I’ve moved around a fair bit, but one place has been a constant since I was born almost 70 years ago. It’s an island off the coast of Maine, and I’m there now.
It’s a privilege to have a summer home – even a rough, unheated, wood-frame cottage that hasn’t changed all that much since my great-grandfather, who lived in nearby Gardiner, Maine, bought it in 1936. Passed down in my mother’s family over five generations, it’s now shared by about 12 households. We divvy up the summer, so my period of basking in privilege is brief. The cottage is one of perhaps 50 on the mile-long island, which has one dirt road running the length of it. We don’t own any land except the ground the cottage sits on. Yet it’s hard to overstate the depth of my ties to this chilly, rocky terrain.
It’s not the people I feel close to, though everyone’s friendly enough; it’s the land. The contours of the granite shoreline, sculpted by geologic forces millions of years ago, are almost as familiar to me as those of my own body.
My mother, who roamed the island with her siblings in the 1930s and ’40s, taught me the names of the landmark rocks. Turtle Rock rises in Middle Cove like a hundred-foot-long turtle in its shell; you can walk to it over mud flats at low tide. Bathtub Rock, near the beach, has twin mounds that hold seawater for “taking a bath.” Pancake Rock is a stack of flat round slabs. Safety Rock, barely submerged at high tide, provides a perch for swimmers to rest.
The Fairy Path, which winds through woods to the Back Cove, is lined with fairy houses built by children every summer from sticks, stones, pinecones, shells, and moss. These are city and suburban children, but somehow they know instinctively that materials from nature are imbued with magic.
I’m a city person too, but my feelings about this island give me an inkling of the bonds that many people used to have, and some still do have, with ancestral land. I think of farmers who passed the family farm from generation to generation, perhaps burying their dead in a tiny family graveyard on the land, until the economics of small farming became unsustainable and they had to sell. I think of people who’ve been forced off their land by infrastructure projects like dams and highways or by development for housing and commerce. I think about what it must have meant to them to lose not just their livelihood but their generational connection to a landscape so intimately known.
A warming ocean
A quarter century ago, when my daughter was little, we’d walk out to Turtle Rock at low tide, clamber over to the ocean side, and hunt for sea life. Pulling back the rockweed exposed starfish and sea urchins, winkles, limpets, and whelks. Crabs lurked in dark crevices, and clusters of jellylike eggs clung to the underside of rocks. But when I checked the back side of Turtle several years ago: nothing. The rocks that year were covered with the toxic algae scum known as red tide. When we arrived this year, we were greeted by the stench of dead fish that littered the island’s beaches. The tides swept them out a few days later.
The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than 97 percent of the world’s ocean surface, according to the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. Human-caused global warming is a major factor, along with Arctic ice melt and shifting ocean currents. Higher ocean temperatures favor algae blooms that kill sea life, though red tide doesn’t seem to have caused the recent spate of dead fish. Warming also changes the balance of marine species. Fishermen (and women) in this area know the waters are warmer than they used to be, and changing fish stocks are affecting their catch.
Climate change is also causing sea level rise, so that storm tides – which happen when storm surge coincides with astronomical high tide – push ever higher. Flooding has damaged homes and businesses along the Maine coast and eroded beaches, dunes, and salt marshes. On the island, storm tides are surging closer to cottages. A fierce winter storm that pounded the island last December collapsed part of the seawall and road, which had to be rebuilt.
Carson’s warning
Marine biologist and writer Rachel Carson spent her summers on Southport Island, which is connected to our island by a wooden bridge. She’s known for Silent Spring (1962), which sounded the alarm on the dangers of DDT and other chemical pesticides. A pioneer of the global environmental movement, Carson saw ecosystems as interconnected and warned of the devastating human impact on them – radical ideas in her day.
Her other books reflect her love of the ocean and shore, including The Sea Around Us (1951), The Edge of the Sea (1955), and The Sense of Wonder (1965). The last was published posthumously after Carson’s death from cancer in 1964. In it, she tells of exploring the Southport woods and tide pools with her two-year-old grandnephew – much as I explored this island with my own daughter, seeking to instill a sense of wonder at the natural world.
Here, I’ve come to understand that land, ocean, air, and living creatures are interdependent and that a change in one system, whether natural or human-made, can send changes rippling through the others. We have a place within these systems, but we tamper with them at our peril. Above all, I’ve learned what it means to feel a connection to land. In this globalized age, people are on the move. But feeling tied to a place, and to the natural world, is a fundamental part of what it means to be human.
I took the pictures in this post. If you share them, please give credit.
Thank you for this walk through nature. Beautiful. So many challenges to this fragile planet. Glad you can still enjoy with your family.
Very nostalgic. I was attached this way to family land in a national forest in Michigan.