York Corner
At Harbor Beach, on the same sunny Sunday afternoon when we met the folks we spoke of here last week (just before the snows and winter returned), we also met an exceptional young couple.
They were Gregory and Valeriya Mullen, currently from Lowell, Mass., but about to move into a condo in Andover, Mass.; they were in York on a getaway day trip, having discovered York on a weekend last summer.
More significantly, he'd just spent three years in the Peace Corps in the Ukraine, and she was a Ukraine native whom he'd met and married there.
He'd grown up in Scituate, Mass., he told us, attended Boston College High School and then the University of Richmond, where he'd earned a degree in 2002 in economics and leadership studies.
His job in the Peace Corps, he indicated, was related to that degree: in the Ukraine, he'd opened a bookstore for a university and a non-governmental organization, and he'd taught leadership and civic responsibility skills to Ukraine youth with the hope that they would take that training and those skills back to effect positive change in their own communities.
He and Valeriya met in 2005, he said, and had been married in two ceremonies, one in the Ukraine, and one in his home town of Scituate.
Now, he said, both were working for a Lowell consulting and research firm called Common Sense Advisory, which works to design, as he put it, "the best practices for doing business globally."
All of this info gave us a lot of meat for discussion, but they told us that they were in quest of real food, so we didn't detain them long.
We did, however, ask Valeriya how she was finding American culture, and she responded thoughtfully but with a frown, "Difficult!" Then (maybe because food was on her mind) she added, "I'm not crazy about the food. It makes your body soft," and, by way of explanation, she said that she deplored an emphasis on the "not-natural," and on the fact that, while organic vegetables are available, they cost more.
She laughed and called American bread "The worst I've ever had!" (we didn't ask what kind it was, or if that judgment applied to it all), and Gregory said that she thought that some eggplant she'd seen must have been grown near Chernobyl, it was so big.
But she softened the negation with high praise for Americans being "polite and kind," and she extended that praise, remarkably, even to American drivers, who, Gregory confirmed when we raised an incredulous eyebrow, score favorably in that regard in contrast to Europeans.
We also learned something about McDonald's. In Ukraine, said Gregory and Valeriya, McDonald's is "better: fresh and clean, and they care about how they make their sandwiches."
And, in some discussion about uniformity among McDonald's throughout the world, Gregory said that the company actually "does a great job of localizing their product" - coming up with no-meat sandwiches in India, for example.
We ended up leaving the Mullens with directions to the Lobster Cove Restaurant - and we crossed our fingers crossed that it be open.
Since then, we've followed up on a tip from our friend Jan Fawcett about new goings-on at B & B Traps on Route 1 in Cape Neddick.
Bonnie Rainville is the proprietor there, and, when we tracked her down, not only did she confirm that she was opening a new gift shop on the premises, but she reported a development that came as a shock to us: she's getting out of the wire-lobster-trap-making business entirely.
Back in November of 2005 we'd reported that, while she was selling wooden lobster traps for decorative purposes, and decorative lobster buoys along with utilitarian items of all sorts for lobstermen, the steady bread-and-butter of the business that she and her late husband, Bob, had begun there 20 years before was wire trap-making: she was producing some 4,000 traps a year, was booked nine months ahead on orders and couldn't keep up with demand.
But the year 2006, she told us this week, had been a bad one for lobstering, and she hadn't had an order for two months. With characteristic cheer she said, simply, "I had to diversify."
We should note here in passing that Bonnie has had emotional challenges enough in her still-young life: Bob died of cancer in 2004, and their son, Robert III, died at sea at age 18 while hauling traps alone in 1998. Bonnie's characteristic energy, bounce and cheer is therefore all the more remarkable.
This winter, she explained, she's been busy building an addition, and, come April 14 (on Patriot's Day weekend), she hopes to have it open for the sale of an expanded inventory of what she terms "nautical items for tourists" - items like statues of fishermen and sea captains, miniature boats and the painted lobster buoys, now personalized (some as small as Christmas-tree ornaments), that have become her hallmark.
Mention of those buoys, and of the fact that they can be personalized, in the October 2006 issue of Coastal Living magazine, hiked orders for them phenomenally, Bonnie said, in a timing that was "just right for Christmas."
She'll continue to keep the lobstermen's equipment-supply store open, she said (lobstermen can get bait bags and lobster bands there, in addition to a wide variety of items like clips and gloves), and will even expand that shop's hours from five to seven days a week.
But she's also going to start making old-fashioned wooden lobster traps, she reported, because they're still in great demand for decoration. She was importing them, used, from Canada, where they'd acquired a sea-weathered patina, but that source has now dried up. She and Bob, foreseeing that eventuality some time ago, devised their own secret method for "weathering;" she'll be resurrecting that, and told us that she still has orders, unfilled, for the particular kind of trap that results.
Bonnie is running the business solo now - she had to lay off her full-time trap-making assistant Dianne Perkins - but look for Ginger Littlefield St. Clair to begin helping out at the gift shop when it opens.
And look for us to check back in there in a while, to see how it's all going. We certainly wish Bonnie all the best.
You can check out some of her offerings, by the way, at www.mainelobstertraps.com.
