Used to be if Mainers used the term fencing, they were referring to the wooden rails that they pounded into the pasture out back when the frost finally left the ground. These days the word has an entirely new meaning Down East — the ancient art of swordplay seems to be cutting a swath through state. The gentlemanly sport of fencing — graceful dueling with thin, plastic-tipped foils — isn’t the kind of pastime one would expect to find in gritty fishing villages and Maine mill towns. It’s usually thought of as a preppy pursuit and confined to universities and urban areas. But fencing has begun to catch on like spring fever in communities large and small across the state.

Just outside Bucksport, John Krause founded the Down East School of Fencing five years ago. His initial classes in Belfast and Bucksport filled right up, and he’s been steadily adding students and classes ever since, toting his sabres and foils throughout the midcoast and as far north as Bangor, teaching a growing number of erstwhile sword fighters — both kids and adults — how to thrust and parry, riposte and reprise, fleche and flick. He’s now readying a group of young fencers for a trip to the Junior Olympics in Salt Lake City.

In Portland, champion fencer Nancy Becker has been doing likewise since 1996, leading eager new fencers through lessons and bouts at a variety of facilities around the Forest City. A few months ago she opened the state’s first bonafide brick-and-mortar fencing school — the Portland Fencing Center — in an old Westbrook mill, a big step forward — a lunge even — for the sport in Maine.

A fencer for thirty years and the women’s champion of her native southern New Jersey five years in a row, Becker has been surprised and gratified by the response of Mainers both to the sport and to the new center. “A lot of people see [sword fighting] in the movies, and tell me it’s something they’ve always wanted to learn,” she says. “They’re just thrilled to find it locally.”

Becker already has thirty-five students at the center — from Harpswell and Kennebunk and Lewiston — and would-be Zorros, both men and women, are ringing her phone off the hook. “I’ve been getting a lot of calls from former fencers, people who fenced in college and want to take it back up,” she says.

Becker thinks the sport will be a part of the Maine landscape for years to come. “People here have really taken to it,” she notes.

When it comes to fencing, Mainers, it seems, are getting the point.

Touché.

(Published March 2001)