On Not Climbing Katahdin

Katahdin: A Native word meaning, roughly, biggest mountain; a place to be dreamed of; a destination to be earned.

         Mount Katahdin: At 5,269 feet it’s a middling peak by world standards. But it’s the highest by far in these parts, and a Maine icon. Simply getting a reservation to climb it is something of a triumph.

         As the centerpiece of Baxter State Park, Katahdin is ascended by hundreds of hikers each summer, all of whom must negotiate the park’s reservation system before setting foot on any of the steep, rocky, sometimes manageable, sometimes heartbreaking trails—every one of which passes through a piece of the wildest country in the East. Two years ago I tried and failed to get a camping and hiking reservation. Last year I snagged one but had to cancel when my hiking partner (Jeff) injured himself while sailing. And so a few weeks ago when we finally shouldered our backpacks and hit the trail under the bluest of skies, our spirits were soaring.

         Why was I so set on climbing the mountain? A fair question. It was partly the lure of the challenge and partly the rite of passage: Most everyone I know who’s lived in Maine for a while has made it to the top. But there was another reason.

Three years ago, on our second visit to Baxter State Park, we had just come through the southern entrance when we saw a hitchhiker by the road. There were no other cars around. How could we not stop?

He jumped in the backseat and told us he’d just been come down from the mountaintop. He’d hiked up the west side and down the east; now he needed a ride back to his car. He couldn’t stop smiling. He had the expression of someone floating ecstatically through the world, in love with life. I decided then and there that I’d someday climb the mountain. I wanted to be where he’d been, and see what he’d seen. I wanted that aura of happiness and achievement.

         Now Jeff and I were hiking the trail to the Chimney Pond campground with food and gear for a three-night stay in a mountain cirque a mere two miles from Katahdin’s peak. We reveled in the cool, clear air, the moist feel of the forest around us.  Sure, our backpacks were a little too heavy. But the campground was only 3.3 miles from the parking lot where we’d left the car. We had no doubt we could manage the climb.

        I had backpacked in my twenties and thirties but not since. I knew better than to go out with a too-heavy pack. That morning, after loading up everything and hoisting my pack, I began tossing stuff. Not needed—extra flashlight; not needed—bird book. Camp shoes. Two pairs of binoculars. (Jeff argued that we didn’t need any.) Why hadn’t we thought this through a little more thoroughly? (I thought we had.) There was nothing for it now but to keep putting one foot in front of the other, ascending alongside fast-flowing Roaring Brook and into steeper country, where the trail was lined and strewn with boulders. Jeff’s pace slowed. I began resting often with my pack propped on a rock. Hours passed. Three-point-three miles: Hadn’t we already come that far, and more? I studied the forest around us, the spruces and firs and the occasional large maples and birches. I rejoiced when the trees grew shorter and the view opened to alpine lakes. A few steps later we both nearly cried when we reached a sign informing us that we still had a mile to go.

We made it, of course, and the pain was worth what we found.

Chimney Pond is a small jewel set in deep forest and encircled by three peaks. A smooth joining of mountainsides. We stood on the shore, marveling. To the south, Pamola Mountain curled into the long form of Katahdin, which melded into Hamlin Ridge. In many places the walls were streaked with beautiful vermilion stone. Watching the colors fade as the sun dipped below the towering ridges, I wanted to be nowhere else on Earth.

That night the stars were the brightest I’d seen in the East.

         Our plan had been to continue on to Katahdin’s peak the following day. We woke knowing this was a bad idea. We were too sore, and too depleted.

Luckily we were not too worn out to take short hikes. We explored the first section of the difficult Cathedral Trail, which began with a steep but manageable climb. We hiked the rising trail through damp forest, passing over a rushing stream we could hear but barely see, buried as it was beneath piled rocks.

We heard the buzz of a mountain chickadee. In full sun now, we hoisted ourselves around and over pale boulders taller than we were. They had been rolled together like marbles by glacial ice.  At the base of the first cathedral, the point at which serious rock climbing would have begun, we sat down and reveled in being here, here, on the side, if not the peak, of Katahdin.

