What would Olmsted and Mrs. Bok do?

 Imagine you are the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, America’s first and most celebrated landscape architect, and you get a call from an old family friend. It’s Mary Louise Curtis Bok and she’s one of your firm’s most important and long-standing clients.

In fact, your fathers knew each other and worked together. Both are so famous now that part of your identity will always be caught up with theirs. But that’s ok. There’s a lot to be proud of.

Her father was Cyrus Curtis. He had recently died and Mary Louise, his only daughter, had an idea to honor him. She wants to demolish most of the family home that her father had built along with the gardens designed by their father some 30-40 years earlier. In its place, she proposes to create a space for trees and public recreation and she'll donate it all to the town in honor of her father.

And that's exactly what happened.

Can you imagine the type of environmentalism and philanthropic vision it takes to come up with a plan like this? This is the type of courage, generosity, and leadership that Mary Louise Curtis Bok and the Olmsteds partnered in over and over again.

And make no mistake, Mary Louise was far from being a simple funding source for these projects. She wrote letters, observed, opined, compromised and negotiated with groups and individuals that were sometimes frustrating and small-minded.

But Mary Louise Curtis Bok was a woman of unusual creativity and intelligence who used her family’s political and economic position to do extraordinary public good. She was also surrounded by a family who set similar standards for themselves, and she took every opportunity to employ the most cutting-edge naturalists in landscape design.

Cyrus Curtis was the publishing giant who printed some of the most popular and widely read material in the country and Frederick Law Olmsted invented landscape architecture. Yes, invented it. Everything before that was really just called gardening. But Olmsted rejected the term and saw his role as curating the unique genius of the place, working with nature to design public spaces where all people could enjoy the benefits of the natural environment.

“Service must precede art, since all turf, trees, flowers, fences, roads, walks, water, paint, plaster, posts, and pillars in or under which there is not a purpose of direct utility or service are inartistic if not barbarous... So long as considerations of utility are neglected or overridden by considerations of ornament, there will be no true art.” -Frederick Law Olmsted.

Curtis hired Olmsted to plan the gardens at his family estate in Wyncote, Pennsylvania called Lyndon. The existing home was soon demolished and replaced by a stone renaissance revival style structure designed by the architect William Lloyd Baily (with considerable input from Mr. Curtis who was himself quite knowledgeable in the field). This was approximately 1895 and Frederick Law Olmsted was hired by Curtis to landscape the grounds and gardens.

After Olmsted’s death in 1903, his sons took over the firm and went on to design hundreds of parks and landscapes all over the country, including several in Camden. The Curtis — and later Bok — families kept a steady stream of work in the pipeline for the Olmsted Brothers.

Olmsted, Curtis, and Bok all shared a progressive —and sometimes radical—vision for the importance of nature in the urban environment. You can read more about Olmsted's design principles at the Olmsted Network website. They have some special material dedicated to Olmsted parks and using the principles of nature-based solutions to address climate change. olmsted.org/olmsted-parks-and-places-adapt-in-the-face-of-climate-change

The name Mary Louise Curtis Bok gets thrown around in political circles in the town of Camden most frequently when someone is trying to make a point about preserving something in the same way that they have known it. That’s how I first became aware of her incredible gifts to the town, at least.

The same is true of the Olmsted landscape design dynasty. Knowing nothing about the values and philosophy of Mary Louise nor the Olmsteds, I knew only that they were the most commonly cited reason for the rules about amplified music on the Village Green or the reasons we might not be allowed to have picnic tables or kayaks in Harbor Park.

For many years, this was enough to satisfy any curiosity I may have had about Frederick Law Olmsted, his sons, or the Curtis/Bok family.

Today, though, thanks to a few other Camden residents and visitors, I dream about what they might say now if they could be here helping us grapple with challenges and opportunities we face today. Rather than a river and harbor that were too dirty to touch, they’d find a vastly transformed use of the beach, as just one example.

The portion of the shorefront that had been reserved as “grounding out space” for big boats to be painted and repaired is now a favorite place for children and the young at heart to examine crabs and periwinkles and dip their feet into the sea. The ramp that we now use to access the beach was there simply to give the Town a place to haul out the floats so they could be stored for winter.

They’d be delighted at some of these evolving benefits, I’m quite certain, but they’d probably describe the public landing in the same way as Mrs. Bok had done before. Disappointing. Dreary. Too much parking. Not enough trees.

As was always the case for Mary Louise, she would see many buildings in need of moving still today. In their place, we’d have trees or grass or views out over the harbor and river. If you look through the designs and photos of the Olmsted archives that relate to the projects she hired them to do, nearly every building pictured had been documented with thought of removing it if possible.

You might almost look at those photos as a type of hit list for buildings and I’ve come to find a certain amount of humor in it. Many of them are actually scattered around town in what she would consider to be more appropriate places.

She faced plenty of opposition in town as well. I’ve tried to be gentle in my sharing of some of these stories about the obstacles she faced in Camden because I know there are still so many opportunities to fulfill aspects of Mrs. Bok’s vision that were not quite ripe for the moment. But the opposition was not limited to Camden.

A 1937 article described public opposition from neighbors of Cheltenham Township at the idea of accepting a donation of 40 acres from the family which included the grounds of her father’s former home. Sixty residents showed up at a meeting of the elected officials to protest the gift, fearing that the playground and park “would attract undesirable people.”

As we talk about change here in Camden, I like to think about what it would have been like to be Mary Louise Curtis Bok in the 1920s and 30s as she mediated between the Town and the Olmsted brothers? She was so much more than a philanthropist.

While it’s true that most of her money came from her parents’ publishing business, her contributions to that business were anything but typical, especially for a woman born in 1876. At the age of 13 she was one of sixteen people on staff at the Ladies Homes Journal. Like her mother, she had a talent for writing and was published under her mother’s maiden name as Mary L. Knapp (her mother was Louisa Knapp).

I mean let’s just dwell on that for a minute. In 1890, 30 years before women got the right to vote, 13-year-old Mary Louise Curtis was writing for the Ladies Home Journal. That was also the year that Edward Bok took over as editor of the publication. Six years later, when Mary was 19, they were married.

The life of her husband was documented in a short autobiography titled The Americanization of Edward Bok and tells the story of how his family came to the United States after losing everything.

Edward Bok died of a heart attack in 1930 and shortly after his death, Mary Louise received a letter from Helen Keller, noted advocate for people with deaf blindness. An excerpt from the letter reads as follows but it is worth reading in its entirety. https://boktowergardens.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16755coll1/id/65

Surely we would all clamor to be associated with Helen Keller’s work today, but can we be sure how we would have behaved before we knew who she would become?

“Dear Mrs Bok.... There will be many a tribute to the great editor, the philanthropist, the peace advocate, the lover of birds and all things beautiful... this eagerness to share, to help, to call forth the best in men and women that endeared Mr. Bok to all who knew him... how warmly he encouraged me in my youthful efforts to write — how he held up my hands in the early days of my work for the blind...”

Today, it’s hard to imagine what Camden would be like without public spaces such as Harbor Park or the Village Green, but we also tend to forget how radical and even controversial the ideas were at the time.

Each time that major events such as fires forced a reorganizing of the landscape, Mrs. Bok swept in and purchased the properties, waiting until the pieces of the puzzle could be brought together with the help of the Olmsteds.

At the time, much like the design at Central Park had to work around the oddly unnatural and rectangular reservoir that pre-existed the park (and his since been removed), Mrs. Bok and the Olmsteds had to work around property boundaries that were outside their control.

Much like in Central Park where they had to accommodate the reservoir, they worked to naturalize and buffer buildings and the dam with trees and shrubbery as best they could in Camden. But we must realize that neither Mrs. Bok nor the Olmsteds ever saw their work as finished, and the designs that we have today include many compromises.

Today, the challenge of climate change and habitat destruction threatens both our parks and our ecosystem, but we have an opportunity to apply the same design principles that the Olmsteds and Mrs. Bok held dear as we plan for the future. The Olmsteds were the original proponents of using Nature Based Solutions, and it was long before the term became fashionable.

Even though the type of flooding we are seeing in Harbor Park and elsewhere in town is overwhelming, any careful reading of the Olmsted/Curtis/Bok philosophies would lead most people to see these challenges as opportunities to take everything that has been learned in the past 100 years and build back better and in greater alignment with nature.

