NOTES FROM THE HINTERLAND
THE ONCE AND FUTURE MAINE
By Laurie Meunier Graves
I.
I live in a house on the edge of the woods. They are not deep—you only have
to go two miles or so before you come to a main road—but they surround the
house on two sides, and from certain windows, all you can see are flickering
shadows and deep, cool green. We have lived here for over twenty years, and
I have come to love these woods with their air of mystery, wildness, and
menace. Many animals make their homes in the woods, and, from time to time,
we catch a glimpse of them—deer, fox, fishers, raccoons, hobbits (just
kidding, of course), and a host of smaller woodland animals. There is even a
bear who lives back there, and, although we have never seen him, we have
seen the results of his visit—a smashed bird feeder and a huge pile of scat
filled with bird seed.
Trails crisscross the woods behind the house, and almost every day, we take
Liam, our young dog, for a walk on them. We let him go free, and he runs
joyfully, stopping to sniff here, stopping to dig there, and barking at
small rodents as they scamper through the underbrush. Liam is light on his
feet, and when he comes to a stream, he barely skims the stones that have
been placed there to help those who are more earthbound. It is hard to
decide who gets more enjoyment out of these walks, the dog or the people
watching him.
One section of the walk is particularly lovely. It is also quite
challenging, at least for one earthbound creature. To the right, glittering
through the trees, is the upper Narrows Pond, more the size of a lake than a
pond, and behind it are rolling hills. The trail soon leaves the Narrows
Pond and makes its way up a big ravine, where dark pines grow tall and a
stream rushes toward the pond. Most days, the woods are quiet, almost
hushed, and, at the top of the ravine, after I finally catch my breath, I
feel perfectly at peace with myself. The bear, the fox, the deer, and the
fishers hover on the edge of my consciousness, and somehow it seems as
though this is where we all belong.
Occasionally, we hear a rumbling in the distance, and, when this happens, I
bribe the dog with treats so that I can put him on his leash. He comes
reluctantly, but he comes, a definite improvement over his puppy days. Just
as I get the dog on the leash, an ATV, driven by an old man with oxygen,
comes down the trail. The old man drives slowly, and he always stops to say
hi to us and to the dog. Liam has never met a person he didn’t like, but
he’s not so sure about the ATV, and he yips and skitters sideways until the
man drives away.
Bleeding heart liberals who care about the environment are not supposed to
like ATVs, which are loud, polluting machines that tear up trails. But
somehow, we can’t begrudge this man his time in the woods. “It’s the only
way I can come out here now,” he has told us many times, and we just smile
and nod. In an odd kind of way, it seems as though he belongs here, too.
Each time I walk in the woods, I am struck yet again by how solemn and
beautiful they are and how lucky I am to have this behind my house. But
then, in the back of my mind comes the snippet of a lecture I attended,
where Sanford Phippen, a Maine writer, acknowledged our state’s beauty but
ended his talk with the question “Is beauty enough?”
Is it enough? When I walk in the woods, it seems like more than enough. Yet
I know this is not really true. People need more than the beauty of the
forest to sustain them. They need healthcare, a reliable car, decent
housing, and a job that will give them all these things. They especially
need education. In Maine, it is not always easy to find jobs that will
provide people the means to a good life in the modern world, where we expect
to live beyond our fifties and not only to graduate from high school but
from college as well. I know many people who struggle to take care of
themselves and their families. Indeed, my husband and I have struggled, too.
II.
I was born in Waterville, Maine, a small mill town that seemed far away from
the forests and the countryside. My earliest memories of Maine are of big
brick factories, small yards, the dirty, rushing Kennebec River, and the
mingled smell of fruit and hot pavement in the rain. My parents shopped at a
small grocery store in the South End, the section of town where many
Franco-Americans lived. Fat women in muumuus, dark, skinny women with raspy
voices, and children in brown shorts and bare dusty feet all came to the
market for bread, cigarettes, and candy. My mother bought our groceries at
this market, which couldn’t have been any bigger than a Cumberland Farms and
might, in fact, have been smaller. When she was done with her shopping, she
would set the food on a counter at the front of the store and call out the
prices so that Christine, the cashier, could ring them up.
We lived in the South End, too, until I was about a year and a half, in a
third-floor apartment of a triple-decker. My father worked at Hathaway Shirt
Company, which, like a huge hulking fortress, stood on the edge of the South
End. Like most of the workers at “the Hathaway,” as it was called, my father
walked to work. “Nobody had a car back then,” my mother has said. “We were
all too damned poor.”
