What is Rural Resilience, and How Do We Strengthen It?

We’re hearing the word “resilience” tossed around a lot these days, especially since the storms of December 2023 - January 2024. These unprecedented storms brought unexpected southeasterly gales, ocean surges, flooding and heavy damages to Maine’s coastal and inland communities from which many are still recovering.

“Resilience” is the ability of individuals and communities to withstand and/or to recover from challenges both expected and unexpected.

Resilience is a kind of combination of toughness and flexibility. Like nylon fabric or line (or Play-Doh!): can we be stretched, return to our original shape, and last a long time?! Like a rubber ball, do we have the ability to “bounce back” after a natural disaster or economic downturn, or to continue to thrive in the face of ongoing economic pressures?

We know Stonington is tough. A community such as ours, the fabric of which is based on an island isolated from mainland resources and on the difficult manual labor of granite quarrying, construction trades, fishing, and shellfish harvesting, one that has survived as long as the nation itself, is resilient by definition.

An important tool for sustaining this resilience is our shared ability to look to the future, envision the challenges that are coming at us, and plan for how we will address these.

Emergency planning for public safety is a great example of building resilience. What is our plan if a storm cuts us off from the mainland not for a few hours, but for a few weeks? You may have a plan for yourself or your family, but what is the plan for the community, and especially for those most vulnerable amongst us?

As demonstrated by the recent Governor’s Commission on Infrastructure Rebuilding and Resilience which I was honored to co-chair, we can plan for the resilience of our essential infrastructure as well. How do we rebuild our working waterfront to withstand sea level rise and southeastern storms? What improvements do we make to expand and/or to protect our drinking water and waste water treatment systems?

The Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest warming bodies of water in the world. This is already causing changes to what we catch and harvest here. How do we as a community, with generations of deeply invested fishing families, plan and  prepare for these changes? How do we hold onto our access to the rich ocean resource? Stonington’s working waterfront, across three harbors, is larger than any other north of Portland. We’ve built and maintained this access through long time policies and continued investments.

What about the two pillars of social resilience: education and housing? Are we actively coming together to identify, FUND, and take action on the changes we need to reverse the demographic trends making Stonington one of the oldest towns in the state of Maine? To make our schools more competitive, and retain and to attract working age families for our schools and businesses? What plans do we need to address the development pressures that have us at a tipping point of being a year-round vs. seasonal community? 

The Town of Stonington has a lot in the works in the struggle to sustain our year-round fishing community. We urge you to join us on August 11 at our Resilience Roundtable to learn and offer thoughts and solutions to strengthen our island’s historic resilience to face new challenges. The future is in your hands. Watch for details.

Contact the Town of Stonington at any time, via email at econdev@stoningtonmaine.org; by stopping by the Town office; or by calling 207-367-2351. 

25 Years Celebrating Community

Opera House Arts' first season's schedule.

by Carol Estey, Judith Jerome, Linda Nelson and Linda Pattie

Twenty-five years ago this July -- a quarter of a century ago! -- a new island nonprofit, Opera House Arts (OHA), held its reopening gala at a restored Stonington Opera House. The nearly 100-year-old theater’s 250 seats were sold out to an audience entertained by CBS daytime soap opera star Ron Raines and Metropolitan Opera diva Lucine Amara among others, and crowned by a bright double rainbow during intermission.

As the founders of that nonprofit, now collectively departed from the organization for 10 years or more, we are awed and grateful at the whole community support that has made these 25 years possible and want to take a moment to remember and cheer on the next 25!

We and the many volunteers and talented artists from the island and around the world who have shared their gifts in community are inspired by and have sought to celebrate the uniqueness, the stories, the people, beauty and talent that characterizes this place.

Graphic designer, artist, actor
and volunteer Bekka Lindstrom
created the original OHA brand.

THANK YOU for the love, passion, dedication, generosity, talent, creativity and hard work so, so many of you have shared – as artists, volunteers, board members, audiences and participants, staff, and new leadership – in support of that historic old building and of OHA’s founding mission: to use the performing arts to foster and promote excellence in ALL the ways we perform our lives: Incite Art, Create Community.

The four of us, along with our community boards and trustees, understood our nonprofit charitable purpose as to benefit, support, and add value to the year-round community.