The Town of Camden and the Camden Public Library are well positioned with funding from the National Coastal Resilience Fund to plan for the future by answering the question, what would Mary Louise Curtis Bok and the Olmsted Brothers do today?

Take a look at information on the National Coastal Resilience Fund and you'll swear that Olmsted himself had a hand in designing the program. http://nfwf.org/programs/national-coastal-resilience-fund

Fabled pass of death

​From last week. 

*****

Last week I wrote about Turnpike Drive and I’m returning to it again because this is one of those topics that has sent me both down the metaphorical rabbit hole and up the side of the mountain.

But I am forcing myself now to stop searching The Camden Herald archives for the words “turnpike” or “blasting” or “rock slide” or anything else for the rest of the weekend.

I have one of those personalities that doesn’t know when to stop researching and I often find myself distracted along the way by something that fits into a different research puzzle I’ve been working on. 

I tend to exhaust the people around me with my unbridled interest in obscure historical details and feel a type of euphoria when I’m able to connect the dots and put something into a larger historical context.

Last week I attended one of the Historic Resources Committee meetings and was reminded of how much fun it is to connect with other people who see things the way I do. I don’t mean that we agree on all the issues facing us today. We don’t.

But we all share the habit of wanting to know what came before us and how it came to be and who played a part. We all appreciate a fuller picture and we delight in the details of the people and personalities and bedrock outcroppings of the past. The Turnpike and Megunticook Mountain is one of those places where most of its best stories I suspect have not been told.

Sometimes I think we all find ourselves relating more to the people of Camden’s past than its present. These people felt more interesting. More authentic. More in touch with the natural world. Their problems were existential and the range of solutions they considered was vast.

But with so much change, we also seek a certain amount of stability — granite markers and landmarks that can be referred to in survey after survey. There are very few things in Camden that can be used as enduring control points over the past 250 years.

We’ve changed where the rivers and streams enter the harbor. We’ve changed the shape of the bedrock on Main Street. We’ve buried most of the shoreline of the inner harbor beneath buildings and boardwalks and sea walls.

And it turns out, we’ve even remodeled the mountain.

On certain topics, there is a wealth of unexplored but well documented history, but on others, it seems that we’ve just repeated the same few things over and over again, with each historian just restating what they read before. This is more or less the case with the Turnpike. Very little information repeated again and again.

If you want to know what has been said over and over about the Turnpike, you can read what John Locke wrote in 1859, four years after he arrived in Camden and discovered that none of the inhabitants had bothered to write much of anything down since they began arriving nearly 100 years earlier. From that point on, everyone from The Camden Herald to the local attorneys quoted Locke as the gospel.

We are surely indebted to him for getting the ball rolling, but his accounts are based off town meeting notes that he described with some frustration as being very basic.

He cautions us that the complete history of the town will have to be written by future historians. He says of his writing that “we shall content ourself with merely writing a few memorials which we have obtained at sundry times from the lips of elderly witnesses, or gleaned from old records, books and papers.”

This is how we learn of “Sambo,” the manumitted (freed) slave who was featured in Locke’s book for being the only worker willing to risk his life during a particularly dangerous moment rolling boulders down the cliff of Megunticook to form the road that we all enjoy today.

The accent that Locke chose for “Sambo” was the same as the one for James Richards’ supposed African cook. The stereotypical drawl we now know is historically inaccurate, and we are not going to recreate it here. Locke quotes him as talking to his “master” and bravely stating that all he asks is that if he dies in the venture that he is given a decent burial.

The name “Sambo” itself is a derogatory term with questionable origins. “Sambo” is the name given to many African slaves by people other than their parents.

I don’t blame Locke, but you can’t help but feel a little uneasy realizing how little we know about the people who built the road and how some of its success depended on undervaluing some people’s lives.

Daniel Barrett hired freed slaves at a time when half the country still held people as property.

From the archives, we know the Turnpike was widened and repaired a few times over the years with multiple articles over many decades saying that the Turnpike was “almost finished.” Most notably, major improvements happened around 1918 and again in the 1970s, always involving blasting.

I mentioned the other day to someone that I was surprised that we didn’t end up with rocks rolling into the road from time to time and was informed that it’s actually relatively common. Oh my… maybe what you don’t know can’t hurt you?

The Camden Herald archives confirmed there have indeed been several notable rockslides. The most serious that I have found was in 1975 when the whole area had to be roped off because of an unstable section of roughly 75-100 feet. A young hiker was seriously injured and Bob Oxton directed the rescue operation.

But if you ask the Camden Public Works Department, you’ll also hear the stories of the more minor events that didn’t make the news. Just a month or two ago, they were clearing debris off the road and notifying the State.

Blasting and breaking of rock is such a part of Camden history that I wish I knew more about the techniques over time. If there were one person I wish I could have met from Camden’s past, it might be William Barrett, the son of the same Daniel Barrett who was famous for the wild lifestyle he lived on the side of the mountain. He could tell me all about the blasting and moving of rocks around Camden.

Bill inherited the Barrett land by the lake and Turnpike when his father died. His brothers got the original Barrett homestead where the 12 children had been raised — now Aldermere Farm, Lilly Pond and the surrounding area

The house where Bill Barrett lived stood for many years in what is today the parking lot for the Maiden’s Cliff hiking trail. It wasn’t until 1968 that the old house came down as part of general improvements to the Turnpike area — much to the dismay of the Camden-Rockport Historical Society and others who wanted to save it. A photo can be seen in the Dec. 5, 1968, edition of The Camden Herald.

Bill suffered a serious blasting injury, which left him with part of a rock permanently lodged in his forehead. He reported to The Boston Globe around 1890 that he had been working off his tax debt to the town of Rockport and was ordered to blast a rock that nearly killed him. The recovery, aside from the physical side effects, left him with the nickname of Crazy Bill Barrett.

“I had to take to the woods and live on wild animals and herbs to help my head. I have been in the woods a whole year at a time… it was tough at times living in the wilds of Maine going sometimes for days without even crackers in the way of bread, and sometimes having to eat raw meat, but during the time I discovered a root and made snuff of it that cured my head trouble.”

Well, wouldn’t we all like to know the magical root that Bill Barrett found on the side of the mountain to cure his head troubles. I suppose that’s why a lot of us go out to hike in the mountains — to cure our head troubles with a big or little dose of Mother Nature.

Sometimes people who research can fall into the habit of looking too much at history books to try and solve this metaphorical puzzle rather than looking for clues in nature. Since the documented history before the 1870s is very scant, there’s probably a lot more value in observing the natural scenery.

I’ve driven the Turnpike a thousand times or more over my life but I had never really looked carefully at the rocks perched alongside.

I pulled off to the side of the road in one of the parking areas carved out on the Lincolnville side of the road and flew my son’s little drone up for a different look at the historical puzzle above and below me.

This time, there was nothing metaphorical about the puzzle. Rompecabezas, rather than puzzle was the word that instantly came to mind. As a Spanish teacher, I sometimes default to my second language when a phrase or word seems more appropriate than the English word. Rompecabezas translates literally to “head breaker” and that was immediately the sensation I got as I looked at the images coming up on the viewfinder of the drone.

The patchwork of broken rocks piled all around me, many of them showing obvious feathering marks from the splitting techniques used more than two centuries ago, was most definitely a historical rompecabezas in both the metaphorical and literal sense.

My goal had been to see if I could see signs of rocks shifting along the mountain, and you certainly can, but more unnerving than that was the unmistakable sound of tumbling rocks.

I’m sure most of it is stable most of the time and that statistically your chances of being hit by a falling boulder from Megunticook Mountain are quite low, but there’s a reason why so many of the early writings about the Turnpike refer to it as terrifying and not just beautiful like we say today.

There is a poem written by “Mary of Rockport” from September 1874 that speaks of recurring vision she had as a child passing by the mountain where she sees the mountain’s cliff forming and then an Indian in his canoe. It is worth quoting in its entirety, but since I’ve again written something much longer than I intended, I will choose just a passage to end with.

“But time rolled on, he passed away,

But left behind him a name;

For this path hewn out from the mountain side

Is his monument of fame.

And again I stand in this lonely pass,

With its grandeur deep and wild

This Vision of fancy comes back to me

As when I was a child.

And I dream again the same wild dream.

I pause and hold my breath,

And I think of many a wild legend

And the fabled pass of death.”

