Travel advisory | In Maine's transportation annals, water always trumps roadways
Last week I found myself heading out west to Vermont to entertain a group with my Maine stories. It was one of those corporate events held at a lovely conference center on the banks of the beautiful Connecticut River, just over the New Hampshire line. My trip took me from Portland out Route 302 to Fryeburg, then into New Hampshire and north along that state’s fabled Kancamagus Highway, which runs east to west for 35 miles through the White Mountains. It’s a wide and beautifully maintained road that has some of the most gorgeous scenery in New England and every time I travel it, I say something like, “Why can’t we have roads like this in Maine?”
Now, don’t get bent out of shape and start firing e-mails at me. I know we have roads like the Kancamagus here in Maine. Route 9, “The Airline” between Brewer and Calais, has become a smooth-as-velvet road and parts of Route 26 that run through the mountains of western Maine are also pretty nice. It’s just that I wish we had more of them and that they stretched further and were closer to where I live and drive on a daily basis so I could enjoy them more often. Experts on such things say the reason Maine doesn’t have more beautifully maintained roads like the Kancamagus is because — from the very beginning — we’ve been more interested in building ships and places to dock them.
Years ago most people in Maine avoided travel by road because, well, the roads were awful. If you had somewhere to go and wanted to get there in one piece you’d go by sailboat or coastal steamer. Sailing along Maine’s coast could also get a little rough and bumpy at times but most people agreed it was faster and easier than travel by road.
Maine’s country roads were still in pretty rough shape right up through the first half of the last century. Many Mainers felt that the roads were never going to be any good, so they spent most of their time and money on vessels.
In fact, one of the first big construction projects organized by Europeans in the New World was not to build a scenic highway or even a toll road. The first big building project in the New World was organized to build the “Virginia,” a 30-ton cargo vessel. It was built at the mouth of the mighty Kennebec at Popham Beach more than 400 years ago in 1607. The Virginia was built by the unlucky settlers of the Popham Colony who suffered through one of the worst winters on record. OK, so they probably didn’t have very extensive weather records back in 1607 and there were no smiling, chatty meteorologists to give out the weather stats, but whatever records they had back in 1607 you can rest assured that that winter shattered them all to pieces.
Things were so bad that winter that many of the 120 residents of the ill-fated Popham Colony died before the decision was made to build the ship to transport the colonists the heck out of there.
According to historians, the Virginia made it back to England in good shape. What’s more, it apparently had been put together so well that for another 20 years or more she went back and forth between England and the Virginia colony, carrying all kinds of passengers and cargo.
Historians aren’t sure what the Virginia looked like but they have lots of fun arguing about the question and making what they insist are exact replicas of the famous vessel. Regardless of looks, all agree that the building of the Virginia on the shores of the Kennebec in 1607 marked the beginning of boat building in America.
Four-hundred and three years later we’re still building great vessels there on the Kennebec at BIW and at a lot of other boat yards along our coast.
Now if we could just do something about those less-than-velvety roads. But that’s not likely to happen anytime soon.
Just recently, the Maine Department of Transportation released some figures that strongly suggest Maine roads need a lot of “attention” (translation: money) and the amount of money on hand in the DOT’s coffers isn’t anywhere near enough to produce a pile of “attention” and do the job right. And Maine’s General Fund isn’t full enough to get the job done, either.
I guess we could all go back to travel by water and get from one place to another in coastal packets — like in the old days — but that probably wouldn’t go over too well in places like Aroostook County or our western mountains. People there aren’t exactly nearby coastal wharves. To them, it would be yet another transportation project for whom the bill tolls.
John McDonald, an author, humorist and storyteller who performs throughout New England, can be reached at mainestoryteller@yahoo.com. Read more of John’s columns here.
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