Sam Smith, 2007 - Casco Bay, which once lay under a mile high pile of ice, is the westernmost of the great bays of Maine, eighteen miles from headland to headland. The product of glaciers, Casco Bay is speared by a series of points extending in a generally southerly direction. Beyond the points are the islands, many laying on the same axis after being chopped off the peninsulas by the dull but indefatigable knife of the sea. Maine has thousands of islands -- a survey in the 1980s found 2,000 of uncertain ownership alone -- and if its coastline were stretched taut it would reach the Panama Canal. But nowhere is it more jagged and idiosyncratic, nor its waters more jammed with the potsherds of glaciations, than in Casco Bay. The Maine Times claimed once that there were 768 islands and ledges visible above the 9-10 foot high tides. Old tourist material referred to "The Calendar Isles," a reflection of the alleged island count. This count goes back at least to 1700 when an English document cautiously reported that
Sd bay is covered from storms that come from the sea by a multitude of islands, great and small, there being (if report be true) as many islands as there are Days in a Yr.
The US Coast Pilot doesn't tally the rocks and says there are only 136 islands and ledges. The Portland City Guide says 222 islands -- based on a state study that listed only those outcroppings "big enough for a man to get out and stand on. " And a 1992 computer-aided study found 763 islands and ledges appearing at mean high water.
In any, case there are a lot of islands, rocks and ledges. It is here, perhaps, that the lobsterman, upon it being proposed that he undoubtedly knew the location of all the rocks, replied, "Nope. But I know where they ain't."
The bay is also home to an unusual variety of wildlife. The Casco Bay Estuary Project reported in 1995 that 850 species had been identified in local waters. The density of organisms in the bay is more than twice that of Gullmars Fjord in Sweden and more then ten times that of Delaware Bay. Included are over 30,000 water birds of 150 different species, over 2,000 harbor seals, and over fifty pair of nesting osprey and even a few eagles.
Many of the islands are uninhabited. The country's oldest mail boat service plies among the largest of the others, bringing letters, tourists, food and palettes of construction materials. In the lower corner of the bay is Portland, one of the east coast's great natural harbors, with a channel deeper than that of Boston, Philadelphia or New York. During and after World War II, the Navy formed transatlantic convoys and moored as many as 60 vessels off Portland. The islands provided a natural barrier to storms and enemy subs, with anti-submarine netting strung between them completing the task.
The Atlantic coast was far more dangerous than Americans realized. Years after the war it would be revealed that in the first months 46 merchant ships were sunk off the east coast. Another 126 would be sunk before the war was over. And Portland was among the first targets for U-boats after war was declared. At least three U-boats were sunk near Casco Bay - one five miles southeast of the Portland sea buoy, one off Small Point and the other seven miles off Halfway Rock after being spotted by shore gunners on Bailey's Island.
On April 23, 1945 - as Stephen Puleo describes in Due to Enemy Action - the 200 foot USS Eagle was sunk less than five miles southeast of Cape Elizabeth by U-853. Only 13 of the crew survived only to be informed by Navy officials that their ship's boiler had exploded and thus they were not entitled to the Purple Heart medal. It was not surprising the Navy wanted to cover up the cause; after all the war was almost over and no naval vessel had yet been lost off the New England coast.
On May 5, the captains of U-boats received word from Berlin that they were to surrender. The commander of one wrote later, "Henceforth we would be able to live without fear that we had to die tomorrow. An unknown tranquility took possession of me as I realized that I had survived. My death in an iron coffin, a verdict of long standing, was finally suspended."
The commander of U-853, however, either did not get the word or chose to ignore it. That afternoon he sank a freighter off Point Judith, RI commencing a chase that ended with the sub on the ocean floor with all crew members dead.
A day later, the war was formally over.
oooo
My childhood morning chores included feeding the pigs. The three pigs lived in a pen to the west of the big barn, about 500 yards away. I would carry the day's garbage to the barn, where I would mix a second course of grain and water and then, with some relief to my nasal passages, turn these substances over to the grunting trio. I never became particularly fond of the pigs, which was good, because they were to feed us through the following winter, but I had to admire the one that got away and swam a half mile across the river to South Freeport. Pigs weren't meant to do that.
I quickly discovered that the most interesting and enjoyable tasks involved working with Jimmy Mann and Walter Stowe. Walter Stowe had been the caretaker of the place when my parents bought it. He had worked for many years for the highway department of Massachusetts and was short, stubborn and funny. He believed that Packards were the best car ever made, though the disjunction between his stature and his vehicular tastes often made it appear that his car was being driven by the perennial dirty green baseball hat on his bald head.
