Portland, Maine

On vacation between political realities

My mother wanted Maine for her birthday. Like every water-loving Cancer I’ve ever known, she fell in love with the “magical” state on a trip a few years ago and booked a stay for the week at a farmhouse with little cell reception and fewer screens. We did the week right with a puffin tour out of Boothbay; hiking Mount Battie for a view of Camden; and lots and lots of lobster. In the evenings, we sat on the back porch surrounded by tall pine trees and watched the sun fade over the silent waters.

That was the whole point. When the smog settles over the Mid-Atlantic in July and refuses to leave, the entire eastern seaboard knows where to go — the least dense state east of the Mississippi, more tree cover than anywhere else in the country, and two nicknames changed depending on who’s asking. The Pine Tree State. Vacationland.

As much as outsiders impose on the state in the summertime, Maine was poised to affect the rest of us for the remainder of the darkened winter. So forgive us for showing up thinking we’re somehow a part of it; sometimes, it’s just impossible to ignore.

On Saturday my mom split off for home and my fiancé Michael and I drove south toward Portland, out of the idyllic isolation and directly into traffic, crowds, and commotion. Damariscotta was the first town to slow us down: brunch spots, gift shops, a bookstore stocked to the brim with non-Stephen King Maine authors. A rack of tchotchkes bearing a modest pine tree on a beige background lined the wall. Simple, recognizable, and free of the stereotypical MAINE plastered across the front.

I picked one up and put it back down. Something about the pine tree was familiar from a different context. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I ought to figure out what rubbed me the wrong way. Where had I seen that symbol before?

Exiting the bookstore, two women were setting up a table with flyers, posters, and a sign-up sheet. In big letters, the main sign read: BIRTH IS BIPARTISAN. I couldn’t help but stop as a Georgian becoming well aware of the issue in my own state. she explained that eleven birthing units had closed in Maine in the past decade, four in just the past year. “Mainers now live an average 45 minutes away from a birthing center,” the woman explained. I asked her why this was happening and what we as tourists could do, if anything.

“They say it’s because there are fewer births, high overhead costs, and it’s hard to recruit workers. But the true culprit is Susan Collins. She claims to have voted against the budget that cut Medicaid, but she voted to advance it in the first place. She bears more responsibility than her talking points claim.”

Filings with the FEC show a $2 million donation to a pro-Collins PAC from billionaire Stephen Schwarzman one day before Collins voted to advance the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB, fucking stupid name) out of committee. The PAC is aptly named Pine Tree Results and has one listed expenditure: oppose Graham Platner.

Two weeks prior, outsider Senate candidate Graham Platner made a speech in front of a closed hospital. With the bravado that built a movement, Platner skewered Collins for “prioritizing health insurance companies, Big Pharma, and private equity firms over Mainers.” It was that charismatic yet rugged tenor that got him plucked out of obscurity by consultants despite his lack of experience organizing, let alone politics. Nevertheless, people were excited to get behind his message of Medicare for All and kicking an entrenched bureaucrat out of office. People were so hopeful, in fact, that they ignored the early warning signs that something might be off.

The woman tabling added, “We want tourists to know. Imagine being on vacation here while you’re pregnant and you went into labor. This is about Maine, sure, but everyone who visits is a part of this, too. What happens in Maine affects everyone, one way or another.” With Republicans in a three-member majority in the Senate, she wasn’t exaggerating – who won the seat in Maine could shift the balance of power for all of us.

I signed their petition, promised to stay informed, and continued out of the town. As we drove the one main street to the other side of Damariscotta, we were met with an on-coming crowd. Dozens were gathered and holding signs in a mass at the end of the bridge. “Renee Good. ICE Bad,” “Justice for Joan Guerrero,” “Sen. Susan funded ICE killers,” “Medicare for All,” and “Still waiting on the Epstein files” for good measure. The focus was on the killing of an innocent man earlier that week, but their grievances ran the gamut. They were pissed off, and they wanted every tourist to know.

A little over a week after Platner’s speech at the hospital, he dropped out of the race, just before I arrived in Maine. That weekend, county elections offices were meeting to elect a replacement before the deadline in a few days. We were vacationing in a suspended reality between new optimism and old disappointments. To pretend nothing was going on would be an ignorance only a tourist could muster.

