Editorial: How could it happen?

Published in the Current

SCARBOROUGH (Aug 4, 2005): If the state is serious about driver safety – and they say they are, even recently stepping up police patrols on busy stretches of highways – it’s time for a registry of dangerous drivers, similar to the one we have for sex offenders.

A bad driver can pose a greater risk to more people in a single day than some sex offenders may in their whole lives. It’s time we knew who the worst drivers are, so we can protect ourselves and each other.

It’s shocking and tragic enough that Tina Turcotte of Scarborough was killed in a car crash last week. Our sympathies go out to her family and friends, who are no doubt reeling in shock. We hope they are also feeling love and support from those around them.

But what’s worse is that the driver of the truck has an extended history of traffic violations, including more than 42 convictions, has had his driver’s license suspended 19 times, and has been involved in five crashes, two of which have killed another driver.

Deputy Secretary of State Doug Dunbar said there are even more convictions that are not shown in state records, because of complications of the state’s computer system.

Scott Hewitt of Caribou, who was bailed out of jail just hours after the crash, might even be back on the road. The state has no way to know, and no way to prevent him from driving again.

And when he was driving Friday, Hewitt’s license was again under suspension, this time for failure to pay a court-imposed fine.

His state driving record starts when he was 19, showing Hewitt has had an average of more than three convictions every year.

Several of those convictions are for serious violations, including two for operating after suspension and one for operating after his license was revoked because he had so many driving-related convictions.

Among his 16 speeding convictions are four for driving double the posted speed limit – 50 mph in a 25 mph zone, 59 mph in a 30 mph zone, 53 mph in a 25 mph zone and 29 mph in a 15 mph zone. He also was convicted for breaking commercial trucking rules 10 times.

That’s just Hewitt. What’s even more scary is that there are others we don't know about. The state needs a way to get drivers them off the road, permanently.

Right now, there’s no way a person’s driver’s license can be permanently revoked. Even a person convicted of driving drunk and causing an accident that kills a person can appeal a revocation after 10 years.

It’s true that there is no practical way to monitor a person to make sure that they are never actually behind the wheel of a car. And such a person can still drive, and can get away with it.

There are parallels here with sex offenders, who also cannot practically be physically monitored to keep them away from children or other potential victims. They must be allowed to go about their lives after serving their sentences.

But they potentially pose a danger to the general public, and enough convicted sex offenders have committed subsequent offenses to generate public outcry.

Gov. John Baldacci has asked for a review to see what the state can do better.

It’s time for Maine to have a dangerous driver registry. After some number of convictions for traffic infractions – say six over three years – or even just one of a very serious nature, like doubling the speed limit, a person should be placed in a public registry for a period of time.

Residents in their communities should be notified. The dangerous drivers should have to register with their local police, and should know that their neighbors are watching them closely.

While that might not make the dangerous drivers reform, it would help neighbors in their communities to know what’s going on, and perhaps encourage the neighbors to call police when the offender backs out of the driveway.

Roads are public spaces, and when dangerous people are in control of heavy machines, we are all at risk.

Jeff Inglis, editor

Bahá’ís keep the faith in S.P.

Published in the Current

SOUTH PORTLAND (Aug 4, 2005): In his late 20s, Glenn Nerbak, raised Catholic, found his true religion: Bahá’í.

Nerbak, now a South Portland resident and one of 10 Bahá’ís in the city, had attended Catholic schools in his youth but had given up practicing religion during college because he felt there were too many questions he couldn’t find answers to. In his late 20s, he started searching again, to find a faith that fit.

Then, in his late 20s, he was playing basketball with a friend in Portsmouth, N.H., and happened to mention he needed a place to live. The friend’s parents had a place in Eliot, Maine, and the friend suggested he consider staying there.

The family were Bahá’ís, and near their place, which Nerbak rented and shared with his friend, was a Bahá’í center called Green Acres, where Nerbak began to learn about the faith.

