Tag: Travel

On occasion, a few critical details do change the course of history

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I detail in Quaking Dover, my history of New England’s third-oldest permanent settlement, the odds against success for early European settlers were nearly overwhelming.

It wasn’t just the English, either.

The French made their first attempt just up the coast from Eastport, where Samuel de Champlain selected an island in what’s now called the St. Croix River at the western edge of the Bay of Fundy or, more specifically, its smaller Passamaquoddy Bay.

St. Croix Island, site of the ill-fated settlement, sits in the river separating the U.S. and Canada today.

The famed explorer was working for Pierre Dugua de Mons, a noble and Protestant merchant who had been given a fur trading monopoly in New France by the king.

Pierre Duguay had some big dreams.

In 1604 the expedition set about establishing a fortified trading post on the security of St. Croix Island and its tidal currents.

Here’s how the settlement on the island was designed. I’d say it was quite ambitious, especially compared to the small settlement that resulted in Dover, New Hampshire.
The enterprise required many skills.
Many of the workers were mere boys.

And then they settled in for the winter, ill prepared for harsh conditions that buried their compound under three feet of snow and iced in the river, cutting them off from fresh water and game.

The lack of fresh water, especially, was a fatal flaw in their plan.

By the time spring arrived, 35 of the French expedition’s 79 men and boys had died, many from scurvy. The remainder survived largely because the thawing river allowed Native Passamaquoddy to arrive and trade nutritious food in exchange for any remaining bread and other goods.

After the colonists’ health improved and ships brought new supplies and more men from France, they abandoned the island and relocated to what would become Port-Royal, Nova Scotia, soon the center of L’Acadie, or Acadia, a large and contested province of New France.

In 1607 the English then made two attempts of their own in the New World. Their Popham colony at the mouth of the Kennebec River in Maine fared no better, while the Jamestown settlement in Virginia managed to hang on.

In 1608, Samuel de Champlain successfully founded Quebec City along the St. Lawrence River. What we know of the St. Croix Island experience comes largely through his journaling.

Quite simply, we could have been speaking French here, had someone thought about drinking water earlier in the game. Or perhaps simply been listened to and respected.

~*~

Sculptures at the St. Croix Island International Historic Site, Red Beach in Calais, Maine, are by Ivan Schwartz, Studio EIS.

This was once the sardine capital of the world

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

Don’t laugh. Sardines were once big business.

The first sardine canning in America happened in Eastport in 1876, and at its peak, 18 canneries were packed in against the waterfront downtown, along with the fishermen’s dories and fishing boats at the docks.

One of the few surviving cannery buildings. This one was small in comparison to others right downtown. 

The largest of them, the L.D. Clark and Son factory, extended far into the water from the north end of Shackford Cove only a block where I now live. It was the world’s largest sardine cannery, employing 500 men and women who packed 4,000 cases of 100 cans daily when the small Atlantic herring were available.

Heads and other parts were cut from the fish and dumped into the harbor, where they were devoured by bottom-feeders that then attracted whales close to shore.

Over the years, though, the fishery was depleted, though whales can still be seen in season.

And then the market and American tastes changed.

Does anyone eat sardines anymore?

Few signs remain of the city’s once flourishing industry.

The 1908 Seacoast Canning Co. plant, which made sardine cans.

 

 

Bold Coast is an apt description

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While Eastport and its neighboring towns are technically on Fundy Bay, they’re sheltered from the open ocean. Not so for much of Lubec and Cutler to our south, where the shoreline on the open Atlantic rivals anything Acadia has to offer. It helps to know where the trailheads and parking are, though. Here are some views from the trails in the Maine state public lands in Cutler.

Best of all, there was no crowd. Just me and a young couple who were planning to land one of the five primitive campsites at the far end of the coastal trail. I met only ten other folks in the next five hours, all of them delightful.
So what had been stripping the bark off these trees? My “Scats and Tracks of the Northeast” field guide points to Canada lynx, which leave “chin rubs” like these and live in “dense conifer forests interspersed with rocky ledges and downed timber.”  There are also forest edges nearby where their major prey, snowshoe hare, might be found. 
While this trunk seems to be a natural totem pole.
Look out, below!
Except that pretty soon, the trail’s crossing down there.
A slightly inland loop back crosses many peat moss bogs, where plank boardwalks are a necessity.

