The Lobster Coast, Colin Woodard

The Upstairs Girl's book posts will be taking on a new look, courtesy of the FTC, which fucking hates book bloggers. Herewith:

Book Source: purchased used at Raven Used Books, Harvard Sq.

Personal or Professional Connection to Author or Publisher: He grew up in Maine; I used to go to the beach there.

Economic Connection to Author or Publisher: none whatsoever.

Woodard's history of the Maine coast is interesting, if not especially well-written. It rambles a lot, careening between oceanography, marine biology, North American history, sociology, fisheries management, local, state, regional, national, and international politics, property rights, Hobbes, economics, urban planning, and anecdote. He's on an island! He's on a lobsterboat! He's scuba diving and picking up juvenile lobsters! He's every damn where! He knows a lobsterwoman who was once on a reality show!

If you can get past the ADD nature of the narrative, though, there's a lot of interesting stuff in here. I'm not sure how widely-known it is that Maine didn't become a state until 1820, when it seceded from Massachusetts. It's a fact I always forget until I'm doing research and come up with an Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court case from Kennebec County, and I'm like, "But there's no Kennebec County in... oh, right. The District of Maine." The history of the settlement and governance of Maine is pretty bleak and brutal - it was badly ruled by Englishmen and badly ruled by new Americans, all of whom had upsetting ideas about class and wealth and governance and Native American tribes and Irish people. Woodard also gets pretty deep into the appalling conflicts between European settlers and Native Americans in a way I haven't been exposed to before. It's straight-up awful.

A significant portion of the focus of the book is on the fact (or perception, but it seems pretty solidly-grounded) that the traditional Maine ways of life are being destroyed from the outside, which has basically been true for Maine's entire history, but is becoming more and more true with increasing rapidity as Maine's local economy comes more into line with the national economy. It's not a screed against in-migration, exactly, but Woodard's clear point is that real Mainers DO NOT LIKE YOU, and that they resent outsiders moving in and outvoting them at town meeting, complaining about the noise of harbors, and remaking Maine in their own image.

I don't doubt that it's a wrenching change - the book is full of stories of people who have been priced out of places where their families have lived for generations; people forced to move because outsiders have bought up property, caused assessed property values to skyrocket, and caused a concomitant increase in property taxes that ordinary working people, like fishermen, can't afford. Young people wind up moving away from their hometowns on the coast just so they can afford a house. None of this is A Good Thing.

I suspect Woodard's intended audience is really Mainers, and that he's not really intending to shame people like me who've always secretly dreamed of being wealthy enough to retire to some quiet place on the Maine shore where we could listen to the gulls and the bell buoys and the foghorns and the lobster boats, people who have fond memories of summers up there back before lighthouse automation and cell phones. But that's the effect, for me, anyway.