The long drive to Castine from Portland puts me in a headspace where the present collides with the past. The sun is warm and bright; the car hums with the prospect of adventure. Beautifully maintained Federal and Georgian buildings line the cape where the Bagaduce River meets Penobscot Bay. As I round a corner onto Sea Street, along Castine’s harbor, it’s easy to juxtapose 18th-century life with the present day, as if the beautiful setting — the tidal shores, the pristine waters reflecting blue sky, the streets lined with majestic elms — has enticed my ancestors to join me on this trip. 

I’m here to see Esther and Emanuel, two newly renamed islands in the Bagaduce, and to uncover what I can about the people for whom they were named. Wherever the actual Esther and Emanuel came from, they wouldn’t have arrived here by land, as I did, but by sea — effectively the only means of reaching Castine in the 1700s. Fitting that their names have come to rest on a place inaccessible by roads: the Bagaduce River islands formerly known as Upper Negro and Lower Negro. 

Last November, after 18 months of committee meetings, listening sessions, and historical research, voters in Castine chose “Esther” and “Emanuel” from among two pairings of names in a binding town-wide survey (and “Meguntic Islands” as a collective term, an Anglicized Abenaki word associated with waves). The names now await final approval from the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. A mile and a half upstream from Castine Harbor, the islands are small, wooded, and linked by a sandbar. The upper island is privately owned, while the lower is a preserve of the Maine Coast Heritage Trust. They’ve been known as the Negro Islands since at least 1790, and their owners have all been white. The reason behind the name has been lost — or, depending on who recounts the mystery, unacknowledged or even erased. As a Black person and descendant of American chattel slavery, I can’t help focusing on the latter two explanations.

The renaming process in Castine was instigated by a complaint, in 2020, to the federal Board on Geographic Names, which the BGN relayed to the town. Earlier that year, a story in the Portland Press Herald reported that the Maine Coastal Island Registry still included three islands with the N-word in their names, plus two that incorporated a slur against Native American women. For decades, both words have been banned from place names under Maine state law. “Negro” is not, but shortly after the Press Herald story, summer-property owners on a Negro Island in Boothbay voted to become Oak Island instead. In Castine, in May of 2021, attendees at a town meeting also approved a name change, by a vote of 44 to 33.

At the time, one argument raised against changing the names was that the islands had a tie to the Underground Railroad — that renaming them would nullify a connection to the historic trail to freedom. But this was nothing more than local legend, as Lisa Simpson Lutts, executive director of the Castine Historical Society, explained in public meetings, producing a deed mentioning Negro Island from 1790 — 20 years before the Underground Railroad network formed. Lutts’s research, she told me more recently, suggests that when Maine place names had “Negro” as the descriptor, these places were historically considered uninhabitable fringes, not for the general public. Islands bearing the name were segregated directly by water and indirectly by the presence of Black bodies — places of marginalization and displacement rather than refuge. 

As Karen Francoeur, proprietor of Castine Kayak Adventures, guides me over the waters of the Bagaduce towards Esther and Emanuel, she tells me it’s long been said around town that early Castine’s wealthy slave owners put enslaved servants on the island. Francoeur and I glide across the water, the shoreline of Castine behind us, the silhouettes of Esther and Emanuel ahead. Labor needed to be nearby, but Black labor needed to live outside of the view of the townspeople. 

Esther and Emanuel appear in the account book of one Colonel Gabriel Johonnot, with entries dated 1785 to 1790. Johonnot notes his dealings with a merchant named Matthias Rich and his “girl Esther,” as well as “Richard Hunnewell, trader, and negro man Emanuel.” Both were likely enslaved. What is now Maine was then part of Massachusetts, which had effectively abolished slavery, in 1783, but release from slavery was gradual. Free people, in documents from the time, have last names; Esther and Emanuel do not. A last name signifies that an individual belongs to a group, a family, and therefore society. It acknowledges someone is human, has a history worth remembering, is worthy of leaving a bread crumb along the trail of life — an opportunity to be remembered, identified, and acknowledged.

In the last year, I’ve been involved with an effort called the Place Justice Project, an initiative of the state’s Permanent Commission on the Status of Racial, Indigenous & Tribal Populations. The project considers Maine place names and whether and how racialized and Native people are remembered, identified, and acknowledged. I’ve often heard it said at Place Justice events that the reaction of the “general public” must be cautiously considered when new place names are proposed, that the “general public” must be gently exposed to new ideas. The phrase often seems like code for “white people” — much as “urban” has become a white cultural code for “Black people,” regardless of where they live. In the 18th century — at a time when the new U.S. Constitution defined a Black person, for the purposes of taxation and representation, as three-fifths of a person — the code for “Black people” was withholding last names.

Esther and Emanuel appear in no other town records or documents. And although they may have been excluded from town life, they weren’t the only Black people living in Castine around the turn of the 19th century. By 1840, according to Lutts, the town had several Black and biracial families, accounting for nearly one percent of the population — a percentage nearly three times greater, at the time, than in Maine overall. A prosperous port, Castine flourished during the 19th century, and Black families there presumably sustained themselves as sailors and domestic help. Sailing was one of the only occupations offering equal pay across races — ironically so, as Black men were considered worthy of equal pay only when they were helping perpetuate the slavery economy. Slavery in the 19th century remained an international business, with trade cycles that brought ships from Castine to southern ports as far as New Orleans and the Caribbean, carrying cargoes of salt cod that fed enslaved plantation workers. Ships were then packed with raw cotton produced by enslaved workers and sailed to textile mills in England, where they were emptied and filled with salt, which was then delivered to Castine, so that fishermen might salt and preserve their cod. The formerly enslaved and free Black people of Castine were still involved in the institution of slavery, just like everyone else in the seafaring community. 

Who were some of the Black people living in Castine as a result of this trade? The records are faint, but as Lutts, from the historical society, explained to me, traces remain. Jabin and Judy Niles were early Black residents of Castine, with records dating back to 1803. Their names were also considered for the islands. Unusual for the time, they were not recorded as living with a white family. In the 1820 census, they are the first African-descended family recorded as living independently in Castine. We know the Nileses were poor, as they’re listed in the Castine pauper records, and they lived in a house on a wharf, which Lutts says wouldn’t have been well insulated, hard to keep warm during a Maine coastal winter. The wharf and the islands: both places to keep a Black labor force marginalized, at the outskirts of town. Most of the Niles children didn’t stay in Castine. One son, who moved to Portland, helped to found the city’s landmark Abyssinian Church, now the country’s third-oldest African American meeting house, then a hub of abolitionism and Black cultural life — and an actual Underground Railroad site. 

In early Castine, only one Black resident owned land and voted. He was a sailor named William Defleet, and the town renaming committee also considered his name for the islands. Unlike most Black residents, Lutts says, Defleet left a bread-crumb trail, paying poll and real-estate taxes. He has a first name and a surname, and we know he owned land in both Maine and California — he was, judging from this, successful. Thinking of Defleet’s name passed over in favor of Esther and Emanuel makes me wonder, is it more important to shine light on the least recognized? To acknowledge unpaid labor over the successes of the formerly enslaved, and their descendants, who were not domestic servants? The stories of Black people blessed with success during that time, success that the enslaved could only dream of, are seldom told, a different sort of erasure.

The Black presence in Castine declined in the late 19th century, after the Civil War, when Castine’s importance as a shipping center waned. In a nation growing more industrialized, new jobs outside of Castine may have simply beckoned people away, changing migration patterns. Did Castine become more hostile to Black residents, these newly five-fifths people, as white residents felt the losses of family members and profits after the war? The details of what changed will remain a mystery, because like so much of Black history, they went unrecorded. Today, fewer than two percent of Castine’s 1,000 or so residents are Black, a slightly lower percentage than statewide. 

Once the U.S. Board on Geographic Names approves Esther and Emanuel, one Negro Island will remain in Maine, off Biddeford Pool and privately owned. The Place Justice Project has tracked 14 other sites with “Negro” in the name, including Negro Brook, in Somerset County, and Negro Hill, in Penobscot County. 

After Francoeur and I pull our kayaks ashore, I walk Emanuel’s perimeter trail, which is lined with dried sea urchins and pine needles. I examine the remnants of an old cistern, gaze across the Bagaduce River, and see the now-submerged sandbar that connects this island with Esther at low tide. I have just as many questions as before I stood on the island, stuck in the 21st century with only limited access to the marginalized past. I hope future visitors leave here understanding that it’s okay to have questions, that more will be uncovered about this parcel of land. Are Esther and Emanuel going to offer the same undeniable, visible history of Black-people’s experience and presence here that Upper and Lower Negro Island did? Visitors, and even those just looking at a map, will need to actively uncover the history to know that Esther and Emanuel Islands are named after the enslaved. Maine Coast Heritage Trust, which owns and stewards Emanuel Island, plans to install a plaque sharing the island’s history. I’m thankful that the people of Castine stepped into their truth, that history is being uncovered and shared, that Black heritage in Maine is being acknowledged. The islands belong to Maine’s expansive and rugged coast, so its historical inhabitants had to be full of the grit that it takes to be a Mainer. It’ll take our grit to get from here to there, from the 18th century to the future, from Underground Railroad folklore to recognition of real Black people’s lives and labor.

Listen to a companion episode of the podcast In the Pocket: Conversations with BIPOC Mainers, expanding on this essay’s topic and reporting.

Get all of our latest stories delivered straight to your mailbox every month. Subscribe to Down East magazine.

Let’s start by acknowledging that change can be hard, and it can be scary. People tend to dislike it. We crave consistency. We want to be certain of outcomes, to know that everything will be okay and that what’s true today will be true tomorrow. Many of us, especially if we’re comfortable, prefer for things to stay basically the same. It’s actually how our human brains are wired.

It seems like a cosmic joke, then, that stasis is impossible. That change is, of course, inevitable. And in Maine, in recent years, the waves of change have felt unceasing. Mill closures have upended communities across the state. The fishing and lobstering industries have faced tightening regulations and a transforming gulf. The pandemic prompted an unprecedented influx of home buyers from out of state. In many communities, Maine’s housing shortage feels severe enough to put our entire economy at risk.

What does all of this mean for this state we love? What is Maine when the lobster boats disappear from the harbors? What is Maine if only a fraction of those who grew up here can afford to live here? What will become of our character? What will become of us if we lose it?

These questions, these worries and fears, are not new, nor are they unique to Maine, although Charles Colgan, economist and professor emeritus at the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School of Public Service, acknowledges that “it is characteristic of Maine to kind of obsess over these things.” More so, he adds, than elsewhere in New England — although not without reason.

“The demographic and economic factors that shape what people think of as ‘Maine character,’ they’re just rapidly ending,” Colgan told me recently. “The notion that we’re going to be able to live with the character of Maine from the ’70s is not going to be tenable — but it’s not going to be recognized as untenable, and there are going to be big fights about it.” 

Among the things we already fight about: a glut of short-term rentals hollowing out formerly year-round communities, helping send home prices soaring; more and bigger cruise ships, dropping thousands off in communities where only thousands live; and, of course, ever more new residents bringing city money, city tastes, and city expectations. We lament the loss of character when a town’s economic base shifts from fishing to tourism, when a once-working-class neighborhood, like Portland’s Munjoy Hill, gets covered in pricey condos, when leaders push to ease development restrictions on formerly agricultural land. Land trusts and preservation organizations rely on appeals to character to preserve threatened spaces. Meanwhile, the word is so frequently conjured as a cudgel to prevent new development — and increasingly understood as a tool of historically racist housing policies — that a state commission last year recommended it be eliminated from housing law altogether. 

Hear it in enough contexts and “character” can start to seem so slippery as to be meaningless. A word without substance. A word that means what we want it to mean. 

If you’re reading this magazine, you probably have your own understanding of Maine’s character and, likely, some urge to protect it. But how possible is this if we’re using the word to describe different things? And what, exactly, are we protecting Maine’s character from? Outside forces? Change? Those people? It shouldn’t have to be said that it’s despicable to invoke “character” to keep away low-income families or people of color. But what if it’s seemingly rapacious developers? What if it’s franchises? What if it’s wealthy Massholes?

One sentiment that’s as much a part of the Maine character as anything: “If you come to Maine because of what Maine offers, don’t try to change it.” That’s how Kate Dufour, who runs the nonprofit Maine Municipal Association, articulates it. “People who move from Boston for the quality of life and then expect us to be like Boston? Yeah, you have to take your own trash to the landfill. We’re not changing that. Yeah, you live on a dirt road. We’re not changing that. Yeah, we have town meetings. We’re not changing that.” And yet, Dufour adds, “If we’re going to survive, we’re going to have to evolve and grow.”

Dufour advocates with state and federal legislators for the interests of Maine local governments on issues that include taxes, housing, and zoning. When I first got her on the phone, she was hesitant even to talk about character. Was I taking the position, she asked, that the word was an instrument of racism? In 2021, Dufour was a member of a state commission assembled to “increase housing opportunities in Maine by studying land-use regulations and short-term rentals.” Among the commission’s recommendations was striking the word from housing law, excluding “character” as a legal basis for zoning regulations. Dufour, along with every other member present, voted in support of that recommendation. The Maine Municipal Association, however, ultimately came out against the bill that emerged from the commission’s work, on the basis that it stripped too much power from local governments. The legislation that was passed last spring, with narrow bipartisan support, permits more dwellings to be built on housing lots, among other things, but it didn’t contain the “character” clause.

Ryan Fecteau, then Speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, introduced the bill establishing the commission. He calls the legislation that came out of it “the crowning achievement” of his time in the legislature. “These are challenging conversations,” he told me. “But ‘character’ is another word for ‘status quo.’ It’s another word for, ‘I’ve obtained prosperity, and I want to make sure no one else does.’ That’s a fundamental unfairness. It’s also a red herring. Because the reality is we will not be prosperous as a nation or as a state if people cannot obtain housing.” 

Fecteau likens the use of the term “character” to America’s history of redlining — the system of racist housing policies that kept people of color and lower-income Americans from buying in certain neighborhoods, beginning in the 1930s. He’s far from alone in voicing criticism of exclusionary zoning policies, and anyone who’s worked in housing policy can attest to how “protecting character” is often deployed as a blanket shield against any kind of development.

Jeff Levine, the city of Portland’s former director of planning and urban development, who now teaches urban studies and planning at MIT, says that his students are increasingly wary of terms like “character” and “historic preservation,” hearing only a proxy for NIMBYism and anti-housing attitudes. “It’s not always that simple,” says Levine, who also sat on the state’s housing-opportunity commission. “For a long time, the general sense was that historic preservation was important and a way to protect. In students now, I see a flip. They think ‘preservation’ is just a way for people to say they don’t want affordable housing nearby. I have to say, ‘Well, sometimes it’s important.’ There’s really a hostile response to preservation as an effort.”

Even apart from who it dispossesses, Levine says, using “character” to thwart change can have unintended consequences. “There’s often an assumption that the way you preserve the character is stopping everything from happening,” Levine says. “In reality, sometimes that accelerates the loss.” Adding multi-unit housing may change the feel of a mom-and-pop-y downtown, in other words, but not as dramatically as a Main Street full of empty storefronts. “Things will change,” Levine says, “and if nothing is changing on the surface, that usually means that housing is becoming more expensive.”

Kevin Sutherland was Bar Harbor’s town manager from January of 2022 through January of 2023, following stints in town government in Saco and Ithaca, New York. “I’ve heard it in every town I’ve worked in,” he told me with a sigh. “‘That development project doesn’t fit the character of this neighborhood.’ The term has been used to keep things from changing. It’s an element of why we have such a shortage of housing.”

When Sutherland, whose salary started at $115,000, and his partner, who works at Bar Harbor’s Jackson Laboratory, began looking for houses in the area, everything they found was either far too expensive or in need of far too much work. Sutherland says they made one offer on a house — listed at an “obscene price” — that was later bought by a private company to operate as an Airbnb. He and his family ended up moving to Trenton, just across the Mount Desert Narrows. During his tenure as town manager, it took him 45 minutes to get to work each morning because he first dropped off his kid in Southwest Harbor, the closest place his family found daycare, then backtracked to his office. 

One hears similar stories across the state. Last March, for example, when Rockland tried to hire a new police chief, at a salary of $90,000, the first candidate offered the job turned it down, citing the cost of homes in Knox County, where, last summer, the median sale price reached $425,000. “People in Maine are driving an hour and a half to get to where they work,” Fecteau told me. “Talk about the character of the community. We should expect that the people who serve our community — whether in public safety or education or retail — can be members of our community.” 

Wariness of development isn’t the only factor inflating Maine’s real-estate prices. In 2021, to combat spiraling housing costs, Bar Harbor passed an ordinance putting a cap on the percentage of homes that can be run exclusively as Airbnbs or other short-term rentals (homeowners who rent rooms or rent for only portions of the year are in a separate category). That currently describes some 15 percent of the town’s housing stock, and the new cap means no entity can buy a home for that purpose until the percentage dips below 9 percent. One side effect: short-term rental operators almost immediately started buying up housing in neighboring communities, Sutherland says. The adjacent town of Mount Desert is now considering a licensing ordinance, responding to critics who argue that short-term rentals “destroy the traditional character of neighborhoods,” as the local paper put it.

