Unknown: [00:00:02] – make sure. Can I just get each of you to say hello?

 

Millie Cowart: [00:00:04] Hello.

 

Birgit Frind: [00:00:05] Hello. Hello.

 

Unknown: [00:00:06] Howdy.

 

BF: [00:00:07] Testing.

 

Lucy Clews: [00:00:09] Hello there.

 

BF: [00:00:09] This is Birgit.

 

MC: [00:00:10] Are we all set?

 

Unknown: [00:00:11] And we’re rolling.

 

BF: [00:00:12] Levels look good?

 

Unknown: [00:00:13] So, you guys can get into it, and we’ll dial in these levels as we go.

 

MC: [00:00:17] All right. I’ll start. I’m Millie. I’m so excited to be interviewing you.

 

BF: [00:00:21] Hi, Millie.

 

LC: [00:00:22] I’m Lucy. I’m very excited to be here.

 

BF: [00:00:24] Hi, Lucy. I’m Birgit Frind. I’m happy to be here as well. I’m from Blue Hill and East Blue Hill.

 

MC: [00:00:33] Lovely. Okay. First question. So, why did you dedicate your life to the mountain?

 

BF: [00:00:39] [laughter] Well, it’s been not my entire life, but a large part of it. Good question. When I first got here in ‘96, I had two dogs, which then quickly became three because one of the neighbors couldn’t find a home for the dog, and she was kind of crazy. Anyway, I thought I would try to find her a home. Anyhow, I was living with three dogs, and I was working full-time. I realized my dogs needed an hour walk every morning to even minimally behave in the neighborhood and not just go running all over the place and not be really upset with me. Even one dog had a way of tearing up the furniture if she was feeling a bit neglected. So, I would lose a foam pad every few weeks. That was my little dog (Lindsey?), the troublemaker who became a sweetheart. I found that if I went for a walk first thing before work, which when I was working as a carpenter, was about six in the morning, it was good for the dogs. It was good for my day. It was good for the house. It was good for the furniture. Then I realized after quite a few years, it was really, really good for me. It became a spiritual ritual where before, I went out and did work for other people and gave my time, energy, and intelligence and caring away to care for other people, I first just spent an hour caring for myself and my dogs.

 

MC: [00:02:12] Why did you bring a camera up to the mountain every day? What were you trying to convey to the public?

 

BF: [00:02:18] Interesting. I didn’t bring a camera up the mountain in the beginning. It was just me and the dogs. I didn’t really have a small camera. At some point, I think it was just that every day I would see something so beautiful that I wanted to record it for myself, to print it out, to remember it, and then maybe to do enlargements or drawings or paintings from. But just the amazement, and even walking up every day and now having – for almost twenty-eight years, whenever I’m in Maine, I walk up every morning. There’s never a morning where I don’t see something new that makes me go, “Oh, I’ve got to take a picture of that. That’s amazing.” That’s probably just the beauty and the amazement of this one little place that just never stops being amazing.

 

MC: [00:03:20] Did you walk up the mountain this morning?

 

BF: [00:03:22] Not yet. I’m living off-grid in a very, very cold place right now. So, I was in bed with the generator, keeping a little travel trailer warm. But I’m on my way after this.

 

MC: [00:03:34] All right. So, in your bio, you talked about the ospreys. Why were you so invested in the lives of the ospreys on Blue Hill Mountain?

 