Hiking back to camp, Jeff found a pile of spruce cone scales where an animal, perhaps a squirrel, had left them piled in a tidy circle. Bright mauve on their insides, they were as beautiful as bits of amethyst.

All the while I knew that this sunny day of relaxation might cost us our chance to reach the summit. The next day’s forecast was for clouds and fog and spitting rain. Even if we managed to finish the climb in such conditions, we probably wouldn’t be able to see past the end of our hiking poles.

We hiked toward Pamola Caves, moving slowly along, sometimes sitting still and just looking, examining small things we would have missed on a more purposeful, destination-driven hike: the lichens on the rocks. The small shrubs pushing stubbornly from cracks between boulders. I told myself it was enough to be on Katahdin’s flank, that the chance to pause and revel in the beauty of this country was a gift we wouldn’t have received if we’d been hellbent on getting to the summit.  

Back in camp, I sat on the bench in front of our lean-to, looking up for a long time. Three big white birches, older and grander than most I’d seen, enclosed our campsite. Their branches waved in a spunky southern breeze (a sign, I knew, of weather possibly changing). Just beyond them, barely visible, was a steep, treeless, vermillion-streaked cliff: the top third of Katahdin.

Jeff asked me if I could feel the spirits of the place—meaning the life pulsing through the trees and rocks and bushes around us. An interesting question, and one on most days that I might have answered yes. I realized that what I felt here was more expansive, a wholeness born of the entire landscape.  I hoped it would be enough, should we be stranded in camp by weather on our last day.

The weather forecast did not improve. As darkness gathered I crawled into my sleeping bag—content, though I knew this would probably be as far up the mountain as we would go.  What a gift, to be here, here, if not on the summit. I had a suspicion that I would be glowing after we made our way back to civilization. I slept deeply and well.

As often happens, the weather forecast was utterly wrong. We woke, astounded, to bright sun. Instead of packing up and packing out, after several hours of hard, beautiful, exhilarating, excruciating hiking and climbing, at last we reached the top of Katahdin.

The view from the top—and a sign of the wind’s srength

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The Bobolinks

The rumble of the mower was slow to reach the house. The man at the wheel had begun by cutting the far end of the field and looping toward the back, mostly out of earshot. This wasn’t nefarious, just a sensible path for carving through the tall grasses across the road from us— in a field that was harboring bobolinks, a flashy, noisy, black-and-white-and-tan bird that nests on the ground. 
             He had made one pass around the front field and was completing a second when the rumble of the machinery caught my attention. I glanced at the calendar: June 28th. The bobolinks would be at the peak of their nesting cycle.
             Those fields, part of a state Wildlife Management Area, usually weren’t mowed before August.
            I slipped on my shoes and went out to investigate. Maybe it was something else. Maybe I was mistaken. But no: There he was, finishing a second circle around the field’s perimeter with a tractor towing a bush hog. 
             He had passed the end of our driveway half a minute earlier. I bolted down the road, running as fast as I could, barely gaining on him but gaining. He couldn’t hear my shouts. I got close enough for him to see me and waved my arms. “Hey! Please stop.”
            He halted, looked at me, surprised, and turned off the tractor.
            I held up a finger in the classic sign for just a second. “Thanks for stopping,” I said when I had caught my breath. I explained about the bobolinks, and how for years these fields had been cut by neighborhood volunteers, and not until August.
            “Well,” he said, “the state told me to cut ‘em.” He got down from the tractor, a working man in jeans and boots, muscular but a little thick around the middle. “The state told me to come do it,” he repeated.
            “They’re paying you?”
            He looked annoyed but nodded.
            “Could you wait until August?”
            He took out his phone and dialed a number, punching the buttons roughly. He hung up—the call must have gone to voicemail.
            I knew who he was trying to reach: the wildlife biologist in charge of the region. I had called him too, a few weeks earlier, volunteering Jeff and myself as the new neighborhood mowers. The man who’d done it for many years was hanging up his spurs. The wildlife biologist hadn’t called me back.
            “Could you please wait to cut it?” I didn’t want to take the job away from this man.
            He made a face. “I don’t want to get all political about this,” he said. He turned, climbed back on the tractor, started it, and put it roughly in gear. He drove briskly off, bush hog lifted, down the field to the trailer that had delivered the cutting machine to our road. 