Bahá’í is a monotheistic faith, believing in one God, and having aspects similar to Christianity, Judaism and Islam. It teaches “progressive revelation,” in which God sends many messengers into the world over time, bringing universal teachings that never change, and rules and guidelines specific to the time the messengers arrive.

“It’s the most recent of the independent religions,” beginning in 1863. It has about 75 followers in Portland and a total of about 300 statewide. Nationally, there are 120,000 to 130,000, and five million to six million in more than 200 countries around the world.

Based on the oneness of humankind and the Golden Rule, and incorporating the teachings of Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Zoroaster and Muhammad, the Bahá’í faith teaches that the most recent messenger from God is Bahá’u’llah, born in 1817 in Persia – now Iran – into a Muslim family. As a young man, he followed another teacher, now considered a herald of Bahá’í, who was feared by the mainstream clerics, and was eventually executed, as were about 20,000 of his followers.

Bahá’u’llah was not executed, but went to prison, where, in a Tehran dungeon in 1853, he felt called by God, Nerbak said. The calling would result in the Bahá’í faith, but would also mean powerful clerics would keep him in prison or in exile for most of his life.

Even though Bahá’u’llah was born a Muslim, the Bahá’í faith is an independent religion, just as Jesus was born a Jew but founded Christianity, Nerbak said.

As he learned about Bahá’í, “I felt this is the religion for me.” A teacher himself, the idea of progressive revelation was appealing.

“It builds on previous knowledge,” the same way he teaches students lessons based on what they learned the previous year from another teacher, he said.

Bahá’u’llah wrote over 100 books throughout his life, some of which have not yet been translated into English. It is to those books that Bahá’ís look for wisdom and guidance.

“We’re a quiet religion. We don’t proselytize. We don’t have clergy,” Nerbak said.

One of Bahá’u’llah’s teachings about equality was the lack of a need for clergy to interpret his lessons. Instead, people were now educated well throughout the world, and could interpret the teachings for themselves.

Nerbak felt this was what he had been praying to find, and discounts the idea of the meeting with his friends’ parents being just an accident.

“Coincidence is like God’s way of remaining anonymous,” Nerbak said.

In the early 1980s, Nerbak went on a pilgrimage to the world headquarters of the Bahá’í faith, on Mount Carmel in Haifa, Israel, a place Bahá’u’llah visited and pointed out to his followers as a place that should be a holy spot for them.

“It’s a wonderful place to be,” said Nerbak.

While there, he met a woman in whom he became interested, and she in him. But he reminded himself that he was on a pilgrimage: “I didn’t come here to meet someone,” he said.

Even as he prayed about what to do, a series of coincidences showed him that he was not just intoxicated by the beautiful surroundings and the holiness of the place. Among the events that revealed to him that she was the match of his life was when she pulled off a huge surprise party for his birthday.

They have been married for 20 years, and both are active in South Portland’s Bahá’í community. The group meets on the first day of every month of the Bahá’í calendar to talk about religion, as well as meet socially.

In 1990, they were invited to serve in Haifa, where they spent five years working in the administrative offices of the faith. He had to quit his job at Lyman Moore Middle School in Portland, but managed to get rehired when he returned.

The experience, and his practice of his faith, have brought him together with other people who are also working toward world unity.

“We’re united in a lot of realms,” including information and economic areas, but not in the political and religious areas, Nerbak said. But Bahá’ís recognize it will not happen overnight.

“The world has to be ready for it,” Nerbak said.

Another pipe found on Casino Beach

Published in the Current

CAPE ELIZABETH (Aug 4, 2005): A copper pipe was found in the surf on Casino Beach in Cape Elizabeth Tuesday evening, recalling the recovery of a similar item in June, which turned out to be a pipe bomb.

The item was found by a resident near the low-tide line, according to Cape Elizabeth Police Chief Neil Williams.

