There Now Here

Approaching the island for the first time each May, I’m reminded of poet Amy Clampitt’s words: “Nothing’s certain. There’s no knowing what the slamming,/seas, the gale of another winter/may have done.” But then, closing in, atop Caterpillar Hill and its reassuring view of Deer Isle and the other islands like green jewels flung against blue, Elizabeth Bishop comes to mind: “The islands haven’t shifted since last summer….”

And so, friends, as the ride telescopes down to this quiet mid-island road of homes, barns, lobster boats, two art galleries, woods, meadows and coves, and further to a narrow lane where carpeting bunchberries beam their white stars from the forest floor and the sun's light, looking spilled, tosses gold coins onto ferns and young spruce, and further still to a small clearing of house, garden and a wind-scoured bluff where the land falls away, I’m home. There becomes here.

Here at the edge of the edge of an island. A meeting place of earth, water, sky. Where sculpted cumulous, like continents on a map, balloon against the horizon’s thin porous rim. Where, in a seemingly unbounded expanse, distant ledged islands anchor, and, closer in, granite ridges and outcroppings corset. Where rock has no plan to be sand.

Bit by bit, my eyes adjust to this unobstructed sweep. They grow accustomed to the necessary stretch, like an athlete who, after a season of short sprints, needs to train for the marathon, attune the muscles, recalibrate the lungs.

Other people return to such places having more history with them. They make their annual pilgrimages to cottages and camps where, decades before them, their family’s generations learned to swim, sail, fish, where they experienced first kisses and marriage proposals, conceived babies, planted in gardens tilled by ancestral hands, mourned deaths, healed illnesses, overcame fears. As I stand before a closet and pull bedsheets and towels from shelves for the first time each summer season, I’m almost able to imagine that for decades, my family’s hands preceded mine in this gesture.

In doing so, I’m stunned anew by the unlikeliness of my traveling here, many miles and years from my childhood realization that the privilege of owning or renting a summer place belonged to other families. No matter how rich I see my childhood now, with its simple but utterly necessary pleasures of a public library, a backyard tree house, the nearby woods and river, its early lessons reinforced class distinctions, particularly later in college when classmates “summered” (who knew there was such a verb?) on the shore or, at their parents’ encouragement, backpacked in Europe. Here again on this island, I marvel at my journey to this place, at all the riches that through a somewhat mysterious confluence of chance, opportunity and work my life contains, including the freedom and means by which I’m able to be here.

And where, in the first days back, each task possesses its own element of reconnection, each errand morphs into a visit. Where, for example, at the post office, I’m likely to have Ron tell me about the doe and fawn he’s seen in the woods near our house, within, he claims, striking distance of our rhododendrons. “Still no bigger than your dog, but the mom’s already showing it the ropes,” he says. And where, at the plumber’s, Lewis holds up a small device he’s just removed from a customer’s toilet tank and sputters, “Probably some guy got paid 100,000 bucks to come up with this bad idea. A restricter on a filler? Why don’t we just go out in the woods and be done with it?” Or where in the village, when I stop to admire Jeff’s new pick-up, he’s quick to tell me his dad, still refusing a hearing aid, climbed into the truck cab the first time, immediately cranked up the radio, cranked it up further, then shook his head, saying, “Your last one didn’t work neither.” Or where, stopping at Mill Pond Mobil, Mike approaches me with a big “Welcome Home,” the best thing anyone has said to me yet.

But it’s probably at the diminutive Periwinkle Shop where the June sun has yet to chase out the winter chill from its pine plank walls but is already chockablock with books, newspapers, cards, magazines, sweat shirts, skeins of yarn, penny candy, calendars and tide charts, all owned, stocked and managed by a one-woman wonder closing in on 90, that I’m apt to linger longest. Standing behind her big brass register, Neva is, as one friend calls her, the “island oracle.” But in early June, I think of her as the appointed keeper of Who’s-Arrived-For-The-Season and Who’s-Due-When – as though she were an air controller with up-to-the-minute flight information. Or that, like a customs official with an ink pad behind her counter, she’s required to stamp the credentials of all new arrivals and respond to inquiries about which summer folks have returned and when.

Surely, a ferry dock is a necessary link between bridge-less islands and the mainland, a point of disembarkation and transformation, the connector between away and home. Where it’s possible to see who’s been off island, who’s about to depart, and, maybe, why. On our island, bridged since 1939, the Periwinkle is a sort of ferry dock stand-in for those of us bonded in the rituals of arrival and departure, in a shared, short season book-ended by “Hi, when did you get here?” and “Bye, see you next summer.” Only after stopping in can we feel most fully here, know we have indeed arrived, and, depending on who we see there, be assured our return will soon be broadcast. With as much certainty as resides in the moment when a ferry bumps against a dock and the landing ramp is lowered, we know our seasonal journey is at an end.

True, a place is independent of us even while we are connected to it, or as Maine poet Ira Sadoff asserts, “the world complete without us.” A physical place is more stable and reliable than our physical bodies or the relationships we share with those we love. But to love a place, to make it home requires that we consider, too, who in it we love. A physical place outlives us but it is richer, stronger, more able to endure if layered with our memories, spackled with our stories. Were it possible to slice off a piece of this island down to bedrock, surely the exposed strata would reveal not just quartz and alpite, but layers of personal history, accumulated experiences and rituals, all deeply veined with a collective narrative. Of which I, too, lucky me, in whatever time I have left, am now a part.