Maybe it’s the winters. A minus-5-degree morning has a way of keeping people real. Whatever the reason, Mainers have always had a knack for spotting nonsense a mile away.

The Aug. 24 op-ed from attorneys Gilliard and Kieser (“Maine beach access case carries huge implications for private property“) was yet another attempt to tell us not to believe what we can see with their own eyes — our beaches and coastline are under attack in ways our Supreme Court, in 1989, surely didn’t intend.

The Moody Beach case wasn’t the natural continuation of centuries of law; it was the first time anyone ever said a landowner could kick a neighbor off the beach just for sitting down. That ruling shocked this state. Our own chief justice remarked: “A citizen of the state may walk along a beach carrying a fishing rod or a gun but may not walk along that same beach empty-handed, or carrying a surfboard.”

Today, families need permission slips to hold a sandcastle contest. Today, lawyers squabble about whether scuba diving counts as “navigation,” whether seaweed is a fish and whether clammers can continue doing what humans have done for thousands of years.

Mainers won’t let ideologues turn us against each another. We know that letting kids play soccer on the beach isn’t the same as the government taking our trucks. And speaking of trucks, we’ll still need those duallies — because when the lawyers have flown back to California, we’ll still be here, digging each other out of snowbanks, the same way we always have, and always will.

Benjamin E. Ford
Principal, Archipelago Law
Portland