Another flashpoint for those concerned about the erosion of Bar Harbor’s character: cruise-ship visits, which have doubled and then some over the last 20 years. Sutherland worries, though, that an ordinance passed in November, putting a 1,000-person daily limit on the number of passengers allowed to disembark, is going to have its own unintended consequences. In January, a nonprofit representing business owners filed a lawsuit against the town, and Sutherland told me he anticipated others, including from the pilot’s association, whose members depend on ship traffic and which had alerted him last December that they’d hired an attorney (shortly after we spoke, the pilot’s association joined the business owners’ suit as an intervenor). Sutherland points out that MDI’s Acadia National Park sees some 4 million annual visitors, while Bar Harbor’s cruise-ship passengers number around 300,000. Before the ordinance, he and other officials had been making progress working with cruise lines and other entities to reduce congestion. Now, the harbormaster is trying to figure out a system to count disembarking passengers. I asked Sutherland, jokingly, how about turnstiles? He didn’t laugh.

Debora Keller has worked in community development for some 30 years and lived in Bath for 23 of them. These days, she runs Bath’s housing authority and sits on a committee tasked with reexamining the city’s comprehensive plan. “What’s fascinating is understanding how deeply rooted housing policy is in what communities are,” she says. “The issue is that there’s a bit of a delay: housing policy plays out over the years, and all of a sudden, you look back and say, ‘Oh my god, how did we get here? Why can’t our kids move back here? Why can’t our teachers find a place to live?’”

The street she lives on, Keller says, includes a mix of trailers on foundations, duplexes, four- and six-family multiplexes, and stately, historic captains’ homes. “It’s the most eclectic housing you can imagine,” she says. “All of Bath is like that. But if you look at the zoning code, you could not build Bath in that way today.” That’s because Bath, like so many towns and cities across Maine, uses zoning and building codes that favor a suburban model — single-family homes on large lots — put in place without much thought decades ago, when avoiding downtown density was the primary goal. 

Today, economist Colgan points out, when we refer to “the character of Maine,” we tend to be talking about rural character, about housing policies that favor single-family homes on two-acre lots. “The dominant use of the term ‘character’ has been to fight density, to put it simply,” he says. “That’s, of course, all wrong, because multifamily housing was standard in much of Maine up until the post-war building boom.” Boarding houses were commonplace before World War II, Colgan says. Now, in most communities, they’re illegal. “We’ve so restricted the amount of housing that can be built that we’re looking at severe shortages and major price increases. Shockingly, there are homeless people now. We look around and say, ‘Where did these homeless people come from?’ And the answer, of course, is that we zoned them out.”

“Character is so elusive,” Keller says, “and like tradition, you have to be careful that it doesn’t get dangerous. Bath has traditionally been a mostly white community. Is that something we want to preserve? No. At the same time, you start to welcome and bring new people in, and what if the new people are detrimental to your character?” She cites stories she’s heard from other town officials in Maine, complaints about people from out of state buying multimillion-dollar homes, then showing up at council meetings and complaining because they can’t find a plumber — because plumbers, of course,  can no longer afford to live there. 

In Keller’s view, character comprises people as much as architecture and other observable attributes. Bath is historically a shipbuilding community, a working-class town. And although Keller says she has sometimes heard pushback on affordable housing from residents who don’t want “those people,” the consensus is that no one wants Bath to turn into a community that welcomes only the wealthy. The current draft of the city’s new comprehensive plan puts it this way: “Everyone who works here, grew up here, wants to stay here, or wants to come here has a reasonable opportunity to live here.”

“Community after community is beginning to recognize that we have to look deeply at housing policies and examine whether they align with how we want to look in 20 years,” Keller says. “If we’re not careful, we’re going to end up being an Idaho or a Montana, a bifurcated state where the only people who can live here are the very poor and the very rich.”

“Change is constant,” acknowledges Nancy Smith, executive director of the nonprofit GrowSmart Maine, which advocates for development policies and projects it deems compatible with Maine’s quality of life. “What matters,” she goes on, “is who gets to decide the whats and hows of that change.”

According to Smith, a former forester, farmer, and state legislator, Mainers shouldn’t let a rush to build more housing threaten farmlands and other little-developed landscapes. “Nobody comes here to take pictures of the suburbs,” she says. But in her mind, Maine’s character is also colored by more than just its rural spaces. For one thing, it involves a rare blend of independence and interdependence. “Feeling like you’re part of the community is absolutely a part of it,” she says. “Mainers have this unique and, I would say, special thing where we help our neighbors while also mostly leaving them alone.” 

Also integral, Smith says, are the state’s heritage industries — fishing, farming, forestry, tourism — and not because they are quaint or ornamental. “That’s my pet peeve,” she says. “I came to Maine as a forester and then was married to a farmer for 20 years. It is not quaint. It is really hard work.”

As for “who gets to decide,” Smith thinks that maintaining Maine’s quality of place requires some statewide policies and standards — to prevent, for example, the kind of ripple effects that Bar Harbor’s ordinance seems to be having for the rest of MDI. In agreement is former House Speaker Fecteau, whose legislation loosens zoning restrictions across the state and allows duplexes and accessory dwelling units on single-family lots. Local governments can be too slow to enact much-needed zoning changes, Fecteau says, and the people who stand to benefit from them don’t always have a voice — not least because they may not live in the community in question. Those opposed to, say, a multifamily unit in their neighborhood may have the time and opportunity to object in a town meeting that those who support it don’t. “It’s easy to be motivated to speak when you’re in opposition to something,” he says. “But folks who support things often get left out. There’s just not as much incentive.”

In 2021, an Island Institute report on the state of Maine’s working waterfronts reached a similar conclusion: that when it comes to preserving access for Maine’s fishing and marine industries, a statewide action plan is preferable to “an inconsistent application at the municipal level . . . based on the interests of councilmen and women.” The current approach, the report says, is “scattershot and catch-as-catch-can,” with a coalition of underfunded agencies and nonprofits shifting their focus as threats crop up. Sometimes it works, as in 2021, when the newly formed Sea Meadow Marine Foundation completed a $1.22 million acquisition of a 60-year-old Yarmouth boatyard. Brunswick’s Coastal Enterprises, Inc. and Freeport’s Elmina B. Sewall Foundation helped achieve financing for the property, now a marine-business hub, which had been developer bait on the open market.

Other times, however, it falls short, as in countless instances when new coastal-property owners have denied overland access to clammers and others, diggers who once reached mudflats on handshake agreements with previous owners. Once such access points are lost, the report declares, they don’t come back — and the domino effect can threaten not only marine livelihoods but also other local businesses, a town’s tourism appeal, and more. Enacting a statewide comprehensive strategy to preserve working waterfront “will be expensive,” the report concludes, “but failing to take action will cost us dearly in ways we cannot fathom. . . . Simply put, Maine is not Maine without a gritty working waterfront.”

Gritty harbors, livable communities, open spaces — it’s a starter list, anyway, of all the things that Maine wouldn’t be Maine without. And yet, as GrowSmart Maine’s Smith suggests, the state’s character may simply be more than the sum of its parts. 

“Close your eyes and say ‘Maine,’” she says. “What are the pictures and sounds that come to mind? That’s as close as I can get to defining the character. For me, I see the natural environment, the roadside beauty, the dark skies, the absolute quiet. . . and the sense of coming home, whether you grew up here or not.” 

* This story has been amended from the March 2023 print version to reflect that the Penobscot Bay & River Pilot’s Association joined a lawsuit against the town of Bar Harbor and Kevin Sutherland resigned as Bar Harbor town manager, both shortly after the issue went to print.

---

BUY THIS ISSUE

The line at Red’s Eats, in Wiscasset, snaked around the corner on a warm Saturday afternoon this fall. Many of the customers had queued up even before the iconic stand had opened, and all were eager enough for one of its famous lobster rolls that they were prepared to wait an hour or more. No one confessed to knowing that, just a few weeks before, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, an agenda-setting program for sustainability-minded seafood buyers and chefs, had shocked the industry by placing Gulf of Maine lobster on its “red list” of species to avoid.

Not Dodie Neo, an Ohioan retiree who’d been in line for 45 minutes when I approached her. Knowing about the red-listing, however, wouldn’t have stopped her from ordering. “The aquarium has a right to put lobster on whatever list it wants,” she told me. “And I have a right to eat it.”

Way down the road, at Highroller Lobster Co., in Portland’s Old Port, the crowd skewed younger and hipper, but wait times were just as long and customers just as surprised to hear about lobster getting canceled. After some discussion, most in line seemed to agree with Rick Conlin, visiting from western Massachusetts, that it didn’t much matter. “I vote for the lobstermen,” he said.

If you follow the news of New England, ignorance of the Seafood Watch censure might seem surprising. When the Monterey Bay Aquarium announced in September that it was red-listing American lobster because of the fishery’s impact on critically endangered North Atlantic right whales, national media outlets jumped on the story. In Maine, the red-listing was covered breathlessly, not least because lobstering seemed to be an issue politicians from every party could rally around during a heated midterm election, with opposing candidates standing shoulder-to-shoulder at rallies in defense of lobstermen and Maine’s whole congressional delegation cosponsoring the “Red Listing Monterey Bay Aquarium Act,” to block federal funding for the aquarium. (The aquarium itself receives little taxpayer support; the bill and the delegation’s press materials allude to millions in federal research grants received annually by its sister organization, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.)

So how did a California aquarium come to cause such hue and cry in Vacationland?

Monterey Bay founded its Seafood Watch program in 1999, at a time when the then–15-year-old tourist attraction was increasingly branching out into advocacy and conservation policy. What began as a pocket guide to take along to the fish market is today an extensive set of buyers’ guides that rate fisheries and farms using a color-coded system: Green signals a “best choice,” while blue indicates certification for sustainability from a trusted third party. Yellow suggests “okay, but some concerns,” and red means “avoid.”

Jennifer Dianto Kemmerly, Monterey Bay’s vice president of global conservation, says that, since its inception, Seafood Watch has based its rating system on international best practices, including those established by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, which began establishing sustainability frameworks and its Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries back in 1995. Using those metrics, she says, Seafood Watch formulates its ratings, assessing both the health of the harvested species as well as that fishery’s impact on other species.

“We first need to answer questions like, is overfishing occurring?” Kemmerly says. “The other criterion we look at is what other species are being caught by accident and whether those species are being harmed. Finally — and this is a really important one — we look at what government officials are doing to mitigate these impacts.”

The assessments, Kemmerly says, are updated every five years by a team of aquarium scientists and external peer reviewers, but an assessment review can also be triggered, either by emerging research and the publication of significant scholarly articles or by a new report issued by federal or state management organizations. When Seafood Watch was first created, American lobster was red-listed because of overfishing concerns. When, not long after, new data alleviated these, lobster’s status was elevated to yellow — although scientists noted concerns even then about the fishery’s impact on right whales.

Two events triggered the recent reassessment, Kemmerly says. First, in 2017, was the recorded deaths of 17 North Atlantic right whales, which the fisheries service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared an “unusual mortality event.” Then, in 2020, a federal judge ruled in a 2018 suit brought by a coalition of environmental groups that NOAA Fisheries was violating the Endangered Species and Marine Mammal Protection acts by doing too little to prevent whale entanglements in lobstering gear.

“We were doing a lot of updating, watching, and incorporating new data for two years before we began circulating our draft assessment for peer review and public comment,” Kemmerly says. “By the spring of last year, it had become clear that we had a dire situation and enough information that this fishery is out of compliance with [federal law]. We felt like the public really did need to know that.”

Marine scientists agree categorically that entanglements in so-called fixed gear — such as lobster traps and their attached ropes and buoys — are responsible for mortalities in certain marine species, including sea turtles and several species of large whales, such as humpbacks, minkes, and right whales. NOAA Fisheries designates lobstering a Category I fishery under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, meaning it is frequently responsible for death or serious injuries to other species. With right whales approaching extinction — there are estimated to be fewer than 350 of them — the prospect of entanglement is particularly dangerous.

Entanglement can kill whales by drowning them in heavy gear, creating lacerations that become infected, or starving them when lines entangled around the mouth keep them from filtering food through their baleen. Today, entanglement is the leading cause of death and injury to right whales, far eclipsing the number two cause, ship strikes. (No right whale in more than a decade has been known to die of natural causes.) More than 80 percent of all living right whales show scarring and other evidence of at least one entanglement; some have been entangled as many as seven times. In recent years, at least 78 of these entanglement events have resulted in life-threatening injuries, and scientists say that number is probably higher, since most carcasses of dead whales are never observed — instead, a whale is presumed dead if it isn’t spotted for five years in a row. Even the stress from a minor or temporary entanglement, studies show, can diminish a whale’s life expectancy and leave females less likely to calve.

“It’s a chronic problem out there,” says Amy Knowlton, a senior scientist for the New England Aquarium’s Kraus Marine Mammal Conservation Program.

Most North American right whales migrate each year from Florida to Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence and back, and historically, they’ve spent summers and breeding seasons in and around the Gulf of Maine. Given this range, it is rarely clear which regional fishery’s gear is responsible for mortality events. Researchers have documented more than 1,700 instances of right whale entanglement between 1980 and 2019 (pdf). Of these, they can trace fewer than 20 to a specific fishery — Nova Scotia crab, say, or Maine lobster. One reason why is that a whale’s injuries can last long after it sheds entangled gear — many instances of entanglement are documented only by visible scars, and it’s not uncommon for a whale to die of infection or starvation even after becoming disentangled. Another reason is that, until recently, most rope wasn’t marked to indicate its origin. Not until 2015 did U.S. federal officials start requiring some fisheries to color-code their lines. Maine lobstermen lobbied for an exemption from this requirement in state waters until 2020 (today, three-foot purple bands mark inshore gear, while purple and green mark offshore lines).

The years since, researchers say, haven’t been enough time to gather sufficient data on the impacts of specific fisheries on whale mortality. However, since 2020, five whales of other species (four minkes and one humpback) have been found entangled in Maine gear. NOAA risk-reduction plans assume U.S. fisheries are responsible for roughly half of right whale entanglements. The agency reports six right whale entanglements traced to Maine lobstering gear between 1997 and 2004; in the years since, at least three others were traced to lobstering gear from somewhere in the northeastern U.S., with the specific state waters unknown. The numbers sound small, until you consider how few entanglements can be traced to any fishery. Given that Maine’s roughly 3 million traps comprise about 90 percent of the U.S. lobster fishery, and that the state rivals all of Canada for both the number of traps and for landings, it’s not unlikely that other entanglements have occurred as a result of Maine gear.

Motivated by these factors — and the ruling in the environmental groups’ 2018 lawsuit — NOAA Fisheries has placed new requirements on lobstermen, mandating, among other things, more traps per trawl line, the use of “weak-link rope” that whales can more easily break free from, and seasonal closures of some offshore fishing grounds. Maine lobstermen have complied, often at great expense, with these and past requirements, says Curt Brown, a multi-generational Maine lobsterman and marine biologist for Portland’s Ready Seafood, which supplies lobster to local restaurants like Highroller and national chains like Red Lobster.

“I’d argue that Maine lobstermen have done more to protect right whales than any other group,” he says. “This isn’t a story about right whales vs lobstermen — one thing everyone can agree on is that it’s important to protect right whales.”

However, the Maine Lobstermen’s Association is challenging in federal court the NOAA Fisheries assessment behind the newest regulations, contending that federal scientists overstate the dangers Maine lobstering poses to right whales. Maine lobstermen are quick to argue that no right whale deaths have ever been attributed to Maine lobstering gear, that the last entanglement attributed to Maine gear dates to 2004, and that there’s reason to believe right whales’ feeding and migration patterns are shifting away from the warming Gulf of Maine.

Meanwhile, the environmental groups’ 2018 suit is ongoing, amended to argue that the newest NOAA regulations still don’t go far enough to comply with the Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act. A federal court agreed in July, but the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, the Maine Lobstering Union, and the state of Maine — all interveners in the suit — have appealed. In October, Governor Janet Mills committed $100,000 from her contingency fund to the Maine Lobstermen’s Association legal fund.

That the latter suit prompted Seafood Watch to reconsider the fishery’s status rankles Brown.

“We’re always going to be guilty until proven innocent,” he says. If Maine lobstermen continue doing all that’s legally asked of them, he wants to know, then who is the Monterey Bay Aquarium to judge whether what they’re doing is sufficient?

A few weeks after Seafood Watch red-listed American lobster, Sara Jenkins put a poached-lobster special on the menu at her Rockport restaurant, Nina June. A chef known for her Mediterranean fare, Jenkins doesn’t often cook with lobster, but it was Maine Lobster Week, and she wanted both to support local lobstermen and please summer tourists who come expecting the state’s totemic crustacean.

Jenkins is a member of the Seafood Watch’s Blue Ribbon Task Force, a group of about 50 chefs and culinary professionals who’ve completed the aquarium’s sustainability training and made a commitment to sustainable seafood — “exemplary leaders in the culinary field” is how Seafood Watch describes them. Down East contacted 18 restaurants run by Blue Ribbon chefs — from NYC to DC to Houston to Denver — whose online menus indicated they serve or have recently served lobster. Six weeks after the Seafood Watch listing, all but two said they are continuing to do so.

For her part, Jenkins says she took note of the red-listing, but it didn’t ultimately impact her decision-making. “Monterey Bay Aquarium is a powerful institution that’s worked really hard on sustainability for years,” she acknowledges. “That said, it does seem like they are doubling down on punishing lobstermen.”

Jenkins says she sees the Seafood Watch red list as a signal that she should think before purchasing and serving a particular fish — but not necessarily as a prohibition. Both Atlantic mackerel and halibut have been red-listed, she points out, but she continues to serve them at Nina June.

“I definitely don’t think we should be eating anything into extinction,” she says. “Maybe we should all be really rigid and abide by what the aquarium says, but you have to choose the hills you’re going to die on. As a Maine chef committed to local food, I only have so many choices as it is.”