A bobolink female or immature bird? It’s very hard to tell. Photo by Jonathan Irons, All About Birds, The Cornell Lab

When we moved to Maine, the most forested of states, I had expected to find a home nestled in trees. We ended up in an old farm field that we’ve come to love, and that’s become a beautiful meadow. Trees run down two sides and sneak partway along the back of the house. The rest is open field—bobolink country.

            Surveys in Maine show bobolink numbers to have dropped 3 percent each year from 1966 to 2017, a trend that will lead inevitably to extinction. During that half-century, the species suffered an 88 percent decline in their numbers continent wide. The authoritative Birds of Maine reports that they are “listed as a Species of Greatest Conservation Need because of concern about cutting hay and silage during the nesting season.” More recently, real estate developers have targeted the open fields.

All good reasons to care for these quirky little birds. But besides that, we love having them around.

            They chortle. They squawk. They perch on the wavering tips of grasses, the males gabbling like old men. The sight and sound of them lift our spirits. And so, on July 8th when I once again heard the mower across the road, my heart sank to somewhere around my kneecaps.

            I didn’t dare again confront the man mowing. So I called the wildlife biologist who had hired him.

            He answered this time, in a thick Southern accent that made me feel right at home. But this was Maine, not the North Carolina Outer Banks. Before we hung up, I asked him where he was from.

            “Georgia,” he said.

            I told him we’d lived down south and that I loved hearing his accent.

            “I sure have taken some hell about it all my years up here,” he said good naturedly.

            “It’s music to my ears,” I said. And it was.

            The verdict he imparted was not music, however. He’d told the mower to recommence. He’d checked and had read that the birds would be mostly done nesting by the end of the first week of July.

            That wasn’t at all what we had observed. I swallowed my protests, thanked him for researching the matter, and hung up. Across the road, the cutting was halfway done.

            Bobolink males are mostly black but have a butterscotch swatch on the back of the head that to me looks like a toupee. Their shoulders and rumps are flashily patched with white. They look ready for a night out on the Jersey shore. Females and young birds are drab by comparison, easily confused with sparrows but for the shape of their bodies and beaks. In autumn bobolinks migrate through the Caribbean and spend five or six weeks in Venezuela before continuing on to grasslands scattered through Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina. They come north again each spring, settling in open fields, which are fewer with each passing year.

            The day before the mower showed up for the second time, I’d glimpsed a dozen birds—three males and nine drab females or young—on the electrical wires along our road. An encouraging sight. But that was before.

            Might the chicks in the mown fields have all fledged? It was impossible to know. In the silence after the second mowing we caught no glimpses of bobolinks anywhere, for weeks. I scanned the fields each morning, my heart numb. A flyer put out by the nonprofit Vermont Center for Ecostudies cautions against mowing in northern New England until July 20th, before which, it says, “Nests are fledging young that are incapable of flight for 10 days.” A delay to August 1 would be best. A wildlife specialist at Ag Allies, a Maine grassland birds program, echoed the need to wait until at least July 15th.

            How many young birds might have been killed by the mowing? What should we do about it—if anything? We’re new to Maine (though we’ve been here six years). This isn’t a culture where pushiness is appreciated. Then again, I’ve never been one to shirk a fight.

            One morning in mid-July, a week after the second cutting, I glimpsed two males and a couple of drab birds—females or new chicks—in the undisturbed grasses in back of our house. The males sat up tall, as if daring anyone to mess with them. Their companions were more cautious. The birds didn’t show themselves the next morning, or the next week. It isn’t unusual for bobolinks to appear and disappear. But things seemed quieter this year. Emptier.