Alison McKellar is a Camden resident and member of the Select Board. Her views are her own and do not reflect those of the Select Board.

Private piers and public trust

I’ve been trying to write as much as possible about Camden’s public access points to the harbor before I forget what it felt like not to know about them. They are easy to ignore when not enough people know they exist, so it’s great to see the new signs marking many of the lesser known spots like Eaton Avenue, Harbor Road, and the Curtis Island Overlook. We are still waiting on signage at Sherman’s Point Road. 

It’s notable that many of the public access points contain the word “overlook”. It’s meant to make it clear that there is no obvious way to get down to the water—whether natural or engineered— but at each of these locations, the public rights goes all the way to the low tide mark. The adventurous and the physically fit are free to descend at their own risk. Everyone else is encouraged to request that the town prioritize safe ways to reach the shore at our public access points. 

But you should also know that public rights to access the water extend beyond the official boundaries of the town owned land. They go all the way back to the 16th century when Queen Elizabeth recognized the public’s “inalienable right to the sea” and the public trust doctrine was established. It’s a somewhat complicated issue and case history in Maine, but in essence, it established that certain lands are held in trust by the government for public benefit. 

Specifically, tidal waters and submerged lands belong to the state and cannot be sold to a private party. The public has the right to cross over “unimproved land” in order to access a great pond or tidal waters. Maine’s beaches or intertidal areas influenced by the ebb and flow of the tides are often privately held by the upland property owner but the public has a permanent right of way to access the land for the purposes of “fishing, fowling, and navigation” all broadly defined. 

Maine has been mulling through case after case determining the evolving meaning of “fishing, fowling, and navigation” as it relates to the economic and recreational realities of today. For those who want to know more, I recommend an article published by the Ocean and Coastal Law Journal (2020) titled Access for the Future: Improving Maine's Implementation of the Public Trust Doctrine through Municipal Controls to Ensure Coastal Access for Continuing Benefit to Maine's People and Economy by Allison M. Kuhns

https://digitalcommons.mainelaw.maine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1392&context=oclj

Private land owners frequently attempt to keep the public off of the beaches in front of their properties, and court cases have delved into the details of creative applications of allowed uses. For example, crossing over a private beach to reach the ocean for scuba diving is a right under the public trust doctrine and so is digging for worms.

In many places, the private property owner’s right to access the water from their property has taken the form of private piers and docks, which in turn, interferes with the public’s right of passage. Some docks are required to have a set of public stairs that allow for passage above the structure when the tides are such that passage underneath is not feasible. 

Piers also displace habitat for shorebirds and shellfish. Wading birds have been found to avoid a 300ft radius around pier structures. The pilings associated with the structures permanently consume real estate used by clams and other shellfish. 

Most of our harbor access points are sandwiched between private property, sea walls, piers, and man-made precipices meant to keep the adjacent properties from losing any real estate to the sea. In some cases, the private property owners even managed to convince the townspeople to share in the cost of building the erosion control sea walls that protect their property while creating a virtually impassable vertical drop for the public access point. 

We forget that beaches are formed by the natural process of erosion. As sea level rises, the beaches and intertidal zones will migrate landward in some places where they are able to. In other places, constructed sea walls (often built in conjunction with private piers) will keep the shoreline in a fixed position, shrinking the amount of dry beach that will be revealed on the outgoing tide. 

This phenomenon is referred to as coastal squeeze and you can feel it at high tide if you try to walk anywhere along the beach in Camden Harbor. In some places, the footings of a private pier actually occupy the only spot that would allow a pedestrian to pass by at certain tides. 

When I was first elected to the Select Board, I avoided taking positions on issues relating to boats and harbor infrastructure since it was clear to me that I have a lot less experience than many of my friends and neighbors. Being surrounded by family members who have spent their professional careers working in this area has prepared me well for the habit of deferring to the input of others on this topic. Even my kids are more proficient in basic marine vocabulary than I am, but there’s something liberating about accepting your role as an observer in need of learning from others. 

This may be one of the reasons that so many people reach out to me with their own questions and concerns regarding the harbor. I’m not embarrassed by not knowing the answer and it’s easy for me to be open minded and ask my own questions. People have rightly assumed that I might be convinced to see things their way on certain topics because I haven’t established a rigid position of my own. 

I’ve done a lot of listening about “the way things used to be” and all the public access that has been lost. There was a time when Camden Harbor wasn’t as popular as it today and it was viewed more like an airport and less like a destination of its own. Allowing some private property owners to build structures through the public trust resources didn’t seem like such a big deal if it was only a few piers and everyone who wanted a mooring in Camden Harbor could get one. 

Today, every inch of Camden Harbor is potentially precious real estate. I do not anticipate personally wanting to have a boat moored in Camden Harbor, but I have many friends and family who pay fees every year just to be on a waiting list for the privilege. Demand is growing all the time. The Harbor itself is a destination for many and the economic importance that was linked to sustenance fishing in Queen Elizabeth’s day may look more like guided fishing and photography trips today.

One place you can see the changing pressure for space in the harbor is at the dinghy dock. Traditionally, the dinghy dock was for people to park their small boat which would get them out to their bigger boat, but a new class of boaters has emerged that is rapidly encroaching on the dinghy real estate. We are broadly referred to as paddlers and many of us are happy to never leave the harbor at all. Smaller vessels are supposed to get out of the way of larger ones but in Camden Harbor there is a single established channel. A trip over to Sherman’s Cove is magical by paddle board if you hug the shoreline and gaze at the rockweed but sooner or later one of the massive private piers will force you out into the main channel to compete for space with launches, tenders, schooners, and more. 

Sometimes I go down to check on my little dingy and I become so enamored with fish and underwater flora and fauna that I never even leave the dingy dock at all. The harbor to us is not a launching point to get us out onto Penobscot Bay but a destination all its own. The intertidal habitat, the changing tides, the beaches, and the estuarine waters where Megunticook and other small streams mix with the sea provides an experience that attracts anglers, tourists, shell collectors, beach walkers, paddle boarders and even swimmers. 

Until recently, shellfish harvesting in Shermans Cove and other swaths of Camden’s mud flats was an activity that drew both hobbyists and the hungry down to the harbor, but the concerns over pollution within a certain radius of wastewater treatment plant outfalls has closed the area for now. This has opened up for door for new pier applications to say with a straight face that they won’t interfere with any existing shellfish harvesting, but shouldn’t we be looking for ways to eventually reopen the shellfish harvest rather than allowing more private structures on the grounds that we already polluted the water too much for certain types fishing?

With so many missed opportunities to look back on, let’s not miss our opportunity to keep the keys to the castle that remain. There may come a time when we need or want to build commercial or public use piers, docks, and even breakwaters. As sea level rises, the water may become deep enough in some places to support new moorings and we have an obligation to safeguard precious public resources now rather than give them away to private interests. We can always go back and decide to give more of it away to private development if we choose to later but it doesn’t work the other way around. 

In 2015, the harbor committee and the planning board unanimously recommended a ban on new private residential piers but the Select Board voted in a split vote not to pass the question on to voters. It’s time to make that happen.

Building over the Megunticook River

After my sister died in 2018, I was a mess. And the two coping mechanisms that worked best for me were filming fish underwater and digitizing old town records. I’ve always been kind of a nerd. One of the projects I took on was digitizing the old Camden Select Board meeting minutes from the 1930s. Although they lack detail, there are many interesting tidbits that remain relevant today and the cartoon in last week's paper got me thinking about Main Street. 

At the May 18th, 1931, meeting of the Camden Board of Selectmen, a letter was read that had come from the woman who donated most of the land for Camden’s library and adjacent park. The minutes from the meeting include only these words: “Letter from Mrs. Bok regarding building over river, read.” Mary Louise Curtis Bok hired and worked closely with the famed Olmsted Brothers to do the design work for this and multiple other locations around Camden and Rockport.

I always wondered. Did she want to build something over the river? Did she want to improve the buildings already there? Something else? I filed it away for a time when I would have more context, but anyone reading those minutes at the time would have had a pretty good idea. Now that the Camden Herald has digitized so much of their archive (actually credit goes to the Camden Public Library, not the newspaper), it’s clear Mrs. Bok was not a fan of allowing the river to be hidden under buildings.