View from the farmhouse // Muscongus Bay Lobster dinner // signs from Miles Delivers Action Coalition // hiking in Wolf's Neck State Park

We spent the day hiking through state parks before checking into our Airbnb. We booked one outside of Portland because the hotels on the peninsula were wildly overpriced to accommodate wealthy out-of-towners while the weather still allowed. This led us to the bedroom community of Yarmouth 20 minutes north of the city. “If you need to lock the door, the key is on the kitchen table,” our host instructed us. “But I’ve never locked my door here.”

After getting settled, we decided to walk to dinner in town. The temperature had dropped and the mist was settling over the small town. Gothic revival churches and Queen Anne homes stood silently in the early evening, leaving an unsettling feeling as I wondered where all the people were on a Saturday night. As we approached Main Street, we began noticing empty event tents and what felt like the remainders of a county fair. At the epicenter, a smattering of pre-teens and young parents with toddlers making the most of their weekend, we saw the cause: the 61st Annual Yarmouth Clam Festival. How we stumbled on such a popular event escaped me; seeing it so empty confounded me even more. Still, we sat among the locals and tourists alike for dinner, the fog hanging over all of us.

The downfall of Graham Platner started with the Reddit comments a few months into his candidacy. Since-deleted statements responded dismissively to sexual assault in the military and separately chided women to “take some responsibility for themselves” by not drinking excessively to avoid being raped. In his other comments on boards for left-leaning gun owners and socialism painted Platner with a complicated brush. A communist to some, a Nazi to others.

When a consultant approached Platner at his home, he responded: “get the fuck off my property.” That consultant was Daniel Moraff, the Brown and Yale-educated grandson of the Toys-R-Us mogul. Along with the digital strategist Morris Katz, best known for getting New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani elected, the coalition of out-of-state experts seemed to foam at the mouth over Platner’s political opinions and, more importantly, his vibe. They were so stoked to find their white male savior of the Democratic party, their “cross between a rugged JFK and Bernie Sanders,” that they ignored advice from more seasoned staffers to do more than a 3-day virtual-only candidate vetting. They were certain they they knew better.

Then there was the tattoo Platner got while drinking in Croatia in 2007. He claimed he did not know it resembled a totenkopf, though reports claimed he’d known for a while and didn’t bother to cover it up until last fall when it became national news. The totenkopf was used by pirates as a demand to hand over a ship before becoming a symbol of the Prussian army. It was co-opted formally by the Nazis for the Schutzstaffel (SS), the secret police and overseers of concentration camps. A maritime flag commandeered by white supremacists… had I heard that one before?

When the waitress brought us our beers, I noticed she was wearing one of those pine tree hats. “Can I ask, what’s up with this symbol?” I blurted out. “I feel like I see it everywhere here, yet there’s something kind of familiar about it…”

She looked confused for a moment before snapping her fingers, “Oooh, my hat! Yeah, it’s just the old state flag of Maine. It’s been popping up a lot more lately. People just took a liking to it, I guess.” I thanked her but couldn’t help but pull out my phone to dig a little deeper.

Pine trees were long the symbol of colonial New England. The Crown decided pines larger than 12 inches in diameter were preserved for the British Navy. When the county sheriff arrested mill owners for processing large pines, the colonists broke into the inn at the Pine Tree Tavern, found the sheriff, and beat the shit out of him with pine switches. The Pine Tree Riot of 1772 was one of the acts of violent rebellion that would lead to the American Revolution three years later.

A pine tree flag was flown by George Washington’s navy in 1775 with the added text: “AN APPEAL TO HEAVEN,” taken from John Locke’s second Treatise on Government stating: “[When the people] have no appeal on earth, then they have a liberty to appeal to heaven.”

The design, without the Locke quote, made a comeback in 1901 as Maine’s first state flag. It only lasted eight years before being replaced by the current blue flag as homage to their Union veterans. The pine tree flag went out of fashion for over a century, referenced mainly by vexillologists (people who study symbology of flags).

