Walking the Berkshires

Monhegan on my Mind

I can hardly believe that it was just a few weeks ago that I spent a week with family and friends on Monhegan Island.  I've been coming to this amazing place, 12 miles off the coast of Maine, since I was six years old, Though there have been some years when I was unable to do so, by my count I am nearing two dozen visits to the Island in every season, including New Years Day. 

There is always something different on trips to this very familiar place.  One the way back to shore as we watched pairs of porpoises leaping after fish, I looked over at Eastern Egg Rock and declared that this time I would see a puffin.  Not two minutes later, there it was, close by the boat and unmistakable with its great wedge of beak. IN WIDE-EYED WONDER I pointed after it as we passed - "Puffin. Puffin! Puffin!  PUFFIN!" I had never seen one of these birds before in the wild, and it was as if wishing had made it so.  Monhegan is like that.  It is hard not to believe in magic when under its spell.

I loved sharing it with Talya for the first time, and seeing her spirit lift like sea fog from the rocky shore.  She said it was the nearest to Scotland she could be, except that it was warmer.  There is nothing like having new eyes, those of a lover or a child, to show you something new about a place you know and love.  My children know and love the Island as I do, but with their own associations and their own memories.  The Ice Pond of old is the Duck Pond to them, and Sea Goblins have joined the trolls of the spruce forest in their play.

We had exceptionally fine weather, with rain largely confined to the pre-dawn hours and only one foggy morning that soon burned off.  There was one day, though, where heavy squalls passed between us and the mainland, setting up one of the most spectacular sunsets I have ever seen.  The cottages on Monhegan face west, and watching the sun go down is a a ritual part of the day.  We added a new ritual this year, waking before dawn on our last morning on the Island and hiking out tot he cliffs to watch the sun come up in golden glory.

Dog Days

(Photo credit: T.Leodari):  The cicadas outside my window are planing down the season.  Shavings of summer days curl on the wood shop floor.  Insects whine like a saw through heartwood, with a drone that lingers at the edge of consciousness but grows persistent as August advances. 

The first sugar maple leaves are starting to turn at the tips of ailing trees, a visual jolt in all this heavy green.  The fields now sport goldenrod and asters and the fireflies have ceased their dance. The summer cannot last more than a few weeks now, declines even as it ripens, and each remaining day of bright sun and blue water is precious to a weary heart.

What we have done and left undone becomes all too apparent as the summer wanes.  The garden got away from me in thick and heavy air too oppressive to bother to weed and mow.  There are many green tomatoes but few green leaves on the vines, and it will be a race to see whether the harvest reaches its potential before the plants themselves wither.  The lettuce has bolted, the crabgrass overwhelmed the flower beds.  There were other priorities, but still my inner gardener disapproves of my stewardship.

On the other hand, I have managed to accomplish a number of core summer activities that are even more sustaining than the fruit of my garden.  I took my children to Monhegan Island.  I had steamers and lobster in Maine, and baked stuffed quahogs harvested right off the beach at Windrock.  I made a cherry pie, and had steamed crabs in Delaware.  I picked raspberries.  I saw whales.  I attended a Revolutionary War Reenactment and joined the 1st New Jersey Continentals.  I made mussels marinara and ate fried clams.  I went for a sail on Buzzard's Bay.  I saw the future and it smiled.

This weekend I will drive to Windrock once more with my children and join 40 relatives for a week by the sea.  I will catch and cook 300 quahogs.  I will make pesto with my garden basil.  I will make peach pies and roast sweet corn.  Maybe we will find a box turtle, and make drip castles, and fly kites.  Maybe I will get a chance to sit and read.  Maybe, maybe, I will rest at ease.

Summer is no less vital when its days are numbered.  What is vital for me is to be present, and aware, and not to mourn the endings.  Turning points are like tides, flooding in at the river mouth, standing waves against the flow.  Something must give, if not now, then soon, and when it does something else can take its place.  As a dear friend reminded me, sometimes when you embrace a change it hugs you back. As with life, then, so with me.