The discussion had been going on for a few years, ultimately prompting a Camden Herald Editorial in the August 23rd 1928 edition in response to a presentation given by Edward Bok (the husband of Mrs. Bok) and Dr. Charles Codman (think, Codman Island on Megunticook Lake) which encouraged the townspeople to value the fact that in Camden we “have the greatest gifts of nature” but have allowed “a beautiful mountain stream, flowing right through the very heart of the town to become a foul cesspool, hidden from view by a few buildings.”

The editors of the paper agreed:

“Dr. Charles Codman, at a recent Board of Trade meeting, pointed out the fact that the river flowing through the town as it does, is not a sanitary or desirable thing. Moreover, we are wondering whether it is lawful for any town to allow the placing of buildings on spiles over a public stream in such a manner as to clog the stream, catch waste and sewage, and hold it. A few years ago, we had a heavy flood and the first place that clogged and gave rise to serious danger was the main Street bridge with the buildings across it.”

They were referring to the devastating rain storm of 1922 which swept at least one Main Street building and many bridges into the river. Dean’s stable — which used to be sandwiched in between the House of Logan and the Leather Bench — gave way, drowning one horse and nearly the rest of them. Most of the Main Street businesses were flooded and the recovery effort required the cutting open of the bridge on Main Street where debris was trapped.

As Mrs. Bok worked with the Olmsted Brothers to design Harbor Park, she slowly removed every building existing on the parcels she owned, but the park design also required working around private property, including the dam. At that time, what we know as Montgomery Dam was all part of a larger parcel that included most of the buildings on Main Street. Over time, the owner of that parcel had leased out space to proprietors of businesses that wanted to perch their buildings over top of the river to gain store frontage on Main Street. 

The 1912 edition of the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps shows multiple buildings in Harbor Park that have since been demolished, and three fewer buildings over the river on the harbor side than there are today.

Eventually, each of these new buildings became separate parcels.

But before that, on June 23rd, 1931, a special town meeting was held at the Engine Hall “for the purpose of granting authority to the Board of Selectmen to invoke condemnation proceedings with regard to certain wooden buildings now located on the Main Street bridge.” The paper reported that the meeting “was well attended by a representative group of citizens… The vote was unanimous, there being no dissenting voice raised.”

On July 1, 1931, the municipal officers of Camden gave notice of their intention to take, “for public park purposes”, the land over which was situated the Stratton fish market and the Drinkwater Garage. But it wasn’t all about Mrs. Bok and her vision for restoring the view of the harbor from Main Street. Plans were underway for replacement of the Main Street bridge — then owned by the county — and the Town had been told that work could not proceed until the buildings were removed.

August 1931, Mrs. Bok stated she hoped that someday the buildings which now rested directly over the falls on Main Street, hiding their beauty, would be removed, and a new artistic bridge erected on Main Street. In the same issue of the Camden Herald, the editors opined over “what a treat it was to hear from Mrs. Edward Bok herself” on the project underway at the Camden Public Library lot and that “many a rumor was put to rest by Mrs. Bok’s keen and masterly appreciation of the fine points of the scheme from the architectural and community standpoint.”

They went on saying “we agree with many of the suggestions that Mrs. Bok set forth, namely — the removal of the buildings from over the stream:—the diversion of waste, etc., into direct sewer lines to the harbor — a new bridge over the stream that shall be a thing of beauty for Camden. We hope that these suggestions will come to pass.”

It’s not clear what happened next, but it appears that compromises were made on the bridge design, and the buildings were allowed to stay. The compromise has involved a delicate balancing act where the water level is raised to improve aesthetics and then lowered as needed to work on the buildings and bridge. The Megunticook River is visible from only one spot on Main Street and so it’s easy to lose perspective of its course as it disappears beneath a labyrinth of bridge piers and building supports before re-emerging on the other side of the Smiling Cow (the former Drinkwater Garage).

The way the buildings and the bridge are designed requires that the water be lowered in order to perform a variety of maintenance tasks. When the flow is at low to moderate levels in the river, the pool underneath the Camden Deli can be drained by opening up the gate on the Montgomery Dam and letting water out the sluiceway into the harbor.

During the May 1st storm, logs and debris got caught in the bridge and the buildings, and had it been worse, we may have gotten a taste of what they saw in 1922. One of the purposes of the early dams was to help float logs over long distances, and the Montgomery Dam in the closed position facilitates floating of debris, which then has to pass through narrow openings of the support systems for the bridge and buildings. This is one of the reasons why modern bridges give rivers more room with wider spans and no center pier if possible.

Luckily, a few days after the storm, the pool under the bridge and buildings could be drained in order to make it possible for MDOT to pull things out with a boom truck. The same thing happens when one of the building owners needs to paint, fix their footings, or make other improvements. Sometimes, additional water must be held back from the lake in order to make this possible.

Unfortunately, draining the pool reveals a scene that is cringeworthy under the bridge and buildings. A derelict fuel tank, impounded sediment, hanging wires, fallen plumbing, sunken timber and collapsed piers. It’s not clear who is responsible for all the stuff, but everyone usually agrees it looks awful enough that they request to fill the pool again as quickly as possible. Out of sight out of mind.

Almost 100 years after Mary Louise Curtis Bok proposed a more aesthetically pleasing bridge on Main Street, we are no longer generating power at the site, but we are still treating this section of the river more like a canal than a beautiful mountain stream. No matter what happens with the dam, we can't put off cleaning up the mess underneath forever.

Communities are wrestling everywhere with the collective responsibility to clean up their waterbodies and remove debris to prevent flooding. Luckily, we are at an unprecedented moment where federal funds are available to improve all of it and the funds can even be used to help improve the support structures under the buildings so they are resilient and aesthetically pleasing.

I am so curious as to what Mrs. Bok would have envisioned for a bridge on Main Street now that it is once again due for replacement. Was she imagining something like what we have on Knowlton Street or near Megunticook Market or would it have been more like the arched granite of some of the other Olmsted parks?

All natural engineering?

Column from a couple weeks ago: All natural engineering?
https://knox.villagesoup.com/2022/11/17/column-all-natural-engineering/

Not another meaningless buzzword to make us feel all warm and fuzzy about sustainability. Please. Anything but that. Promises of green products and eco-conscious ingredients have left some of us rolling our eyes and suspicious of all terms referring to nature.

Nature-based solutions (NBS) is the latest term you’ll see highlighted in grant opportunities ranging from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to The Nature Conservancy. Billions of dollars are being leveraged to encourage solving human challenges by restoring, protecting and learning from natural systems.

But is all this rhetoric just the engineering version of “all natural ingredients” in the food we eat? The proverbial paper straw that makes us feel better about spending money? It depends, but for the most part, the idea is so simple and obvious that it’s a wonder we’re just coming around to embracing it.

FEMA defines Nature-Based Solutions broadly as “sustainable planning, design, environmental management and engineering practices that weave natural features or processes into the built environment to promote adaptation and resilience.”

In short, the agency tasked with hazard mitigation and recovery has noticed that certain things last longer than others and that sometimes the most durable and resilient solution has already been worked out by nature. Just because it may seem easier to put a stream in a pipe, bury it underground, and build on top of it, doesn’t mean we should do that.

Just because there’s a composite aggregate that looks just like granite doesn’t mean it will behave like granite over the next couple hundred years. Systems that depend on sealing the cracks between rocks with cement and grout will eventually fail.

Insurance companies are actually one of the main drivers pushing for nature-based solutions and funding their adoption. It’s not because insurance executives have suddenly become “tree huggers.” It’s because they don’t want to pay the high price of rebuilding things when they fall down.

As many have noted, the ocean has been rising and falling since time immemorial just as the rivers have been expanding and contracting as they meander, overflowing their banks and altering their course. It’s nothing new, but large boulders remain perched atop bedrock for a very long time under a wide range of conditions whereas saplings with shallow root systems only rarely beat the odds.

Some stones were dragged hundreds of miles by the glaciers or crushed up into sand whereas others held strong. Water slowly erodes everything in its path. If we don’t want our creations swept out to sea, we would be wise to deploy concrete and grout a little less frequently near the shore when rocks and bedrock can do the trick.

Nature-based solutions are different depending on the climate but it’s fun to try and start noticing what seems to stand the test of time with minimal human effort and what does not.