Ultimately, she says, she’s more persuaded by what local lobstermen are telling her and by the integrity of her suppliers, who follow sustainability guidelines published by other organizations, such as the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.

Highroller Lobster Co. co-owner Baxter Key echoed the sentiment. “Obviously, we care about sustainability and the survival of the right whale, but we also know that the Maine lobster industry has been working to comply to keep the ocean safe for other species,” he says. His company relies on its supplier, Ready Seafood, to provide assessments of the sustainability of the lobster fishery. “We’ve always felt confident that they are providing seafood that is sustainably harvested. Knowing they are our provider allows us to feel comfortable serving lobster rolls.”

The degree to which other buyers are influenced by Seafood Watch is mixed. Immediately after lobster was red-listed, it was widely misreported that the national meal-kit service Blue Apron had discontinued lobster in response to the designation; however, a Blue Apron spokesperson says lobster was only used once, in a special 2021 holiday box, and was never a regular ingredient. The similar HelloFresh kit service, however, announced it would abide by Seafood Watch’s recommendation. As of mid-October, the Portland location of Whole Foods, a collaborating partner with Seafood Watch, was still selling a variety of lobster products. The chain’s press team didn’t respond to inquiries, but the website explains that Seafood Watch is just one among several sources of information for the company’s purchasing decisions.

So just how influential is Seafood Watch? The program has its roots in the global concern that arose in the late 1980s over the collapse of key fish stocks, including Atlantic cod and Bering Sea pollock. In response, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization issued guidelines aimed at making fisheries more sustainable. Around the same time, consumer trepidation about farm-raised seafood was spurring new guidelines for safe aquaculture practices. By the mid-1990s, organizations specializing in sustainable-seafood assessments began to proliferate. They included groups like the Marine Stewardship Council and the Global Aquaculture Alliance, both of which offer particular fisheries a sustainability certification using third-party auditors.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium took a different tack: instead of responding to a fishery’s request for certification, Seafood Watch designated which species it would evaluate, then went directly to the consumer with purchasing recommendations. Other organizations, including Audubon and Greenpeace, soon followed suit, offering their own rating systems, and by 2012, consumers had access to some 200 different sustainable-seafood guides.

The information presented by such lists was at best confusing and sometimes contradictory. A 2012 Maine Sea Grant study found major discrepancies in how different guides rated seafood. Take sea scallops, which the study found were designated green, or “environmentally friendly,” by one list, yellow by three others and red, or “don’t eat,” by yet another. Swordfish also garnered green, yellow, and red ratings from various leading indices. While the study found that most of these lists rated lobster as sustainable, many did note concerns about the industry’s impact on endangered North Atlantic right whales.

In the last decade, many food-industry insiders have come to place more stock in voluntary third-party certification programs than in omnibus consumer guides. Accordingly, many organizations have retired their rating systems, including Greenpeace and the New England Aquarium. Spokespeople for both say their organizations decided that money and resources were better spent on conservation efforts. “The criteria used by a lot of these guides was murky at best,” says Brian Perkins, CEO of the Global Seafood Alliance, an international NGO dedicated to advancing responsibly sourced seafood. “They weren’t necessarily based on scientifically established criteria or independent audits.”

Today, certification programs include international actors like the Marine Stewardship Council and regional efforts like the Gulf of Maine Research Institute’s Responsibly Harvested label, which uses criteria derived from the UN and other globally recognized standards that assess both management plans and a fishery’s impact on the environment. Wal-Mart, one of the largest grocery-chain purchasers of seafood, requires all its sources be certified as sustainable by organizations like the MSC. Hannaford, meanwhile, uses a combination of benchmark standards from the Netherlands-based Global Sustainable Seafood Initiative and from GMRI.

Kyle Foley is GMRI’s seafood program manager. As far as the group’s Responsibly Harvested certification program is concerned, she says, lobster remains a sustainable seafood. “The industry has implemented and followed the rules put in place to address entanglements,” Foley says. “They are now facing the prospect of additional, potentially devastating rules being put in place to reduce the risk of entanglement to essentially zero.”

In an email in October, Celine Rouzaud, spokesperson for the MSC, emphasized that that the organization doesn’t assess whether a fishery meets sustainable standards; that work is done by independent auditors. Those auditors, she said, had not determined that lobstering’s threat to right whales is sufficient enough to revoke the industry’s MSC certification. However, she also added that the court rulings against NOAA Fisheries had triggered an expedited audit of lobstering, then underway, which could potentially result in the decertification of lobster. “Any harmful interaction with North Atlantic right whales will be reviewed immediately and could result in the suspension of a fishery’s MSC certificate,” Rouzaud wrote.

On November 16, shortly after this story went live, MSC announced it would be suspending its certification of the Gulf of Maine lobster fishery. As of December 15, Gulf of Maine lobster can no longer be sold as “MSC certified sustainable” — a decision likely to impact the industry more dramatically than Seafood Watch’s red-listing.

In September, just days after Seafood Watch publicized the red-listing, NOAA Fisheries announced it would begin analyzing potential amendments to its regulations affecting fisheries and right whales. Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Jennifer Dianto Kemmerly says she’s hopeful that additional efforts by the agency and Maine lobstermen to protect the whales will result in a new assessment that removes lobster from the red list.

“It’s time to really highlight the work that needs to be done to save a critically endangered species and bring the lobster fishery back in compliance with federal law,” she says. “We believe that saving a species and preserving livelihoods can coexist.”

What’s a sustainability-minded consumer to do in the meantime? “Find a merchant you trust,” Brian Perkins says, “and make sure they’re doing their homework.”

Back at Highroller, in Portland, the wait time showed no signs of abating, even after the lunch rush, leaving hungry patrons with plenty of time to contemplate the implications of lobster’s red-listing. Rick Conlin decided to read up on it on his smartphone. After a bit of surfing, he decided he was still circumspect about Seafood Watch’s rating.

“I want to see their data — I want to know if they’re allowing for geographical distinctions and which locations are really problems,” he concluded. “If they can convince me their assessments are sound, that would have an impact on me. In the meantime, I’m going to trust the people here.”

This story was updated on November 16 to reflect the Marine Stewardship Council’s suspension of its certification. The story was updated again on November 18 to reflect that the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute are distinct sister organizations.

BUY THIS ISSUE

From our November 2022 issue

The most famous campaign stunt in Maine political history is no good today. Or so, anyway, argues the man who engineered it, Christian Potholm, a Bowdoin College professor emeritus of government and the editor of the new book Bill Cohen’s 1972 Campaign for Congress: An Oral History of the Walk That Changed Maine Politics. It’s a highly readable, if fairly wonky exploration of a landmark election that found Republican Congressional hopeful William S. Cohen, a young trial lawyer and the mayor of Bangor, hitting the road for a six-week stroll across Maine, striking up sidewalk conversations and crashing in his would-be constituents’ spare rooms. As another Maine election season reaches its culmination — full of the usual TV attack ads and slick soundbites and social-media insanity — the book feels like a window on an alternate electoral universe, where campaigns are scrappy, political opponents are collegial, and politics happens on the streets rather than on screens.

“Today, with cell phones, walks would put candidates under constant visual supervision,” Potholm writes in the book’s foreword. “They would not be able to go into the woods to relieve themselves without being filmed. More importantly, today’s candidates have to spend so much time raising money, going to fundraisers, and ‘dialing for dollars’ that they wouldn’t have time to walk in the first place. . . . A walk simply cannot drive the political narrative the way it did in 1972.”

Not that Maine candidates haven’t continued to try it. Cohen, of course, won a seat representing Maine’s 2nd District in the House of Representative in 1972. He served three terms there before Mainers sent him to the Senate, in 1978, and President Bill Clinton appointed him U.S. Secretary of Defense, in 1997. But before any of that, “The Walk” had already become an offbeat political tradition in the Pine Tree State, repeated by Cohen the congressman and by Maine political hopefuls in every decade since, including future senator Olympia Snowe and governor Jock McKernan.

In the book, Potholm and co-editor Jed Lyons, a Bowdoin student and campaign staffer in ’72, talk about these and other campaigns with various veteran Maine politicos. But the meat of the book draws on conversations with former campaign staffers and Cohen himself, now 82, recalling a campaign that Lyons calls “historic for its revival of the Maine Republican Party,” which was then on the outs with voters — and the long, freewheeling walk that made it possible.

This excerpt from Bill Cohen’s 1972 Campaign for Congress: An Oral History of the Walk That Changed Maine Politics (Rowman & Littlefield; hardcover; $24.95) draws on two chapters, from conversations with Cohen, Lyons, Potholm, and Cindy Watson-Welch, a Bowdoin student in 1972 who joined the campaign field team. The text has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Jed Lyons: The walk was the brainchild of Bob Loeb, who was a student at Bowdoin. He came from Chicago and knew that the Illinois governor had done a similar walk across his state, and so we decided to do the same thing in the sprawling 2nd District of Maine.

Bill Cohen: Yes, he was “Walking George Walker.” He was the governor of Illinois, and he had walked, not the entire state, but a big stretch of it, and there was also Senator Lawton Chiles from Florida. I went down to meet with Lawton Chiles. Of course, I got pushed off to a staffer. I asked how did you guys do it? He did not walk his entire state and didn’t stay overnight in someone’s home. He just walked. Those were the only two at the time, Illinois governor Walker and Lawton Chiles, as I remember.

Lyons: How did you get the audacious idea of doing a walk from one end of the state to the other, and one that would include consecutive overnights in private homes over the course of many weeks?

Chris Potholm: I thought the whole idea was to cover as much of the state during that period in the summer, when there wasn’t much campaigning. It made sense in terms of the math, and I never realized we would go beyond Houlton. But looking back on it, while it probably made the walk a lot more painful, I was adamant about Bill spending the night in a real person’s home each night.

Cohen: Actually, it was really enjoyable, partly because we would stay with families that were pretty modest, on the lower end of the economic spectrum. Not always, but as we got into the Lewiston area and into the Democratic areas, it was fun for me to be able to say, “Look, I come from these roots.” If you look at the building where I was born, on the top floor of a tenement house that was filled with immigrants, I certainly could relate to these families. They might have as many as six people around a table eating, probably pasta or something comparable. And then, after the meal, they would invite their neighbors and expand from six to maybe 12 or 15 in the living room, where I could sit, either in the middle or on a sofa, and just ask them what they thought about politics. What were they looking for? How can I help if I got there? It was really connecting to them in a way that was unique, that a politician would spend the night with them, eat with their family. I knew that they would tell at least 15 more of their friends the next day, and their friends would tell 15 more.

I never felt exhausted, even though some of these meetings went on till 10 or 11 o’clock. They had to go to work, and I had to be up and ready by 6:30 to get out there and start from the spot that we marked where we had stopped the night before.

Campaign poster courtesy of Christian Potholm, photographed by Gridley Tarbell.

Cindy Watson-Welch: My role most of the time was to be a front person. I would travel a day or maybe two ahead of Bill’s destinations. I would put up signs announcing that Bill was on his way and then explain to the locals who Bill was. I would also scope out the town and the townspeople to see what was important to them for feedback for Bill. I remember one town, for example, they had a little local newspaper, and on the cover of it was a big picture of this damaged telephone booth. Everyone in the town was outraged that their only telephone booth had been vandalized. So I told Bill about that, and when he arrived in the town, he started talking about crime and vandalism and, boy, that town was united behind him immediately!

Lyons: Where did you stay while you were doing this work?

Watson-Welch: We were on a very tight budget, so basically we stayed in small motels. We sometimes had three to five of us in a room. Being the only girl, I would often get the bed (out of chivalry), and the others would share the second bed or sleep on the floor. I did do my turns on the floor, to be fair.

Lyons: So you had no budget. Did you spend your own money on your motel rooms or were you reimbursed?

Watson-Welch: The campaign paid for the hotel rooms. We pretty much were on our own for picking up meals, but the host families and others involved with the campaign would stop by with donuts or other treats.

Lyons: So our esteemed campaign chairman Professor Potholm gave you no budget other than for a fleabag hotel room shared by three people?

Potholm: Compared to today’s overbought, wildly expensive campaigns, I mean, we really did it on a shoestring. Today, you’d be eating sushi and staying in suites, with all the money washing around.

Watson-Welch: I know, but it was always interesting. I mean from one town to the next it was always something new. There were some really long afternoons in which there were very few cars going by. I think it was tempting to just have Bill hop in a car and move on to the next town, but he was determined to walk each mile. Slow days could get a little tedious. But for the most part, it was really fun.

Cohen: And we always made sure there was no cheating. The media would basically know where we stopped, and they would come out to see if we were starting from there. I never felt exhausted. I was energized by the whole experience, and it wasn’t quite the Second Coming, but it felt like that on many occasions, where people, especially in the rural areas, would sit out on their porches and wait for me to walk by. We had a rule that I would never go up and try to knock on the doors of homes. Along the walk, if people were outside, I would walk up to their driveway or on their porch, but I wouldn’t be knocking on doors and disturbing their privacy. The local newspaper would say, “Cohen is scheduled to walk here tomorrow morning,” and so people would actually be out there, some for hours, waiting for me to walk by and talk with them. So it took on a messianic feeling for me. One, they couldn’t believe that I would make that effort, and two, that I would spend time with them. So that was energizing in and of itself, and I never felt tired.

Watson-Welch: Our destination was from one point to the next point, but people would slow down, they would wave or they would look at me, or sometimes when I was in the back car, they would say, “Who’s Bill Cohen?” So yeah, I mean, he got a lot of attention that way — passersby, of course, most of the time. Sometimes, people would stop and offer him a beer or a sandwich or something like that. He actually gained 20 pounds on the walk, which is really amazing when you think he was making 20 miles a day, but every family made a feast for him. They were really happy to be hosting him and having friends come in and speak to everybody.

Cohen: My feet were hurting because of the big footwear mistakes I made at the beginning of the campaign, and even that turned out to be a political plus when I went to the hospital to have my blisters cut and then my feet taped so that I could go back out on the walk. A photo was taken of me, soaking my feet in a steel tub, that appeared in the local papers. I think there were two occasions when I had to seek medical treatment.

Lyons: I remember that you went into many shoe factories and were handed a new pair of boots. It was the last thing you wanted to see, but you gamely put them on and walked out and your feet were killing you.

Cohen: We gave them all away at the next stop. Every time we stopped in a small town, they were doing a fundraiser for a charitable cause and would ask me to donate something. I said, “Yes, my shoes.” I could afford to do that because at the time there were a number of shoe factories in Oxford County, where we had started out. We were almost the shoemaking center of the country before the massive transfer of those jobs to Asia.

I always looked forward, on the walk, to see if there were any kids playing basketball. I would ask if I could shoot baskets with them, and they would be impressed that this old guy could still shoot. And so that was part of the fun of it as well, showing off a little bit in the pickup games.

Walking was to become Cohen’s trademark. In most of his campaigns, and in many non-election years, he walked through the towns and cities he represented, talking informally with constituents. These photos capture moments during the 1972 campaign and other subsequent walks in Maine.

Beyond that, I just recall looking ahead, watching out for cars. You may recall, Chris, that was the route where the Canadian cars came flying down 70–75 miles an hour on a two-lane highway. I kept looking to make sure they weren’t getting too close. I think a couple of times people tossed bottles out of their car windows. They didn’t come close to hitting me, but it was a warning sign that not everybody was honking and waving and shouting hallelujah. I remember that walking in the rain was really dangerous because visibility is down, wipers were clicking away, and the people were still traveling pretty fast. Those were the moments I worried about the most during the walk.

I believe that it was Jane Johnson, of Houlton, who arranged for me to take part in a race at the Spud Speedway, near Presque Isle. I’m not sure at this time whether it was on the [first] walk or a year later. I had no knowledge that she had done that, so I was surprised when I arrived at the Saturday-night event. They would get these old banged-up cars, remove the interior padding, and weld the car door shut, so you had to climb through the windows to get into the car. This was not something that I was eager to do, but the organizers of the race handed me a helmet and gave me little choice. I might get injured if I entered the race or be wounded politically if I rejected their offer. They had a picture of me with a guy called “the Flying Frenchman of Madawaska,” wholookedatmeasifIwasgoingtobehis meal on the dinner table that night.

The cars had no mufflers. They were stripped down to the metal bones of the car. No dashboard and just two gears where you go from low to high very quickly. I said, “Well, okay, I guess I can do this.” There were about six or seven cars in the race, and I thought I would go to the very end of the starting line and let all of the cars pull out ahead of me and let them get ahead of me and just hang in last place. That’s not what they had in mind. They insisted that I be the lead so that the other drivers could bang me all over and ultimately push me off the track.

Every time I tried to slow down, bam! Someone smacked me from behind. Then another car hit me from the side. Bam! Two cars had me pinned on the inside and were trying to push me off the track. The fans in the stands were cheering, and it wasn’t for me! I made it around the track, I think, a couple of times and then I pulled off. They were disappointed that I wasn’t having as much fun as they were and said, “Well, you got to stay here. We want you to flag the next race.” They had kind of a plank-like structure built over the speedway, and they had me walk out on the platform and wave the flag to start the race. Unfortunately, I had to stay on the platform until the race finished. The problem was while I was up there, one of the tires came off the cars on the last curve and was bouncing toward me on the structure. I managed to retreat just in time.

I didn’t get hit by the tire, and I didn’t get turned over into a ditch on the racetrack, but this wasn’t a great idea, even though the local press played up my being a good sport.

Lyons: I remember we entered you into a fundraiser “swimathon” at the YMCA in Lewiston, and you were not happy about that either.

