For many years, my wife and I have spent our summers on a small island in Harpswell. Our two daughters grew up spending their summers on the island, and now our four grandchildren make regular visits there as well. Harpswell is in our blood. On cold winter nights, as I sit in my city house near Boston, brooding about the next day’s assignments, I imagine I’m on the island, wearing shorts and sandals, smelling the sweet ocean air, listening to the calls of sea gulls and ospreys.
Like Thoreau in Concord, I’ve traveled far and wide on the island. I know each cedar and poplar, each cluster of spruce, each clump of wild rose, each patch of blueberry bushes and raspberry brambles and lush moss. I know the ledges and slopes and old fallen trees.
When I get up early in the morning, I love to make a pot of tea and, while everyone is sleeping, walk down to the dock and watch the sun rise over the trees on the far shore. One morning, I was there on the dock just as a light fog began moving in. The rising sun became a gauzy fire. Suddenly, the air started to glow. Fog scattered the sunlight, bounced it around and back and forth until each cupful of air shone with its own source of light. In all directions, the air beamed and shimmered and glowed, and the gulls stopped their squawking and the ospreys became silent. The ocean was still as a held breath. For some time, I stood there spellbound by the silence and the glowing air. Then the fog burned away and the glow disappeared.
Some mornings, we’re treated to a light show on the bedroom ceiling. Sunlight, reflected off the ocean below, shines through the east windows and shudders with each passing wave in the bay, each ripple on that vast blue-green mirror. I like to think that a single bluefish swimming close to the shore can create enough of a wave to flutter the sun on the ceiling, leaving a trace of its slender body forever in my memory.
Unconsciously, our lives on the island follow the rhythm of the tides. At high tide, the land area shrinks. The ocean seems practically at our doorstep. Familiar rocks and ledges near the island disappear, submerged. Mid-tide, when the tidal current is swiftest, we can hear the water trickle by the rocks on the shore. A V-shaped water wake trails downstream of each lobster buoy in the bay, as if each buoy were a little boat rushing forward against the current. At low tide, we get our island back. Down on the shore, gold sea kelp drapes over the rocks like braided hair and hisses with popping air bubbles. Some rocks on the shore are uncovered only at low tide, timidly peeping above the surface for their brief hour of air, each with its own headdress of sea kelp, attached periwinkles, and visiting gulls.
Living close to wildlife is a fine Harpswell pleasure. For several summers running, a family of phoebes returned to a nest under the house. They would fly in and out through the small holes in the wood lattice at great speed, never slowing down but never colliding with the cross struts. Besides a variety of birds, red squirrels abound on the island, and they have a ferocious self-confidence and irreverence. One summer, while I was having a picnic with my family, a single red squirrel made off with an entire bag of chocolate chip cookies, probably twice its weight. Then, when the fellow was safely away and its loot stored, it climbed a tree and mocked us with a loud chatter. Deer sometimes come to the island, miraculously swimming over from the mainland. I love these delicate creatures, but they often eat my day lilies. I’ve also seen a brood of wild turkeys in the afternoons, the babies scrambling to keep up with their mother. And hummingbirds. They defy gravity. They float. “Air within air,” wrote the poet Pablo Neruda.
Then, suddenly, the summer has vanished. The air cools. The ospreys have abandoned their nest near the house and flown south. And it is time to go back to my life in the city. How could those warm days have passed? And years? All of it so fleeting, like the playful laughter of my children, and their children.
