Mid-July is peak season on the central Maine coast. The blueberries — the small, low-bush kind long prized by the state’s jam makers and pie bakers — had started to appear in the farmers markets, along with the first of the tomatoes. Bright orange tiger lilies burst from front yards, while Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod line the two-lane roads. The summer light dazzles, falling in soft waves upon the spruce and cedar, and brightening the paint on both midcentury saltboxes and grander Victorian homes. It’s no wonder that people want to come here.
Stonington is, without a doubt, one of the prettiest towns on the Maine coast. Over breakfast one morning at Stonecutters Kitchen, I asked Linda Nelson, the town’s economic and community development director, how many Hallmark movies had been filmed there.
“Not enough,” she replied.
Stonington also happens to be the largest lobster port in America. Dozens of fishing boats are anchored in the harbor, while lobsters caught in nearby Blue Hill and Jerichoare exported across the country and, more recently, across the globe. I was told by locals that not one of the beautiful wooden homes that form Stonington’s classic picture postcard view is owned by a fishing family, who now live elsewhere on Deer Isle or over the bridge on the mainland. From the perspective of a lobsterman, many of whom have deep Maine roots, the P.F.A.s — People From Away, as locals call them — are a presence to be tolerated. The lobster fishermen and the tourists and part-time residents coexist in two separate worlds, one that is changing beneath the surface.
In a significant political year, when a small group of voters in a few places will most likely shape the answers to pivotal questions about our government, how does a community living out climate change feel to its residents? This part of Maine is represented by a Democrat in Congress, but the district, Maine’s second, has voted for Donald Trump twice by decent margins; this is one of those places where every vote can matter. Here, the punishing demands of the present, how hard everyday work is, how important costs and prices are, make the pivotal nature of this time feel very distant from politics.
During much of the past two decades, record numbers of lobsters have been caught off the Maine coast, providing a steady living for scores of lobster fishermen and their families. But a host of recent pressures has been building up that may upend a way of life that, for some, stretches back for generations. Indeed, as far as climate change goes, Maine’s lobster fishing community may well be America’s own canary in the coal mine.
“Everything has changed. Everything is changing,” said Dana Black, age 50, who is a fourth-generation fisherman and lives with his wife and two daughters over the bridge in Brooksville. “That’s all I’ve done,” he said. Mr. Black got his first job, on a lobster boat, when he was 12. By the time he was in high school he had gotten a taste of what kind of money could sometimes be made on the water. He skipped school one Friday to work as a sternman on an offshore boat, hauling lobster traps. By the time he got back on dry land on Monday, he recalled, “I had made 27-hundred bucks.” Like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him, Mr. Black had found his calling.
It took years to scrape up enough money for a down payment on his own boat. Mr. Black also battled alcoholism, a not uncommon affliction in Maine, for years. “I used to have a beer for breakfast,” he told me. Then, one night at a Chinese restaurant 19 years ago, he drank seven suffering bastards, a mind-numbing concoction of brandy, gin, lime juice and ginger beer that was said to have been invented at the long bar at Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo during World War II. Mr. Black had reached a turning point. The next day he quit drinking forever.
In the years since, he has seen both lean and abundant years. But none quite like now.
To begin, sea squirts are suddenly everywhere. Translucent, water-filled organisms known as tunicates and about the size of a golf ball, they can spread rapidly across the ocean floor, fouling oyster beds and leeching oxygen from the seawater. “After they die off,” Mr. Black said, “the bottom is dead.” Sea squirts were most likely imported in the bilge water of a foreign ship, and they can now thrive in the Gulf of Maine, whose water has warmed. They are not the only newcomers. Some lobstermen have recently seen scup, a type of fish that, historically, was usually found only south of Cape Cod, while there are more crabs and sharks than ever before. Lobstermen are also now trying to cope with long strands of an invasive kind of algae, known colloquially as gorilla hair, that can cover their traps.
“There is definitely something going on,” Dominic Zanke, who has fished for lobster for 34 years, said at his home in Deer Isle. “It’s kind of scary,” he added. Asked if he thought that his young daughters, should they choose to go into lobstering when they grow up, would have a future on the water, Mr. Zanke took a beat before answering. “Probably not the way that I know,” he said.
In truth, scientists have made dire predictions about the future of the lobster fishery in Maine for decades — predictions that lobstermen have routinely dismissed. And while there seems to be a soft consensus that lobsters won’t disappear from Maine anytime soon, other pressures may radically reshape the lobster industry in the near future.