The trip had nothing to do with landing on another planet, though it felt that way

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

According to the map, it looked like a good road. I had just taken a lovely, very smooth one a few miles to the east, so I expected to enjoy more of the same. But when the pavement abruptly ended, I kept going. After fifteen or twenty miles of encountering no house or other vehicle, I finally came out on the state highway – one of three paved roads running east-west across the county. I did have to back up at one point and try the one intersecting logging road I encountered. Good thing my little Sonic has a compass on the dashboard array. It’s easy to get disoriented in hilly wilds.

Welcome to Washington County, Maine.

The drive had me remembering forays into the logging back country of the Pacific Northwest or even a “shortcut” in the ’50s along Devil’s Ridge in southern Indiana that was pure hillbilly, uh, perfection. I think that route’s long since been covered in asphalt. What a shame – it was timeless.

Long ago, I learned you can’t always trust maps, no matter how much you need them. A tourist site like a commercial cavern might be indicated on the wrong side of the road, or there might be a circle for a village that today is no more than a trio of houses.

Still, they’re pretty essential. As I said, there was one intersection on this trek where my car’s compass had me confounded. Checking the map, I realized I should have turned left and headed south, so I turned about and course-corrected. Good thing, too. According to the map, I would have spent the rest of the day heading into the sunset on a rocky dirt lane.

If I keep this up, I really will need to get a battered pickup or four-wheel-drive SUV.

Getting there is half of the fun

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The Maine coast is 3,478 miles, not including islands. They raise the figure to 7,000 miles.

I live on an island.

Just two miles away, as the crow flies, but an hour by land is the waterfront town of Lubec. One of the best ways for tourists to appreciate the coastal nature of Downeast is by taking the passenger ferry that runs between there and downtown Eastport. I promise you it’s much less crowded than Acadia.

We go down for a walkabout the town, a New Jersey-style pizza, and a sit in the brewpub’s beer garden. One day I watched seven gray seals cavort in the current. And then we catch a ride back, which runs along the other side of the channel from the one we followed down.

Folks from Lubec do something similar, including a stroll though Eastport’s art galleries.

Either way, you get fine insights the shoreline, history, and wildlife in a way you’d never get from land. There’s the Cargo Terminal, salmon farms, Roosevelt summer home, Treat Island. Maybe seals and eagles, too.

The ferry runs every two hours on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, weather permitting.

The Quoddy Dam is a friendly little vessel, named as a joke about the federal project that was quickly jettisoned.

 

Approaching Lubec.

 

At the dock. Treat and Dudley islands are in the background, with Eastport sticking out to the right.

 

Lubec at low tide.

 

Here we are, leaving Lubec behind.

We’re rolling in wild blueberries

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments
The handheld rake was invented in 1910. I can’t imagine trying to pick large quantities of blueberries without it.

What’s harvested by the ton in Washington County is not just blueberries, but wild blueberries – lowbush, laced with small pellets of complex, concentrated flavor, rather than the big, juicy, cultivated highbush kind.

What grows here, I’ll argue, is tastier and richer than the more coddled kind I had previously known and even grown.

As you can see, traditional picking can be backbreaking work. But old-timers tell you it delivers better berries than the newer mechanized harvesters do.

Maine has a near monopoly in the production of the wild lowbush berries in the United States. Neighboring parts of Canada are also of note. Still, the output is only a fraction of what’s harvested from the domesticated highbush farmers in other states.

You can drive right past a blueberry barren like this and not know it’s loaded with ripe fruit.
Here’s what a stop to look reveals.
For a few weeks each spring, clusters of commercial honeybee hives are placed by the hundreds throughout the barrens. The electrical fencing is intended to keep bears out.

Just so you know.

What’s your favorite kind of berry? And your favorite way to eat (or drink) them?

The lighthouses around Eastport are rather modest

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 18 Comments

Unlike the two most photographed and visited lighthouses around here – East Quoddy on Campobello Island, New Brunswick, and West Quoddy in Lubec, Maine, both of which have been featured here at the Barn – the remaining lighthouses I encounter locally are small-scale. They’re beacons, all right, but to call them houses may push the definition.

You be the judge. Here they are.