But something happened in 2013. Pentecostal pastor Dutch Sheets received the flag as a gift and with it, he claimed, a prophecy: the flag was meant to be a symbol to restore America to the Christian nation God intended. He gifted one to Sarah Palin in 2015, who wanted it flown over courthouses across America. By 2021, it had spread across the Christian nationalist network, culminating in its very public association with the belief that Trump had a divine right to the presidency.

I read this hunched over my phone in a fog-bound town while my beer went warm, and that’s when I placed it. Paraded around the insurrection on January 6th. Flown proudly outside of Justice Alito’s house. It had been co-opted by the far-right and I wasn’t sure who got to claim it anymore. If an outsider takes your symbol, how do you take it back?

Also in 2013, a Portland-based Maine Flag Company was founded and began using the symbol on merchandise, sans the Locke quote, akin to the first state flag. While the owners of the company seem to have no affiliation with Christian nationalism, Stop the Steal, or anything remotely right-wing, it would be impossible to parse how often people purchased the souvenir for aesthetics or as a political dog whistle. Their website states that “as of February 2021,” (interesting date to anchor to, but whatever) “we have shipped some 4,000 handcrafted original Maine flags… to almost all U.S. states and several countries.” I wondered if the pine tree flag felt different waving in Maine as opposed to, say, Georgia, where its symbolism may now be better known for something else in a state where election denialism is… more complicated.

A 2024 ballot question to replace the current flag was spearheaded by David Martucci, a local vexillologist with a Santa Claus disposition, pushing to get the pine flag back for decades. He just really, really likes it, and as a flag expert, it’s purely for the love of flag. Republican State Rep Shelley Rudnicki called the pine flag white erasure and communist. “The new flag erases two white men, the farmer and the sailor, and if you look at the countries that use the star in the corner, it’s a lot of communist stuff that we don’t want to be associated with. You have to think: ‘Why are they really doing this?’ I don’t want it to look like a communist flag.” Was it too woke, or a racist dog whistle? What’s more important: intent or context?

We wrapped up and walked home in the darkened fog, the eerie glow of an empty neon ferris wheel looming over us. Still, we wanted to support the event; as outsiders, it felt like we owed some patronage. We stopped to buy a t-shirt at a stand from a man in a hat with a bold navy Y embroidered on the front. “Maybe you should get a Y hat instead,” Michael suggested as we walked away.

“A Yale hat?” I asked, assuming the logo.

Michael laughed, “I thought it stood for ‘Yarmouth.’” All in the eye of the beholder, I suppose.

The next morning the veil had lifted. The festival was buzzing with hundreds of attendees lining the street to watch a semi-professional bike race through town. Bluegrass bands played to crowded tents and the air wafted with the smell of fried seafood. T-shirts were flying off the rack. No sign of fog at all.

the 61st Annual Yarmouth Clam Festival night versus day

On our last night of vacation, we Ubered down to Portland for a night of bar-hopping and concert-going. Our driver spoke with a thick New England accent that I love to hear. I asked him an easy question to get him talking more, and ended up following him down a rabbit hole of complaints for the 15 minute ride. I thought “How are you feeling about what’s going on?” was an innocuous question. Such a thing did not exist in Maine the week of Platner’s suspension.

“I went to high school with Susan Collins,” he started, “so I know she’s too old to be doin’ this jahb.” Collins (and our driver) grew up in Caribou in the northernmost county of Aroostook. Her family operated a lumber business established by her great-great-great-grandfather, Samuel W. Collins, in 1844. “She’s always doin’ politics. Campaigns, commissions, hell, she ran student council in high school.”

“So, do you like her?” I asked.

He took a deep sigh. He hadn’t looked back at us in the rearview once, but I could see his pale eyes searching the horizon line for an answer. “She was fine… til she started gettin’ in with Trump.” Though a life-long Republican, Collins had proven herself to be relatively independent, or at least, not a guaranteed vote, like her 2017 vote against repealing the Affordable Care Act. Mainers, like the rest of New England, disapprove of Trump but tolerated Collins for her mixed record. Now, with an endorsement from the president, Collins has no choice but to be associated with the right-wing, Medicaid cuts, and ICE funding.

So there they were: Trump-backed bureaucrat versus Nazi tattoo outsider. From the outside, I could empathize with Mainers looking at the online comments as excusable within context; maybe even the tattoo made sense with some mental gymnastics. He apologized, after all. Don’t our mistakes make us relatable?

