And so, on April 25, cooler stuffed with Moxie and stereo keyed to Ray LaMontagne, Caron, GrowSmart program director Lisa Fahay (or, as Caron calls her, “Lisa, old buddy”); his legislative liaison Maggie Drummond (“Maggie, old buddy”); the Brookings Institution’s Mark Muro, policy director for the Metropolitan Policy Program; and this reporter piled into a rented van smelling vaguely of someone else’s dog and departed from Presque Isle to snake south through nine stops — in Caribou, Eastport, Dover-Foxcroft, Farmington, Waterville, Camden, Scarborough, Brunswick, and Alfred. These were three days set aside to find unvarnished Maine.
Bitter reality
Somewhere between Eastport and Dover-Foxcroft, Mark Muro had his first taste of classic New England. Bored with a wifi laptop rendered useless by a dead signal, he bent to pressure from Lisa Fahay and tried a Moxie.
“As of this legislative session, that is now the official drink of Maine,” said Maggie Drummond from the front seat.
Muro stared at the dark soda in his glass.
“What’s it taste like?”
“It tastes like root beer before it was sweetened,” Caron answered.
Muro grimaced.
He sipped from the cup and nodded politely. A few minutes later, while Caron sat immersed in a biography of Lincoln, Muro dumped his remaining Moxie out of the van’s back window.
“We’ve got some pickled eggs up here for you later,” shouted Fahay from the driver’s seat.
The classic Maine, which Muro had found himself in a van full of, is what Brookings refers to as our “brand.” For decades, Maine’s brand was defined by its rural lifestyle — Mainers were fishermen, farmers, factory workers, homemakers, and hunters living in small communities on the edge of a sweeping, untamed wilderness. But since the collapse of Maine manufacturing became evident in the 1980s, Maine has been in the throes of what University of Southern Maine professor Richard Barringer refers to as a “time of historic change” in which the state must decide how to both grow economically in a global market and still retain its unique character, which comes from generations of independent-mindedness and contented detachment from the rest of the world. It’s a question that colors every part of Maine policy and it’s the biggest one facing the young generation of Mainers who will inherit this morphing state.
Caron himself is part of that classic Maine. A lifelong Mainer from a working-class Irish family in Waterville, he’s as wary of the Brookings outsiders as he is eager to hear their take on Maine. At various points in the road trip, Caron rolls his eyes when the researchers lament the lack of cell phone coverage in rural Maine and silently bristles when they vocalize a characterization of Maine that he finds offensive. But, as much as he remains defensively local, Caron believes Maine needs their outside expertise to move forward.
According to the Brookings researchers’ preliminary findings — and their experience studying other rural states like Missouri and Pennsylvania — the Maine of the future needs to be one that welcomes an injection of some outside know-how. We will have to get a handle on Maine’s 504 municipal government agencies, whose policies, left unchecked and uncoordinated, perpetuate self-destructive sprawl and costly inefficiencies. We will have to encourage industries that can build an economy that’s a major player in the global market rather than a spectator.
