Maine news, sports, weather from Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram, Portland, Maine

August 19, 2012

Campobello's sea change

Visitors are returning to the U.S.-Canadian park after 9/11 upended international rules.

By Colin Woodard cwoodard@pressherald.com
Staff Writer

CAMPOBELLO ISLAND, New Brunswick - It was, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt would have said, a day that would live in infamy.

Park staffer Ron Beckwith was in his office here at the Roosevelt Campobello International Park when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center. A bus tour full of tourists from the New York City area had just pulled into the visitor's center. By the time the second plane hit, everyone was in shock and the Gothamites were desperate for information about their city, friends and loved ones.

"We have poor cell reception now, and it was even worse then, so we were starved for information," recalls Beckwith, who is now the superintendent of the park, which is built around FDR's summer home on this Canadian island, located a stone's throw from Lubec, Maine. "We set a portable television up in the visitor's center and did our best to get everyone a chance to use our (landline) telephones."

"We'd hear rumors about how the border was going to close, so we all scrambled around to get all the tourists back over the border before that could potentially happen," he says. Rangers fanned out over the park's 2,800 acres of forest, beach and rocky headlands, looking for visitors, telling them what had happened to the Twin Towers and Pentagon and advising them they might consider getting back to their cars and heading back to Maine.

The visitors back on their own side of the border, the park turned eerily quiet. After all, if the borders are sealed it's extremely difficult to get to the island from the rest of Canada -- and impossible to drive here outside of high summer, because the tiny passenger ferry to the rest of New Brunswick stops running and the only bridge leads to Maine. "At the time we didn't think too much about what the long-term impact would be," Beckwith adds. "And it turned out to be a very big impact."

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- the most deadly foreign incursion on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor -- transformed all sorts of North American institutions, from airports to subways to banks. Because of its peculiar geographical location -- on an island isolated behind border posts from both the U.S. and Canada -- the Roosevelt Campobello park was hit particularly hard. Like the president whom it honors, the park was partially paralyzed, and has had to shift and refocus its energies in the wake of an unexpected catastrophe. 

OUT OF THE BLUE

FDR led the country through the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, and World War II, but his personal tragedy began on Campobello 91 years ago this month. Franklin Delano Roosevelt awoke one morning in his family's 34-room, 7,200-square-foot summer cottage, and knew something wasn't right. The athletic 39-year-old had spent the previous day fighting a forest fire on the island, but had been surprised how tired he'd been afterward, barely able to muster the energy to read a book. Now as he swung out of bed his left leg lagged. Assuming he'd pulled a muscle, he hobbled over to his wash basin to shave. By evening he was confined to bed, feverish and unable to move.

(Continued on page 2)

Tweet