Cohen: I had the flu or something, and I was feeling really ill, but you said, “You gotta swim.”

Lyons: And you did. You got in a bathing suit and you swam up and down the pool and you earned money that you contributed for each lap. Being competitive, you continued to swim and swim and swim to make money for the YMCA. This was right in the middle of the walk. You were exhausted before you even got in the pool.

Cohen: Right.

Lyons: You weren’t happy with us that day.

Cohen: No, well, probably many other days too. I remember that one well.

Potholm: How about the time you two decided it was a good idea to do some politicking in the drive-in theater?

Lyons: That was in Houlton.

Cohen: The movie playing that night was Boxcar Bertha. The goal was to get there by 6 o’clock or 6:30, as the cars were coming in, and shake the hands of the drivers. Unfortunately, we didn’t get there until about 9, and it had already become dark, and we said, well okay, what do we do now, folks? And Jed said, “Well, we’re here so we might as well give it a shot.” And so I went around knocking on the steamed-up windows of the cars.

Lyons: I remember that night. We had nothing planned, no dinner at a private home or an event. And so I suggested that we go to the drive-in and meet some voters and you said, “Are you crazy?” But because we wanted to meet voters, we went, and when we got there, there were no voters to be seen.

So I suggested that you go over to a nearby car and knock on the window. You knocked on the driver-side window and there was no response. Then, all of a sudden, the backseat window comes down and the guy says, “What the hell are you doing?” and you said, “Well, I’m Cohen and I’m running for Congress,” and the rear window went right back up. We stopped by a few more cars and the same thing happened. Do you remember that?

Cohen: Oh, I do, I do, and I’ve got you to blame. That’s one of the more memorable events, Boxcar Bertha. There was also the time, I think I mentioned before, when I went into a bar. And there were two rules I talked about: Don’t go into a beauty shop where women are having their hair done. That’s a no-no, because they would scream for me to get out. That was their time and their place to become beautiful. Men are not wanted! The other rule was to never go into a bar. I had violated both rules of no beauty shops and no bars.

I was in a small town, I think it was near Lincoln, and decided to meet some of the local folks in the bar. I started walking around shaking hands, and one fellow refused to shake hands. I ordered a Coke and asked him if we had ever met. He said, yeah, without volunteering more. “Did I represent you on a legal matter?” “Yeah. You’re the son of a bitch that put me in jail!” The man was mean-looking, and I decided to finish my Coke and get the hell out before my attempt at pleasantries turned really ugly. I decided that I wouldn’t go into a bar again looking for votes. People who are drinking, usually they’re either happy or very angry, one or the other. They’re almost never happy to see a politician.

Those are two experiences that remain vivid. Also, having to watch out for farm dogs. They don’t like strangers. I managed to get nipped a couple of times, but nothing serious.

Lyons: We had a car in front of you and a car behind and a hand-painted sign that said, “Cohen Ahead, Honk and Wave.” I recall that when we were in a slow area, a quiet area, I’d go forward a day ahead to try and find the local Republican committeemen or committeewomen to help organize an event the following day when you’d be walking into town. I remember how excited people were because they knew you were coming and they were vying to be the host or hostess and have you stay overnight at their home. . . . I remember, we really got into some rural areas, and you were walking sometimes without seeing a single car for hours at a time.

Cohen: The Haynesville Woods, you may recall. That was about a 19-mile stretch where you’d see nothing but pulp trucks and blackflies. And we had to make a decision to walk that 19 miles or skip it. We decided that since I had said I was going to walk the entire district, we weren’t going to take any shortcuts. It was an unpleasant experience but it turned out that all the guys driving those pulp trucks talked to other people at rest stops and restaurants down the line, saying that they saw some crazy SOB in the woods slapping flies on his neck and face. He must really want the job.

Excerpted from Bill Cohen’s 1972 Campaign for Congress: An Oral History of the Walk that Changed Maine Politics, edited by Christian P. Potholm II, with Jed Lyons. Used by permission of the publisher Romand & Littlefield.

BUY THIS ISSUE

Mostly, it’s easy to know whether one happens to be standing in Kittery or in York. There are, however, some places where the town line, as certain as it looks on a map, gets fuzzy on the ground. York’s Woodside Meadow Road, for instance, is a cul-de-sac that just barely extends into Kittery: at street level, it’s a little perplexing — thanks to a sharp bend in the road, thick woods, and a border not pegged to any obvious landmarks — why an address belongs to one town and not the other. Still, until recently, nobody seemed too bothered by the occasionally disorienting status quo.

In 2018, a company affiliated with York-based developer Duane Jellison, who grew up in Kittery, purchased a tract of former farmland along Route 1, not far from Woodside Meadow Road. The property straddles the town line. The following year, in 2019, a York official wrote Kittery’s town council asking for cooperation in redrawing the border in such a way that — by coincidence or not — would place more squarely in York the property where Jellison wants to build condos. Kittery officials have speculated that Jellison (who did not respond to our interview requests) prefers York’s zoning codes. “The town of Kittery appreciates that a change in border may hold some potential benefit for a single property owner,” town council member Judy Spiller wrote. “Reason, however, does not support or encourage the time, expense, or potential ill will that such a dubious legal challenge might create between friends and neighbors.”

York eventually sued Kittery. In court filings, York argued the existing border was “meandering” but ought to run straight, based on a description from 1652, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony annexed southern Maine. According to Kittery’s attorney, the proposed shift would affect 25 residential properties with a cumulative tax-assessed value of close to $8 million. Earlier this year, Kittery’s attorney also filed a Maine Freedom of Access Act request for any communications that York elected officials, employees, consultants, and contractors have had regarding the disputed parcel.

Territorial squabbling between neighbors is nothing new in New England. York has formerly clashed over borders with another neighbor, Eliot. In 2000, New Hampshire’s claim that its border with Maine extended to the north shore of the Piscataqua River went to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it failed. Off the Maine coast, the U.S.–Canada border remains unsettled. Old lines have a way of fading, and Kittery, Maine’s oldest town, was incorporated in 1647, just five years before York, Maine’s second-oldest town.

This summer, a York County Superior Court judge ruled against York, on grounds that officials failed to comply with a state statute requiring the boundary be “perambulated” — walked, that is. As it turned out, officials had not formally walked the line in some 200 years. York could appeal the decision but, as of press time, had not done so.

Recently, I did a little perambulating of my own along the border. Everyone I met seemed sure of what town they were in. “You see that sign over there?” a woman at a farm stand said, pointing up the road. “This is Kittery. Over there is York.” The shoulder of Route 1 does not make for the most pleasant of walks. The road funnels down to two lanes north of Kittery’s outlet malls. Cars and trucks whizzed past. But there, across from a small cemetery, under a leafless tree, I found a square white post marking the town line. One side says “York”; the other says “Kittery.” It looked clear as day.

BUY THIS ISSUE

One of the strangest parts about being famous in the particular way that Nirav Shah is famous is that strangers often approach him and burst into tears. That and the Diet Cokes, cans of which get tied in red ribbons and left on his porch, shipped in bulk to his office, and handed to him in person by people who, upon noticing him, rush to the closest store, so that when they introduce themselves, they can present him one, like an offering.

Shah, who is 45, has been an economist, an attorney, and an advisor to the Cambodian government. But across Maine, he is recognized — at the farmers’ market, at restaurants, during the hikes he takes with his wife, Kara Palamountain — as the face of the pandemic response in a state that, at the start of the outbreak, ranked among the nation’s most vulnerable. During the nervous early-pandemic months of 2020, Shah — then brand new as director of the Maine Center for Disease Control & Prevention — rocketed from anonymity to ubiquity. He seemed to saturate Maine media, giving daily televised briefings, answering questions on radio call-in shows, and posting a stream of updates to Twitter — along with endearing dad jokes, photos of his dog, and, long, occasionally irreverent threads. In a state known for a certain reticence towards newcomers “from away,” Shah, who’d never stepped foot in Maine until three years ago, has found himself the darling of a 40,000-member Facebook fan group, the inspiration for a chocolate bar bearing his likeness, and the subject of a slogan “In Shah We Trust,” emblazoned on shirts and coffee mugs and at least one flashing municipal highway sign.

This spring, the health-care think tank Commonwealth Fund ranked Maine first in the contiguous U.S. for the state’s management of the COVID pandemic (Hawaii scored higher). Shah, meanwhile, received four separate honorary degrees and gave commencement speeches at three universities. In June, the Maine Hospital Association named him its Caregiver of the Year. Mike Fraser, executive director of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, whose membership comprises public-health directors from all across the country, says he’s hard-pressed to name one who’s garnered as much public affection. Maybe Amy Acton, he says, the former head of Ohio’s Department of Health, who enjoyed a period of folk-hero status — but then resigned after receiving anti-Semitic abuse and death threats.

“Nirav’s been very steady in a way that other health officials haven’t been able to be because they had to pull back for their own safety,” Fraser says. Shah is also the association’s current board president and, as Fraser points out, a “leader among peers,” consulting with other state officials at least once each week. “He’s been an icon for Maine,” Fraser says, “but also for the whole country.”

Shah arrived in Maine in the spring of 2019 after what had been, for him, an exceptionally bad year. He’d just been replaced as director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, a position he’d once called a “dream job,” to which he’d been appointed by a Republican governor in 2015, at just 37 years old. Early in his tenure, an outbreak of the respiratory infection Legionnaires’ disease at a western Illinois veteran’s home made headlines, eventually contributing to 12 deaths. In the state’s 2018 governor’s race, Shah’s office’s handling of the crisis became a campaign issue, and Democratic Illinois senators Dick Durban and Tammy Duckworth both publicly called on him to resign. In November, the governor who’d appointed him lost in a landslide.

Meanwhile, Shah’s father, Dinesh, was losing a prolonged battle with lung disease. Dinesh had grown up in a tiny village in India, the child of mango and coconut harvesters, in a hut with a dirt floor and an open fire. He was 16 before he owned a pair of shoes. He excelled in school, though, and went to college and then medical school, coming to the U.S. in the ’70s for his residency. At the time, the quickest path to a green card was to work in an underserved area, so he and his wife, Shaila, moved to Medford, Wisconsin, population 5,000, and opened a small practice. Nirav, their only child, was born in 1977 and eventually earned not only a medical degree but a law degree as well. Before being tapped to run Illinois’s state health apparatus, he was billing $700 an hour at the same white-shoe law firm where the Obamas met.

Dinesh passed away the same week that Shah was supposed to start as director of Maine’s CDC. When Democratic governor Janet Mills appointed him, in May of 2019, the agency was rebuilding, left significantly understaffed during the previous administration of Republican governor Paul LePage. During eight years in office, LePage made no secret of his contempt for the massive Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees not just the CDC but everything from nursing homes and daycare facilities to drug-dependency campaigns and food-safety guidelines. When LePage left office at the start of 2019, more than 100 vacant CDC positions had been left unfilled; the workforce was three-quarters of its size from 2011.

Shah was, nonetheless, thrilled about the job. Rarely does any governor appoint someone from out of state to head important agencies. After Illinois, Shah thought he’d never have another opportunity to run a health department, and every other job, he told me recently, sounded boring. He’d never been to Maine before his interview with Mills, but something about the place felt instantly familiar. He’d been in Chicago for nearly two decades, but Maine reminded him of where he’d grown up, in northern Wisconsin. It reminded him of a place that he missed. The week after Dinesh died, Nirav and his mom got in his wife’s Ford Focus and headed east.

The first person Shah met was Peggie Lawrence, his scheduler and secretary, who retired this summer after 40 years in state government. They met in the lobby of the downtown Augusta building that houses the CDC. Lawrence remembers discovering they had the same family structure: married, no kids. Shah remembers talking about their shared interest in cooking, a mild obsession of his. What struck Lawrence at the time was how present her boss seemed. “A lot of times, when you meet an executive in the lobby, they’re focused on getting upstairs and what they’re going to say,” she says. “But he was in the experience. I was struck by the way he looked me directly in the eye and asked me about myself.”

She laughs to recall the weeks that followed: two hepatitis outbreaks in Shah’s first week on the job, a sudden influx of asylum seekers arriving in Portland, a transformer exploding outside their offices, forcing everyone to evacuate. Then, a flood from a malfunctioning HVAC system that destroyed their entire floor. During his first year on the job, Lawrence teased Shah that he had brought the chaos with him from the Midwest.

An anecdote Shah tells these days that always gets a laugh: In February 2020, while he was addressing a committee at the State House, a legislator asked what was keeping him up at night. He was concerned, Shah said, about a situation unfolding with a new virus in China. When he got back to his office, a staffer popped his head in and asked what was happening in China, as if Shah had been referring to the central Maine farm town.

By then, Shah had already stepped up the state’s supply of personal protective equipment. He was likely one of the country’s first health officials to start taking action, placing an order for PPE on the first day his offices were open after the New Year holiday. Shah was uniquely attuned to health information coming out of Asia because of time he spent in Cambodia during medical school, when (“out of boredom,” he says) he applied for and received a fellowship to study there. He spent two years in Phnom Penh, serving as an economist for the Cambodian health ministry and emerging with a newfound passion for health policy and a deep well of contacts. Those channels helped keep him informed of the severity of Asia’s COVID-19 outbreak. Among the things he’s most proud of today is that Maine’s doctors and nurses faced no shortages of medical gowns or N-95 masks — never resorting, as in other states, to wearing garbage bags.

Shah took to the airwaves as soon as the coronavirus arrived in Maine. For months, his briefings were daily, broadcast by TV stations and public radio, livestreamed by the major newspapers and others. Turn on your preferred device and there was Shah’s bespectacled face, framed by a bookshelf and a small landscape painting, peering into his laptop’s camera. He would start with statistics — new cases, hospitalizations, deaths; later on, vaccination rates — then field questions from reporters, often pausing for big swigs from the can of Diet Coke that became his trademark. He acknowledged every question as a good one and seemed firmly in command of the facts. If he didn’t know something, he’d say so and promise to follow up. He never seemed to equivocate or pander. He typically signed off with the same reminder: “Please be kind and take care of one another.”

Mainers were won over not only by Shah’s evident knack for data and commitment to fact gathering but also by his approachability and a dry, zany streak. As the months of briefings went on, he occasionally deadpanned groaner lobster puns and pop-song lyrics into his remarks (“Maine’s CDC contact tracers,” he explained, straight-faced, in September 2020, “are never going to give you up, never going to let you down”). Followers of his Twitter feed, meanwhile, found him equal parts wonkish and droll. One day, he’d post a 13-tweet thread, complete with charts, unpacking complex vaccine-trial data to help contextualize the unlikelihood of a specific side effect. The next day, he’d quip that his booster shot helped him nail the pie-crust recipe he’d been working on, then geek out about baking minutiae with strangers in his replies (“Vodka in pie dough has been a game-changer for me,” he tweeted).

Robert Long is the Maine CDC’s communications director, a job he took after stepping down as politics editor at the Bangor Daily News (seeking a healthier work-life balance — a “most epic fail,” he jokes). As the state launched its pandemic response, Long, Lawrence, and Shah became a pod, working 80-hour weeks, subsisting on pretzels and hummus, seeing more of each other than any of their spouses.

“Peggie and I joke that his brain has multiple chambers, like a nautilus,” Long says. “He’s just functioning on levels that we don’t even conceive.” As evidence of Shah’s “vibrant mind,” Long mentions Quincy, his boss’s 13-year-old rescue dog. “He’s really intrigued by Quincy’s worldview,” Long says. “He’s genuinely interested in how other humans and his beloved canine see the world. In the elevator, he’s like, ‘What do you think Quincy is thinking? We go into a room where the doors close, and then they open and we’re somewhere else. Is it magic? Can dogs conceive of magic?’”

The cards and letters started arriving about a month in. First a trickle, then a flood. Lawrence calls it “an amazing phenomenon.” People sent drawings their children made, cards, letters of gratitude. They shared stories of the loved ones they’d lost to COVID, nonetheless praising Shah for his leadership. Before long, dozens were arriving every day. “Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty,” Lawrence says. “I can’t even read all of them, and it’s my job to open the mail.” People sent in gifts: Diet Coke, of course, but also homemade cookies and handmade face coverings. Someone sent dozens of whoopie pies.

At some point, Lawrence discovered the fan page on Facebook. “He was so shocked,” she remembers. “I mean, what health department director has a fan page?” Three months into the pandemic, Wilbur’s of Maine, a long-established chocolatier, asked permission to put his face on a confection. “The ‘Shah Bar’ is just as sweet as your favorite CDC director,” one local news headline gushed.

Today — nearly 30 months into the pandemic, when it seems clear that the virus will never actually go away — the cards and letters haven’t stopped. Shah, however, largely refuses to look at them. It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate them, he says, it’s that he doesn’t feel he deserves the gratitude. Long suspects the missives embarrass him. Lawrence has put them into albums; by this spring, she said, she was up to eight volumes. “I made him take one home one time,” she told me. “I put it in his bag. I wanted his mom to know and his wife to know. I know that somebody looked because when it came back, one of the pages was in the binder backwards.”

Long, Lawrence, and others who know him well reliably mentioned Shah’s modesty. When thanked, he often demurs that he’s just one of a cast of thousands, crediting not just the entire CDC but also the Maine people for the state’s remarkably low COVID death rate (1 in 558, among the lowest in the nation) and remarkably high vaccination rate (95 percent of those eligible have received at least one dose of vaccine, compared to 83 percent nationwide). He even turns remarks about his personal popularity back around. More than once, he has said, or tweeted, some version of the line he told me: “I’m a brown guy with a funny name from another state who just moved here. For so many people to be so receptive, I think it says a lot about the people of Maine.”