Looking from the stage as we started to
rebuild the theater.

In 1999 when OHA purchased the Opera House, not only had Russ’s Hill slid through the back sill and wall, its mud covering half of the theater with a happy family of six raccoons claiming residence – you could also see through many of the walls and there was no heating system.

It took five years to make it possible to hold programs and generate economic impact during the 10 months of the year it is most needed. Our community board members asked for and received a predictable schedule of movies to support year-round restaurants and other businesses; as well as community and educational performance programs, from playwriting and readings to movie-making for all ages, throughout the winter.

First year's ballet classes on stage.

Because two of our founders had a background in Performance Studies and all of us were committed to community service, OHA’s mission was based on our shared belief, then and now, that we all perform different roles as part of our daily lives: as parents, teachers, selectmen, friends, athletes, musicians, workers, etc. One way we believed OHA might make a positive difference as well as providing entertainment for the community was to integrate artists who had sought professional training into the island’s daily life, fabric, education and work.

Cue sheet from Dear Fish,
an educational performance
collaboration with Juneau, AK
through the Kennedy Center
National Partners in Education program.

Actors study and practice how to perform their ever-changing roles with excellence. At the heart of OHA’s eight-year arts integrated learning partnership with island schools and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was “The Actor’s Toolbox:” ways to become aware of and to practice how to work effectively with one’s body, voice, and imagination, as well as how to concentrate and cooperate. These are learned skills, and this “toolbox” remains a wonderful classroom and warm up practice.

We’ve found these “performance skills” to be very helpful for us all as we navigate community life, share our stories, and bring our differences together in public – sometimes in celebration, sometimes to solve the big challenges we inevitably face.

Early Wicked Good Film Series:
Carol, Linda, Emmie, Galen, Ani

Some of our fondest memories are of the programs which brought this particular community together on the stage, in the quarry, or in the streets! The very early Wicked Good Student Film Series programs, including students Walker Collin and Travis Fifield and Galen Koch, all now community leaders. The Hot 8 Brass Band and Board Chair Stan Bergen and wife Sue leading a “New Orleans meets Downeast” second-line parade down Main Street to the Fish Pier. Beloved and newly departed friend Rick Weed at “ballet practice,” swinging dancers from his excavator above the Settlement Quarry in Quarryography. School students from Brooklin, Sedgwick, and the island working with composer Maia Whitman Aprahamian to write lyrics for “Burt Dow, Deep Water Man.” Bringing Deer Isle’s last ferryman, Charlie Scott, and community leader Frank McGuire to life in “The Last Ferryman”...and now ongoing creative collaborations between OHA artists and our neighbors at Nervous Nellie’s and more! We feel very blessed to have created such a deep trove of memories and possibilities with so many of you. Thank you.

Amazing local excavator operator
and dearly recently departed friend
Rick Weed brings Cableman alive
in Quarryography.

As our old friend, colleague, and theater warhorse Jean Wilhelm from Eastport would say: Onward!

As we all were then!
Carol Estey, Linda Nelson,
Linda Pattie, Judith Jerome

Teeter Tottering between Beauty and the Storm

Always seek to find the beauty on stormy days...

I grew up as an "American Exceptionalist" -- thinking the U.S. democracy was the best thing since...slice bread? hot tubs? swims in the ocean?! -- to the extent I was an American Studies major in college.

Today I think a lot about our U.S. white culture as a teeter totter that has been slammed to the ground on the side of individualism and is now completely stuck...with our communities dangling mid-air and too many squashed beneath the side on the ground.

It is such a delicate balance, as theorists and theologians far more profound than I, have explored -- between the I and the Thou, the individual and her culture.

The founders sought to balance the rights of the individual with the responsibilities of the citizen in both our Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

The "finger on the scale" that slams the balance down on the side of individualism is that too often we give up citizenship (along with the basic principles of christianity and other religions) for the sake of consumerism.

For the privilege and convenience of getting what we want, whenever we want it.

For pushing ourselves to the front of the bread line even when we are not in need of sustenance.

For always saying "I" comes first and others second.

Our communities are only as strong as we who come together to meet our common needs -- and especially those of the most vulnerable amongst us.