My parents were so poor that roasted peanuts from the five-and-dime were a
treat, and my mother tells of how my father would roll the nuts around and
around his mouth to make them last longer. Being poor was nothing new to my
parents, who were children of the Depression. Living in a cramped apartment,
walking to work, and barely being able to afford peanuts seemed, well,
normal.
But better times were coming. The Hathaway was just one of many factories in
the area, and they employed a lot of people who gradually made enough money
to buy not only a car but also a house. My parents bought a small, five-room
ranch in a lower-middle-class neighborhood. The house had a yard, hardwood
floors, and a picture window. My father could afford to buy peanuts whenever
he wanted, but he still rolled them around his mouth to make them last as
long as they could.
Nobody knew it at the time, but this was the golden age of central Maine.
Jobs were plentiful, and for the most part, nobody needed more than a
high-school education to get ahead. Main Street in Waterville was a vibrant
place with nice department stores, restaurants, movie theaters, a bookstore,
and a music shop. People came from miles around to shop in downtown
Waterville, and revitalization was a foreign concept, applicable to other
places, maybe, but certainly not to central Maine. While I don’t begrudge my
parents’ generation this golden age, I do wonder if it lulled them into
thinking that this was not only the way life should be but also the way it
would be for their children and their children’s children. Why worry about a
college education when it was easy to get ahead without one? Why put much
money into schools and state universities? Why push higher education and
make it accessible for the lower middle class? Those in power, those who
owned the factories and ran for office, were only too happy to encourage
this point of view, which gave them plenty of workers who would not move on.
The history and implications of Maine’s indifference to education became all
too clear one day not long ago as my mother and I walked through the South
End in Waterville. We stopped in front of the Hathaway, now silent and
deserted, and read the sign that had been placed there describing the mill’s
early days and its importance to the Franco-American community. On the sign
was a picture of a young girl, a child really, who worked in the mills. It was
taken sometime in the early 1900s. We then read of how common it was for
children to work in the mill.
“When did they go to school?” my mother asked.
“They didn’t,” I answered, and suddenly I was struck by what this meant. In
Maine, Franco-Americans make up between 30 and 40 percent of the population,
and they were the ones who primarily worked in the factories. That young
girl came from the same generation as my grandmother, who never went higher
than eighth grade, and this was typical for Franco-Americans of that period.
The significance of this is impossible to ignore. At one time, a large
portion of Maine’s population was undereducated, and it wasn’t that long
ago.
This, in turn, produced a “trickle down” effect of under-education that
rippled through my parents’ generation and then to mine. The politicians,
the factory owners, and, yes, even the workers (who, after all, sent their
children to work) created a rigid system that was unable to adapt when the
tide turned, so to speak. Having an uneducated workforce might be fine for
the industrial age, but it wasn’t good for the technological age that came
sooner than anyone expected. My husband maintains it’s no accident that
Silicon Valley was born in California at a time when state universities were
free and open to any resident who could get in. I am inclined to agree with
him.
By the early seventies, the golden age had passed from central Maine as, one
by one, the factories closed and moved south. Workers with only a
high-school education were adrift, unable to find jobs that paid well. Those
without a high-school education, and there were still plenty of them, were
in even worse straits. This began a cycle that has yet to be acknowledged.
Without an educated workforce, very few technology companies were willing to
come to Maine, a state that clearly did not value or encourage higher
education. Not surprisingly, there were few homegrown start-up technology
companies, either, and without new businesses there were no jobs to replace
the good jobs and benefits the factories had once provided. Politicians paid
lip service to education, but their attempts were feeble at best, and they
were only too ready to slash the education budget when there was even the
hint of hard times. (A question for those who love statistics: What is the
correlation between money spent on education and a state’s poverty rate?
Which one is the chicken and which is the egg?)
My husband and I came of age in the 1970s, at the end of Maine’s golden
era, and we foolishly expected to live the good life that our parents had
lived, with a modest but nice house, cars, and money for vacations. He would
find a job, and I would stay home, raise the children, and write.
Unfortunately, it didn’t go as smoothly as we had planned. Even with a B.A.,
it was difficult for my husband to find a job in central Maine that paid
well enough to support a family. Although I worked for much of our married
life, a lot of the time we were a low-income family and even qualified for
free school lunches.
Often we talked of leaving, of going to a state where my husband could earn
a decent salary. In the 1990s, during the boom times that never came to
Maine, it was tempting, especially for my computer-geek husband. But we
stayed, and, in our hearts, we knew we would never leave. We were rooted in
Maine, and we just couldn’t picture ourselves living anywhere else.
III.