Among those who know Shah as a regular guy, rather than a celebrity or symbol, is Jaed Coffin, Shah’s Brunswick neighbor (and a writer and contributor to this magazine). Coffin met the CDC director in the late spring of 2020, during the early peak of pandemic anxiety. Shah and his wife had moved into a subdivision in Coffin’s neighborhood and started showing up at cookouts and neighborhood get-togethers. “As much as he likes Diet Coke, he also likes Miller Lite,” Coffin laughs. “I think most of us realized, this guy needs to hang out. What we can do is just hang out and not make a big deal out of who he is. . . . The neighborhood is like a pressure valve for him.”

As they became friends, Coffin says he watched the outpouring of affection for Shah with a degree of trepidation. “As someone with cultural roots in South Asia, I kept thinking, as much as Maine is in love with this guy in 2020, it could fall out of love with him in 2021. All this — the puns and the chocolate bars and the ‘Shah-phoria’ — they’re going to look for someone to blame as much as they’re looking for someone to lionize.”

Shah and I discussed that possibility at length on a recent afternoon at Rockport’s Samoset Resort, where a national pediatrics organization was presenting him its Child Health Advocate of the Year award. We met before the ceremony and took a walk together on the neighboring Rockland Breakwater. Like most people one primarily sees on a screen, he seemed a little shorter in person. If anyone recognized him on the breakwater, they didn’t let on (he was without his characteristic glasses). As we walked, he compared himself to a soap opera star. “I play a character, but the character happens to be me,” he said. “People know me from, like, one-hour snippets.”

Later, during a two-hour interview in a spare resort conference room, he told me that every time he hears, “Are you Dr. Shah?” he braces himself. It’s partly because he’s aware of the vitriol health officials in other states have received, partly because of the tenor of some of the comments aimed at him on Twitter and via email. Only twice has anyone said anything less than positive to his face — once outside the CDC’s Augusta offices and once at a vaccine clinic, where anti-vax protestors stood outside. The norm, he says, is still interactions like one he had recently at Waterville’s Colby College, where a professor approached him and wept, telling him how much it meant when she wrote to the Maine CDC early in the pandemic and received a response. Or like the one he had in Calais in May, when a woman in a truck with a Trump sticker pulled alongside him as he loaded up his Tesla, then told him that while she didn’t like that Dr. Fauci, she appreciated everything Dr. Shah had done.

He calls all of it extremely gratifying — the albums, the cards, the tears, the 40,000-strong Facebook fan club — but he’s also aware, perhaps more than anyone, of how quickly things can turn. He seems ready for it. “People love you right before they hate you,” he says. “And the speed of that descent is very fast.” In March, after tapering back their frequency, he stopped giving his briefings altogether, both because the pandemic no longer merits being called an emergency, he says, and because he recognized that each one was an opportunity to screw up. “You’re always this close to the line of completely saying something that gets you fired,” he says. “One minute you’re talking about COVID, the next minute you’re talking about condoms for kindergartners — like, that’s it.”

Shah says he has a thick skin. He also has perspective. He knows from experience that every outbreak — Legionnaires’, COVID, HIV — is political. In Illinois, he was the target of the Democrats. These days, on Twitter anyway, he’s the target of Republicans. As he sees it, it’s just part of the job. When I asked him how he categorizes himself — as a doctor? epidemiologist? economist? lawyer? politician? — he told me that he’s a bureaucrat.

But Shah is not without ego or pride, as he says himself. For much of his life, he told me, he assumed he was the smartest person in every room — he was, he says now, “insufferable.” He has a jealous streak too, although its targets seem exclusively to be polymaths and child prodigies: He name-checks the head of the CDC for New York State, who graduated from college in his teens and on whom ’90s TV writers based Doogie Howser, M.D. Also, Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft exec who penned the five-volume culinary tome Modernist Cuisine, about the science of cooking. Working at the Chicago law firm helped him check himself, Shah says, because he was surrounded by so many geniuses. Although it’s hard not to think that having two sitting senators calling for one’s head — and then, within a year, losing a parent — might cause a degree of ego death.

A flash of the old ego shows, though, when Shah runs down the state’s COVID-response numbers. Apart from the PPE inventory, he is proudest of Mainers’ high vaccination rates and how quickly they attained them. He credits large-scale vaccine clinics, like the one set up at the horse-racing venue Scarborough Downs, where staff administered some 3,000 shots a day (Shah made the rounds visiting clinics in person, often trailed by Quincy the rescue dog). He also cites the state’s dead-simple, exclusively age-based vaccine-eligibility standard. He got hate mail for both of those programs — he was accused of being ableist for the latter, because it didn’t take into account pre-existing conditions — but because of them, he insists, Maine vaccinated more people more quickly and at a steadier pace than any other state. “The numbers speak for themselves,” he declared, laying out his palms on a Samoset conference table. He can rattle off weeks of rankings from the early days of the race to get shots in arms: for months, Maine was the only state consistently in the top 10 for vax rates. We never fell off the list. If he were an academic, Shah says, he’d do a study on just how many lives were saved.

This fall, once again, the governor who appointed him will be up for re-election. Shah insists that, no matter which way the election goes, he plans to stay in Maine. “We just signed up to put a heat pump on our house,” he says. “We’re staying.” He even suggested, admittedly in passing, that he might just run for office himself someday — if only as a way to stick it to the racists who sometimes come after him on Twitter. “It just emboldens me,” he says. “I’m like, you know what, motherf*ckers? I’m staying. You think you’re going to bully me out of the state? Not even close. I might even run for office, just to stick it in your face.”

Coffin, Shah’s friend and neighbor, made a similar suggestion. “I think the pandemic exposed fissure points in our society and the way that government functions,” he says. “People don’t really trust the buttoned-up, streamlined politician anymore. Someone like Nirav, he is who he is. The way he rolls is definitely asking us to imagine what else a politician might be or expand our definitions of what a politician might be. I think it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have someone like him in perpetuity, someone who has their finger always on the pulse, in terms of what our public-health needs are.”

Though he’s ended his briefings, Shah has by no means disappeared. The spring commencement-speech circuit brought him to the University of Southern Maine, Bates College, and Washington County Community College. After receiving the award at the Samoset, he patiently took photographs with everyone who asked. Two days later, he was back on public radio, where he remains a recurring call-in guest.

The following Sunday was Mother’s Day, and Shah spent most of the day at home, making waffles for his neighbors. He’d set up a little table outside, Coffin told me, with whipped cream, orange juice, and three different kinds of maple syrup. “He’s always trying to perfect things, and he was like, ‘I’ve perfected my waffles,’” Coffin says. “We were all out there from like nine in the morning til one in the afternoon, having a beautiful day, eating waffles. We’d see Nirav every eight minutes, the exact amount of time it takes to make a waffle.”

BUY THIS ISSUE

One evening in June 2008, 21-year-old Brandon Brown came out of his second-floor apartment in the Old Port and walked downstairs to the Cactus Club. He sat at the bar with a friend, ordered a beer, and commenced, unaware, his last few hours of freedom for many years. It was a quiet night, a Tuesday. Brown had just gotten home from a shift at a rental-car agency and smoked a joint. He had no inkling of the headline-grabbing act of violence he was about to commit or of the personal transformation it would lead to.

The latter began in earnest a year and a half later at the Maine State Prison, in Warren, following his trial and sentencing. Sitting in a reception cell on his first day at the maximum-security facility, he silently resolved to make his time count for something. In the months and years that followed, he availed himself of opportunities to volunteer and to work: providing hospice care in the infirmary, making kids’ toys in the woodshop, serving as president of the prison’s NAACP chapter, training rescue and service dogs. What Brown became most invested in, though, was his education.

A new program at the prison allowed inmates to take courses through the University of Maine at Augusta. By 2018, Brown had associate’s and bachelor’s degrees in the liberal arts. Nobody had ever earned a postgraduate degree from behind bars in Maine, but Brown, feeling he had exhausted other avenues for growth, pressed for the chance. He won permission from warden Randall Liberty (now commissioner of the state corrections department), applied to a master’s program in peace studies and conflict resolution at Virginia’s George Mason University, and got accepted.

Brown was permitted 11 hours of computer access a week, eight of which he spent Zooming into classes, leaving three for researching, typing papers, and emailing professors (American college students average 10 hours per day in front of a screen). He made an unusual request to move to a more restrictive unit where inmates are confined to their cells from 5:45 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. He settled into a monkish routine, poring over books and monographs and scribbling notes from the time he was locked in into the small hours of the morning. In a very specific way, he was thriving. “The most painful thing I have to admit,” he says, “is that coming to prison saved my life. If I hadn’t been found guilty, I think my life probably would have continued in the direction it was going. And the reason that really sucks is because, in a messed-up way, it still requires that harm to have occurred.”

In another time or place, his record of community service, work, and academic achievement might have made him a candidate for parole. Parole, which permits certain offenders to serve out a remainder of their sentences under supervised release, has featured in American criminal justice since the early 1900s. It appealed to Progressive Era reformers, who saw it as a motivation and a reward for rehabilitation. Maine adopted parole in 1913, and by mid-century, so had every other state. The shine wore off quickly, though. A national “law and order” movement coalesced around Richard Nixon’s successful 1968 presidential campaign, repudiating the idea that social programs could cure the underlying causes of crime and giving a racialized wink and nod to the subset of voters aghast at Civil Rights unrest. In the ensuing decades, policing intensified, sentences lengthened, and the prison population doubled, then doubled, then doubled again. “Truth in sentencing” became a popular talking point, the idea being that prison terms ought to be served in full, not subject to the discretion of a parole board — you do the crime, you pay the time.

In Maine, public perception was that the parole board had gotten too lenient, and in 1975, the state legislature passed, and Governor James Longley signed, a bill making Maine the first state to abolish parole — anyone sentenced after April 1976 would be ineligible to apply to the parole board. California and Indiana followed suit, then Illinois and New Mexico. Today, there are 16 states without parole, and Congress did away with it for federal offenders in 1984.

Talk of bringing back parole has intermittently stirred up in Augusta. In the early ’90s, with the corrections department facing overcrowded prisons, the head of the parole board and the warden of the state prison both publicly lobbied for it. In 1999, a parole bill was introduced into the legislature but failed to gain traction. In 2016, a group of inmates tried to initiate a voter referendum on a parole-like system. Now, just three Maine offenders remain under the parole board’s jurisdiction, on account of committing their crimes so long ago. The only one still in prison is a murderer who has been locked back up after violating terms of early release in the past. So when a push for parole got underway a couple of years ago at the statehouse — the most serious such effort to date — someone who seemed more deserving of a second chance, Brandon Brown, found himself the de facto face of the movement, and his story, for the second time in his life, started making headlines.

Growing up was neither particularly easy, as Brown describes it, nor particularly hard. He spent his early-elementary years in Texas. His family moved often, bouncing him from school to school. His parents divorced. His mom moved to Georgia. When Brown was in fourth grade, his dad, who’s from Maine, relocated him and his two older sisters to Cape Elizabeth. The family peregrinations continued, with stints in the western Maine town of Wilton and in Dover, New Hampshire. Brown wasn’t much of a student (“I probably only read my first book cover to cover when I was held in county jail,” he recalls. “It’s embarrassing to admit that now, and I think the book was from the Twilight series.”). Instead, he threw himself into athletics. In high school, he played soccer, lacrosse, and basketball. “Sports were the only way I fit in every time we moved,” he says.

During high school, he returned to Cape Elizabeth. He’d grown at least 12 inches in just a few years, nearing his full height of six-foot-five, and at the first basketball practice of his senior season, in 2005, he blew out his knee. His family didn’t have health insurance and tried to put off surgery. One afternoon, Brown came downstairs without his crutches, and his dad chewed him out. There was an escalating exchange of words — neither remembers exactly what was said — and the next thing either knew, they were wrestling with each other on the floor. “I’d never had an interaction like that with my dad before,” Brown says. “I was so shocked by it that I left and didn’t come back.”

He moved in with a friend’s family in South Portland, transferring schools one last time. For more than a year, he had almost no contact with his own family. He started going to parties, drinking alcohol, and smoking weed. After high school, he worked hourly jobs — LongHorn Steakhouse, Footlocker — and spent months couch surfing and living out of a car. At 19, he was arrested for marijuana possession during a traffic stop. He accrued multiple speeding tickets and lost his license. Soon, he was dealing weed and renting an apartment, which he outfitted with an air mattress, a television, an Xbox, and nothing else. He eventually reconciled with his dad, although he still kept his family at arm’s length. He got in a few fights around town. He bought several handguns. “I thought I was the shit,” he says, “although I doubt anyone else did.”

Then came that evening at the Cactus Club. Brown had ordered pizza for delivery to the bar, where he was nursing a beer as he waited. After a little while, a group he recognized walked in. One of the guys, he says, had recently stolen drugs from the friend sitting with him. Another was James Sanders, an ex-Marine who worked as a bouncer at Platinum Plus, a strip club from which he had tossed Brown months earlier. Brown felt like the group across the bar was eyeing him and his friend, so he briefly ducked back into his apartment, picked out a pistol with a laser sight, and shoved it in his waistband. His idea, he says, was that he and his friend were outnumbered, and the red laser beam would serve as a deterrent if tensions rose. (“It’s hard for me to say that out loud,” he says, “because I realize it was incredibly stupid.”) Pizzas arrived, and Brown went out to pay the driver at the curb. At the same time, his friend started jawing with a few guys from the other group who had also stepped outside. Brown nosed in, and all of a sudden, he felt himself being tackled off the sidewalk and into the street. He scrambled back to his feet and saw Sanders standing nearest him, maybe eight feet away. He drew his gun, leveled it, and a little red dot flickered on Sanders’s chest.

“It was like time was frozen,” Brown remembers. “Complete silence. So much adrenaline.” He saw out of the corner of his eye a knife on the ground between him and Sanders (it was his own, fallen from his pocket in the scuffle, although he didn’t admit as much until years later). He says he thought Sanders made a move for the knife. He pulled the trigger. Sanders collapsed on the pavement.

James Sanders barely survived. He was partially paralyzed and has, over the past 14 years, suffered a litany of physical and mental health complications. Brown was sure he had acted in self-defense. “I didn’t feel a single bit of remorse,” he says. “I convinced myself that what I had done was unfortunate but not necessarily wrong.”

A jury found otherwise, convicting Brown of attempted murder and elevated aggravated assault, and a judge sentenced him to 17 years in prison. If he accrued the maximum amount of good time — a credit system for staying out of trouble in prison — Brown was looking, in practical terms, at between 13 and 14 years. (Parole opponents often point to good time as an adequate manner of reducing sentences for good behavior. Parole proponents say that judges already account for good-time reductions in their sentencing and that good time rewards docility, not rehabilitation.) Brown’s opinion of his crime evolved over the first few years of his incarceration. “At first, I hadn’t been mature enough to see how my decisions created this reality,” he says. “I chose to go upstairs and get a gun. I ended up hurting somebody. Nobody else pulled that trigger.” He also started to consider the totality of the impact: “James’s family is fucked. My family is fucked. There were a lot of eyewitnesses who have to live with that incredibly traumatic event for the rest of their lives. And I’m always going to be the source of that trauma.”

In 2013, state representative Jeffrey Evangelos attended a reception for graduates of the associate’s-degree program at the prison. He was moved by a speech Brown gave about the role of education in altering his life’s trajectory. Evangelos, a four-term Independent from the midcoast lobstering community of Friendship, describes himself, half-jokingly, as “a left-wing radical from the 1960s,” even though his constituency skews conservative. (His campaign leaflets feature Red Sox and Patriots schedules on the front and tide charts on the back — something practical to stick on the fridge.) He lives on an old farmstead and has one cow, Sheba. He bought her for beef, and, for more than a decade, has kept her as a pet — she comes trotting whenever he calls her name.

In Augusta, Evangelos has a reputation as an implacable reformer on criminal justice. “People think I’m anti–law enforcement or pro-criminal,” he says, “but my father was a Massachusetts state cop for 23 years. I just want what’s right.” In the past two terms, he introduced a bill to end time limits for post-conviction reviews of new and potentially exonerating evidence, a bill mandating the creation of special integrity units to investigate questionable convictions, and a bill requiring the reassessment of seemingly excessive sentences. Two of the bills stalled in the appropriations committee, and the other died in the Senate.

Once Brown was working toward his master’s degree, Evangelos resolved to try to get him out of prison ahead of schedule by helping him apply to the governor for executive clemency, the sole recourse for anyone in his position since the elimination of parole. Clemency can take one of two forms: a pardon forgives a crime; a commutation reduces a sentence. Of the two, Maine governors issue pardons far more often, usually to people who have already finished serving their time — a woman whose old misdemeanor theft conviction prevented her from working as a home-care provider, or a man who boosted a snowmobile at 18 and simply wanted to live without the stigma of being a felon.

Commutations are a trickier political proposition. Showing mercy to someone still in custody — someone who could, possibly, reoffend if freed — might backfire. In 2017, Governor Paul LePage granted early release to 17 inmates in one day, but the move was less an act of compassion, more a tactic in a standoff with the legislature over whether the governor had authority to close a detention center in Machiasport. Otherwise, there have been only 10 commutations since 1990. Although history wasn’t on his side, Brown asked Governor Janet Mills to suspend three years of his sentence, enough, with good-time credit, to guarantee his release. His application ran into the hundreds of pages, comprising a personal essay, letters of support from professors, academic transcripts, and prison records.