Mr. Stowe appreciated having someone to instruct and with whom he could share his skepticism of my father's current projects. At an earlier point in his life, Mr. Stowe had told a lot of people what to do. Now Jimmy Mann, a recently returned young Army veteran, was in charge of things on the place. I think Mr. Stowe was skeptical of that too but he didn't say so. He had to make do with gruffly telling me to fetch his paper bag of nails, move a board a little to the left and so forth. It wasn't the Massachusetts Highway Department but he made do and I didn't mind at all.
Besides, he never got poison ivy and would eat it to prove it to me. He had a stock of sayings of which he never tired. He could recite a blasphemous version of the Lord's Prayer at breakneck speed and when you asked him how much something cost, he always replied, "25 cents, two bits, two dimes and a nickel, one quartah of a dollah." When you picked up your end of a plank, the instructions also never varied: "Head her southeast!" When you said goodbye he said, "Keep her under 60 on the curves." And he offered this assessment of a suddenly departed brother-in-law: "That fella never was any good. Now he's upped and died right in the middle of hay season."
When I introduced my future wife to Mr. Stowe and told him we were engaged, he did his shuffle and his head scratching, glanced at Kathy and then looked up at me over his little round glasses and said, "Pretty good for a girl."
" . . . Er, Mr. Stowe, Kathy's from Wisconsin."
Shuffle. Hat back on.
"Glad to meet you anyway."
Behind his back, we called Mr. Stowe 'Waltah,' just like his wife did. Mrs. Stowe would have made a fine mother, but she and Walter never had any children. I know she would have made a fine mother because I would regularly drop by their house at the end of the point just to talk, knowing that there would always be fresh baked cookies before the talking was over.
As far as I was concerned, there was little Mr. Stowe didn't know and little he couldn't do. And if he didn't or couldn't, Jimmy did or could. Jimmy's family had come to Maine 300 years ago His father, Horace, ran a farm just before you turned onto the main road to town. Horace Mann was taciturn and stolid even for Maine, with that native blend of rock-hard integrity and soft-eyed gentleness. Once, at a Farm Bureau supper, as the home-made root beer fizzed around the ten pound block of ice in the galvanized tub, I heard Mr. Brewer tell him, "That was the coldest wintah evah. First snow come the 25th of Octobah and by the fifth of May we were still on runnahs."
In time Jimmy would be called James and become an important person in town like his father, but back then, being just out of the Army, everyone called him Jimmy and we called his wife Mrs. Jimmy.
No matter how incensed my father would get, Jimmy would stay calm. When the moment was just right, he would interject a wry comment or concoct a scenario for disaster that in its absurdity turned my father's concerns into trivia. Then they would both laugh and the crisis would be over. When he couldn't think of anything to say, he would just exercise the Mainer's sacred right to say nothing and in the silence my father would wind down his anger.
Jimmy had a Model A Ford that he had converted into a sort of tractor. You had to crank it to start and Jimmy let me sit in the sideless and topless vehicle and play with the wheel and the levers.
Together -- Mr. Stowe and Jimmy and the Model A Ford -- moved two sheds that connected the farmhouse to the little barn on skids down to the banks of the river a quarter mile away. The sheds became "The River House." The farmhouse would later become my house and the barn would burn to the ground in a conflagration described in the local paper as the "biggest disaster in Freeport this week."
ooo
Today, most people in Maine weren't born there. Now, when you have a problem "down cellah" you call a contractor from Brunswick. Recycling is a cause rather than a necessity and you don't hear people say, as they once did, "Fix it up, make it do, wear it out, use it up, do without."
Other things are disappearing. The humor has largely moved from casual interchange to books and videotapes. It's been many years since the day I drove into a gas station, stepped out of my car into a puddle and heard someone say "How's the watah?"
Occasionally it still crops up. John at R&D Automotive told me a few years back that my brother had been in with his car. "He said he kept smelling gas . . . so I told him to stop it."
Or the exchange at Leighton's department store:
"How ya doin?"
"You want the long story or the short one?"
"Give me the long one."
"Pretty good, I guess."
Or the time Bob Guillamette, the plumber, came to fix something. I asked him to also look at the tub he had recently installed because the water was slow to drain. He returned a couple of minutes later saying, "Jesus Christ, Sam, you're one of the lucky ones. Most of them won't hold water."
