on with a scallop boat in the winter. For the past several years he and his girlfriend, Faye, have split their time between two locations: Stonington in winter, when rentals are less expensive, and a mobile home park in Orland, a good 50 miles from his hometown, in summer.

Orland is where I meet Turner on an early June afternoon. It’s been just a few days since he moved from Stonington, and he is still settling into his summer routine. We sit at a picnic table at the mobile home park, and as we talk, Turner, a gray baseball hat perched atop his head, picks away at a pack of Montego Reds.  

“I miss the salt, I miss seeing Isle au Haut,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty here. We can walk to a lake from where we are, but a lake doesn’t do much for me.” Turner raises his hands and holds them a foot apart. “I’m not interested in catching fish this big. I used to catch sharks as big as this table. You see these guys posting a pic of themselves on Instagram holding up a brook trout and I’m like, I’m proud of you, buddy, but to me that’s just not exciting.”

Health issues have slowed Turner down over the years, and he fears that he may only have another season or two in him. “I just can’t keep up with things the way I used to,” he says. “I’m getting slower. My reactions are slower. My eyesight isn’t what it was, so I miss things. You gotta be in your 20s to be doing what I’m doing. Every second counts—and if you step in the wrong spot with the rope, you’re in a mess.”

Turner has mixed feelings about what’s happened to his hometown. In part, he feels like a casualty of its success—that in missing out on the early years of a lobster boom that began to take off in 2009, he missed the opportunity to create his own nest egg. An influx of younger lobstermen and people “from away” means he also doesn’t recognize many of the faces in town.

But as Stonington has built and attracted fortunes, he also sees a town that looks prettier and more upscale than it used to. Main Street has a few new restaurants, the Opera House theater has been refurbished, and many of the homes don’t appear as tired as they once did.

“When I was a kid, a family would fight over who would get the house after someone died and it would sit empty for a bunch of years,” he says. “Now those houses are fixed up. I think it’s been pretty positive for the town.”

As someone who’s always called Stonington home but now can’t afford to live there, Turner is remarkably sanguine. He recalls a piece of fishing advice he received years ago from an old-timer.

“I had this place where I was catching a lot of scallops, and one day after I’d been off the water for a few days, I went back and didn’t catch a thing,” he says. Turns out, the few friends he’d told about the spot had gone and cleaned it out. “This guy just told me, ‘It’s eat or be eaten. Don’t take it personal.’ And it’s the same thing with this housing market. Hey, if I could have afforded [the houses in Stonington], I’d have bought them up, too. Maybe I’d have bought every last one of them. Who am I to complain?”

* * * * *

Latin pop music blares from a speaker as Tyler Cousins motors his boat, the Breezy Dawn, to the docks of Stonington’s largest seafood dealer, the Lobster Co-op. Waiting for him are three men from Puerto Rico who had traveled north for the $18.50-an-hour jobs that Maine twenty-somethings no longer want to fill. The trio includes a 32-year-old nurse named Luis, a new father who says the pay is better than anything he could earn back home at a hospital. “Maine is beautiful and I like the work,” he tells me. The men arrived in May, live in housing right on the dock, and will return home in December. 

Cousins bops his head to the music as he powers his boat down. It’s still early in the lobstering season, and the 36-year-old Stonington native is taking the day off after hauling in a few hundred pounds yesterday afternoon. Though his head is shaved, he sports a long beard, and he wears camo shorts, a red T-shirt, and a pair of sandals that do little to slow him as he moves briskly around the boat’s stern, offloading empty traps. At the same time, he’s coaching one of the dockworkers, John, who’s still learning how to use the motorized lift that transfers the traps onto a trailer.

Cousins watches one trap dangle in front of him. “You take my teeth out and I won’t be happy,” he tells John, and laughs.

Several minutes later, Cousins is back behind the wheel of his boat to make the slow, short motor through the harbor to fuel and bait up for tomorrow’s run. In a town where a lobster license is practically a birthright, Cousins learned his trade at the hands of his grandfather, Dick Bridges, who was running his first boat before the age of 10 and even now, at 80, still fishes every day.

Despite Cousins’s best efforts to leave lobstering behind, “I realized early on that living on land, getting a paycheck, dealing with people—that wasn’t for me,” he says. “I went to school for hydraulics and diesel mechanics and even moved out to San Diego at one point and worked at a marina: lived on a boat, had a great life, but I was bored. I came back.”

He slows as he approaches the bait dock. “I like the chaos of never knowing if the job is done. Everything is up in the air: the weather, the lobsters, the mechanics.”

Gliding to a stop, he looks up at the two men on the dock. Both are familiar faces. “You got anything special?” he barks.

They drop down six 40-pound bags of frozen redfish. “You sure you can lift those bags in front of your friend?” teases one of the workers. Cousins smiles, waves him off, then rumbles over to the fueling station. That’s $188 for the bait and another $667 in diesel.

“The expenses pile up fast,” says Cousins. “During the heat of the season, you can be up around a grand a day. But I haul alone, so the good days are really good. I can’t haul as much as I’d like, but I don’t have the headaches of teaching someone the system or the problems of just working with another person.”

He cocks a grin. “And to do the same job others do with two people, that makes me kind of a badass.”

Cousins is at an interesting point in his life. He’s not so old that he can’t just break off and start a new career. He’s watched friends leave lobstering for good and heard others talk about doing the same. But just as quickly as doubts begin to enter his mind, they go away.   

“I’m building a business,” he says. “And I’m getting better at it every year. There are lobsters out there. There are always lobsters out there. You just need to know where to look to find them.”

* * * * *

In mid-January of 2024, back-to-back nor’easters clobbered Stonington. High winds, heavy rain, and a rarely seen high tide wreaked havoc on the waterfront, pulling wharves from pilings, hurling debris out to sea and onto land, and flooding roads, businesses, and homes. Down at the town fish pier, assistant harbormaster Dana Webb watched as a four-foot wall of water rushed past his office building, flinging a boat onto the landing and relocating a pair of dumpsters. The pier’s main generator was swallowed whole by seawater.

Elsewhere in town, the waterfront’s electrical system was wiped out, while the Deer Isle Causeway was submerged by 18 inches of water, isolating islanders from the mainland. Private businesses also took a beating. At Fifield Lobster Co., a wharf that had been raised and rebuilt just two years earlier was overtaken by stormwater and had to be reset. Across Stonington it was much the same, with upgrades and rebuilds slated for the docks at both the Lobster Co-op and Isle au Haut Boat Services, all in the name of addressing what had happened and accounting for what could happen next. The uncertainties unleashed by climate change leave no other options. Unless, of course, Stonington ceases to be Stonington.

“People say, ‘Well, just retreat,’” Travis Fifield later told The New York Times. “We can’t retreat. We have to be here.”

Stonington town manager Kathleen Billings was at her home in North Deer Isle when the first and more powerful of the two storms rolled up early on the morning of January 10. “Everything got racked,” she says. “That surge came in and tore all the docks up. It was just devastating, but I also think it opened the eyes of a lot of people that these kinds of storms are real.”

Building resiliency is layered into every part of Billings’s job, and her office reflects the different projects that compete for her time. Desks and tables are stacked with blueprints, maps, and memos. There are grants to complete, project bids to pore over, and a schedule of meetings that at times can feel relentless. “It can be a lot,” says Billings, who has worked for Stonington since 1997 and been its town manager for the past 18 years.

Billings’s family were among Deer Isle’s original European settlers, and today their name is etched into various parts of its economy—notably Billings Diesel & Marine, one of the biggest full-service boatyards between Boston and Nova Scotia. But Billings’s perspective on her hometown isn’t colored by nostalgia. She speaks in meaty paragraphs about the toll that federal regulations have taken on the local fishing economy and the threats it also faces from climate change and cost of living.

Few Maine towns of this size have been as proactive around these issues as Stonington. Over the past year, Billings’s office has spearheaded town discussions about workforce housing, sea-level rise, land management, and aquaculture. A recently established town-administered resiliency fund uses donations from seasonal residents to purchase private waterfront and make it accessible to fishermen. Restrictions on short-term rentals earned voter approval in 2023, and even before last January’s storms, plans were drawn up to raise the fish pier.

With so much of Stonington’s income dependent on the sea, what’s at stake is not just a single industry, Billings says, but a community’s whole way of life. 

“We are a fishing town, and it’s important we maintain that—not just for the fishermen but for everyone else who benefits from it,” she says. “But we only have so much working waterfront, and with the sea-level rise and the storms, how many times do you think these guys can rebuild? Once that waterfront goes to hotels and restaurants, you’re never going to get it back. It’s gone forever.”

And what fills that void, says Billings, is not a one-for-one replacement. A viable Stonington, she argues, is not a tourist-heavy Stonington, whose harbor is stocked with pleasure boats and an economy that relies on a 12-week window to make most of its money.

“I’m all for diversity, but I don’t think a seasonal economy is the answer,” Billings says. “It’s really hard to have stable families, to have a school and other businesses that can subsist and spin off from that. I know some people don’t always see it that way. But if we are going to stay a strong community, we need to sink our teeth into year-round jobs that can help people.”

Whether those year-round jobs can reliably be built long-term off or around the lobster industry is another question. In 2021, Stonington pulled in a record-setting $76 million worth of lobster—nearly $21 million more than Maine’s next-largest port, Vinalhaven—undergirding the state’s record haul of just over $724 million. But those numbers are seen as an anomaly. A near-decade-long boom that began around 2009 has given way to a series of uneven years.

“We have seen a decrease, but I’m not sure you can say that’s a biological signal yet,” says Carla Guenther, chief scientist for the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries in Stonington. “We’ve had a lot of demographic changes in the fishery and how the fishermen are participating [in studies]. But there’s definitely been a slowing of the catch. There was a time when you pretty much couldn’t avoid catching lobsters. You’d pull up a trap and it was full. But you talk to the experienced lobstermen and they’d say, ‘What goes up must come down.’ For others, the thought was, Let’s just ride this high.

“I wish we’d asked as a community if this boom was real,” she says, “because I think there may be a breaking point.”

* * * * *

Michael Joyce is hedging his bets against whether that breaking point might come. He’s 21 and, like Robbie Eaton, grew up here and hails from a long line of fishermen. But he hasn’t staked his future to the water. Instead, he completed an HVAC degree from Eastern Maine Community College, and over the past two years he’s been deep into a 4,000-hour apprenticeship to be an electrician. His mentor is Dana Webb, a veteran electrician as well as assistant harbormaster, and together they worked for much of last year to rebuild the fish pier’s electrical service. 

“I still want to fish, but slowly make it a hobby,” Joyce tells me as we sit in Webb’s office, a small building located at the head of the pier. “I want to keep it fun but still make the money. I look at guys I know, and I just see a lot of them just surviving, just making their payments. I don’t want to fall into that rabbit hole.”

For a time, Joyce thought he might have it in him to make fishing his life’s work. He started in the business at age 7 with his grandfather. A decade later, he had a 29-footer with an inboard engine large enough to haul 500 traps. “There’s a freedom to being on the water all day that is hard to beat,” he says.

Webb, 74, nods in agreement. He also grew up in Stonington, and while he worked 40 years as an electrician at the Bucksport paper mill, he always had a little boat with some traps to run on the side. “[Joyce] and I both talk about how nice it is,” he says. “Just to be out there, there ain’t nothin’ like it. But to do that job, you gotta have drive and you gotta love what you’re doing.”

“One hundred percent,” Joyce says.

Joyce lobstered most of 2021, when Maine shattered catch records. He talked to his parents about pursuing an offshore permit, but his family pushed back; his mom, in particular, lobbied him hard to create some options for himself. So, he enrolled in college and then watched as the lobster boom began to soften. In the time since, Joyce has straddled two versions of the future: one that is still “fully invested” in lobstering, and another that wants “protect” his years ahead.

“I really want to have [security] for my family and stuff, and I think [the electrician] trade is never going to go away,” he says.

Among Joyce’s buddies, “I have friends who are diehards,” he says. “They have the 40-foot boats and they’re all in. But I can tell they’re worried. I have [another] friend, he went to school for electrical engineering and he’s fishing, but he sees the same scenario [I do]. He’d like to start a business before long.”

Over the next several minutes, Joyce and Webb’s conversation becomes a highlight reel of the challenges that the fishing industry faces. But it’s still impossible for either man to shake his reverence for it. You can hear it in their voices. Joyce likes electrical work just fine—the order of it, the demand for precision, and, of course, the consistency of the paycheck—but something in him needs to be on the water. It’s who he is. It’s what he does. It’s where he truly prefers to be.

 “You’re your own boss,” he says. “You’re watching the sun rise, then you pull up these traps, and they’re full of lobsters. It’s really something special.”  

The post The Lobster Trap: Can Stonington, Maine, Survive the Tide of Change? appeared first on New England.

