Even before he became president, Franklin Roosevelt—who knew the area from childhood visits to the family summer home on Campobello—had endorsed creating tidal-power systems in Eastport and nearby Lubec. As president he authorized WPA funding for the dams and power plants that would constitute the Passamaquoddy Bay Tidal Power Project. Congressional opponents stopped the funding before the project was complete. But the dams and dikes are still there, along with some of the houses the WPA had built, which then were used for a youth job-training center, and as military housing during World War II.

Of course the tides are still there too, and in Eastport a group called the Ocean Renewable Power Company (ORPC) has been testing huge undersea turbines, like the one shown below, to generate low-cost renewable power from the tidal flow.

When we first visited Eastport, these big turbines and the yellow frames with which they were anchored to the seabed were out in dry dock, to be inspected after their long trial run in the water. Since then ORPC has been testing its components in Maine, Alaska, and elsewhere. The purpose of the tests, I was told today in a phone call with Bob Lewis, ORPC’s Director of Operations and Chief Safety Officer, was to refine engineering issues rather than to resolve any fundamental conceptual or scientific questions. The company has also been running extensive tests to ensure coexistence with salmon and other wildlife in their areas.

The grant is intended to help ORPC improve the performance and commercialize its TidGen® Power System by integrating several advanced component technologies.  This project, which is based on 11 previous in-water deployments, will integrate improvements into a commercially viable and certified tidal power system.

The device’s novel floating design will move the turbine near the surface to capture higher flow velocities and will help reduce the cost of installation and on-water operations, ultimately lowering the cost of energy.

This is the way the cleaner-energy revolution is happening around the world: project by project, improvement by improvement, small engineering refinements amounting to significant steps forward in practicality.

***

There’s more going on, for both better and worse, in Eastport, as we’ll try to explain in upcoming reports—intertwined with more from Erie, Pennsylvania, and Dodge City, Kansas. The picture at the very top of this post is a pointer to one of the things that has gone worse for Eastport. In that opening photo, you see a breakwater and pier that had been important parts of Eastport’s economy and its culture. A mooring site for visiting cruise ships; protection for local boats; even a site for day fishing—that was what the breakwater meant:

In December 2014, just as Eastport had decided to authorize repairs for the breakwater, it suddenly collapsed, damaging many boats and closing this part of the harbor. When we visited last week, repairs were still underway:

The goal is to open again by the beginning of next summer’s season—for anglers, for pleasure craft, for cruise ships, and for the normal life of the port. More ahead, on the successes and setbacks of cities like Eastport, but for the moment we’re glad to know of this good news for ORPC.

In my Indiana photography business my largest client was an animal pharmaceutical company. As a result, I did a lot of photography of cattle. Little did I know that in Eastport tens of thousands of head of cattle would pass through this tiny place.

One day a couple of years ago I was having coffee, facing the window at the Happy Crab, when I noticed a black Angus running past the library! I was not drinking Irish coffee.

A cowboy showed up at the shore walk next to the WaCo Diner, threw the cow, and hogtied it. Several men rolled the animal onto a pallet, a fork lift raised the pallet onto a flatbed trailer, and the critter was trucked back to the port.

Apparently, even cattle can have second thoughts about crossing the ocean.

His note was titled “the Reluctant Bovine Sailor.” No larger point, just part of the surprises of our vast country—and a reason to point again to Deb’s new piece. Good wishes to Eastporters for this weekend’s Pirate Festival.

Here are a few of the ideas that libraries came up with this year:

The Orange County Library System in Orlando is helping the community heal. The library and a local art supply store businessman is hosting Paint Strong Orlando, a public art exhibit.

In Colorado, the Colorado Parks and Wildlife is partnering with the state libraries so that hikers can check out from their local library a week’s pass to the state’s parks, plus a backpack, binoculars, and park information. That effort began in June.

And my personal favorite, where Jim’s world and mine collide: Vermillion, South Dakota, is hosting a beer-and-books event.  Go to the library’s beer garden (!) to grab an craft beer and meet the new library director. It’s Friday; don’t miss it!

***

As a “Do not despair!” note to myself during the extremity of this presidential campaign; as a thought-organizer before this afternoon’s conference in Erie; and as a little glimpse for readers of the richness of what Deb and I have been finding around the country, here is a sample of the things we would already have written if the campaign weren’t destroying my brain, and that we will get to once it’s over.

