Former Maine Attorney General Jim Tierney, now, after failed
runs for both U.S. Senate and the governorship, a Court TV
commentator, has mounted a new hobbyhorse. Maine is too white,
Tierney says. Maine needs people of other colors and other
nationalities. Tierney trumpeted this theme (this campaign?) in an
April 22 University of Maine speech, the grandly titled “TIAA/CREF
Distinguished Honors Graduate Lecture.”
Tierney complains that Maine’s economy could do better, that its
young people are leaving, that its elders are overtaxed (but that,
paradoxically, they don’t want to leave). The former AG seems to
have mistaken the look of commercial vitality in many places (a lot
of immigrants making money) with the reality of potential
commercial success in Maine. I have vacationed with my family in
Maine for almost ten years, and last year had a chance to evaluate
the state as a possible place to live, because there was a job
offer on the table. No, Maine is not “diverse” in way the
bean-counters usually mean. Maine is simply different from the rest
of the country, and gloriously so.
And it’s really not doing badly at all.
Geography is destiny, as Thomas Sowell demonstrated convincingly
in his book Conquests and Cultures. Maine lies on the
North Atlantic, with a glacier-shredded coastline offering
thousands of island and harbor shelters for boats. So Maine has
always had a coastal economy, like Norway, a place it compares to
in many respects. Historically, Mainers are sophisticated, worldly
people. They were among the first and most prolific traders in
North America. They enjoyed the eighteenth and nineteenth century’s
equivalent of vast oil fields — tens of thousands of acres of
tall, straight pine trees for masts. Mainers lived literally in the
world at large. Local historians remark that Maine traders used to
run into one another as regularly in Lisbon, Buenos Aires, and Hong
Kong as in York. The traders brought their families with him. The
Merchant Marine Academy is still there.
It’s cold. Even in the glorious seaside summer, it can get so
cold by five o’clock on some afternoons that you’re grabbing for
sweaters and jackets. In the winter, snow falls — lots of it. And
it’s not a ski destination of any importance, like Vermont. The
wind blows, the waves bash on the rocks. Sleet and freezing rain on
the coast turn to snow, like driving into a wall, fifteen minutes
inland. If living eight months a year in long johns, boots, parkas,
and tire chains doesn’t appeal to you, you’re going to stay
away.
Maine resists ease. You can’t get in or out of the state
east-west. Wilderness covers ninety percent of the territory. There
is one road, the meandering north-south Route 95, petering out 35
miles short of Presque Isle up by Canada, a very good road, true,
but one that can back up 20 miles with a little highway work or a
bad storm or too big an influx of tourists jamming the Kittery
discount malls. You have to have a car, a good one, given the
weather. You have to have heat, and that can cost a lot. Portland
sparkles with a model mix of new construction and traditional
preservation, but outside of that, you live with the picturesque
and the funky and roomy. And you bundle up.
All in all, not the kind of place likely to appeal to today’s
immigrants, as opposed to the fishing and homesteading
Scandinavians and Germans of yore. There are no foreign-language
enclaves, no Chinatowns, no Spanish or Japanese TV channels, no
churches sharing sanctuaries with Korean congregations. With so
much homeboy comfort on offer so nearby (New York, New Jersey),
with so much opportunity for characteristic immigrant urban
enterprise elsewhere, why choose Maine? Maine is not urban.
Many people do choose Maine, and not just for vacations. You can
see the pattern in house prices. Portland costs about two-thirds as
much as Boston. North of Portland, you can buy a house on the coast
for less than $200,000. The line moves northward every year. And
Maine gets more diverse all the time as it does so.
The southern coast, from Kittery up through Kennebunkport, where
George H.W. and Barbara Bush spend their summers, is now called
“gay Maine” by knowledgeable New Englanders. An easy hour’s drive
up from Boston, it has been settled by that city’s prosperous
homosexuals, and the merchants have cheerfully gone right along,
stocking up on goat cheese and arugula, opening restaurants, art
galleries, antique stores, interior decorating businesses, and
nightclubs, and trousering the hefty real estate commissions. On
our first vacation there, in 1994, when Sally was pregnant with
Bud, we strolled into Ogunquit on a Friday night, me with clarinet
in hand, looking for a jazz pianist and a jam session. We found
one, no problem. And let’s just say that the hills were alive with
the sound of music.
Yet right in the middle of the gay Maine coast lies Ocean Park,
a seaside village with one of the prettiest beaches in the world, a
tiny township of half a dozen stores, a traditional summer
encampment for evangelical Christians for more than a century. We
have stayed there twice. At the tabernacle on the main street,
there is a church service at least every night. The New England
Baptist Youth Choir meets there for two weeks every summer. Robert
Frost, as a teenager, taught tennis on the still-existing clay
tennis courts that once fronted a long-gone wooden hotel. Ocean
Park’s library stays open all summer, and the local ladies read
stories to visiting children.
Up the coast just a bump you find Old Orchard Beach,
honky-tonks, carnival rides, barkers and booths. Summer-long,
families of tattooed bikers bring their kids — along with
everybody else, cheerfully and unworriedly doing the same thing.
Here, hurly-burly with the big leathery dudes and their ladies and
their children, you notice something, something that prevails no
matter where you are, that pervades the gay scene on a weekend
night in Ogunquit, and the narrow gauge railway museum on a
spitting chilly day along the Portland harbor front, that informs
that open-handed welcome of the costumed guides at the old fort in
Augusta. Everybody is nice. There is no “edge.” People don’t curse,
not usually. In all my visits to Maine, the most hostile
confrontation I ever saw was between a hulking drunk despairing
teenager and a street preacher who was challenging him to come to
Christ.
There’s the appeal Jim Tierney overlooks, the appeal of what
some have called “the last good place.” The Eastern corridor, that
jam-packed, commerce-driven strip, ends at Boston, and so do
jam-packed, commerce-driven problems. Once you drive north past the
Somerville Powder House, the metropolitan East just plain stops.
Lots of people like it that way.
Some foreign immigrants will discover Maine, the way the
Portuguese did in the past, and for the same reasons. It reminds
them of home. Maybe Northern Japanese. Maybe Chileans. Maybe Danes,
fed up with the EU.
