The past never seems to give up on the state of Maine. Or perhaps it is the other way around. The present, at any rate, remains at best an intruder there, particularly in the heavily wooded coastal areas, which have adjusted to the automobile but not to the six-lane highway. In Maine the sturdy frame houses off narrow winding roads plainly belong to the century past. The people grow their own vegetables, chop their own firewood, bottle their own pickles and paddle their own canoes.
Where better than Maine, then, for a man to launch a dream—and a wind-driven cargo schooner? If fuel costs are to force America to retreat from the technological revolution wrought by the internal combustion engine, the first step backward is shortest, and easiest, and most welcome where there has never really been a wholehearted step forward. So it was that on a bright, late-summer day, farmers, fishermen and their families—6,000 of them in all—flocked to the ramshackle Wallace Shipyards in Thomaston (pop. 2,500) to cheer "that Ackerman boy" as his new two-masted, gaff-rigged schooner slid down the ways and eased majestically into the clean waters of the St. George River, exactly as hundreds of schooners used to do before steamboats, trucks and trains put most of them out of business more than half a century ago.
The launching of the schooner John F. Leavitt was not a sentimental return to the past. It was an experiment to see if perchance the past has a future—and will work. In a sense "that Ackerman boy," who turns out to be Edward Arthur ("Ned") Ackerman, a bearded, moderately grouchy 36, is simply doing what most pragmatic Maine-landers are also doing these days: turning away from expensive fossil fuels as fast as they can. Wood is already stacked high against nearly every house, ready to be fed to wood-burning stoves and fireplaces this winter, when the temperature, as it always does, will drop to 20° below and the cost of heating oil will rise to 90¢ per gal., about twice as much as last year.
For three years Ackerman has worked in the Wallace Shipyards, helping build his 97-ft.-long schooner. Her hold can accommodate 150 tons of freight and haul it cheaply and cleanly along the New England coast, or south to Haiti, into the Caribbean, and back. As recently as the early 1900s, schooners carried most of New England's southbound ice, fish, lumber and granite, returning with molasses and coal. But not for 40 years has such a commercial vessel been built, and Ackerman intends to turn a profit with this one. "It better," he proclaims, "and it will." Like his vessel, Ackerman is a throwback. A fiercely independent Yankee out of Newmarket, N.H., with skilled hands and shoulders like a fullback's, he doesn't give a damn for anyone who doesn't give a damn for him.