From Erie and its environs:

• the history of this Jefferson Society, which plays a very unusual role that could set an example for other cities with similar challenges;
• the structural cruelty of the funding system for the Erie public schools, which should be a shame to the state of Pennsylvania and is a cautionary example for other parts of the country;
• the role of a tech collaborative called Radius CoWork, and what it has done to make open new entrepreneurial possibilities in a city shifting out of its heavy-manufacturing, GE-dominated era;
• how the local Behrend campus of Penn State has worked with advanced-manufacturing plants in the region to connect local workers with higher-wage skilled jobs;
• how a particular high-value local manufacturer has grown and thrived;
• why the company that is now the city’s largest private employer, Erie Insurance, has stayed in the area and redeveloped a significant chunk of downtown;
• how a publication that started as a local alt-weekly has developed;
• and some other things.

There’s a similar list of upcoming stories from western Kansas, including the surprising effects of the “Why not Dodge?” campaign in Dodge City, and the growth of local distilleries and breweries there. And more from Alabama, Texas, and beyond.

I tell myself, with 27 days to go until the election, Don’t despair! Better things are happening than what dominates the news—and has dominated my own recent output. I tell readers too: Don’t despair! Will provide more evidence for that assertion soon.

Meanwhile, see you tonight in Erie.

***

This screenshot from the video is (a good) part of the on-the-road reporting experience, in this case at Ms. De La Torre’s tortilleria. With me is Ernestor De La Rosa, the city administrator in Dodge City whom I wrote about here.

That is one of the motifs you’ll notice in this video. It touches on several others that we’re primed to start writing about again (as outlined here), if this election campaign ever ends and if I regain any control over my life: the breadth of the innovative efforts in Erie; the scale of the downtown redevelopment schemes in Fresno and the impact of tech centers like Bitwise (whose co-founder you’ll see in the film); the dramatic step Dodge City took years ago with its “Why Not Dodge” campaign, which is now having such effects.

For now, another look at the previous video in this series, about the difference between the national-level “build a wall!” fury with which immigration is discussed and the calmer tone in the places where significant numbers of immigrants and refugees are actually being absorbed:

National politics this cycle makes me feel worse. Exposure to the country outside politics should make anyone feel better. There is a lot going on.

***

2) Next round of Knight Challenge. One of many under-appreciated aspects of “interior America” is the overlapping network of organizations and individuals working on civic-improvement efforts. Last week, in Birmingham, Alabama, Deb and I got to meet people from around the country involved in the “Purpose Built Communities.” Over the months we’ve met their counterparts from NeighborWorks America, from ArtPlace America, from the National League of Cities, the Urban Libraries Council, MakerFaire and the Maker Movement, Main Street America  center, and many others. Many hands, many forces, are pulling in a similar direction. Increasingly they are seeing the resonance in their connected works.

Of the many foundations and charitable entities operating in this realm, one significant program is the the Knight Cities Challenge, from Communities program of the Knight Foundation of Miami. Six months ago I wrote about some of the 37 winners of the 2016 Cities Challenge grants, who shared a total of $5 million in grants for civic-improvement efforts.

Applications and nominations for the 2017 grants are open for one more week. You have until noon Eastern Time next Thursday, November 3, to apply on behalf of your neighborhood, civic organization, or community. Details here. It’s a good program and worth checking out.

I will also recommend this recent piece in the NYT from Garden City, Kansas, where we have also spent time. It’s about the recent white-nationalist plot to attack Somali refugees and immigrants there. Its theme, similar to what we have seen, was that the community itself was incorporating its new members, but people from elsewhere decided to deal with this alien “threat.”

(For the record, and for later discussion: Somalis and Sudanese are more obvious outsiders in western Kansas than the Mexican and other Latino immigrants who have been there for generations. The Somalis and Sudanese are more likely to arrive as unattached young men, rather than in families. They have much less of an established community to join. They are mainly Muslim, and thus more religiously foreign than the mainly Catholic Latino immigrants. The linguistic and cultural gap is wider. Still: it wasn’t people in Garden City itself who decided to plot against them.)

***

3. The former Wall Street figure, now photographer and writer (including for The Atlantic) Chris Arnade has been doing a series of travels across the country that are a kind of sine-wave complement to what Deb and I have been doing. He has been dramatizing the people harmed and left out by economic polarization; we’ve been aware of them but also talking about the people trying to find a way forward. These are two parts of a complex modern whole. Our views on the immigration front are more directly congruent than on some other topics. You can read about it in a tweet series by him, starting here.

