Disintegration and discontent abound in rural Maine. We hang on out here, praying for better days. We are “placed people,” in Wendell Berry’s term; we stay put no matter what.

Another author, Wallace Stegner, calls us “stickers” since we stick to the homeplace, as opposed to “boomers,” who flit from place to place, fad to fad. “Placed” people “love the life they have made and the place they have made it in,” he wrote. I prefer Berry’s term.

But staying “placed” is ever harder as jobs flee small towns and the countryside. Here are a few ideas about ways to pull rural Maine back up.

Housing is not only expensive in rural Maine, but the housing stock is crumbling. I wrote two weeks ago about counting 34 empty houses along Route 2 between Palmyra and New Sharon. Empty houses deteriorate quickly.

About one in 12 Maine housing units is a mobile home. It runs as high as one in eight in rural Maine. Mobile homes may be plentiful because people can’t afford a fixed house. Yet, many towns raise the cost of housing by requiring larger-than-needed house lots.

A large lot size also spaces houses so that towns offering services such as water and sewer spend more to install and maintain those systems because houses stand far apart. Paying for that, of course, falls back on the house owner, raising the cost of ownership.

Times are hard for town governments. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, my town of New Sharon has nine firefighters, about half the staff of 2019. And local fire/rescue squads are being stretched thin by the rising number of medical calls. In January, for example, seven of the nine calls to New Sharon Fire/Rescue were medical. Two were for fires, both in other towns. (January’s total number of calls was way lower than usual.)

We are proud, even boastful, about local control, but local control can raise costs. We need to find ways to entice more residents to join fire/rescue squads or to merge those services without drastically raising response time. Paying firefighters, which New Sharon began when I was on the Select Board (2016-19), helps, but I doubt anyone signs on to fire/rescue for an hourly wage paid only while the squad is on a call.

Towns can’t find police officers and are in the unhappy position of competing with one another for officers. Supply (low) and demand (high). And people in towns with police forces are double-tagged because they also pay for sheriff’s coverage for the rest of us. I expect we can expect to see police wages rise sharply.

We have just come through a public health crunch that hit schools unusually hard. Thousands of Maine kids have lost nearly two years of school. Internet access is often difficult in rural Maine, and many kids couldn’t get to a computer to “learn” remotely.

Now that schoolhouses have reopened, we need a statewide effort to identify these kids and help them catch up. This may mean tutors after school. It may mean more extensive summer school so teachers can work closer to one-on-one to make up for lost time.

Cars are the way people move about rural Maine. And closures have meant many people must travel more miles to get to work or store. I once picked up a hitchhiker at 6:30 a.m. in Skowhegan. He had first hoisted his thumb at 4:30 that morning in Madison. He was going to Pittsfield, where he worked for Herman Shoe (now closed). He did it every day. He was a poster child for the willingness of “placed” people to do what they have to do.

I’m no fan of state Rep. Laurel Libby. R-Auburn, but her idea to suspend the state’s 30-cents-a-gallon gasoline tax for 2022 is on the right track for rural Maine. Maybe the legislature could put in a clause to cut the tax until crude oil falls below, say, $90 a barrel.

Lost jobs, as at Herman Shoe, underlie the fall of rural Maine. We haven’t progressed much in replacing those jobs, but the University of Maine may be a place to look.

UMaine was recently elevated to an R-1 rating, putting it among the 146 top research schools rated by Carnegie Classification. Research spending there has grown by 80% in five years. The research has paid off in new products that use Maine’s natural resources.

UMaine pioneered a wood-epoxy amalgam, which strengthens wood, and the “bridge in a backpack,” an arch system for bridges. But only 28 bridges have been built. Dr. Greg Porter developed the Caribou Russet potato, which I consider a vast improvement over the Russet Burbank, in 2015, but it is planted on less than 10% of Maine’s potato acreage. By the way, Ninety-Nine restaurants use the Caribou Russet exclusively. Hint, hint.

Great things are happening in Orono, but professors might not make the best sales reps. Besides, they need to be in the lab developing new uses for our resources. Nor is Augusta good at sales, but it could put to work some private-sector folks who do know how to sell.

I won’t repeat the litany of loss in rural Maine, but we have renewable resources here, and we have people who know how to use the resources. We need ideas to make those resources work for rural Maine.

On a radio call-in show, Bob Neal once nominated Wendell Berry as the greatest living American. The announcer ended nominations, saying Berry wins the contest hands-down. Neal can be reached at [email protected].