A note from James Sanders was enclosed as well. Evangelos had tracked down his current address, in Georgia, and mailed a letter explaining Brown’s application for clemency (Brown is prohibited from directly contacting Sanders). “It’s rad to hear that you’re doing well,” Sanders wrote back, addressing Brown. He described the long-term impacts of being shot: a leg amputation due to infection, a section of abdominal muscle removed to patch the entry wound, an inflammatory bone condition. He was in recovery after a drug addiction. He had attempted suicide.

The governor’s clemency board reviewed the case and sent its sealed recommendation to the governor, who denied Brown’s application without explanation.

Evangelos was furious. His first thought was, “Fuck this, I’m filing a parole bill. We can’t keep doing things this way.” The denial of Brown’s petition turned into a rallying cry for an alternative to the clemency process. “If Brandon Brown doesn’t qualify for a commutation, nobody does,” Evangelos says. He introduced to the legislature “An Act to Reestablish Parole.” Under its terms, anyone serving 25 years to life would be able to file with the parole board after 20 years. Anyone serving between one and 20 years would have to wait until halfway through a sentence. And it would apply retroactively to people already in prison. Amid the public debate that followed, Brown became something of a cause célèbre.

Both sides often accuse the other of cherry-picking examples to make their points — touting paragons of self-improvement or instances of the most heinous crimes. “I don’t think Brandon Brown is a typical case,” says Arthur Jette, Maine chapter leader of Parents of Murdered Children and Other Survivors of Homicide Victims, which circulates petitions against individual parole applications in states that have parole. “He’s an outlier and, it seems to me, an example that was ripe for the media. I hate to be so cynical, but they found a poster boy. For me, that doesn’t tip the scales.”

One day in 1999, Jette’s stepdaughter was at work while a friend took care of her 21-month-old son. The friend had a restraining order against an ex-boyfriend. The ex-boyfriend showed up and shot both the friend and the toddler in the head. Jette got a call at work and rushed to the scene to intercept his stepdaughter. “There is no restitution or restorative justice for the wanton taking of another person’s life,” he wrote in testimony to the legislature, against Evangelos’s parole bill. The experience of losing a loved one like that, he told me, “changes you down to your DNA, and it’s seemingly irreversible — at least it hasn’t reversed for me yet.”

He’s not, however, entirely opposed to parole. If murderers and certain other categories of violent offenders were precluded, he might reconsider his stance. The idea of murderers having the right to appear before a parole board is “an insult to the value of the life that’s taken,” he says. “The victims of murder can’t appear at a hearing to tell anybody what they think is justice.”

Francine Garland Stark, executive director of the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence, was among those worried about the toll that uncertainty over sentences might take on victims and their families, who can spend years preparing for a perpetrator to get out: readying themselves emotionally, deciding where they’ll live, arranging protective orders and other precautions. The possibility of parole, Stark says, makes that planning much more challenging. Her larger concern, though, is what she sees as the inadequacy of both rehabilitative programs inside correctional facilities and re-entry programs outside. Reinstituting parole without building up the infrastructure around it, she thinks, puts the cart before the horse.

At the same time, Stark notes, many factors, often overlapping — mental illness, discrimination, substance abuse — can lead a person to commit crime, and that’s why her organization came out neither for nor against the bill. “I think we all share an understanding that incarceration does harm and that it’s been egregiously overused,” she says. “What’s less clear is what amount of incarceration is right.”

Supporters of the parole bill included the ACLU of Maine, the Maine Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and the Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition. For Evangelos, the issue is, at root, a moral one. “You and I get sentenced to prison the same day,” he hypothesizes. “We both have 30 years. We both keep our noses clean, but you get a job and go to college while I sit around and play cards. Then, you and I still get out of prison on the exact same day. That’s not okay to me.” A parole board, he contends, can base decisions on the extent to which a person has worked toward rehabilitating. He also likes to say, “The quality of a civilization is measured by the degree of its empathy and belief in redemption.”

Another argument is fiscal: parole can reduce the prison population, and supervising a parolee costs as little as a tenth of what it costs to house an inmate. Another pertains to community safety: if parole encourages reform, it reduces the risk of recidivism — a 2013 report from the RAND Corporation, funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, found that inmates who participated in educational programming were 43 percent less likely to commit another crime. “Formal education obviously isn’t for everyone,” Brown notes, “but there are people as driven as I am, just in other areas — artists, musicians, welders. There’s a ton of drive in that prison.”

Jeremy Pratt, an attorney who penned testimony in support of the bill for the Maine Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, adds that parole can act as a check on erratic sentencing practices by evaluating individuals over time, not only in the immediate wake of their crime. Judges in Maine have wide discretion, and studies have found inconsistent sentences from case to case. “It’s all over the place,” Pratt says. “Clients always ask me what I think they’ll get, and I tell them I have no idea until I know the judge.” A man got 10 years for attempted murder after he hit his wife in the head with a rock and pushed her off a cliff in Camden Hills State Park. A Milbridge man got eight years for attempted murder and aggravated assault with a gun. Brown got about double those sentences.

In the legislature, the House passed the parole bill; the Senate did not. Evangelos overhauled it, creating a measure not to reestablish parole but rather to form a study group, of legislators and outside experts, to further evaluate the issue and then produce a new bill. It passed both chambers and went to the governor’s desk last year, where it sat unsigned for months, running out the clock on the time allotted for the study group to do its work. Normally, an unsigned bill becomes law after 10 days, but a quirk of the state constitution says the governor can simply hold a bill passed on the last day of a legislative session — as this one was. Evangelos recalled the bill from the governor and pushed the study group’s deadline to the end of this year. This time, it became law without her signature.

The study group will first gather in July, leaving five months for its work. Francine Garland Stark, from the Coalition to End Domestic Violence, thinks that’s “an unreasonable amount of time in which to accomplish such an important task.” Evangelos is pleased enough with the outcome, although he’s grown so frustrated by the legislative process that he’s not running again. His term will be up when it comes time to debate a new parole bill early next year.

He realizes that much hinges on Governor Mills. In an emailed response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for the governor wrote, “Under parole, innocent individuals would be repeatedly subjected to the possibility that the offender will be released, forcing them to relive the crime at every parole hearing. In the push to reestablish parole, the voices of the victim, and the transparency of our individualized sentencing process, should not be ignored.”

The governor is a former prosecutor, Evangelos notes, and she’s heading into an election against former governor Paul LePage, who would be keen to paint her as soft on crime. Whether she’s personally disinclined toward parole or politically pragmatic about it doesn’t make much difference.

Both Brown and Evangelos brought up, in the course of making their case for parole, Leo Hylton. Hylton arrived at the Maine State Prison shortly after Brown. He too got involved with hospice care, the NAACP, and dog training, and he has a job organizing programming at the prison. He earned his associate’s and bachelor’s degrees and, eventually, followed Brown into the same master’s program. He’s aiming to continue on the PhD track. Hylton, however, is nowhere near the end of his sentence.

He grew up in Augusta. His mother, a native Mainer, worked long hours, and his father, who was Jamaican, inflicted a steady regimen of physical abuse on him, justifying it as training, reiterating that a Black person living in an overwhelmingly white place always had to be ready to fight. Hylton ran away often. Once, he went out a second-floor window and jumped into a snowbank, after police had already brought him back to the house. Another time, he sprinted through four lanes of traffic on Route 202 to escape school. Finally, one night, he was hiding out on a neighboring home’s porch, and the woman who lived there found him, brought him inside, and gave him the business card of a social worker she knew. A few days later, at age 10, Hylton walked to a pay phone in a Rite Aid parking lot and called the number on the card. Soon, he was a ward of the state, placed into foster care.

Several weeks after his 18th birthday, he and his foster brother, Daniel Fortune, broke into a house in Pittston, to rob a safe. Fortune had burglarized the house before and been caught. The plan was to take enough to cover his resulting legal fees. “For some reason, that made sense,” Hylton recalls. He brought a machete, he says, to use as intimidation. As they crept into the house in the dark, a security alarm started blaring. A man came into the hallway. “In that moment, my mind snapped, and I reverted back to my father’s training,” Hylton says. “Any normal human being would have run away, but that didn’t cross my mind.” He struck the man with the blade of the machete. Then, a 10-year-old girl wandered from a bedroom, and he brought the machete down on her too. Both were severely injured, but they lived. Hylton pleaded guilty to multiple counts of attempted murder and received a 50-year sentence.

Maybe even more so than Brown’s case, Hylton’s seems to put to the test the extent to which a horrific crime can be punished at the same time as personal growth is rewarded. Recently, he published an article in Religions, a peer-reviewed theology journal, examining the relationship between spirituality and trauma healing. (He has become a devout follower of Christianity.) He’s also an employee of Colby College, co-teaching with an anthropology professor a course on incarceration and its alternatives.

Hylton is wary of complacency. He’s watched other inmates succumb to it. Prison creates a sense of “stuck-ness,” he says. For now, the master’s-degree program keeps him busy and engaged. He remembers, though, a terrified feeling as he neared the end of his bachelor’s degree not knowing whether he’d be permitted to continue with his studies. “What am I going to do,” he asked himself, “when I’ve done everything there is to do here?”

In early 2020, Brandon Brown left the Maine State Prison, transferring a mile up the road to Bolduc Correctional Facility. There are no fences around Bolduc. He could wear his own clothes and take walks on a mile-and-a-half trail through the woods. Residents tend to 90 acres of fields and raise cows, pigs, and horses. One morning, Brown was part of a group permitted to take their service-dogs-in-training for a stroll through downtown Rockland. Summer travel was in full swing, and the sidewalks were bustling. It was “a lot of stimulation, a lot of sensory overload,” Brown said on the phone later that day — it was unclear whether he meant for Chewy, an English cream retriever and poodle mix, or for himself.

At the time, Brown was feeling more hopeful than ever of getting out. A law requiring the corrections department to expand its program of supervised community confinement was going into effect: once down to 30 months left on a sentence (or, if serving less than six years, down to one-third of the sentence), a minimum-security prisoner could apply to serve the remaining time on the outside, overseen by a probation officer, with approved weekly schedules, regular check-ins, and random drug tests. It’s not parole, Evangelos is quick to point out, even if it shares some features. Unlike with parole, its fixed, limited time frame means it has a proportionally greater impact on people with shorter sentences.

Still, Brown wasn’t any less eager for it. He filed his application well in advance, and the new policy kicked in at midnight on October 18. Eight hours later, Brown, 35 years old, was greeted by his dad, his sister, and Evangelos on the front lawn at Bolduc, there to take him away. They stopped at Moody’s Diner, in Waldoboro, and he tucked into a loaded omelet while processing what had just transpired. He was fighting a sensation of unreality — he felt numb, he says.

More freedom made managing his time with schoolwork more of a challenge as he started into PhD classes through George Mason. He also had to learn to cook, and he was overwhelmed by grocery stores — “In prison, there were like five types of chips you could buy,” he says, “and now there’s a whole aisle.” This spring, his probation officer approved a trip to Virginia so that he could present at a conference and, for the first time, visit his college campus. He drives down to South Portland once a week to mentor kids at the Long Creek juvenile detention center, attends a weekly reentry support group in Lewiston, and, this fall, is teaching a University of Maine at Augusta course on narratives of incarceration.

The face of the parole movement in Maine no longer needs parole. He met some people in prison who should never get out, he says, and others who should, sooner than their sentences allow. Sometimes, he experiences pangs of guilt at being on the outside, going on hiking and fishing trips on weekends, spending time with family, while friends of his — “genuinely good people,” he says — are locked up.

On the morning of his release, after breakfast, Brown and his dad and sister eventually parted company with Evangelos and headed west, to their family’s camp near the New Hampshire border, where he would live for a while. The road followed the course of the Androscoggin River. The sun was setting behind the White Mountains. The trees were in full fall color. “That was when it hit me that a part of my life was over, that I got to start something new,” he says. “And look how beautiful what’s new can be.”

BUY THIS ISSUE

It all began with environmental reporter Bob Cummings wanting an editor off his back. The Sunday paper had space to fill — what was he working on? Cummings was no greenhorn. After four years at Portland’s Gannett newspapers (which included the Press Herald, the Evening Express, and the Maine Sunday Telegram) and nearly a decade at the Bath Times, he knew that if he didn’t float an idea, he’d soon be researching some flimsy thing his editor noticed driving to work.

“Let’s do a story about the public lots,” he proposed.

“Never heard of them,” his editor said.

At the time, few Mainers had. Cummings had learned about the state’s public lots years before, from a Bath resident named White Nichols, a one-time surveyor and frequent pesterer of journalists, who’d urged Cummings to investigate how some 400,000 acres of overlooked, publicly owned land was being ceded to timber companies. Because it wasn’t a Bath story, Cummings filed the lead away. Now, he was ready to follow it.

His first story on the subject ran on the front page of the March 12 Telegram, under the headline “Public Land Sold and Given Away.” In the piece, Cummings explained how 19th-century Mainers, upon separating from Massachusetts in 1820, expected the whole of their state would one day be settled. In preparation, the state surveyed townships of about 36 square miles, and within each one, set aside wooded parcels of 1,000 to 1,280 acres, to be held in trust by the state. As towns sprung up, the thinking went, they could use the reserved lots and proceeds from them to support churches and schools (which the law later limited only to schools).

But settlers never flocked to the north woods, and in 1850, the state started aggressively selling land in the proposed townships — those places in your Gazetteer with names like T14 R9 WELS — to timber companies and others at bargain rates. The public lots, by law, couldn’t be sold, so the state sold rights to cut timber on them — and then, as the loggers moved in, more or less forgot they existed.

By 1972, timber companies owned the overwhelming majority of Maine’s undeveloped lands, but some 400,000 acres of public lots remained scattered across the state’s unincorporated townships. Some were on mountain summits, others on lakefront. About a quarter had never actually been designated on maps and existed only as an idea, an ownership stake the public had in the townships. The very few in state government who were aware of the lots’ existence had come to think of them as essentially belonging to timber companies, with the state retaining little more than mineral rights.

But Cummings dug up the legal documents establishing the public lots and the deeds conferring the timber leases, and what he saw convinced him the state had never parted with surface rights: the lands belonged to Mainers. His first story quoted nature photographer and Natural Resources Council of Maine officer John McKee, who cited the squandered recreational potential of the forgotten parcels at a time when the state was struggling to preserve land from development. Cummings also reported a few provocative tidbits, including that the Dead River Company had leased state-owned land for camps and that the legislature had authorized the sale of public land in the Carrabassett Valley for as little as $400 an acre.

The article prompted what the paper called a “deluge of letters.” A week later, the Telegram ran a tart editorial. “We do not imply deliberate wrongdoing by State officials,” it read. “But we do strongly suggest that State officials are asleep at the switch.”

Throughout 1972, Cummings kept asking questions — for example, did the timber companies even have rights to harvest in perpetuity? — that infuriated timber execs and forestry officials and stoked public outrage. Governor Kenneth Curtis established a committee to look into the state’s stewardship. The state attorney general assigned a legal analysis of the deeds, and when the office dragged its feet on releasing it, Curtis gave Cummings a summary. In November, Cummings broke the news that the report suggested timber companies’ rights were moot after they’d cut the trees standing at the time of the deeds — they’d essentially been squatters for most of the 20th century.

In 1973, Cummings’s reporting led to the establishment of the Bureau of Public Lands (now the Bureau of Parks and Lands). The state and the timber companies went to court for years, with the Maine Supreme Judicial Court finally ruling in 1981 that the timber leases were indeed long since exhausted. Through settlements and land swaps with the industry, the state parlayed the diffuse public lots into what’s now known as the state’s system of public reserved lands, which includes the remarkable 36,000-acre Bigelow Preserve, the Mahoosuc Mountains, 22,000 acres of Aroostook County’s Debouille hills and ponds, the Cutler Coast Public Land down east, and too many other gems to list. Through it all, Cummings kept filing stories and holding public officials’ feet to the fire.

“What he achieved was quite extraordinary — he just wouldn’t listen to ‘no,’” says Thomas Urquhart, whose 2021 book Up for Grabs: Timber Pirates, Lumber Barons, and the Battles over Maine’s Public Lands traces the saga of the public lots in comprehensive detail. Urquhart, who interviewed Cummings in 2006, explains how the reporter was shaped by an upbringing in Bath during an era when sewer pipes discharged directly into the Kennebec — and how Cummings’s Bath Times reporting was instrumental in ending the practice. At a time when Mainers were rapidly losing access to their natural heritage, he was emphatic that the public lots should be the public’s to enjoy.

“What he believed in very much was the power of the lands around us,” says his daughter Brenda Cummings, now Bath’s city assessor. “They didn’t have to be extraordinary lands, they just had to be what’s there. You fall in love with your backyard, and then maybe you travel to Baxter, and that’s what makes you passionate about protecting all these other things that you don’t know.”

After Cummings died, in January 2016, Brenda and her sister, Charli, made a vow: they would scatter some of their father’s ashes in public lots around the state, returning him to the land he fought for.

---

From our special feature, “1972: The Year That Changed Maine.” Read about more 1972 happenings here, and pick up a copy of our April 2022 issue to read them all.

BUY THIS ISSUE

By Brian Kevin
From our April 2022 issue

Very few people took seriously the lawsuit that 28-year-old attorney Tom Tureen filed in Portland’s federal district court on June 2, 1972. When Tureen had described the suit, on behalf of Maine’s Passamaquoddy Tribe, to an influential DC Native-affairs attorney a few months earlier, the more-senior lawyer had bluntly told him he was dreaming. When, years later, the New York Times ran a front-page story about the case’s gobsmacking implications — for Wabanaki tribal members, for Maine, and for the nation — the reporter opened by marveling that the suit had once “seemed insignificant, even ludicrous.”