Mount Washington stands only 6,288 feet high, yet it’s said to have claimed the lives of more people per vertical foot than any other peak in the world. Set in the heart of the White Mountains region of New Hampshire, Mount Washington sees often-violent shifts in temperature, precipitation, and wind, making it exceedingly perilous. Dawn might find the peak calmly welcoming the sun’s warmth; by noon, fierce wind might rush up its slope every minute, carrying ice-laden clouds so thick that visibility nears zero.

Mount Washington’s notoriously changeable climate, however, makes the summit an ideal location for studying the wonders of our restless atmosphere. And in 1934, three men stationed there were doing just that when they experienced some of the most extreme conditions ever recorded.

The country was still in the depths of the Great Depression when Salvatore “Sal” Pagliuca, Wendell “Steve” Stephenson, and Alexander “Mac” McKenzie accepted the $5-a-week job of monitoring the wind, rain, and snow atop Mount Washington while sharing a small timber-framed cabin literally chained to the rocky peak. Pagliuca, a former electrical engineer with GE who had emigrated from Italy, led the effort. He spent his time carefully calibrating and recalibrating their anemometer, which was custom-designed to withstand the elements. Even so, the instrument, set on the roof of the cabin, needed constant care.

The biggest obstacle was rime ice, a phenomenon that transforms the barren summit of Mount Washington into a fantastic frosted confection. Rime occurs when supercooled water molecules carried by the wind hit something solid, such as the cup of an anemometer, or an antenna, or a scientist’s beard. The water molecules crystallize, accreting into dainty spears that point accusingly in the direction of the wind. Weighted with rime and pummeled by hurricane-force gusts over long periods of time, meteorological instruments break, freeze up, fly away. Even today, the observer’s job includes breaking the ice with a sledgehammer if necessary, and sometimes hourly under the most challenging circumstances.

In 1934, just as today, there was always something to fix or tweak on the mountaintop. Fresh from earning his engineering degree, Stephenson was a born tinkerer who earned his keep fixing anything and everything. McKenzie, meanwhile, was a recent Dartmouth grad who developed some expertise working the complex radio equipment of the time, as maintaining communication with others in the region was a key feature of the weather-reporting operation.

These being hard times, the trio would have been satisfied to have a bed, a roof, food in their bellies, and meaningful work. But they were also experienced mountaineers, drawn to the edge of life where beauty and death intensify each other. They were eager to test themselves in the unforgiving climate of Mount Washington.

* * * * *

Almost 90 years later, I decided to immerse myself in that same environment. I headed to Mount Washington from Boston on April 11, 2023. I chose the date because it was on the next day in 1934 that the three weather observers atop the summit recorded the highest wind speed on earth, an astonishing 231 miles per hour. It was a record that would not be broken for another 62 years, and still remains the fastest wind ever observed at a staffed weather station.

In hopes of experiencing something like that myself, a ferocity of wind I had never known, I would be spending the night at the Mount Washington Observatory (MWOBS). Unlike the 1934 trio, I’d be living in relative luxury in a bunker-like reinforced-concrete structure built in 1980 with modern conveniences. Having timed my excursion with the weekly observatory shift change and re-provisioning, I would reach the summit in a snowcat with three weather observers fresh from a week off, plus a married couple who had volunteered to prepare all the meals for a few weeks.

The observatory was having a banner year for extreme conditions. Two months earlier, on February 4, the temperature dipped to 47 degrees below zero, matching a record that had held for nine decades. During that bitter-cold day, 127-mile-per-hour wind gusts produced an impossible-to-imagine windchill of minus 109 degrees.

In preparing for my visit, I carefully followed the daunting packing list compiled by the MWOBS staff, creating my own small mountain of snow pants, hats, long underwear, goggles, mittens and gloves, snow boots, and a sleeping bag on my living room floor. The century of product development since 1934 was reassuring: Unlike the trio’s “Byrd cloth” parkas and pants, which were made of a densely woven cotton cloth promoted by polar explorer Richard Byrd, my gear was fabricated from light-but-tough synthetic fabrics filled with very fine strands of polyester microfibers.

During the week leading up to my trip, I had tracked the mountaintop forecast via the observatory’s website, and there were some promising signs that a storm might come through. But when we finally reached treeline in the snowcat, I saw that much of the Mount Washington Auto Road had been cleared of snow in anticipation of opening in late May. As we climbed, we encountered some sections that were still frozen, and I felt grateful for the spiked tractor treads that rumbled under us, sinking their steel teeth into the thick ice.

Arriving at the summit at noon, we were greeted by wind blowing up to 100 miles per hour—a sustained rush of air, like an indomitable river. To prevent the duffels and boxes of dried pasta, canned beans, and jars of peanut butter from being blown away, our driver backed the snowcat up to the service entrance of the MWOBS building so we could unload in its shelter.

I followed the staff down into the bowels of the building and tossed my duffel onto one of the two bunkbeds in my assigned room, named after McKenzie. It was like a ship’s cabin, cramped and dark. It was impossible to see through the cabin’s small, heavily reinforced window; like nearly all the rest in the building, it had long been sandblasted by rushing winds and the debris they carried.

The room was chilly. I snuggled down into my sleeping bag and began re-reading World Record Wind: Measuring Gusts of 231 Miles an Hour, McKenzie’s 1984 account of that incredible day. The slim volume is filled with log entries made a century ago, when he and the other observers felt, heard, and recorded a wind like no other. As I read, I listened to that constant, muscular, unearthly wind, like the dull roar of an airborne ocean.

* * * * *

The catalyst for Mount Washington’s official winter occupation in the 1930s was a call by the Second International Polar Year Commission to “record continuously the variations of all the meteorological elements” at high altitudes around the planet. Scientists hoped that by logging the conditions and analyzing data “at levels uncontaminated by local irregularities and peculiarities on the earth’s surface,” they would unlock the secret of the atmosphere in its entirety.

But if there was something significant happening a couple of miles up, only mountaintop observers would be close enough to gain a clear picture of the engine driving the planet’s weather. Mount Washington was a particularly desirable location for a weather station because it was accessible: close to civilization, with a cog railway and an auto road that could facilitate provisioning the weather observers with coal, gasoline, kerosene, and food.

At the time, scientists understood little about the larger forces that create droughts, hurricanes, and deluges, but some were gathering clues. In 1926, Japanese scientist Wasaburo Ooishi had published a report about a phenomenon he had observed while launching weather balloons near Mount Fuji. When released, the balloons would float up thousands of feet, then inevitably be swept east by a powerful and consistent westerly that appeared to blow more than 200 miles per hour—faster than any wind yet recorded on the planet.

By the 1930s, more accurate weather forecasting was seen as a way to build a more robust economy. While aviation was in its infancy, people were already imagining an era of passenger flights, which of course would be vulnerable to atmospheric shifts. Better weather forecasting would also benefit agriculture, trade, and shipping.

It took World War II for meteorologists to understand the general workings of the earth’s atmosphere. Pilots flying at high altitudes not only confirmed what Ooishi had discovered (and the Mount Washington observers had recorded), but also offered a picture of its strength and magnitude. There was a river of air up there, they said, with such a strong current that when they flew against it, they practically stood still.

What the pilots found was the jet stream, the heartbeat of the world. That rush of air that sends hats flying and forest fire smoke billowing across the sky is part of a complex system of ever-changing air pockets pushed around the globe by four serpentine currents that ring our planet: one near each pole, and two closer to the equator. These are the whooshing, spinning spirit of the world, forever moving about us, nourishing and cleansing the earth. There’s simply nothing else that so completely ties us together, everywhere, all at once.

Sitting at 44 degrees north, the Northeast’s highest peak feels the direct effects of this mighty river, as the northern polar jet stream meanders north, south, and over its location. And because Mount Washington lies in the path of major storm tracks traveling west to east across North America, those winds can pick up remarkable speed as they race unchecked over roughly 1,500 miles before charging up the northwestern slope of the mountain. 

One more fascinating reason that Mount Washington experiences some of the world’s worst weather: When that massive volume of wild air howls up to the summit, it finds itself squeezed under the tropopause, the invisible boundary between the two lowest layers of our atmosphere. Compression then compounds the wind’s speed, similar to what happens when you put your thumb over the end of a garden hose. As a result, winter winds atop Mount Washington regularly exceed 100 miles per hour and the temperatures drop well below zero. And because the jet stream also sweeps up all manner of small, local weather systems in its path, storms can barrel into the White Mountains seemingly without warning, surprising unfortunate climbers who looked up an hour ago and only saw blue sky.

* * * * *

All that winter of 1933–1934, Pagliuca, Stephenson, and McKenzie recorded the mountain’s many moods. They kept their equipment running, jotted down their findings, and sheltered adventure seekers who had braved the elements to reach the summit. They also spent an inordinate amount of time feeding kerosene and coal into their stove and generator.

On April 11, there was much life inside their minuscule cabin. The trio had been joined by two friends of Pagliuca who’d climbed the mountain the day before, plus three cats and five newborn kittens (feline residents have remained a constant presence at the summit ever since).

Throughout that day, the weather gave ominous signs. In the morning, a wind stirred from the southeast, sending ice crystals sweeping across the blue sky in the form of wispy cirrus clouds. The idea of a weather “front” was brand-new, its nomenclature an artifact of its discovery right after World War I. The phenomenon was first proposed by Norwegian scientist Vilhelm Bjerknes, who argued that weather was dictated by the movements of cold and warm pockets of air swirling around the planet. When they banged up against each other, he wrote, that’s when we experience all the gifts and punishments of the skies.

Bjerknes’s observations and mathematical analyses of these systems had shifted meteorologists’ interest from the barometer to the sky, and Pagliuca read the clouds as portents. On that morning, he stood on the summit of Mount Washington, gazed clear to the Maine coast, and pronounced it an “emissary sky.” A few hours later, stratocumulus clouds gathered into a dome above the mountain, then settled down and enveloped them.

Carried from the east by high winds, these clouds brought “rough frost,” wrote McKenzie. Quite different from the dry rime to which they were accustomed, it created a dangerous dampness for the men going about their chores on the exposed mountaintop. Rough frost, McKenzie wrote, “tended to permeate our garments and then freeze into a thin ice armor.”

Throughout the day, McKenzie maintained radio contact with colleagues at the Blue Hill Observatory in Massachusetts some 180 miles away, as well as amateur radio enthusiasts following the weather in the surrounding country. The barometer in the cabin continued to drop, and wind speeds increased to 124 miles per hour. The men were both anxious and excited to see what this storm had in store for them. After evening chores, everyone but McKenzie climbed into the attic to nestle under blankets close to the warm stovepipe.

All night, the wind assaulted the cabin, sending the anemometer pen zigzagging madly across the record sheet and shaking the door in its frame. Arctic blasts splintered through cracks in the window sash; the stove struggled to give warmth. The cats, the smartest of all creatures, piled into a cozy feline mound in a box on a shelf behind the stove.

The wind shook the building with every gust, threatening to tear it from its mooring and hurl it into the ether. Although experience had taught the men to trust their shelter, now insulated with a foot of ice all around, they listened even in their sleep for the terrifying sound of a snapped chain.

Before dawn on the morning of April 12, 1934, Stephenson awoke, acutely aware of the bellowing wind. His instruments claimed it was blowing at only 105, but the sounds outside were like nothing he’d heard before. Ice must have built up on the anemometer overnight, disrupting accurate recording. He had to knock it free.

Fumbling in the dark and cold, Stephenson climbed into his snow suit, tucking the inner skirt of his parka into his snow pants. Wearing thick, gauntlet-like gloves, he tugged at the handle of the cabin door, but the rushing wind created a vacuum so strong he had to fight to open it; when he finally stepped outside, bracing himself as usual for the northwesterlies, he found himself face-down in the snow. A southeasterly blast had upended him from behind. Stephenson recovered and, with great effort, climbed to the roof of the cabin with a wooden club he used to knock the anemometer free of ice. The moment he loosened his grip on his stick, the wind swept it away.

A hurricane-style storm was well under way. Later that morning, Pagliuca wrote in his diary that they’d logged several 172-mile-per-hour gusts. While he was riveted to the wind speed recorder, the rest of the crew kept busy. There was work to be done, a welcome distraction from that confounded wind and the chilling thought that the cabin might, at some point, be blown to smithereens. The stove in the kitchen was rigged to generate electricity to help keep the anemometer free of ice. It gulped kerosene, so the volunteers chipped the 55-gallon drum free of ice to refill it.

As the day wore on, everyone was “beginning to be a bit edgy,” wrote McKenzie. Cabin fever was setting in, compounded by the relentless wind. Before noon, he was astonished to see the highly reinforced window behind the stove bulging inward during gusts. They were now timing speeds of 220 and occasionally 229 miles per hour. No one knew how long the cabin could stand against that kind of force.

