Knox County. Camden, Maine. In summer, beach roses tumble over dry stone walls and the long lupine spines streak roadsides and garden beds with purple. On certain winter days, when the temperature’s right, sea smoke—a vaporous, ghostly fog—rises from the harbor. The craggy face of Mount Battie looms to the north. On the cover of Camden’s 2024 annual report, available for passersby at the town office, the town slogan: “Where the mountains meet the sea….”
For visitors, Camden might be a stop along US Route 1, called the Coastal Highway, though it only briefly kisses the water. What the drive on US Route 1 lacks in actual coastline it makes up for in dense stretches of trees, various rock and mineral shops, excellent thrift stores, and the Taste of Maine restaurant—almost impossible to miss, given that the world’s largest inflatable lobster, a 700-pound behemoth named Larry, sprawls across its roof. Once you see Larry, you’re about an hour out.
In Camden you’ll find a town of tidy Colonials and Cape Cods and bungalow cottages with names like “Shamrocks” and “Millstones.” After a fire decimated 40 buildings on the main drag during the shipbuilding boom back in 1892, business owners got together and decided to remake the district in brick, rendering it more fire-resistant and perfectly picturesque. When it came time to choose a filming location for 1957’s Peyton Place, a story of gossip and violence roiling against a backdrop of New England charm, the filmmakers chose Camden. Today, thanks in part to a local ordinance, even the Walgreens sign is quaint, its logo rendered not in the usual oversized red plastic but instead in a tasteful, unassuming gold on black.
The population is just above 5,000, and there are a little more than three times as many registered Democrats as there are Republicans. Per the 2020 census, 93 percent of residents are white. It’s a year-round town, locals will be quick to tell you—not like Bar Harbor! Most of the businesses stay open for the winter, kept afloat by full-time residents and visitors to the Camden Snow Bowl, which houses a 400-foot wooden shoot that allows “many toboggans to reach speeds up to 40 miles per hour,” according to the website—and, more notably in a town that prizes the expanse of its harbor above much else, it “is also the only ski area on the East Coast with ocean views.”
Less than a mile from the town center, Lisa Gorman’s two-story cedar-shingled vacation home nestles on a low bluff above the Atlantic, with floor-to-ceiling windows offering an unobstructed panorama of Camden Harbor and a set of private steps winding down to a public beach. Native oaks, spruces, and hemlocks encircle the property at 3 Metcalf Road, which covers a little over half an acre and abuts two neighboring plots. It’s a prime spot in a rarefied neighborhood, one befitting the 74-year-old widow of the chairman emeritus of L.L. Bean. The town’s median income is about $91,000 and its median home price hovers around $800,000. Down the street from Gorman, a five-bedroom waterfront property is listed for just shy of $4.5 million, and her own home is valued at $5 million. Her neighbors include John Reed, the former CEO of Citigroup and chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, and at least one heir to the IBM Watson fortune.
Sometime in the spring of 2022, a caretaker noticed that several of the trees on Gorman’s property were ailing: Leaves withered, turning yellow and brown. The failing trees were along the property line that divided Gorman’s house from her uphill neighbors at 1 Metcalf Road, Amelia and Arthur Bond, both in their mid-60s. In May, Gorman’s landscapers arrived to suss out the scene. The crew found themselves working in close proximity to another team of landscapers—not unusual in a town where gardening, as one local said, is “blood sport”—contracted by the Bonds. The unusual thing was that, according to a document written by Gorman’s lawyer and sent to the town of Camden, her guys found the Bonds’ guys putting ladders on Gorman’s trees, as if they were preparing to cut them down. Gorman’s team ran them off, but shortly thereafter, Gorman noticed that more than a dozen appeared to be missing their tops.
In mid-June, according to the same document, Amelia Bond told Gorman that her trees “did not look good.” There was, apparently, some mention of brown-tail moths, seasonal pests that had become a particular nuisance in Camden in recent years: The caterpillars have tiny, noxious hairs that can cause a poison ivy–esque rash and feed on oaks like the ones languishing on Gorman’s property. Amelia Bond made a neighborly suggestion that she and Gorman split the cost of removing the trees. But Gorman had been treating her trees for brown-tail moths, and her landscapers thought the damage looked more like a symptom of herbicide. It so happened that the trees featured prominently in the view from the Bonds’ bay-facing windows. Gorman declined the unbelievably generous offer.