It was more than just a David-versus-Goliath battle. It was David brazenly strong-arming Goliath into battling even more indomitable giants on his behalf.

The defendant in the suit was Nixon’s interior secretary, Rogers Morton, whose department encompasses the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. Fifteen weeks earlier, Passamaquoddy governors John Stevens and Eugene Francis, each representing one of Maine’s two Passamaquoddy reservations, had written to the BIA’s director. They’d requested that he ask the U.S. Department of Justice to file a lawsuit against the state of Maine for the return of ancestral lands that 18th-century Passamquoddies had relinquished to Massachusetts via a questionable treaty. A copy of the 1794 treaty had materialized 15 years before, from a shoebox belonging to Stevens’s wife’s great-aunt. In the course of reviewing it for a much more modest land-claim suit, Tureen, then a legal-aid lawyer working for Passamaquoddy clients in Eastport, became convinced the entire treaty was invalid.

The reason was a piece of legislation from 1790 known as the Non-Intercourse Act, which mandates that the U.S. Congress ratify all sales of tribal lands. The act also creates a trust relationship between the feds and the tribes whose lands are in this way regulated — the basis for subsidies and services that the BIA has long provided tribes in the central and western U.S. But the law was mostly written to prevent transactions on the frontier that might threaten government interests, so it had simply never been applied to tribal nations within the original 13 colonies. Tureen could find nothing in the statutes, however, that explicitly ruled out eastern tribes — and no indication that Congress had ratified Massachusetts’s acquisition of the Passamaquoddies’ territory.

So, working with the tribe, he assembled a legal team and started building a case that would compel the state of Maine, which had split from Massachusetts, to return some portion of ancestral land and pay restitution on the rest. Because sovereign immunity prevented the tribe itself from suing Maine, the Passamaquoddies’ hope was that the federal government would own up to its neglected role as a protector of tribal interests and bring a case against the state. Governors Stevens and Francis wrote to the BIA petitioning for this on George Washington’s birthday, a nod to the tribe’s support of the Continental Army during the American Revolution. And they did so with urgency: while researching the case, Tureen’s team found that Congress had quietly, years before, established a statute of limitations for federal involvement in old Native land claims. The Passamaquoddies had only until July 18, 1972, to convince the feds to back their cause.

The Interior Department dragged its feet, though, stonewalling even after Tureen convinced Maine’s entire Congressional delegation to issue statements of support, suggesting the tribe’s case deserved to be heard. Years later, Tureen told a New Yorker reporter of having heard secondhand about a conversation between a top Native-affairs officer at Interior and a member of Nixon’s staff. “An attorney friend of mine quoted [the official] as saying that it was high time the Indians accepted the facts of life,” Tureen explained, “that the statute of limitations was about to expire, and that no court had ever ordered the federal government to file a lawsuit on behalf of anyone — much less a multimillion-dollar lawsuit on behalf of a powerless and virtually penniless Indian tribe.”

So Tureen’s team filed what became Passamaquoddy v. Morton, setting in motion a legal and political drama that, in many ways, is still unfolding today. The suit argued that the Non-Intercourse Act applied to the Passamaquoddies and that, therefore, the state’s claim to any of the tribe’s former territory should be voided. The unresponsive Interior Department had breached its responsibility to the tribe, Tureen argued, and if the court didn’t compel the Justice Department to sue Maine before the July deadline, then it would be too late to do so by the time the court made a ruling. Government rebuttals were clumsy, and in late June, Judge Edward Gignoux ordered the Justice Department to file suit.

“This action alone was extraordinary,” John Paterson, then a lawyer in the Maine Attorney General’s office, wrote decades later. “As far as can be determined, that may have been the only time when a federal court had taken such an action.”

Meanwhile, reps from the Penobscot Nation had been talking with Tureen and their Wabanaki peers, and they voted to join the fray. One day before the deadline, the Justice Department filed suit on their behalf as well. Between the two tribes, the amount of disputed land came to as many as 12.5 million acres, valued at perhaps $25 billion — around $168 billion today. Some 350,000 Mainers lived on those acres, theoretically at risk of eviction, and much of the land was controlled by Maine’s powerful timber companies.

Judge Gignoux immediately put the suits against the state on hold, pending the outcome of Passamaquoddy, and surprisingly, their existence didn’t make much of a public splash. “I have no doubt that many people were sincere in wanting the Indians to have their day in court,” Tureen told the New Yorker. “I also happen to think that just beneath the surface of all the talk about fairness lurked the comforting conviction that, as always, the Indians were bound to lose.”

They were not. Judge Gignoux ruled in 1975 that the Non-Intercourse Act indeed governed dealings with the two tribes. The ruling, upheld on appeal, gave the tribes federal recognition and opened the door to the land-claim suits. Only in 1976, when the window to challenge Gignoux’s ruling in the Supreme Court had closed — and when the disputed ownership started causing municipal bonds to be canceled — did the gravity of the conflict seem to dawn on Maine’s leaders and press. In September of that year, independent governor James Longley flew to DC to plead the state’s case. A few weeks later, a Justice Department official wrote to Judge Gignoux, urging the suits be settled out of court, describing them as “potentially the most complex litigation ever brought in the federal courts, with social and economic impacts without precedent and incredible potential litigation costs to all parties.”

It took another four years and plenty of rancor, but a settlement was reached in the form of the 1980 Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act, which President Jimmy Carter signed during the waning days of his term. The settlement — paid out by the feds, rather than the state — amounted to $81.5 million shared among the tribes, the majority earmarked for the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot to reacquire tribal lands. (A small portion went to the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, which joined negotiations late, while the Aroostook Band of Micmacs, the fourth Wabanaki nation in Maine, settled its own claim years later.) By any measure, the settlement represented a victory for the tribes that few could have predicted in 1972, and the court rulings that led to it empowered tribes across the eastern U.S. to launch successful land-claim campaigns of their own.

The settlement provisions, and state laws that implemented them, also allowed Maine to preserve a level of jurisdiction over tribal affairs that’s uncommon among federally recognized tribes — the reason why the state and the tribes are now in an escalating clash over matters of sovereignty. Contemporary generations of Wabanaki, along with coalitions of non-Native supporters, argue that the settlement was flawed, if not consciously underhanded, in withholding from tribes in Maine the rights to regulate hunting and fishing on tribal lands, establish their own tax codes, regulate gaming, benefit from new federal laws affecting tribal nations, and more. A passionately debated bill now before the State House would amend the 1980 legislation and oblige the state to recognize such rights. As the first edition of the Wabanaki Alliance newsletter wrote of Passamaquoddy v. Morton shortly after it was filed, seemingly not daring to hope, “One can only speculate on the outcome.”

---

From our special feature, “1972: The Year That Changed Maine.” Read about more 1972 happenings here, and pick up a copy of our April 2022 issue to read them all.

BUY THIS ISSUE

By David Shribman
From our April 2022 issue

To many, his name evokes little more than one of the great also-ran stories in contemporary American politics, a brief comet that lit up the electoral heavens and then flamed out. But in Maine — in modest Democratic Party town offices, in the power corridors of Augusta, and in the wide sweep of the state’s civic life — Edmund Sixtus Muskie is a celestial giant, a star distant enough that its light still reaches us long after its death. The arc of his political career, from his beginnings as a state rep in Augusta to his tenure as U.S. secretary of state, is arguably the Big Bang of Maine’s modern political universe — in particular, his 1972 presidential-primary campaign, which saw “the Man from Maine” go from front-runner to lost cause in a matter of weeks.

The son of an immigrant tailor, Muskie was born on the eve of World War I, in Rumford, where he grew up speaking Polish at home. He was valedictorian of both his high-school and his graduating class at Bates College, a debate champ, and an outspoken admirer of then-president Franklin Roosevelt. His high regard for FDR made him something of an outlier in Maine, where political luminaries — from Joshua Chamberlain to Percival Baxter, Hannibal Hamlin to Margaret Chase Smith — were all but uniformly Republican.

When Muskie was elected as a Democrat to the state legislature in 1946, following nearly four years in the Navy during World War II, Maine was among the nation’s most devout GOP strongholds. The last 90 years had seen just three Democratic governors (and 29 Republicans). A Democrat hadn’t represented Maine in the U.S. Senate since Muskie was a toddler, and he had never seen the state deliver its electoral votes to a presidential candidate from his party. In 1936, when FDR won a landslide reelection, only Vermont joined Maine in voting against him.

So it was an upset when Muskie was elected governor in 1954. He served two two-year terms before being elected to the U.S. Senate. Then, in 1968, vice president Hubert Humphrey plucked Muskie for his running mate, and although Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon, Muskie’s polish and candor impressed both the party brass and the press. By the spring of 1970, both were anointing him the front-runner against Nixon in 1972.

But Muskie was an imperfect candidate. Though he was a mighty debater and legislator, he often fell flat connecting with voters. Pundits took him to task for lacking “pizzazz, savvy, and chutzpa,” as one New York Times reporter put it. “He could absorb details of arms-control negotiations, and he knew the fine print of environmental legislation,” campaign chronicler Theodore H. White wrote, “but he simply could not speak simply.”

On the flip side, beneath his wonkish public persona was a temper that staffers and colleagues regularly described as “volcanic.” Stories of Muskie lashing out at the press corps and other inquisitors were legendary, and the press didn’t shy from acknowledging the candidate’s irascibility — even in backhanded compliments, as when a New York Times editorial praising Muskie’s uncharacteristically expressive response to 1971’s Attica Prison riot declared, “If the ability to feel something passionately is the opposite coin of the fabled Muskie temper, hurrah for that.”

Ironically, it was feeling something passionately that sunk Muskie’s campaign. On February 24, 1972, in New Hampshire, the site of the first presidential primary, the conservative and influential Manchester Union Leader printed a letter to the editor claiming Muskie had recently laughed at and condoned the derogatory term “Canucks,” referring to French-Canadians, an important New England voting bloc. Whether the paper’s firebrand publisher, William Loeb, knew it or not, the letter was a phony, planted by operatives supporting Nixon. Loeb lambasted Muskie in an accompanying editorial, and the paper repeated some previously published gossip about Muskie’s wife telling dirty jokes.

Two days later, Muskie stood on a flatbed truck in front of the paper’s headquarters, before a crowd of reporters and others, furiously denying the letter’s accusations and denouncing Loeb for attacking his wife. The publisher was a “gutless coward,” Muskie fumed, declaring, “It’s fortunate for him that he’s not on this platform beside me.” At one point, the senator grew so seemingly agitated, he fell silent, and his cheeks were visibly wet. For five decades, observers, colleagues, and commentators have debated whether Muskie wept that day or the droplets on his face came from falling snow. The major papers reported tears.

Initially, Muskie’s team didn’t realize the impact of those ostensible tears. In fact, most thought the candidate’s performance demonstrated his compassion, that “he’s got an emotion that connects with people on an individual basis,” as campaign manager and longtime adviser Berl Bernhard later put it. But on March 7, Muskie’s showing in the primary fell far short of expectations. He won, as a candidate from a neighboring state was expected to, but with less than 50 percent of the vote, and a narrative of weakness dogged him in the weeks that followed. His poll numbers sank, and he won just one more primary before withdrawing in late April.

“He was punished for being a strong candidate and punished for not winning big enough,” former aide and Portland lawyer Charles Micoleau told Bates’s Muskie Archives oral-history project, years later.

But seldom has failure produced such success. “One of the unintended consequences of the ’72 campaign,” explains Colby College political-science professor L. Sandy Maisel, “was bringing a whole group of young Democratic politicians to the fore who would dominate Democratic politics for decades to follow.” For many of the men and women who ran it, Muskie’s flawed presidential campaign was transformational, turning young staffers into the core of a new crop of Democratic power players.

“That campaign gave all these Maine figures enormous exposure and experience,” says Harold Pachios, another Portland lawyer, who joined Muskie as a staffer for his vice-presidential campaign in 1968 and became chairman of Maine’s Democratic Party in 1976. “We traveled around the country, met all the important people in politics. I knew every single leading Democrat in California, and others had the same experience I did.”

“The people he brought into politics, and later, those he inspired, created a huge cultural change for Maine,” says Saint Louis University School of Law professor Joel Goldstein, who is writing a biography of Muskie. Among that group were Shepard Lee, the late auto mogul and Democratic fundraiser; Nancy and the late Bruce Chandler, who became a Democratic National Committee member and a Maine Superior Court justice, respectively; Don Nicoll, a policy planner and veteran of many state boards and commissions; Jane Fenderson Cabot, who joined Rosalynn Carter’s White House staff; the late Peter Kyros, who represented Maine in the U.S. House, and Eliot Cutler, who ran for governor twice.

Perhaps most notably, the group includes George Mitchell, who after serving as Muskie’s campaign manager in 1972 became a federal judge, then the U.S. Senate majority leader, occupying Muskie’s former seat, then a renowned diplomat in Northern Ireland and the Middle East. Mitchell joined Muskie’s staff in 1962, often driving the senator around Maine, staying with him in private homes or tiny, rural motels. “And he talked a lot to me, and I listened, and I observed him going about the task of being a senator,” Mitchell told a Bates oral historian. “Just about everything I’ve learned about public service, I learned from him.”

By the time President Jimmy Carter appointed Muskie secretary of state, in 1980, those shaped by him and his campaigns were known simply as “Muskie people,” in the same way those in John F. Kennedy’s orbit remained “Kennedy people” long after they’d become senators or ambassadors or commissioners of the NBA. “Muskie people” came to include those who’d never worked for the senator but who turned to him for counsel, including Maine governors Kenneth M. Curtis and John Baldacci. By the time Muskie died in 1996, just months before Bill Clinton swept the state in his re-election campaign, Maine was in the midst of a political transformation that has seen it deliver all or most of its electoral votes to Democrats in eight straight presidential elections. In a state where Muskie’s success was once considered a fluke, his party occupies the governor’s office, both seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, and both chambers of the State House. “None of that might have happened,” Pachios reflects, “if the failure of 1972 hadn’t happened.”

---

From our special feature, “1972: The Year That Changed Maine.” Read about more 1972 happenings here, and pick up a copy of our April 2022 issue to read them all.

BUY THIS ISSUE

John Glowa Sr., would-be governor of Maine, meets me in a slush-covered Hannaford parking lot at 7 a.m. Until recently, he says, he worked at the store’s fish counter. Today, he’s driving to Moosehead Lake to meet a collaborator whose name I’ve been asked not to reveal, one who worries about the repercussions of being associated with Glowa. The day is overcast and, for mid-December, balmy. Temperatures hover around 33 degrees, and a layer of wet snow blankets the ground. Glowa is, quite adamantly, not a hunter, but today he’s dressed like one: red plaid jacket, blue jeans, and thick, felt-lined boots.

He grabs a plastic tote from the trunk of his car, what he calls his “little bag of tricks.” Inside are a few plastic vials, a canning jar full of 200-proof alcohol, and a spiral-bound logbook — everything he needs to bag and document animal scat. The scat he’s after usually resembles dog poop, although it is far more pungent. Glowa is determined to find animal droppings that he believes will contain DNA proving that wolves, long ago extirpated from Maine, are returning to the state — a point he has argued for nearly 30 years.

On the shore of Moosehead Lake, we rendezvous with Glowa’s anonymous source and hop into his truck, Glowa riding shotgun. We pass through the village of Kokadjo, with its iconic billboard (“This Is God’s Country. Why Set It On Fire and Make It Look Like Hell”), then head down a snow-covered two-track. Glowa quickly spots fresh tracks, and the driver stops the truck. The tracks seem to have a hopping pattern — likely, Glowa says, made by a snowshoe hare. We keep driving, and before long, we reach the GPS coordinates we’ve been aiming for, a spot where the driver collected some promising scat last fall. From its scent and color, Glowa suspects it was deposited by a large canid possessing wolf DNA, and he’s planning to send the scat — in a tube of alcohol, bagged in plastic — to the Wildlife Forensic DNA Laboratory at Ontario’s Trent University.

Today, though, the collection site looks just like the rest of the wooded roadway: a long, straight stretch of white. No scat. No tracks. No wolves.

Glowa makes scat-finding trips like this often, and while he rarely comes back empty handed, he doesn’t always turn up specimens fresh enough to test. The pages of his spiral-bound scat log are filled with records noting the GPS coordinates where scat was collected, the date and time of discovery, and a short description of each (“strong odor, stiff, but not desiccated”). As we drive back the way we came, he explains that no one else in Maine is ground-truthing by way of scat — particularly not, to his ire, the state’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. “And I’ll use the tired cliché,” he says. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to get in your truck and drive down the woods roads.”

Glowa’s tipster stops to point out two moose in a clear-cut. Then, farther along, just past a planting of spruce (future 2x4s, Glowa notes), Glowa sees something and shouts, “Can you stop? Oh!” The source hits the brakes, and we skid to a halt. “It’d be right under the middle of the truck,” Glowa says, as we slowly back up. He pops open the passenger door to check out the scat, then pops his head back in, grinning. Scratch that. “It’s just a rock.”

Glowa, however, is undeterred. “We know they’re here,” he’d told me that morning. “We’ve been gathering physical evidence.” Out on the scat trail, he forms his hands as if cradling a mid-size dog poop. “When you see scat that’s this long and this big around, that’s real,” he says. “It’s not like we’re hunting Bigfoot.”

