The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Men of Maine One bright morning a few weeks ago, I was sitting on a sun-warmed ledge of Smuggler's Cove in Sebasco, Maine. Before me the lobstermen were...
...We sat in his comfortable cottage near the Carrying Place at Westpoint...
...I asked Amos if the people around Sebasco were as well off as their parents...
...When I put my question about the Maine sea-dwellers, Fred fully appreciated the seriousness of the problem and turned it over in his mind before venturing an answer...
...When I was a young man, a captain got his learning the best way he could...
...One thing for sure, though, these people always fend for themselves...
...Which reminds me that sometime ago I wrote a column asserting that the fishermen of Maine are the most independent people in America...
...James Gilman, born in 1872, for 30 years managed the store which catered to the needs of Sebasco's fishermen...
...Sure, these people are just as independent as ever," he said...
...When I was a youngster I went to sea, and I suppose it was a rough sort of life-least I can remember many a good brawl...
...We harvested ice here on our fresh water ponds and sent it as far away as Cuba in big fiveand six-masted schooners...
...So, in the course of my recent visit to the old haunts of Sebasco, I checked up on the soundness of my daring thesis by interviewing three old men who have spent their lives among fishermen and sailors...
...But they're fisherfolk all the same...
...Then he said: "Of course, there is more education around now than there was then...
...I am told, too, that practically all of them have money in the bank...
...They take in more money, but of course everything costs more...
...Before me the lobstermen were slowly gliding back and forth, gracefully manipulating their boats among the floats which marked the distribution of their lobster pots...
...If anything, they are probably more independent, because they get regular pay...
...Although there were countless lobstermen out in the bay, my attention was riveted to the nearest seeker of succulent crustaceans, a man bearing the solid old New England name of Lowell...
...People used to talk a lot about Presidents and Congress...
...You had to depend on the neighbors for entertainment...
...I came upon my second interviewee, Amos Wallace, sitting in the sun on the porch of the grocery store at Westpoint, a fisherman's village near Sebasco...
...Things seem different than they used to be, but they aren't as different as they seem," he told me...
...But before I was through I guess I saw every part of the world...
...Thinking of the lobster dinner ahead of me that evening, it was with something less than detachment that I watched Lowell go about his work: swinging his oars in their elevated locks, stopping by a float and pulling up a trap, taking out the lobsters, rebaiting the trap and, with a great splash, once again committing it to the sea...
...On a busy day, maybe a dozen carriages passed by...
...Nowadays a lot of girls and boys work in the fish-packing plant...
...I reckon they haven't changed all that much...
...But people here ain't a wit less independent...
...So everything is kind of smoothed out...
...The men who live by what they take out of it are as faithful to their profession as other men are to theirs...
...And why not...
...It was thus that his ancestors earned their living, and doubtless his children will carry on the tradition...
...Mail and papers came only three times a week, but our boys sailed all over the world and brought back tales of foreign cities and countries...
...The old man thought very seriously for a moment...
...Finally, he answered: "Well, things are pretty much the same...
...Now they have schools for them to go to and examinations to pass and all the rest of it...
...There wasn't any autos or telephones...
...He sits there every day, and is perfectly willing to talk to anyone who happens to come along...
...They get their living out of the sea, and they won't take anything from anyone...
...It about evens up...
...The sea is about as reliable as any other source of income...
...It's the sea, it just naturally seems to fill people with gumption...
...If you felt like it you could stop any one of them and have a talk...
...I have never come across anyone who has been inclined to argue the point...
...The third Sebasco historian with whom I talked was Fred Hutchins, who is only a year shy of 90...
Vol. 45 • September 1962 • No. 19
