For several years we rented a big old farm house on Maple Juice Cove, on the St. George River, in Cushing, Maine. We hosted the annual family reunion there. Just across the cove is the Olson House, a museum now, where Andrew Wyeth did his most famous work - a portrait of Christina Olson, the crippled daughter of a Swedish captain who married a local girl. The Olson family story is oft told, of course.
A couple hundred yards down the road is Sam Olson's Seafood a lobster buyer's wharf. There Sam's father John - Christina's brother - fished his entire life. John, who told his story in a plain narrative to his daughter Virginia, died last year. But before he did he told his story again to a writer from Outside Magazine.
We knew Sam - the kids jumped onto his dock to watch as the yardman put the "bugs" into a floating crate for us. I met Sam a few times. A small man with huge hands that had been hauling lobster traps for 70 years by then. I liked his old wooden boat My Girl, classic high bow, low freeboard from the days before powered trap haulers. One day, sorry to say, he forgot to put in the scupper plugs and the boat went to the bottom, frying the electricals in the salt water. Easier to buy another boat than re-power the sunken one.
So John lies in the local graveyard near the Olson House, just a few yards from Andrew who made this typical Maine family famous. - GWC
Life Lessons from a 97-Year-Old Lobsterman | Outside Online
by Suzanne Rico
If the definition of a true outdoorsman is spending more of your life braving the elements than seeking shelter from them, lobsterman John Olson may be the finest example alive.
On Halloween morning last year—the wind six knots, the temperature 38 degrees—Olson stands at the helm of a high-bowed wooden boat that shoulders aside the sea. Wearing rubber boots, brown work pants, and a navy jacket with enough dirt on it for him not to worry about keeping it clean, John has the straight-backed bearing of the World War II sailor he once was.
“My mother wanted me to work in an office,” he says, nudging the boat close to an orange and black buoy bobbing off Griffin Island in midcoast Maine. “But that wasn’t for me.” He snags the buoy with a duct-taped gaff, and the hydraulic hauler whines as it lifts a wire trap with a tangle of lobsters inside.
“How do you know where to find them?” I ask.
“It’s all in here,” John says, pointing a yellow-gloved hand to his head, which, after 97 years, is still covered by a respectable amount of gray hair. “I been over this bottom so many times, it’s imprinted.”
John Olson caught his first crustaceans nine decades ago. Born in 1922, he spent his childhood summers roaming Hathorne Point on Maine’s Muscongus Bay with his buddy Clyde. The boys spent their nights camping out and their days fishing, swimming, or working on Clyde’s father’s lobster boat.
“I couldn’t have been much more than six,” John says of his early start in the lobstering business. He digs through a box in the kitchen of the weathered saltbox house he built in 1954, his cat, Mia, rubbing against his legs, until he finds a faded photograph. In it, a young John, jug-eared and smiling, stands by a wheelbarrow full of lobsters, clutching one in each hand. “I started out paddling with oars. Then motors came along, and my father bought an engine for me—a one-cylinder—and we put it in a dory.”
John shows me the lobster fisherman’s license he received at age 16. Dated July 1, 1938, the creased and torn document is a remnant from the Depression, when lobsters sold for 15 cents a pound. After high school, he bought a brand-new boat, paying for it the Maine way: “I went into the woods and cut 100 cords of pulpwood with a bucksaw and ax,” John remembers. “There weren’t no chainsaws.”
