For centuries the Scarborough marsh, like many across the country was seen as something to overcome. To serve their purposes people built dams and levies, filled it in and dissected it with causeways – all of which resulted in the slow-motion asphyxiation of the watershed. It has only been in the last several decades people have come to recognize the utility of marshes to the health of an ecosystem and that utility is directly tied to a marsh’s ability to respire – breathing in during high tides and breathing out when the moon pulls the ocean in the opposite direction, all the while exchanging nutrients and oxygen, sequestering toxins and carbon. The marsh has begun to recover as those structures have been dismantled – or allowed to fall apart.
Life in Maine is a bit like the marsh, except the barriers to exchange are cultural and psychological rather than physical.
In a September 2004 “advice column” for the Sentry’s sister paper, the Biddeford Saco Old Orchard Beach Courier, I wrote that Mainers’ driving skills “stink” and that we generally do things better in Jersey.
That column would serve as a template for Jersey Tawk, a forum for me from time to time to vent against the peculiar provincialism and entrenched insularity with which many Mainers regard themselves and this state. At the time of that piece, I had lived in Maine for three years and was constantly shocked by the sheer number of people I encountered who never felt the need to travel beyond the state’s borders and the hostility toward anyone or anything originating somewhere else. In my adopted hometown of Portland, I often found myself arguing with people (sometimes in dark bars in the middle of the day) who believed Maine was being overrun by Somali and other east African immigrants who were stealing “their” jobs and even “their” government handouts. Such xenophobic ranting may get some traction in San Diego, but Maine?
My purpose with Jersey Tawk is to get under the skin of such people by boasting about some place as reviled as New Jersey. But far from a simple desire to annoy people with my version of hometown pride, I truly believe the myth of “the way life should be” is damaging the reality of the way life is or could be.
But aside from this gut feeling, I’ve always had difficulty quantifying or qualifying just how damaging Maine’s rejectionist isolationism is to the state’s cultural and economic health.
Last week, I opened a copy of the Portland Forecaster and to my surprise found my own company, Mainely Media LLC, mentioned, if obliquely, in a rather long article about our corporate owner’s attempt to get publicly supported financing for a new acquisition. The article mentions near the top that the pursuit of the financing is “not unusual” and mentions further down that the Forecaster’s owners also have availed themselves of the financing. Nowhere did the article make clear how the story was relevant to readers in Portland and nowhere in the article did it mention that the Forecaster’s Southern edition competes directly with two of the “several weekly publications” in Southern Maine that comprise Mainely Media, LLC.
What is mentioned on several occasions in the article is that Sample News Group (which owns Mainely Media, LLC), its principals and several of its employees are from away.
In what could be spun as a good news for business in Maine story (“Company continues to see value investing in Maine”) instead paints a picture of an out-of-state company possibly abusing a subsidy to take over Maine a family-owned business and fire its employees. While it offers no direct evidence to counter the argument that the public financing will help the company preserve Maine jobs, the article does cite past incidences when the people (including the Forecaster’s current editor) left Sample newspapers’ employ either by choice or force.
Never mind the industry is currently undergoing historic changes. Never mind the fact that a number of former Sample-owned Journal Tribune employees currently work at Sample-owned Mainely Media, LLC. Never mind that Chris Miles, the “Pennsylvania-based” Sample News principal cited in the story actually lives and pays taxes in Maine. The story’s subtext is: These people are not from here and they are not trustworthy.
While all this may seem a bit “inside baseball” – an esoteric example of my larger point about Maine’s attitude toward outsiders; it is but one note in the near-constant drumbeat heard by all of us “from away” who come here and contribute to the common good and are resented for it.
Those who wish to inhabit the mythological Maine that is home to the industrious, self-reliant and woods-wise Yankee, suspicious of outsiders seeking to install foreign ideas also chooses the real Maine in which the economic conditions foster a culture of dependency, obesity and ignorance. Those who ascribe too literally to the notion that Mainers have figured out the magical formula for living “life as it should be” fail to see the irony in the fact that their neighbors depend on charity to survive the winter.
I love Maine. I really do. Otherwise I wouldn’t still be here. But that doesn’t mean I think it’s perfect.