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September 24th, 2010 by Dave Mance III Notes from the Editor

On The Road

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The open road – the notion of high adventure just over the county line – holds a special place in the American imagination. Media types are especially drawn to the idea, as we’re stimulated by the thought of traveling to exotic locales, absorbing information, and bringing it home to report. While that sentence sounds pretty grown up, there’s also something adolescent in this allure, something that speaks to the 19-year-old, Hunter.S.Thompson-reading journalism student that many of us were, once.

It was a combination of all of these urges that prompted me to leave three days early for my trip to the Common Ground Fair in Unity, Maine, this week. The stated purpose for the extended trip was to rub noses with writers and business contacts in Maine, but deep down, when I hit Route 2 in Saint Johnsbury, Vermont, and started east, I had Jack Kerouac on my brain. I was going to suck up this country – bask in its essence. I was going to discover northern Maine: taste it, touch it, feel it, then report back to you in a sensuous, overwrought manner. I may have been driving a ridiculous-looking rented orange Kia that would have made old Jack shake his head incredulously, and sure, I may have been 10 years too old to be entertaining such self-indulgent goals, but like I said, when you’re in this line of work, the regression can be hard to resist. The trip starts and it’s automatic – you put on your aviator shades, roll the window down, pass over NPR for the most corrosive sounding classic rock station on the dial, and then you put the pedal of that little rented orange Kia to the floor. (Until you catch up to the first log truck).

Now the premonition of failure in phrases like “I was going to suck up this country” is intentional. The problem with any kind of trip to anywhere is that it’s impossible to get any sense of a place in a short amount of time. When your goal is to report back to people and tell them what a place is like, you soon realize that all the sensuous, overwrought prose in the world is not going to be able to mask the fact that you’re just a gawking tourist who, after three days, has no real sense of anything.

And so here we are.

In the past three days I’ve seen some pretty cool things in Maine. I drove through the heart of the wood belt, stopping off at the New Page pulp mill in Rumford – the place that makes the paper we print our magazine on – to get a personal tour. That was some place – I’ll tell you all about it as soon as I get off the road.

I attended the Farmington fair and talked to Mainers of all stripes about the issues confronting their forested landscape – from the deer herd that’s in shambles after a string of hard winters and what some feel is an overpopulation of coyotes to the environmental battles over windmills on western ridgetops.

I visited my friend Bill Mackowski and got a tour of some of his favorite haunts. We cruised a network of timber company roads through an aggressively harvested landscape: broad, forested plateaus falling subtly into alder flats, cedar swamps, and logy, tannin-stained bogs. In Vermont it can be hard to find flat land and so it always seems like the water is going somewhere. In this part of Maine the water is big and ubiquitous and still. It just gurgles from and puddles on the earth.

So yes, good leads, good contacts, good times. But the essence of Maine still proves elusive.

If this were a piece of journalism and not a blog, I’d craft some ending around dinner at the Mackowski house, where I sat with Bill, his wife Fran, and his great-granddaughter Madison eating beanhole beans and drop biscuits, talking about beaver trapping and log drives on the Penobscot while listening to the pop musical stylings of Justin Beeber and Lady Gaga (Maddy was DJ). The point would be that people are never one thing or another – we’re all a collection of diverse influences and ideas. The same is true with places. Maine is deep woods and costal urban, clipped Boston accents and back-woods French, a bumpersticker in Rumford that says Hug a Logger – You’ll Never Go Back To Trees and a bumpersticker in Orono that says Stumps Don’t Lie.

But I’m not a writer, I’m an editor, and so an ending like that doesn’t fly. Maine is the hardest place for us to cover, based both on its expansiveness and its fractured nature (North, South, East, and West all seem like distinctly different places). I need to know, as editor, what Mainers are talking about, what they’re thinking about, how they’re handling forest ownership changes and ecological challenges and everything else that falls under our coverage umbrella.
So Mainers – react to what I’ve just written. Tell me, tell us, what makes your state tick. Tell me a story that gives a flavor of your life in Maine. Help us to better cover your forest issues de jour.

And if any of you are at the Common Ground fair in Unity on Friday or Saturday, stop by the Northern Woodlands booth and say hello.

by Dave Mance III

© by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author's consent.

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Discussion *

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Sep 24, 2010

Thanks for taking a special interest in Maine.  I have been on the roads here for 37 years and still find surprises around every bend.  May it always be so. You asked what your readers are up to so I will give you a brief snap shot of my time. 

I am an arborist in the Blue Hill area.  In my work, I meet folks at all levels of social strata. Having learned about the invasions of plant pests and diseases, I try to educate my contacts about their effects on their trees and the larger consequences on our forest community.  There is an active movement in Maine to preserve forest habitat that acts like a rising tide of interest in responsible stewardship.  However, awareness of the potential future onslaught of pests like the Emerald Ash Borer, Asian Longhorned Beetle, and the present incursion of the Hemlock Wooly Adelgid is sorely lacking.

Consequently, I took it upon myself to invite speakers from the U Maine Extension and the Maine Forest Service to talk about invasive plants and insects.  From the conversations I had with some of the attendees, I learned that, although they are very concerned, they were quite unaware of the potential scope of the looming disaster.  Word of Wooster has not yet made an impact here.  I just hope Blue Hill and other communities in Maine do not have to go through the same agony Wooster did with the ALB.  Unless we somehow raise awareness of the problem, it seems our fate is sealed.

Here is where you come in.  As an educational organization, please think about ways to reach more folks in our New England forest region to educate them about invasives.  I have one suggestion that I submitted some months ago to Northern Woodlands.  We have a wonderful community radio station here, WERU, 89.9.  You can easily find their booth at the CG Fair.  They are commited to producing shows on public affairs.  Please consider hooking up with them and other community radio stations across New England to produce the magazine or at least features from it on the radio. You will undoubtedly reach an audience already sympathetic to all the issues raised by NW, including invasives.

Thanks again for asking.

Tony Aman

Tony Aman

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