The late afternoon sun strikes a brick building in Eastport.

Working Waterfront

Let’s understand our rural communities as islands

I believe the number of islands in the U.S. is growing, and here’s why. Across rural America people are feeling isolated—remote, beyond the care and concern of others, cut off from the rest of society. People living in rural communities feel like their futures are subject to forces beyond their… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Summer friends change island’s rhythm

The swift, ephemeral nature of summer on an island is felt in many ways. The sudden frenzy of activity as caretakers open houses and mow fields, lobster boats leaving their moorings for 12 hours a day, six days a week, and lines forming outside Calderwood Hall just before they open… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

The ‘priestess of nature’ who took on the ‘elixirs of death’

By Tom Walsh If you don’t know much—or even anything at all—about Rachel Carson, here’s your chance. The Library of America recruited the help of editor Sandra Steingraber in recently publishing a new retrospective on marine biologist Rachel Carson and her seminal role in jump-starting environmentalism in post-World War II… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

‘Into the Raging Sea’ details human failings that cursed El Faro

Into the Raging Sea: Thirty-Three Mariners, One Megastorm, and the Sinking ofEl Faro By Rachel Slade (HarperCollins, 2018) Reviewed by Tina Cohen In October 2015, the El Faro, a 790-foot American container ship owned and operated by TOTE Maritime, sank off the Bahamas, claiming the lives of all 33 crew, including… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

A plethora of peaches

The peach deluge is over for this year. For two weeks from the end of August into the second week of September a flood of peaches and a surge of panic fill the house while the three peach trees in my life deposit their fruit on the ground, in waiting… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Trapped on film in ‘Trap to Table’ promotion

“Trap to Table” is a four-part web-based video series by the Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative to promote new ideas for new shell lobster. My husband, Bruce Fernald, was one of four fishermen paired with a chef for a day of fishing, cooking, and eating. You can see the video on… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Free screening of ‘This Changes Everything’ at Rockland Strand

It has been yet another summer of alarming temperatures, the aftermath of Hurricane Maria is still part of Puerto Rico’s daily reality, and news of dramatic wildfires in the west has people across the country and across the world wondering about their future. This Changes Everything, a documentary film about our… SEE MORE

Volunteers pick up trash on a Midcoast island this summer.

Working Waterfront

Microplastics are everywhere you are, and that’s not good

By Abby Barrows Plastic—we all touch, use, and throw it out every day. It is an amazing, lightweight, and durable material. That quality of durability, however, has made plastic into a worldwide pollution problem. We use items designed to last a few minutes, made from a material that lasts thousands… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Confessions of a coastal upbringing

By Cortney Simmons Between my pointer finger and thumb I can feel the dark green cloth of the sofa as I gently rub it against itself. I gaze out three great windows overlooking a spectacular, coastal view. As warm beams of light drape a dreamy haze on a sunny… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

A city’s eternal force through the years as seen in paint

“Casco Bay Ferry Reflection,” by Sarah Knock Paintings of Portland by Carl Little and David Little DownEast Books, Lanham, Md., 2018; 140 pages, hardcover, $29.95. "Portland gets its hooks in people," Jim Smethurst said to me one sunlit afternoon in 1978, “and won't let them leave." We were standing on Middle… SEE MORE