As many fish stocks dwindle precariously, salmon farming and related aquaculture are hailed as a viable alternative.
Salmon pens at Broad Cove.
Young salmon are placed in the circular enclosures when they’re about six inches long, where they leap and splash under netting that protects them from eagles, osprey, cormorants, and gulls. In about two years, they grow to a harvestable size of about two feet and ten pounds. A specially designed vessel sucks the mature fish from their pens and its conveyor stream immediately cleans and guts them.
Lubec rises in the distance.
Cooke Aquaculture, based in Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick, manages 15 pens in Deep Cove and Broad Cove, operating from a former fertilizer plant on Estes Head. A feeding barge sits amid the pens, which house about 450,000 salmon. About one-third of the pens are left fallow at any time.
A pen like this can hold 25,000 fish. The netting protects the salmon from osprey, eagles, and other predators.
From our upstairs windows, we can see other salmon farms at Campobello Island across the channel.
I was feeling a little down as Eastport turned into its annual ghost town. Cooped up, too, especially under the tedious revisions to the Dover history, even before seeing how much I still don’t know and will likely never know, even if I spent a month at the University of Massachusetts going back through the Quaker archives.
Then I realized I hadn’t been anywhere other than eastern Washington County since mid-April. Six months confined to this sliver of rocky coastline and piney interior. The largest city has only ten thousand population and has commercially suffered under the Covid border restrictions. So I decided to see something new and finally settled on Aroostook County, widely known simply as The County, and thus hit the road at 7:15 Monday morning and headed up U.S. 1 without a plan other than turning back around noon.
I can now tell you it’s four hours to Caribou and a lovely drive, some of it through long stretches of forest, others through the tidy farmlands of The County itself. Yes, tidy, unlike many of the rural residences in this state.
Remote Aroostook County is famed as potato farming country.
Turned out to be the perfect day. Sunny, foliage in its prime, little traffic, small roadside sheds selling new potatoes on the honor system. I really felt at home amid all the farmland wonder.
Feeling sated with the visual glory, I felt ready to head home. At Caribou, turned over to Fort Fairfield to follow U.S. 1A back to Mars Hill, and was surprised to find a yellow “share the road” sign with a horse carriage emblem. And sure enough, I found a large colony of Amish. I’ve missed them and Mennonites and Brethren since moving to New England, and this was exciting.
Amish families are finding a place here.
After passing one Amish farm and its bright red barn – yes, that seems to be the custom here, red next to the plain white farmhouse and laundry on the line – I noticed a small church and whipped around to take a closer look.
Never would have if a Friend hadn’t tweaked my interest by sharing something he found online.
The meetinghouse is one that escaped Silas Weeks’ research for his definitive book, too.
Afterward, I learned that one of our good friends was from Caribou, not further north as I’d thought. And then another was from Presque Isle.
So now I have a much better grasp of what folks are talking about when the say “The County.”
I should also mention I came home with 60 pounds of new potatoes from three different stands. Ten pounds for five dollars, three different varieties. Turns out they’re ones that didn’t pass the baggers’ standards, usually because of irregular shape or size, but that’s no problem for us. The skins of new potatoes are so soft and tasty – no need to peel them, even for mashed potatoes. You do need to unbag them, wash and inspect them, before storing. Otherwise, a few damaged ones can spread rot.
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Next time I venture that far north, I plan to visit the entire solar system. Seriously. I caught a clue of it with a model of Saturn atop a pole beside U.S. 1 followed miles later by Neptune. Turns out all of the planets sit beside the road to Presque Isle, scaled in size and distance from the sun at the University of Maine branch campus. There really is a lot of emptiness in space.
I thought the guy was kidding when he pulled up in town and confided that he was going to repaint Eastport’s iconic waterfront fisherman statue, changing the blue coat to a yellow slicker. I was sworn to secrecy at the time, but the next day, there he was, in full light, doing the deed.
The somewhat surreal, but shall we say fiberglass de facto emblem of the city, really got a fashion update. Or upgrade, in my opinion. Seems I’m not alone. Yes, that yellow slicker fits much better.
Just look.
My kudos to Patrick Keough of Seward, Nebraska, for something that even included an imaginative eyepatch.
Some folks, however, are seeing a similarity with the Gorton’s guy down in Gloucester on Cape Ann, Massachusetts.
I think they have that backwards.
Well, here’s how he looked before. The figure was a leftover from a television series set in the town.
Most of Eastport’s small population resides in a semicircle around the Breakwater downtown. Quoddy Village stands apart, separated by a narrow neck around Carrying Place Cove. It also fronts Half Moon Cove, with a dead-end road to the former toll-bridge to the mainland. The place feels like an island of its own and is easily overlooked when you drive into town. The highway skirts it, and what you see is mostly former industrial, rusty, and all that.
A former factory looking for new uses gives no clue to passers-by of the residential neighborhood behind it.Chimneys are all that remain of the administrative headquarters and even a school that supported a federal project in the 1930s.
Until 1935, this was farmland, but then an ambitious but ecologically disastrous public works project took off, one to dam up most of Passamaquoddy and Cobscook bays to transform their vast tidal energy into electricity. A large but confusing working model of the engineering proposal can be viewed at the historical society’s gift shop in downtown Eastport. (The room-size three-dimensional map is water in and water out, mostly. If you don’t already know the area, it’s baffling – and the presentation is aimed at today’s tourists. I still think it would make for a really interesting model railroad layout.) The short-lived boondoggle’s most lasting contribution, apparently, was the causeway connecting Eastport to the mainland by filling in a former railroad line. No more toll bridge and longer loop. Oh, yes, and it also had a noticeable negative impact on the Old Sow, the world’s second-largest whirlpool, perhaps even pushing it more into Canada.
Significantly, the project needed housing for its estimated 5,000 workers, and that led to the construction of Quoddy Village.
Even though the plug was pulled a year later on what would have been the world’s largest tidal dam – it did require Canadian cooperation, among other things – 128 single-family, two-family, and four-family houses had been constructed, along with three large dormitories with dining rooms for single workers, plus a fire station, a hospital, a heating plant, a school, a large mess hall, and a large administration building that included a theatre, library, and sub post office. In other words, a small city unto itself. Even though the homes had been designed as temporary, many of them are still occupied today. Still, for a brief time, the village was home to a thousand people.
More evidence of abandoned projects, also seen from the state highway.
From 1938 to 1943 the National Youth Administration used Quoddy to train 800 city youth a year in vocational trades. It was also a Navy Sea Bee base named Camp Lee-Stephenson during World War II.
And then? It morphed into a residential neighborhood.
Its best-known attraction today is David Oja’s colorful and eccentric Bazaar, a gift shop that includes what’s arguably the best gourmet wine and cheese selection in Washington County. Think of it as a blast of Puerto Rico, Brooklyn, and Provincetown rolled into one. Who knows what the original function of the building was, we can be sure it was not nearly anything like this.
The one-of-a-kind Bazaar, seemingly out in the middle of nowhere.Today it’s mostly residential. I think of it as a small suburb.Anyone else see potential here?Yes, there’s a mix of housing, some of it from the ’30s.Much of it is also a working neighborhood. I’m all in favor of working from home, when you can.
Jnana's Red Barn 