BF: [00:03:44] Well, I wasn’t even really aware much of the ospreys up until I believe it was 2022. They were just one of the many birds that would fly along, you know, the warm updrafts – when there were warm updrafts, there were the eagles or the vultures, the bald eagles and the big ravens and crows, and the ospreys were some of them. There were some other hawks, some faster hawks. But when AT&T put its most recent really big array on top of the tower, which I believe was 2021, in spring of 2022, the ospreys saw that and said, “Aha, nesting site.” The way osprey determine whether a place is a good nesting site is they fly above it with a stick in their feet, and they drop it, and they just keep doing that for a while, and if they get a few sticks to not fall off, they keep adding and adding and adding, and then they weave the sticks into each other. I have pictures of osprey flying with branches with lots of needles where the whole branch is so heavy the osprey can just barely manage to fly, and then they stick them in there. I have a picture of this really amazing osprey nest they built that year. But what I had found out from years of working on building the service trail – and I really want to tell you that story of how that started, hopefully, if we have a chance for that today. In walking up the mountain every morning, I would meet the service techs. I’d meet the guys on their ATVs. I’d say, “Hi,” and I’d ask them about the machine they were on and if they could please ask their supervisors to give them machines that were not sport-geared, but maybe utility-geared so they wouldn’t tear up the trail so much. Often, they would see me there working on the trail in the previous years and go, “Oh, this is weird. What are you doing with all those rocks and those buckets?” So, I got to know them. Then, we started to have cell phones. They were in my cell phone contacts. Then, when something would be going on, they would get there. “What was the combination for the gate again?” It became mutual help, the techs and me; we were friendly with each other. I heard from them about the osprey. They’re like, “Oh, gosh, when osprey end up nesting on towers, it’s just a matter of time before they get electrocuted, the adults or one of the young ones does, or it causes a fire up there or causes equipment to malfunction, and we have to go up there. If the fledglings are still in the nest or if the eggs are still in the nest, we call the bird biologist and USDA [United States Department of Agriculture], and he comes; he just takes them away, and that family is not a family anymore. Supposedly, they bring the birds to a rescue place, but they never see their parents again. They don’t really learn how to fly. It’s pretty bad. I have a picture from 2023, one of the teenage fledglings that I watched – every morning, I’d see them. After the parents were sitting there incubating the eggs for about a month, you’d see the babies making noise, and the parents feeding them and feeding them and feeding them and feeding them and fish, fish, fish. Then, the fledglings start to learn how to fly. That one year, there was one fledgling that was somewhat bigger than the others who had started learning how to fly first. It would stand there on the edge, and it’d go cheep, cheep, cheep, acting like a teenager, just really loud and excited. Then it would jump off, and it would be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, flying in circles, and back in the tower. Then, cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep. It was just amazing to watch this bird learn how to fly and then start to be able to actually control its wings and glide and be graceful. Meanwhile, the parents were just kind of hanging around going, “Okay, let’s see how this goes.” [laughter] It was so much like when a parent is teaching a teenager how to drive. “Don’t look.” So, I felt that way towards them just from the ground, watching that and the progress. Then, the next teenager, the next young one started doing the same thing because the older one had gotten to be a better flier. You see this family every morning. I have one picture of one morning on the electric pole at the top. One of the teenagers was electrocuted and was dead. It was hanging there. I already started to do some activism around getting a nest deterrent up there to prevent them from nesting the next season to just nest where they always used to go in big old trees. Right? But, of course, I’m always called a troublemaker when I do those things. “Why don’t you just leave things well enough alone, Birgit? They’re just birds.” But that got me to step up the activism. We had found wildlife biologist Jim Kaiser in Seattle, who designed nest deterrents. He was in his retirement years now, and he actually produced these things and sold them. He was on the side of the birds. But he was also on the side of the tower owners and operators. He said, “This works for everyone. This is a win-win. We keep the osprey off the towers. The towers don’t get damaged. The birds don’t get electrocuted. The birds go back to nesting, where they know how to nest. And we’ll sell this to you for $2,200.” So, it was a lot of a lot of advocacy with the Blue Hill Heritage Trust, who finally decided to go along with this. But then, our tower array, the triangle, is bigger than the one Jim designed it for. So, the next year, we had to add some sticks – I think he calls them spikes or rods – to prevent the birds from being able to land and prevent the sticks from landing where they could build a nest. Here’s something I could really use your help with. Right now, I don’t know if the Trust is going to follow through on what they told me they would do, which is add just two more rods. I have pictures. So this is the osprey nest that first year. This is the nest deterrent that’s designed by Jim Kaiser. Here’s where Jim sent me photographs of where the spikes need to go. When the tower guys went up, we were having some challenges communicating because they weren’t the same tower climbers that I’d met with the summer before, and we’d already done a dry run. And they were like, “Who is this crazy lady on the bottom? What’s with the sticks?” Anyway, there was two places where the sticks didn’t get put, and the parents came back, and they actually built a nest in this – there’s a bird flying with a really huge stick. They built the nest in these odd – just this tiny little spot, not in the middle where it was really safe and secure. So, I saw the parents incubating there for like two weeks and three weeks. I’m like, “Oh, my god, that looks like a really scary place to have a nest.” That’s Jim Kaiser. This was some of my directions to the tower climbers. I learned that they communicated well through their phones. The climbers were all in their early twenties. I showed them pieces of paper, and they went – but I texted them like this. They’re like, “Oh, yeah, we can do that.” [laughter] [inaudible] So, I learned some things about how to communicate with that generation. This was a picture from the top of the tower. That’s the umbrella kind of arrangement that Jim Kaiser’s nest deterrent – and the other spikes. The incubating parent was there every morning. Was there every morning. We had a big windstorm, and it blew away.

 

Phelan Gallagher: [00:11:52] These are all your photos? [inaudible]

 

BF: [00:11:53] Yeah, my photos. Yeah, this was just this past summer. So, there’s two spots, one of these and one of those, where the Trust has told me yes. When we paid for the tower climbers to go up there and do repairs on the tower – because the tower now belongs to the Trust. Peninsula Conservation Enterprises has some kind of a – it was created so that whatever profit comes from the tower goes to Blue Hill Heritage Trust because the man who owned the tower in the past, Dan McGraw, who was the guy who hired me for all those years, donated the tower to the Trust, thinking that would be the best use of that. So, I’d love to tell you, if there’s some time, the story of how Dan came to hire me to build the service trail.

 

PG: [00:12:41] Please. Please do. Can I ask one follow-up, Brigit, before you get into that?

 

BF: [00:12:43] Sure.

 

PG: [00:12:45]  I feel like you alluded to it. The relationship between these stakeholders, the cell tower –

 

BF: [00:12:51] There’s the town.

 

PG: [00:12:52] – the Trust.

 

BF: [00:12:52] Yeah. They’re all there at the beginning of the story. That’s exactly what I want to get to.

 

PG: [00:12:56] So, that’s what you [inaudible] –

 

BF: [00:12:57] Rob McCall is in there, and Gordon Emerson is in there.

 

PG: [00:12:58] Boom. Go, go. [laughter]

 