The Maine reputation for straight talk, even in business dealings, is likewise on the wane, but as recently as the early 1980s, I set out to buy some fishing tackle for my sons. My first stop was LL Beans. I wasn't going to waste money on fancy gear but I thought I might pick up some nice hooks in the display case there.
I said to the clerk, "I haven't been fishing since I was a kid and all we used were mackerel jigs."
"They still work pretty good."
Mackerel jigs were simply a hook extending from a elongated diamond - shaped weight, so I left Beans having spent all of $2.19. My next stop was Mel's Sports. Mel had some nice but inexpensive metal reels so I picked up a couple.
"These for fresh watah or salt?" he asked unsolicited.
"Salt."
"You'd do better with the plastic reels."
It was true, but Mel lost a couple of bucks in the deal.
My last stop was a hardware store in the Falmouth shopping center. I walked in with my sons and asked about rods.
"These for you or your boys?"
"My boys."
"Well, I wouldn't buy these; they're too good. Go over to Zayres and get the Zebco Z-29. That'll do just fine."
L.L. Bean has a worldwide reputation of honesty and good customer relations, but Bean's wasn't that exceptional for Maine. I once bought a used car for my son sight unseen over the phone from David DeGrandpre at R & D Automotive. I figured I'd do better that way than buying a visible vehicle in a Washington lot. I was right. The car made two roundtrips across the country and innumerable college commutes before collapsing in Moab, Utah. Even then, my son Ben got enough for the car to complete his trip to the west coast by train and bus.
Some of the best stories still come from Beans, though. Like the New York lady who complained that her woodstove was smoking up her living room. When pressed about how she had the flue set up, it turned out that she was not aware of flues and had just plunked the device down in her Manhattan living room and started burning wood. Bean's convinced her to send the stove back and gave her a refund. Another urban customer was upset because the wreath bought the previous December had turned brown in the intervening year. Bean's sent $25 so the customer could buy a new one in time for Christmas.
Once my mother called on what she suspected was a hopeless search to find a certain color yarn to finish her L.L Bean hunting boot needlepoint. The operator said she had been working on the same pattern and had some left to which my mother was welcomed if she'd come by her house to pick it up. And in the 60s when we received a damaged order, the company promptly replaced it. In the package were postage stamps in the same amount as the ones we had used returning the item.
o
Enjoyable were the tasks that emerged from my parents' new interest in tree farming, which, among other things, brought to Maine its first wood chipper. This boisterous device, made in Fitchburg, Mass., was so novel that the Soil & Conservation Service held a field day just to show it off.
My major tree farming task was to stack the lumber randomly dumped by the trucks from the sawmill. Pieces of kindling were placed crosswise on each level of wood, so the boards could dry on both sides. There was a lot of lumber, especially after hurricanes Carol and Edna. When Carol hit, my parents became worried about a pregnant tenant renting the Crate House, so when the calm eye of the storm arrived, my father and I headed up the road to clear a path to town. The deep woods concealed what was happening above and it was not until trees began suddenly toppling that we realized the storm had resumed. We got out just before the way back was blocked. It was a pointless task anyway. Before it was over, Carol blew down a couple of hundred trees. It would be two days before the road to town would be cleared.
Stacking the windfall was hard work but I liked walking past the barn and seeing just how much I had done that summer. Unlike the tennis court, the lumber piles didn't regress each evening. My father seemed pleased as well, and began to regard me as a useful adjunct to his enterprises, so much so that by the age of 14 he let Jimmy teach me how to drive the army surplus personnel carrier with the front-end winch and A-frame. I was double-clutching and shifting into six-wheel drive and using a winch to haul things out of places long before I was able to drive legally on Maine roads beyond the farm.
My brother recalls, "You couldn't go directly from one gear to another but had to go into neutral first, let the clutch all the way out and accelerate or brake the motor before shifting again, depending on the direction of the shift. The maneuver also required one to take into account the load on the truck, its speed and the grade of the road."
The six wheel drive Army surplus truck in which the author learned to drive
The Army truck was just one of a fleet of amazing vehicles that kept the farm going, ranging from the practical to the insane. For example. my father obtained the local Railway Express truck from Clarence Bolster, a familiar figure at the local railroad station. It was, however, short on brakes. Asked how one operated such a vehicle, Jim Degrandpre, son of the farm manager, explained, "You planned ahead." Jim's brothers, Richard and David, converted the family 1952 DeSoto station wagon into a monster tractor, one of several such homemade vehicles.