            The following morning we left on a sailing trip. When we returned after a week, the power lines along the road to our house were empty. The fields were distressingly silent.

            Two mornings later, though, our front field exploded with birds: four splashy males and another 16 or 18 females and young. It was a party, a grass-top mashup. The birds made no attempt to conceal themselves, calling to each other, chattering away, all the while bobbing on their shaky perches. We watched; we counted; we rejoiced. When I ducked quickly inside for my tea and came back, they were gone, another of nature’s disappearing acts.

            And—that was all. I envision them now in the wild rice fields around Merrymeeting Bay, fattening up for the trip to South America.

I know I can’t protect everything I love in this world, whether people or animals or places. Even so, doing nothing is never an option.

I don’t want to get all political. Neither did I. This wasn’t a political matter but simply an exchange between people with differing fears, overlaid on the needs of a small, quirky bird.

I wrote to the wildlife biologist with the information I’d gathered: the local bobolink census figures, with dates when the birds generally leave the fields; the graph from the Center for Ecostudies recommending that mowing be delayed. That was all I could do. He wrote back within minutes to say that we can probably work something out for mowing later next year.

The seasons will turn; the election will come and go. Regardless of its results, our nation will be living with these rough edges for the foreseeable future. May I do nothing to sharpen them. May I instead find ways to soften them until—however long it takes—the concept of “getting political” over small but important matters, like caring for bobolinks, no longer holds sway over the American psyche.

Writing Home

One spring day nearly twenty years ago, I found myself in front of a class of bored eighth grade students, scrambling for whatever key I could turn to ignite their imaginations. I had walked into their school that morning with the assumption that I could easily run this class—that I could quickly engage these kids and get them thinking about their home landscapes: the places nearby that they considered special, and how those places affected their lives. Ha!

            Early that morning I had slung a backpack full of papers and books into my car for the hour-drive from our home on Roanoke Island, over two bridges and three islands, past fields of rolling dunes and glimpses of blue-green surf, to the Cape Hatteras School, grades K through 12. I was teaching in the school that week through a visiting writers’ program sponsored by the state of North Carolina.

Normally I loved this kind of assignment.  It gave me a chance to connect with young people—to spark a little creativity even in students to whom the idea of creative thought seemed utterly foreign. But for the previous few years I’d been teaching workshops with college students and adults. I was (I realized belatedly) badly out of practice working with students this young.

The assignment I’d given them had always worked well in the past: Write a few paragraphs about your favorite place in the world. Maybe it’s somewhere you can comfortably be alone. Or maybe it’s where you hang out with friends. What’s special about that particular place? How does it make you feel? I stood in front of the class trying to hide my deer-in-the-headlights surprise that my request was falling so flat.

I changed tacks and asked the students how many of them planned to leave Hatteras Island after high school. Twelve hands shot into the air. “I don’t know where I’m going,” one boy volunteered, “but it’s outta here!”

“It’s too boring here,” another boy said. “There’s nothing to do.”

“What about the beach?” I asked. “Any of you like to surf or fish or hang out there?”

Most of the students nodded, if reluctantly.

“Okay,” I said, relaxing slightly. “We all have places we love, even if we live in the dullest spot on Earth. Think of where you like to hang out with your friends. Those places may not be anything special to anyone else, but they’re where you feel at home. Right?”

A few of the students nodded; a few others looked thoughtful. These kids were so young! But for their guarded expressions I would have guessed them to be in fifth grade, not eighth. Most were looking down at their desks, but two or three shot furtive glances toward me One girl with incredibly smoothly combed hair, wiggled a pen between her fingers and stared coolly and directly at me.

I asked the students to take out a piece of paper and sketch a simple map of the places on Hatteras Island that they most loved. “Maybe start with your house, or even your bedroom” (I hoped they had bedrooms) “and go from there.”

This seemed to do the trick. Heads down, they went to work. After ten minutes I asked them to choose one of the special places they’d drawn and describe it in three or four paragraphs. Several of the boys groaned loudly. “That’s almost a page,” one complained.