Then, at 1:21 p.m. on April 12, 1934, the extreme value of 231 miles per hour out of the southeast was recorded. “Twice I yelled the time so that [my companion] could put it down on paper,” wrote Pagliuca in the official logbook. He then seized his slide rule to extrapolate his calibration curve once again and confirm what he had witnessed. It was true.

Pagliuca could not contain his awe. “We had measured by means of an anemometer the highest natural wind velocity ever recorded officially anywhere in the world.” He added, “Will they believe it?”

* * * * *

I awoke with a knock. Cocooned in my sleeping bag, I’d slept away the afternoon, dreaming of the smoky cabin half-buried in snowdrifts. Jay Broccolo, director of weather operations, was ready to take me into the wind, and again I became aware of its pervasive drone. I zipped and fastened layers upon layers of gear, then huffed and puffed up the concrete silo’s three-story ladder, following Broccolo to the roof. As we climbed higher, the entire structure shivered and groaned with pressure of the wind. At the top of the ladder, Broccolo pulled open the small exterior door, and I crouched to follow him through.

When I stood up, I was relieved to see that a waist-high wall protected the outdoor walkway that skirted the silo. Without it, I’d be pinned against the wall. Even so, all my senses recalibrated to withstand the blast. Broccolo had told me to put my ski goggle strap over my hat, which was the only reason both were still on my head. I gazed northwest, straight into the wind, then west where the horizon glowed faintly from the last rays of our distant sun. Broccolo motioned for me to follow him around to the lee of the silo, and in that sheltered place, I barely heard him as he called out the snowy mountain peaks before us.

Then he pointed up one half-flight to the highest point of the observatory, where two pitot tube anemometers stood in the wind on slender legs, like sandpipers. He motioned that I should go up to experience the full force of the wind.

I hesitated, then seized the ladder and stepped onto the first rung. When I reached up to shake hands with the wind gods, they knocked my arm back. Determined now, I kept going, crawling onto the three-foot-wide platform, girded with a circular handrail. With difficulty, I stood up, grabbed hold, and faced straight into the winds.

They rushed by, as they have for hundreds of millions of years. In their embrace, I felt the sublime, like stargazing on a cloudless night, shivering in the absolute freedom that I am nothing, of no consequence. The winds raced on, over and around me—a mere twig in their path—on their journey across oceans and continents. I stood there for an eternity, marveling at the force of creation.  

To learn more about the Mount Washington Observatory’s weather work, complete with webcams and daily logs, go to mountwashington.org.

The post Blast from the Past: Experiencing Mount Washington’s Legendary Winds appeared first on New England.

The first time I knew the feeling of leaving home I was a month shy of 11, though what I felt then was home leaving me. My mother, sister, and little brother went to spend the summer on the island of Jamaica, where my mother had grown up and where her parents still lived. I stayed home to play Little League. A strange sense of loneliness soon settled in, as I waited all day in the unfamiliar quiet for my dad to come home to take me to practice or a game, and afterward we’d go to a diner or simply open a carton of ice cream. I never forgot what I learned that summer: Home did not just mean a roof and walls and familiar rooms, but the people you lived with inside.

Since then, I have left numerous homes: off to college, leaving college, leaving the Peace Corps, leaving Maine. Then I came to Yankee in October 1979—and never left. I have been part of more than 400 issues of this magazine. I have lived tens of thousands of hours inside this sprawling red building, have worked alongside so many people here, have known and published so many writers. There has been little distance for me between home with family and my second home here with another family—one where day after day we talk ideas, plan issues, look at layouts, meet in hallways and offices, look after each other.

My coworkers have been part of my life for so long that I have been here when their children were born and seen them grow up and have their own children. I have lost colleagues I will never forget, and I have welcomed new ones I will never forget.

For the past few years, when people asked me when I was going to retire, I replied by saying they don’t understand the feeling of holding a new issue in their hands, or of finding a story that arrives unassigned, like a stranger knocking on the door asking to come in, and then beginning to read it and knowing Yankee’s readers will want to read it, too. They don’t understand what it’s like to get a phone call from a friend to say she’s seen a Facebook post about a Maine lobsterman named Joel Woods who takes photos of a life that few of us ever know. And then to sit in Woods’s cottage on the Maine coast and see his work, and then publish it, and then enter it in the annual City and Regional Magazine Association contest to be judged against photos by professionals across the country. (Joel Woods took first place.)

And then there is that hard-to-define connection with readers, so strong at times I can almost hear their voices when they write. I have kept hundreds of their cards and letters and several thousands of their emails, which speak to a bond that runs deeper than just editor and subscriber. They want me to know how much Yankee means to them. They tell of losses in their lives and how Yankee kept them grounded, how we have kept New England alive for them no matter where they live. They talk about their family as if we here at Yankee all belonged, too.

They write things like this: Dear Mel, I think I can be so familiar as to call you by your first name though we have never met in person; we have known each other for decades though only through Yankee.

Or this one, a nod to my long-standing editor’s photo: Check your closet, Mel. Caught between all those red shirts must be one navy-blue or forest-green shirt you could don for Yankee issues. Please?

But there is always an end time. There is always a sense that if not now, when?

In early January, our conference room filled with everyone who works here in Dublin as well as former colleagues who had left or retired. We all enjoyed some good food, and then I told them what they had meant to me, and they told me what I had meant to them. And I am 78 but I felt like a boy as I tried, not always successfully, to choke back tears when a colleague was doing the same.

If you were in the room with us, I would have wanted you to know this: Many days I walk with several editors to a dirt path that runs past a pretty cemetery and ends at a spot where we gaze out upon lake and mountain. And each time I say, “Can you believe how lucky we are to see this where we work?”

I’d want you to know how we pulled together during the pandemic and saw one another only on a screen, and we still put together issues that made us all proud.

I’d want you to know about the time Rudy, my Jack Russell, escaped from my car in the Yankee parking lot and I was certain I’d lost him forever. But within an hour my staff had made “Lost Dog” posters, and everyone fanned out to distribute them and to look for Rudy. And late that night, as I lay in the back of my car at Yankee, hoping somehow Rudy would find his way back, my colleague Joe arrived at the parking lot. Driving once more along the darkened roads, he’d found Rudy walking along the highway and called him into the truck. Now, he held Rudy out to me.

I’d want you to know about working alongside Jud Hale, the former editor in chief whose uncle Robb Sagendorph started Yankee in 1935, and hearing him walking to his office calling hello to everyone he passed. And how Sarah, an editor with The Old Farmer’s Almanac, whose offices are just down the hall, always bakes me a chocolate zucchini bread for my birthday because she knows it’s my favorite.

I’d want you to have seen me this past New Year’s Day, alone in my office, stepping over the plastic crates I’d brought to fill with what I had saved all these years—which seems to be nearly every manuscript, notebook, calendar, magazine, and newspaper clipping, plus enough odds and ends to fill my newly rented storage unit a few miles away. When I took down all the cards from readers and photos from my bulletin board, I remembered the boy from a long-ago summer who had the sensation of home changing right then and there, and I was glad I was alone on New Year’s in my office.

So this is the last issue of Yankee with my name at the top of the masthead. For 90 years, Yankee has evolved, always changing, because times and challenges change. But this remains: We are New England’s voice, whether in this magazine in your hands, or our Weekends with Yankee TV show, or our website and newsletters, or even our online New England Store.

Now, I will be working on a collection of my stories, and I will continue looking for new ones to write. You can find me at melallen716@gmail.com. I leave knowing that the people I have worked with for so long, who care about this region so deeply, will continue to do the work they do so well. I will always hold them close. I will still come by and join the walk on the dirt path to where lake and mountain appear. And I am certain that if I ever lose my way, they will find me and bring me home.

***

See More: Yankee Magazine Announces New Organizational Plan Following Retirement of Longtime Top Editor Mel Allen

The post Leaving Home | Mel Allen Says Goodbye to Yankee appeared first on New England.

By Alyssa Giacobbe

Thirty-one-year-old Jacob Knowles is a fifth-generation lobsterman in Winter Harbor, Maine, population 475. He got his start in the business before he was even in double digits, working crew on his dad’s boat; by the time he was 15, he was operating his own boat, setting and hauling traps before school, after school, on weekends, and all summer long. When his waders were shed, he turned to YouTube for a glimpse of how other kids his age—beyond the 20 or so in his graduating class—lived. It was a chance to see the world without leaving his own.

Knowles was a teenager when he began creating his own videos for YouTube, mostly of his recreational pursuits: hunting, fly fishing, skiing, hiking. But nothing really happened (was anyone out there?) until Knowles took to TikTok—and, specifically, until he turned his attention to the one thing that was so day-to-day familiar it hadn’t even occurred to him that others might find it interesting, let alone wildly compelling: the life of a lobsterman.

Today Knowles has nearly 6 million followers across multiple social media platforms, plus a videographer, several corporate partnerships, and even a talent agent. His videos are energetic and entertaining, but they’re also educational without being pedantic, not even a little. “Everybody’s always asking what the biggest lobster I’ve caught is,” he says in one video posted to TikTok showing him aboard his boat, the Rest-Ashoar, in his bright orange waders holding up a massive lobster, which he places next to a can of Red Bull for reference. (“And that’s the big Red Bull, too. That’s not the little 8.4 [ounce].”) Knowles estimates that the lobster is well over 10 pounds and probably pushing 100 years old. “Pretty crazy,” he says, “to think that my grandfather, great-grandfather—most likely my father—have caught this lobster [too].”

Other videos offer tutorials on such topics as egg-bearing female lobsters—aka “eggers”—and how they are given a notch on their tail so that other fishermen will know to release them. Lobsters pulled up with lots of barnacles on their shells get a trip to what Knowles calls “Claw Spa”: He cleans each up with pliers, places a fish “snack” into the pincher claw, and tosses the lobster back into the ocean. Other creatures also make appearances, including monkfish (“probably the world’s ugliest fish”), the occasional tiny seahorse, and any number of small birds that get blown out into the Atlantic during high winds and come to rest, exhausted, on the boat, where they spend the day being fed snacks and drinking water from bottle caps until they get ferried back to shore. (One of Knowles’s earliest bird posts generated more than 10 million views. )

We caught up with Knowles by phone in late summer, on a rare day off from the Rest-Ashoar he’d given himself in order to take his wife and three kids to the Portland Sea Dogs baseball game, where he’d been invited to throw out the first pitch. 

Q: So, what does a lobsterman know about becoming a TikTok influencer?

A: I’d been experimenting with YouTube since I was a kid, maybe 14 or so. I never really stopped. My senior year of high school I started watching YouTube a lot. I’d watch fishing content but really just loved watching anybody outside of the small world I grew up in. The more I watched, the more I was like, I want to try this.

I’m in a unique spot in Maine. I see things that a lot of other people may never see. I wasn’t sure if my niche was on the ocean or on land, but I thought that I had something, a unique looking glass. And I’ve always been good at explaining—anything that I understand is easy for me to explain to other people.

Early on, I tried taking cameras out on the lobster boat to film for YouTube, but you know, it was challenging. When you’re running the boat, you sort of need to be running the boat. So I’d show my life in Maine, doing things I did for fun. I was doing those things anyway, and I enjoyed making videos. If I was doing it for the views, I would have quit.

Then, during Covid, TikTok really took off. All of a sudden, it was possible to just haul a phone out and take a 6-second, 10-second, 30-second video and post it. That was a lot easier to manage. That really revolutionized how I, and lots of other people, created content. Now all of a sudden, farmers, truck drivers, lobster guys—anybody, really—could do this. You didn’t need to know how to film and put together a video to be a content creator anymore.

Q: Lobster licenses are hard to come by, at least in Maine. Did you ever feel pressured to go into lobstering simply because you could?

A: My father was a lobsterman, as was his father and his father. Licenses can’t be passed down, but it’s easier to get one if you’re born into a fishing family, because you start at a young age. To get a license, you have to log hours on another boat. After you get your hours done, you sit on the waiting list until a certain amount of fishermen leave your zone. There’s an enter-exit ratio in place—I believe ours is three-to-one or two-to-one, somewhere around there—so a couple fishermen have to leave before one can come off the waiting list. That’s why starting as a kid is important if you’re going to stand a chance of getting a license by the time you want to do it full-time.

I could have gone the college route. But I’d already worked my way up in fishing, and was fishing full-time pretty much through high school. My summer vacations were spent lobster fishing. So by senior year, when I had enough credits to only have to go to school every other day, I was ready to make a real go of it. It just made more sense to me at that time to continue pursuing lobster fishing. And I did enjoy it.

Q: The New York Times has called you “TikTok’s finest lobsterman.” What do the other lobstermen Down East think about that?

A: I was nervous about what they would think of this whole thing. But I’ve always tried to make all my content something that other fishermen could respect and appreciate—informative, educational, and cool. I don’t want to ever do something that is frowned upon by my fellow fishermen. Everything on the ocean, the world that I have grown up in—and still live in—is based on respect for each other…. It’s very old-fashioned. So I’ve always tried to make sure the content is something that is good for the industry. And for the most part, but especially in my harbor, all the fishermen have appreciated that.

