For centuries the Scarborough marsh, like many across the country was
seen as something to overcome. To serve their purposes people built
dams and levies, filled it in and dissected it with causeways – all of
which resulted in the slow-motion asphyxiation of the watershed. It has
only been in the last several decades people have come to recognize the
utility of marshes to the health of an ecosystem and that utility is
directly tied to a marsh’s ability to respire – breathing in during
high tides and breathing out when the moon pulls the ocean in the
opposite direction, all the while exchanging nutrients and oxygen,
sequestering toxins and carbon. The marsh has begun to recover as those
structures have been dismantled – or allowed to fall apart.

Life in Maine is a bit like the marsh, except the barriers to exchange are cultural and psychological rather than physical.

In a September 2004 “advice column” for the Sentry’s sister paper, the
Biddeford Saco Old Orchard Beach Courier, I wrote that Mainers’ driving
skills “stink” and that we generally do things better in Jersey.

That column would serve as a template for Jersey Tawk, a forum for me
from time to time to vent against the peculiar provincialism and
entrenched insularity with which many Mainers regard themselves and
this state. At the time of that piece, I had lived in Maine for three
years and was constantly shocked by the sheer number of people I
encountered who never felt the need to travel beyond the state’s
borders and the hostility toward anyone or anything originating
somewhere else. In my adopted hometown of Portland, I often found
myself arguing with people (sometimes in dark bars in the middle of the
day) who believed Maine was being overrun by Somali and other east
African immigrants who were stealing “their” jobs and even “their”
government handouts. Such xenophobic ranting may get some traction in
San Diego, but Maine?

My purpose with Jersey Tawk is to get under the skin of such people by
boasting about some place as reviled as New Jersey. But far from a
simple desire to annoy people with my version of hometown pride, I
truly believe the myth of “the way life should be” is damaging the
reality of the way life is or could be.

But aside from this gut feeling, I’ve always had difficulty quantifying
or qualifying just how damaging Maine’s rejectionist isolationism is to
the state’s cultural and economic health.

Last week, I opened a copy of the Portland Forecaster and to my
surprise found my own company, Mainely Media LLC, mentioned, if
obliquely, in a rather long article about our corporate owner’s attempt
to get publicly supported financing for a new acquisition. The article
mentions near the top that the pursuit of the financing is “not
unusual” and mentions further down that the Forecaster’s owners also
have availed themselves of the financing. Nowhere did the article make
clear how the story was relevant to readers in Portland and nowhere in
the article did it mention that the Forecaster’s Southern edition
competes directly with two of the “several weekly publications” in
Southern Maine that comprise Mainely Media, LLC.

What is mentioned on several occasions in the article is that Sample
News Group (which owns Mainely Media, LLC), its principals and several
of its employees are from away.

In what could be spun as a good news for business in Maine story
(“Company continues to see value investing in Maine”) instead paints a
picture of an out-of-state company possibly abusing a subsidy to take
over Maine a family-owned business and fire its employees. While it
offers no direct evidence to counter the argument that the public
financing will help the company preserve Maine jobs, the article does
cite past incidences when the people (including the Forecaster’s
current editor) left Sample newspapers’ employ either by choice or
force.

Never mind the industry is currently undergoing historic changes. Never
mind the fact that a number of former Sample-owned Journal Tribune
employees currently work at Sample-owned Mainely Media, LLC. Never mind
that Chris Miles, the “Pennsylvania-based” Sample News principal cited
in the story actually lives and pays taxes in Maine. The story’s
subtext is: These people are not from here and they are not trustworthy.

While all this may seem a bit “inside baseball” – an esoteric example
of my larger point about Maine’s attitude toward outsiders; it is but
one note in the near-constant drumbeat heard by all of us “from away”
who come here and contribute to the common good and are resented for it.

Those who wish to inhabit the mythological Maine that is home to the
industrious, self-reliant and woods-wise Yankee, suspicious of
outsiders seeking to install foreign ideas also chooses the real Maine
in which the economic conditions foster a culture of dependency,
obesity and ignorance. Those who ascribe too literally to the notion
that Mainers have figured out the magical formula for living “life as
it should be” fail to see the irony in the fact that their neighbors
depend on charity to survive the winter.

I love Maine. I really do. Otherwise I wouldn’t still be here. But that doesn’t mean I think it’s perfect.