“Just try it,” I urged.

In a few minutes they were bent over their papers, writing, their brows creased. Occasionally one would pause, as if working through how to describe a thought with words. Only one boy, a youngster with very short, dark hair, wasn’t working. He sat alone at a table on the side of the room, his legs and arms sprawled as if he were dumbfounded by the assignment.

This was Josh, who seemed to have no intention of complying with my request. I made my way to his desk and stood in front of him. “What’s up?”

“I can’t do this. I can’t think of anything to write about.”

“Do you ever go to the beach?”

He shook his head.

“Do you skateboard? Is there anyplace special you go with your friends?”
            “I don’t have any friends.”

I crouched down so we were eye-to-eye. “What do you do after school?” I asked quietly.

“Nothing. I just go home.” His chin rested heavily on his hand.

“You stay inside all afternoon?”

“My mom makes me take the dogs for a walk.”

“Write about that,” I said, trying to hide my annoyance. “Write about walking the dogs.”

He curled his upper lip distastefully and let his hand collapse on the desk.

I hurried across the room to answer a question from another student. When I glanced back, to my surprise Josh was writing.

At the end of the period I asked the students to take their pieces home and finish them overnight. I’d collect them the following day. As I watched them stuff books and papers into folders and backpacks, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Josh. “Look,” he said, thrusting a paper into my hand. “Look what I wrote.

It was three-quarters of a page about his two dogs and how he loved to take them out to romp in an old campground. “I don’t know where to find adventure,” it said, “but they do. They follow their noses, and I follow them.”

The next day, when he handed in the paper, he had lengthened the piece and titled it, in curly script, “The Smell of Adventure.”

The teacher was astounded. “I’ve barely been able to get him to string two sentences together,” she confided.

All week I had similar experiences.

A sixth-grade boy who swore he hated to write turned in a story about his favorite hideaway beneath a bridge over a marshy creek.

An eighth-grader composed a beautiful passage about a live oak she often visited, and the solace she found in its sinewy branches and textured shade.

After a particularly silent-and-surly ninth-grade class, where students refused to acknowledge my simplest questions, a girl turned in a story about her father, who had once encountered a humpback whale on an offshore fishing trip with friends. The whale swam around his boat, coming frighteningly close. As the amazed fishermen watched, it stuck its head out of the water to reveal a fishing net wrapped tightly around its mouth. It couldn’t feed. Reaching carefully for his knife, looking all the while into the whale’s large, liquid eye, the girl’s father cut away the net. The whale remained motionless, watching. Once it had been freed, it sank out of sight, surfaced a final time, and was gone.

I read the story to the class.

“Cool,” said a tall, pretty girl in the back, looking at the floor as she spoke.

“That’s supposed to be true?” asked a wise-cracker boy.

“The ocean’s a mysterious place,” I told them. “Strange things happen there all the time.”

I read them another story, one of my own, about a Hatteras woman whose husband had vanished in a fishing accident. Months after his disappearance, the woman heard him calling to her. She made her way, as if led, into a nearby marsh and immediately found his body, where a high tide had washed it, perhaps the previous day.

“These are the kinds of stories that define our communities,” I said. “They remind us why living by the ocean is so special. But they’re not getting told anymore. Everyone’s too busy watching TV.”

By the end of the week I was exhausted. When the alarm went off at 5:20 Friday morning, I pulled myself out of bed, wondering how our school teachers manage to keep going.

My class load was lighter that day, and the hours passed quickly. I drove north again in a buoyant mood, past fields of shining salt hay and stunted cedars, over bridges and across the blue, blue waters that defined my home. I had no illusions; I hadn’t changed anyone’s life that week. But I’d introduced them to the concept of landscape and story, and I’d reminded myself that all people—even the problem students who never, ever crack a book—have immense capacity for creative thought. It’s a lesson I hope I’ll carry with me all my life.