What ties a person to a place? What makes a person stay in a hardscrabble
state where earning a living is a challenge, to say the least? Over and over
I ask myself this. What keeps us here, for God’s sake? Part of it is the
natural beauty of the place, the deep blue skies, the shimmering ocean, the
dark forests, the rolling hills. Beauty might not be enough, but it has a
tight hold on many of its natives, and it entices people from away to come
for a few weeks, a few months, and finally the whole year. Despite the
harsh winters, there are a surprising number of people who decide to retire
in Maine, and, for the most part, these seniors do not belong to the
shuffle-board crowd. Instead, they are active, creative people who bring a
lot to the state.
Another thing that keeps us here is a certain sense of freedom. Small
communities have the reputation of being narrow, restrictive, and
conformist, but in the town where I live, I have not found this to be the
case. Instead, there is a broad tolerance for different lifestyles and
different incomes. Not far from where we live, there is a beautiful old
house, large and lovingly maintained, with a grand expanse of yard
overlooking the Narrows Pond. I expect the house is worth well over a
million dollars, an expensive house for this area, and it is admired by all
who live on this road. Between that house and my house sits a small, metal
trailer, at least thirty years old, neatly kept but adorned with a riot of
birdhouses, lawn ornaments, and wind chimes.
Our road and indeed our town are the opposites of a gated community. The
rich, the poor, and the middle class live side-by-side. For the most part,
the children all go to the same school, and there is no hidden section of
town. We can hang laundry in our backyards, keep some chickens, and even
have a rusted car or two. Nobody cares if my husband and I drive a
seven-year-old Toyota Corolla, or if we always wear blue jeans. My husband
and I have patched together an unconventional life where I publish a small
magazine, and we both work at home, yet not a word of censure have we heard.
Nobody looks at us as though we are strange, and part of the reason is that
many people in Maine lead patched-together unconventional lives so that they
can farm, write, make pottery, paint, or travel. The creative urge runs
strong in this state, and on a recent visit to Maine, my daughter’s friends
from DC were astounded by the number of bookstores, libraries, and art
galleries that they encountered, not just on the coast but inland as well.
Yet, I am only too well aware that a patched-together life is not for
everyone, especially for young adults. For both college and employment,
young adults are leaving the state in such numbers that when it comes to the
percentage of senior citizens, Maine ranks fourth in the nation. To be
blunt, the old people outnumber the young ones. Freedom, like beauty, only
goes so far. Good jobs are still hard to find, and now that so many
companies are moving from the South to overseas, there appears to be little
hope that big corporations, which bypassed us in the booming 1990s, will
come to Maine, whose workforce continues to be undereducated. We seem to be
stuck, and tax breaks cannot compete with the cheap, ambitious, educated
workforce in India and China. Our politicians will not acknowledge this, and
it is discouraging to hear them talk in platitudes when the state, as it so
often does, runs into financial troubles and the faintest mention of tax
increases becomes grounds for a public lynching. (Mainers take note: Mark
Warner, the former governor of Virginia, raised taxes and lived to tell the tale,
and, in the last election, his lieutenant governor won the gubernatorial
race.)
With each passing year, our world becomes more technological, and barring
some dark plague or nuclear disaster, this trend is likely to continue.
Unless I am very much mistaken, the days of a thriving economy based on an
uneducated workforce are gone for good, a concept that countries such as
Ireland, India, and China seem to have no trouble understanding. Maine, on
the other hand, is still stuck in the past, and in a recent election voters
approved every bond issue except one—for the renovation of public colleges.
Instead of putting more money into public universities, we put less, and
according to MELMAC, an education foundation in Maine, this trend accounts
for the fact that even though “85 percent of Maine ninth graders are
expected to graduate from high school, only 31 percent are expected to
graduate from college.” MELMAC also states that relative to income, tuition
costs for public universities in Maine are too high, and this is the main
reason why more young people don’t go to college. Our stinginess with public
education haunted us in the past, and it continues to haunt us now. What we
sow, so shall we reap.
I cannot tell what the future of Maine will be. Nobody can. Our fortunes are
tied not only to the rest of the country but to the rest of the world as
well. However, this much I do know. Despite its problems, Maine is still a
state blessed with abundant natural resources. It has been spared the worst
of development and gated communities and McMansions. From central Maine, it
takes three hours by car to get to Boston and seven hours to get to New York
City. With smart, progressive leadership, both nationally and on a state
level, Maine would be an ideal location for many, many businesses. It could
be a state where young people stay to work and raise their families, a
vital, creative state that appeals to all ages.
Until that time comes, beauty will have to be enough.