None of this surprised me much. After all, when I accompanied my parents to France as a college student, our rented Simca had broken down some miles from the nearest village. It turned out to be a broken accelerator rod. My father had me stand on the front bumper with the car's hood up adjusting the speed of the car by hand as he stuck his head out the window and steered it.
In the
course of their constant search for productive uses of the land, my parents one
summer stumbled upon the idea of growing cucumbers for pickling. Growing
cucumbers is easy; growing an acre and a eighth of them for pickling is not.
The pickling factory bought them at prices that varied in inverse ratio to
their size. The best price by far were for those barely larger than one's
finger. The ordinary cucumber of the magnitude one would find in a grocery
store was well past its pickling prime and brought the least per pound. The
time between the former and latter state often appeared to require less than a
day. Despite one's certainty that all of the smaller cucumbers -- or A grade --
had been discovered underneath the long lines of vines, the mere existence of
the larger -- or C grade -- cuke provided evidence that the search had been
inadequate. There were always an embarrassing number of C grade cukes.
Fortunately, the task was so great, and required so many pickers, that my parents could not discover individual responsibility for careless plucking. After all, it could easily have been one of the numerous house guests dragooned into the operation in order to stay ahead of the life cycle of the common cuke On one occasion, even my grandfather appeared in the field in his black tie and black suit to pick for awhile.
At the end of the morning, my brother and I would load 1,000 pounds of cucumbers into the 1941 Plymouth station wagon and haul them to Portland 20 miles distant where they would be weighed and then dumped into huge, malodorous vats. I learned that summer that loading things and driving them some place was fun. Picking them was not. On the way back we would pass five widely spaced small red signs with white lettering. They read:
Big new tube
Just like Louise
You get a lot
In every squeeze
Burma Shave
There was also a growing need for water, which was met in part by a full day visit by the famous dowser, Henry Gross, his friend, the novelist Kenneth Roberts and their friend, the actress Bette Davis. Some of the wells that were dug at Henry Gross' suggestion are still faithfully providing water today.
And some were dug by my hapless friends and me. As my brother Lewis tells it, "Some of our wells were dug rather than drilled and were actually a combination of a well and cistern. They consisted of a hole about five or six feet in diameter, dug by hand in wet clay down about ten or 12 feet, and then lined with stones but no mortar, so the water could seep into the well. The clay was hauled up in buckets by hand, and the water pumped out until the well was finished. . . In this matter of wells, Sam and the friends who visited him were really unlucky. They just happened to be the right size for well work during the summers that my father decided to dig. I think digging wells was the hardest job that any of us kids ever had to do on Wolfe's Neck."
o
According to my father's analysis, farming and conservation were interlocked. If you couldn't save the farms, you couldn't save the land. Further, he figured that Maine, with its rocky soil and short growing season, was best suited for grazing cattle.
Key to the operation was getting the cattle over the winter. This led to a variety of silage experiments. I spent some of one summer driving a tractor back and forth over a 50-foot long, 40 foot wide, 15 foot high box built of railroad ties, compacting the silage underneath. It was called a trench silo even though it wasn't really in a trench.
One summer, Kathy and I arrived for a vacation to find my mother, then a widow, in a small frenzy. Fourteen of her cows had died that morning. There was no explanation, although there was an immediate suspicion that planes from the Brunswick Naval Air Station had dumped something on the land. The next morning, my family, including our two small sons, were dispatched to the animal morgue at the University of Maine in Orono with cow parts in a picnic cooler and samples of their feed. We arrived before breakfast and in our search for the right office ended up in a room occupied primarily by a large table on which lay a dead and partially deconstructed horse. I moved quickly and queasily on, but my sons lingered, eyes unblinking, thinking whatever thoughts the young have when they first see death up close.
The cause, the university reported some days later, was, Sudax, the experimental feed the farm was using. Sudax, which is basically corn without the cob, is rich in nutrients. But little known at the time, it can -- under extremely moist conditions -- generate arsenic. This, in the wake of an extremely wet few weeks, is what it had done.