A few years back I remember watching as a stone retaining wall was constructed in the front yard of a home down the street from me. It was very pretty and the stones reminded me of the ones we used to sell from our farm out in Union when I was a kid. My sister and I always laughed about the people coming to buy rocks from my mom. What a strange thing for adults to buy and sell.

My mom was probably 110 pounds with long hair and not at all what most people were expecting from a rock broker. She knew the value of good, flat landscaping rock and the wooded areas beyond our horse pastures had plenty of it woven into quickly built walls — a payout on the sweat equity invested hundreds of years earlier by people as they toiled to turn the rocky Maine woods into suitable farmland.

My mom used the stones herself to build patios, steps and benches, but it still surprised my sister and me that people would come from Camden, Rockland, and sometimes further just to buy the rocks we had dragged out of the woods in our GMC Suburban.

Rock harvesting was the only time we spent in a vehicle when we didn’t have to wear seatbelts. My mom would let us sit on top of the bench seats in the back, pretending we were on horses and trying not to fall off as the Suburban bucked and balked at the decidedly not-so-suburban terrain.

Sometimes we would be out on the trails with the horses and my mom would see the “perfect” rock for one of her projects—some funny shape that was just the complement to another rock she had already laid down. She couldn’t get it with the horse but she’d go back later with the Suburban.

But aside from the few we kept for ourselves, it was off to the suburbs for most of the stones — at least the flat ones. Nature doesn’t usually build with straight lines and that’s probably why flat rocks are a little less common too. The natural evolution of things doesn’t produce straight lines but rather densely woven and interconnected patterns.

OPINION Posted November 17 INCREASE FONT SIZEResize Font
Column: All natural engineering? 
Rocks are the original nature-based solution, and try as we might, humans have not engineered anything that can hold a candle to well-chosen natural stone when it comes to durability and even long-term aesthetics.

BY ALISON MCKELLAR
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Alison McKellar is a Camden resident and Select Board Vice-Chair. Her views are her own and do not reflect those of the Select Board or the editorial position of The Camden Herald. We welcome letters and guest columns reflecting other viewpoints via editor@villagesoup.com.
Not another meaningless buzzword to make us feel all warm and fuzzy about sustainability. Please. Anything but that. Promises of green products and eco-conscious ingredients have left some of us rolling our eyes and suspicious of all terms referring to nature.

Nature-based solutions (NBS) is the latest term you’ll see highlighted in grant opportunities ranging from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to The Nature Conservancy. Billions of dollars are being leveraged to encourage solving human challenges by restoring, protecting and learning from natural systems.

But is all this rhetoric just the engineering version of “all natural ingredients” in the food we eat? The proverbial paper straw that makes us feel better about spending money? It depends, but for the most part, the idea is so simple and obvious that it’s a wonder we’re just coming around to embracing it.

FEMA defines Nature-Based Solutions as a broadly as “sustainable planning, design, environmental management and engineering practices that weave natural features or processes into the built environment to promote adaptation and resilience.”

In short, the agency tasked with hazard mitigation and recovery has noticed that certain things last longer than others and that sometimes the most durable and resilient solution has already been worked out by nature. Just because it may seem easier to put a stream in a pipe, bury it underground, and build on top of it, doesn’t mean we should do that.

Just because there’s a composite aggregate that looks just like granite doesn’t mean it will behave like granite over the next couple hundred years. Systems that depend on sealing the cracks between rocks with cement and grout will eventually fail.

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Insurance companies are actually one of the main drivers pushing for nature-based solutions and funding their adoption. It’s not because insurance executives have suddenly become “tree huggers.” It’s because they don’t want to pay the high price of rebuilding things when they fall down.

As many have noted, the ocean has been rising and falling since time immemorial just as the rivers have been expanding and contracting as they meander, overflowing their banks and altering their course. It’s nothing new, but large boulders remain perched atop bedrock for a very long time under a wide range of conditions whereas saplings with shallow root systems only beat the odds.

Some stones were dragged hundreds of miles by the glaciers or crushed up into sand whereas others held strong. Water slowly erodes everything in its path. If we don’t want our creations swept out to sea, we would be wise to deploy concrete and grout a little less frequently near the shore when rocks and bedrock can do the trick.

Nature-based solutions are different depending on the climate but it’s fun to try and start noticing what seems to stand the test of time with minimal human effort and what does not.

A few years back I remember watching as a stone retaining wall was constructed in the front yard of a home down the street from me. It was very pretty and the stones reminded me of the ones we used to sell from our farm out in Union when I was a kid. My sister and I always laughed about the people coming to buy rocks from my mom. What a strange thing for adults to buy and sell.

My mom was probably 110 pounds with long hair and not at all what most people were expecting from a rock broker. She knew the value of good, flat landscaping rock and the wooded areas beyond our horse pastures had plenty of it woven into quickly built walls — a payout on the sweat equity invested hundreds of years earlier by people as they toiled to turn the rocky Maine woods into suitable farmland.

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My mom used the stones herself to build patios, steps and benches, but it still surprised my sister and me that people would come from Camden, Rockland, and sometimes further just to buy the rocks we had dragged out of the woods in our GMC Suburban.

Rock harvesting was the only time we spent in a vehicle when we didn’t have to wear seatbelts. My mom would let us sit on top of the bench seats in the back, pretending we were on horses and trying not to fall off as the Suburban bucked and balked at the decidedly not-so-suburban terrain.

Sometimes we would be out on the trails with the horses and my mom would see the “perfect” rock for one of her projects—some funny shape that was just the complement to another rock she had already laid down. She couldn’t get it with the horse but she’d go back later with the Suburban.

But aside from the few we kept for ourselves, it was off to the suburbs for most of the stones — at least the flat ones. Nature doesn’t usually build with straight lines and that’s probably why flat rocks are a little less common too. The natural evolution of things doesn’t produce straight lines but rather densely woven and interconnected patterns.

A natural stormwater conveyance system capable of transporting millions of gallons of water from Hosmer Pond to Rockport Harbor, also known as the Goose River. A nature-based solution so logical, we almost forgot how well it works. Photo courtesy of Alison McKellar

Humans seek out flat rocks to fit into their straight lines, so that everything can be built efficiently and according to a plan drawn up by an engineer — the type of line they can mow around.

The irregular and rounded rocks got to stay in Union, marking the edge of horse pastures and property lines, but the flat ones were sent off to places like the Camden village. Ultimately, my neighbor’s vertical stone wall with the neat lines and the flat stones fell down and was quickly replaced by a design consisting of only a few large boulders, some soil, and plantings. At first I was sad for the eye-catching stone wall but soon enough I decided I actually like the new design better.

Most of our built-up areas were long ago cleared of the rocks that held the earth together. They were removed to make way for smooth roads, hayfields, and later, the loam and grass seed that now partially enslaves us. Today, when it comes time to landscape close to town, not everyone has all the rocks they need or want so close by, and so they import them or they come up with a less expensive alternative like pouring concrete.

I suppose rocks are the original nature-based solution, and try as we might, humans have not engineered anything that can hold a candle to well-chosen natural stone when it comes to durability and even long-term aesthetics. The benefits are compounded when we can learn to arrange the stones in a similar fashion to nature, complete with irregularities.

Modern society has gifted us with the technology to turn swamps into high-rise hotels and build swimming pools in the desert and grow food virtually anywhere. We can create land where there was ocean and put deep-water dockage and bustling harbors where there were only mudflats. The science and practice of engineering has been obsessed with finding the limits of natural systems and then finding a human solution to transcend them.

Concrete, cement, and grout are a few of the things that we keep getting better and better at manipulating. They are wonderful for creating the smooth surfaces that allow wheelchairs and roller skates to safely pass but they should be deployed cautiously as a method of fighting the flow of moving water.

That’s just one small example of the type of strategy being encouraged by the bipartisan infrastructure bill and millions of dollars in corporate financing. What’s working in nature? Try that first.

https://knox.villagesoup.com/2022/11/17/column-all-natural-engineering/

Camden without a car

The need for town government and taxes evolved in large part out of the need to build and maintain roads for public use. The original settlers all had to agree to let public roads be erected across their lots wherever it was deemed necessary, and instead of paying taxes, they were required to assist in building those roads and keeping them passable by working a certain amount of time each year for the first ten years of settlement. 

 Keeping the roads passable was the name of the game and no one had to worry about the danger of any group getting by too quickly. The roads were slow and rocky and muddy and often washed out. And in the winter, they were slippery and all sorts of other things. 