BF: [00:13:00] Yeah. So it was August 12th, I believe, 2002. I was just walking my dogs up the mountain at six in the morning, and I heard all these chainsaws up ahead of me and this big growling machine. I’m just like, “Oh my God, what’s happening?” I knew that there was a trail that the ATVs who serviced the tower used, and it’s what’s now called the Hayes hiking trail, where the stone steps are. It was just a big, eroded ditch. It was ten-foot wide, four-feet deep, and it was a ditch going all the way up the mountain. It was just solid erosion. I also knew that that had become too – and that’s where I hiked every morning in the muddy ditch. It had become too dangerous with just big, huge boulders with the soil eroded away for the ATV tech drivers to get up there. So, they built another trail on the back side of the mountain that came up from the rifle range road. Then, that eroded, and that became too dangerous. Some guy flipped over and, luckily, didn’t hurt himself badly. But we’re like, “Okay, we need to build a new trail.” So, this was the third trail. In my mind, I’m like, “Oh my god, wait a minute. The third eroded muddy ditch up this beautiful mountain, which is public property, and it belongs to everyone.” I thought, “Someone’s making profit off that tower, and the mountain’s paying for it? Does anybody care?” So, my question was, does anybody care? Well, I know at least Rob McCall cares. So, I talked to him. But that morning, I was literally – I was late getting to work because I just said, “I have to do something.” I got my camera from the car. I ran back up the mountain, and I took pictures of the guy with the chainsaw and the big drilling machine. The guy yelled at me. “Grr, what’s your problem?” Anyway, we’re good friends now. That’s Blaine Davis. It was this very confrontational thing. I went to the cardboard dumpster at the co-op, and I wrote signs. “Does anybody care? Go see the damage on the mountain. Call blah, blah, blah,” which [was] my landline back then, “if you care and you want to do something about it.” I got some calls, but not many. I took my pictures and my little story to the selectmen’s meeting the next time it was, which, I think, at that time was in the middle of the day, so you couldn’t go to work. I kept having to apologize to the people who were employing me. I was like, “I’m sorry. I really need to – I’ll be back at work.” Gordon Emerson was one of the selectmen, and Jim Schatz and John Bannister. I did my best in the public comment period to say, “This thing is going on. It’s going on on town land, and shouldn’t we require whoever’s doing this to do it so it doesn’t become an eroded, muddy ditch like the other two trails?” The select people were like, “Well, I mean, yeah, but we don’t have any money. The town doesn’t have any money. Sorry. You’ve got a point.” [laughter] I had talked to Jim Dow at the Blue Hill Heritage Trust about this problem, and he got angry at me and called me a troublemaker. We have since done lots of good work together. But he was really angry at me. He’s like, “This is not your business. Just go away. This is what we do.” So I was just like, “Wow, even the people that I’m supposed to count on for caring about something like the mountain are telling me I’m a troublemaker and I should just go away.”

 

PG: [00:16:30] Why do you think that was, Brigit?

 

BF: [00:16:32] Well, it continues to this day. [laughter] I’d like to just finish this story, but it is a good question. So, then there I was, at the end of the meeting, having gone – the Trust was kind of like, “Go away.” The town is like, “Well, you got a point, but we can’t do anything.” I just went, “Well, I’ll do more in-person outreach and find hikers and people who care about the mountain and people who grew up here who I know care about the mountain.” For example, I had a conversation with Gordon Emerson earlier, not around this, and he told me about when he was a boy. So, this conversation was in the ‘90s, and he was in his eighties, something like that. When he was a boy, there was a movie theater in Blue Hill Village, and it was ten cents for a movie on the weekend. He and his best buddy, when they were about ten, eleven, twelve years old, wanted to go to a movie, and the way that they often got money for the ten cents was a local farmer around the base of the mountain would give you five cents per dead porcupine. They would go up to the porcupine caves, which, to this day, there’s these porcupine caves right in the face of the mountain. They go up there, get two porcupines each, go see the farmer, get their money, and go to the movies. Gordon also told me how he drove a jeep up the mountain with the boards to make the caretaker’s cabin for the fire tower that used to be up there. He just said it was the scariest thing he’d ever done in his life. He’s just amazed that he’s still alive. But a real adventure. His eyes glowed. He’s in his eighties, and he’s just like, “Grr, that was exciting.” [laughter] he would talk about the [mountain]. I knew so many people here loved the mountain. I knew Rob McCall of the Mountain. He took people on walks every Wednesday at noon. He had an Awanadjo Almanack radio production and in the newspaper. Rob said just nothing should be on the mountain. Nothing. If you do anything on it – the mountain is sacred; you shouldn’t do anything. I would say, “But we’ve got this tower. There’s been one trail after another. Can’t we do a compromise of build a trail that won’t erode, something that respects the mountain, respects that it’s community property and that’s beautiful?” So, Rob got mad at me for trying to even work with anybody to do – but there I was at the end of that Selectmen’s meeting, wondering what to do next. Outside of the room, where it was kind of dark, this gentleman came up to me and said, “Hello, my name is Dan McGraw. Nice to meet you. I agree with you. I own the tower. I agree with you. How can we build a trail that won’t erode?” I was speechless for a while, and I was just like, “I’ll do some research and get right back to you.” [laughter] So, that’s what I did. I did a lot of research on how can one do that. Dan ended up paying me over the course of 2002 to 2017 to do most of the building of the service trail. In the course of the research, I found out about the Recreational Trails Program Grant to fix the old, muddy, eroded ditch that the ATVs for the tower had been responsible for in the beginning. That was twenty thousand dollars to the town. Lester Kenway and eight AmeriCorps volunteers would spend two months, eight weeks, and build the stone steps. Dan donated Blaine Davis, the guy who got mad at me. Well, we were together. Blaine staged the big rocks, the medium rocks, the small rocks all the way up the ditch. We’ve been friends ever since. [laughter] Mike Asbury donated the rocks themselves. So, that was ten thousand from Dan, five thousand from Mike, and five thousand local volunteers in little fundraisers and people making donations to match the twenty thousand dollars from the federal government. Then, the stone steps got built the next year. So, that wasn’t in the plan, but it just happened. It happened pretty quick. That very next October 4th, it was done. We had a hot cider party and just got to see this is what one little town can do when you make a little bit of trouble, but you also do a lot of work and follow through. You just find out who cares and have the people who care work together. The really cool thing was none of that would have happened if it wasn’t for Dan McGraw. He’s such a humble person. He’s always embarrassed whenever anyone calls him out publicly for all the good that he’s done and the community service he does. But none of that would have happened without Dan McGraw. He spent probably close to $200,000 dollars over all those years building that trail. The first day that the stone steps got done, the first year of starting to build the service trail – we had that one thing completed. It was his birthday, October 4th. That felt really special to say thanks to him. So, I told you the little Gordon Emerson story. I want to tell you – Dan is only about twenty years older than me. One thing I found really fascinating, and it relates to the mountain, and it relates to you guys being the age that you are, and you’re going to be dealing with what happens in this place in the years going forward, the decades going forward. Dan said one morning – we would usually meet at 5:30 before we both had to go to work. We organized the day. He had been taking notes, keeping track of when the first blackfly arrived – he grew up in Surrey, and he still lives in Surrey – every year. He said the mean average was May 11th, and that was in like 2003, ’04, or ’05. I’ve been keeping track, and it’s getting a lot earlier, at least in Blue Hill, maybe. So, that’s something interesting along those lines. One more story from – Ronnie Conary, who was the postmistress in East Blue Hill, was in her late eighties and nineties in the late ’90s. In the winters, the wood stove would be on in there, and there was usually some people standing around talking. A story she told was that when she was a young woman before World War II, in the winters, January and February, the men would get into their trucks and drive over the ocean to Long Island to get timber. It has been so long since you could even drive along the beach on the ice of the saltwater ocean. So, that’s one thing that I have noticed in working on the trails on the mountain, caring for them and maintaining them, and having to adjust to climate change. We get so much more water so quickly than we ever did, and things never really freeze. They’re just icy constantly. So, the ground doesn’t really get protected all winter by the fact that it’s frozen. It’s constantly melting and making mud and melting and making mud. Then, even foot traffic completely destroys the plants. Where in the past, they’d just stay frozen, and the plants were protected because nothing was getting mixed up. One more thing from Ronnie that really blew my mind was, sitting there in East Blue Hill, she’d say from here to Blue Hill, that entire coastal area, there were no trees when she was a young girl. It was all just pastureland. So, how much has changed in just the course of one person’s life where unless I’d heard that story, I would have had no idea. I wouldn’t have known, oh, this is far from climax forest. This is just the first pioneer species. So, anyway. There’s lots more stories to tell.

