Maine Unbowed by Weather, but Rules Take Toll

There are easier places to live. Places where the sea is more forgiving and the winters not so long.

But easy has nothing to do with it. People stay here because they were born here, because they are connected to the land in ways most Americans used to understand but few do now.

They are men and women, rugged as the coastline and just as hard, who have built entire lives from sea and soil, hauling lobster traps, cutting white pines, digging for clams and worms.

Until a few years ago, these things weren’t strictly monitored, but overfishing and clear-cutting have seen to that.

Bad weather, unnavigable seas: These they understand and respect. But environmental laws made by people who can’t tell an ash from a white pine or wouldn’t know a bowline knot if it hit them in the head: These they neither understand nor respect.

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The day her husband nearly drowned on a fishing boat, Tammy Robinson decided to save his life.

“Money talks, but it don’t sing and dance and it’s not worth it,” she says. “I don’t want him out there anymore, and I’m going to do whatever I have to keep him home.”

This year, the 34-year-old mother of two enrolled in a government-funded job-retraining program for self-employed fishermen and their families. It is not easy.

“I haven’t been in a classroom for 18 years,” Robinson says.

She takes math and writing classes in Portland, lugging her young sons to day care three times a week via a 30-minute ferry ride from her home on Great Diamond Island, population 30.

Robinson needs a two-year college degree to get the job of her dreams: a public service position at the YMCA that pays between $18,000 and $20,000 a year.

Her husband, Roger, has been a fisherman all his life. In the last four years, Robinson estimates, nearly 50% of Portland fishermen have gone belly up under new federal and state laws that limit everything from the length of fishing seasons to the size of nets.

The regulations are designed to save valuable species--haddock, flounder, scallops--that by the early 1990s were fished to near-extinction on the Eastern Seaboard.

Roger Robinson wouldn’t have been working in dangerous weather on an unfamiliar boat if it weren’t for the new laws, his wife says. “The competition for a single job is real hard,” she says, watching her 4-year-old son, Parker, play in a Portland schoolyard during her lunch break.

After a storm knocked a hole in the boat, “they were taking on 200 gallons a minute 10 feet below the waterline,” Robinson says. Her husband patched the hole with his clothes and fashioned a pump from a light-bulb casing and a hose.

“There wasn’t even a . . . pipe wrench on that boat,” she says. “He almost lost his life.”

The Robinsons are living one step ahead of the bill collectors. Before the new laws, she says, a ground fisherman could make $60,000 to $100,000 a year.

She won’t say where her family was on that spectrum, or how much their income has dropped. “I don’t want the whole town to know how bad we’re doing,” she explains.

Robinson’s husband bought a lobster boat three years ago. It pays more than ground fishing, but the season lasts only about five months. During the winter, he takes ground-fishing work.

But he will not quit.

“I swear to Christ he’s got saltwater in his veins,” Tammy says.

It is in Parker’s veins too. At 4, he baits and empties his own lobster traps. After lunch, strapped in his car seat, he doesn’t hesitate when asked what he wants to be when he grows up.

“A fisherman,” he replies. “And a lobsterman.”

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The Norton Farm in Falmouth, a 25-minute drive from Portland, was built in 1742. Loring Norton, 78, “is sleeping in the room he was born in,” says his wife, Ruth.

To survive, the farm has been through several incarnations: dairy, poultry and now horses. The Nortons breed and train racehorses. They also keep Percherons--giant draft horses, the size of Clydesdales--to pull wagons for hayrides and weddings and to carry tourists around downtown Portland.

“In Falmouth, there used to be dozens of farms,” says Ruth Norton, 66. “I think there’s maybe five left.”

Why do the Nortons stay? The set of Ruth’s face is gentle, but her eyes say, “You must be thick as a post.”

She smiles. “It’s in your blood,” she says. “I was born on a farm. It’s good, clean, honest work.”

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J. Luther Gray keeps Doc and Pat, his mammoth Percherons, at the Norton Farm. He and Loring have known each other 20 years.

Gray, 61, begins his day before 5 a.m., feeding the horses before he feeds himself.

He calls what he does “weeding the woods.” Working with a chain-saw-toting “cutter,” he removes older trees, giving younger ones more room to grow.

He is the only logger in this community who uses a team of horses to haul felled trees.

Environmentalists and politicians have struggled for years to simultaneously protect Maine forests and the timber industry. Clear-cutting, a practice that levels every tree in a given area, is their biggest worry.

Small landowners prefer Gray’s horses.

“You can be in and out of here quickly,” Gray says, surveying the woods of Norton Farms as a fine, steady rain drenches his hat. “The big equipment ruts the land, just ruins it.”

This is backbreaking work, and Gray is no longer a young man. He does not abide fools and has little patience for city slickers and their laws. His way of life is vanishing, and he knows it.

“I’m damn glad I’m on the downhill side of life instead of the uphill,” he says, as steam rises from the sweating haunches of Doc and Pat. “If I had my way, I’d go clear up to northern Maine, just as far as I could go.”

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Desperation has reduced Adam Johns to digging for worms. An average day brings $20 to $30. On this day, every penny he has adds up to seven bucks.

Johns once earned $500 a day diving for sea urchins. Like the Robinsons, he and his family have been devastated by new fishing laws. But Johns, partly because of his own foolishness, has no way out: He is stone broke.

In 1990, he quit his factory job to earn more money as a fisherman. And for a while he did. Then came the crackdown. Instead of saving money, Johns blew it. And bad weather made this year’s sea urchin season even shorter.

He lives with his girlfriend, Wanda Leavitt, and their two sons, Dillon, 3, and Danny, 14 months, in a run-down trailer on a big plot of mud given to him by his mother.

They wanted to build the American dream, Johns says, but it looks more like a Dorothea Lange photograph of Dust Bowl despair.

“I make a lot of bad decisions,” says Johns, 36, who bought two Camaros, a truck and a snowmobile instead of paying his electricity bill. “I’ve caused a lot of pain in other people’s lives. I’ve been trying to come up with ideas.”

He even went to see the governor. He asked for the urchin season to be extended 15 days to make up for the $8,000 he estimates he lost to bad weather. No luck.

Johns has considered getting out of the fishing business. He has considered leaving Maine, where he was born and reared. But he has no education. He has no money. And he has no immediate prospects besides worm digging and lobster season.

“This is the worst year I’ve ever had,” he says, shaking his head.