 The need for sidewalks didn’t come along until the roads began to be heavily used by horses and other livestock and the downtown became dense enough that sanitary issues arose. The lines began to form between the use of town roads by those with horses and those without. 

 In the March 24 edition of the Courier-Gazette from 1903, the editor offered the following reminder:

 “we submit that we are not, as taxpayers living in a progressive community with a live Board of Trade, doing right when we permit the elements to make walking unbearable for an entire winter… We pay for making the middle of the streets comfortable for horses, which are never heard to complain, but we let poor tender-footed humanity slip and stumble and break its bones and the commandments and appear to regard it quite as a matter of course.” 

 How many times have we heard complaints about pedestrians walking in the road even when there is a sidewalk? Well, I’ll bet the reasons are almost always similar to the ones from 1903. 

 Yes, there are certainly inconsiderate pedestrians, but for the most part, people only choose the road over the sidewalk when there is a noticeable disparity in the conditions. 

 Almost every road in Camden is in better condition than the sidewalk, if there is one, and it is the sidewalks and not the roadways that are frequently obstructed by telephone poles and mailboxes. Just as towns prioritized horse and cart passage over making the sidewalks passable for people, we fall into the same patterns today with cars. Some assume that the only people out using our sidewalks are those walking by choice or children who are not yet old enough to drive. They also tend to imagine that the activity is seasonal and that by winter everyone is in cars. 

 There are of course many reasons that someone might make the choice to walk around town rather than drive but there is also another demographic: the carless. I’ve been renting rooms in our home on Mechanic Street since 2008. Advertising on Craigslist and wading through all the inquiries and getting to know the people during their time has shown me that many people are without a vehicle either by chance or by choice. 

 In fact, I got so used to having people without cars that we actually started charging more if a tenant would need to park a car in the driveway. The reasons that our tenants have not had cars have been numerous, including financial issues, physical disability, license revocation, anxiety, a preference for walking, never learned to drive, no need for a car, and probably more that I can’t think of. 

 When I first moved back to Camden after college, I quite comfortably shared a car with one of my housemates, but the longest I went without a car completely was about 9 months. My kids were very young at the time, and I worked to conquer my nervousness on a bike in order to be able to pull them around in one of those carts. 

 So much of our town is designed and operated on the assumption that everyone needs or wants or can afford a car, but it’s time to start acknowledging the fact that not everyone has one.

If the carless in Camden suddenly all had an automobile that they needed to park and drive, we’d notice an increase in congestion.

On a similar note, if a few more of us could get by without one more often, we’d all benefit with cleaner air and less congestion. One of the many obstacles to the creation of affordable housing is that it all has to be built with the assumption that we are building space for as many cars as people, and sometimes more.

 For the people who already need to walk or bike, we owe it to them to make that experience as safe and accessible as possible, and that will mean clawing back a little space and preference that has been ceded to automobiles.” 

 Originally published by the Camden Herald https://knox.villagesoup.com/archives/column-camden-without-a-car/article_c0b9c560-4afc-51ed-9b7c-ec9594c3f744.html

Camden's Cancer

 A lot of what I read in the old Camden Heralds is stuff that predates my own living memory and that of most people living in Camden today. Sometimes, though, I stumble upon things that I remember all too well.

One thing I came upon recently that I did remember was a guest column from 2001 titled Camden’s cancer. It was written by a fellow student who attended high school with me at a time when we were facing an unprecedented number of tragic deaths in our small town, a result of both suicide and accidents.

I remember Evan’s writing got a lot of attention at the time, puzzling-and sometimes frustrating-the adults but hailed as “spot on” by everyone in my age group that I remember. It started like this: 

“For as long as I can remember, Camden, Maine, has been very sick, and finally Camden is dying. We live in a town infected with an obsession. We are a community stricken with almost every serious affliction common among teenagers… the truth is that we as a community are to blame. We are a superficial group, perpetually concerned with our image as a town.” 

At the time, this resonated widely and almost wildly with many of us who felt exhausted trying to keep up in Camden. He went on to make vague references to the efforts and institutions that were concerned more with appearing to address problems than really solving them. Some residents responded with letters to the editor expressing a range of responses from agreement to defensiveness. 

I graduated from Camden Hills Regional High School in 2002 so I was one of only a few classes to spend time in both the old high school and the new one. It was a time of rapid change. Not the little changes of a few parking spots and street trees that seem to consume us today, but a major reshaping of the town. 

The high school was moved from Knowlton Street to Route 90 in a move that provided a state of the art facility while also radically severing some of the community interaction that used to happened organically.
Somehow we used to fit not just the middle school but the entire high school and all of the student and teacher vehicles onto Knowlton Street at the edge of downtown Camden. 

You can still see the little signs on a few side streets prohibiting parking during school hours. They seem oddly placed today as unlikely streets to be overrun as a convenient parking spot. They are leftover from another time when some of the residential neighborhoods felt they needed protection from a high school bursting at its seams. Now, the complaints are occasionally directed at parents picking kids up at the skate park… imagine what it was like when the whole high school was there!

An even bigger problem was that skateboarders were overwhelming the freshly built ADA ramps at MBNA and the Post Office. That and dealing with the problem of teenage loitering was a topic of endless concern from the downtown business owners. MBNA had a solution for that too, and an old lot on Knowlton Street was transformed into a fully staffed skate park. 

But when our school community was confronted the horror of multiple student suicides, the conversation changed for a moment from the problems that teenagers created for the town to the not so obvious problems that the town might be breeding in its teenagers. The relentless pursuit of perfection and the focus on improving the way things look rather than improving the way things are seemed embedded in the collective consciousness.

The 2001 column continued:
“I have spoken to peers who honestly believe that a C in math is the end of their academic career and their lives as a result. Students must learn to understand that there is so much more to life than high school. It’s far too easy to get caught up in the everyday stresses that our elitist community forces on us and lose sight of the bigger picture.”

20 years later, I can say with certainty that the school district has done a lot to foster an atmosphere that is more inclusive and less stressful. I’m not so sure that Camden as a town is making much progress winning the battle against the cancer that Evan Thomas spoke of back in 2001. We do have fewer kids downtown, that is for sure.

It took leaving Camden and seeing the types of problems that are faced in other parts of the world to shake myself mostly free of the paranoid fear of not fitting in or not meeting some standard of what success looks like here. 

I’ll admit to secretly cheering for the people and properties that are overgrown and unkept in Camden. Too much perfection is bad for the soul, and sometimes, by striving so hard to force people and landscapes to conform to a template, we rob ourselves of beauty and creativity that we never imagined. 

When the little parking lot next to Camden House of Pizza was redesigned and the retaining wall replaced, some were eager for a more manicured look, but I wished the whole thing would have stayed the way it was. We used to climb up the wall as kids in the same spot where there is now a staircase. Multiple mature trees had found a way to survive and prosper, embedded against the odds in rocks and pavement. They were nuisance weeds that had escaped the knife year after year until they became actual trees. 

Nothing about it looked nice in the traditional sense and it used to be notorious for attracting teenagers with nothing to do. One resident who shall remain nameless even spray painted the words “loser lot” in an attempt to dissuade teenagers from congregating there. But sometimes I really am convinced that It’s good for us to be at peace with the weeds, however we define them. 

Just recently, an arborvitae growing alongside Paul Gibbons’ old office across from the Opera House was cut, and now the incredible sound of the birds that used to hide there is gone too. I’m sure the new owner had no idea the sweet sounds that used to mysteriously come from that tree.

When Harbor Park becomes overgrown, there are those in town who scoff and wag their fingers, but some of us delight in seeing the triumph of wildness in Camden. 

For many years the Montgomery Dam used to be sprayed with Roundup on a regular basis in order to keep the weeds from growing on it. I’ve been told we don’t do that anymore but there are still plenty of ways that our obsession with a certain image can become poison to the people and natural resources we should cherish just as they are.

This piece originally appeared in the Camden Herald: https://knox.villagesoup.com/archives/column-camden-s-cancer/article_31017580-d556-5e56-b9db-c0c97f317924.html

Syria update... there's more to do!

Dear Friends of Syria-

An overdue update. I just checked and our first container is due to cross into the Mediterranean tomorrow and the second one is just leaving Rhode Island on route across the Atlantic after picking up her final cargo.

