I was this many years old when I found out that the classic flower of Maine, the lupine, is not a native species to the state. Lupines are good for pollinators and are hugely popular as perennials because they proliferate so easily, but their seeds are also poisonous to farm animals and native herbivores. There was one native lupine species, the sundial lupine, but it has been extinct in Maine for some time. But those fields of waving purple, blue, and pink flowers? They didn’t grow up here and they come from away.

I’m not against flowers—who could be?—but the problem with the introduction of invasive species is that they often crowd out native ones. And when we lose native species, we lose the plants and fauna that are adapted to the environment and are often interdependent. Lupine, for example, can have a deleterious impact on the migratory monarch butterfly, whose larvae cannot eat lupine. The larvae’s survival depends on native milkweed and lupine crowds that out.

It’s hard not to think of invasive species in the summer time in Maine. I’ve lived in and around tourist popular areas all my life and the seasonal influx is as familiar to me as the pain in my knees. And like nearly everyone who lives here, I have a mixed feeling about the incomers.

First off, I like it when they spend money and support local businesses. Our economy is beholden to them and because of that, I have taken to standing by the dock at the Ocean Gateway Terminal and chanting to the tourists as they come off the boat “Spend money, spend money.”

At the same time I’m sympathetic to the view of John D. Macdonald, whose beloved Florida has been overrun with tourists since time immemorial, or at least since the motorcar came along. I can’t remember in which of the Travis McGee novels he posits this, but I’d like to have the Maine Department of Tourism consider supplying all tourists with a small machine they could strap to their backs that would, every half hour or so, dispense a twenty-dollar bill for the nearest recipient. It might go a long way to making the traffic, vehicular and sidewalkian, more bearable.

I jest, of course, though it seems possible to me that the summer influx, not to mention the popularity of Maine as a place for people to move to, has some potential to crowd out the native. I’m not thinking about people so much as some of the more pleasurable aspects of being in the state, even in the cities. For example, drivers from elsewhere often don’t understand that the thick white stripes in a crosswalk denote a safe place for pedestrians to cross and thus, a notice to those drivers to stop and let them go. Or just because you notice a cashier opening a new lane before anyone else doesn’t mean you get to jump the line.

But the longest-lasting native species are hardy and that’s the consolation I have. No Audi-driver in a hurry to get to Kettle Cove Creamery is going to drive old Dave at the small engine repair shop out of his place. There is native and not, and even if we need the fresh air and income of the incomers, it is pleasant to believe that we will survive. Those of us who came in and closed the door behind us, that is.