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Islandport Press - MarieTherese Martin

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87 pages

English

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MarieTherese "Terry" Martin grew up grateful for the paper mill that dominated the economy of her small Maine town, providing jobs for hundreds of local workers. But years later, while working as a nurse, she and her physician husband "Doc" Martin came to fear that the area's sky-high cancer rates were caused by the smoke and chemicals that relentlessly billowed from the mill's stacks. Together, they sounded an alarm no one wanted to hear and began a long, and often bitter, fight to expose the devil's bargain their hometown had struck with the mill. Through it all, Terry waged a more private battle. This one against domestic abuse, as she tried to reconcile the duality of her husband's personality-the fearless crusader for good in public versus the controlling, verbally abusive partner behind closed doors.

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Memoir

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Publié par	Islandport Press
Date de parution	12 janvier 2023
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781952143618
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Available at www.islandportpress.com

Islandport Press
P.O. Box 10
Yarmouth, Maine 04096
www.islandportpress.com
info@islandportpress.com
Copyright 2022 by MarieTh r se Martin
First Edition: December 2022
All rights reserved.
The stories in this book reflect the author s recollection of events. Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of those depicted. Dialogue has been re-created from memory.
ISBN: 978-1-952143-39-7
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-952143-61-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932036
Printed in the United States of America
All photographs, unless noted, courtesy of MarieTh r se Martin.
Dean L. Lunt Editor-in-Chief, Publisher
Piper K. Wilber Assistant Editor
Ron Currie, Jr. Editor-at-Large
Dylan Andrews Book Designer
Emily A. Lunt Book Cover Designer
Cover image by Cappi Thompson Getty Images
Editorial by Rex Roades (p. 157-158) Maine Today Media
To those who find themselves in abusive spousal relationships with nowhere to go,
and
for those who suffer the consequences of industrial toxic chemical exposure and injury without understanding or warning or both.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Prologue: A Revelation
1 Everything Changes
2 Don t Breathe
3 Number 24
4 Copper Crucifix
5 When Enough is Enough
6 The River
7 Stephens High School
8 Nursing 101
9 The Rule of the Keys
10 Tricky Dick
11 Rumford Community Hospital
12 A Mainer in Paris
13 Back to Rumford
14 Doc
15 Town Without Pity
16 The Day After
17 The Granite Bowl
18 Acadian Heritage
19 Office Gossip
20 Multiple Contamination Principle
21 A New Strategy
22 Farrington Mountain
23 Billy White Shoes
24 Doc Gets Sued
25 Guilty!
26 Arsenic Cocktail
27 A Better Place
28 Toxic Waste Women
29 Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun
30 The Meeting
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Foreword
R umford and Mexico, Maine, like many towns in America, were once small tourist destinations, capitalizing on healing mineral springs and access to the great outdoors. The area boasted a few nice hotels, theaters, social clubs, churches, and sports teams. Rumford and Mexico were not unlike the imaginary town Rachel Carson wrote of in the opening lines of her 1962 book Silent Spring : There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to be in harmony with its surroundings. But in the end, Carson s town, like Rumford and Mexico, was a place that seemed to live quietly and safely while, in truth, it had not. In fact, this is the nut of MarieTh r se Terry Martin s memoir, And Poison Fell from the Sky .