A few minutes into the 1969 documentary Wolves and the Wolf Men, the narrator observes that “for thousands of years, man’s imagination has endowed the wolf with awesome supernatural powers and rapacious appetites.” Once North America’s most widely distributed carnivores, wolves were literally demonized by European colonizers, who feared them as threats to their livestock and livelihoods but also as manifestations of dark spiritual forces. (As one scholar writes, “Wolves were considered capable of murdering a person’s soul.”) Government policy sanctioned the killing. Wolves were effectively shot, trapped, and poisoned out of Maine by the turn of the 20th century. Where wolves are found in the Lower 48 today — the northern Rockies, say, where they’ve been reintroduced, or around Lake Superior, where remnant packs have persisted — they still inspire enmity. A bumper sticker popular in pockets of the rural West depicts a pair in crosshairs alongside the phrase “Smoke a Pack a Day.” As the narrator of Wolves and the Wolf Men explained, “Modern man sees the wolf as a killer of his livestock and competitor for the wild game man likes to kill for sport.”

Glowa watched the documentary as a teenager and was moved, particularly by its graphic scenes of people shooting wolves out of a helicopter in Alaska. At the time, he lived in Connecticut, where his family had moved from Aroostook County shortly after he was born. Growing up, Glowa loved finding newts and turtles around his suburban home. At 15, he was named to a local conservation commission, making him, as one newspaper reported, “the youngest municipal official in the state and, perhaps, the nation.”

In August of 1993, Glowa was 39 and back in Maine, raising a family in South China, outside Augusta, and working for the state Department of Environmental Protection. That month, a Pennsylvania man hunting in northwestern Maine shot and killed a wolf about 25 miles from the border with Quebec. Since gray wolves were then protected under the Endangered Species Act, federal prosecutors charged the hunter and his guide with a crime. Glowa remembers calling the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife to ask what the agency’s wardens, biologists, and other state officials were going to do to prevent any future wolf killings. DIFW’s answer, as Glowa recalls it, was nothing. “It’s not our job to educate the public,” Glowa remembers an agency rep telling him. “It’s the public’s job to educate themselves.”

The next year, Glowa and “a couple of other folks who were really into wolves” founded the nonprofit Maine Wolf Coalition, committed to supporting “wolf recovery in Maine through research, education, and protection.” Glowa had always sensed wolves would return on their own if allowed, and when another large canid was identified as a wolf after being shot and killed near Ellsworth in 1996, it seemed like evidence of recolonization. MWC set up a wolf-spotters’ hotline and booths full of literature at events like the Common Ground Country Fair. In 1997, members brought a captive gray wolf “ambassador” to the State House in an effort to destigmatize wolves and reduce the odds, particularly for hunters, of mistaken ID with coyotes. The group peaked at around 200 members but abandoned a membership model years ago. These days, Glowa says, MWC is mostly him, working on a computer in his basement, along with a four-person board, some volunteer scat collectors, and 2,700 or so Facebook followers.

Since cofounding MWC, Glowa has become one of the most vocal critics and reliable pesterers of DIFW, an agency he thinks is too beholden to the minority of Maine residents who hunt, trap, and fish — and too dismissive of non-consumptive users of Maine resources. He’s a recurring presence at public forums and committee meetings and a prolific writer of letters to the editor and op-eds (some of which he’s framed and hung on his kitchen walls). He’s argued for more representation of non-hunters on agency committees and against bear baiting, recreational trapping, lead ammunition, and more. He’s filed petitions with the agency that have forced public hearings on several of these issues. As of this writing, he’s awaiting an appeal decision on a petition he filed in superior court last year to prevent DIFW from issuing additional moose-hunting permits as part of a culling effort. (Glowa is such an agency bugbear that his Moosehead scat source preferred his name withheld because his day job requires cooperation with DIFW officials.)

In 2019, Glowa submitted a formal public-records request for any and all DIFW materials relating to wolves — every report, internal memo, email, recording of meeting minutes, and more that makes mention of the species. The agency calculated it would take 6,040 hours of labor and quoted him a $90,000 fee, along with a scaled-back alternative at a cost of $2,400. Glowa pursued neither, but he thinks such documents would show that the state is willfully ignoring evidence of wolves in order to avoid the headaches and controversies that would accompany having to establish a wolf-management policy. “What I feel is motivating DIFW,” he says, “is political pressure being exerted on them by organizations and individuals who feel that if a wolf population was documented in Maine, they might have to change their way of doing things, and that includes hunters, trappers, and the forest-products industry.”

That’s why, in Glowa’s estimation, the agency ignores potentially credible evidence of wolves. He offers the example of a Gorham man who claimed in 2013 that his trail camera had captured a long-legged, fur-covered animal with a wolf-like nose. A DIFW biologist told the Bangor Daily News that surrounding vegetation in the photo sure looked like the Pacific Northwest, suggesting the image simply wasn’t from Maine — a cursory dismissal, Glowa contends, that’s typical of DIFW’s response. “It just goes to further bolster my personal opinion of the agency,” he says, “and my understanding, my belief, that they don’t want wolves here.”

“I would say we’re neutral,” says Nate Webb, a biologist and director of DIFW’s wildlife division. The agency fundamentally disputes Glowa’s characterizations, and Webb says it regularly receives reports that can be debunked without an on-the-ground investigation. “Our role is to conserve all of Maine’s wildlife,” he says, “and if wolves ever were to become reestablished in Maine, we would conserve and manage them under Maine state law.”

As it is, state law prohibits killing any wildlife that doesn’t have a designated hunting or trapping season. Though, of course, licensed hunters can kill coyotes in Maine year-round and with few restrictions. The risk, as Glowa sees it, is that wolves are taken accidentally — or “accidentally.” DIFW’s official stance is that, while the odd wolf or wolf-like canid has been documented in recent decades — including in ’93 and ’96 — these are rare outliers, and some were likely released from captivity. (State law prohibits releasing a wolf for the purpose of reintroduction.) The agency has seen no evidence, Webb says, that wolves have a breeding population in Maine — and he says there’s certainly no institutional bias against that scenario.

“We all love wildlife and the outdoors,” Webb says, “so whenever we get a report of a potential large canid, to be honest, there’s some excitement. ‘Jeez, that could be a wolf!’”

Debates over wolves in New England are complicated by a lack of scientific and popular consensus about what makes a wolf a wolf. For starters, biologists and geneticists generally agree that North America has only one wolf species, Canis lupus, or gray wolves, and that relatively recent interbreeding with coyotes explains various subspecies, including Canis lycaon, the smaller eastern wolves found today in southern Ontario and Quebec. But another school believes that gray wolves and eastern wolves are distinct species with a distant common ancestor. Everyone agrees that wolves and coyotes (and domestic dogs) have interbred, particularly in the last 150 years, as wolves’ range diminished and coyotes’ expanded eastward. The first coyotes likely arrived in Maine in the 1930s. Today, DIFW puts their number around 15,000.

In 2014, DIFW oversaw a genetic survey of 100 Maine canids identified as coyotes (pdf). Every single one showed some percentage of eastern wolf ancestry, although most were in the single digits, with just eight animals exhibiting wolf ancestries of 10 percent or greater. The results come as no surprise to anyone familiar with coyotes on both sides of the country — Maine’s tend to be noticeably heavier and larger jawed than their western cousins. Glowa has been sending scat for laboratory DNA testing since 2019, and his results similarly illustrate hybridization. Some have embraced the term “coywolf” for the genetically motley hybrids, even suggesting eastern coyotes warrant their own species designation. Others jokingly refer to Maine’s wild canids as Canis soupis.

Glowa received his most notable scat-test result in the fall of 2020, when the lab identified a sample as belonging to a canid that showed 85 percent wolf ancestry. The result got a bit of Maine press. Then, late last year, Glowa posted a video slideshow of trail-cam stills, some of which he says were captured near the site where the canid scat was collected. In a press release, he announced that the images “show at least two wolf-like adults,” and an MWC Facebook post declared them “photographic documentation of probable wolves.” Nonetheless, Glowa says, the only news outlet to report the discovery was The Town Line, a free weekly published in South China, where he lives. The video racked up a few dozen Facebook shares and some 700 YouTube views.

DIFW spokesperson Mark Latti notes that Glowa declined to reveal his trail camera’s location, hindering agency efforts to confirm or refute a wolf sighting. But the issue for biologists, as Webb points out, is that you can’t view photos or videos and conclude with much authority what percentage of coyote, wolf, or dog DNA an animal possesses. One canid in the agency’s 2014 study exhibited 89 percent wolf ancestry but was among the smallest animals out of the 100, essentially indistinguishable from other canids in the study. Even having an overwhelmingly wolf ancestry, Webb argues, doesn’t necessarily make a canid a wolf. As important as DNA is the ecological role an animal plays in the wild. “There’s no evidence that the animals are functioning as wolves,” Webb says. Maine’s canids feed on mice, squirrels, grouse, and even, at certain times of year, deer. “However,” Webb says, “we essentially see zero predation by the coyotes we have here on moose.” According to Webb, the department has investigated the deaths of some 500 radio-collared moose, and none were killed by canids. “That is pretty clear evidence to us that the canid we have here is not functioning ecologically as a wolf.”

Glowa’s detractors acknowledge that his basic premise isn’t unreasonable: eastern wolves have a presence in Quebec and could potentially cross the border. Glowa acknowledges that he’s never actually seen one in the flesh (at least one that’s been positively identified — he currently has a roadkill carcass in his chest freezer on which he says he’s awaiting testing results). But that’s likely because wolves don’t want to be seen, he says, and run at the first sound of a truck. To find evidence, Glowa insists, you have to look. And he argues that his coalition of volunteers has, on a shoestring budget, documented more wolves in the last two years than DIFW has in the last 30.

Webb, for his part, sees no harm in collecting scat, but he doesn’t think it would be the best use of public funds — not least, he says, because eastern coyote and eastern wolf scat are virtually indistinguishable to the naked eye. Moreover, his staff biologists perform track surveys and keep tabs on radio-collared moose. He points to one University of Maine researcher who’s collected over a million photos from trail cameras across the state. Any of these monitoring programs would turn up signs of breeding packs of wolves if they were back in Maine, Webb says. (The UMaine researcher, Bryn Evans, confirms she’s collected no images of wolves or ambiguously identified canids .)

“Wolves aren’t that good at hiding once they’re in a pack and reproducing on the landscape,” Webb says. “Based on my experience, if wolves were here, we would detect them pretty quickly.”

On Glowa’s campaign signs, a wolf’s head, placid and noble, looks out from an O in “Glowa for Governor.” He admits he is an underdog for the Democratic nomination — an understatement, if anything, in a year with a Democratic incumbent. He also knows he is likely to be pigeonholed as the “wolf man.” Glowa ran unsuccessfully for state representative in 2016 and in a primary for a state senate seat in 2018. The day of our scat search, he shows me a framed copy of a political mailer sent by the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine’s political action committee during his 2016 run. It reads, “John Glowa Wants Wolves, Lots of Wolves, in Maine.” Next to his face is a picture of a wolf, hostile and snarling.

Glowa remains proud of his wolf advocacy. He compares himself to another Maine politico with a quixotic mission. “I am the first environmentalist and animal/wildlife advocate to run for governor of Maine since Percival Baxter,” his campaign materials read, invoking the revered benefactor of Baxter State Park. But Glowa maintains that wildlife mismanagement isn’t the only thing motivating him, just the lens through which he came to see state government’s backwards approach. “I actually want to return the ecosystem to where it should be,” he says, “but also to return government to where it should be.”

During almost 30 years as an inspector for the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, he developed a keen nose for sewage leaking from septic systems — and learned about Augusta’s inner workings. His last four years overlapped with the administration of Republican governor Paul LePage, and Glowa maintains he was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do next to nothing because the executive branch didn’t want to enforce environmental laws. Today, he sees himself as a populist who speaks truth to power.

Some of the life experiences informing his campaign others might see as political liabilities. Glowa describes himself as “a mental-health consumer” and talks openly about taking medication to treat depression. “If I’m elected, I want to use my position as an example,” he says, “and work to encourage folks who need help to get it.” In 2018, his 43-year-old son was convicted of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old. Glowa acknowledges the crime and says the difficult time helped his family see inside the criminal-justice system. Prior to his release from prison, his son contracted COVID, shedding light for Glowa on why state leaders had so little to say about the health of incarcerated Mainers during the pandemic. In 2020, a loved one died of an overdose, underscoring for him the need for more treatment and funding to address substance-use disorders. His mother recently died after a traumatic experience in the eldercare system. The run of anguish, he says, helps motivate him to seek change.

Out in the woods, after our fruitless quest for wolf scat, I watch Glowa record a campaign video for Facebook. Standing in front of Spencer Mountain, a 3,200-foot peak shrouded in fog, he declares, “I just want folks to understand my reason for running. Wildlife is just one very small portion of the whole big picture . . . The fish-and-wildlife management system in the state is a very good example of a bad example, and it’s just one of the many things in Maine that needs to be repaired.” Then, he suddenly seems eager to hit the road again. “My speech is over,” he concludes.

Glowa’s ability to challenge Governor Janet Mills in a Democratic primary hinges on collecting 2,000 signatures in support of his candidacy by the March 15 filing deadline. He confesses it’s been difficult, but he is adamant that he wants to be taken seriously as a candidate.

Which is perhaps why, when I ask if he’ll let out a howl, Glowa politely declines. But I don’t let that stop me, and tilting my head back, I let one rip.

“Louder!” Glowa says, egging me on. I howl again, and when I stop, the forest all around us is snow covered and still.

“This is what we usually hear,” Glowa says.

BUY THIS ISSUE

Issues like affordable housing, food security, and the labor shortage have been dogging Maine for decades, and the 65-and-over set — who make up a little more than 20 percent of Maine’s population, the highest proportion in the nation — have been hit particularly hard by these issues, especially during the pandemic. This legislative session, the Maine Council on Aging is weighing in on more than 160 bills addressing a sweeping array of issues impacting older adults. Jessica Maurer, the council’s executive director, sat down with Down East to discuss some of the council’s advocacy priorities.

What legislative proposals are the Maine Council on Aging championing at the moment?

If not for emergency COVID funding, which is due to run out soon, hundreds of older Mainers would be waiting to receive Meals on Wheels. During COVID, demand for the program more than doubled. There’s a bill before the legislature that appropriates $3 million to permanently fund the waitlist and address growing demand. Without permanent funding, once the COVID funds are exhausted, people who qualify for Meals on Wheels will have to be removed from the program.

There’s another bill that, among other things, provides funding to eliminate the waitlist for Section 63, a state-funded program that provides home-based care for those who don’t have the means to pay for it but don’t qualify for MaineCare. Right now, there are nearly 1,000 people on the waitlist for Section 63. Both Section 63 and Meals on Wheels help people stay in their homes and communities, where they want to be, instead of having to go into nursing homes or hospitals.

Has the labor shortage made it more difficult for older Mainers to receive care?

We’re facing a huge need for essential support workers — those who provide assistance with activities of daily living, like getting in and out of bed and bathing, for older Mainers, as well as people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and behavioral challenges. Thousands of people can’t get the support they need. It’s just the market. We need to figure out how to incentivize people to work in these areas. This was a problem before the pandemic, and COVID has absolutely exacerbated it. Last summer, the legislature passed a bill that, among other things, boosts pay for essential support workers to at least 125 percent of the minimum wage and requires the state to review pay rates on an ongoing basis. That went into effect January 1. The bill also implemented other measures to help build this workforce, including a student-loan forgiveness program, the hiring of navigators in career centers to help people access benefits and training, and a public outreach campaign to promote these jobs as an on-ramp to health-care careers. Surveys of the market are also underway to determine how we can be competitive in pay and understand what would effectively attract people to these jobs.

All of this is a good start. We still need to create some real structural incentives for people to enter these careers. These might be subsidies for childcare or housing, transportation vouchers, or interest-free microloans that help people meet immediate needs, like fixing a car. We need something significantly bigger to give a jumpstart to people who want to work in this field, rather than in other similar or even higher-paying jobs.

How is Maine’s affordable-housing crunch impacting older adults?

We have a significant and pervasive mismatch between the housing we have and the housing that adults in their 80s and 90s need. There comes a time when the house you intended to grow old in doesn’t work for you, and as a state, we just haven’t developed affordable alternatives. Right now, 10,000 older Mainers are waiting to access affordable housing. While the state needs to increase funding for this housing, we’ll never be able to dedicate resources to develop thousands of new units to meet demand.

Last year, the legislature created a commission to increase housing opportunities by studying zoning and land-use restrictions. Other bills are also on the table that would incentivize weatherization and repairs and promote the construction of energy-efficient affordable homes. A lot of towns and cities are also trying to address this in their own communities. In some cases, it means changing local zoning laws around accessory dwelling units to create more feasible living situations for families and caregivers. In other cases, it can mean changing outdated regulations around group housing to make way for options where older adults can live independently but get assistance with things like housekeeping, laundry, and meals.

Your organization recently launched something called the Power in Aging Project. What’s that all about?

We’re having very targeted conversations with human-resources leaders, employers, financial institutions, health-care providers, the media, and others about ageism. We’re trying to help them see how ageism is holding us back from building multigenerational workplaces and communities and a strong economy. The state has a huge labor shortage, and the 65-and-older population can help address that. We want to help organizations develop strategies to recruit and retain older workers. That may mean offering flexible work arrangements, removing age data from the job application process, and including ageism in conversations and training about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Like racial equity, this is not about being color-blind or age-blind, it’s about intentionally seeing that different ages of people need different things and that all people are worthy of living fully integrated into their communities regardless of age. As a just society, we need to understand these differences, then plan to meet them.

Find details about the Power of Aging Project and other initiatives at mainecouncilonaging.org. This interview has been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.