Enter Obliging Gull, Stage Left

I was blissfully in an eddy of time for the past week, out on an Island 12 miles from shore in the Gulf of Maine.  I shared this time with dear family and good friends and with no electricity, no white noise, no workaday crises to detract from the here and now.  Monhegan for me is one of those enchanted isles that rises to the surface every other year or so and offers me a 1930s summer for a brief and blessed space of time before receding back into the mist.  It restores my soul with a sweet expectancy that that can neither be rushed nor conjured at will.  It is a place that I carry in my heart through the long seasons ashore until the next time I surface on its rocky shore.

It had been three years since the last time I was able to take my children to Monhegan, and watching them respond to its wonders and make it their own was one of the great joys of our time together.  Emily the seal girl swam out over the cold blue water with such joy she forgot she would eventually be chilled to the bone.  Elias explored every tide pool and found young urchins, went to the library for a book about dolphins and picked all the blueberries and red raspberries in sight.  There were six children aged 6-9 (2 girls, 4 boys, 4 cousins,2 great friends) and five adults, including my sister and her husband who I love and see far too rarely.  It was a time of fresh discoveries and views so familiar I know every crease in the rock and contour of the cove like I know my own sun-bronzed smile.

I love this island of gaslight and fog.  One afternoon I pulled out the red kayak and slipped over the dulce and Irish moss into Deadman's Cove and paddled out along the shore toward the Seal ledges while the rest of the crew took the shore path behind our scampering children.  I went out toward Eastern Duck rock with its harbor seal colony and watched them arched on the rocks or bobbing in the swell watching me with their dark, curious eyes.  The wind was stiff behind me and fog coiled around the next headland, reminding me that I was in a little craft low in the water and far out to sea if I let the mist close behind me, so I did not linger.  But a seal followed me all the way back to the shelter of the cover when I hauled back out on the rocks below the cottages.

I have been coming to Monhegan since 1974 when I was younger than my son Elias.  It used to be a week or 10 days every summer for at least a decade, and I remember when the cod and pollack were so large and plentiful than three hours of jigging off Sherm Stanley's "Phalarope" or his son Shermie's "Desperado" would fill a skiff to overflowing with 20-30 pound fish.  I remember the island before the dwarf mistletoe decimated the spruce forest, opened up the headlands as they were a century before when sheep grazed above the surf.  Eli and I walked the graveyard below the Lighthouse where the Islanders had to build up enough fill and soil to bury their dead in six feet of earth atop this granite mountain in the sea, and saw that I knew many of the names on the markers as individuals as well as representatives of old Monhegan families.  As with our beloved Windrock, I have strong place memory here that allows me to be simultaneously in an older time as well as the present.

In a place where some things seem immutable, there are always changes in the wind.  The community is fiercely debating the merits and concerns about a possible wind generator on Lighthouse Hill.  The "poop and power" discussions are critical to sustainable living on an island where there is no more topsoil for leaching fields than their is to cradle the dear departed.  The small winter community has its own dynamics and relationships with those they support during the summer and with each other during the long stormy lashed winter.  There are just 13 working lobster boats in the harbor, where once in the 1950s there may have been three times that many making their living from the sea.  Now there are more artists in residence than fishermen.

There are parts of this Island, not 2 miles in length nor a mile broad, that get very few visitors.  Out by green point and some of the spur trails, one can be alone with the sound of the bell buoys on distant ledges and the mist dripping from spruce tips in delicious solitude.  There are trails where I know to look for lowbush blueberries, or a rock that looks like a smiling seal, or a weathered pile of driftwood above the wrackline, and lose myself in my five visceral senses, and the inner sixth sense that spins like a gyroscope to keep me centered in time, be it fast or slow.  What I carry forward refreshes and reinvigorates, even as there is longing when the time comes to sail back to shore.  On our return trip there were porpoises and a minke whale and diving gannets to send us over the water and back into the mainstream of our lives with joy in our hearts.

