This image from the Captain William Abbott Collection at the Penobscot Marine Museum shows a schooner being towed by a tug.

Working Waterfront

Even schooners relied on tugs

The photo accompanying this month’s column shows the Ross Towing Co. tug Walter Ross with a four-master in tow down the Penobscot River, seen from the Stockton Springs shore, off Verona about three miles above Fort Point. Blue Hill is barely visible through the haze in the background. A fish… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Poetry sprouts from shift into spring

The busy season on the island begins. Lobster boats are being launched after their winter on dry land and the harbor starts to fill with familiar names and colors. All around the island stacks of lobster traps, either new or repaired, are ready to hit the water in the weeks… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

How can I keep from singing?

A while ago, I joked to someone online that my pandemic memoir would be titled The Year Without Singing. Although nobody has asked me to write a pandemic memoir (yet!), it occurred to me in the moment that the directives prohibiting singing, or restricting it to 16 feet apart, outdoors,… SEE MORE

Vinalhaven Harbor FILE PHOTO: TOM GROENING

Working Waterfront

Understanding a man’s hidden fear

Hidden in Plain Sight: How Men’s Fears of Women Shape Their Intimate Relationships (2021) By Avrum Weiss I read Hidden in Plain Sight: Men’s Fears of Women and immediately asked myself “What is he talking about’?” I’ve not been in as many relationships as lots of men my age, but… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Remembering Maine’s lady of letters, Elizabeth Coatsworth

Though less renowned than Damariscotta’s late Barbara Cooney of Miss Rumphius fame, prolific poet and writer Elizabeth Coatsworth penned an estimated 127 total titles while living for decades in an early 19th-century house at lakefront Chimney Farm in Nobleboro. There Coatsworth and her pioneering nature writer husband Henry Beston (contemporaries… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Slavery’s ties to New England

Like many of us, I learned in school about the trade triangle based on the shipping of enslaved people from Africa to the West Indies—rum, sugar, and salt going from the West Indies to North America and Europe, and luxury goods, tools, and household items carried to white plantation owners,… SEE MORE

Francis Hamabe, Boat Yard, ca. 1960, watercolor and silkscreen on paper, 18 by 24 inches. Collection of Ellen Best and Geoffrey Anthony.

Working Waterfront

Francis Hamabe’s boat yard

In a 1965 article in the Newark (NJ) Sunday News, Francis Hamabe explained his attraction to his adopted home to the north and east. “Maine is like I thought Sweden would be,” Hamabe told the reporter, while the Penobscot Bay area was “very much like where my father lived in… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Celebrate Ashley Bryan by making art

No matter how you feel about Facebook, one thing the social networking site does well is to connect scattered friends in times of celebration and grief. On Feb. 5, less than 24 hours after his death, it did not feel to me that Ashley Bryan was gone. It seemed more… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

How anti-government sentiment was harnessed

At War with Government: How Conservatives Weaponized Distrust from Goldwater to Trump By Amy Fried and Douglas B. Harris; Columbia University Press University of Maine political science professor Amy Fried’s new book concerns a pattern in recent political history you may very well think quite familiar. At War with Government:… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Photographic proof of Portland’s hip rebirth

Take It Easy: Portland in the 1970s by John Duncan; Islandport Press Review by Dana Wilde Summers in the ’60s my father trundled from Cape Elizabeth to Portland to go to marine chandleries on the wharves. I remember Commercial Street being like something out of a badly filmed B movie.… SEE MORE