Landscape of Dreams

Alaska: The word itself is beautiful, the idea of it too vast and faceted to be easily held. Alaska: largest of states, and in some ways the most varied, from shadowy rain forest to the most frigid, light-filled tundra. In my mid-20s, at a time when nothing was certain for me—indeed, when my I-can-do-anything bravado was crumbling—I had a dream about Alaska: a sky-blue sparkling landscape, a place of many colors, more beautiful than any I’d seen. Of tall, snowy peaks; of slanted sunlight and the clearest lakes; of vast meadows of wildflowers.

         I awoke dazzled.

         There was no question beyond when I would go. The timing was tricky, because I had what was considered a good job at a newspaper in Oregon, a position I’d worked hard to win. The pay was generous, the schedule relentless. To my dismay, I neither liked nor excelled at the work. So I kept my head down and saved money. When I had what I thought was enough, I quit the job, drove to Seattle, and caught a ferry north. I left my car with friends, figuring I’d improvise when I reached the end of the ferry line.

         “Improvising” turned out to be hitch-hiking. On the ferry from Vancouver Island, I met a feisty German woman with laughing blue eyes who went by the nickname Mausie, and we decided to travel together. Standing on the road shoulder alongside her, I felt much safer. Mausie had no such fears. She’d explored much of the world with her thumb.

         We hopped ferries as far as Skagway, threading through the islands of southeast Alaska, pausing on any whim. Most days were cloudy with spitting rain, the mountains appearing and disappearing like ghosts. North up the Klondike Highway, where mists closed thickly around us. “I sure wish you girls could see the mountains we’re passing,” lamented the kind truck driver who’d picked us up. I tried hard to envision them rising in every direction.

He let us out at Tok Junction, a sparsely traveled crossroads known as a brick wall for hitchhikers. But we were two women; it took us only four hours to snag a ride. Men waiting with thumbs out glared at us. We rode southwest, passed quickly through Anchorage, and turned toward the beautifully green, off-and-on rainy Kenai Peninsula, where I had a friend from school. North again to Denali National Park and patchy gray weather. The mountain revealed itself briefly on the summer solstice, more spreading and lovely than any peak I’d ever seen.

         But where was the beautifully lit landscape of my dream, and the stretching fields of wildflowers? I had fun traveling Alaska, yes, and a sense of accomplishment for having struck out on my own. Still, sitting around a fire one night, when another camper said, “You should come back in autumn. It’s drier and the wildflowers are amazing!” my spirit gave a small, sad cry.

         What is it about the places we hold dear that nourishes us and makes our souls sing? For me it’s the sense of being slapped alive by the beauty of the landscape. Many people find verve in cities, but I’ve always sought out natural places.

Decades ago on Hatteras Island and the North Carolina Outer Banks, I believed I’d found the natural and spiritual home where I’d live out my life. Climate change and overdevelopment derailed that plan. Now we have a new home in Maine, in a community that has graciously embraced us. These past pandemic years I’ve come to better understand the sentiment of a writer friend who’s given up travel, who’s content to stay close to his home landscape in northern New York.

Still, the restlessness I keep thinking I’ve killed off has a way of reasserting itself.

         “You should come back in winter.” I couldn’t help remembering the words of a colleague in Anchorage, where I was teaching summers at the university.

         “Really?” I’d responded. The idea of winter there, with its relentless darkness, was daunting.

         “Come in March. There’s more light, and the snow is amazing.”

That was in 2019. Alaska in March: The idea echoed through my mind that autumn and early winter, until the global pandemic silenced it. A few months ago I found an opening: a plane ticket I could afford and a trio of friends happy to host me. So in early March I again boarded the ferry from Juneau to Skagway, retracing the first part of my route with Mausie.

The waters of the fjord were rough that day. Steep waves stirred up by north winds collided with the ferry, making it something of a dance exercise to walk to my seat. But the skies were clear, the snow-covered mountains fully in view. They rose straight out of the water, lining the eastern and western horizons. More snowy peaks awaited in the north. Through the ferry’s large windows I could see them all.

