That Mess On The Prestile (February 1970 | Volume: 21, Issue: 2)

That Mess On The Prestile

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Authors: Frank Graham Jr.

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February 1970 | Volume 21, Issue 2

The traveller who leaves Maine on Route 6 and enters New Brunswick at Centreville encounters a curious monument beside the road only fifty feet inside the Canadian border. It is a large concrete slab, ten feet tall and tapering toward its flat, unadorned top. A plaque on its face bears the following inscription:

THIS INTERNATIONAL

MONUMENT

SYMBOLIZES THE BEGINNING OF THE CITIZENS’ WAR ON POLLUTION IN WESTERN NEW BRUNSWICK AND EASTERN MAINE, AND MARKS THE SITE WHERE AROUSED CITIZENS BUILT AN EARTHEN DAM TO STEM THE FLOW OF POLLUTION FROM THE VAHLSING INC. COMPLEX IN EASTON, MAINE

9 JULY 1968

THIS DATE MARKED THE BEGINNING OF

OUR WAR ON POLLUTION

THE WAR CONTINUES

An interested traveller must look closely to detect the remains of the storied dam. The ground slopes sharply down from the road through alder thickets to a puny stream, the Prestile, which, considering its notoriety, is not much to see, like those rivers in classical tales that remind tourists in modern Greece of an inconsequential creek back home. On the far side of the stream some earth has been gouged out of the bank. Limbs of a few small fallen trees interrupt the water’s surface. And this is all that remains of a dam that endured about as long as the May flies that annually appear and mate over the stream.

If the traveller continues a little farther down the road into New Brunswick, he may also encounter Robert Caines, who is chiefly responsible for both the dam and its monument. Of middle age and placid disposition, Caines is an unlikely crusader. He was once mayor of Centreville and worked as an electrician there.

But Centreville has fewer than five hundred people, and correspondingly few walls to be rewired and toasters to be repaired. Recently Caines followed the path taken by most of Centreville’s wage earners and went to work for a nearby food-processing company on the St. John River. His choice of jobs, however, was also dictated by an idealism not often found in a middle-aged man who has dabbled in politics: eager to learn more about the subject to which he was first drawn in anger, Caines operates the company’s waste treatment plant.

“We’re going to prove at this plant that industries don’t have to go on polluting the rivers,” he says.

Caines has thrown himself into his job as if while working to clean up the St. John River he is striking a blow as well at what conservationists call “that mess on the Prestile.” The mess has its origins in cities far from Centreville. It can be traced through Maine to the capital at Augusta, and beyond to Washington. It is the inevitable issue of the enduring love affair carried on in Maine between politicians and the leaders of industry; and prominent in the romance appear such names as Maine’s former governor John H. Reed