It was the spring of 1936, if you can imagine such an ancient date, when we received our inheritance from Grandmother Lizzie Winslow, late of Congress Street in Belfast: five shares of AT&T, market value five bucks per share, annual dividend $1.25.

This bonanza allowed a college sophomore (who knew everything, and in Mark Twain’s phrase, was astonished at how much his parents had learned in a mere two years) to establish a budget for medicinal needs as well as a grain-based diet, as follows:

$0.15 One bottle of aspirin

$1.10 Eleven cans, Ballantine’s Ale

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$1.25

Things have changed. Now we face five Push-Down-and-Turns every morning, and except for one that’s gone generic, any one of the other four could take the above budget into deficit mode faster than Dubya Bush could.

Three or four decades ago, 30,000 gallons of Bunker C was spilled from a tanker in Portland Harbor, coagulated into a single mass as soon as it hit the water, voyaged east, and at the top of the tide went almost entirely into the Friendship Island Lobster pound, in which we had what could immediately be called a passing interest. This local event was the feature of our year (you could still pick up fossil-fuel traces in the pound’s sediments five years later), but it couldn’t hold a candle to the breakup of the ESSO CADIZ on the coast of France and thereafter the wreck of the EXXON VALDEZ (same company, fancier name, same image) coasting billions in Alaska. Things change.

In 1949, there were 51 sardine plants along the Maine coast. And there was a passel of bright young bankers from the First National of Boston who did nothing else but call on the packing plants and help out with the sardiners’ highly seasonal needs for working capital. Now, with faster machinery, bigger vessels, and new markets, there are essentially just two companies left, and they’re capable of doing all the processing for as many seiners willing to chase the herring.

If it’s still permissible to mention the Bible under the First Amendment, we can observe once again that among the disciples were four fishermen and one bureaucrat, and now the ratio has been reversed. The fishcrats in their finite wisdom have decided on a mere 25 days for the shrimp season and then turned the knife in the wound by forbidding the baiting of a shrimp trap until the midnight ushering in the opening day. What the fishcrats may have been telling us is that “Maine” shrimp is really a circumpolar species preferring 41 degrees F or less and that maybe the place to set a gang of shrimp traps is somewhere between Cape Sable and St. John’s in Newfoundland, now that our waters have warmed up. (And by the way, if you push along nine chapters in the same Gospel, you’ll discover that by-catch was a problem in the Sea of Galilee, so now you know how long it takes the crats to come up with a solution, if ever.)

The next big change seems to be the promotion of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and what effects these no-fishing reserves would have on the industry. As usual, the opening guns from the enviro-orgs wish to do the initial planning, implicitly “why should we appoint the foxes to guard the henhouse?” and the return barrage from the fishermen predicts the end of civilization as we know it and the collapse of the whole industry.

Neither will happen. In the first place, unless you’re devoted to that Scanadanavian coin dated before 1000 CE found in L’Anse aux Meadows, the close-lipped Basques were taking cod out of the Gulf of St. Lawrence from many ships decades before Cristoforo Columbo raised a couple of Caribbean sandspits. Columbus started looking for financing in 1474 (using Italian maps from 1421 — the same year Prince Henry the Navigator designed and built the first caravels). In the second place, settling U.S. fishing rights from the 1814 Treaty of Ghent took 95 years — from 1814 to the World Court in 1909. In the third place, Clinton’s executive order on the subject of MPAs was two years ago, and NOAA just got, and has to run through, 3 mil from Congress.

The fact of the matter is that what a fisherman does is fish. It’s been so for centuries, despite countervailing duties, net gauges and lobster gauges, fishing days, quotas and a zillion other regulations. Change keeps coming, and the latest move is always the most frightening, but they all get hashed out over the years. So enjoy the Fishermen’s Forum, right down the strong language in the MPA section. Predictable.

And just as predictable, go back to fishing.

— Ed Myers

Damariscotta