 

PG: [00:24:39] So much good stuff there. I feel like this is a good opportunity for you guys, for us to just pause, catch our breath, and be like, what do you want to follow up about? This is the hard part, or I think, the interesting part.

 

BF: [00:24:50] Then, suggestions – that’s like the kind of thing I would put up to get volunteers to show up for an erosion workshop. This is on the hiking trails. I don’t get paid to do anything on the trails anymore because Blue Hill Heritage Trust has decided they just don’t care, and they won’t even pay their own workers. Sorry, but that’s the truth.

 

PG: [00:25:08] [inaudible]

 

BF: [00:25:09] Yeah. I’ve offered to consult for free, to teach their workers that they pay to finish building the service trail, and they’ve said no so far. I teach erosion mitigation workshops for free. These are some of the worksheets that I hand out to people.

 

PG: [00:25:27] Could we start with that? Talk about that a little bit.

 

BF: [00:25:30] Yeah, maybe.

 

PG: [00:25:31] I am curious. How did you learn all of this stuff about erosion? I understand that water is such a powerful force, but are you just putting this together on your own? Do you have a background in this?

 

BF: [00:25:41] I put it together all on my own, basically in response to Dan McGraw’s question there in the town hall. Okay, now I need to learn how to do this. He’s a civil engineer, but he doesn’t specialize in erosion. He specializes in building buildings. That’s what the towers were for, as a matter of fact. The tower was never supposed to be a cell phone tower. He had this really big construction business, Atlantic Builders, that he started in Surrey, and they had jobs all over Downeast Maine. It was before cell phones. Because he was a civil engineer, he knew how to build things with metal, like towers; he built a bunch of towers so his guys could be in radio contact with each other and the main workshop just to plan the jobs and the suppliers and all that. Then, it just so happened that cell phones became a thing, and cell phone companies started contacting him. “Can we put our things on your tower?” And he’s, “Okay, I guess. I’ll rent you some space and make some money off of it.” So, he didn’t get into this to make money off of a tower. It was just so his guys could talk to each other.

 

PG: [00:26:46] That’s wild. I did not know that. [inaudible] cell phone, cell tower.

 

BF: [00:26:47] Yeah. He said to me, “How do you think we can keep the trail from eroding?” I talked to all the Inland Fisheries and Wildlife [IF&W] people, the USDA, the National Park Service, the trail builders. And I’m like, “It’s for ATVs. We’re not building a road for cars. We’re not building a trail for hikers, specifically for ATVs. How can I find people who have figured out the erosion?” Well, there was this guy, Brian Bronson, at IF&W. He’s like, “I’ve actually just been doing that.” We just learned some things from out west. It’s a totally new thing. But I’ll tell you what we did, and so far, it’s working pretty good.” We’ve got some pictures of it. You know those conveyor belt black strips across the trail, which need to be replaced, by the way, because they went in in 2003? They’re supposed to be replaced – actually, paved with stone into dips and swales. So, he’s like, “The fastest way to prevent the soil from eroding, just going straight down the trail, is to put these strips diagonally across the trail every so often, according to the grade, so the ATVs can drive over it, no problem for them. But when the water comes down, the water goes off to the side.” And then the other one was those wooden troughs. If you’ve got a stream, just direct it across the trail. So, we built those in 2003. But then I also started seeing, really like through observation and through talking to people on the phone, at a certain point, you’ve just got to harden the trail because there’s going to be water seeping and flowing across this huge area, turning into total mud. It’s going to become deep mud. Then, the water is just going to run down. Even at the water bar, it’s just going to go there and then run off the trail. So, you’re going to lose the trail. Okay. What’s the most cost-effective way we could possibly harden the trail? Dan and I would be in his office again. So, now it’s maybe five in the morning because we know we’ve got to scratch our heads longer together because we’re both early risers. We’re like, “Well, I’ll look up those paving blocks, maybe. Maybe they should be cheap. They’re going to be ugly, ugly as sin. I’ll look into using native rock. Maybe we can use enough native rock.”  So, we tried different things and came up with using native rock first the flat way because Blue Hill has a lot of rock that breaks into paving flat things, not square, but flat, putting them down. But depending on how you drive on the trail, those things get flipped up. So, eventually, things needed to be installed vertically. So, there’s more rock up and down than there is across so that when the wheels kick into it, it doesn’t just flip out. So, then, that’s what we did. Then, every year, watching – okay, the water’s doing this here. Our solution, how’s it doing? Does it need some help? At the same time, I was actually building a one-mile road for myself because I bought land a mile off into the woods. So, I learned a lot from road builders, building my own road and not having much money to spend. So, trying to find what’s the most efficient way that you can keep the soil in place. So, yeah.