Two weeks ago, we sent out our second container to Syria, successfully loading an estimated 45,000 lbs of donated humanitarian and medical supplies in roughly 3 hours, thanks to an incredible turnout of motivated volunteers of literally every age. 

​

And here's a great image of the CHRHS band room before and after.

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FROM EMPTY TO OVERFLOWING IN UNDER 2 WEEKS

That photo is deceiving though because the donations have not stopped and we have the best kind of problem right now. Piles of donations, from hygiene products to clothes to stuffed animals and strollers all overflowing from the Mechanic Street porch. We also have a few residual things left on 64 Bayview Street (like an amazing maternity bed and some random medical equipment) and there are at least 9 exam tables and other equipment waiting for pickup in various places. Oh yeah, and we need to move our loading dock from the high school (the one we built).

NO CURRENT PLAN FOR STORAGE, but we're not quitting!

Here's the rub.... WE NEED SPACE. The current backup plan is to buy a 53ft storage trailer (about $2000-2500) and find a good place to park it (we're waiting to hear back from the American Legion Post on Pearl Street). We'd pay a fee to park the container somewhere and use a church, school, business, or home for bi-weekly one day sorting sessions and then move everything back into the container. We'd also love to share the wealth and expand the operation by partnering with a church or organization that helps local people. We already lend crutches, walkers, and wheelchairs, but we'd love to do more of that.

THE VISION FOR THE FUTURE

There is so much opportunity to turn this project into something EVEN BIGGER. I know it seems daunting, but we never imagined we'd get this big and reach so many people and the opportunities to save life saving equipment and materials from scrap metal, landfill, or the incinerator, is still bigger than we can absorb. That's right, the offers for donations are coming in all the time and things are still being wasted. Spend a day at the transfer station in Rockport and watch what goes into the hopper and scrap metal, and then remember that the SWAP SHOP isn't even open on Saturdays or the winter. What if we could accept an even broader range of things and be in a position to respond to all kinds of requests from local organizations. We could furnish apartments for veterans or people leaving homeless shelters. We could be a resource for local teachers and social workers. There is so much generosity out there and so much need, but we need a better system for making sure all of these resources are helping as many people with the greatest need.

Check out the www.thewishproject.org for inspiration if you're interested in helping our project grow. 

When I began this process, I was deeply moved by the realization that all of our little efforts matter and add up to something much bigger than we imagine. I've spoken to so many of you who I know have been inspired too. We are not done yet and we either need to raise more money or find more space. This is the number one thing holding us back. 

Anyway... here are a few more photos from the second container:

https://www.facebook.com/MaineSyriaRelief/photos/?tab=album&album_id=1102231859846627

Other assorted photos:

https://www.facebook.com/MaineSyriaRelief/photos

A huge thank you to all the amazing donors, lifters, sorters, thinkers, and cheer leaders. Thanks to you, there are many people in Syria who will know they are not forgotten and our shipment will provide hope and tools that will literally save lives. It doesn't get better than that.

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Nothing quite like knowing you've given someone a little hope.

-Alison

www.nudaysyria.net

Don’t burn your trash. We can do better - PenBay Pilot

ATTEND YOUR ANNUAL TOWN MEETING to VOTE NO to BURNING YOUR TRASH

Dear Friends and Community Members : There is an important meeting tomorrow, Tuesday, May 24, at 6:30 p.m. in the Washington Street Conference Room in the back of the Camden town office. This will be a public hearing and informational session on the issue of solid waste which we will be voting on at town meetings this year in Camden, Rockport, Hope, and Lincolnville. 

Having spent an enormous amount of time researching this issue, I am very concerned that the Board of Midcoast Solid Waste Corporation (aka the dump/transfer station), is recommending an option that is not only going to be more expensive but also carries a much heavier carbon footprint than the alternative.

Trash is a complicated issue, believe it or not, and it takes extensive research to understand all the factors. Jim Guerra (transfer station manager, lifelong composting enthusiast, and pioneer recycler) has been very patient with me, explaining the intricacies of anaerobic digestion and the climate benefits of converting our trash to biogas rather than burning it to make electricity. 

However, our boards have not done the extensive research that many other municipalities have done and have failed to listen to experts like Jim in our own community. They are choosing to drive our trash almost twice as far away out of an unreasonable fear that the newer and much more environmentally friendly facility won't work properly, even though there are hundreds like it in Europe. It will be the first of its kind in the United States and has been extensively vetted by everyone from private investors to independent engineers. And did I mention it will actually cost us less? It's a rare and exciting opportunity.

Anyway, please consider attending the meeting tomorrow. For those who want to learn more, below is a letter I wrote to Select Board members from the 4 towns, detailing my reasons for opposing the continued incineration of our trash.  

Also, the Belfast City Council just voted unanimously to go with Fiberight. The archived video is a wealth of information for anyone interested. Here is the link. Scroll to item 10B. 

And in case you're still reading this far down, here's a free press article by Andy Obrien detailing the issue: http://freepressonline.com/Content/Special-Features/Special-Features/Article/Towns-to-Vote-on-Whether-to-Burn-Their-Trash-or-Convert-It-into-Biofuel/52/78/44736 

*************

Dear Members of the Boards,

We have a big decision facing us about where to send our trash after 2018. I write to you as a Camden resident, as an advocate for the environment, and as an engaged member of the community. I serve on the Camden Budget Committee, the Camden Conservation Commission, and volunteer maintaining the town Facebook page... so I know it's a busy time of year for you all. There have been an overwhelming amount of meetings lately, and if I feel a little weary from all of them, I can only imagine how you all feel. I appreciate you hopefully taking the time to read this. Who knows, maybe it will save you some research. 

I've been attending Mid-Coast Solid Waste Board meetings for the past two years. I've only missed a couple, and feel I have a good understanding of the factors that were considered in the lead up to the MCSWC board recommendation to go with Ecomaine. I've also been attending meetings of the Hampden Citizen's Coalition and volunteering to maintain their website (the group of citizens that was formed to advocate for the rights of Hampden residents living near the now closed Pine Tree Landfill). You might say that solid waste has become a bit of an obsession for me and I actually began this process quite opposed to Fiberight out of a concern for the people of Hampden. But, as a Mainer and as an environmentalist, I know that Maine is in dire need of regional solution for waste disposal other than landfilling. I've spent many hours attending DEP meetings in Hampden and questioning and arguing with Jim Guerra, our representative to the MRC, and I've come to feel as enthusiastic about the possibility of Fiberight as he is. Jim is a lifelong environmentalist who worked closely with the other members of the MRC to come up with an option that is for once both the cheapest and the most environmentally friendly.  I've learned enough to know that we have a long way to go, and there are no easy answers or silver bullets, but for the first time in many years, we have choices and what we decide matters. This is why I believe that sending our trash to Ecomaine and withdrawing from the Municipal Review Committee and the 186 towns we now partner with is the wrong decision for the Midcoast, for Maine, and for the environment. 

Although the MCSWC board took this effort seriously, and I know it was a grueling decision for them, I don't think there was enough time or public participation to fully consider the options. There are a few things that I don't think were fully discussed by the MCSWC board, or perhaps misunderstood. I've broken my thoughts  down into a few different areas to make it easier to digest...  

BASIC OVERVIEW:

PERC is an incinerator that uses our trash to make electricity. Our contract with PERC has been overseen by the Municipal Review Committee for 25 years. The MRC is a group run by a volunteer board of directors, all municipal representatives elected by the member towns (our elected member is Jim Guerra). The problem with PERC is that they sold the electricity at above market value and now that the subsidies are running out, their business model doesn't work. The MRC has spent the past 5-7 years anticipating this issue and working on alternatives. They vetted many different proposals and eventually chose Fiberight, a company that uses mechanic biological treatment and anaerobic digestion to create biogas. Their process first pulls out as many recyclable materials as possible (things that still make it into our trash despite our best intentions). Then they use a special system for digesting the leftover material to create biogas which is sold on the open market. Member communities will be entitled to rebates based on the profits, which are expected to be significant. The MCSWC has voted to recommend that we break our ties with the MRC and go with Ecomaine instead, based largely on apprehension about the technology being new to the United States. Ecomaine is also an incinerator, although with a slightly more efficient and environmentally friendly business model, some would say.

