Return to main article
BY ELIZABETH STROUT
When I was a child in Harpswell, Maine, our house was so close to the water that even on a hot summer's day, the air stayed comfortable. Only occasionally, if the sun baking the bayberry leaves in front of the house remained hot enough, and the water still enough with no breeze, would the evening require a change in scenery. On such an evening my parents would say, "Let's drive over to Land's End." For me, this always brought the secret hope that at the gift shop there, my mother would buy me a small silver ring with a dot of turquoise in it. But driving over to Land's End also brought with it a confluence of other feelings, which were hard for me to understand as a child, and are hard for me to understand still, but they had to do with a kind of yearning and anxiety and puzzlement because we were going where the tourists went.
I am a 12th generation Mainer. I was born there, as was my brother, and while my parents, as adults, also lived and taught in New Hampshire, they made it clear that they thought of Maine as their true home, and my brother and I believed this as well. We went to Harpswell every weekend and spent most of the summer there. We lived on a dirt road, and our neighbors were lobster fishermen. On this same road, in small cottages, lived my grandmother, two aunts, and an uncle.
Harpswell is a peninsula northeast of Portland that sticks out into Casco Bay. From our front deck we could look directly across to Orr's Island, and off to the right was Bailey Island. At high tide, I would climb the rocks in front of our house, finding the right little crevice in which to stick my bare foot. My grandmother, sure I would fall into the water and drown, could not watch me through her window. At low tide, there were starfish to find, white snails to collect, seaweed that slipped in a special, delicious way beneath my feet.
This shoreline, ragged and beautiful, with cedar trees growing so close to the shore that their roots crack into the rocks, was something I took for granted. And yet it was this shoreline that the tourists were coming to see. The way the light falls across the water, the constant changing of the tides, the water sometimes as flat as a mirror, sometimes choppy with whitecaps, and sometimes swirling fiercely-all this is something that resides deep inside me, even though I have not lived in Maine for 20 years. And when I go back there now, I know I am not a tourist, and yet I know, too, that when I drive to Land's End with my own family, our car has a New York license plate, and there remains a quiet, small sense of confusion for me, as I sit on a rock and look out to sea.
Land's End is at the far southern tip of Bailey Island. To get there, one drives along Rte. 24, passing through Orr's Island first, the same island Harriet Beecher Stowe borrowed in her book The Pearl of Orr's Island. In the summer, the road is lined with masses of lupine and pink bouncing Bet. At the southern end of Orr's, there are shingled cottages as well as clapboard year-round homes that have been there for decades, clustered together like barnacles on a rock. When I was a child, I would peer through the window of the backseat and wonder who lived there, and when I go there now, I wonder still.
The bridge connecting Orr's Island to Bailey Island is said to be the only one of its kind in the world. It's a winding cob, or cribstone, bridge, made of granite slabs placed in honeycomb pattern, which allows the tide to wash in and out. From the bridge, if you look to the left, you can see Ragged Island. We always called this "Edna's Island" because it was once owned by the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. The view of Edna's Island intrigued me: my mother told me the poet used to swim naked from its shore. Nobody I knew ever went swimming naked.
On the northern tip of Bailey Island, by Garrison Cove, there's a group of wooden cottages, one built by my great-great-grandfather in 1899. As small children, my parents played on the rocky beach there, having no idea they would marry someday. As you follow Rte. 24 along the spine of the island, past the firs and spruce trees and Rugosa roses in pink and white, you get a view of Mackerel Cove down off to the right, where there are always sailboats, fishing boats, and pleasure boats moored in the cove or tied up at the dock where seagulls circle overhead. You pass road signs along the way: Spruce Ledge, Shoestring Lane. Land's End is announced by a large sign: "Road ends 500 feet." Land's End is simply that, where the land ends, and you are, quite literally, looking out to sea.
In the small parking area, you pull your car up next to the others and walk a short distance, either down to the water or to one of the rocky ledges. Halfway Rock, its lighthouse now automated, is on the horizon. Beyond the spectacular mass of saltwater, lies Europe. Nowadays, in the midst of Rugosa roses, there is a bronze sculpture of a lobsterman kneeling and holding a lobster in his hand. The statue wasn't there when I was young, but otherwise, the place is the same: the jutting rocks, the crashing surf, the vacationers wandering about, looking through binoculars, then going into the gift shop that sits there on top of the ledge.
The gift shop has what it always had: little canvas pillows decorated with lighthouses and smelling like balsam, sweatshirts that have simply the word MAINE printed on them, red-felt stuffed lobsters, and postcards of seagulls or a moose. There are also cans of "Maine air," and when I was a child, skirting around the tourists in order to gaze at the little silver rings with their dots of turquoise, I would wonder sometimes why people came to Maine to pay money for cans of the air.
And why do they? I think it is more than the smell of the ocean, the gust of freshness with the scent of evergreens. I think the light in Maine creates an "otherworldly" sense, the ever-changing way it falls through the trees, over the rocks, and breaks sometimes through a morning fog. As a child, I took all this for granted.
When I had my own family, and we came to Maine to visit, my daughter loved the drives to Land's End. When she was small and we visited the gift shop, I would offer to buy her one of the rings, but she always opted for something else; a collection of seashells or gell-filled stickers of mermaids. It was back in New York one day, when she was 14, that she asked, looking through my jewelry box, "Can I have these?" picking up two turquoise rings that had survived those many years. "Of course," I said, and for years she wore them on her pinkie. My brother does not have children, and my daughter was not born in Maine, so the 12 generations of Mainers have come to an end. I don't know yet what my daughter's relationship with Maine will be. But when I visited her recently at the University of Chicago, where she is a student, I noticed she was wearing the rings.
ELIZABETH STROUT is the author of the best-selling novel Amy and Isabelle. Her next novel will be out in spring 2006 from Random House.
Copyright © 2009, American Express Publishing. All rights reserved.
Visit our other American Express Publishing Web sites:
Food & Wine |
Departures |
T+L GOLF |
T+L Family |
SkyGuide |
Executive Travel
SUBSCRIPTIONS: Manage Your Subscription | International | Billing | Change Your Address or E-mail
Advertise |
Contact Us |
Site Map |
RSS Feeds 
AddThis