My dad is still fishing. I feel him out a little bit. Social media is all very foreign to him. But he’s a good example of who I try to make content for.

Q: What’s been the most surprising part of this turn in your career?

A: That there’s so much fan engagement. That people care. I spent three years basically just answering questions that popped up in the comments. Maine lobster is popular worldwide, but nobody really knew much about it other than it tasted good.

Personally, it’s made the longer days more interesting. The lobster fishery is open year-round but we slow down a lot in the winter. There’s a lot of monotonous, boring times where when we’re not catching much. We’re confined to a small zone on the coast, so we can’t really go chase after lobsters in other areas. We’re just sitting waiting for the lobsters to come to us. If you compare it to a sport, we’re never really on offense. And now, instead of grinding through those boring times, it’s fun all year long.

Q: People learn a lot from watching your videos—for instance, I never knew you could put a lobster to sleep by petting it. Have you learned anything from making them?

A: Petting a lobster—I knew that one from my dad. That was an old trick passed down through the generations. I don’t know who first figured that out or how, but it’s always a funny one. People love it.

It’s been interesting trying to figure out what will be popular and what won’t. I’ve learned how to structure a video so that people don’t lose interest too early. I’ve learned a lot about “the algorithm” from other creators, people who are actual content creators. Those guys have, like, very creative brains. I don’t even know if I really consider myself a content creator. I’m more or less just sharing my life. 

Jacob Knowles is on TikTok @jacob_knowles. For links to his other social media accounts and more, go to pillar.io/jacobknowles.

The post Q&A With Jacob Knowles, the Charismatic Maine Lobsterman Making Waves on TikTok appeared first on New England.

During the winter of 2021, I spent three months living solo on an island in Maine. I’d been seized with the idea a few summers earlier while walking along a sun-splashed road on Monhegan, thinking, Gosh, this is nice. I wonder what it’s like in the middle of February? After some fits and starts, I found myself in a sweet timber-framed year-round house on the south side of Little Cranberry Island, far enough from my nearest neighbors that I could go a week without seeing anyone if I chose.

The project, if you can call it that, was to take my well-worn, extroverted, relational self (son, friend, husband, father, worker, all-around glad-hander) and put him on the bench to see what or who would emerge in his place. That’s another essay, but it’s also how I found myself sitting by the woodstove late one February afternoon, reading Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, which my sister had sent me as “just the thing” for her kid brother’s wacky adventure.

May writes about the salutary effects of following nature’s cycles, allowing oneself to withdraw, rest, even mourn, rather than relentlessly pursuing the headlong linear rush this society encourages and rewards. One of her chapters recounts her experiences with cold-water swimming, and it was utterly captivating. Her first time into the ocean, it was drizzling and 43 degrees, the water 37. Entering, she writes, “was so absolute. So vicious.” I shuddered as I read. Minutes later, when she was back on the beach, she gasped, “That was brilliant.”

I closed the book and looked out at the ocean in front of my house. The sun was setting, the wind brisk; there was some snow on the ground. I said a string of phrases that I can’t share here. I knew what I had to do.

Cursing some more, I headed down to the beach, terrified but slightly tickled by my sudden resolve. A little back from the waterline, I began taking off my clothes, shocked by the coldness of the sand and, as each layer came off, the strangeness of my bare body exposed to the air. This continued up to the toughest moment of the whole process for me, when my shirt came off and my mind said, Really? And there I was, buck naked and dry as a bone.

I walked into the water. It was indeed absolute in the way it grabbed my attention. Up to my knees, the small waves splashing the martini-cold onto my poor warm thighs. I ain’t waiting for the crotch, I thought, and I turned around and launched myself backward into the Atlantic.

My body and mind were so astounded by the novelty of what was happening that pain or terror or even alarm didn’t register. But I did want to stand up as soon as possible, which I did, finding the bottom, jumping to my feet, gasping for air, and shaking the water from my hair. I was fully wet and vibratingly electrified. Now what? I crouched back under the water, up to my chin, trying to tame my breath. I started counting—one thousand one, one thousand two—and made it to about 20 before bolting to the beach, where I looked out on the ocean, bellowed an exultant and again-unprintable phrase, gathered up my clothes, and ran back up to my house and into the hot tub.

Which is where my buzz instantly ended. Yes, I was warm again and yes, I had DONE IT, but the feeling that I’d just read May describe—“My blood sparkled in my veins”—was now gone.

Still, I felt acutely alive for the rest of the evening, and I would end up sleeping even better than normal. This thing was real, it seemed. And uttering another, gentler curse, I knew I would do it again tomorrow.

I went in every day for the remaining month and a half of my stay, following the high tide and ignoring the weather (wading in with snow on my shoulders was memorable). I worked my way up to staying in for a minute, which seemed plenty, and I never had another hot tub buzzkill, instead walking on the beach, tomato-soup-red as my capillaries flushed with blood, feeling utterly bulletproof for five minutes or so, spectacularly present in nature. One of my favorite times was an early morning with a good surf running; crouching in the water, I looked into the rising sun through the tube of a wave. The last day I got out of the water was the only time I cried that my island sojourn was over.

Since then, I’m less regular in my plunging, but when presented with an opportunity I’ll usually take it. I’ve been in Cape Cod Bay in January, Wildcat Brook in February, and Walden Pond at the drop of a ski hat, wading in while ice chunks banged my shins and hockey players skated past me. Canada, Scotland, the Faroe Islands—my trips are now more vivid for these immersions, connecting me to place in an indelible way. My wife and I even fill the bathtub with cold water on winter mornings, getting ourselves revved up for the workday. The high never fails, and the benefits linger.

It’s brilliant. 

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I want to show you a special place on this fine spring morning in Portland, Maine. Walk south on Exchange Street in the heart of the Old Port. The one-way street is just shy of a quarter mile as it stretches to Casco Bay and spills out near Commercial Street. This is the Portland that brings endless streams of visitors. But this is not the special place I want to show you. 

Follow me a few blocks west on Commercial Street, away from ferries steaming to the islands, away from the boutiques and tourists. There, at 225 Commercial Street, nestled between a men’s clothing store and a shop selling wine and cigars, is a five-story brick building with tall windows facing the water.

We climb steps to the second floor. The sign on the door reads “The Telling Room.” Before we go in, take a moment to imagine being young and leaving behind everything you have known—friends, family, landscape, language—to come to a new country, and having few ways to express what you have seen and endured along the way. And even then: Who would listen or understand? Loneliness is a part of your new life, like the snow and the cold.

Or imagine growing up in a small Maine town while wrestling with questions of sexual or gender identity, knowing kids in school talk about you, feeling as much an outsider as if you had arrived from another continent, too.

Or simply imagine being young, and not knowing what lies ahead for you.  

Now: Imagine opening this door intoa place where you can sit beside someone who will help you writethe stories that have stayed inside you for so long, you sometimes don’t remember they are there. A place where, after you hear others share their lives, you can take a breath and begin telling about your own—and everything changes. 

It is here, in this place called TheTelling Room, that young people are asked to be brave. To trust others. To know that they can tell their stories, and to believe their stories matter.And for the past 20 years, The Telling Room has shown them how. That’s what waits on the other side of the door.

 And there’s no place quite like it anywhere.

———

“We’re dealing with all this heavy stuff, but it’s all driven by the stories that kids need to tell and are compelled to tell and urgently want to tell.” —Michael Paterniti, cofounder of The Telling Room

———

To understand what happens at The Telling Room, which has seen more than 35,000 young people take part in its programs all across Maine, let’s step back a few decades. Creative newcomers are putting down roots in Portland, and ideas and energy are everywhere. One day in 2004, three people are sitting in a booth at a Congress Street café. They are in their mid-30s, and two are a married couple: Michael Paterniti and Sara Corbett, both accomplished journalists as well as the parents of two preschoolers. With them is their friend Susan Conley, an author and a passionate teacher of writing. She grew up in midcoast Maine and, after teaching in Boston, moved to Portland with her husband and their two preschool-age children.

At this time, Portland is seeing an influx of writers, artists, musicians, makers, and chefs. But also arriving in the city is the first big wave of asylum seekers from Africa, Afghanistan, and the Middle East—families who had fled the kind of danger and turmoil that Paterniti and Corbett had both reported on. “I found the same young people I had seen in Sudan now on the other side, in Portland,” Paterniti tells me now, 20 years later. “You would see the end of their journey here. It felt really vital that we help them tell their story.”

Paterniti and Corbett have recently returned from a village in Spain, where they spent hours in a cave set deep in a hillside. Inside was a special space, El Contador, literally “the counting room,” which also translates as “the telling room.” There, they heard stories by a man named Ambrosio who held his listeners spellbound.

Sitting in the café, the trio begin talking about their belief that children are natural storytellers who need their own “telling room” to discover their voices. “We wanted to show them the path,” Conley remembers. So they hatch an idea: Start a nonprofit writing center where young people can come for free and learn how to unlock the stories they had lived.

The problem was, as Conley puts it, “we had all these wild ideas, but we had no students.” So they begin meetingwith teachers throughout the city, telling them, “Many students feel unheard, not seen. Let us help you reach them.”

Theyvolunteer in high schools, middle schools, elementary schools. They work with kids who’d been in Maine all their lives as well as those who had just landed here, with a new language to learn. Calling their project The Telling Room, they believe in their mission even in the face of its mounting obligations. “The conflict was, we’re writers. We have to write and produce,” Conley tells me.“And we were really, really overtired. It took a serious personal toll. But we kept hearing yes from teachers—We need you.”

Paterniti remembers Conley saying once, “It’s like we have seven tickets a day to spend. So you spend three tickets on family, three tickets on work. And we only have one ticket left for The Telling Room. Except The Telling Room is taking three tickets.”

“But we had to keep doing it, because it mattered,” he adds. “These kids were telling unbelievable stories. And there was this awe at how these kids were finding the words, the courage to tell these stories out loud.”

And then angels arrive:A foundation awards them $8,000. “It was life-changing,” Conley recalls. With the funds, they hirethe poet Gibson Fay-LeBlanc to be the first program director of a nonprofit writing center that doesn’texist yet. They applyfor more grants, small ones and then big national ones. Local businesses takenote. Donations come in. By 2007, The Telling Room finally has a place to call home—the sunny spaces on Commercial Street where it’s been ever since—and the ability to publish its first anthology of young writers’ work, I Remember Warm Rain.

An installation called the Story House Project launches that first book at Portland’s nonprofit SPACE Gallery. Students at the Maine College of Art & Design created posters to illustrate the writers’ words and built a series of sculptural “houses”—some representing what the writers had left behind, others showing the writers’ imaginings of what a home could be. Inside each house, audio of a story is playing.

One of these is stories by Aruna Kenyi. He is 16, maybe 17. He has spent hours with Paterniti, sitting beside him in a room at Portland High School, as Aruna spoke his words into a tape recorder. He told Paterniti about being 5 years old in South Sudan when soldiers burned his village. He ran and hid with his older brother in a cane field. He was certain his parents were dead. He hid and walked for more than a year before reaching a refugee camp, and then walked again when the camp became too dangerous.

After each session, Paterniti transcribed the tape so they could look together at the words in Aruna’s new language. Eventually, a way to put them into a story took shape. And now, for the first time, Portland will hear it.

In the house, Aruna’s audio begins: “I have no photographs of my past, none of my village or parents or me as a boy there, none of the places where we fled or the camps in which we lived, nor of my friends.” After Aruna came to Maine, the listeners learn, a letter arrived and inside was a photograph of his mother and father, still alive thousands of miles away. 

Looking back on that night at the SPACE Gallery, Paterniti remembers it as a seminal moment for The Telling Room. “We all saw you can be vulnerable. You can be emotional. You can tell your story. All seems possible.” 

———

“Who are the youth of Maine? What stories are we missing? There is a need for us to be here.” —Kristina M.J. Powell, executive director of The Telling Room

———

The day of my visit to The Telling Room begins with a field trip by fifth-graders from the Village School in Gorham, about 10 miles west of Portland. It is one of the 42 Maine schools that will reach out to The Telling Room this year. The kids wander around the large central loft, which is filled with light from tall windows. Chairs and shelves are painted cheery red and green. The sofas are deep and comfy, and the tables hold jars filled with pens and pencils. A poster on the wall sets out a simple ethos: “We Agree to: No Phones; Pen to Paper; Respect Other People’s Work; Don’t Hold Back.”

In all the rooms and offices, books line the shelves. They range from classics by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald to modern-day works by Telling Room mentors and visiting authors. But most precious here are the nearly 230 titles that hold the writings of more than 5,000 young people. Whatever else they do in life, their stories will live inside these books.

