The Edge of Maine by Geoffrey Wolff Page B

drag). My friend reminded me that Maine Yankee and the Bath Iron Works were likely targets of al Qaeda and still “ground zero for some old 3M25 Scorpion class nuclear-tipped missiles now under the supervision of Uzbeki rebels who don’t know how to retarget them and figure, what the hell, let’s light them off and see where they go.” He neglected to mention Brunswick Naval Air Station, a few miles south, center for anti-submarine warfare during the Cold War and currently the second largest employer in Maine. Continuing his assessment of my real estate investment, my dear friend wrote that “as far as the waterfront aspects are concerned, surely you must never have visited the place at low water springs, when the sulphurous mud flats combined with the PCBs dumped up there in the sixties, creates an air quality to which no decent grandfather would ever expose an heir. Of course you might ask, ‘an heir to what?’ Good point.” He closed by assuring me that in Bath I should be able to find retail outlets for numerous manufacturers of Hazmat gear. “These protective costumes have the added merit of keeping more or less at bay the swallow-sized mosquitoes.”
    In fact, the mosquitoes aren’t so bad on our patch along the river. Maybe the cardinals and chickadees eat them, maybe the eagles and ospreys scare them off, but we endure. My old friend must be referring to Vinalhaven, infamous breeding ground of the Maine state bird. And Ducktrap Cove: I remember a Memorial Day week we spent there in 1970 when we hid in his driveway, cowering in our car from the black flies that would carry us away if we made a run for his parents’ casually screened house. Polluters didn’t bring bugs, but they nearly killed off the eagles and ospreys trying to get rid of them. And if DDT had done its work to the very end, the mosquito-less Maine coast would be infested with rusticators, and Fox Island Thorofare might look like Myrtle Beach, with miniature golf courses, a roller coaster, and cotton candy stands. If there’s such a vice as an attractive nuisance, there’s such a virtue as a repellent nuisance. In the seventeenth century, John Josselyn noticed the pests:
    The Country is strangely incommodated with flies, which the English call Musketaes, they are like our gnats, they will sting so fiercely in summer as to make the faces of the English swell’d and scabby, as if the small pox for the first year. Likewise there is a small black fly no bigger than a flea, so numerous up in the Country, that a man cannot draw his breath, but he will suck of them in: they continue about Thirty days say some but I say three months, and are not only a pesterment but a plague to the Country. There is another sort of fly called a Gurnipper, that are like our horse-flyes, and will bite desperately, making the blood to spurt out in great quantity.
    The disincentive to rusticators of biting insects may seem petty—an instance of what Albert Camus termed the “fleas of life”—but the pollution of the Maine coast might have been calamitous. Belfast, one of the Maine coast’s most economically and culturally prosperous cities—where a governor chose to build his mansion and shipbuilders and whaling captains settled during the nineteen century—was a sick joke when I first cruised Penobscot Bay in the late 1960s. After the town’s busy docks fell into desuetude and ruin, a sardine processing plant on Belfast Bay gave way to a couple of huge chicken processors. The bay turned bloodred, and gizzards floated on the surface. “When you sailed up Belfast Bay on the swan-crested waves,” advised Don Johnson’s Cruising Guide to Maine, “it was neither sea-foam on the crests, nor was it swan feathers.” You wouldn’t expect a depressed community to recover from such a decline, and when the poultry processors left for the South, Belfast might have slipped into