Word: oceanic
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...record, it was on Wednesday, Nov. 23, that Kennebunkport met its first metal detector. Bush was to address his friends and neighbors -- folks like Booth Chick and Carl Bartlett -- on the town green, and his security men set one up on Ocean Avenue to screen the audience. He had survived more than 60 summers in this lovely coastal Maine town without a single metal detector, but then he never was President-elect. Trouble was, there were too many people for the lone detector. The police finally said the hell with it, just before Bush began, and let everyone...
None of this is lost on Kennebunkport's 4,500 natives. Many ponder their future at Alisson's Restaurant, where fresh rumors mingle daily with the clam chowder. Someone murmurs that the Secret Service will close Ocean Avenue, the road that runs past the Bush compound on Walker's Point, for security reasons. "If they do that, the cars will back up all the way to Wells," moans Rick Griffin, owner of the Kennebunkport Inn, envisioning a traffic jam stretching to a town seven miles away...
...already a tourist hive in season, and George Bush has nothing to do with it. The population swells to around 30,000 in the summer, and 19,000 cars cross the narrow two-lane bridge into Dock Square each day in peak season. Gridlock comes with the Coppertone. "Ocean Avenue is already a zoo," concedes selectman Drew. Adds Tom Bradbury, whose family has been in town for generations: "The Bush factor changes the name on the souvenir, but the souvenirs were already here...
Kennebunkport was not always a summer mob scene. When Bush's maternal grandfather George Herbert Walker built his house in 1903, the town was a quiet refuge for well-heeled gentry from New York and Boston. They built sprawling "cottages" along Ocean Avenue and played tennis at the River Club, while the natives fished and built ships on the Kennebunk River. Life remained peaceful until a decade or so ago, when the southern coast of Maine was discovered by tourists and developers. Dock Square used to have a gas station, a hardware store, a market, a movie theater. They...
...rich. It also represents the single most irresponsible and reckless way to get rid of the growing mountains of refuse, much of it poisonous, that now bloat the world's landfills. Indiscriminate dumping of any kind -- in a New Jersey swamp, on a Haitian beach or in the Indian Ocean -- simply shifts potentially hazardous waste from one place to another. The practice only underscores the enormity of what has become an urgent global dilemma: how to reduce the gargantuan waste by-products of civilization without endangering human health or damaging the environment...