by Jonathan Reisman

I traveled to Augusta in early February to testify on several climate, energy, and environmental policy bills. The geography of the three-hour drive triggered memories of similar journeys over the past forty years.

Thirty years ago, in the spring of 1995, I took a leave of absence from UMM to work for newly and narrowly elected Independent Governor Angus King. I had advised candidate King to oppose car testing, which was part of how Maine was complying with the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA, led by Maine Senator George Mitchell). In the 1994 gubernatorial campaign, Democrat Joe Brennan, Republican Susan Collins, and Green Jonathan Carter all supported car testing. My reward was a special projects assignment to find a way to make good on that campaign promise without drawing federal penalties.

I’d leave Cooper and the Dennys River watershed every Monday morning in the dark and drive west down the Airline through the East Machias, Machias, Narraguagus, and Union River watersheds to the Hancock County Highlands. The environmental left had just started their Atlantic salmon endangered species listing effort on those watersheds. I advised my new boss to oppose that listing, and he took that advice.

Township 30 is just west of the Machias River. In 1987, a “special” waste landfill proposal there had been noisily defeated by environmental activist Nancy Oden. I had first met Nancy after I was elected a Board member of Eastern Maine Electric Cooperative. She called me up to berate me for supporting the Coop’s Right of Way Management Plan, which included pesticides that she loathed. That might have been the moment I realized that environmental policy involved politics as much if not more than science and economics (the dismal science), and it really didn’t matter whether I liked that or not. The path to running for Congress in 1998 against John Baldacci was getting somewhat beaten.

Angus pushed for $100 million in improvements to Route 9. Passing lanes and other improvements cut travel time and made it safer and less terrifying. In the ’80s, on the narrower and passing-challenged Airline, oncoming, yellow Sunbury Trucks were called “killer bees.” That was probably unfair, but they could be terrifying.

Transitioning from the Airline to the interstate brings bigger rivers/watersheds — the Penobscot and Sebasticook/Kennebec. Newport’s Sebasticook flows into the Kennebec at Winslow. My alma mater Colby is across the river up Mayflower Hill in Waterville, just east of the interstate. Upstream lies the Dead River and Benedict Arnold’s ill-fated invasion of Quebec. Downstream lies Augusta and all the political science, policy analysis, ambition, and mischief a retired Statler and Waldorf intern could wish for.

Exiting the interstate at Western Avenue, the Senator Inn and Spa is immediately on the right. In 1995, I would join the Washington County legislative delegation for a weekly breakfast there. Rep. Theone Look advised the young whippersnapper to stay at the Senator because it’s very close and convenient to the State House and they took good care of you. I have taken her advice ever since.

Past the Senator is the Maine State Armory (I think there are large stores of whoopie pies and Moxie inside), where you take a right onto Capitol Street and proceed to the ugly, squat ramped concrete state parking garage, kitty-corner from the Cross Office Building (think early Politburo), and the State House.

My arrival coincides with a noisy anti-Trump/anti-Elon Musk resistance demonstration between the State House and Cross/Politburo building. I hadn’t seen a “pussy hat” in some time. 

The country remains closely divided. The shock and awe policy strategy and purpose that Trump is following is charging up an optimistic “irrational exuberance” amongst his supporters (I voted for him three times). It is also supercharging an irrational resistance that sees Trump as a Hitlerian existential threat to “Democracy” and their cultural and political hegemony over the deplorables.