Chapter Next

Summer in Maine.

I've been in Portland for almost a month now, and I suppose the time has come to start writing things down. I happen to have a free evening, so here are retroactive blog posts.

June 1

I leave reasonably early (7:00am) in the company of Will and Charlie driving from Ohio to Massachusetts. Will decides to stay up all night in order not to be tired while driving. He takes first shift, and I stay awake and make conversation. Will regards the GPS estimated time of arrival as a personal challenge. Our stops are infrequent and brief. Charlie takes second shift, and I drive cleanup. We stay the night at Charlie's family's house in Andover, MA. His mom cooks steak and refuses to let us help clean up, so we play with the dog.

June 2

I eat my first freshly baked bagel and then get to the train station to take the commuter rail to Boston (you must go South to get North around here). I have come over encumbered with instruments, so I leave the guitar in Andover for the time being. From North station, I take the T to South Station and just make it in time to board my bus to Portland. I finish my book en route. It's a long ride. Kris and Jim, my new landlords, pick me up from the bus port in their Prius. We drop off my things, and then Jim gives me a driving tour of Portland with a stop off at Hannaford to lay in supplies. I forgot my list and manage to not buy most of the basic essentials I will need. The Millards seem like nice folks. Jim teaches English at an independent school, and Kris does freelance writing. One of their daughters is in Italy, but will come back soon, and the other is in high school at the school Jim teaches at. The house is on the campus of the school. I will stay in the old servants' quarters. There are two closets and a separate bathroom. Jessie drives down from Brunswick, where she is working for the week, and we see each other for the first time in three months. It's raining, but that doesn't matter.

June 3

I go on a downtown walk with Jessie. It's pouring, and we get soaked through. We stop at a yuppie soup place and get clam chowder. I go home and get a hot shower. The shower is nice with a reliable, steady temperature. Sometimes it shrieks like a boatswain's whistle for no apparent reason though. Jessie takes me to Goodwill, and I buy a reading lamp, a pair of shorts, and a bucket.

June 4

I wake up early and walk downtown. The Forest Foundation has hired a van and driver to transport the Portland interns to MA. I meet up with the other three Portland interns and with two staff from the McKeen Center for the Common Good. We meet with all of the Forest Foundation interns (there are 27 in total) in a community center in Lawrence, MA. There are many introductions, getting to know you activities, speeches about philanthropy, and we are introduced to a grant writing project that we will work on over the summer (this came as a surprise to me). I meet David, the Forest Foundation director, in person at last. He seems competent, and very committed to his work at the Foundation. After the meeting, I go to the bus station with Nural, another intern, and make the now familiar way back to Boston to get on another bus headed toward Hanover, NH for the GIS and agent based modeling working group. I arrive late at night, with an address for the hotel and the name of the person I will be rooming with: Peter. I meet him in the elevator on the way up to the room. He's a cheerful, chatty fellow, with a big beard and a ready laugh. He fills me in on what has happened so far in the working group and who are the people I should know. We talk economics late into the night.

June 5

I get up early. Peter introduces me to Jim and Tim from the University of Maine and Ted Aimes, all fishery people. We eat breakfast with them, and I remeet Sigrid, a French post-doc at GMRI who I briefly met in March. The working group sessions are long and chock full of information. They talk about a lot of models in a lot of fisheries. If I had not just finished a GIS class and talked at length with Peter about agent based models, I would be lost. I learn about Tuna migration patterns and Floating Aggregator Devices and many other things. After the sessions, I meet up with my UWC roommate, Carlo on the green. There is a crowd gathered around a bunch of sun telescopes to watch the transit of Venus. There is a carnival atmosphere. We join them and watch the little dark circle move across the big light circle. I see Peter Johnson, an old teammate from SERF. Dartmouth sets a good table for dinner, and I chat with Sigrid and Tim about the difficulties of working in a second language.

June 6

Both days of the working group start with presentations with lots of information and then digress to fairly tangential presentations. The person who organized the thing seems not to have read the paper she is talking about. I feel uncomfortable when she misinterprets some graphs. I don't know if I should point it out (since I have so little knowledge of the subject area); luckily, someone else does. After lunch we visit the greenhouse on the roof, which houses a fantastic collection of exotic plants. I go back later and take pictures. I drive back to Portland with Jenny (my boss), Peter, and Sigrid. It's a pleasant drive, and I enjoy their company. Too bad Sigrid will be going back to France soon, and Peter neither lives nor works in Portland.

June 7

I make it to the lab for the first time, on my fourth official day of work. The other interns have had an orientation and are already at work in their respective labs. I get all my paperwork taken care of and get my workspace set up. I'm in the closet of the benthic lab, mostly because there's a spare desk there, though I will be working topic related to benthic critters. My first task is reading through a bunch of background information. I know nothing about lobsters or groundfish at this point, but that is about to change. I'm going to be working on two projects with Jenny this summer. The first is a groundfish sector viability project. The groundfish sectors are non-profit organizations that serve to self-regulate fishermen who target groundfish. Groundfish are bottom dwelling species like Cod, Redfish, and Flounder. This fishery is managed under the catch-share system, where a Total Allowable Catch (TAC) is set for each fish stock, and each vessel is assigned an Annual Catch Entitlement (ACE), which is how much they can fish. The fishermen can choose to join one of the 17 sectors to manage their ACE or they can operate out of the common pool, though few really active fishermen choose the latter option. The problem that we will be dealing with is that until now, funding for the sectors has been provided by the federal government, but that funding will end in 2013. Then the sectors will have to find a way to cover their costs of operation as well as finance the mandatory observation program that ensures compliance with catch-share regulations. Our task is to find alternative sources of funding and suggest business strategies that will keep the sectors viable.

My second project is an assessment of the lobster industry to see if there are opportunities for increased profits and sustainability by accessing more of the international market. GMRI is also submitting a bid for a third party assessment of the limited entry system in the lobster industry, so I will probably work on that too, if our bid is selected.

June 8

I manage to take care of that last of my paperwork concerns, and start working on the import/export database for lobsters. Jenny is trying to get an idea of the market structure, so I am tasked with generating a series of figures identifying who is sending lobster where, for what purpose, and at what price. I try doing it with SAS, a statistical software package that I am trying to learn, and it does not come out exactly how I want it. The rest of the afternoon is spent fighting with Excel instead. There are a number of problems and intricacies to the dataset. It's tricky, but it's exactly the sort of thing that I signed up for.

That's all I feel I can write for now. I'll keep going at a later date (perhaps with pictures and/or something more exciting to tell). Hopefully I can catch up to the present in good order.

Future topics will include:

Give and Go rummage sale.

The Old Port Festival.

A Grant Writing Workshop and project.

A trip to the Library.

The District 118 election campaign.

Lots of data processing.

Other interns at GMRI.

A backpacking trip to Mahoosic Notch and Old Speck.

Teleconferences.

A trip to New York City.

and many more.