 

LC: [00:30:13] I’m curious if there was any code or legalities that you had to go around.

 

BF: [00:30:20] Go around.

 

LC: [00:30:22] Or deal with.

 

BF: [00:30:26] I mean, it was completely codeless and legal to destroy as much of the public property as you wanted. I mean, there was there no rules. I don’t think there’s any rules to this day. I’ve been asking, could we limit the width of the ATVs that are allowed to go up the mountain? We could do that by literally restricting with poles at the bottom, which we sort of tried. Can we limit, at least, verbally the type of gearing of an ATV, like no sport gearing? The sport gearing, the minute you give ignition, the wheels go wham, and the tires – please, not tires with four-inch knobs, but maybe inch-and-a-half knobs that won’t do so much damage to the trail. That would just be a verbal agreement going on the goodwill of the techs. But since I had gotten to know a lot of the techs, I could text them and send pictures and say, “What do you think? Can you ask your supervisor?” Some of them did try, , and they’re like, “Okay, I’ll bring the least destructive machine next time,” and they would. Now they’re like, “We just sold the last least destructive, narrow machines, and this is just what the boss bought.” Now they’re actually wider than my Jeep and much more destructive. I could take my Jeep up the trail and do less damage, probably. That’s all I can think of. No, I don’t think there have ever been any codes.

 

LC: [00:31:58] Interesting.

 

PG: [00:31:59] It’s so interesting because it’s so much about relationships that you’ve developed. It feels like you’re one of the central players here, starting this and advocating for this, and there’s so many stories of resistance. This is kind of what I asked earlier, but I’m just hung up on it, especially because I know a lot of these people, and it’s like everybody is – it’s not like people have bad intentions.

 

BF: [00:32:20] Everybody has goodwill. Everybody loves –

 

PG: [00:32:23] But there’s this resistance. As somebody who’s been able to punch a way through that, how do you think about that, and how do you think about communicating with people who think differently than you about this to try to achieve a common goal?

 

BF: [00:32:35] Yeah. That’s a good [question]. I’ve asked myself the same question, of course, this whole time, and I haven’t stopped asking myself the question because I still get surprised by the level of resistance about things where it just seems – but this just seems so common sense and relatively inexpensive, and it could just solve so many problems. Why am I getting resistance? Part of it first, I think, is consciousness. What are you aware of? If I’m coming from this set of facts or information or experiences I’ve been involved with – I’ve gotten to know the ospreys themselves, right? I’m talking to somebody who really thinks, “Well, it’s just a bird, Brigit.” We’re obviously coming from two different places. We’re both caring people. This person cares for the environment in all kinds of ways, has dedicated his life and his career to it, but in a different way than I have. [inaudible] “Brigit is just anthropomorphizing the osprey. She calls it a teenager.” It’s a fledgling. [laughter] Yeah, that’s what I do. It’s true. [laughter] But understanding that other people are looking at the same issue, where they may love and care for the community just as much as you do, they’re just seeing it differently. I think what I’ve tried to do is, first of all, be polite. Don’t take it personally. Don’t give up trying to have a conversation with other people about something that I care about, and maybe bring other people besides just me along with me for the conversation next time. It’s not just, “Oh, god, here comes Birgit again.” Because there’s a lot of people who care about the things I’m bringing up but aren’t as willing to put up with the resistance. That’s just a difference of personality. I kind of wish I wasn’t built that way sometimes, but then it’s really rewarding when something finally happens that everybody says, “Wow, this was a win-win for everyone.”

 

MC: [00:34:49] Has your connection with the mountain changed over time? After doing all this stuff, is it deeper or is it more important? Is it the same?

 

BF: [00:35:01] It’s definitely more important. Definitely deeper. Yeah. For example, I have chronic Lyme disease, and I used to be impervious to the cold and the wind and the wet. I was a professional sailor in my twenties and early thirties. But my body’s only really comfortable right now at around eighty-five degrees, and you all know about how often that happens in Blue Hill, right? So, I’ve had a lot of opportunities. I’ve looked at to move to places where it’s that temperature a lot more of the year or maybe all the year. Yes, it’s the people, the connections with the people in Blue Hill. Certainly, that is a big part of what makes me keep trying to figure out how to be happy and healthy here, even though my body has changed so much. A lot of those connections with all these people have happened through the mountain and around the mountain and advocacy there. Then, the photography, the kind of images that happened on the mountain in the winter when there are no leaves when it’s just the winter light and the snow and the ice, it’s just phenomenal. It’s just this source of – I can show you pictures, and I would dare you to guess what that’s a picture of. Otherworldly things happen with the light in the winter. It’s one of the most photogenic places I’ve ever been, and I’ve done a lot of traveling around. I would really, really miss not being here in the winter to be up there with the camera every day.

