Seacoast Blog #73

Writing about history is a slog. I find myself thinking of those poor Seacaost sods marching from here to Quebec, only to get trounced prior to the Revolution. At least I have shoes, and a nice gas stove, and snacks. But those militiamen suffered and died together, while we who tell their stories march alone through a boot-sucking marsh of footnotes and facts. Five hundred words a day is my tridging goal, but only after weeks of stationary study and research. Two hundred words is more common. I’ve been stuck for days on the same sentence, sinking almost out of sight below the muck with dwindling hope of rescue. (Continued below)

Rockport bridge has tragic history

And so it was the other day when the start of Chapter 7 in this book about privateering refused to move. I know where it is going. In this chapter the Privateer Lynx travels half a mile from Rockport Marina to the waters of Rockport Harbor in July 2001. Then after a triumphant launch with thousands of cheering onlookers, the schooner makes her maiden voyage to Portsmouth, NH, then heads to Bermuda and the West Coast.

If you stand at 1 Main Street in Rockport you can see the potential drama of this event. The harbor is within view of the boatyard where Lynx was built, but to get there the newly constructed 80-ton schooner (built in the style of an 1812 Baltimore privateer) had to be towed up a steep hill, around a sharp corner, across an old bridge, around and even sharper turn, and down another steep hill to the boat launch ramp. I walked the route a few months ago, and though I’m no engineer, it looked like a dautning feat, and therefore, a great narrative moment for the book.

Tom Bromwell, the man who moved the Lynx, confirmed that when I spoke to him recently by phone. Taylor Allen, owner of Rockport Marine, called Tom back around 1998 when he first got the contract to build Lynx. It was to be the biggest wooden boat he had ever attempted and his travel lift, the machine that lowers boats in and out of the harbor, was too small to accommodate Lynx. Tayolor would have to move the boat along a potentially risky roadway. Tom Bromwell, whose Massachusetts company specializes in moving big boats, came up and took a look. If Taylor Allen could build Lynx, he said, he could move her.

"We have done boats way heavier," Tom Bromwell tolke me. "We have done boats longer. But we usually move boats on rlatively flat ground and down very gradual ramps so there’s nowhere near the force necessary to overcome gravity."

UPDATE:  LYNX BOOK NOW AVAILABLE (signed copies)

Tom eventually used four tractors with a pulling capacity of 200 tons to get the job done, and there were some hairy moments en route. Since then Allen has built a number of replica wooden ships including the Godspeed for Jamestwon and the Spirit of Bermuda. Brownell Systems, Inc. has moved them too. But that first trip was no walk in the park, no matter how cooly the two men talk about it today. It was an adventure.

"That job was not par for the course because of the very extreme uphill and then the very steep downhill and a 90 detree turn to the left," Tom admits. "Those were not typical at all."

My job is to capture that adventure, but to start the chapter, I needed one more nudge. I can’t explain what that nudge is, but the more history books I write, the more I recognize it. There is a moment when the writer is so loaded down with facts that he loses momentum on the forced march toward the final chapter. The writer knows too much to continue.

Sometimes the nudge can be a good opening line, or a fresh twist on a character, or a bit of descriptive detail. Whatever it is, the nuidge must be something wholly new to the author. It can be tiny, weighing no more than an aphid on a leaf, but just enough to create the last molecule of momentum that the writer needs to leap into the battleground of a new chapter.

I had a feeling about the old bridge that runs over Goose River just above Rockport Harbor. It is high above the narrow waterway that leads to the launch site. There is a photograph of Lynx moving over the bridge towed by Bromwell’s tracktors at the halfway point of the journey. The brand new $3 million boat is almost as long as the old bridge that used to accommodate the trolley line into Rockport.

When I stood on that bridge a couple of months ago I had a premonition. I don’t get many. It was a sense of unease. Perhaps after all these years of writing I’ve actually developed a reporter’s nose. It seemed too narrow and too high for the two-way traffic it bears. There is no sidewalk and the cars move too fast as they speed from Main Street to the bridge on Pascal Avenue.

Call it a hunch, but since I was stuck in the mud already, I called Jamie Ritter at the Camden Public Library. Jamie had helped me with a question earlier, and I asked him if he knew any weird tales of the Goose River Bridge. He asked reference librarian Heather Bilodeau.

A history writer is only as good as his sources. If the librarian or archivist is asleep at the switch it can take literally months to get a response. I was working on a project last year in which I begged a Massachusetts libriain on the phone to look for something in his archives. He said I should send him an email via their web site. I did. A week later I got an email saying he had received my email and would look for the items I requested. A month later I got another email saying that, yes indeed, the library did have a few items on the topic in which I was interested. That was it. No list of items. No offer to help. When I called back I was told that, if I wanted to see the items (whatever they were) when I visited the library in person, he would go get them out of the vault. I stopped work on that book and, so far, it hasn’t moved an inch ahead.

So imagine my joy at receiving an email from Heather the following morning. Joy is the wrong word. It was, after all, a tragic acident on Goose River bridge, and a strange one. On Novermber 28,1946, Hubert Craven of Bangor was driving his traactor-trailer over that bridge. Perhaps he fell asleep at the wheel. His rig hit the bridge, accoarding to the local newspaper, sending him and the bridge into the river below. The entire structure was destroyed and Cravem died. Locals rebuilt the bridge in wood, and later replaced that with the steel structure that stands today.

Heather sent along a stunning photo. I hope we can use it in the book. I know it’s not the same bridge and over 60 years ago, but it gets the mind racing. And it was just the nudge I needed to get back on the march.

© 2009 J. Dennis Robinson, All rights reserved. Photo courtesy of the Camden Public Library