The Edge of Maine by Geoffrey Wolff Page A

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ELEGIES, HAIRBREADTH ESCAPES, AND REPAIRS
    The yellow leavings of the logs poured into the river year by year, covering over the rich dark feeding grounds of salmon and trout, killing the fry, carpeting the [Kennebec] with a carpet of death. The March floods scoured the sawdust out in places, but there was always more sawdust to come…. The paper mills of Augusta and Gardiner did for the water above the carpet of sawdust and bark. They ate up Maine’s wealth in young trees and spewed out their venom and acids.
    â€”R OBERT P. T RISTRAM C OFFIN, Kennebec: Cradle of Americans (1937, revised 1965)
    It was the growth of the pulp industry that ruined the Kennebec as anything but a working river. A river should be beautiful—and the Kennebec is still that—and useful, which the Kennebec has always been. But in addition, it should be a source of pleasure, which the Kennebec is no longer. The sawdust from the mills has covered the feeding grounds of the fish, and the chemicals used in the manufacture of paper have polluted and poisoned the water. There’s no more good fishing except way up near the head-waters, and nobody in his right mind would think of swimming in the dirty water. It’s too bad.
    â€”L OUISE R ICH, The Coast of Maine (1956)
    T here’s no end to elegies, of course, and no surprise. After all, this twenty-five-hundred miles of jagged coastline, a drowned mountain range scoured and crushed and ground by glaciers, underwent what geologists term a prehistoric “ordeal.” But in such a setting, so primal and extreme, happened upon by explorers awed by its staggering bounty, the place must have seemed indestructible. Settlers and their progeny clear-cut the virgin hardwoods and then the evergreens. They killed off the wolves and ate the eggs of puffins. They shot seals because the seals competed for the plentiful fish. Then they fished the fish damned near out of existence. They trapped otters on the riverbanks and beaver from their dams. Then they built their own dams to harness the river’s energy, and incidentally put paid to the alewife runs and shad runs and salmon runs. They poured their shit into the rivers, and then they invented chemical shit to finish the job. Impacted sawdust and junk flotsam so choked the channels of the Penobscot and Kennebec that river traffic jammed to a halt. The comeoverers and their successors bought cheap from the Abnaki and then sold cheap to the rusticators and hotel owners. It’s the oldest story in the books, and as Louise Rich notes, it sure is too bad.
    Except here I am living on the Kennebec River, and I’m in my right mind. I swim in the river a mile north of Bath, and so do sturgeon and striped bass. We see eagles every day. A few years ago, just after we bought our house, I got a letter from a friend with whom I’ve sailed forty years, and many days in Maine. He spent his boyhood and adolescent summers just east of Camden, on Ducktrap Cove in Lincolnville, and he built a house on Vinalhaven overlooking Hurricane Island. Much of what I first experienced in Maine I learned from him. He’s a taciturn fellow, with a dry sense of humor, and when I boasted of setting down shallow roots on the Kennebec I didn’t expect him to go sentimental on me, to break a bottle of Mumm’s over the doorsill. But what I got in place of congratulations was a clear-eyed report about what Bath might have become. Until it was dismantled this past summer, the Maine Yankee nuclear facility was one river over and a few miles east by road in Wiscasset, the “prettiest village in Maine” (measured by its own aesthetic standards), the “worm capital of Maine” (measured by its impact on the live-bait business), and site of legendary traffic jams on Route 1 (owing to its pedestrians’ sullen, leisurely insistence on availing themselves of the right-of-way in several crosswalks on the town’s main