Mr. Zanke’s wife, Carla Guenther, a marine scientist who serves as the chief scientist for the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries, knows them well. “A consolidation is overdue,” she said. For generations, Maine lobstermen baited their traps with herring. But now that the herring have largely disappeared from nearby waters, not only do they often have to rely on bait from as far away as Europe and British Columbia, but prices have skyrocketed. Boxes of bait that once cost $20 can now go for $140.
Fishermen have also had to cope with a steady decline in the number of lobsters caught in Maine each year, while many of the younger fishermen, who came up during the flush times, are now saddled with heavy debt after purchasing top-of-the-line boats that can cost $1 million. In part due to climate change, Ms. Guenther believes, the number of full-time lobster fishermen in Maine may decline by as much as one-half during the next decade.
But making the connection between climate change and politics is another matter.
“I would not put politics and fishing into the same sentence,” Ginny Olsen told me. One of a handful of female lobster boat captains, and a well-known public advocate for the lobstering community, she was close mouthed about her own political leanings. When I pointed out the stark difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties on climate change, Ms. Olsen waved away its significance. “Fishermen are very — they want facts and information about their fishery, right?” she said. “They could care less about politics until it affects them on the water.” Fishermen, by and large, are practical, self-reliant and task-oriented. “For all fishermen, really,” Ms. Guenther observed, “if it’s not something they see in their hands, it’s not real.”
I would soon get a taste of what that meant. I met Mr. Black in the parking lot behind the Blue Hill Fire Station at 4 a.m. A short ride in his pickup took us to Cave Man Cove, so named because of the preponderance of older boats — and older fishermen. Fifteen minutes later we were off, the steady throb of the engines of the Cap’n Morgan, his 40-foot lobster boat, pushing us steadily south. It was still pitch black out, but in the coppery glow of the deck lights, Mr. Black’s two sternmen, Logan Leach, age 20, and Nick Amaro, 26, were already busy loading week-old menhaden, locally known as pogies, onto bait spears, to be used in the lobster traps. These were augmented, a half-hour later, by cardboard boxes filled with frozen redfish heads, imported from Iceland, that we picked up at a floating bait dock. Despite a gentle morning breeze, the Cap’n Morgan reeked to high heaven.
The sun came up at 5:15 a.m., a tangerine ball in a hazy sky. Six minutes later, in a nearly wordless onboard ballet, Mr. Black, Mr. Leach and Mr. Amaro were pulling in the first two lobster traps from the bottom of Blue Hill Bay tethered to a line attached to one of Mr. Black’s bright pink buoys: Mr. Black would gaff the buoy, feed the line into a motorized hauler and put the boat into a slow, tight circle. The line would scream through the hauler until the first trap, leaping out of the water like a dolphin, was pulled onboard by Mr. Leach, who would then open it and pass it down the rail of the boat to Mr. Amaro.
Mr. Amaro would then add fresh bait to the trap, collect any lobsters inside that were of legal size, tossing any that were too small, too large or egg-bearing females back into the water. At the same time, Mr. Leach did the same with the second trap. Both traps were then returned to the water, and we took off for the next set of traps, all to the sounds of classic rock from Bangor’s WKIT 100.3 FM — “Stephen King’s station,” Mr. Leach tells me — blaring from a speaker in the pilothouse.
The whole process took less than two minutes. Then Mr. Black pulled the boat out of the circle and took off for the next buoy.
This was repeated 175 times, without any real breaks, over the next seven hours. By the time we started back for Cave Man Cove, the three fishermen on the Cap’n Morgan had a haul of some 800 pounds of lobsters. “A good day,” Mr. Black allowed.
Though he has regularly voted Republican, Mr. Black is far from MAGA. Like many Maine Republicans, at least historically, he is fiscally conservative and no fan of big government. He believes in climate change, isn’t worried about immigration and considers the former president to be something you won’t hear Jessica Fletcher say in reruns of “Murder, She Wrote.” But it is likely, at this point, that he’ll cast his vote for Mr. Trump. “I like Trump’s decisions on stuff that he did,” Mr. Black told me. His two sternmen are, at this point, inclined to do the same, citing the rise in gas prices and the high cost of housing.
This is also something that, as November draws ever nearer, should worry Democratic strategists. For young workers like Mr. Amaro and Mr. Leach and millions of other Americans like them who are busting their humps week in and week out trying to get ahead, the price of gas, groceries and housing is perhaps the most important factor in determining their vote. Not abortion, not Gaza, not the war in Ukraine. As long as the perception that Mr. Trump will do a better job with the economy remains unchallenged, the Democrats will pay a price at the polls, perhaps a dear one.
“I care a lot about nature,” Mr. Amaro said, “but also I think about my future and how I can take care of my family, and what would benefit me, in the long term, financially. And it kind of sucks to think like that.”
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