Going and Coming

My children start summer vacation tomorrow.  In my youth, this usually meant 2 months at Windrock,often with Mom and with various assorted cousins and aunts, but with only a few weekends when we were joined by our working fathers.  There was a week of full family vacation in Maine at Monhegan in there as well, and then a mournful and grudging removal back home a few days before the school year began.  It helped that by late August, the air at the shore required sweaters, but for me there is something melancholy that lingers as summer wanes, and unlike my children I do not have the excitement of a new term in September to carry me forward.

This summer I will take half a year's worth of vacation days for that week in Maine and a week at Windrock.  I was able to save up and carry forward an additional week, which is needed because my dance card has gotten quite full now that I have embarked on finding a life outside of work and parenting.  I am off to Monmouth, NJ for the Revolutionary War reenactment this Saturday, and will spend it as an enthusiastic fan and potential recruit of the 1st New Jersey (Col. Ogden's) Regiment, Continental Line.  I will overnight in Philadelphia rather than in camp, for I have personal reasons to be spending time in that city beyond delight in old friends and the usual genealogical and historical factors.  Yes indeed.

Next week, my wife and I will find a quiet moment and sit with our children and share the news of our plans for divorce.  We do not have all the answers worked out to all of our own questions, but we are very clear that it is the right time for Emily and Elias to hear that they will always have both parents, that we love them deeply and that they are safe and secure.  When Viv finds sufficient employment to allow us to divide our assets into two homes, what has long since happened in the heart will be possible in the physical space we occupy.  As it is, nothing material will change in the weeks and even months after our conversation with our children, which may ease their acceptance, or may delay their response to it.

There is no avoiding this, but it can be done with love and sensitivity, without blame or panic, and that is the task ahead.  It will be painful, but also a relief.  We tend to take vacations and long weekends separately in this family, so going to Maine or Windrock without Mom and to Vermont without Dad is customary and comfortable already.  Last Saturday we went to the theater together and had a wonderful evening of Gilbert and Sullivan, followed by midnight desserts and children enchanted and asleep in my arms.  There are opportunities for grace and togetherness even in the pain of transition to our unmarried lives.  Joint custody means we will still be important factors in our children's' lives and give our better angels the incentive to interact well as good parents.

Although I am still in the same place, the same corner of our living room where I have been sleeping since October, my life and heart are in motion.  I am not pacing the cage.  I am hopeful and have much to hope for.  There is work to be done before all that needs to go and abide and come into my life is fully able to do so, but I do not fear it. No indeed.  I am just in that place on the edge of the season when change is in the air but the leaves are only just starting to turn.  And instead of melancholy, I feel myself turning as well.

Cold Spring Rain

Today the wind is driving a steady rain inland from an Atlantic storm.  The sky is steel wool gray and the air raw.  There is cold, clinging mud outside and the creeks are high with snow melt.  A most excellent day.

There is nothing like a cold rain outdoors to make the inside feel warm and snug.  Some of my golden memories are of rainy days with windowpanes rattling and sheets of rain beating against the glass.  A fire in the hearth and something warm and dark in the glass, the wet wool of my sweater steaming the way it was when I found that pub down by the Victoria and Albert pier when hitchhiking in a southern winter toward the Cape of Storms.  I  think of playing board games and gaslight in the upper cottage on Monhegan, or gazing through the leggy riot of my grandmother's geraniums at the window and out across the Bay with a Nor'easter blowing.  

This is the sort of day that lures the lobstermen to cribbage games and banter in Sherm's fishhouse, or calls for pasties and pints in a favorite pub.  It was made for words like galoshes, Machintosh and foul weather gear.  Duck weather.  A good kind of inside day.

So, there are logs on the fire, and malt in the glass.  There are children playing board games and plans for corned beef and cabbage.  Maybe I will make soda bread, or French Onion Soup, or dumplings.  Maybe I will settle in with a book and nod off to the patter of rain.  Tomorrow I may tire of it.  But today, it's all good.

Descant

"April is in my mistress face / And July in her eyes hath place

Within her bosom is September / But in her heart a cold December."

                                                    - Thomas Morley (1594)

I remember every note of the first tenor part for this shortest of madrigals. All the choral music of the Christmas season has put in mind my singing days, when I could follow my last, clear note reverberating from the Chancel through the high columned Nave.  In Canterbury Cathedral, this lasted seven seconds. 