 

LC: [00:36:58] You talk about all the people that you’ve been in connection with around the mountain and in Blue Hill. How do you think all these people – have their feelings and thoughts towards the mountain changed since you’ve been here and since you’ve done all this advocacy?

 

BF: [00:37:18] Well, I know there’s a lot more awareness about erosion and even how foot traffic causes erosion. When I got here, I was completely clueless about foot traffic causing erosion. You see that where you walk, it’s mud. And next to where you walk, it’s grass. But what’s the problem? A lot more people have learned how to build water bars and build dip and swale, and how to maintain them. Every fall, you’ve got to clear them out, all the stuff that grows in the leaves, so they work well. I know access to the mountain has improved. When I first got here, there was just this pull-off spot for two cars, and winter mornings, when I would go hike with the dogs at six in the morning when it snowed, I’d had to park in the middle of the road, leave the Rabbit running, snow shovel a spot out of the snowbank, shove my Rabbit in there, and then walk them out. It was really dangerous. The visibility there was really bad. I would ask at the Selectmen’s meeting, “Can we just make a little parking lot where it’s safer?” In the summer, there were quite a few people who would park on the side of the road, and it was dangerous. It was a public safety issue. So, the first parking lot got made. Then, that would get full all the time. So, I went back to the selectmen and said, “Can we make it a little bigger?” Five years later, it’s bigger. Now we’re on our third parking lot size, and it really probably wants to get bigger. So, we have a lot more access to hiking the mountain. It’s easier to get up there. In the early 2000s, my really good friend Jim Dinnan would just come by and plow the parking lot with his truck before work. Then, after a few years – I forget who was road commissioner – I think I asked at the selectmen’s meeting again, and they – “Sure, that makes sense. We should plow because health and safety, and it’s a recreational area and all that.” And then, a couple of years ago, they stopped plowing. My Jeep has no trouble driving in the snow and parking there. But there’s a lot of people with really low clearance vehicles and Priuses and things. So, I go to the selectmen’s meeting again. They’re like, “I don’t know. It’s really gravelly. We’re just going to make a mess if we plow it.” I’m like, “But you plowed it all these years.” [laughter] We know how to fix gravel. You just shove it back in the spring. That took some more advocacy. But now they’ve agreed to plow it. It changes every year. I think access is one of the big things. Then also I started the doggie waste station in 2009 and stewarding that because I got back from California with three dogs, and I had seen what happens to populated trails where all the dogs poop in California. But still, that first winter, I was back here. I’m like, “It’s nature, it’s dogs, whatever.” I was literally the only person up and down the mountain all that winter. I would see my footsteps in the snow, and then I’d see my footsteps. Maybe there were a couple of skiers here and there. Anyway, the first spring thaw – I think that was 2009 – I get there one morning. I’m like, “Why is the field full of polka dots?” Every single one of those hundreds of polka dots was my dogs’ poop. Three dogs. Just do the math. Three dogs pooping like ninety to 120 days. All those poops. I’m like, “Oh my.” In the beginning, right when they get out of the car, and then they’re – “Now we’re fine.” I was like, “I’ve just turned this into a personal dog toilet,” and that felt really irresponsible. I had seen in California – you just get a little doggy bag dispenser, you get the biodegradable ones, you put the trash can there. I went to the Trust to ask if we could partner on that because I might not be here forever because I occasionally go work on boats in other places, or I travel, or I might move away. The really wonderful thing about working with Blue Hill Heritage Trust when things have worked, the really wonderful thing is when they embrace something, when they get part of it, there’s so much of a better chance that this is going to be happening for our community going forward into time. There’s only so much one person can do, but that’s the community, creating a structure. My hope was that I could partner with them and say, “If you guys buy the doggie bags” – it’s thirty dollars a year – “I’ll build cedar post and the garbage can and the little dispenser, and I’ll do the stewardship of cleaning it up.” Every year, I would have to argue to get my thirty bucks. It was a lot more time I spent if I charged for work hours. But the value of that time spent begging for the doggy bags every year – I actually have to do it again now. But I’m kind of emotionally a little bit – I’m going to wait for winter. The value of that was – partnering with a community organization like that is so important because that’s the only way that all of our consciousness becomes aware of something and that it keeps the caring as a group happening. So, yeah, doggy bags.

 

PG: [00:42:51] Thank you for doing that. [laughter] I feel like we should say thank you a lot for all of it.

 

LC: [00:42:57] Yeah.

 

BF: [00:42:57] It’s like, yeah, you’re welcome. On another level, I do it for completely selfish reasons because I go up there every morning, and if I see all the dog poop as a mess, it breaks my heart. So, I’m just trying to prevent my heart from breaking. When I see erosion happening, it’s not being cared for; it makes me really, really sad. So, really, this is what I do selfishly for myself that I am aware lots of people in the community also care about. They might not care about it quite as much as I do, but they’re happy and willing to partner with me. [laughter]

 

MC: [00:43:40] Was there anything else you wanted to talk about that I didn’t ask you? Or did we hit beats?

 

PG: [00:43:47] Yeah, We have ten minutes.

 

BF: [00:43:49] Ten minutes.

 

PG: [00:43:50] And it’s just kind of unstructured. So, I think [inaudible] perfect, Millie. I’ll probably leave it rolling, but you guys can take a breath. You’re doing an awesome job, too. Very professional. We also practiced don’t say a whole lot. So, if it feels like they’re not verbally –

 

BF: [00:44:06] They’re being like Terry Gross.

 

PG: [00:44:07] That’s a thing in interviewers where you don’t want to constantly be on the mic.

 

BF: [00:44:09] Absolutely, yeah.

 

PG: [00:44:10] You guys are rocking it.

 

BF: [00:44:11] Yeah. Not like like Joe Rogan, who just goes on and on and on. Joe –

 

PG: [00:44:16] Yeah, you’re interviewing somebody.

