Thermidor galore

TO THE tourists who crowd into Maine each summer, lobstering used to be thought of as “quaint”: lots of wooden lobster pots and tanned old tars, all set in a state known for little else but forests and potatoes. “Wages weren't much above subsistence,” says Ed Blackmore, who has laid and hauled in traps for decades off Stonington. He would leave at daylight, return at dusk, ignore the rain, and cope with water so cold that few lobstermen even bothered to learn how to swim; to fall in was to die.