It wasn't Morley, then, on that March night when we visiting choristers and the Dean's wife had that incredible space all to ourselves.  Illuminated only by the candles in our hands, the columns disappeared overhead.  We descended stone steps hollowed by the knees of pilgrims, and had a moment of musical intimacy in the crypt as powerful as what we produced in the endless space above.  I was not quite seventeen years old.

I have known two great stands of eastern trees that stood for cathedrals.  One was Cornwall Connecticut's Cathedral Pines, eviscerated in a whirlwind.  The other is Cathedral Woods on Monhegan Island in Maine, where Red and White Spruce contend with a parasitic dwarf mistletoe that conspires to lay them low, leaving only Balsam Firs and hardwoods to reassemble the forest.  I have wandered in Muir Woods and among the great Sequoia groves, seen the clear cuts amid the old growth of the Olympic Peninsula during the height of the Spotted Owl war.  I was befriended in a logger bar by a shell shocked Viet Nam vet who saved me from  the impotent rage of one of its patrons.  I was 21.

Sometimes I stand by the shore, watching the great swells dash and cream against the rocks below, and yearn to lift off like the gulls flying below the headlands.  An old friend once wrote a poem about the gravity arc of the rope swing, where "if you time it right, you can hang like lightning in the air."  Hang like the high note in the vaulted cathedral, or the toppling trees in the wind.  All of an instant, rootless, and lighter than air.

Astronauts in training simulate such weightlessness in deliberate free fall, in a plane flying parabolic arcs.  Astronauts in space are always falling toward earth.  Deep Sea divers can also become disoriented in their three dimensional environment, with only their telltale bubbles to distinguish down from up.  In my diving days, I sometimes would hang at neutral buoyancy, rising and falling ever so gently with every breath.

These days I do not sing in choirs, or swing out over dark water.  But I still wander, amazed, in the cathedrals of the heart and forest, and slip loose from earth as I lift my eyes on brittle nights brimming with stars.

Island in Winter

It is going to dive down toward negative territory tonight in the Litchfield Hills.  I remember cold like that on a Christmas morning when it got so bad we seriously thought about bringing my sister's pony up from the empty barn and into the back wood room of our house. 32 degrees below zero is downright unfriendly weather and one tends to have uncharitable thoughts about the season.

Back in 1990 I spent New Years week on Monhegan Island out in the Gulf of Maine, and got to see that familiar island in winter.  The little summer cottages on Dead Man's Cove were dark and empty, and the rising tide sucked the snow from the rocky shore.  We stayed in a heated apartment and pitched in with the Islanders as they prepared for Trap Day, the traditional launch of Monhegan's lobster season, now established by law but then enforced by custom.  I rode out that morning with Doug Boynton and my friend Chris Koerber who was Dougie's stern-man and the swells and the stench of the bait were beyond description and I wouldn't have missed it for anything.

Monhegan still had deer back then, before they got too numerous and were removed to protect the island ecology.  The parasitic dwarf mistletoe infestation  was starting to spread in the spruce forest but had not yet had the impact that it would in the coming decade.  I skated with my Mom on the Ice Pond which I had never seen in its frozen form before.  As always in winter, the human population shrinks to a few dozen year-rounders and a handful of others like ourselves with warm homes to return to elsewhere. 

When the sun came out, the low angle light on the long grass of the cemetery was breathtaking with the whitecaps and blue water beyond.  I loved the days that were leached of color, all gray skies and steely water and white frosting on the dark shore.  To endure a winter out here takes more than most would hazard, but to sojourn for a time was to see with fresh eyes.  I will try to see with them again on this cold winter night in Connecticut when the marrow in my very bones wants to curse the cold and dark.

Family Time

One of the highlights of our week on Monhegan for Emily and Elias was the Mallard family at the icepond that always came looking for breadcrumbs whenever they were passing by.  The children never tired of them, nor noticed that the first day there were three babies but only two on subsequent visits.  Halcyon days indeed, and as we gear up for a week at Windrock and savor our time in Maine there are great goings on here in the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills to delight young and old.