O
The farm eventually grew to about 900 acres -- nobody ever seemed to know for sure. My parents added a hundred campsites and gave two hundred acres of the woods for a state park. They became noted figures in the state, not only for the organic beef farm and the campsites, but for my father's creative ways of preserving land before it was too late. He bought one of the few great beaches in that part of Maine, Popham, and kept it until the state could buy it from him at the price he had paid. He did the same thing with an historic boatyard. And when rumors arose that oil companies were thinking of building a deep water oil port, using an uninhabited island far down east, he organized a group of purchasers to buy the island, effectively blocking the whole scheme.
As he reached his seventies, my father started to slow down. On a bright day my mother gazed out to sea and said, "Oh look, there's the ghost ship of Harspwell." Later that afternoon my mother and father went swimming. Kathy was in the garden nearby picking flowers. Suddenly I heard Kathy screaming. When I reached the garden with my son Nathaniel, she told me that my father had had a heart attack and that she was going to call the ambulance and get some nitroglycerine.
Nathaniel was only seven, but I told him to stand right where he was and direct the rescue squad to the beach house. I then tore down to beach where I found my mother attempting CPR on my father who was lying on the first floor of the beach house in his bathing suit looking purple and cold. While the rescue squad came the six winding miles from Freeport, my mother and I tried to revive my father. She continued pressing while I gave mouth to mouth resuscitation. For those long minutes I did nothing but try to blow life into my father. It was, I would think later, the closest I had ever come to him.
When the rescue squad arrived, we followed my father to the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital in Brunswick, eleven miles away. My father was dead. After awhile my mother came out from the room where he lay and we just stood in the lobby uncertain what to do next. Finally, I said, "Let's go home and get a drink." My mother put her finger to her mouth, gave a short giggle and whispered, "Shh, these are 7th Day Adventists." We drove home. It was dark now and a full moon had risen and it shone down as we crossed the bridge at Little River. The tide had also risen its ten feet and was gently lapping at the timbers of the bridge. The moon and the tide made what had happened seem strangely natural, even inexorable.
Back at the house, my mother suddenly remembered. "The ghost ship of Harpswell," she cried. "You're right," I said, because I remembered, too. I had been sitting next to her and had looked out and seen nothing.
We pulled out a volume of John Greenleaf Whittier's poems and found it. The ghost ship of Harpswell had been the privateer Dash, built in South Freeport and lost on its maiden cruise. It was later said that women saw the vessel just before their husbands died, but would make nothing of it.
o
My mother took over my father's affairs with the confidence of a small shopkeeper. While he would agonize, lawyerlike, over every implication of an action, she made decisions based on fact and instinct as they carried equal weight. She would sit in a hours-long meeting with a half dozen lawyers and accountants quietly doing her needlepoint and then, when the discussion was over, just say something like, "Now, here is what we are going to do." Once at a real estate closing, two lawyers were arguing over who was to pay a $45 inspection bill. While they disputed, she rummaged in her enormous pocketbook, fished out $45 and placed it on the table, asking mildly whether this would resolve the matter.
She also prolifically defended her views whenever an opportunity arose. Once she spotted a news story about a city councilor from Hallowell who had introduced an ordinance that would allow cows to be detained as illegal aliens if they invaded one of the city's swankiest subdivisions. Using a skill she had taught herself during the war in order to correspond with my father, my mother promptly typed a poorly proofed missive to the city councilor:
Dear Sir; The problems of roaming cows is very familiar to me. Alas, the fault is not always that of the owner.
May I suggest that you look into what made the cattle stray. I find that suburban life and that of the farmer do not mesh very well.
Joggers, some who leave open gates, wandering dogs that chase the cows, and those, as one woman said to our farm Manager, "my dogs don't chase them, they just bark at them!"
All this adds up to very unhappy cows and so they brake out, with disastrous results.
She knew whereof she spoke. Some of her own cows were pastured on rented land near the Brunswick Naval Air Station, then key to our strategic defenses against the Soviet Union. It had around 40 planes and two dozen atom bombs. One day the commanding officer called heatedly to say that 17 of her cows were blocking the main runway of the air station. His tone and rhetoric implied that if America were to lose the Cold War, my mother would bear major responsibility.
My mother was too well-mannered to ask the captain what sort of national security he was providing if 17 cows could break through his perimeter. Instead, she promptly dispatched the farm manager, Charlie Degrandpre, to retrieve the strays.
The captain, however, forgot to tell the guards at the main gate that a farmer in a pickup would be by to get his cows off the runway. The guards were thoroughly skeptical of Charlie's story, and thus Charlie, unlike the 17 cows, was denied immediate access.