Cherry Island Light, New Brunswick, is the one we see most clearly. It’s an 18-foot-tall tower with a white flash every five seconds. As a lighthouse, it was first built in 1824.
And at night it does this.
Deer Point, New Brunswick, is a 20-foot tall tower with a two-second red flash every 10 seconds. The famed Old Sow, the largest whirlpool in the Western Hemisphere and second largest in the world, is just off its shore.
Facing Deer Island, the Dog Island Light in Eastport flashes white/red every five seconds. As you can see, it’s no longer a house, much less manned.
The Pendleberry Lighthouse, or St. Andrews North Point Light, in New Brunswick is glimpsed here from Robbinston, just up the Maine shoreline from Eastport.
A “sparkplug” or “wedding cake” design, the Lubec Channel Light  can be seen framed by the bridge from Lubec to Campobello Island from points in Eastport, though never this distinctly. I shot this in South Lubec, where it stands 53 feet above Mean High Tide and emits a flashing white signal every six seconds.
Whitlock Mills Light on the St. Croix River in Calais is the northernmost light in Maine. It’s on private property, and I’m grateful to the owner who allowed me access. The second tower has both a bell and a foghorn. I find this 25-foot tower, despite its small size, particularly charming.

When our small city turns into a four-day party

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Though Eastport was settled relatively late – that is, toward the end of the Revolutionary War – it was instilled with a Colonial flavor by prominent early residents who were resolute veterans.

A continuing spirit of Tea Party and Minutemen makes Independence Day in New England feel different than those elsewhere. It’s not just the place of the Shot Heard ‘Round the World. It’s the region where thickheaded Yankees have always doodled.

Quite simply, history is palpably alive everywhere across New England.

Boston, of course, is the epicenter, but across the six most northeasterly states, local observations uphold distinctive traditions. Think of musketeers firing a round ever so often along the town parade route, along with fifes and drums.

As an independently enterprising oceanside village, Eastport soon had a reputation as a hive of privateering – that is, legalized piracy – and not-so-legal smuggling. That independent streak gets its own attention in the city’s annual Pirate Festival a week after Labor Day.

How joyous!

Unlike much of America, the city had frontline experience of the War of 1812. Fort Sullivan atop the bluffs surrendered to the British Navy in 1814, and Eastport then remained under the royal thumb until 1818.

Two years after its reunification with the United States, Maine became liberated from Massachusetts for the first time since 1653 and began to breathe into its own unique character.

For its part, Eastport rocketed as a center of shipping, shipbuilding, fishing, and sardine canning before the big decline of the 1900s set in.

Today, the tiny city’s locals remember a vibrant past and close-knit community, one that spanned the shorelines on both the American and Canadian sides of the watery border.

Is a renaissance on the horizon? There are signs for hope.

All of these strands infuse the holiday here.

Here’s a taste of last year’s pyrotechnics fired off from the fish pier downtown.
Yes, fireworks can be visually composed, leading your eyes around the sky.

The national holiday also marks the opening of New England’s short summer season. After a cold, dark, long winter, Eastport’s small year-’round populace can actually come out into the open air for long times together. The ocean and lakes are finally warming, to the extent that they do, and that attracts vacationers to join in.

After months when only a stray New Hampshire or Massachusetts auto plate is seen around here, I’ve now seen those of every state but Alabama, Hawaii, and North Dakota (not all at the same time), some seeming rather exotic.

And the Fourth includes the city’s Old Home Week, with high school reunions and the return of many summer residents.

A lot happens over a four-day span. There’s a doll carriage and wagon parade. A torchlight parade. Car shows, bike races, water games, pet show, rubber ducky race, festive all-you-can-eat blueberry pancake breakfast, free outdoor movie, contests, live music, and a street dance, all with a small-town flavor.

A traditional visit by a large U.S. Navy vessel failed to materialize, a consequence of being on Ukraine-related alert. Three different ships had expressed interest in landing at the Breakwater before the turn in world events.

While fireworks were displayed off over the harbor on the Fourth, America’s Independence Day (the beautifully designed and executed big show fired from the town’s Fish Pier was followed by a joyously rowdy encore from a diner’s smaller private pier), the companion July 1 presentation for Canada Day, in honor of our neighbors in New Brunswick, was still a victim of Covid cutbacks. Some residents, though, could view shows happening on Deer Island across the water.

Seems ever so fitting to shoot the works twice, considering Eastport’s dual connections.

it really does feel like a party’s come to town.

How do you celebrate the Fourth?