There Goes Summer

Toward the end of the summer there’s a day out on the water when the weather changes moods, and it feels like the season takes a subtle but abrupt turn around the corner. The morning feels like summer, but as the afternoon sun fades and the breeze picks-up, you start looking for those extra layers of clothing. A few days ago felt like such a day. I’d guided a mid-day trip and headed out on my own afterward. I didn’t get far. Paddling past a favorite spot – one that had often been occupied by campers for much of the summer, but was now vacant – I opted to stop and hang my hammock rather than paddle farther.

I felt a bit worn-out, lazy – whatever. Maybe I wasn’t sure if that southwest breeze would let-up before I had to paddle back and I didn’t want to get farther downwind. Or maybe it just seemed obvious that the chances to steal a warm, sunny hour or two in the hammock would become increasingly rare in the coming days.

From where I hung, I had a glimpse of the busy Stonington waterfront a couple miles away. A few sailboats were anchored nearby and while I lay there, occasionally looking up from a book, a couple more boats made their way into the anchorage, sails full with the breeze. I’d hung my wet paddling gear on a branch and lay enclosed within the peapod-like cocoon of my hammock wearing nothing, and it felt good to dry in the sunlight. But as soon as the sun went behind the clouds, I dug from my stern hatch the layer of fleece that I’d carried all summer, but rarely needed.

It reminded me of the day exactly a year earlier, in which Rebecca and I finished our nearly two-month meander of the Maine coast. We’d started the day at The Hub, a tiny island off the northwest corner of Mount Desert Island, and it had been warm enough that I’d taken a swim before launching. It turned out to be the warmest day of our whole trip. I even took a swim at lunch, savoring it, knowing how quickly the whole experience would fall into the past. And I was right. 

We took our last break on Little Sheep Island, mostly because the wind had increased and I was chilled and needed another layer. We crouched in the lee of a ledge and I ate a granola bar, shivering. And then we paddled the last two miles and finished the trip. At Old Quarry, we found the ground covered with boats that needed to be cleaned and returned to racks; they’d had a busy day. We would be working there again, soon enough.

Not long after that, in Newfoundland, I began writing an account of that journey, which has ensured that I don’t go a day without thinking about it somehow. Rebecca began working from the sketches and paintings she’d done on the trip, and in a way then, our experience evolved into something else, something new. We try to relive it and to understand it, but any account of reality is seen through a filter. It gets shaped and re-shaped. The boring parts get cut, and you look for themes, threads that run through it that might give it more shape than a mere account of a summer vacation. I’m not sure that it’s there yet, but the process itself has been good, the reliving. In a way, the writing process echoes the theme that seemed to come up a lot, and I can’t get away from, which is simply the fleeting nature of experience, how quickly it all passes: how we can try to grab it while we’re living it, but how suddenly it is gone. Certainly that’s how summer in Maine feels.

But one thing from the trip that has persisted is my desire to relax a little, to get to these idyllic places and enjoy them for a while, especially when the air is warm. When you’re worn-out after a day of work it may seem like too much trouble to get the gear together and paddle out there for only an hour or two, but I never regret it. And though we may not paddle as far or get to as many places, we spend a little time getting to know this one place better.

Notes:

Paddling Magazine used one of Rebecca’s photos in their current issue to illustrate a piece on Cumberland Island.

We went to the Maine Island Trail Association’s annual volunteer party a couple weeks ago and were very surprised when they honored us with their ‘Spirit of the Trail’ award, giving thanks for the volunteering we’ve done, both in sharing my writing and research for the new Bold Coast section, and the island clean-ups we’ve occasionally led. We met wonderful people there, kindred spirits, and it made me wish we’d gone out of our way in the past to go to more of these, to get more involved.

We’re mulling-over our options for our next move, but we’re hoping to spend the next months doing a little house-sitting and just enough work to pay the bills while we work on our own projects. If you have something in mind that might work for us, drop me an email at michaeldaugherty@zoho.com.

Moonlight on Thomas Island

I’m not crazy about waking-up in the middle of the night to pee – one of those things that most of us can look forward to with increasing frequency as we get older – and it is certainly complicated by the need to climb out of your sleeping bag, find your shoes in the tent vestibule and stagger-off over unfamiliar terrain, but it also gives you the chance to experience this place you’ve gone to some effort to get to in yet another sublime moment. You could call it a bonus moment, or perhaps more of an interlude.