"It had obviously been in the water quite some time," he said. The pipe did not have any holes drilled in it for a fuse, but did have an end cap, similar to other pipe bombs.

There was no gunpowder or other explosive material in the pipe, Williams said.

He would not say whether the pipe was related to the previous pipe bomb, which has triggered an investigation into a 15-year-old Cape resident, in whose home police found explosives and pipes similar to those found on the beach.

Police have also found in his home a box sent from a fireworks company to the boy's mother's office in the Old Port and a videotape that court documents say shows the boy blowing up pipe bombs on Casino Beach the night before the first pipe was found.

Former chief still going strong

Published in the Current

SOUTH PORTLAND (Aug 4, 2005): Jim Darling of South Portland has helped train hundreds of South Portland drivers and shaped its police force, but his local ties run deeper still.

Darling, who turns 94 today, Aug. 4, was born in Ferry Village, and has stayed in the area his whole life. He and his family lived in Portland before becoming pioneers in the Broad Cove area of Cape Elizabeth. “We were the only ones there,” he said.

Darling remembers his father trying to get a skiff off the beach to get out to the boat during a northeaster, but the waves drove him back. “His boat eventually sunk that night,” taking to the bottom all of his traps and his dory.

The family – “there were 13 of us altogether” – stayed in Broad Cove eking out a living into the 1920s.

Darling went to school at the Bowery Beach schoolhouse, now the Lions’ Den.

“We walked a mile to get there,” up a dirt road, he said. “When the snow came, we just had a little trail up to the school.”

When he finished the five grades there, he still walked up there, to catch a horse-drawn wagon to class at Pond Cove School, where the Thomas Memorial Library is now. High school classes were held on the second floor of Town Hall.

“The summers were idyllic,” Darling said. “On the last day of school we came home, took off our shoes and didn’t put them back on until school started.”

Winters were different, living by kerosene lamps and well water. “It toughened you up in a lot of ways,” Darling said.

The family eventually moved to the Riverton area of Portland for a brief stay, and then to Front Street in South Portland.

Making a new life

Just after coming back to South Portland, Darling met the woman who would become his wife. The two were at a housewarming in Ferry Village and struck up a conversation, what Darling now calls “just one of those chance meetings, which turned out to be perfect.”

Merle, a bank teller, died in March at age 90, after 69 years of marriage. She was born on Feb. 4, so the couple would celebrate one’s birthday and the other’s half-birthday on those dates each year.

He works hard to keep her memory alive. Last week he baked a pineapple pie. “I found it in my wife’s recipe book. I don’t remember her ever making it and I thought I’d try it,” he said.

He and Merle raised three sons, Peter, who died in 2000 of asbestos-related cancer; George, who is a Methodist minister in Clinton; and Dana, who lives on Two Lights Road in Cape Elizabeth.

In February 1941, Darling started work with the South Portland police.

“I was the seventh man on the police department,” he said. “We had no training, nothing. You learned by doing.”

“During the war, they discovered there wasn’t enough young men who knew how to drive the trucks” the Army needed, so the federal government started driver education courses.

“I was always interested in traffic safety,” so Darling began teaching classes at South Portland High School, where he taught 80 kids a year for eight years, while also working full-time as a police officer.

As a result of his work, he attended a traffic safety institute at Northwestern University, from which he brought back many ideas that would become common practice in South Portland and nationwide.

Formalizing the police

“I put seat belts in cruisers,” he said, recalling having to convince people during test drives, zipping quickly around corners to show how seat belts can help prevent accidents by keeping drivers behind the wheel.

Later, “we were the first to use the breathalyzer.”

Another first is “burned” into his memory: “I was the first officer on the scene of that plane crash in Redbank,” on July 11, 1944, when a bomber clipped a tree while trying to land at the Portland airport.

He remembers the challenge of identifying the 15 dead, many burned beyond recognition.