American culture, despite its alleged grounding in christianity, abhors systems thinking. To admit that we have built systems that oppress others (see: slavery; see: sexism) and shape our culture to this day is to break the cult of "American exceptionalism."

If we failed to see this throughout the five assassinations that broke progressive momentum for civil rights and wages for all in the 1960's, then perhaps we will remember that legacy in light of today's political violence.

The politically motivated shooting of public servants -- and the superfluous access to weapons that make it possible -- shows again the U.S. in its most damning light.

We are not exceptional -- especially as long as individual rights are privileged over the common good.

In order to re-balance our teeter totter, all of us that have slid toward the ground side of individual consumerism need to shift our positions.

We'll all need to give something up to achieve a better balance, one that teeters more toward the common than the individual good.

#newblogpost

Pride, Sanctuary, and Why Allies Matter

 

The hand blown rainbow glass gifted
to me by my English teacher upon
my high school graduation.

June Pride. 

This year, we not only remember but activate the true meaning of Pride -- a riotous and righteous fight for our lives as well as a celebration of who we are.

Why does Pride have more relevance and hopefully more impact this year?

Just as in the '60's, when the Stonewall riot launched our marches for equity, and the '80's, when we lived under another repressive Republican regime that attempted to silence us in our fight against a lethal pandemic -- we are fighting for our lives. 

Very simply: fighting for our right to be named, addressed, and respected for who we are, to have sex with whom we wish, and to receive the services and health care to which others have access.

If you already have these rights then this may not resonate with you. You may wonder: what's to fight for? We ask for your empathy, compassion and, most importantly, your solidarity.

I was lucky to receive and feel these actions -- empathy, compassion, solidarity -- from someone as a very young person a very long time ago.

The first adult to whom I came out, in 1976 when I was 15, was my high school English teacher.

She saw my queerness, my loneliness, my distress.

Not because she herself was queer. But because she saw me and my need for support.

There was no one in my hometown whom I knew that could guide me on this path: what would it mean for my future to be queer? to not marry a man? to not have children?

The options to a 15 year-old in 1976 were unimaginable.

The homophobia, particularly in girls sports where we demonstrated our strength and independence, was ferocious.

But like all great teachers: she saw me and went beyond the call of duty, inviting me into her home.

She listened. With curiosity and without judgement.

She provided sanctuary.

A place of refuge and safety. A place I could be who I was without hiding, or fear of reprisals.

I can't make sense of living in a world in which it is illegal to provide sanctuary for those most in need. But here we are, with the current Republican administration punishing "sanctuary" cities for helping legal immigrants.

When I graduated from high school and was approaching the legal drinking age, my teacher gave me the hand-blown rainbow glass pictured above.

This glass is a sign of solidarity: it was the twin to the one she used every evening at her home, which she had opened to me, as she graded papers and watched TV.

I treasure and use this glass and carry it carefully with me to this day.

A reminder of how important solidarity, and sanctuary, are.

We will keep the fight. And hope many of you who do not directly experience the repressions of the current regime will join us.

Mystic Pizza, Sorrow, and Me

The young Julia Roberts as a Portuguese-American
"local" pool shark with her rich, preppy potential
beau in 1988's "Mystic Pizza."

What's a sorrow that's been a teacher to you in your life?

The poet and theologian Padraig O Tuama offered this question up for our Sunday morning reflection in his Poetry Unbound email this morning.

What's yours?

You may be surprised to know that mine tied into thoughts I was already mulling about the 1988 romantic comedy, Mystic Pizza.

Yes, that Mystic Pizza. The one with the young Julia Roberts, an even younger (18-year-old) Matt Damon making his film debut, Annabeth Gish, Lili Taylor, and Vincent D'Onofrio.

Mystic Pizza is set in the town in which I grew up: Mystic, CT, a village that is part of the town of Stonington, where much of the movie was filmed.

The sorrow that has been a teacher to me in my life is the sorrow of feeling I had to leave home and family behind to become myself.

I graduated from Stonington High School in 1979. In those days, Stonington, although midway between New York City and Boston on Long Island Sound, was still a lobster fishing village characterized by a large fishing population of Portuguese immigrants.

Thus the characters, and divides, depicted in Mystic Pizza.

Mystic is a lovely, gentle, salt-marshy, watery world. Now like so many beautiful waterfront places over-populated by people with too much wealth.