Terry is a storyteller, born from other storytellers of Acadian heritage. While their homeland may have vanished in the Acadian genocide in 1755, their stories and trauma remain in Terry s blood and echo in the landscapes of her life. Terry was a small-town Catholic girl with big-city dreams that were foiled by powers beyond what she felt she could control, which is probably similar to how Acadians felt when leaving France in the 1600s and how they felt when leaving Canada for New England to work in its industrial mills. Rachel Carson grasped this in Silent Spring : There is always a story behind the story that is hardly ever told. In continuing the description of her imaginary town, Carson said, Some evil spell had settled on the community Everywhere was the shadow of death There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among the adults but also among the children.
As a young mother and nurse, Terry witnessed a similar evil spell, which she writes about here. And in her text, she has taken back what was taken from her years ago-her story-about being on the front lines between industry and disease but also on the front lines of abuse-in her state, in her town, in her church, in her role as a nursing student, in her home. In writing about her first day of nursing orientation, where she witnessed a woman being given electroshock therapy, Terry writes, I would do what I had done before: store the memory of these events in a dark corner of my mind, write about it in my journal, and deal with it at a later time.
With this book, she no longer has to live in the shadow of any of these things. In America, the fundamental need for bodies to be respected has always been at odds with the goals of industry. History has shown these abuses to be true, from medieval dike builders in the Loire Valley to the paper mills of rural Maine. Terry followed those circuitous routes and ended up, surprisingly, whole. Why? Her DNA is of strong stuff, made from ancestors whom Colonel Winslow tried to snuff out in 1755. But they survived, and so did she.
Genetics do not explain everything about who we are. Identity is more complex. It s made of social, cultural, and environmental legacies and can be harmed by others who do not have your best interests in mind. Terry took (to use a line from her text) notes both sound and sour from her life and spun them to mend the fractures in her heart. I think she will help others do the same. She helped me. I depended on her story, her ideas, and her friendship for ten years while working on my own book, Mill Town , about these same two towns. And while Terry tells me she is proud of my tenacity, without her I wouldn t have had the courage to write what I did.
Terry s wisdom, compassion, and fortitude are evident in every word she writes. It feels like she is telling you stories sitting by a fireplace on a cold snowy night-intimate, warm, with a little magic and often some humor. Which, by the way, happened one night at my house over a few glasses of wine. It wasn t the wine or the fire that made her go from tentative to dynamic storyteller; it was what came from depths that most of us will never reach.
-Kerri Arsenault
Roxbury, Connecticut
March 2022

Prologue

A Revelation
O n an inescapable hot and humid night in the early 1970s, the air felt so thick in my bedroom that it was hard to breathe. Even though I shut and locked the windows in our drafty old house, pungent odors from the nearby Rumford paper mill always managed to work their way inside. The rotten-egg smell seemed particularly strong in the wee hours of quiet summer nights along the polluted Androscoggin River. But it was just a bad smell, right? The smell of money, the mill bosses always told us.
Suddenly, Edward Doc Martin, my husband, sat bolt upright in our bed, sweat dripping from his forehead.
What s the matter? I asked, still half asleep, but fearing an urgent problem, either personal or with a patient.
Doc and I, physician and registered nurse, operated a family medical practice in an office attached to our house. It was somewhat quaint and our regular patients usually had stories to tell-pretty typical in a small community in the seventies. But increasingly it seemed their stories were about cancer: who had it, who might have it, who died, and maybe details about the next fundraiser to help a cancer family in need. Doc, although a man with dark secrets who could be terrifying behind closed doors, was also a remarkably compassionate professional and a relentlessly curious soul. It bothered him and he couldn t figure it all out-until now.
Water, air, chemicals, unregulated dumping, cancer, disease-they are all connected! he blurted out.
What? I responded.
We didn t fall back to sleep. We talked until the sun rose over what, just a few years later, the media would dub Cancer Valley. Doc s middle-of-the-night revelation would forever change and, at times, nearly destroy our lives. The issue and the debate eventually prompted one of the most famous cancer hospitals in the world to call Doc and ask him straight out: What the hell s going on in Rumford?
For me and my hometown, the answer to that question was a long and painful journey.
This is my story.
One

Everything Changes
I still remember the exact day in my life when everything changed. I was ten years old, and I would never feel safe again. This day started out as any other at our home on Knox Street. My mother stood at the electric stove wearing a bibbed apron as she made dinner for her family. My father sat in his red vinyl reclining chair reading the daily newspaper, as some fathers did, waiting for supper to be served promptly at five, as he had plans for the evening.
Hey Van, what s for dinner tonight? he shouted to my mother from the next room.
Evangeline was my mother s name. She was named after the heroine of the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem of the same name. Ironically, the poem is much better known today than the event Longfellow wrote to commemorate-the Acadian Deportation, when thousands of my family s people were forcibly removed from their homes in Canada by the British. Mother stood at only five-foot-two, but her name carried huge significance.
Pot roast, she answered brightly.
She fixed dinner using a copper-bottomed set of pots and pans, a wedding gift from twelve years earlier. The aroma of her pot roast filled the house, and to this day, whenever I smell a pot roast, I am transported back to that afternoon. My brother, Rick, and sister, Andrea, were each in their rooms reading, and I was standing at an old wooden ironing board, hot iron in hand, carefully pressing my mother s nursing uniforms to perfection. I took the job seriously, dreaming that someday I, too, would become a nurse and wear a starched white uniform.
The radio played a countdown of popular songs sung by such stars as Patti Page and Nat King Cole. This was the scene that day. Everything peaceful, everyone seemingly happy. None of u