The impatient captain took command in the best heavy-handed naval tradition. He ordered the base fire trucks to the runway with sirens blaring. The cows, quite naturally, took to the 3,000 acres that surrounded the airstrip and were not seen again for a week, when, early on the Sunday morning of the officers invitational golf tournament, they turned up en masse on the 9th green.
o
Twelve years after my father's death, my mother also had a heart attack. It turned out not to have been her first one; she had lied to us about the nature of an earlier hospitalization. She would occasionally scribble notes from her bed. "So stupid," said one. She would revive and then sink back. And finally, the last morning, the doctor, who had acceded to her living will and taken no extraordinary steps to keep her alive, came out and gave us a full medical report on her condition. Then he added, in words that seemed both so right and so Maine, "Basically, she's shuttin' down."
At the funeral, I asked Bill Maybury, the undertaker who had first driven my parents to the great stone house at the end of the point forty-one years earlier, how he wanted the pallbearers arranged.
"How many you got?" he asked pleasantly.
"Six," I replied
"Three on a side."
o
Before she died, my mother gave the farm and her home to the University of Southern Maine. The USM president, who had cajoled my mother into the deal, was soon selected as chancellor of the state university system and his successor, an English professor from Baltimore, would tell friends that she was embarrassed to have cattle under her.
After my mother died, the farm deteriorated despite the efforts of a small foundation that she had established to help its work and which I came to head. Charlie DeGrandpre, who had raised four sons on the farm, was about the most respected man in Freeport, and had worked for my parents for more than twenty years, became increasingly frustrated in the mindless, memo-rampant world of a large academic bureaucracy.
The farm belonged to another world, which the university neither understood nor respected. It could not understand, for example, why Jimmy DeGrandpre would come from his real estate office and, tieless but still in his white shirt, help his father load bales of hay late in a hot summer afternoon. The main job of an administrator at USM was to keep his or her job. Doing something that wasn't your job was beyond comprehension.
When the university hired a new manager, he quickly fired the two farm workers, put triple locks on the farm dumpsters, and cut off profitable snow plowing services to neighbors a few weeks before the first winter storm.
The university also had a new president, Richard Pattenaude, a 1980s style manager relentlessly abstract in rhetoric and action. Once when I pleaded with him to find someone at the university who would really cared about the farm, he said, "Oh I know what you want. You want a product champion." I said I guessed so, although what I really wanted was someone who gave a damn.
To the university the farm was just another facility. And the people who cared about it were intrusions on orderly management. When I proposed a modest summer ecology project on a couple of acres of farm land, a dozen local people quickly began meeting to organize, including the director of the state park, the head of Freeport Community Services and of Freeport Community Education. A contractor not only offered a 12'x30' shed but the free use of his crew one day a month.
When we took the proposal before the university, the new president, the vice president, the dean, the farm manager and the university lawyer sat stony faced as it was described by the project's leader.
The first reaction was from the lawyer. There were, she said, serious liability problems. Funny, I thought, there hadn't been any "serious liability problems" when the university had instituted a far more risky Outward Bound-type program on a couple of acres on the farm.
"Let's cut to the chase," I said. "we've already looked into that and we can get, and have money for, insurance for $750."
The dean then gave the real reason. "It's the camel's nose under the tent," he said. The real issue, it turned out, was control. I had designed the project specifically to have it not screwed up by the university and all they really wanted was the power to screw it up. Finally, we had to give them the power to screw it up and they did.
After a hostile exchange of op ed pieces in the Portland Press Herald with Pattenaude, I resigned as president of the farm foundation.
o
I feared the whole experience with the university and the farm would sour me. But the restorative powers of the land and the water soon took hold. I stopped wondering about scattered picnic benches and skewed budgets and began again examining closely the field pine near the place where the road to our house turns. It had changed as it did every time I noticed it and yet it, as always, was exactly the same.
Both my parents had died here. My 25-year-old nephew had been killed in an accident four miles up the road. David DeGrandpre, my brother in a failed chase to a dream, had fallen to his death from a ladder a mile the other way. And yet it still seemed all right, still beautiful.
And so when I left Maine, I did what I had done each time since the end of that first summer. I went to the shore and for a long, long time stared out to Bustins and Moshiers and Eagle and Jewell and Chebeague, Whaleboat and Lower Goose and the ledge where the seals rest at low tide as I tried to fix in my mind every pixel of what I saw, to keep and to hold until I could come back.