But to call them books does not do them justice. “Books” is a quiet word. The pages in these volumes are not. Instead, they are filled with voices. Some emerge from memories that have sometimes traveled across years and thousands of miles; others come from growing up in Aroostook or in fishing villages on the Maine coast.Here are stories from the Young Writers & Leaders program, focused on high school students with international backgrounds. Their stories slowly shift as the years pass: There are fewer tales of harrowing journeys to a new land, as their journeys now lead inward—the struggle not in the getting here, but in the being here. And here are novels and poetry collections and memoirs from the Young Emerging Authors program, in which four high schoolers each spend nearly a year creating just one work that becomes as polished and professional as if they were far older writers.

Whenever schoolkids visit, they learn about these books, written by young people just like them. The message is clear: You, too, can do this. And one way to begin is simply to look closely at the life swirling around you.

Before long, the kids from the Village School go outside with their teacher, Alison Penley, to walk around, to see the life of the Portland waterfront so they can come back in and write about it. Once inside theygrab pencils and paper and sprawl on the red carpet, or sit hunched at the tables. Telling Room teachers Kathryn Williams and Jack Gendron move from one to the next, helping to coax a few more words. “What do you want to happen next?” Williams asks one boy.  

After a half hour, the children gather in a circle. Williams, who writes young-adult fiction and who has been teaching here for a decade, tells them, “I think writing looks like walking in the world and just eavesdropping. You know what writing is? It’s being curious. It’s asking, What if?”

Then she asks everyone to share something they had written. “Sharing your writing can make you feel a little embarrassed,” she tells them. “The more you share, the easier it becomes.”

One boy says he wrote about a pirate. Gendron, a poet, asks, “What do you think it is like to raise a pirate?” With a shy, proud smile, another boy reads about his father’s gold watch. A girl says she wrote a play about getting ready to go to a party.

I watch and think what The Telling Room wants to do with field trips like this is not to teach writing—the way it does during the months-long workshops. This is about striking a match, and hoping a spark may catch.

———

“When I came to The Telling Room it was a very powerful feeling, knowing that I could share my stories honestly, and feel like I would be listened to.” —Leigh Ellis, whose novel Bach in the Barn was published in 2021 

———

By midafternoon during my visit, when the schools are out, high school students begin to arrive at The Telling Room. Four are in the Young Emerging Authors program, and I meet them in a small room where they are working under the final deadline for their 10-month project. There are three high school sophomores and one junior, high achievers who have signed up for the intensity of writing a solo book. Each has been working with a mentor under the direction of program lead Jude Marx and teacher Kathryn Williams.

They introduce themselves and their work to me. Josie Ellis’s poetry revolves around the theme of water. Margaret Horton’s novel features a heroine living in the last human settlement on earth. Madeleine Turgelsky has set what she calls her “sapphic novel” during the ’80s AIDS epidemic in New York. Natalia Mbadu’s memoir of struggling with faith is a mix of prose and lyrics.

Each of them has just received feedback from an outside reader, someone coming to their work for the first time, and they admit to me it can be scary to see new critiques after putting in so much effort. The room is quiet as they scroll through the suggestions. They have only two weeks to make changes. Soon their books will be off to a printer, ready for their own book launch and reading in September.

Marx sits beside Josie to discuss a problem her reader has flagged. Josie has written more than 30 poems, and while many address different people—her mother, her siblings, her friends—she uses “you” for nearly all. It’s a problem she needs to solve, and time is not her friend. “I want it to be perfect,” she says softly.

Outside in the big loft space, students in the Young Writers & Leaders program have gathered. Before joining them, I meet with Sonya Tomlinson, who has been with The Telling Room from the early days. On her bulletin board she has pinned group photos of every young person she has taught: 437 in all, from 57 countries. She talks about them as if they were family, and she admits she feels protective of these students, who—because she and co-teacher Hipai Pamba are very good at what they do—open up their lives to each other.

When I mention the challenges today of being an immigrant, Tomlinson stops me. “We do not use the word immigrant.We do not use the word refugee,” she says. “Our students told us they don’t want to be identified by those words. They don’t want people to feel pity for their hardships. We say our students are multilingual, multicultural. And for some that’s not their story. It’s their parents’ story.”

And because of that, she is sensitive to the fact that “students may reveal something to their family that they haven’t been able to express. And what they write lives forever. Your grandchild is going to pick this up and see who you were in 10th grade. So we talk about that.”

Tomlinson shows me apoem by a Muslim girl who no longer wants to wear the hijab. She feels that her mother is proud of her only when she dresses religiously, “and she doesn’t want to anymore,” Tomlinson says. “I told her, ‘I need to know you feel OK publishing this. Because your mom will read it.’ Her mother came to herreading, and afterward she found me to say thank you.”

At around 4, the students sit down in a circle with Tomlinson and Pamba. They read a snippet from the session’s writing prompt—where they find calm, or whether they’ve had a dream—and then they talk about what lies ahead. On this day, they are only a few weeks away from the program’s end. At a reading at the Portland Museum of Art later this month, they will see the new book Outbeam the Sun—their book—for the first time. “It doesn’t set in that they’re published authors until the book is in their hands,” Pamba, a former Telling Room student herself, tells me. “You look through and find your story and see your photo.”

In the circle, a number of the students admit they are nervous because soon they will stand on the museum’s auditorium stage and they will read. And for the first time, their family will hear their stories.

Pamba understands the nerves, but offers this advice: “When you finish reading, take a moment at the end and listen to the applause. Feel the awe.”

On this day, I keep hearing how The Telling Room believes in these students. That the teachers don’t tell them they’ll be a writer one day, but that they are right now.

———

“Without writing, I wouldn’t know what would be on my mind every day, what would give me the joy in my life…. Writing is my way of creating life.” —Sunila DeLoacth, writing at The Telling Room in 2024 

———

Later that month, I return to Maine for the book launch and reading. The young writers’ photos are displayed on a big screen on the stage as one by one, they walk to the podium.

Here is Nevaeh Lynn-Rose Patt. She is 16. We hear about her childhood in the state of Washington where her mother often left her and her little brother on their own while she chased her next fix. Now she is with a new family she loves in Maine. But “I don’t want to forget that feeling of abandonment and loneliness. The person I am now was created by the person I was before.”

Here is Noemia Nzolameso, who tells about trying to fit in with white classmates and realizing she needs to be true to herself. Here is Faisal Azeez, his voice crisp and confident, telling about the growing distance he felt during the pandemic from the brother he loves.

Here is Angelique Kabisa, as composed as if she has done this all her life, reading about how she needs to be a success in life in order to honor the sacrifice her parents made to bring her here to have a chance at a better life.

And here is Cristina Zalabantu. She is 17 and came to Portland from Angola when she was 5. “As the Stars Watch” is a memory of a home she has never forgotten, the first story she has put out into the world: If welcome were a home, it would be our house. I remember not being able to fall asleep most of the time. The three of us slept in the kitchen. There was a little window where I could see the bright stars watching me as they reflected into the room. I loved watching the stars…

When everyone has read and the audience has stood and clapped, the young men and women take it all in from the stage as if in a theater—and in a way, they are. This is their moment in the spotlight. As I watch them in the hallway afterward clutching their books, I think about how every young person I have spoken with has told me how The Telling Room has changed their lives.

But I think about how for all these years, so many people reading and listening to them have also been changed. Because what the founders of The Telling Room always knew is something Paterniti once wrote years ago to Aruna Kenyi: You speak—and we listen, as if it happened to us. 

To learn more about The Telling Room’s programs, events, and published works, go to tellingroom.org.

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The town of Paimpol lies 3,000 miles east of Maine along France’s northern coast, which makes it an unlikely place to glimpse the future of Maine seafood, but one look at the craggy waterfront, stone houses, and fishing boats rocking in the cold Atlantic and we get it. I’m tagging along with a delegation of eight Mainers who would like to make the scallop Maine’s Next Big Thing, so we’ve come to the region that wrote the playbook. The Fête de la Coquille Saint-Jacques, held every April on the Côtes-d’Armor, draws 50,000 scallop lovers for a two-day binge of scallop kebabs, scallop rolls, fried scallops, seared scallops, and yes, scallop beignets. You can tour fishing boats, hosed clean for the occasion, and seize the rare opportunity to buy 10-kilo sacks of live scallops in the shell—a bargain at 35 euros—and cart them off to your vehicle with the help of on-site wheelbarrows.

Leading the love for all things coquille is the Confrérie des Chevaliers de la Coquille Saint-Jacques des Côtes-d’Armor, the Brotherhood of the Knights of the Scallop of the Armor Coast. France has hundreds of confréries devoted to regional specialties. There are Truffle Knights and Strawberry Tart Knights. It’s what you do in retirement instead of joining the Elks Club. The Knights of the Scallop don yellow capes and golden medallions and lead a parade to get the festival rolling. Then they spend the rest of the year promoting scallop amour in France’s restaurants.

Their grandmaster, Alain Dornadic, along with a second member also named Alain, walks us through the festivities, explicating the fine points of scallop cookery. “Never with french fries,” Alain 1 says, pointing to several offenders on the main drag. “Always rice.” He has a pointy white beard and a woolen flat cap and looks every bit the retired French chef he is. He urges us to avoid some common mistakes when cooking scallops, such as shaking the pan, which forces water out of the scallops and prevents a good browning. “Just turn them once very gently with tongs.”

Our group nods politely, but frankly most of this crew graduated from Scallops 101 years ago. We’ve got Sam Hayward, dean of Maine cuisine; Robert Dumas, who leads food innovation efforts for the University of Maine; and certified Master Chef of France Jean-Louis Gerin, who was Dumas’s mentor at the New England Culinary Institute and who has graciously called on his French connections for us. We’ve got Andrew Peters, one of the two people in Maine attempting to farm scallops on a commercial scale instead of fishing them wild; Togue Brawn, a one-woman powerhouse of scallop enthusiasm whose Downeast Dayboat delivers straight from the sea to restaurants and individual customers; and Dana Morse, who has been rolling the Sisyphean rock of Maine scallop culture uphill for most of the 25 years he’s been the aquaculture guy for Maine Sea Grant and the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. We’re here thanks to a grant that Morse scored from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to facilitate a knowledge transfer between the seafood-crazed regions of Maine and France.

We pass another group dressed in yellow robes and scallop-shaped medallions, and a chill can be felt in the air. We quickly decamp to the Alains’ favorite portside restaurant—the chef was recently inducted into the confrérie—so they can explain. There has been a schism in the brotherhood. No need to go into the sordid details (at the annual meeting, somebody bought frozen American scallops by mistake), but the upshot is that a faction has broken away to form the Confrérie Coquille Saint-Jacques Pêchée en Côtes-d’Armor, or the Brotherhood of the Scallop That Is Fished in Côtes-d’Armor. They have their own robes and patches and snazzy yellow driving caps with white shells on top. “It’s fine,” Alain 2 says, unconvincingly. “We’re better off without them.”

What matters to me and the rest of our contingent, as we nibble on scallop brochettes served with the bright orange crescent of roe still attached (and just try finding that in the U.S.), is not so much that there are two chapters of Scallop Knights in France (well, three if you count Saint-Méloir-des-Ondes, but of them we will not speak), but that there are any at all. In America, scallops are essentially the chicken nuggets of the sea. Firm, mild, and easy to cook, scallops are popular more for their versatility than their perceived character. But in France, their greatness is a given, even fought over. So why not in Maine? “We need to become the culinary center of scallop culture in the U.S.,” Morse says, blue eyes lit with conviction. “Massachusetts has the quantity, but we have the quality.”

That’s the crux of it. In the U.S., 95 percent of scallops are fished by big boats and vertically integrated corporations based in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the undisputed scallop capital of the universe and the most lucrative fishing port in America. These 100-foot “trip boats” will spend a week or more dredging scallops from Georges Bank, the giant underwater shelf 60 miles off the coast of Cape Cod that is the mother lode of scallop beds, returning to port with tens of thousands of pounds of meat—meat that’s been sitting around. “If it’s coming off a trip boat, it’s potentially sat in a sack for 10 days surrounded by melting ice,” Brawn explains. The meat absorbs water, diluting the flavor and preventing the scallops from developing a nice crust in the sauté pan.

That doesn’t happen in Maine, where the tiny supply of scallops is caught by day boats—smaller vessels, usually lobster boats, that fish closer to shore and return to port that same day. These “dry” scallops never touch water after being harvested and retain their concentrated sea essence. “I don’t want to diss the big boats,” Brawn says. “Trip-boat scallops are perfectly fine. But there is a big difference between a trip-boat scallop and a day-boat scallop, and I want the day-boat fishermen to be getting more money for their product.”

So far that rarely happens. Despite more than a dozen years of spreading the gospel, Brawn has barely managed to expand the pool of Americans willing to pay the premium necessary to make the business sustainable. So what’s different about France?

