Working Waterfront

Listening for right whales

You might think keeping track of a 100,000 pound animal would be easy. But when its home has no boundaries and its prey moves with changing ocean circulation within the vast Atlantic, it presents a challenge. Then there’s the fact that there are only around 350 remaining and they aren’t… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Making our ‘civic deserts’ more fertile

Like most of Generation Z, many of my early life milestones were bookmarked by incredible socio-political events. I graduated high school in 2016, the same year as a shocking U.S. presidential election and the second deadliest mass shooting in the country. When I graduated from college in 2020, the first… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

When admitting you’re wrong is the right move

Reading the Glass: A Captain’s View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships By Elliot Rappaport, Dutton/Penguin Random House (2023) A few of us get to know everything: doctors, editors, various experts, philosophers, TV pundits, religious gurus—and, now after reading Elliot Rappaport’s Reading the Glass: A Captain’s View of Weather,… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Fear of aquaculture not couched in reality

An article in the February/March issue The Working Waterfront outlined the fact that an increasing number of coastal towns in Maine fear, and are interposing regulatory measures that bar or limit, new and/or expanded aquaculture activities in their respective towns (“Towns fear, fight aquaculture expansion”). Similar (and somewhat stronger) views… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Shrinkflation, reformulation, and recipe extinction

Shrinkflation and reformulation are messing with our recipes. This past year, inflation along with supply chain problems sharpened our attention to price increases. Did you notice, though, the few ounces sucked out of a package of your favorite products? Coined around 2009 or so, “shrinkflation” refers to the reduction of… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Childhood by neighborhoods and houses

On Nov. 14, 1948, Mom, Dad—the man she’d married in Massachusetts four years earlier and who’d just been discharged from the army after a grueling couple of years in Germany—four-year-old me, and my two-year-old brother, moved back to her island home on Vinalhaven. We moved into a second story downtown… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Art, the early years

Telling Stone Maine Authors Publishing (2022) Who were the first artists and why did they make art? Those are the central questions that prompted Scott Dickerson to write Telling Stone. Set in paleolithic times, the novel tells the story of 20-year-old Okyo, a “man apart” in his band of people,… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Listening to the landscape

Notes on the Landscape of Home By Susan Hand Shetterly, Down East Books Notes on the Landscape of Home confirms Susan Hand Shetterly’s status as one of Maine’s and this country’s finest environmental writers. Like Terry Tempest Williams, who lives nearby on the Blue Hill peninsula, Shetterly weaves personal life… SEE MORE

A view of Greenland's glacial landscape. PHOTO: PETER NEILL

Working Waterfront

Greenland’s lessons for the climate crisis

I was in Greenland last year and travelled north to south along the western coast from Baffin Strait to the Atlantic Ocean, visiting the four major coastal towns of Illulisat, Sisimuit, Nuuk, and Narsaq/Narsasuaq. We travelled by coastal ferry and by internal air, at low altitude to see what is… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Tasty memories from Kirstie’s kitchen

In all likelihood, Kirstie Alley was the only hostess in Dark Harbor who had a container in her kitchen of silicone worms, spiders, centipedes, and creepy crawlers with which she or her cooks could garnish platters of food. We sprinkled them in salads, and they crawled along the edges of… SEE MORE