Short version: we’re all saying that if you want to feel more encouraged about the possibilities in this country, do what has been true in most eras of our history: talk with people who have fought to make this the arena for their family’s futures.

***

4. Deb and I will be discussing these issues and others tomorrow morning, October 30, live from 8:30am ET to 9:15 on C-Span’s Washington Journal, with Steve Scully (who himself is from Erie). We’ll be on at the same time as the Marine Corps Marathon, which I used to run in back in its early days, and just before the Redskins-Bengals game from London.

Ann Coulter, whose views of America’s future and of immigration are … somewhat different, will also be on tomorrow, but not at the same time.

See you tomorrow.

Difficulty: it has so few people, roughly 1,300, who are poorer-and-older than average even for a state that is overall poor and that has the highest median age of all states. Opportunity: so many of these few people have been so inventive in exploring arts-related, advanced-tech, recreational, environmental, and other possible futures for their town.

The Globe follows up on a twist in the Eastport economy I reported in early September: the way the ramifications of the warfare in Syria had reached even this seemingly insulated locale, plus how the bad luck of a collapsing breakfront has complicated the city’s efforts. Worth reading, for the combination of hardship and hope, and also for the very good photos and graphic illustration of the pregnant-cow trade.

***

As part of the Eastport story, it’s also worth checking out this piece by Deb in early September, about the surprisingly ambitious and large-scale arts scene in a little town. Among other characters you’ll meet Jenie Smith, the nephrologist who doubles as a coffee-bar owner (and whom we first saw as stage manager at the local playhouse, at a production of The Glass Menagerie). She provides a nice closing quote in the Globe piece. Also Richelle Gribelle, shown below, part of the artist-in-residence program in town.

Continued good luck and better fortune to the local patriots of Eastport, especially now as another winter comes on.

In a different way in each of these different parts of the country, renewable energy is serving as the source for new companies and increased jobs. I think you will find this interesting:

***

For convenient one-stop shopping, here are previous videos in the series. This one is about the way immigrants and refugees are becoming part of existing communities, even in today’s direct political atmosphere.

And here is one about the generational divide in the hope/despair balance in many of the communities that have suffered from large-scale, long-term economic dislocations.

And while I’m at it, a related one from the “Golden Triangle” of Mississippi:

Thanks to Nic Pollock and the entire intrepid video team for telling this part of the modern American story.

Many of these children start out with varied disadvantages: of family income, language, unsafe neighborhoods, underfunded schools. Through the past decade, as Stockton was hit like other inland-California cities by the sub-prime real-estate crisis and then by its municipal bankruptcy, funding for almost everything has been cut. That’s why I find it impressive that the city council voted unanimously to fund libraries and rec centers again, and that most local civic groups have supported it. I hope the voters agree today.

***

Why do I care about this? Partly because civic governance is at the moment more encouraging than national politics. And partly because Deb and I have seen other cities go through a similar process, with positive results.

Consider the example of Dodge City, Kansas. Dodge City and its environs in western Kansas are politically and culturally much more conservative than even inland parts of California. But their ethnic situation is similar—as we’ve discussed before, the meatpacking centers of Dodge City, Garden City, and Liberal have become majority-Latino—and they also have faced civic challenges.

Dodge City’s answer, nearly twenty years ago, was something called the “Why Not Dodge” initiative. In 1997 the city’s voters approved a permanent sales-tax increase totaling one percent, with the proceeds to be used for long-term civic improvements. Now nearly everywhere you look in town, there’s another project funded by the ongoing flow of Why Not Dodge revenues. They include: a large public soccer complex; the Cavalier and Legends Park  baseball and softball fields; an auto raceway; a new civic center; a large expo site; a brand new aquatics park, the Long Branch Lagoon, which was in very heavy use during our visits last summer; repairs on a historic railroad depot; and more.

In effect, a very conservative community voted itself an open-ended tax to pay for long-term infrastructure improvement. Why was this possible there, when its counterparts at the national level are gridlocked out of consideration?

“We may be ‘conservative.’ but we’re progressive,” Melissa McCoy, who grew up not far from Dodge City and is now the city’s Project Development Coordinator, told me. “There was a time when we had a really negative self-image as a town. But people thought, If we won’t invest in ourselves, how can we expect anybody else to? It was a matter of getting the community behind it and realizing that we needed to back ourselves up to get outside investment and support. Now we’re starting to see it pay off.”

