Publications

AMC Outdoors, September 1999

By Madeleine Eno

Drive up the road six miles from Greenville, Maine, past a small marina and purple patches of lupine jutting up around "Land for Sale" signs, and you'll find Beaver Cove Camps. Inside the office, owner Jim Glavine sits back in a worn leather easy chair, dwarfed by an eight-foot-tall map of Moosehead Lake mounted on the wall under Plexiglas. An antique display case he bought in town holds a stuffed fox in midstep, old faded tobacco tins, and vintage Maine guidebooks. Waves lap quietly outside the window on a morning warm for early summer.

Glavine stretches out tan legs bare in khaki shorts, and folds his arms across his chest, a silver bracelet glinting on his wrist. He's a young 46, with a warm, rugged face and a polished, rapid-fire way of speaking. A half-dozen years ago, looking for a "more connected quality of life" than he'd had in his successful career as a contract negotiator for Bath Iron Works on the coast, Glavine bought the deterioriated fishing and hunting camp. He was not a newcomer; his parents had met and married in Greenville and still had friends in town. Glavine repaired the six small log cabins that perch right on Moosehead's shore. He bought canoes and kayaks; hauled out dozens of truckloads of debris to build resplendent gardens of lemon thyme, iris, and rhubarb; and carved out a brisk business, with repeat clientele from snowmobilers to moose hunters to mountain bikers to fly-fishermen like himself. From here it's a straight-shot 11 miles across to the opposite shore, and at night Glavine sees only a single light out there. He often comes down to sit on an Adirondack chair he's brought out to the end of the dock.

"There are no amusement parks, no water slides here," says Glavine. "But there is sitting on the porch, flying over the area to see its vastness, climbing Katahdin, and listening to loons. I could live here for 300 years and feel like I've never explored it."

Listening to loons, trout-fishing, and building his business were just what Glavine was doing until a couple of years ago. Then the massive SAPPI-Plum Creek land sale unfolded, and Glavine found himself in the spotlight with a far more public life, reading up on conservation politics, and organizing a local group of business owners to ask questions about what the sale spelled for the future.

"Two years ago, I was an obscure camp owner. I ask myself, How the hell did this happen? I never sought this. But I have a great deal of passionate love and belief in this place and you don't have to squeeze me for my opinion," he says.

He's now a second-term selectman in the town of Beaver Cove, a member of Businesses for the Northern Forest, rallying other business owners on conservation issues, and was just named Maine's North Woods "Champion of the Land" by the Wilderness Society. In June he traveled to Washington, D.C., where he met with legislators and environmentalists from around the country to discuss land issues. As Glavine went to talk to his neighbors, he quickly learned he was not preaching to the converted.

"When I became outspoken on conservation, I met with local opposition. There were people whose allegiance was to the paper companies. They said, 'They've treated us like family.'" But now, says Glavine, people are coming around to realize that it's not the same world anymore and "being conservation-minded doesn't make you an environmental wacko."

He is happy to note he was invited over to a constituent's house for brownies just a few nights before.

"That was a first," he says.

Last October, when Glavine went online to research new landowner Plum Creek, he found that in the western U.S., the company's pattern has been to acquire vast tracts of land, then subdivide and develop it. The company now has thousands of Montana, Washington, Idaho, Louisiana, and Arkansas acres for sale on their website.

"The potential for that to happen here is high," says Glavine, squinting out at the undeveloped shoreline across from Beaver Cove. And he believes there are plenty of buyers. "Twenty-five years ago the primary draw up here was hunting and fishing," he says. Now tourists come looking for other diversions, and have money to spend. "A $40,000 cabin is not so hard for someone driving a $75,000 car," he says.

In March, Plum Creek and the state of Maine announced the state's purchase of several thousand acres of the company's land, including 65 miles of Moosehead shoreline. Glavine, having been a vocal proponent for the local businesses in favor of the purchase, was invited to a cocktail celebration with the governor, company officials, and heads of several conservation groups. But there's a lot more Plum Creek land on the table now, and Glavine considers this an emergency.

"We should be in Washington, pounding on desks and saying, 'Show me the money!'" he says, referring to the federal dollars that could be available to Maine and other states through the Land and Water Conservation Fund. "We basically have until November to get it done. Plum Creek is now willing and anxious to discuss easements; and development, state, local, and conservation-group options. There is bipartisan support right now for conservation issues, and because of the presidential elections it may not be there after next year. If we don't come to the table with interest and money, they will turn around and offer the land to developers. We can keep the wolves at bay. We don't want the shores of Moosehead to look like the shores of Winnipesaukee."

Glavine sees local residents coming around. "They're beginning not to be so reluctant to voice a conservation opinion," he says. The stakes as he sees them—"400,000 acres of condos"—are high. So high, in fact, that Glavine wants to sell Beaver Cove Camps in order to devote all his time to working for conservation and protecting the land he loves.

—Madeleine Eno is publisher and co-editor of AMC Outdoors.

Stand by your land, main article  |  Jim Glavine  |  John Willard  |  Carol Stirling