“The one person who could identify them was a blind girl” who had talked to many of the victims earlier in the day and remembered what they said they were going to have for dinner, Darling said. “She knew what they ate,” allowing authorities to identify some victims by the contents of their stomachs.

On Jan. 1, 1959, Darling became chief of police, a job he held until retiring in 1968.

“I liked the work. I liked meeting the people, but you lose a lot of faith in human nature,” he said.

The couple enjoyed their retirement as well. Darling did more of the woodcarving that had been a hobby, making the seagull that sits out front of his house, as well as models of puffins, ducks, geese, eagles and owls that decorate the shelves inside and the homes of a few folks who bought them or were given them over the years.

For their 50th anniversary, Darling and Merle, then in their 70s, took a Volkswagen camper across the country, traveling 10,000 miles in 10 weeks on a marathon tour to see friends and family.

For his 85th birthday, his sons got him a dog. And last month, he got his first computer. “I can write an e-mail,” he said.

Maine Attraction: Portland's inland and coastal secrets

Published in National Geographic Adventure

Come August, Mainers and Maine-lovers take to Portland's Casco Bay like lobsters to salted herring. But while the bay's more than 200 islands offer countless opportunities for sailing, paddling, and lighthouse ogling, savvy visitors combine coastal attractions with inland thrills to create the ultimate seaside escape. Hit the coast, sure, but also bike a back road, climb a local hill, and save an evening or two to check out the urban scene in Portland's very own warehouse district-bum-boutique haven: the Old Port.

INN AND AROUND
Drop your bags. The 1835 vintage Inn at ParkSpring ($149; www.innatparkspring.com), just off Portland's bustling Old Port, offers an eclectic medley of lodgings, from 19th-century colonial bedchambers to renovated modern rooms - all air-conditioned to cool you down after a hard day's exploring. In the morning, get your fill of Maine blueberries and other local delicacies at the inn's breakfast table before setting out on your day's paddle or pedal.

Treat your ears. Seven nights a week, top local and regional artists, like the rockabilly group King Memphis, jam at the Free Street Taverna's downstairs bar (207-772-5483). Accompany the set with a pint of local summer ale like Geary's or Shipyard ($3).

Fill your belly. Wrap up your day's coastal adventures like a true-blue Mainer: Eat seafood from a plastic basket at a picnic table right on the rocky shore. The Lobster Shack at Two Lights (207-799-1677) in Cape Elizabeth specializes in steamed lobster and lobster rolls, but their lobster stew ($13) - a coastal favorite little known elsewhere - steals the show ($4 to $22 for entrées; lobster prices vary with market).

OUT AND ABOUT
Bike by morning. If you only have a few hours, rent a bike from CycleMania ($20 a day; www.cyclemania1.com) and head north out of town for the rolling countryside along the lightly traveled State Routes 9 and 115. Don't forget your snack money: At Toots Ice Cream (207-829-3723) on Walnut Hill Road, just south of the junction with Route 9 in North Yarmouth, you'll have a chance to meet the cows who contributed to your chocolate shake.

Hike by day. A scenic hour's drive northwest of Portland is Pleasant Mountain, in Bridgton, where the three-and-a-half mile (round-trip) Ledges Trail affords summit views that extend to New Hampshire's Mount Washington.

Paddle by night. Choppy surf and hidden rocks make a nocturnal paddle on Casco Bay a dicey proposition. But at Scarborough Marsh - the state's largest - you can paddle in the enchanting stillness of a full-moon night. Your naturalist guide from the Scarborough Marsh Audubon Center ($12 for a one-and-a-half hour trip; www.maineaudubon.org) will attune you to the great horned owls hooting from their perches and the black-crowned night herons stalking in the darkness.

Resources: To find out about the best sea kayaking between Kennebunkport and Bar Harbor, take the ferry to Peaks Island to visit the Maine Island Kayak Company (800-796-2373; www.maineislandkayak.com). For other pursuits, stop by one of Maine MountainWorks's two Portland stores (207-879-1410).