Last week a storm ripped a historic herring smokehouse, the last of its kind in the United States, from its moorings in Lubec, Maine and across the water to Campobello Island in New Brunswick. That’s a province in Canada.
It’s not far. Lubec includes West Quoddy Head, the easternmost point in the United States, and Campobello Island, where Franklin Roosevelt spent summers at a family estate, is barely in New Brunswick. You can easily see one from the other. (More on that in a minute.)
The owner of the smokehouse, Lubec Landmarks, is a nonprofit organization that has been restoring the shack for 25 years. A lot of it washed up on Campobello Island and can be retrieved and restored.
Simple problem, right?
Turns out it isn’t. Canadian authorities, while appearing to be friendly, are allowing Canadian scavengers to go to the smokehouse and cut pieces off it for what the Canadians are calling “salvage.” And they aren’t allowing the rightful owners to come get it.
In short, the Canadians have taken a local problem and turned it into an international incident.
Well, two can play at that game, and we can’t think of any better player than President Donald Trump.
Campobello Island, although technically in New Brunswick (at least for now), is accessible by land only from Lubec, Maine. Tourism is one of its biggest industries, with many people coming just to see Roosevelt’s estate and buy trinkets at the gift shop.
Campobello is a pretty if overrated place with a small population. (Kind of like the country that claims it.)
President Trump: It seems that the Canadians have something that’s rightfully Americans’, and that they are refusing to give it back, and that they are allowing their own citizens to destroy it, piece by piece.
How about closing the border at Campobello Island?
Call it a new version of NAFTA: Give us back what’s ours, and we’ll let people into what you call yours.
Make Lubec Great Again.
THEN...
Fishing Shack Nonprofit Head Apologizes for Calling Canadian Scavengers ‘Vandals’
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