Instead, in July, Gorman contracted Bartlett Tree Experts to take tissue samples. The samples came back positive for tebuthiuron, a broad-spectrum herbicide indicated to kill woody and herbaceous plants at industrial and large-scale sites like airports, highways, and grazing pastures. On Gorman’s property, the herbicide had seemingly affected more than 80 trees, bushes, and shrubs—maples, blueberry bushes, dogwoods, and seven mature oaks that towered over the houses, ranging from 39 to 77 feet high. The flora was unsalvageable and would need to be removed. And because of the nature of the herbicide, which is resistant to degradation and disperses via groundwater, the soil would have to go too.
In October, Gorman’s lawyer, Daniel Nuzzi, contacted the office of Camden’s planning and development director, Jeremy Martin. “Hey, can you meet me on the site?” Martin remembers the lawyer saying. “We got a problem.” Martin, who among other things oversees the town’s shoreland zoning, visited the site, took a look at the affected trees and, in turn, brought the issue to the Camden Select Board. And just like that, the neighborly dispute became a matter of public record, spiraling into a saga that has dredged up existential anxieties and disparate personal tragedies, and that now, more than two years later, remains unresolved.
Camden operates under a select board/town manager form of government—“the last holdout in the experiment of direct democracy that began in New England nearly 400 years ago,” as current board member Alison McKellar wrote in her first campaign letter, published in the local outlet the Penobscot Bay Pilot in 2017. An elected five-member select board serves as the executive branch, while a board-appointed town manager handles daily administrative duties. “At the state and federal level, we have a republic, not a democracy, and this is the system we teach in schools,” she wrote. “Not so in Camden…. The Select Board gets to choose a town manager, but citizens must vote on budgets, ordinances, and many contracts and policies that the town adopts.” Seven years into her tenure, she adds, to me, “We’re very much a complaint-based system.”
McKellar, born and raised in town, is 40 years old, with the streaked blond hair of a camp counselor and a wry sense of humor. (Brown-tail moths or no, “You can’t decide to put your neighbor’s trees out of their misery…” she said with droll exasperation during one Select Board meeting, “…by poisoning them.”) Her longtime cause célèbre has been lobbying for the demolition of the town’s controversial 200-year-old Montgomery Dam, an attractive relic that, following a 2021 study, environmental consultants advised should be removed. Her Instagram offers views of Camden typically reserved for the fish and the birds: drone shots of the harbor, underwater videos of trout and elvers in the Megunticook River. In the name of participatory democracy, every two weeks McKellar spends up to four hours in the bowels of the Camden Opera House, which homes the town office, with her fellow board members and the town manager, discussing and codifying issues ranging from marijuana licensing ordinances to solid waste disposal in town and the potential purchase of a new groomer for the Snow Bowl. For their trouble, board members make $2,000 a year.
It was Gorman’s complaint to Martin’s office, McKellar says, that triggered the Select Board’s involvement in the herbiciding. “If you’re going to take somebody to court, you can send a notice of violation without the Select Board, but if you want to follow up”—namely, with enforcement action—“they need us.”
Martin fields grievances about “anything under the sun,” he says, with not a little weariness, when I meet him at the town office: “Their tree, their vegetation, their drainage from their property is causing a problem on my property,” is how he describes the scope. More often than not, he determines these to be civil matters rather than code violations. But following his visit to the site of the poisoning, Martin consulted with a Maine Department of Environmental Protection shoreland zoning coordinator on the relevant ordinance. “It deals with aesthetics, erosion, water quality, those kinds of things,” he says. In allegedly applying the herbicide that killed the trees, Amelia Bond had breached an ordinance—a fact Martin delivered on November 28, 2022, via a letter emblazoned with the town seal and “***NOTICE OF VIOLATION***” in large type. “It came to the attention of the Camden Code and Planning Office that an herbicide was used by you or an agent of yours to defoliate and kill numerous woody trees and plants on land not owned by you at 3 Metcalf Road,” Martin wrote. “The town of Camden is alarmed at such blatant disregard for the environment and for the abutter’s property, and in such close proximity to the Atlantic Ocean.”
Martin gave a copy of the letter to the Select Board, which kicked off the first of multiple discussions. The board, whose members serve staggered three-year terms, can be a place for fierce disagreement. But on the herbicide, board member Tom Hedstrom tells me that the issue prompted “the most unifying response that we’ve ever had.”