Yesterday we took in the weekly concert by David Grover and the Big Bear Band at the Great Barrington Bandstand.  When Emily was three she went around calling herself David and I believe we attended nearly every one of these performances.  David's trio are pied pipers of the first order and Elias was especially enchanted. Then it was off for a picnic at Waconah Falls State Park in Dalton, MA.  We spent very little time at the waterfall itself, preferring a muddy pool and silty beach downstream for our explorations.  One could almost hear the dulcet strains of Flanders and Swann's Hippopotamus Song:

"Mud, mud, glorious mud
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood
So follow me follow, down to the hollow
And there let us wallow in glorious mud!"

We rounded out the afternoon at a playground at the old Housatonic Primary School in Great Barrington, with all sorts of climbing structures and obstacles to successfully surmount.  These three birds on a wire were spotted on one the monkey bars, but lured away with the promise of ice cream from the general store at the corner.

We'll be making new memories from midweek on at Windrock, with plans for whale watching and a clambake and who knows what else besides.  These are the days that keep us warm through the long dark winter, the memories of family time that sustain us through the generations.

Hard to Swallow: An Island Invaded

If I were a pirate, my ship would be named "The Black Swallow-wort."  That would strike just the right notes of romance and terror, as indeed does the namesake invasive species that inspires this selection.  I can just see the customized Jolly Roger at the masthead, tendrils of Monarch Caterpillar killing bindweed coiling from grinning skull sockets and clove-hitched around the crossed bones. Its other name is Dog-strangle vine, which while evocative sounds more like a more appropriate appellation for one of my scurvy crew.

An infestation of Cynanchum louiseae, like Syphilis, is one of those  conditions you really don't want to catch. Its polyembryonic seeds are wind dispersed and will also float downstream to new destinations.  It is easily confused with a near relative Pale swallow-wort (Cynanchum rossicum), likewise invasive, and to make matters more taxonomically confusing has also been described as an entirely different genus Vincetoxicum nigrum.  No matter what label it gets in the herbarium, it is villainous as an invasive plant.

A European species introduced in the late 1800s, Black swallow-wort has expanded rapidly in a variety of habitats from Canada to Missouri and especially along the Atlantic coast.  Monhegan Island is enduring a dramatic infestation, from the rocky crevasses just above the spray zone by the sea cliffs to the forest understorey and meadows around the village.  A forest health study conducted on the island found that Black swallow-wort and Asiatic bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) were rapidly invading areas where control efforts were underway for another invasive, Japanese barberry (Berberis thungbergii).

Blackswallow-wort is a management nightmare, for it resprouts when cut as well as from root fragments and can form matted monocultures that overwhelm native species.  It is also hell on Monarch butterfly larvae.  A relative of milkweed, it proves a confusing and toxic larval host. 

Islands, especially small, isolated ones, suffer the greatest harm from exotic introductions, and while barberry is a bear and bittersweet a known thug, I would consider the Black Swallow-wort invasion on Monhegan a greater threat.  It is well underway and eradication can no longer be hoped for.  Vigilance, containment and rapid response to new outbreaks are the best hope, but this is not something an Island of 70 or so full-time residents can do one their own with volunteer labor.  The rest of us who visit and enjoy this place need to do our part.

Once I started looking for it I found it everywhere.  I found some growing at the base of the path leading to the Upper Cottage on Monhegan and lost no time in pulling it up and exposing its roots to dessication.  There's a nice cluster of spearmint there in great demand for Mojitos and a great patch of wild strawberries that would be sorely missed in pancakes if swallowed by Swallow-wort. Charity, indeed, begins at home, and pirates belong in sea stories, not ravaging our coasts with Dog-strangle vine.

