Using summer as a verb: Photojogblog goes to Friendship, ME

My runs on Bradford (top), Davis
and Martin points

I spent last week in this little lobstering village in Midcoast Maine. Friendship is spread out along four points along the coast: Bradford, Davis, Martin, and Wadsworth. I managed to run the first three of three of them (right) this year. Last summer, when I was in better shape, I did three points in one run. I had vowed to do all four this year, a run of roughly 18 or 19 miles. Nope.

Friendship's main claim to fame is the Friendship sloop, a small sail boat that was favored by New England's commercial fishers. The town has long had a sizable summer community—John Cheever vacationed here—and second homes dominate the coastline, but it still has a busy working waterfront. By all accounts, the lobstermen of Friendship have been having a tough time lately: Notice all the hot new lobster-roll restaurants in New York? They're a pretty much direct result of a crash in Maine lobster prices. 

Lobstering is a territorial business. As Colin Woodard explains in his terrific book The Lobster Coast, local lobster gangs—that's what they're called— have a lot of, shall we say, informal ways of defending their traditional bit of the water. Occasionally this has escalated in to “lobster wars.” In 1995, Friendship tried to push into the waters claimed by Monhegan Island’s lobster fleet. “Traps were cut,” writes Woodard, “and, near the end of the season, vandals sank John Murdock's Sea Hag while she sat at her mooring in Port Clyde, causing $13,000 in damage.” Fishermen were carrying guns. Since then, Maine has allowed lobsterman to participate in the official regulation of the sea bottom. But Woodard argues that the old system of traditional fishing grounds helped to defeat the tragedy of the commons and keep lobstering sustainable, even as the Gulf of Maine cod fishery collapsed. 

I really can't recommend The Lobster Coast strongly enough, especially if you spend any time in coastal Maine—but also if you live in or love any place that's grappled with growth and economic dislocation (Brooklyn... Montana...) It's a popular history written by a journalist, but unlike most books of that type, it's really smart about social history and economics. Woodard shows how Maine's economy has shaped its landscape, and vice-versa. Here he makes the intriguing argument that coastal Maine, which all us folks from "away" love so much because it seems timeless and unspoiled, was really America's first Detroit: 

Maine wasn't preindustrial; it had just been deindustrialized. 

...Maine ice, granite, lumber, salt cod, and foodstuffs filled the docks of the United States' Atlantic ports, themselves clogged with Maine-built sailing ships. But those goods had been displaced by refrigerators and cement, by fresh fish caught by Gloucester steamships and cheap lumber and foodstuffs moved from the Midwest by the nation's railroads. Practically overnight, all of Maine's industries collapsed. As a result, the coast was losing population. The wild meadows and weather-beaten farmhouses the summer people found so picturesque had been abandoned by their owners, thousands of whom had moved to Ohio in hopes of a better life. With the offshore fishing industry in decline, residents of many coastal towns tried to build an industry around the only resource they had left: the summer people themselves.

Woodard spends a lot of time of the delicate relationship between outsiders and locals. The vacationers aren't new interlopers: They've been a big part of the economy in Maine for over a century. But the flood of new development since the 1990s has made it harder to keep the working waterfronts open, and for the people who work on the water to live anywhere near it. The Island Institute does work on these issues, including publishing this excellent newspaper I've subscribed to for the past couple of years. Good local journalism is itself activism.

On to the pictures, most of them after the jump.

Run to Davis Point

From mainephotojog Friendship's famous sign, at the Mason Lodge

From mainephotojog Every little town in Maine seems to have a Mason or Grange hall.

From mainephotojog Pulled over much?

From mainephotojog Friendship's war memorial. The names  on the benches show that this little town has seen a lot of its young people go to war.

From mainephotojog Archie Wallace's. The only store in town.

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog First view of the Friendship Harbor

From mainephotojog Wallace's lobster wharf

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog The Sloop society

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog Boats at the town landing

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog

Run to Martin Point

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog The Lobster Conservancy

From mainephotojog Friendship Museum, a former one-room school house

From mainephotojog Hatchet Cove

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog Crystal Pond

From mainephotojog Martin Point has a bit of of a summer-camp feel

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog The end of Martin Point Road

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog Back in "downtown" Friendship

Run to Bradford Point

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog The road ends in the water...

From mainephotojog ...except at low tide. On the GPS map  above, it looks like I ran into the harbor.

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog The submerged road becomes the Carlsons' driveway.

From mainephotojog The Carlsons' dog chased me off his island and back to  the mainland. He's no Cujo.

From mainephotojog

From mainephotojog Lash Brothers Boatyard

A Run Through the Backwoods

From moremaine

From moremaine

From moremaine On the big rock in the woods

From moremaine

From moremaine

From moremaine

From moremaine So let him out! (At Archie Wallace's store.)