A sardine will drop in Maine
To usher in the new, Eastport looks to old
As the 1,070-pound Waterford crystal ball begins its descent in New York's Times Square on Sunday night, a few hundred souls in Eastport , Maine, 570 miles to the northeast, will lift their eyes and watch their own harbinger of the New Year: a 22-foot-long sardine.
The sardine is a symbol for the easternmost city in the United States, where canneries were once a booming industry. The canneries are gone, and Eastport is known as an artsy seaside community with galleries and a quaint downtown. But the sardine is a new New Year's Eve tradition.
"We thought it was intriguing enough, bizarre enough, that it might catch some interest," said Hugh French , director of Eastport's Tides Institute & Museum of Art , which will lower the sardine on Sunday night.
Eastport is not alone. Across the country, enterprising civic cheerleaders have come up with all manner of local versions of the Times Square countdown.
In North Carolina, Brasstown drops a live opossum in a cage from the top of a country store.
In Pennsylvania, Lebanon drops a massive bologna.
In Florida, Key West boasts three drops within a mile of one another -- a conch shell, a woman dressed as a pirate wench, and a drag queen named Sushi, generally ensconced in a red high-heeled shoe.
In Eastport, a picturesque city on Moose Island that is home to fewer than 2,000 people, the stab at a new sardine tradition began last year.
Then, a downtown civic group suggested lowering a ball from the top of the Tides Institute.
"I found that very derivative," said Chris "Crash" Barry , a local artist who was then working at the Tides Institute.
He said he thought a sardine would better represent the city's cultural history.
And others agreed. Last New Year's Eve, about 350 people turned out to watch the descent of a sardine -- that one was only 6 1/2 feet, with a glittery ball in its mouth -- in a salute to Times Square.
To be fair to many Canadians, who live less than a mile away across Passamaquoddy Bay, and to observe Atlantic time there, Eastport also dropped a large maple leaf at 11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
But it's the sardine that gets most of the attention.
"People got a big chuckle out of it," said French, who got e-mail messages from as far away as Norway (a curator of a sardine museum there sent a picture of "the world's largest sardine can.")
The ball-drop tradition harks back to the early 19th century, when a ball installed on the top of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich dropped every day at 1 p.m.
This ball-dropping would allow ship captains to set their chronometers, according to the Times Square Alliance website. Times Square lowered its first New Year's ball in 1907.
In recent years, as First Night celebrations have flourished in communities across the country, locals have infused the ball-dropping with local pride.
The traditions often seem to make sense only to the people who live there.
"We are known for our bologna, so it's a real good fit," said Jody Kasperowicz , coordinator of Lebanon, Pa.'s Bologna Drop, which will mark its 10th anniversary Sunday with the descent of a 150-pound , 10-foot bologna.
In Havre de Grace , Md., which is known for duck-decoy carving, a hook-and-ladder fire truck drops a massive duck designed by a decoy carver, with colored Christmas lights depicting the bird's plumage.
This year, though, reported Warren Hiss , a volunteer at the Havre de Grace Decoy Museum , the duck cannot be dropped because the truck is in the repair shop, so it will be displayed atop a tall building instead.
In Eastport this year, the sardine will be part of Eastport's Festival of Lights, which also includes a dance for seniors, short plays, open galleries, and music. Barry's wife, the artist Shana Barry , constructed an 80-pound sardine named Sally.
The fish is three times as long as last year's, made of lumber and chicken wire decorated with silver lamé. To lower the fish, Chris Barry and another local artist engineered a boom made of welded steel pipe and connected it to a pulley system. A trial run went swimmingly yesterday, to Barry's relief.
"We would hate to have anybody decapitated by a sardine," he said.
Until Sunday night, the sardine is being stored at a new restaurant, The Pickled Herring. 