I asked Joyce Warshaw, an elementary school principal who is Dodge City’s mayor, whether there was any mystery or contradiction in a politically conservative community enacting a permanent infrastructure-improvement tax. Warshaw is herself a Republican, who ran (but lost) in the GOP primary for the Kansas state senate this year.

“Not at all,” she said. “It’s been so beneficial for the city. This community is incredible in embracing things that need to happen for the city. I think many people saw how important it was to raise taxes just a minute little bit to raise our quality of life here in Dodge.” And to anticipate a question from those who haven’t been there: cities in this part of Kansas cannot define themselves in narrow ethnic-enclave terms. The railroad and cattle businesses have historically brought a range of people to western Kansas, and Dodge City is now majority Latino. (As Deb and I have discussed here, here, and here.)

***

We’re nearing poll-closing time here on the East Coast, and I won’t pause now to untangle the ways in which local-area communitarian impulses do and do not convey to the national level. That’s for later, at greater length.

The point for now, on election day, is to note that the work of investment and civic improvement still happens in the country; it just doesn’t seem that way, since national politics have been so discouraging. In this spirit, I hope that San Bernardino’s voters approve Measure L, to put their city on a better course; that the necessary super-majority of two-thirds of Stockton’s voters approve Measure M; that statewide voters defeat Proposition 53, which would hamstring big statewide investments; and that Dodge City’s investments continue to pay off.

As I head back to vote-watching, here is one more photo from Robert Dawson’s extraordinary series “Raising Literacy: A Photographic Survey of Libraries and Literacy in Stockton and San Joaquin County.” Dawson and Ellen Manchester have documented the role of libraries around the country and the world, including in his book The Public Library: An American Commons.

The Erie area’s most important employer is no longer GE, which for years has been shedding jobs from its huge locomotive factory. Instead, it is Erie Insurance, a Fortune 500 company that was founded in the city in the 1920s and is still run with a very strong local-patriot sense. During election week it announced a $135 million new building project in the heart of Erie’s downtown, where its main campus is already located. This complements other downtown efforts, like the one I described earlier this fall.

In October, before this news came out, I asked Erie Insurance’s longtime chairman, Thomas Hagen, and its current CEO, Timothy NeCastro, why they had kept their growing business in this relatively remote location. “Our goal has been to do good things for our customers, and also for this community,” NeCastro said. Yes, sure, anyone could and would say that. But both Hagen and NeCastro went on to argue, as NeCastro put it, “we make plenty of money doing things according to our values. By setting out to do what we think is right for the customers, and this community, we find that we generate enough profits.”

I’ll have more to say about this very interesting company, which is run on the “reciprocal exchange” model that also applies to USAA and Farmers; Erie is No. 3 in size after those two. (In crude terms, you could think of this as an insurance-world counterpart to the Vanguard model of brokerage.) For me, what’s interesting about the company involves the way it has managed to run its national-scale operations and international talent-searches from its northwest Pennsylvania outpost, and how it imagines its long-term fortunes being connected to the town’s. That’s later; for our pre-Thanksgiving purposes, here is news of the expansion and background on the company’s evolution.

Also in local good news, I’ve mentioned the stark axis of generational differences in outlook in Erie. People in their 50s and 60s and above expected to work at the big factories, and bitterly feel the loss of those jobs. People in their 20s and 30s came of age when the factories were already on the way out, and they’re very prominent in the startup, advanced-manufacturing, and civic-engagement scene in Erie.

Last week one of the people we talked with several times in Erie announced his candidacy for mayor: That is Jay Breneman, a 34-year-old combat veteran of Iraq who is now on the county council. Obviously the choice about future leadership is one for Erie’s own people to make. My point is that the generational shift already evident in educational, technological, and non-profit parts of the community is extending to public life too. (And as Breneman and others are well aware, perhaps the most urgent task the city faces doesn’t involve crumbling factories at all. Instead it is the unjust state funding system that penalizes Erie’s schools. Pat Howard, opinion editor of the Erie Times-News, made the case very bluntly this past weekend. We’ll have more on this too, “soon.” )

***

Want a few more teaser items on a pre-Thanksgiving list? Well, here is the latest report from the Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City, on the dispersal of startups around the country, and an accompanying video. And here’s Steve Case to similar effect. And here’s something related from AutoDesk. And this from our friends in Fresno.

But that’s enough for now. I’ll squeeze my thankfulness into the few hours of Thursday remaining when I get off the plane.