Rebecca Daugherty photo - Greenlaw Cove

Late on Saturday night, the full moon shone over a calm stretch of water, high tide lapping only a few feet away from my tent. To the south, Thomas Bay – an area that had been an enormous mudflat when we’d arrived – glimmered brightly, and headlights snaked up and down the road on Cadillac Mountain.

 

It was a good moment. One might theorize that beyond biological function, these increased mid-night interludes as we get older are meant to give us more opportunities to enjoy life; that with our remaining time on this planet constantly decreasing, we need these opportunities to have a little breather and look around, enjoy the moment, take stock of where our kayaks have brought us.

It’s autumn, and I’m prone to these autumnal thoughts, the ones where you wonder how much life you have left and what you ought to do with it, but I’m more prone after a trying couple of weeks that left me feeling particularly uprooted and detached. We moved from one house-sit to another, but before really moving-in, went to a reunion of sorts for R’s family and well, a reunion of sorts for my own. 

 

There were ups and downs. One late-night interlude found me with two of my sisters in a non-descript motel in a non-descript highway-side sprawl in the Midwest, at least a thousand miles from any ocean, but is across the street from the place where my mother, whose memory of me is intermittent and vague at best, now lives, often wondering how she came to be there. 

But I also paddled (in canoe and kayak) on Squam Lake and hiked in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, standing alone atop familiar peaks and with an old friend, walking a trail to a waterfall that I thought I’d never been on, but became increasingly familiar. 

There’s something vaguely unsettling about that- about realizing how much you’ve forgotten, and it reminds me of at least one good reason to keep writing this blog, since I do constantly wonder why I am doing it. But I think it’s akin to the journals I kept for the first part of my life and finally abandoned when I decided my writing time should be focused on more productive writing pursuits. With the journals and the blog, I can at least look back and see where I’ve been, but with the exception of my guidebook, most of those “more productive pursuits” are as forgotten as the trail to the waterfall that now feels only vaguely familiar after I’ve been on it for hours, inspiring more of a sense of deja-vu than anything particular. A dream we dreamed one afternoon, long ago.

And I suppose I get some comfort out of the sense of continuity that writing brings. I’m sitting in a new place (a wonderful place with a view over a placid cove and Mount Desert rising in the distance) (I’m sitting on the deck where the railings are festooned with drying kayak gear) and I’m engaging in this process that both connects me to the past and helps me move forward, but most of all, connects me to this moment.  

Come to think of it, this process has some similarities to the process of paddling. With all I had to do over the past couple of weeks – the traveling, the ups and downs, I’d come to view guiding and teaching this weekend trip as a hurdle before I could relax a little, after months with very little down-time. I returned “home” late Friday night, my first night there, only to pack my kayaking and camping gear and strap a different kayak atop the car, getting only a few hours of sleep before I had to drive to Bar Harbor. But even if it’s work, getting on the water is a balm, and I quickly began to feel like myself again.

Saturday’s forecast was mellow, but Sunday’s called for strong winds from the southwest. I had a small group of College of the Atlantic students learning kayaking and leadership skills, so I put the choices into their hands, and we paddled the northeast coast of Mount Desert Island to a campsite and a route that kept us mostly sheltered from Sunday’s winds. 

I tend to think of MDI’s northeast shore as one of the less interesting parts of the island’s shoreline, but I paddle it every now and then, usually when southwest winds make the wider expanses of Frenchman Bay livelier than desired. Most of the shoreline is sprinkled with homes, and there’s not a lot of public access, but a couple of areas stand-out.

Just east of Sand Point and Salsbury Cove, The Ovens are a series of steep cliffs with undercut hollows along the high tide line. Steeped in Wabanaki mythology, the features were a more popular tourist attraction in the Victorian era, before private property limited public access.

It’s still private, and of course Maine riparian rights laws extend private land to the low tide line, so access remains tricky. At high tide though, you can get right into The Ovens, and at a very high tide even paddle through a natural arch. And if you’re quiet about it late in the season, you might even get away with lunch on the smooth, flat stones.

Hadley Point is a town-owned launch and picnic area. On Saturday, we ran out of energy just short of our campsite and had a picnic at Hadley Point, but it’s also a good place to launch if you want to explore the Mount Desert Narrows area or The Ovens. Judging from the litter and the occasional headlights I saw pull into the parking area that night, I’m guessing it’s also a good spot to watch submarine races.