Then came the real bombshells: the leaked information from Platner’s wife Amy that he had sent “sexually explicit” messages to women after they were married. Then the revelation from three ex-girlfriends about how volatile and aggressive he’d been, including physically restraining one of them. But it still wasn’t enough to dissuade people – Platner won the Democratic primary.

Finally in Portland, we made an evening of bar-hopping and exploring the peninsula’s Sunday night life. We started at Franciska for dinner before posting up at Cuties for a few rounds of frozen watermelon margaritas. The two bartenders working were more than happy to chat and give us advice on where else we should go that night. Then I asked the same thing I asked every Mainer willing to talk to me: “How are you feeling about what’s going on?”

I left my question intentionally vague for a reason. The first bartender, a man originally from New Jersey, started with the ICE incident. “They’ve been picking up guys I’ve worked with. Good guys, hard-working guys. Do you know how hard it is to get one of these tweakers out here to wash a dish? But they get to roam around, no job, yelling at people, while my buddy Diego was detained for hours.”

“They got Diego?” the female bartender asked, then shook her head. “It’s just. It’s all bad right now. It’s all just so bad.” She was from New York originally, and her main goal was getting Collins out of office. “Now I just… I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

It had only been a few days since the breaking point: Platner was accused of raping his ex-girlfriend after trespassing into her home. Contrary to the sage advice Platner offered on Reddit, her sobriety could not keep her safe from Platner. When asked why she waited so long to say anything, she cited the “huge moral conflict that I had between supporting his politics, but not supporting him as a person.” Platner denies the accusation.

I’m not sure that we can or should separate the politics from the person, in the same way I’m not sure we can separate politics from the place. Not because I want politicians to be people I could have a drink with (an old litmus test I’m baffled that Platner passed, given his track record of drinking). The bigger problem to me is someone’s ability to embody a symbol without the substance. How easy it can be, with the right consulting, to become an aesthetic. A person with a track record is reliable regardless of context; a vibe is easily manipulated to suit the room.

I asked the bartender about her other options being voted on that weekend. She took another heavy sigh, as if still clinging to the dead hope Platner offered. “I guess it’s going to be Troy Jackson, so… I guess they’re saying he’s, like, got the same policies? I just… I don’t feel excited about him.”

Troy Jackson is who Graham Platner was said to be. He didn’t look like an organizer, he was an actual organizer having led a strike of loggers at the Canadian boarder. He had poor policy opinions in the past (like being against gay marriage and abortion) and has since apologized, evolved his opinions, and voted in meaningful ways to backup those changes. But he didn’t have the right branding and that made him less exciting to fight for. The consultants were right about that, at the very least. Everyone was waiting with bated breath for the next phase to see if the momentum could drum back up again. For the time being, it was the weekend.

We caught a show at the Portland House of Music then ended the night at Room for Improvement at the recommendation of our Cuties bartenders. The darkened room was packed with service industry folks getting off a long weekend of catering to tourists. Signs marked ICE OUT blocked the doorway. A banner reading “Y’all are welcome but you gotta act right” was displayed prominently behind the bar and I giggled at the imported southernism. It was a reminder that my vote in Georgia mattered as much to the Mainers as theirs did to me.

The 2024 ballot question to reinstate the pine tree flag failed. Voters decided that it was a waste of resources and they liked their Union flag just fine, even though the pine tree flag is still more popular and recognizable across the state. You can get a symbol back, but you can’t get back is the part where it spoke for you.

cocktails at Cuties // late night at Room for Improvement // poutine at Duck Fat // view from the East End

On our last morning, we ate poutine at Duck Fat to soak up the alcohol from the night before, then replenished it slightly at the East Ender later that day. But most of our time was spent on the beach looking out at the bay, reading Stephen King’s writing memoir, and enjoying the ocean breeze with locals and tourists alike. I couldn’t tell who was there all year long or who was just passing through.

I decided to buy a pine tree gift after all as a mug, which I knew I would use at home more than in public. For a hat, I bought one from Cuties instead, as an outsider who could wholeheartedly endorse the choice, no matter what context it’s taken in. I let the Mainers keep the pine trees for themselves.