Maine Chance

Five years ago, after decades of stunted growth, Maine seemed poised on the edge of the American dream. Oil companies, hunting for ports to accommodate supertankers, were bidding to bring then" business to Maine's deep-water harbors. Land developers were revving up their bulldozers to push exurbia into rural Maine. Scores of urban-weary Americans were bringing skills and capital to Maine as they fled the megalopolis.

But at what cost such sudden prosperity? The question, which began as an ecological whisper, eventually rose to a roar as Maine residents took stock of their land and lifestyle. An oil refinery would bring jobs to poor coastal towns Like Eastport, but a single spill might pollute the water from Canada to Kittery. Land developers could expand the tax base, but the quiet, smalltown shops on Maine's streets might be run out of town by tacky shopping malls.

The issue is not yet resolved, but two recently published books make eloquent pleas for preserving the beauty and pleasures of unspoiled Maine.

With In Maine (Button; $6.95), an anthology of his newspaper columns, John N. Cole, a flinty ex-New Yorker who founded and edits the crusading liberal weekly Maine Times, makes an oblique case for limiting growth. He does so in the form of eloquent descriptions of the state that he clearly loves. There is the January morning when the bay near Cole's house in Brunswick becomes a 30-sq.-mi. ice rink, and he glides across it alone, watching the sun and clouds pass in perfect reflection under his skates. With unabashed enthusiasm, Cole explains his lifetime love affair with Roccus saxatilis (striped bass), that "master of tumbling currents and white-water turbulence." Like a poet, he extolls the virtues of the northwest wind and wonders how city dwellers can live without "knowing which way the wind blows, which way the rain falls, how the sea surges, the land lives and the forests die." There are no environmental or political polemics here, just a vivid and often lyrical journey through one man's Maine.

In Maine Pilgrimage (Little, Brown; $10), Richard Saltonstall Jr. has more ambitious designs. The author, a former TIME correspondent, has summered on the down East island of North Haven for decades and traveled extensively throughout the state in recent years. His advice is that the state must rediscover and build upon traditional trades, crafts and industries--such as boat building--that do not leech the land.

Measured Growth. The Salton stall plan is imaginative, to say the least. It proposes that the dour city of Portland, overlooking Casco Bay, be turned into a radiant East Coast San Francisco by restoring the historic waterfront and attracting new, clean industries, including publishing and tourism. Maine's dying farms, Saltonstall claims, could be revived as the hub of a profitable beef industry. Landowners along the precious coast must selflessly pool their property to prevent convulsive development. Instead of importing oil refineries, the state should develop a vast aquaculture industry along its shores. Tourists could be whisked from town to town on a network of trains, buses and ferries, thus keeping beaches and scenic sites relatively free of cars. Through these actions, the enthusiastic author suggests, Maine could not only save it self from reckless growth but might be come a model of measured development for the other 49 states.

Saltonstall nonetheless leaves some doubt about the practicality of his dreams. Asking citizens in an economic depression to put their hopes in a boat building boom or the chance that an aquaculture industry may some day flourish does not seem an adequate program--or a realistic one.

Maine's problems do indeed have national environmental implications. But, like so many summer visitors with good intentions, Saltonstall essentially praises the land and toys with its future, leaving the natives to struggle through another long winter.

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