Thomas Bay turns to mudflats at lower tides, but it is sheltered from southwest winds, and popular among birds, including the bald eagles that nest on The Twinnies, a pair of wildlife refuge islands. Just across from them, also attached at low tide by the massive mudflats, is Thomas Island, owned by Maine Coast Heritage Trust. When Sunday’s winds picked-up, we got into a couple of windy spots, but for the most part were able to paddle back to Bar Harbor in the lee.

Notes:

The arch pictured above is in front of the gorgeous campus of the MDI Biological Laboratory, a nonprofit biomedical research facility in operation since 1898. 

“I went outside to take a leak underneath the stars – yeah that’s the life for me.” The Poet Game by Greg Brown,

“It’s all a dream we dreamed one afternoon, long ago.” Box of Rain by Phil Lesh & Robert Hunter

An article about a recent Pinniped Kayak class at Sullivan Falls in the Quebec publication, La Soleil (it's in French, but I think it says good stuff about us).  

Here's a link to the blog, Amongst The Current by friends Cody Presny and Haley Brasile. Cody interned with us at Sea, Surf & SUP last year in Georgia, and now he and Haley are canoeing down the Mississippi River.

Here & There

 
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It is possible, to get up very early in the morning in Deer Isle, Maine – middle of the night is more like it – and drive the hour and a half to Bangor International Airport in the dark, and after a series of flights, find yourself somewhere in the middle of the day in the middle of the continent, not far from another major airport, but not close to anything at all that would make you feel … somewhere. Certainly very far from the nearest ocean. The lack of somewhere-ness is as strong an attribute to the place as its features: the highways and concrete buildings containing the things people need to live: shelter, food, stuff- all of these offerings wrapped into the same shell- the same shape and color scheme as anywhere else you might find them in North America. And it might occur to you that once upon a time, having returned to the US from a couple of years abroad, you thought maybe I could get a job at that airport and live in one of those… units. Lots of people do it, how bad can it be?

How bad can it be? Most of the people there are obviously more affluent than we are. The highways are packed with new cars, and former farmland sprouts new house after new house, connected by networks of fresh black asphalt. There’s tasteful landscaping- little trees and shrubs rising from tiny islands of artificially-colored bark mulch and acres upon acres of freshly-sodded lawn. There are schools and parks (and lots of big, warehouse-like churches) and mile after mile of strip malls containing things you can buy and even things you can do- movies, nail salons, and well- shopping. There are the schools and other municipal buildings for recreation. And of course there’s stuff on TV, and here I’m just taking a wild guess, but there’s probably a huge television in most of these living units, a TV like the one in the motel room that seems inclined to show me ‘reality’ shows about ‘real’ people out in the rest of the world somewhere doing ‘real’ things. You know, real things like pawn shops and storage units full of stuff that you can buy and sell.

Okay, I’m intrigued by the show about treehouses. Heck, I’m intrigued by it all, especially when it’s after midnight in a motel room and I’m wondering about all this stuff I’m missing. And it will occur to me that our life could have been much different had we made a few different choices along the way. Even the choice, right now, to be here in Maine in January instead of someplace south, someplace warmer. 

But I’m sitting next to a fire (a fire that I built with birch bark and junk mail and logs that I split into splintery strips- not a picture of one on a screen or even a propane flame created with the push of a button) and out the window I see a grey, blustery day, waves breaking over the ledge in the mouth of the cove, and wintery clouds drifting through Eggemoggin Reach. It is freakin’ gorgeous.

We’re here only because of someone’s kindness, because the choices we’ve made have economically limited our options, given us not much money and little security… the lack of security and its corresponding lack of commitment which enabled us to hunker-down here, hoping our savings from summer work tides us over until the next summer while we pursue our personal occupations. But we’re here, and with any luck we’ll go for a paddle this afternoon.

Well, we didn't get out for a paddle that particular afternoon. The wind picked-up, and then the snow and ice followed. Trees blew down, power went out... in other words, it started to really feel like winter. That's when you start watching the forecast even more carefully for those little windows of opportunity, which came over the past couple of days. It's still a little cooler than we would like, but it's a treat to get out at all, and of course, there's nothing like a little travel to more populated and less oceanic parts of the continent to help us appreciate the backyard.

  Even if it's just for a few hours at a stretch, out among the nearby islands...

 Every moment out there is precious. I think we'll be staying put for awhile.