INCINERATORS ARE THE PAST, ANAEROBIC DIGESTION IS THE FUTURE

Much of the discussion at the MSCSW board level has centered around apprehension that the Fiberight process won't work. It's understandable that they would feel this way. It has taken a lot of energy for me to understand it over the past two years and read about the similar things that are going on in Europe. But the reality is that Fiberight's biggest investor is Covanta Energy, the biggest waste-to-energy (incineration) company in the country. The biggest incineration company is investing 80 million dollars in a trash to biofuel plant. They have vetted the Fiberight technology and are funding the building of the plant because they know that it will work and they will make money from it, even if it takes a bit to work out the glitches. Yes, there is a risk. As critics have pointed out, Maine will be the first to use this exact process on such a scale, but since when have we been afraid of going first? Anaerobic digestion is not new, and across Europe, the process of turning waste into biogas is a well established part of the plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Here are some of the main benefits I see for the environment:

1. Anaerobic digestion is like composting without oxygen under controlled conditions. Much of our waste stream is made up of organic material. Separate collection of food waste in a rural state like ours may come with a big carbon footprint, and some people still won't want to do it. Food scraps do not burn well in Ecomaine's incinerators but Fiberight's process will use anaerobic digestion to turn this portion of our trash into biofuels. 
2. Displacing fossil fuels: Biogas is generally considered to be a carbon-neutral source of energy because the carbon emitted during combustion was "new" plant based carbon that was already in the atmosphere, as opposed to the combustion of fossil fuels which burns carbon that had been sequestered for millions of years, and releases it into the atmosphere. Thus, replacing fossil fuels with biogas cuts down on GHG emissions associated with energy production.
3. Fiberight's sorting facility will add to existing recycling programs by pulling out and baling the recyclable materials that people are still throwing away. Watch a video of the process at work in the demonstration facility.

CARBON FOOTPRINT MATTERS

Although I'm thrilled to see that the debate is centering around which choice is the most environmental, by a great project that was the best choice for Portland, and not for us. Environmentalists have long been critical of incinerators, and while they've improved, no one would argue that they are an efficient way of producing electricity. The air emissions they create are still the subject of much concern (considerably greater than any air emissions from Fiberight). Here's a link explaining some of the issues: https://www.ecocycle.org/files/pdfs/WTE_wrong_for_environment_economy_community_by_Eco-Cycle.pdf To think that we would be willing to pay extra money and increase our carbon footprint with the longer hauling distances for the environmental benefit of incineration is a bit laughable from an environmental perspective.

I've attached a proposal from Fiberight which spells out how we can partner with them to create a carbon neutral recycling/transfer station (see attachment) 

ECOMAINE IS NOT A REGIONAL SOLUTION. THERE IS REAL POWER IN BANDING TOGETHER WITH OTHER TOWNS TO MAKE THESE DECISIONS.

Ecomaine is a facility currently operating at capacity. They take in mostly municipal waste from their member towns and also about 40,000 tons of commercial waste. They've been hit hard by the diminishing price of recyclables. Revenue is down about 3 million dollars, and for them, it makes sense to replace as much commercial waste as they can with municipal waste.  They can charge a higher tipping fee. The MRC towns represent about 180,000 tons of trash annually and the Fiberight facility needs about 150,000 tons worth of trash to operate profitably. This means that if Ecomaine succeeds in getting 40,000 tons worth of towns to sign up with them, it may mean the Fiberight facility can't be built. This will reduce the options available to the whole region. By sticking with the MRC, we maintain municipal oversight that protects our interests as they always have and we invest in a solution for sustainable waste to disposal in our entire region. 

FIBERIGHT WILL SEND THE SAME AMOUNT TO THE LANDFILL AS ECOMAINE, WITH MUCH LESS AIR EMISSIONS

Ecomaine often mentions that they reduce the waste they take in by 90%, only landfilling 10% of waste by volume. The key here is that they refer to volume whereas the rest of the solid waste calculations are always done by weight. 10% by volume translates to 20-25% by weight, which is about the same as the Fiberight process. The big difference is that Fiberight will have a fraction of the air emissions that an incinerator has. 

COST OF HAULING EXTRA DISTANCE

The bottom line is that it is going to cost us more to go to Ecomaine. It is considerably farther away, and with the hauling rates we've been quoted, it will be about $80,000 in additional fees annually. The trouble is that gas/diesel prices are quite low right now. These hauling fees will only increase. When oil prices rebound, so will our hauling costs.

EDUCATION PROGRAMS NOT REALLY FREE

One of the things the MSCWC board was impressed with w​ere​ the education programs from ecomaine that we can hopefully use to help educate the community and reduce our waste. I too loved the model that is working well for Portland. However, the education programs rely entirely on us switching to single sort recycling. This may end up making sense for us in the long run, but it is going to be cost us, and it will cost us more with ECOMAINE than with FIBERIGHT. Currently, we actually make money some years on our recycling program, but Ecomaine will charge us $38/ton to process our recycling. That doesn't include the cost of hauling the material which is $32/ton. Current Ecomaine member communities deliver their recyclables to the facility for FREE, but they will charge us the private hauler rate. Essentially, we will be subsidizing the Portland area waste disposal program. We are of course free keep doing what we do with recyclables, but ecomaine's education programs won't be useful to us. 

WE DO NOT NEED ECOMAINE TO DO EDUCATION PROGRAMS

There are education program curriculums widely available and we could implement them for without going through Ecomaine. Here's a link to a proposal from the Maine Resource Recovery Association, an organization that is already doing education programs in Maine that supports the Fiberight proposal. They have worked with us for years helping to market our recyclables. They are the go to resource for recycling in Maine and have programs available to boost participation no matter what direction we decide to go with our recycling (single sort vs staying the way we are).

WE SHOULD BE INVESTING IN A SOLUTION FOR OUR CONSTRUCTION DEBRIS. OUR LANDFILL IS FILLING UP FAST AND IT'S EXPENSIVE

The conversation about where to send our trash centered around all the waste reduction we could implement if Ecomaine comes and trains our communities how to recycle and compost. It's a nice idea but the options that have worked for Portland to reduce waste have been single sort recycling and curbside composting, and those may not be our highest priorities. Composting is great, don't get me wrong, but we have very limited space here at the transfer station and it's hard to imagine a curbside compositing program taking off in our rural areas. People do this at their homes and that makes lots of sense. This is something people are willing to pay for in urban/suburban areas only. Where we should be focusing our energy is on reducing what goes into our own landfill. We should be composting our yard waste, not allowing it to rot in our landfill and produce methane. We should dedicate a space for sorted construction debris so that reusable lumber and other things can be sorted and perhaps even marketed. Our landfill is going to close eventually and we'll have no where for construction debris to go. At the same time, it will continue to incur hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs for pumping leachate and a variety of other things due to the environmental hazards it presents. We should be investing extra money in things like this, not in trucking our household waste extra distance to Portland. 

IN THIS CASE, WE SHOULD TRUST THE EXPERTS AND STICK WITH THE GROUP. 

As a community group that cares about the environment, I hope that we will look beyond our own little bubble and see ourselves as part of a larger state that needs a regional solution for our waste. Sure, we could pay the extra money so that Ecomaine will take our trash and kick out the commercial trash we'll replace to the nearest landfill, but if we all make decisions like this, where does that leave Maine? 

I appreciate you considering these things as you make your recommendation. Here are a few links that may be of interest to you:

Here's an example of an MSW facility in Europe with similar technology:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwALdw7AQs0

Here's a final article from the Maine Resource Recovery Association in case you missed it: http://freepressonline.com/Content/Download-the-current-issue-as-a-pdf/Letters-Opinions/Article/About-the-Proposed-Fiberight-Project-for-Municipal-Solid-Waste-/93/450/44074

South Thomaston voters just decided not to go with their Solid Waste Board's recommendation of Ecomaine. Convincing residents to pay more for something has to come with very clear environmental benefits, in my opinion. This article explains some of their reasons for choosing to stay with the MRC:

https://bangordailynews.com/2016/03/30/news/midcoast/south-thomaston-voters-back-fiberight-for-waste-disposal/?ref=moreInmidcoast

Profit sharing information on MRC:

http://bangordailynews.com/2016/03/25/news/state/panel-tackles-confusion-over-hampden-trash-plant-profit-sharing-deadline/ 

Thanks to all for your time and consideration. 

Don’t burn your trash. We can do better - PenBay Pilot