Amherst, Massachusetts is a fair way from the sea, but this fall a group of enthusiastic retirees is participating in a seminar on lobsters and lobstering in the State of Maine, led by my husband, Jim, and me. We live in Amherst but summer in Friendship, a serious lobstering harbor, and have for years been surrounded by lobster boats, lobstermen and lobster culture. We belong to the Five College Learning in Retirement program, in which all participants in seminars are expected to make presentations to the rest of the group. We chose Trevor Corson’s The Secret Life of Lobsters as our text, and gave our group a list of possible topics for presentations, ranging from the biology of lobsters, to issues of overfishing/conservation, to the Whole Foods controversy.
Jim and I did much preparatory work before we left Friendship, talking to local lobstermen David Neubig and Arnold Benner, and also his wife, Alice. We contacted Mike Wadsworth at the Friendship Trap Company, a major local employer, Wesley Lash, proprietor of Lash Brothers boatyard, and Philip Bramhall, who runs a wharf. Beth Delano of the Friendship Museum and Celia Briggs of the Friendship Library steered us towards the excellent oral history project on Lobstering, done by sixth-grade teacher Gaylea Hynd and her students, who interviewed town lobstermen from age eighty to eight. Their CD also contains a 10-minute video clip of a lobsterman tending his traps, showing just how many lobsters are returned to the sea, and how few are kept. Jim photographed activity at the local wharves — bait, traps, fueling, unloading, weighing the catch, etc. — and prepared a Power Point presentation for our seminar. We learned more about Friendship than in many a previous summer, and felt enriched by the experience.
We were not alone. Nancy and Jack Frazier, two of our participants, have a place on Dutch Neck in Waldoboro, and Jack became interested in how lobstermen decide who can put traps where, according to unwritten but ironclad rules. Prior to returning to Amherst, Jack contacted Waldoboro lobsterman and neighbor Arthur Creamer and his sons Millard and Harlan. Had it not been for his involvement in our seminar, Jack might not have reached out to get to know the Creamers. Nancy prepared a fabulous visual presentation on “Lobsters in Art and Design,” featuring, among others, Roman mosaics with lobster motifs, a 17th-century Dutch still life showcasing a gleaming red lobster — owned by Amherst College — an outrageous telephone with a lobster receiver by Salvador DalÃ, and works by Waldoboro artist Jean Kigel. Another participant, Sara Wright, visited us in September and was given a tour of the town, including the Friendship Village Grill, which, in our opinion, serves one of the best lobster rolls in Maine. Sara agreed.
Some of our participants are from “really away.” Shlomit Cheyette, a former elementary teacher in Israel, engaged with lobster anatomy, while Syma Meyer (from Poland and France) did a presentation on other types of lobsters, including the blue European clawed lobster, the spiny Caribbean lobster, and a six-inch hairy Pacific version, which has just been discovered.
It has been an exciting semester for us, and we’re not done yet. Many of the members of our seminar now want to visit Maine, and all of us were happy to note that on Halloween night the University of Massachusetts served 9,500 lbs. of lobster to its students. According to the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, this was the largest serving of lobster at one sitting of any college on the East Coast. Not bad for a town this far from the sea!