Lucky in northern Maine

    Gulf Oil Day 71: today, June 30th, 2010 is Gulf of Mexico Oil Day 71 and August is forever away. Can you even imagine the small business people all along the Gulf Coast? I can’t, it seems unfathomable. Think of all the entrepreneurs: sinking their money (who knew so literally) into businesses dependant on the tourist trade, or just the Gulf itself to make their loan payments back to the bank. Endless misery it seems to me: if it’s not a natural disaster, it’s a man-made one.     Watching the devastation on TV seems like a hard way to determine we’re lucky. We’re lucky to be so far north there’s nothing much else going on but snow, and some years not even enough of that. Especially as we look out over the downtown at all the empty buildings, and think of all the work not available in the area. But lucky we ought to consider ourselves just the same: it certainly could be worse.
    Have you heard the business people along the Gulf Coast who were talking about the moratorium on oil drilling being seen by many of them as some type of double punishment to a region which is already devastated? Or did you hear about the business in Auburn (Packgen) which just sold something like 25 miles of boom which they’d manufactured on purpose, hoping to sell it to Gulf contractors? Odd really: a win for our businesses in southern Maine, at the loss of so much in the Gulf.
    Bringing me to turtles and dolphins. Is there money to be made in saving the animals? Surely there must be. Marine biology and research is tremendously expensive stuff. Large economic engines. Again, all a hard way to go, looking at the glass half full of tar balls seems bleak.
    I’m not feeling badly for the snakes or alligators: they always seemed like creepy dangerous things which ought to be only good for shoes and bags. I know that’s evil, but I have a hard time to think of them as necessary creatures in our cycle of life (I imagine PETA would revoke my membership if they knew). But the birds and fish and turtles: well even if they don’t have fur, I can’t help but feel a calling to want to go help de-grease and de-bog them. All this being said, it sounds as if the surface stuff is just the proverbial tip of the ice burg, since the devastation is so much more pervasive than just those globs we can see the reporters standing in, or glop-ing up off the beaches.
    So, I’m back to thinking we’re lucky. Snow, snow and then some more snow, and every spring our fair share of flies. No floods really to speak of, no mud slides, or snakes or hurricanes or twisters. No humidity really, and the bugs we do have are all so much smaller than the ones in the warmer climates. Unbelievable really.
    I wish we could help them in some substantive ways. I keep thinking we should all be shaving our heads, our dogs and our cats and sending hair. Maybe send some hair from those hairy cows at Highmoor even. I’m being flip, and I don’t mean to be, because it’s such sad and serious stuff.
    So we’re lucky, I have steadily been reminding myself, and I’m going to try to keep chanting it as we work into Independence Day weekend. We live in a country where anything is possible, and we live in The County, where nothing much ugly is going to happen to us as a whole.
    Happy July Fourth — see you in Limestone this weekend!
    Wendy Landes, MPA, is the executive director of the Caribou Chamber of Commerce & Industry. She can be reached in person at 24 Sweden Street, Suite 101; by telephone at 498-6156 or via e-mail at wlandes@cariboumaine.net.