Well, for one, the scallop. This is most obvious in the shells. While our Atlantic sea scallop, Placopecten magellanicus, has a smooth, brownish-pink shell that is, let’s face it, a little boring, France’s king scallop, Pecten maximus, is stunning, with a deeply fluted orange shell that is the kind of thing Botticelli would paint and Venus would ride around in. Even the French name for Pecten maximus, coquille Saint-Jacques, refers to the sacred nature of the shell, an iconic route marker for the famous pilgrimage to the tomb of Saint James (Saint Jacques in French) at Compostela.

Might French scallops outclass America’s in ways beyond the shell? The thought haunts us, and a reckoning awaits: Brawn has smuggled 20 pounds of her frozen day-boat scallops in her luggage, to be handed out to any open-minded aficionado we meet. For now, however, our goal is simple: Meet the chefs, the fishermen, the scientists—and most important, the beast itself.

* * * * *

How much do you know about scallops? It turns out I knew less than I thought. That nugget of meat you find at the seafood counter, for example? That’s just their swimming muscle.

Yes, scallops swim. Don’t let these bivalves fool you. Unlike oysters, clams, and mussels, scallops are pretty mobile. When disturbed, they clap their shells together and squirt water out their hinge end, clattering along comically like a set of wind-up teeth. (That ability makes them trickier to farm than other shellfish. Peters employs a Japanese technique called “ear hanging” that involves threading a thin line through the edge of each scallop’s shell and attaching them to a central line hanging down in the water, so they can roam around like tethered livestock.)

Scallops have hundreds of tiny sensory tentacles for sampling the water around them and dozens of retractable blue eyes that peer out from the edge of their shell. In the wild, they spend most of their time sitting on the bottom of the sea and filtering water across their gills, straining out the plankton.

That life strategy made them sitting ducks for the New England groundfishing industry in the 20th century, whose nets scooped up most of the scallop supply along with the cod and haddock. Badly overfished, they were on few cooks’ radars by the 1990s, when NOAA began closing the primary New England groundfishing areas. Cod never recovered, but scallops’ fecundity allowed them to bounce back after a few years of protection. By 2004, areas off Cape Cod, such as Georges Bank and Nantucket Shoals, were booming. Landings rose from 10 million pounds to 50 million pounds, and scallops began gracing the tables of America’s finest restaurants. Today, scallops are nearly as valuable to Massachusetts as lobster is to Maine.

And much of that wealth accumulates in the coffers of a handful of players we could call Big Scallop. In most fisheries, fishermen are free to sell their licenses to the highest bidder. This has resulted in massive consolidation, as bigger players snatch up more and more licenses. Intended to introduce efficiencies of scale, which can bring down prices and benefit consumers, it also leads to a world where fishermen are mere employees in a big machine.

But one place has staunchly resisted this trend. “Maine is the last Yankee outpost,” Brawn declares with characteristic high intensity as she pilots our minivan through the rolling fields of Normandy, land of cream and Calvados, en route to a meeting with France’s top scallop scientists. “It’s the last place on the East Coast that still has this arcane style of fisheries management where you can’t sell your license.”

In Maine, you keep your license for as long as you fish, and when you retire, it goes to whoever is next on the list. That, along with a culture that prizes independence, has led to what Brawn calls romantic inefficiency: small boats, high quality, working waterfronts distinguished by character rather than sameness.

Brawn came to love the beauty of that culture growing up in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, the daughter of a part-time lobsterman and fishing guide. (While her given name is Kristin, she goes by her nickname, Togue, which is Mainer for lake trout.) She went away to Duke for college, but soon came back and landed a job tending bar at J’s Oyster, a notorious dive on the Portland waterfront. She learned to deal with people of all kinds, from tourists to disgruntled fishermen, and she became a fixture on the waterfront scene. When the local drunks had reached their limit, she would literally waltz them out the door so they could leave with their dignity intact.

She soon scored a job with Maine’s Department of Marine Resources (DMR), which allowed her to put her marine policy interests into action. “There were two management committees: one for lobster, and one for everything else. I got everything else.” Even with the state job, she kept tending bar at J’s to keep it real. “People would say, ‘She’s got a degree in marine biology,’ and I’d say, ‘No, I don’t study fish. I study fishermen. And they’re much more interesting.’”

Brawn has a penumbra of frizzy hair that seems to move of its own accord, a hearty laugh, and a leap-before-you-look attitude that has mostly served her well, but not always: Our minivan hadn’t even made it out of the airport rental facility before losing a side panel to a corner curb. At DMR, she channeled that energy into reviving Maine’s scallop fishery, which she saw as healthy insurance for an economy that had become dangerously dependent on lobster. She helped to implement a series of three-year closures in Maine state waters, during which certain areas would be left alone to repopulate, following scallops’ natural boom-and-bust life cycle. It was a hard sell to the fishermen. “The way you create long-term gains is by forcing short-term pain,” she says. “I got yelled at a lot. But the more pissed off people get, the calmer I get. J’s was great for that.” The plan worked. Maine now has a thriving inshore scallop fishery.

Yet it has struggled to cash in on that success, because the market is not set up to differentiate. Whether it’s from a Cutler day boat or a New Bedford trip boat, almost every scallop gets sent to Massachusetts to be sold at the daily auction—a situation that makes it difficult for small-boat fishermen to survive. “Injustice really galls me,” Brawn says as we drive. “I was at a meeting in Jonesport, and a fisherman was saying he never knew what he was going to get paid for his scallops. And I had this aha! moment. Like, why is this fisherman, with his 80 pounds of scallops that he harvested three hours ago, having his price set by the offshore fleet? It makes no sense to truck our delicious Maine day-boat scallops out of state to be mixed in with the federal fishery. It’s like pouring a bottle of Dom Pérignon into a vat of Barefoot Bubbly!”

The metaphor is apt. Like wine, scallops from different locations taste different. “When I was at DMR, a woman out of Stonington said to me, ‘You know, a Stonington scallop is the best scallop in the water!’ And I remember thinking she was crazy, there’s no way there’s a difference in flavor, but lo and behold, as I started to get into scallops, I realized she was absolutely right.”

Brawn can tell a Cobscook Bay scallop (“soft, creamy, sweet”) from a Casco Bay (“gamy”), a Vinalhaven (“coppery”), or a Frenchman Bay (“consistently well-rounded”). Gouldsboro Bay, a long, thin, well-enclosed bay with a natural gyre that keeps its larval scallops from mixing with other populations, produces unique scallops with extraordinary depth of flavor.

But who’s going to know? Big Scallop not only controls 95 percent of the resource, it also has an iron grip on the processors, the distributors, and the promo money. And it isn’t about to sing the praises of day-boat scallops, says Brawn. “That would be sort of a tacit admission that their scallops are inferior.”

So the goal of Downeast Dayboat is to cut out Big Scallop and go straight to chefs and consumers, labeling each delivery with the provenance of the catch and the name of the boat and the skipper. It adds a new dimension to scallop appreciation that can be delightful. For instance, I now know that I’m partial to the robust scallops that captain Alex Todd pulls out of Casco Bay aboard the F/V Jacob and Joshua.

Brawn has expanded what she calls her “David and Goliath battle” to the federal scallop fishery that begins three nautical miles offshore, where Maine territorial waters end. For many years, this fishing area, known as the Northern Gulf of Maine, was little more than an afterthought for Big Scallop, because it took much longer to bounce back than the banks off Cape Cod. But Brawn knew it would eventually, and that it could be a godsend for Maine’s independent scallop fishermen—if it could be protected. The existing regulations placed no limit on the number of scallops the trip boats could take from it.

At the time, it didn’t really matter, but Brawn foresaw the insanity that would result when the area reopened. “One big boat could go in there and wipe out the whole resource before the small boats had a chance!” For years, she lobbied the management council that sets the regulations to fix the problem. “I just kept going back and saying, ‘We gotta close this loophole! This is insane!’ And nobody would listen to me. They said, ‘We’ll deal with it when we need to.’”

They didn’t. In 2016, the scallop population exploded in the Northern Gulf of Maine, and the big boats found it. Over the next two seasons, they harvested millions of pounds of scallops from the tender region while Brawn and others screamed for new regulations.

But this time, Goliath overplayed his hand. The rapaciousness had been so over the top that the authorities finally changed the rules. Today, the first 800,000 pounds per year from the Northern Gulf of Maine is reserved for day boats, and since the current quota is just north of 420,000 pounds, it’s all going to them.

Brawn’s dream of a day-boat-only fishery is real—if she can get consumers to support it. “Maybe I’m just an idiot,” she says as we wend our way through tiny villages on roads that are a terrible match for her and her minivan. “I’ve been doing this for 13 years, and I’ve still never made a profit. I’d like to think that at some point in the future, people will realize just how special Maine scallops are. I don’t quite get why it hasn’t taken off yet.”

With any luck, the people we are here to meet can help us with that.

* * * * *

We check into a giant seaside Airbnb nestled between two old German gun emplacements, the black North Atlantic crashing against the stony beaches where World War II turned, and hustle to a meeting on the Port-en-Bessin harbor with four men who know as much about scallops as anybody in France. Arnauld Manner, Dominique Lamort, and Eric Foucher are scientists in charge of managing Normandy’s scallop fishery. Dimitri Rogoff is president of the Normandy fishermen’s association. The scientists are rail-thin; the fisherman is Falstaffian. From offices overlooking a medieval harbor where small fishing boats bob behind a stone breakwater, they sketch out a system that is straight out of Maine’s deepest fantasies.

In France, they explain, there are no trip boats. There are no scallops soaking in ice water. There are only small boats and day trips. Everything comes to port live, still in the shell. Everything gets sold for a premium and whisked to market that same day.

How, we ask, is such a thing possible?

“We are a country of gourmets,” Rogoff points out, as if nothing could be more obvious. Nobody would accept anything less.

We all nod knowingly and try to convince them that Maine is, too. The landscapes, the seascapes. Everybody knows a fisherman. Everybody cares.

The Frenchmen look dubious. “Don’t Americans just eat fast food?”

We argue our case, and as we do, the parallels keep growing. Normandy rotates its open areas, just as Maine does. The quotas are very conservative—short-term pain, long-term gain—but here, again, nobody argues.

Yet they also have their own Goliath to deal with. French territorial waters extend 12 nautical miles from shore, but the scallop beds they so carefully manage extend farther than that, and big boats from England fish them hard year-round with full support from the U.K. government. Every few years, another battle in “the Great Scallop War” flares up. The most serious came in 2018, when 40 of the small French boats intercepted the British boats and turned them back. Vessels collided, hardware was thrown, windows broken, outrage registered. “For the Brits, it’s an open bar,” Rogoff complained to the BBC at the time. “They fish when they want, where they want, and as much as they want.”

By the end of our meeting, the two groups are fully bonded in their outrage and passion, and we pop our big question: Will they join us for dinner at our place? And perhaps they can bring some of their own scallops for a little friendly competition?

Game on.

In 1976, the world of fine wine was rocked by a tasting that came to be known as the Judgment of Paris. A band of upstart Napa Valley winemakers brought their best bottles to Paris and had them judged blind against the best of Bordeaux and Burgundy by a panel of top critics, both French and American. At the time, it was widely believed no U.S. wine could ever compete with the French classics, but American bottles carried the day. Although the French protested loudly, the Judgment of Paris marked American vinology’s coming-out party.

Could our Judgment of Normandy do the same for scallops? There’s no way to make it blind, but that just makes it more fun. The Frenchmen arrive with scallops and cider from family orchards. Rogoff dismisses the cider and Calvados we’ve picked up with a wave of his Gallic hand and replaces them with his. We toast friendship, France, Maine, and of course coquilles Saint-Jacques.

Then we get down to business.

Manner reduces the cider until syrupy, then sears his scallops and nestles them into a bed of caramelized apples blanketed with the thick, bubbling syrup. For Team Maine, Dumas sears our day-boat scallops on a griddle and covers them in a sauce made from shallots, mushrooms, butter, Calvados, and crème fraîche. Both American and French scallops also get the crudo treatment, served thin and raw and sprinkled with sea salt that Morse evaporated on his woodstove back home. We fill our plates with the bounty of this bountiful place.

By the time the scallops are gone, the sauce mopped up with baguettes, and the bottles of Calvados are out, Brawn and Rogoff are old drinking buddies, swapping notes on merroir, and this president of Normandy fishermen has convinced us that Maine must stay the path at all costs. (“Togue, you and I defend more than seafood products,” he writes her in a follow-up fan note. “We defend seafarers and the coastline on which we love to live and work.”) The only thing they don’t see eye to eye on, predictably, is who has the better scallop. To a person, the Frenchmen prefer their scallop. To a person, the Mainers like theirs.

