AT 7:30am, Sorrento harbour’s small parking lot is full of pickup trucks and empty of people. The lobstermen are already out hauling in their traps; lobstering is big business in coastal Maine. Thankfully, I am here to meet cod farmers, who don’t keep such rough hours. I am awaiting my contact on a bench overlooking the placid bay between Sorrento and the hazy mountains of Acadia National Park. The tide is low. A diesel engine rattles somewhere out on the water. I am in no hurry for him to arrive.
The Victorian homes stretched along Sorrento’s waterfront are shuttered and vacant for most of the year. Like most towns in coastal Maine, the population is split between ‘summer people’, who arrive in July and flee at the first bite of autumn air, and ‘winter people’, real Mainers, who live here year-round, many of whom earn a hardscrabble living catering to tourists in summertime and find any job they can get during the rest of the year.
Read the full story in The Economist