LUBEC, Maine — The wall of her grandfather’s boathouse told the story. “On the inside of the big doors at the front of the boathouse, he had written every name of every person he knew that had been lost at sea,” Julie Keene recalled recently.
When asked how many names were on that list, Keene,52, could only close her eyes and say, “Too many. Too many.”
Keene is a periwinkle harvester who grew up in Lubec, one of generations of Keenes who manned lighthouses, built boats and fished. She spent a fair amount of time in her grandfather’s boathouse up the hill from the town’s wharf where he built the boats that would harvest the fish, the lobsters, the scallops and sea urchins that defined the town’s working waterfront.
But her grandfather’s list wasn’t just names to Keene.
She recalled as a young girl hearing screams of help from men tossed from their skiffs into freezing water in Johnson’s Bay one afternoon. Then came the silence after their drowning, and after that, the weeping of townspeople began.