 

BF: [00:44:17] – your person. [laughter] Yeah, right. Anyway, let me see. I would love to show you some images that are just part of this. We can talk about them as we look at them.

 

PG: [00:44:30] These are really cool. I really want to try to make copies of some of this –

 

LC: [00:44:35] Yeah, these are really –

 

PG: [00:44:36] – stuff, Birgit, or something.

 

BF: [00:44:37] Yeah.

 

PG: [00:44:38] I mean, this is –

 

MC: [00:44:39] Cool, dude. Look at that.

 

BF: [00:44:41] Yeah. So that was just recently. In that box, I have those posters –

 

PG: [00:44:45] Do you really?

 

BF: [00:44:46] – from all the years and years and years of organizing, just like, “Who wants to show up and help?” I’ve always taken pictures of people working, too.

 

LC: [00:44:55] Do you think social media has changed the outlook of the mountain?

 

BF: [00:45:01] I wonder. I’m so not on social media. People tell me I should get the message out about some of the volunteer things or the issues or to get some help advocating for things. I’ve thought about starting an Instagram, “The Daily Mountain,” and just taking a picture. Then when there’s a volunteer trail thing or an osprey thing, then it’s people who love the mountain will be looking at it. It’s probably just because – I’m just really busy, trying to be well. Let me just turn the music off. There we go. So, now how do we –?

 

LC: [00:45:52] I have one more question that just popped in my head. Since the pandemic, do you think the attitude towards the mountain has changed as people are embracing going outside?

 

BF: [00:46:05] Interesting. Trying to think if – the usage of the mountain was super high when we were all still isolating, bubbling. There’s a lot more people who didn’t grow up here using the mountain. A lot more foreign license plates – foreign – outside of Maine, [laughter] which is not a nation.

 

PG: [00:46:30] From away.

 

BF: [00:46:31] From away. Yeah. I haven’t really noticed anything besides that. Just a lot more people moved here during the pandemic and after it who are just seeing it for the first time and don’t maybe have a lot of the history of growing up here and having seen it before. Probably, yeah. So, let me see. Where is that? Is this just going? No, there we go. There’s the apple tree at the bottom. That’s it in winter. There is the foundation of an old – that’s the ferns in the spring –  foundation of an old homestead there. That’s sunrise over Acadia. Look at the light in the winter. It’s just so dramatic. Okay. What do you think that is?

 

MC: [00:47:29] Grass.

 

LC: [00:47:30] Grass.

 

PG: [00:47:31] Yeah, or some kind of branch.

 

LC: [00:47:33] Or blueberry barrens.

 

PG: [00:47:35] Oh, yeah. Could be the blueberries.

 

BF: [00:47:35] It’s actually blueberries in an ice storm at the top of the mountain.

 

PG: [00:47:38] Nice.

 

MC: [00:47:39] Lucky guess.

 

PG: [00:47:40] Looks like fingers. Yeah.

 

BF: [00:47:41] I have quite a few series of those.

 

PG: [00:47:45] I mean, that’s a new feature of our climate, too, right, this ice phenomenon because –

 

BF: [00:47:49] Happening consistently, constantly.

 

PG: [00:47:50] It wasn’t the way it was growing up that we have so much ice.

 

LC: [00:47:52] Yeah. I remember the first year that happened and thinking it was a once-in-a-lifetime. Then it’s happened every year.

 

BF: [00:47:57] Well, ’98.

 

PG: [00:47:58] Right, the big ice storm.

 

BF: [00:47:59] The big ice storm of ’98. Yeah. Most of my pictures here – winter, it’s a full moon over Acadia. So, this –

 

PG: [00:48:11] Wow. What is that?

 

BF: [00:48:12] That was the stone steps the year they were built, 2003. So that’s October 2003. The stones and all that was stone so that the ditch went from here to there and four feet deep. So, now we’ll see what it looks like now. That’s the same spot as that other picture. It’s just completely – and nothing could grow there because the water just kept eroding and eroding and eroding. So, once you get the water to slow down and curve around rather than just go straight down the hill, all the plants grow –

 

PG: [00:48:50] And hold it all together.

 

BF: [00:48:51] – and hold it all together.

 

MC: [00:48:52] That’s so cool.

 

BF: [00:48:53] Isn’t that amazing?

 

PG: [00:48:53] Did (Jed?) McGraw help you with that?

 

BF: [00:48:54] Yeah. Well, actually, John Perkins with that, and then John and (Jed?), the service trail for many years.

 

PG: [00:49:01] Yeah. I remember when they were working.

 

BF: [00:49:03] So, there’s one of those conveyor belt water bars. I just found photographs, and there is one of the ones that’s deteriorated. A lot of them had deteriorated, and they were only meant to be in the ground for twenty years, max. I used rough hemlock, rough native hemlock, which we thought pressure treated would probably last longer. But I didn’t want to put the cuprous oxide in the ground, the toxins. But then, as it happened, the native hemlock would last longer than pressure treated. That’s what we found from this test. But the wood is finally degrading, where the wheels hit it all the time. The agreement always was that these were just giving us time, buying time, to slow down the erosion, so then dips and swales would go in those places. But PCE and the Trust has decided since the tower was donated to them after they spent one winter building a dip and a swale – decided they weren’t going to do anymore. I think because it’s just Birgit talking about this. But if other people talk about it, they’ll probably change their mind. There’s another one of those. So, this is the one that they did. Andrew, their new stewardship guy, and I took these out because they were completely rotted, and they’re letting the water go. We had erosion happening down here already again, like about eight inches of soil going away. We did a stone dip and swale, and it’s beautiful. That’s going to be there forever. But now there’s all the other ones that it’d be great if they got on to instead of what they’re doing now is they’re building wooden trails all over the place. There’s the pile of rocks at the base. There’s the ATV that did all the really heavy work carrying. There’s putting stone in the trail. Some closing it up.

