Welcome to Maine, we hope you love it here!
As Mainers prepare for another summer, the relationship between tourists and Mainers comes to mind again. Walk down Commercial Street in June and you’ll likely see fishermen pulling trucks loaded with fishing gear as they weave their way down the docks through a sea of tourists. It’s crowded, sure, but we Mainers share a gratitude for summer tourists that goes beyond economics.
But of course, as Portland, Bar Harbor, Baxter and beyond fill up with people from “other places,” Mainers start to complain about tourists. Does tourism evolve Maine’s identity for the better? Tourist season is more than just a glamorous charity event for Maine; it’s a time when Maine culture is elevated in tandem with the summer population boom.
Last summer in 2023, tourism in Maine brought in $9.1 billion in revenue for the state, helping support the jobs of tens of thousands of Mainers like me. Growing up in the Portland area, the money I saved for school during the summers came from clearing tables and working on lobster boats, both jobs that depended on the export of goods and, yes, money spent by people from outside.
Maine is a beautiful and quaint place, but a big reason people come back to our state from far away is the friendly nature of the people here. The friendship Mainers share with one another is palpable, and tourists love to experience it. Tourists and visitors not only stimulate our economy, but they also contribute socially. These people may start out as tourists, but they often become friends, wives, husbands, and even future Mainers. Maine’s tourist season is not only a time to generate money and employ the people of our state, but it’s also a time to remember who we really are.
Maine has a population of just over 1.3 million people, ten times that number when you add in the summer visitors, and of those 1.3 million, we spend our summers wandering our hometowns, trying to spot familiar faces and wondering where everyone is.
For some Mainers, the disruption they feel back home during the summer isn’t the result of tourist intolerance, but simply a projection of Maine culture onto the backdrop of tourism. “Don’t kick us out” is a recurring phrase in the “12 Little Wharves” video, produced in 2018 by the Maine Coastal Fisheries Association, as Mainers plead to be heard, rather than the industries that support tourism and the 15 million people who visit the state each summer.
As fishermen and local business owners say in the MCFA video, their vibrant communities, Maine culture, and all of us, are the very attractions that draw people from across the U.S. and abroad to Maine every summer. As tourism continues to grow, hardworking entrepreneurs continue to build more infrastructure to feed, house and assist visitors. During the summer, a concern for MCFA and all Mainers is what happens when tourism becomes more important than Maine itself? Is there an imbalance in life in Maine? And is this attraction “pushing out” the people and industries that define us?
This perspective could be interpreted as a call to action for Mainers, and perhaps it is.
But I like to think of it as a unified Maine voice, knowing the traditions of the past, with an abiding love for the place we call home, and participating in a broader conversation about what it means to be a local. Maine’s tourist season brings other people closer to Maine, and in that way, it brings Mainers closer to each other. We all sweat, complain, laugh, and sometimes wish September would come sooner, in traffic jams and long hours to support this industry. But in a way, tourists remind us of who we are and why we love our state. That’s why people keep coming.
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