But I have no dog in this hunt, so I can tell it straight. There is something sweet and dreamy about the sea, a collective memory of brine and tides we’ve long forgotten, but every now and then something triggers a half memory: a fish on your line, a rock in the breakers, a tidepool of urchins, a salty cottage. To me, scallops have always been the finest emissary of that primordial bouillabaisse. Yet the rich kiss I’d assumed to be the essence of all scallops turns out to be the signature of Placopecten magellanicus, the Atlantic sea scallop. I’ll never take it for granted again. But I will, if need be, throw on a yellow cape in celebration—accented, perhaps, with an orange ascot and a necklace of a few dozen blue beads. And wherever the day-boat scallop needs a champion, I and my brochette will be ready.  

The post The French Connection | Maine’s French-Inspired Scallop Revival appeared first on New England.

By Jon Marcus

The gale of laughter startled jays and sparrows from the woods along a steep road at the hilly inland edge of Camden, Maine.

I had inadvertently provoked this outburst. Riding with a group of local cyclists, I had casually mentioned I was struggling to flush out how this small, idyllic coastal town became—of all things—a retirement destination for the nation’s top spies. My fellow cyclists laughed so hard, I almost managed to catch up to them. 

It was not that I was wrong, one explained, not unkindly, when we reached the top of the climb. It was just that “nobody around here is going to talk to you about that.”

I should have heeded his advice.

Over the course of years, on countless stops in town while visiting relatives who live nearby, I inquired about these enigmatic residents and how they ended up here. I got knowing smiles, and that burst of laughter in the woods, but little else. It was true: Nobody would talk about it.

Here is what I would eventually learn about the spies of Camden: Drawn to the area for various reasons that proved impossible to corroborate, after lives about which there is little in the public record, some indeterminate number of former military and civilian intelligence operatives and occasional diplomats found this Midcoast community a friendly place to spend their sunset years.

Beginning with the man I heard described as Agent Zero, but whose identity I couldn’t conclusively establish, they bought summer homes, then settled year-round, after colorful and itinerant careers. More colleagues followed from the closed and tight-knit fraternity of secret agents, and wove themselves into the fabric of the place. They joined the garden club, the Rotary club, and the Episcopal church. Even the former library director once worked at the CIA, I discovered from a mention buried deep in her biography; she at one point agreed to speak with me, before apparently deciding better of it.

Invisible in life, these spies were often revealed only in death. Their obituaries divulged a pattern: A disproportionate number of them died in Camden. That had been the clue that set me on my seemingly futile quest.

Then came my epiphany. I had it all wrong, I finally realized, after years of fruitless prying.

The real story wasn’t who lived behind the tidy brick and wood colonial facades of Camden, what they’d done before, or how they came to be here.

The real story was about how small towns in New England keep their secrets.

What the former spies had found in Camden was a sense of privacy embedded deep in New England culture. It goes back to the tradition of live and let live, says a former head of the chamber of commerce. “This is a place that people come who want to be left alone.” In a New England town like this, adds the local newspaper editor, “you’re not going to intrude on someone else’s life.” 

Of this, Camden is a prime and indisputable example.

* * * * *

The stiff breeze across the harbor is not enough to ruffle the water at low tide, or the fleet of boats that lie at anchor in the shadow of the soaring Camden Hills. The scene looks like a landscape painting. Tourists stroll the picture-postcard main street, the Colonial Revival–style red-brick public library at its crest.

Camden is consistently ranked among the nation’s most beautiful small towns. What began as a hardscrabble assortment of shipyards, factories, and water-powered mills became a summer destination at the end of the 19th century for people who found Newport and Bar Harbor too ostentatious, but who still had money enough to put up grand vacation “cottages.” They also built the Camden Yacht Club and Megunticook Golf Club, the iconic harbor park and amphitheater, the four-story opera house with carved wood trim and chandeliers, and a toll road to the top of Mount Battie, from which spreads a hypnotic panorama of thick woods pierced by white church steeples against the backdrop of Penobscot Bay.

Neighbors here look out for each other, says Nancy Harmon Jenkins, 87, a noted food and cookbook writer, who grew up in Camden and now lives in an 18th-century yellow wooden house with white brick chimneys near downtown. “People are very private, but on the other hand they are watching all the time,” she says in a conversation on her front porch. When she drove her parents’ car into a ditch at 16, she recounts, a stranger took her in and offered to call her father. “But I haven’t given you my name,” said Jenkins. “I know who you are,” the stranger responded.

The 5,000 or so residents spread across 18 square miles of land continue to protect each other’s privacy. Only the most egregious behavior seeps into the open, such as when the head of a local charity was found to have embezzled several million dollars over more than a decade, or when a wealthy summer resident in 2021 poisoned a thicket of oak trees on an adjacent property owned by the widow of the president of L.L. Bean because they blocked her view. “Every now and then somebody breaks the rules,” says Jenkins.

Among the more dubious chapters in its long history, Camden was the backdrop for the 1957 movie Peyton Place, based on a best-selling book of the same name, which exposed the darkest gossip of a fictional New England town—adultery, illegitimacy, domestic abuse, murder, suicide, even incest. In Peyton Place, “two people talking is a conspiracy, a meeting is an assignation, and getting to know one another is a scandal,” one of the principal characters observes.

The movie starred Hope Lange and Lana Turner, looking unhappy to be playing a teenager’s mother. It reveals how astonishingly little Camden has changed in its appearance in the nearly 70 years since. Neither has the murky sense of mystery just below the surface. Its seamy subplots, the Camden Herald review said when the book came out, were “recognizable because they are universal.”

They still are, says Lynda Clancy, editor of the Penobscot Bay Pilot, which covers the town today. Camden “is more like Peyton Place than it thinks it is,” she says.

Soon it would have a new secret to keep.

* * * * *

The biggest unknown about the spies of Camden is what brought them here, beginning in the 1950s. In answer to that question, I uncovered only speculation.

The most intriguing centers on a shadowy research center set up by a former Army scientist to study extrasensory perception. One of the heirs to the Borden milk fortune, who heard him speak at Harvard, invited the scientist to visit her and her husband in Camden, where they owned a farm. With their even wealthier fellow residents, they set up a lab for him in a 45-room mansion in the neighboring village of Glen Cove. It was called the Round Table Laboratory of Experimental Electrobiology.

Before the operation shut down in 1957, military officers interested in potential Cold War applications of ESP visited Glen Cove to learn more about its work, according to Annie Jacobsen, a national security expert who has written about it. Among them was the Army liaison to the CIA. That exposed them to the charms of the Maine coast, this theory goes, where they returned to vacation in the summers and eventually settled.

There are other suppositions. That intelligence agents knew Maine because they kept safe houses there. That it was comfortably distant from nuclear missile targets.

But the most likely reason that spies retired to Camden is probably the simplest. Unlike its wartime predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS—whose disparate agents included Julia Child, Black future civil rights activist Ralph Bunche, and Jewish Major League Baseball player Moe Berg—the CIA was made up largely of white male Ivy League graduates, often from families with money; even today, more than 60 percent of agency employees are men, and nearly three quarters are white. They knew New England from vacationing or attending summer camps there.

High-level military intelligence men were already summering nearby even when Glen Cove was operating, Jacobsen reports—so many of them, in fact, they crept quietly into popular culture. In the film adaptation of Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, for example, fictional CIA analyst Jack Ryan chooses to hide a stolen Soviet submarine in the Penobscot River, a beach pebble’s throw from Camden, because he’d grown up and fished there.

“The CIA and the State Department were the domain of WASPs. They went to Yale. They liked to sail. They had an affinity for Maine,” says Matt Storin, a former foreign correspondent and newspaper editor who also retired to Camden, explaining with a shrug the less complicated truth that likely led so many spies here.

The CIA man who covertly recruited those Ivy League graduates also may have had a hand in this. While no one will admit to remembering his name, insiders describe him as an avid sailor from an old Gloucester, Massachusetts, family and credit him with luring some of his confederates to Camden.

Then there was Robert “Bob” Tierney, a West Point grad and Strategic Air Command pilot who joined the CIA and was posted to Laos, Japan, and Singapore before he also ended up in Camden, where he made an unusual decision for a retired spy: to start a bed-and-breakfast inn that welcomed former colleagues.

More fatefully, Tierney helped create an annual foreign affairs conference that filled guest rooms in the dark and gloomy month of February even as it cemented the town as a destination for still more international intelligence experts. He and others “had not only seen the world but had helped to run it,” an official history of what became the Camden Conference notes. “In retirement, they wanted to bring that world to Camden for one weekend a year.”

The conference, which debuted in 1988 in venues ranging from the town library to a local church, has managed to attract a number of marquee guests. Former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft showed up at the first one; so did future Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and future Defense Secretary William Cohen, then Maine’s senior U.S. senator. In subsequent years came Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Thomas Pickering, and Nicholas Burns, who currently serves as U.S. ambassador to China.

Even the conference’s executive director, Kim Scott, doesn’t know for certain which members of her board are former civilian and military intelligence operatives. But, she says, “you can’t just call these people up and get them to come here unless you have connections.”

Speaking at the Camden Conference one year, former CIA Director John Deutch made waves not by disclosing some national secret, but by quipping, as he looked out at the audience (the event is open to the public): “I see there’s a lot of CIA.” Everyone “started looking around furtively,” remembers Daniel Bookham, the former chamber of commerce director.

So big did the conference grow that it eventually made its home at the Camden Opera House (though many of its founders “would just as soon go back to the library and keep it kind of quiet,” Scott says, smiling). It began to draw more visitors from the ranks of the clandestine services, too.

“Word of mouth was circulating around Langley and around Foggy Bottom that you ought to check out this Penobscot Bay,” one told me, in the wood-paneled study of his Camden home, on the condition that I not disclose his name. “We came up to these conferences two years in a row and we would sit in the audience and my wife would go to the ladies’ room during breaks and meet the other attendees at the conference, who said, ‘You ought to come [and move here].’” Already familiar with Camden from summer visits in his youth, he did.

In part because of its high-level policy focus, the Camden Conference attracted mostly senior intelligence officials. Nancy Jenkins has a journalist friend who mentioned this small town in Maine to a high-ranking CIA official he was interviewing for a documentary about the Vietnam War. “‘Ah,’ said the very high-up gentleman, ‘you know you can tell the status of a CIA man by where he retires to,’” Jenkins says. “‘The low-level guys go to Bethesda, the mid-level to somewhere in Florida, but the really top men retire to Camden.’”

This influx wasn’t in itself a secret. “We used to say there must be a sign down there at the CIA telling them all to come here,” Barbara Dyer, a former member of the select board and official town historian, told me before she died in 2022, at 97. The locals didn’t care where they’d worked. If there was friction, it was over “people from away” trying to change things.

“They would join a committee and they would say, ‘We should change this and change that because that’s the way it was where I came from.’ And that didn’t go over big with the natives,” Dyer said.

Otherwise the natives kept their feelings to themselves, in the New England tradition.

* * * * *

New Englanders were not always so restrained. Puritans informed on newly arrived Baptists and Quakers for working on the Sabbath. Neighbors turned against each other in the hysteria of the witchcraft trials. “If you weren’t the accuser, you could become the accused,” says David Allen Lambert, chief genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society.

All that changed dramatically in the 18th century. Lambert traces the shift to the abolition era, when communities conspired with their silence to protect escapees from slavery. So circumspect are small New England towns today, he says, “I think of them as the perfect places for people in the witness protection program. You can keep a really low profile.”

David Watters cites the “craggy individualism” preached by Protestantism, which he calls “inseparable from the notion of privacy.” Around the Civil War, New Englanders began to answer questions with questions, says Watters, former director of the Center for New England Culture at the University of New Hampshire and coeditor of The Encyclopedia of New England. “How are you?” one might inquire. “Why do you ask?” the other would reply.

“There is a recognition of boundaries,” Watters says. After all, he says, quoting Robert Frost: “Good fences make good neighbors.”

And Camden “is New England writ large,” says Philip Conkling, author of the town history Where the Mountains Meet the Sea. “People go to incredible lengths not to ask directly what you do. They’re no less curious than anybody else. But it’s considered really poor form to say, ‘So, what did you do?’”

Peter Ralston chronicles life in Midcoast Maine as a professional photographer whose gallery is in an 1835 wood-and-granite building overlooking Rockport Harbor. When he was a boy, Ralston’s family lived next to the artist Andrew Wyeth in Pennsylvania; years later, Ralston would stay in a guest house at the Wyeth summer home in Maine. “[Tourists] would stop and ask, ‘Where do the Wyeths live?’ And we, of course, would send them miles in the opposite direction. We have each other’s backs here,” Ralston says. “That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of gossip—very little goes unnoticed, much less unremarked upon. But there are certain quiet community ways that still prevail.”

This can confound newcomers. When Tess Gerritsen moved to Camden more than 30 years ago, after living in California and Hawaii, she thought the reason locals seldom asked her anything about her life was because she was one of only two Asian residents at the time. Then she realized, “No, they’re like that to everybody. It’s Yankee reserve. They know things, but nobody talks about it.”