In Mystic/Stonington in the 1970's as throughout the U.S., the world was changing. Nixon had resigned; we waited in line on alternate days to buy gas for our giant cars; the last helicopter had left too many stranded on the roof of the embassy in Saigon. In the wake of Martin Luther King's racial justice movement and the anti-war movement, feminism and gay rights were ascendant but far from triumphant.

I was 15, and gay, the year of America's Bicentennial (1976). The world depicted in Mystic Pizza was pretty much my world growing up.

A marina rat, I loved being on or in the salt water. While the film would have you believe lobster fishing boats were leaving from the Mystic River, the reality is that the Portuguese fishing population lived primarily in Pawcatuck, the last town on the CT coast before Rhode Island, and Stonington, and fished out of the Borough, home also to the Holy Ghost Society of 1914. The Feast of the Holy Ghost continues in Stonington every August and in Portuguese communities around the world to this day, following the Blessing of the Fleet in July.

The Portuguese community in Stonington dates back to around 1840. Southeastern CT -- New London, Noank, Mystic, Stonington -- was a whaling coast, a history faithfully preserved by and at the Mystic Seaport, site of my first volunteer work. Whalers from the Azores who had been contracted onto Stonington-based vessels returned with the ships to their home port and began new lives. As is the nature of immigration routes, over the next 100 years thousands of other Azoreans followed. St. Mary's Catholic Church was built in 1851; St. Patrick's in Mystic, our parish, in 1870.

Like the feisty female characters in Mystic Pizza who sling a mean pie and shit-talk the too-many-already tourists, I grew up in an old-world, Catholic, very heterosexual culture where the class divides between the Portuguese fishing community and wealthy summer residents, between the college educated and working class folks like my parents, were glaring and deeply experienced.

There was no question in my queer girl, 1970's disco'ing aspiring feminist mind: I had to get out.

And truthfully my parents supported that as well. They were intent on my going to college: a privilege they had not had. And we had already busted up the family compound in Old Saybrook, where I grew up adjacent to aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandmother, when my mother's sister and family relocated to the suburbs of northern New Jersey.

In Mystic Pizza, Daisy, Julia Roberts character, is on the hunt for a man and/or marriage that will get her out of Mystic. Her younger sister, Kat, has punched her departure ticket and is headed to Yale. The third, Jo Jo, faints at the marriage altar listening to the priest extoll the virtues of a lifetime commitment to her fisherman husband.

Best line of the movie, delivered by Jo from the Mystic drawbridge to boyfriend Bill (D'Onofrio) on his boat which he has re-christened NYMPHO to mock her sexual desire for him: "I don't have to marry an asshole. It's the '80s."

Wild applause from tourists gathered at drawbridge. A win for girls!

Somehow, with little help from my high school graduate parents, I get myself into Bowdoin College in Maine -- until very shortly before my arrival an all-male school. Heaven help the working class lesbian.

What neither my parents nor I (nor the girls in Mystic Pizza, I suspect) knew is that upward mobility, and the education that facilitates it, can be a trap -- creating chasms of experience between parents and children that are very difficult to cross.

I never again really went home. I figured that was true of my high school classmates who went to college, too, until I finally attended a high school reunion (my 25th) and found they had pretty much all moved back.

I never again felt close to my beloved family -- who had adopted me and given me an unbelievably stable childhood -- until it was too late to share the appropriate love and gratitude with my parents.

Mae and Evert, happy together, 
circa 1986 in Mystic, CT.
Family portrait with me and David
in the background by
Kathryn Kirk.

This sorrow of estrangement and loss and homesickness has been a lesson for me regarding difference and love.

Who gives a damn if you speak the same language? read the same books? believe the same things? look the same? vote the same?

Well, too many of us.

What if we could stop trying to hurt and control each other with our different beliefs and actions?

What if our culture weren't so self-righteous, so much about being "right"?

As my grandmother Mary used to say when I had done something particularly heinous to my brother: "The girl is good."

We are all good, even when we hurt each other.

The trick is how to look past the righteousness and the hurt and specific actions to see and to forgive the persons -- oneself and each other.

This is the complex and challenging lesson this particular sorrow, and Mystic Pizza, have taught me.