 

LC: [00:51:07] Where’s the old fire tower cabin?

 

BF: [00:51:11] It got taken down a few years ago. Yeah, the fire tower came down in 2005. That was really sad just because of a fear of liability. It didn’t need to come down.

 

LC [00:51:21] The cabin came down, too?

 

BF: [00:51:23] Just recently. Fairly recently, I think. Yeah. I don’t know. Did any of you guys, when you were kids, see all those buckets along the trail? So, this was 2021. Hang on. Stop. Can I go back? 2021. This was the road up the fields at the bottom of the mountain. That was like ten to twelve inches deep, that erosion. I was like, “Oh my god, if it’s already that bad, if we get one or two heavy rains, it’s just going to get huge. That’s going to be so much money and work. We’re never going to be able to fix it.” I went to the Trust and asked, “Can we put this on your schedule of stewardship?” And they’re like, “No, no, you’re being a troublemaker again.” I’m like, “Dan McGraw paid me to put them in twelve years ago. The erosion mitigation devices, they’re there. They just need to be redone.” Like, “No, no, no.” So I did it as a volunteer, and I gave like about four to five thousand dollars of my time, got about two to three thousand dollars of other people’s volunteer time, and we fixed it. But I can’t do that anymore. I’m getting older. My body can’t do it anymore. Someone who is a community organization needs to take over responsibility for making sure this doesn’t happen again. They need to be maintained. No one at the Trust yet has done the maintenance of those guys, though they do maintain the service trail. They’ve embraced that. So, these are some things I could use help with. The next picture is what the volunteers and I built. You’ve seen those stone water bars across the whole road. We put seeds down and straw, so everything had a chance to grow again. We hired people to mow alternate walking trails to get the foot traffic off there.

 

PG: [00:53:18] Yeah, redirect.

 

BF: [00:53:19] This is just a really pretty picture in the winter.

 

PG: [00:53:21] That’s gorgeous. Yeah.

 

BF: [00:53:22] That was when the water bars had gone in. That’s the road with the straw and the seeds. Here’s the little hiking paths on the side. It’s just really pretty. It’s basically healed now. There’s been foot traffic in areas that have caused some erosion. That’s at the top of the stone steps. That was two years ago. I think that was this one. Five or six people showed up, and we put in some dip and swale. We dug out a ditch and fixed it. There’s Andrew, who I’m so glad the Trust hired. He’s twenty-four, and he really cares, and he’s really smart, but he needs to have the support of the leadership of the Trust to do some more work on the mountain trails, too. They’ve just been paying him to build wooden trails in the woods, which will rot and break and are dangerous in the winter – need to be shoveled. Whereas if you just do erosion mitigation devices, they’ll last forever, and they’re safe.

 

PG: [00:54:30] All right. Did the bell just ring?

 

Unknown: [00:54:33] Yeah.

 

BF: [00:54:34] It rang.

 

PG: [00:54:34] All right. I see you guys later. Good job. Come on down, then. We’ll have a little advisory coming in here. See you, Charlotte. Thanks, Miles. That’s John Perkins’s – what are you, his nephew?

 

Unknown: [00:54:52] Yeah.

 

BF: [00:54:53] Are you related to John? Cool.

 

PG: [00:54:55] Birgit was telling us John worked on the trail. Did you know that? On the mountain?

 

BF: [00:55:00] Yeah, he worked on that on the stone steps and then the service trail. Then, I was in California driving along Ocean Beach, and I picked up two hitchhikers. It was (Hayden Cummings?) and Jonathan Perkins. Yeah. John ended up working with me for four years on boats in California. It was totally random.

 

PG: [00:55:15] (Hayden?), we were high school buddies. I toured Europe with (Hayden?) in a punk rock band.

 

BF: [00:55:20] With The Kings of Nothing.

 

Unknown: [00:55:21] You were in a punk rock band?

 

BF: [00:55:22] Yeah, yeah, The Kings are nothing.

 

PG: [00:55:23] That was an experience.

 

Unknown: [00:55:25] You were in a punk rock band?

 

PG: [00:55:26] The Kings of Nothing was the name.

 

BF: [00:55:28] [laughter] That was the name of it.

 

PG: [00:55:30] Yeah, they were so fun. [inaudible]

 

BF: [00:55:31] Yeah, he was living in squats in the city then.

 

Unknown: [00:55:35] He actually ended that tour in an Italian prison.

 

BF: [00:55:38] He did?

 

PG: [00:55:39] Yeah. Good times. I don’t think he’s allowed to go back. Is this thing still recording?

 

BF: [00:55:45] I don’t know.

 

PG: [00:55:46] That was so awesome.

 

BF: [00:55:46] That was fun.

 

LC: [00:55:47] Thank you.

 

BF: [00:55:49] Thanks for your questions.

 

PG: [00:55:50] You guys rocked it. I do think there’s a chance that we want to follow up with you just even to look at all your materials and maybe digitize some of it with your permission –

 

BF: [00:56:00] Sure. Yeah, yeah.

 

PG: [00:56:02] – and make it part of our archive.

 

BF: [00:56:03] I just found a bunch of pictures this morning. Every day after work, everyone who worked for me had to poke the gloves through. And then we had to hang them up and dry – it is so much work for your fingers. Anyway, the fisherman’s gloves were the key to actually getting the work done in the cold.

 

PG: [00:56:34] That’s very cool.

 

BF: [00:56:36] It’s so cool. Great. What are some of the other stories you guys are doing oral histories on?

 

PG: [00:56:43] It’s really just the mountain.

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