Eddies In Time

Raymond H. and Alice M. Barker bought the cottage on Deadman's  Cove on August 6th, 1929.  Five years later, they planned and began to build a second cottage right above the water.  Grandma and Grandpa Barker's legacy has been cherished by five generations of the Barker clan, who know and love Monhegan because these adventurous Midwesterners were so enchanted with the Island themselves that they decided to buy and build and spend their summers here, despite the Depression that struck just months after they closed on the property and the death of Raymond while the lower cottage was still under construction.  Their portraits preside over the living room in what became "Grandma's Cottage", and something about the proud, direct gaze in each of them pierces the veil between their time and ours. 

Maybe that is because on Monhegan - in the Barker cottages at any rate - it is always 1939.  There are stacks of Good Housekeeping and Better Homes and Gardens from that year by the day bed in the Upper Cottage, while a remarkable map on the stairs leading to the second floor, printed in August 1939, shows an expanded Germany poised to invade Poland.  The piano, an unusual table-shaped behemoth made by the defunct Arlington Piano Company of Boston, holds sheet music for 1930s musicals and the marching songs of the Great War.  There is gas light only, and an old hand crank Victrola with a stack of 78s, and the books that line the unfinished walls are Jack London and Sabatini and stories of shipwrecks and sightseeing in Europe between the wars. 

Even seemingly minor changes become the stuff of family legend, like the time my mother's cousin thought the wooden lobster buoys handing from the rafters could use freshening up with new designs, unaware that he was painting over the original color schemes of generations of Island lobstermen.  This happened in the early 1970s and is still a sensitive topic after all these years.  The wind rattles the casements and the gray cedar shingles weather and fade much as they ever have, and one would be forgiven for assuming that time has stood still in this place and will always remain so.

Of course, this is not Brigadoon, though at times it may feel its close relation.  There are significant changes afoot, both in the Island community and for this specific piece of Monhegan that our family shares.  There are perhaps a dozen year round island communities left in Maine; in 1900 there were 300 such islands.  An influx of summer residents and visitors has been a part of Monhegan since the 1880s, but their impact is more deeply felt today.  When my grandfather would come here for a few weeks in the summer, the locals would come and visit the "Boston doctor" and the Barkers and Islanders knew each other rather well.  Many visitors do not enjoy the same relationships today (although there is still no reliable medical care on the Island).  The fishery that sustained the year-round population for generations is greatly diminished and the question of what makes a sustainable community is a matter of intense debate and considerable contention among Island residents.

Then there are the challenges of compliance with the requirements of modern regulations.  Monhegan is one of just two Island communities in Maine where overboard dumping of sewage is still permitted.  Living on solid rock with precious little topsoil makes it difficult to provide septic systems and leech fields, but now the Island is on notice that plans need to be made by each property owner to replace the pipes to the sea with alternative waste disposal systems. For those of us who have thus far chosen not to electrify - there is now a central diesel generator and power company on the Island - there is no option that will allow us to comply without at least some power, because the lower cottage is so close to the water that waste will need to be pumped uphill.  It is time to make this change - environmentally the current system cannot be justified and the State of Maine, while understanding the challenges Island property owners face in complying, has made it clear that change we must. 

But once that socket is in place, will television and dishwashers and -gasp - the Internet and all the electronic clutter of modern living also intrude on the solitude and slow pace of life we prize so highly on Monhegan?  I, for one, know that if my laptop were to join me on the Island, something more precious to me than connectivity would be lost.  We rise and go down with the sun and leave the maddening world on shore when we come to the Island.  I don't want my work and usual entertainment to come with me.

Fortunately, the extended family that stewards this place has given time to its members to share what Monhegan means to each of us and how we want to approach the weighty questions of electrification, and user fees, and how we want to manage the changes that will come.  We are in microcosm dealing with the same issues of sustainability and community character that towns across America struggle with today.  Smart growth on Monhegan with its 70 year round residents and 1,200 daily summer visitors presents unique challenges, and so do the 3rd - 5th generations of this family who now enjoy and cherish the legacy of Raymond and Alice Barker.  There is hope for us because we know that it is not enough to save the family property if we lose the family in the bargain.  This is not merely an anonymous timeshare.  Each of us leaves our mark here and knows we connect to those who have come before and above all the two that made it possible for us to know and love a place where time, if it does not stand still, still moves in slow eddies outside the main stream.