D.E. Steward
Tinker mackerel dimpling in the dawn off floating docks whose hinged ramp down from the concrete pier is remarkably steep at low tide
Northeast Harbor. Down East
Coast fringe of white spruces and balsam firs on outcrop headland coves below channel block granite dike hump-island skerry passaged hanging fog
A bald eagle mobbed by a single tilting, resolute herring gull just outside Cutler's harbor pitching twisting diving pulling up in a brilliant evening sky over a white spruce in direct illumination from clear early summer evening sun
A blue, absolutely and totally blue, lobster in a bucket on the Cutler lobster house dock
Stinking gurry bin to the side against barn red clapboard on fish scale oil slippery dock planks in laughing gull squawk cupper scupper slup wind
Blue lobsters perhaps once or twice in a lifetime, and only few people ever see one of the brilliantly yellow ones that are extraordinarily rare
A blue lobster as to ball lightning or the green flash. A yellow one as to seeing a meteorite actually strike the ground
Off Cutler over a dozen common eiders in a float line out along the wracked lowtide rocks in dim late evening light
Three great blue herons on the rocks of wrack at extreme low tide fan dipping low flight tilt back and forth across the Cutler harbor mouth
And in the morning out at sea, leaving for Grand Manan, a raft of common eiders, mostly male
Out at sea from all that spruce fir blue-lobster green
Back from stately Grand Manan brought in a shorthorn sculpin on a handline in Eastport, skin a blotchy warted leaf-rot pattern on scum slime bottom-feed greenish brown, two rows of spiny platelike scales flanking the dorsal fins
The longhorn sculpin, that looks much the same except for having only one row of spiny scales, is more common, especially in harbors Down East
Have seen both kinds on that far Maine coast
Summer, summer bright sun green
Out of the low oak woods onto the rockshield summit ridge of Mount Saint Sauveur in brilliant bright afternoon light, the angle scape feel of an N. C. Wyeth Leatherstocking Tales illustration, eagle-feather longhair down naked back deerskin fringe leggings red trader-stuff loincloth, but complying with the modern logo mode of Velcro and Urethane coated nylon, Gore-Tex, Cordura, as two rare northern goshawks arrive, large and emphatic, banging straight down the ridge line soaring on the thermals at sixty or seventy feet up sailing southward down along Mount Desert's Somes Sound
As goshawks have hunted Somes Sound since the last glacial ice retreat
Somes Sound deep dug glacial scraped fiord old Indian sea canoe launching sailing ship building Yankee place with Sutton, Great Cranberry and Little Cranberry Islands seemingly adrift seaward out in front
At the head of Somes Sound, Somesville's clean rain-scrubbed gurry-free weathered plank porch docks and a green grass lawn waterfront of big geranium planters on the two stone bridge buttresses white clapboard with wooded slopes behind the village scape lie serenely all far, back, below and behind the goshawks’ flight plane glide
A Somesville paradigm for other small New England settlements of the last three hundred and fifty years off from narrow blacktop roads, from hardwood ridges back behind the Christian cemeteries two centuries old placed sometimes on the same hillsides the Indians came to from the sheltered winter fishing villages below to expose their dead, from the water with the depth of slope shadow structure flat perspective
The far Northeast the most civil and probably the most serene region in the whole of the Americas
Clipper ships sailed to Pacific Asia from ports Down East, not from Somesville, but from Kittery and Kennebunkport, and of course from Camden, Belfast and Searsport that are on Penobscot Bay
Entrepreneurial proselytism that ranged the globe, to China around the Horn, the Hongs, the red silk, the blue glazes, green tea, blocks of smoky black tea, black mahogany, mother of pearl, rattan, ceramics in exotic polychrome, opium out, Bibles in, Yankee steel and trade-good gimmicks, Chinese puzzle boxes, adenoidal missionaries dropped off and left there for their term
The energy, savvy and purpose of coastal New England in those days was alone almost enough to anchor an empire
Congregational Unitarian Quaker plain, but widow's walk ornate, and rich, profoundly rich in the 1840s even before the clippers began humming into San Francisco Bay with the opportunistic gold-mad hordes
Through this long century, the reaches of New England have drifted to a spotty quirky economy of antiques, Harley-Davidson outings, RV camps and mobile home parks, small-scale electronics, marginal cottage industries, potholders and frozen yogurt, bed and breakfasts, mild tourists who stand around the boat docks, eat lobster, drive around looking at the foliage
On an early-morning busy two-lane near Winterport with a roadkill blue jay, two catbirds and an American crow still gasping when put aside on the bank across the ditch. The dying crow's band surrounds it in branches twenty feet up and some of them fly escort watching it being carried back from the road
And so Somesville, levelly serene, sits in place like some French village only to be seen, preserved, admired, mostly to be seen and left alone, and a sixtyish Somesville resident with a bucket on a rope walks out from his white clapboard house to the stone bridge daily, at eb‚ tide to assure there's no salinity in the water he brings up, slings the bucket into the stream emptying there into Somes Sound and swings it up full a few times over to pour onto the abundant geraniums in their planters on the buttressed bridge
His ancestor could well have sailed out of here for wherever the ships he signed on with would take him. He may only drive up to Kmart in Ellsworth and every couple of years to a dentist in Bangor, if anywhere at all
Inheritors of a vastly diminished Wasp-dominant Edwardian world of grosgrain, calfskin and unpolished brass with verdigris in the hard to polish niches, corners, incised grooves
Like the shoals of the raised grain on old clapboards painted long-weathered barn red
And if this coast and the Wasps on it are now irrelevant to the world other than what it is in tourist terms then let it be
Down East
Maine fits against the ocean in the way no other state except Alaska touches the ocean. Hawaii's soaring coastlines are merely volcanic headlands, cliffs and sweeping bight-crescent strands as the islands sit there throbbing volcanically. Few inlets and bays, no inland passages
The Down East tidal rush sets it far apart from other coasts. With the Bay of Fundy there just out past the cliffs of Grand Manan, when yo? tack in past Quoddy Head, the northeasternmost of the great Down Easternmost until you pass off into New Brunswick, and yo? come in toward Lube„ and Eastport, better to come in around north of Campobello Island because of the eddies off the piers and the height of the Lube„ bridge
So that when you're there around Quoddy Head watching the tides flush across wreck kelp black rock brown rock slosh and drip and drain, you're at a maximum point as striking as the last headland in far Hawaii, which is a matter of fine geographic definition as to whether that maximum point is defined as a dramatic extreme like Kalala? Lookout on the western cliffs of Kauai, or low Paihau Point further out on Niihau, or even the last sand spit of Midway or Kure Atoll out up against the Date Line
The cogency is that at Quoddy Head, in the far locale of rare blue and rarer yellow lobsters, sailing north, Europe lies to starboard, and that out past Kauai, Asia is dead ahead
At Campobello there's only a vague and wistful suggestion of the destiny of Roosevelt's shadow there against the wonder of those tides surging on far up Fundy into the Minas Basin. Somewhere else, deep in wondrous Nova Scotia, Down East of even Maine
[Published in The North American Review, 284/6,November/December 1999]