By Sheila Dassatt
Have you ever played dominos? You know, the small black rectangles with dots on them that represent a certain amount of numbers. If you line them up just right, when you push the first one in line, they all start falling like a cascade of dominos falling in unison. It is pretty interesting to see some of the championship challenges where they line up an entire room with this little gems and set them off. If you get halfway through and should happen to touch it just right, they all fall down and you have to start over again. I’d have to say that those challenges must take a lot of precision and patience!
Okay, you’re probably saying once again, where am I going with this? Well, there’s a lot of talk about the fishery diminishing as time goes on, between regulations and lack of being able to find generational help or just plain help itself. This is all true and a happening thing. I am one of those generational people myself and over my lifetime, I have seen the change.
It all blends together if you look at the issues, with it starting like a trickle effect and now it is escalating into a situation that is much bigger. Now I don’t want to appear that I’m picking on any one category of people, we all love Maine…..mostly in the summer, unless you’re a skier. But especially after the Covid virus, it drove a lot of folks to Maine like fleas scooting to a dog’s neck. The real estate market took off and it was a real estate mecca for anyone that had the money to buy cheap, fixer up and sell for three times the money invested. The real estate market has made a mint on these properties on the coast. Now most of these houses are what they call “Air B&B’s……and weekly rentals for around $2,000 a week. This is exactly what is happening. We’re even finding ourselves caught in this situation. We cannot afford the price that has been offered to us. It is sometimes a nowhere situation on the very island or coastal town that you grew up in.
The neighborhood that I lived in as a child has all been “bought up” by folks that love Maine, but only about two months out of the year. Now, let’s mention those young folks that want to follow their heritage. They grow up, work on the boat, they want to marry and have a family of their own some day. (or most do)…..“Let’s look for a place to live that puts me close to the dock.” They are few and far between. So they find themselves only being able to find an affordable home “off the island” unless there is family land and they can have a chunk of that to put a home. With this being said, there is a fair amount of commute just to get to the dock on time. Some of these young folks come all the way from Bangor just to stern on a boat!
So the older generation is going out, but they already have a place to live from establishing their home years ago. I see a lot of the younger ones giving up the battle and not going on the water any longer. Now don’t take me wrong, but there’s only so much landscaping work that can be done for hire after the boat and gear is gone. I see this every day. This is the hard, honest truth as to the choices that there really are if you want to stay in the community that you grew up in. This puts us in the “service category.” Do you understand what I’m saying?
Now I’m going to sound like Tim Sample, the one about the tourist opening the window of the motel to look across and see another tourist looking back at them from the window across the way. This is not what folks come to Maine to see! They want to see the authentic Maine and have an opportunity to share that way of life and get away from the hubbub of the city life that they live during most of the year. As time goes by, they will not see that because all they will see are the fancy houses and folks walking their dogs down Main Street. In all honesty, after Covid, it hasn’t taken very long for this to happen! Let’s not start changing our way of life here, please. We like it the way it is and always was, a fishing community.
This is how my version of the domino effect is happening. There has got to be a happy medium and an opportunity for our next generation to find affordable housing. Being from a fishing community myself and my family, we want to be able to preserve our way of life and not be just a tourist attraction for folks to sit on their porches and watch us like we’re part of the show. Take the time to get to know each other and not have that dividing line that is getting worse as time goes on. Fishermen and their families are the “salt of the earth” and would always help you out if you are in a fickle.
One of the things that hurts the fishermen’s image the most is all of the social media coverage of whales, windmills and the threats to our livelihoods. We have all had a full plate of that lately and we need to stop believing everything that we see and hear from the activists. Let’s try to work together and rebuild our “Working Waterfront” the way that it will help everyone involved. Those “once in a generation storms” were devastating to our waterfronts and it will take time to have it all restored, the commercial and private docks alike. We don’t want that lost in time.
