The more they stay the same – or so the saying goes… Had a lot of trouble today with the sewing – lot’s of stitching and unstitching when things wouldn’t line up right so I took it as a sign that it was time to reorganize my closet. The print and book page pieces don’t take well to being run through the sewing machine in the first place and they certainly don’t like being sewn, ripped up with a seem ripper and then run through the whole thing again. Since things weren’t working well (Mercury in retrograde?) I figured I better stop before I wrecked everything.

So another thing that I’ve been wanting to write about are the changes in the landscape that have been taking place in my old neighborhood. I know everyone says that ‘you wouldn’t believe how much the old neighborhood has changed…’ but my old neighborhood has actually undergone geologic change.

My mother’s house is a few blocks up from the Penobscot River just upstream from the old Veazie dam. When I was growing up Graham Station was still in operation on the dam, producing power as part of Bangor Hydro (it was built before WWI and we would constantly get power outages when a power surge would go down the line that Graham Station couldn’t handle). My father worked at Bangor Hydro when I was young and several family members and friends of the family worked at Graham Station. The River was a constant part of life though we were warned to never go in it, it was quite polluted when I was young (there were around 50 paper mills on the river at one point that discharged their waste straight into the river-thank you Senator Muskie for the Clean Water Act). There was apparently however a tradition of swimming in the river on Christmas Day when my grandmother was young (I do wish I had a photo to share…).

Veazie is a river town, a mill town.  It exists where it does because of the Penobscot.  There were 4 dams on the river when my Great Grandfather first moved to town to work at the Morris Canoe Company (he boarded with a local family up the street and took a shine to their daughter Grace).  You could reportedly walk across the river to Eddington on the logs when the drives would come down river.  The town was full of sawmills and ‘entertainment’ venues for the loggermen in those days and the town had quite a reputation.  My grandfather’s woodshop was built around an old relic of those days, a giant saw from one of the old mills that was used to rip logs.  I used to sit on the floor of that woodshop making sail boats from scrap wood while he worked and that saw seemed big enough to feel redwoods.

In July of 2013 the dam was breached as part of the ongoing effort to restore the natural habitat of the Penobscot River. When they removed the dam they actually found another older wooden dam beneath it. The river had been damed for more then 200 years. The Penobscot has now returned to it’s natural tidal state (Veazie is the head of the tide) and there are rapids where the dam used to be.

The first few times I visited my mother’s house after the breach it seemed a bit weird – it took some getting used to low tide in particular, but the fish seem to like it and so do I. The river is much louder than it used to be and it somehow seems happier, one had the sense before that it was aching to burst free.

Here is a link to the Penobscot River Restoration Trust  if you would like to read more about their work on the Veazie Dam removal or find out about how the fisheries and wildlife are recovering.

Change can be good.