Across a red and orange sky, a yellow sun with star-like rays sank slowly toward the watery horizon. Just finished with setting up my tent and kitchen gear, I now squatted on a rock outcropping that fell away to the Maine seacoast 50 feet below. Behind me, a boulder covered with shiny green poison ivy looked so bush-like and handsome one might never suspect its deadly effect. Before me the ground dropped off into bands of thick, low vegetation, bayberry, bog myrtle, viburnums, rugosa rose, and meadowsweet, punctuated with taller twisted staghorn sumacs, whose silhouettes formed palm trees against the sky.
The rocky coast of Maine, including where I sat, was laid down many millions of years ago as sediments from eroded older mountains washed into the sea and became compressed under their own weight. These layers, which read like growth rings on an old tree, were then melted, folded and forced up into foliated vertical slabs by the smashing together of continents and volcanic island arcs. The whole conglomeration of volcanic and sedimentary rock, wiped clean, scarred and polished from an almost mile-high wall of ice that, when melted, left behind boulders and thick beds of gravel from elsewhere. Some 12,000 years of erosion has filled in enough crevasses with soil to grow plants that don’t need much — neither soil nor nutrients — and can tolerate the salty spray and harsh winter winds. These years of erosion, river deposits and wave action have deposited enough sand in the bays to attract families for swimming, boating, fishing and just being together.
One must hike a bit here to get to water or toilets, and campsites have no electricity and spotty internet. The phone would go dead and be left in a bag for four days. This should have been easy, for I claim to be a naturalist, happier in the forest than the house, more alive in the country than in a city. Yet, I immediately experienced connectivity withdrawal; I had to concentrate to just be in the world without documenting and sharing.
My rationale for connecting on social media is that I share with others who study plants, animals and geology. We learn from each other and encourage each other in the field. As fitting as that seems, I now recognize that I have become another slave to the internet, suffering from the fallacy that an event does not really happen if not shared online.
The rock by the ivy became my favorite place for being. Early mornings, the lobster fishermen steered their boats through the fog from one buoy to another, checking, throwing back or keeping. Large schools of filter-feeding menhaden churned the water white with their flapping; from a distance the schools looked like oblong shadows on the sea, as if a whale were down below. Seals’ heads looking like lobster buoys turned on their sides popped up in the middle of the fish. Crested cormorants skimmed in pairs just over the surface of the water, then settled on a rocky cliff with others. Herring gulls screamed and laughed and stole food from all the campers’ tables. Eagles and osprey flapped enormous wings descending into the water to emerge with a silvery fish in their talons. The sun rose behind me and set in front of me, each night turning the sky aflame. The big buoy clanged day and night like a wind chime.
Watching from the rock became my addiction, for I never knew what would appear. Where will the seals be? And why do seals make me sentimental? Will the family fishing on the rocks below hook some menhaden to use for bait for striped bass? Will the teenagers swimming out to the island every day make it OK? Who will come kayaking by? How can such a massive body of water become depleted of resources? Will my campfire keep the mosquitoes from turning me to pulp?
Not every day was spent on the rock. The sandy coves called me in to swim and body surf like a preteen. Yellowish brown algae called knotted wrack (Ascophyllum nodosum) grew on beaches and rocks, making climbing slippery, yet every cove had its own secrets — a flock of young common eiders, a crab, a jellyfish, a granite boulder, a diving cliff. A father pushed his two toddlers across the packed sand in a double stroller, back and forth at the water’s edge, hoping the sounds of surf might lull them to sleep. Not to be fooled on this beautiful day, they crawled onto each other and tumbled out. Rather than scold, he began to act like a baboon running backward as the little ones chased after, laughing. As I looked around the beaches, I rarely saw heads looking down at screens (the most common human posture of the decade), but rather heads looking out to sea as if watching a most entertaining movie.
Day four, I took down my tent, packed up the car, and went down to the beach for a last half-day of rock climbing and body surfing. The sun had burned me crisp; the salt had pickled all my wounds, and it felt good. Before starting home though, I would need to charge up the phone and search Google Maps for the fastest route, as driving with the Gazetteer on my lap is one way of just being I’m not willing to try.
Micki Colbeck, of Strafford, is an artist, a conservation biologist and a member of the Strafford Conservation Commission. Write to her at mjcolbeck@gmail.com.