Gerritsen, the best-selling author behind the Rizzoli & Isles mysteries, learned about the spies around her in a typically roundabout way. In a town where a third of the population is 65 or older, her physician husband asked his many retired patients what they’d done in their careers. “Worked for the government,” they would answer, cryptically. “Doing what?” he’d ask. “I can’t tell you,” they would say.

One night Gerritsen was talking to a neighbor at whose house her son was attending a sleepover. “Oh, you must be one of those retired spies,” she joked. There was a long pause. “Who have you been talking to?” the neighbor asked. Gerritsen still isn’t sure if that was meant to be a joke, too.

Gerritsen’s experience would eventually lead to a novel, The Spy Coast, about a group of retired CIA agents living in a thinly disguised stand-in for Camden called Purity, Maine; a sequel is due out in spring, and a TV adaptation is planned. In the book, “old friends from Virginia” is code for former CIA, a reference to the headquarters of “the company” in Langley. “This village is our DMZ,” one character says. “It’s the reason we live here, to be left alone.”

Since the book came out, people have started to confide in Gerritsen about the spies, she says, sitting at the heavy wooden table in her dining room overlooking Penobscot Bay. “‘My dad was one,’ or, ‘My grandpa was one,’” they’ll whisper, in line at the Bagel Café.

It’s that younger generation asking questions now. Some have realized they don’t know much about their parents’ work lives, either.

Chrisso Rheault’s father, Andre, was a CIA agent—recruited by that Gloucester sailor—and his uncle, Robert “Bob” Rheault, was a Green Beret officer in charge of Special Forces in Southeast Asia in the late 1960s (and who screenwriter John Milius said partly inspired the character of Colonel Kurtz in the Francis Ford Coppola film Apocalypse Now). Both retired here.

“They just didn’t talk about it. Whatever had happened, happened,” Chrisso Rheault says. That was the sentiment among their neighbors, too, says Rheault, who still lives in Camden and helps run the Atlantic Challenge youth rowing and sailing program. “No one talks.”

“You don’t really talk about these things,” echoes Les Fossel, whose late father was in the OSS and then the CIA. His mother probably wasn’t, but wouldn’t have told him either way, he says.

Fossel, who owns a Midcoast-based company that restores old houses, took the extraordinary step of hosting townspeople at the Camden Public Library to see if they could fill in the blanks about his father. Someone joked that the windowless room was a good place to have the conversation, and Fossel had to promise that the video camera recording the session wouldn’t swivel and show any faces.

The session didn’t unearth much more than Fossel already knew—which wasn’t a lot, considering that the file on his father that the government had relinquished to a Freedom of Information Act request was, not surprisingly, extensively redacted.

Piercing those defenses would test the most accomplished spy. And the results might be like something out of Peyton Place, says cultural historian Watters.

“If all the skeletons in the closet rattled at the same time,” he says, “you could probably hear it on the moon.”  

The post Company Town | A Community of Spies in Camden, Maine appeared first on New England.

Volkswagen had its beetle; Walt Disney, his mouse. But of all the animals that Vermont entrepreneur Ann Clark could have sent to market, she chose a little pig—and ended up with a baking-supplies empire.

The story begins around the holidays some 35 years ago. Clark, who graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in art, always had a knack for making things. She’d already been creating and selling toys and crafts from her family’s Rutland home when, late one night, as she was simultaneously painting ornaments and baking Christmas cookies, inspiration struck. As Clark recalled in an interview with the Rutland Herald, she looked at one of her most popular ornament designs, “and then I thought to myself, this pig would make a really cute cookie cutter.”

It did, and people noticed. Founded in 1989, Clark’s fledgling company would grow to become the nation’s largest cookie-cutter manufacturer, which today turns out more than 4 million cookie cutters a year—all made right in Rutland—with 700 to 800 individual designs in production at any given time.

While Clark, now 84, still comes into the factory almost every day, Ann Clark Ltd. has been overseen since 1998 by her son, Ben. Under his leadership as CEO, manufacturing has expanded to include related products such as food coloring, baking ingredients, and baking mixes (think: French crepes, Belgian waffles, gourmet scones).

On the cookie-cutter side, meanwhile, the company is continually trying out its hot-from-the-oven designs. Channeling Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, heart sunglasses were a big hit this past summer. There are new sugar skull shapes for fall’s Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), and this holiday season will see a centerpiece cookie-cutter set for creating pre-portioned cookie “pies.”

Among the top 20 longtime best-sellers, the spirit of Christmas abounds in gingerbread men, snowflakes, and a vintage truck with tree. Alas, there is no plump little pig on that list. But as it turns out, Ann Clark’s success today may be best represented by a surprisingly simple cookie cutter that’s outsold all the rest: the number “1.”

To learn more about or to buy Ann Clark products, go to annclark.com; you can also visit the Ann Clark store page on Amazon.

The post Vermont’s Ann Clark Cookie Cutters appeared first on New England.

By Jennifer De Leon

On this sunny October day in Massachusetts, the blue sky stretches wide as my parents, husband, two young sons, and I head to Boston, a city that holds so much history in its pocket—our history.

When my mother was 18, her former elementary school principal loaned her the money for a one-way flight from Guatemala City to Los Angeles. There, she learned English by memorizing five words a day, worked as a live-in nanny for four years, and met my father. He, too, had come from Guatemala, but his time in California was—he believed—temporary. His main goal was to make enough money to buy a motorcycle, then head back home.

As with any good story, there was a plot twist: Soon after they were engaged, my father got a job offer he could not turn down (driving trucks, the most money he had ever made); only it was in a place called Boston, Massachusetts. And so our family map, like the far-reaching sky above us today, widened. It was in this part of the world that my parents married, became U.S. citizens, and raised three daughters.

As we make our way down the Massachusetts Turnpike, my 10-year-old son practically yells from the back seat (a little too loud, because he wears headphones), “Where are we going again?”

“Faneuil Hall,” I reply.

“So, we’re going to see a hall. Wow.”

“Don’t be like that. It’s where your abuelos became citizens.”

“Oh, yeah,” my mom says, sugar in her voice. “I remember that day. Verdad, Luis?”

My father, wearing a jacket zipped up to the neck and a Patriots hat, simply nods. I watch him in the rearview mirror through my white-rimmed sunglasses. Always, I drive. Otherwise I get carsick, a trait I passed on to my boys. They have playlists and lollipops to distract them. I have the road ahead—and stories. Always stories.

Like how my parents were married in a civil ceremony in a courthouse in Manchester, New Hampshire, instead of Boston because they were afraid that officials at City Hall would ask too many questions about their legal status. In the mid-1970s, immigration raids were common, and their paperwork had not yet been finalized. They could not imagine being sent back to their home country like returned mail. Safer to quietly marry just over the border, in New Hampshire.

In the car, my mother loves to share stories. She goes on about fulano (so and so) this, and fulana that, sharing random anecdotes about people I vaguely know. But today, the stories spin on the axis of memory. The day my parents became U.S. citizens in Faneuil Hall. And how, aside from the births of their children, it was the most important day in their lives—that, and when they got married.

First, Faneuil Hall. I admit, I didn’t always know the story. But raising kids of my own is a glorious prompt, really, to hear my parents talk about their past. How when my mother first came to America, she longed to speak Spanish so much that she would open the Yellow Pages, find a random Spanish surname, and dial the number. And how my father used his first paycheck in Boston to buy a winter coat. I love that my boys are inheriting these details, and I hope they will remember this day trip in particular.

After we park, we step onto the sidewalk and stretch a little. Something about autumn in New England always makes me sit up straighter, lean forward, a whiff of cinnamon and sharpened pencils permanently in the air. We are here. In “the city.” 

“Be careful!”

“Hold his hand!”

“Did you lock the car?”

I am.

OK.

Yes.

No matter how much time passes, it seems, I am still my parents’ daughter.

And, a mother. “I’m hungry,” my 5-year-old announces. He is wearing a green Gap sweatshirt and sneakers to match. “All right, let’s get some food first,” I say, squeezing his hand.

We walk to Quincy Market, and within 20 minutes, we’re all sitting together on wooden cubes at a table among strangers and tourists for a celebratory meal: Greek salad, clam chowder, chicken lo mein. We ask who wants a bite—Yes, yes, take more. And we smile, at each other, and at our phones for dozens of pictures. There can never be enough.

Afterward, we head toward the actual building, the “hall” where hundreds of naturalization ceremonies have taken place over the years, including that of my parents in the fall of 1982. The location for each year’s ceremony is randomly assigned, my mother explains. Theirs could just as easily have taken place at the Moakley Courthouse, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, or Worcester Art Museum. I imagine my parents on that day, standing—holding hands?—on the creaking wood floor where so many like them had stood before, people for whom American citizenship meant a freedom and protection unlike any other, and possibility, like a lit match to ignite a new life.

Yet I recall a line from one of Annie Dillard’s great essays: “There is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go.” What did my parents let go of that day they lifted their right hands? A past, yes. A country, yes. But also: never again having to worry about not belonging.

We zigzag our way through the crowd, step outside into what is still one of the sunniest October days I can remember, and approach the grand brick building with arched windows, its white steeple making it look even grander. Did it used to be a church? Was the architectural design intentional? Did the building always hold such significance?

“This is it?” my son asks.

From where we stand on the steps of Quincy Market, I can’t help but see the building through his eyes. The structure resembles a child’s drawing, something he might scrawl with crayons. Simple, but significant.

“Sí,” my mom replies, and sneakily hands him some Sour Patch Kids. My children, like me, are inheritors of the sweetness that comes with being a United States citizen, which for us was based simply on the latitude and longitude of our birthplace. Simple, but significant.

On our way home, we decide to drive through Jamaica Plain, the neighborhood where my parents used to live. My mom narrates the past with every street we pass—stories and anecdotes and more than a few murmurings of “Oooh, I remember….” My dad chimes in every so often with: “Take a left.” Soon, names circle back like familiar spices—Francisca, Irma, Esperanza—as well as the mention of real estate prices, and regrets for not having bought a triple-decker as an investment. Back then, though, their eyes were on marriage, having their first child, and, of course, citizenship. After they were sworn in that day in Faneuil Hall, they had filed applications for their parents and siblings, extending the possibility of freedom to other branches of the family tree.

As we reach Sheridan Street, where they had rented a second-floor walk-up, everything is smaller, narrower: roads, driveways, spaces between houses. But in my mom’s memory, it is all massive. She taps the window. “Oh, that hill! I remember in winter. Oh, no … when I was pregnant. Forget it!”

“There,” my father says, when we arrive at the exact house.

The boys tilt their heads up at the second floor, as if a younger version of their grandparents will step out onto the balcony and wave. I look up, too, picturing my parents as a newly married couple, on the verge of a life together.

“This is where you had your wedding reception?” I ask, putting the car in park. 

“Forty-eight years ago this October,” my mother says.

While I have seen the triple-decker before, years ago, now I can also imagine my mother standing in the courthouse in Manchester, New Hampshire, on a Monday morning, her hair pressed into thick black waves, maybe playing with her knuckles as she waits for my father to return from a quick drive to the convenience store to buy film. A camera was one of the first things she had bought in the United States. She has no pictures of herself as a child. Not one. Since then, she has made up for the empty photo albums of her past.

When my father finally returned to the courthouse, she was relieved. But then they realized they didn’t have any wedding rings. They had shopped for ones in Downtown Crossing, but two rings cost a thousand dollars. That amount of money could buy land in Guatemala, my father said. So instead they pushed coins into a candy machine in the courthouse lobby and waited for a plastic egg that held rings.

Not too long ago, my mother found a copy of their wedding reception invitation. She used plain card stock, cut into one-by-two-inch rectangles, and typed on each one:

LUIS DE LEON Y DORA FLORES
Tienen el honor de inviter a Ud
y familia a la recepcion, que tendran
con motivo de celebrar su matrimonio
el 25 del corriente mes.
Direccion: 30 Sheridan St. J. Plain
Hora: 7 P.M.
Muchas gracias por su asistencia.

That Saturday evening, they ate tamales and danced in the space made by pushing the couches against the walls. Someone snapped a picture of the two of them sipping champagne with their arms linked inside each other’s.

Maybe this is what it means to move countries, to have one arm always linked to the past, as the other binds to the future. Maybe I am not so different from them. Even though I was born in Boston, I, too, have always felt an in-between-ness, and a deep connection to Guatemala—what the poet Pablo Neruda called “the tiny dark-skinned country at America’s waist.” I know, now, that this connection began from hearing my parents’ stories, these portals to the past. It is why I want my children to hear them. It is, I believe, why my mother and father raised their hands inside the Manchester courthouse and Faneuil Hall so long ago: to embrace the new, but never forget the old. And so, half a century later, on this glorious autumnal day, we all stand together. We angle our heads back, and squint in the sun.  

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