There were few other passengers on this cool, late winter day. A couple of women at a table laying out a jigsaw puzzle. A man stretched out in a sleeping bag. A group of Natives of varying ages. I relaxed into my seat as steep white mountains slid by on both sides. I imagined the precipitous plunge of their slopes beneath the ocean surface.

The Native kids were full of energy. Several adolescent boys threw open a side door and tried to fight their way forward to the open viewing deck on the bow. The wind had other ideas. Its force distorted their faces; they scrunched their eyes and pressed on, mugging comically for those of us in the cabin. One boy opened his coat and let himself be blown backwards along the side deck. Watching from inside, a little girl with pink footie pajamas and worshipful eyes ran to the window, laughing and waving to get his attention.

These kids were of the Tlingit tribe, which holds ancestral lands here, and they were well accustomed to the bright mountains we passed, with their rocky shoulders sliding toward the water. Snow-covered peaks above a beard-like covering of forest. Treeless white strips that showed old avalanche routes. There is a way of seeing a landscape in which you know exactly how the pieces fit together. I had that understanding on the Outer Banks, a much smaller tableau. I wondered how many of these kids would come to have it here. I hoped they all would.

The mountains slid by, and by. Even the rough waves couldn’t shake my feeling of being suspended in time. Six hours later, when we reached Skagway, I gathered my things and left the boat as if awakening for the first time that day.

 Wonderful times followed: a trip with a friend to a small town in British Columbia, where the temperatures dropped to -25 F one night and the days were barely above zero. We stayed in a simple cabin, woodstove heat only; no indoor plumbing. Outside I was careful to cover my nose and mouth and to wear gloves, especially whenever I touched something metal. The threat to my skin felt slightly existential. But, oh, the crystalline clarity of the air! I felt as if I could see forever. We walked along a mostly frozen river and skied on a lake overlooked by mountains as high and snow-covered as any I’ve seen. With no wind and great gear, the temperatures were manageable. When the thermometer climbed to zero, we began shedding clothes.

I floated through the days, aware that they were too short but lengthening them by enjoying each moment. It felt a little like magic, like smoothly walking a balance beam knowing that at any moment I could topple off—but also knowing I would not.

Back in Juneau, two other friends and I hiked and kayaked along the rocky, forest-lined coast. We bought a king crab right off a fishing boat and drove past high rise buildings slam up against mountain cliffs. At my request we visited the Mendenhall Glacier. When I’d last visited the glacier in 1980, it had truly seemed like a river of ice, its front face a glaze of snow and dirt and rocks. It filled the river valley and towered over me. Here and there depressions revealed a core of glowing, electric blue. What I found this time was as third as wide, almost a half mile farther back, and clearly dying. Before turning away from it, I said a small prayer of apology.

There were, of course, no wildflowers. I didn’t miss them.

I found the landscape of my dream, and it was not just scenery. I know now that Alaska would never have revealed itself to me on its own. It did so thanks to my friends, all with deep ties to their home. They helped me glimpse its heart. It in turn glimpsed mine, changing me in a small but profound way. It kindled a glow within me that I feel even now as I move again through my daily life, here in pastoral Maine.

I close my eyes and see snow-covered mountains: rocky jumbles, merengue tops, cleaved white faces, long ridges running down to a wave-ruffled fjord. The tracks of my skis as I glide along a frozen lake, circling an island beneath snowy behemoths. A little girl in pink footie pajamas, laughing at her brother who’s outside on the deck, jousting against the wind.

Three Tempests

A tidal surge at Greenhead Lobsters in Stonington, Maine, in January. Click here for a video of the tide’s quick rise. Boston Globe image, provided by Greenhead Lobsters

The storms—all three of them— drifted along what was at first a novel route, then a frighteningly familiar one. An unusual wave in the jet stream helped spin them up and toss them off like meteorological cannon fire. One by one they passed over Quebec and moved off the coast. Their slow drift, coupled with the air plunging toward their cores, generated winds more long-lasting and powerful than any seen along the Maine coast for decades: southeasterlies of up to 70 miles an hour, with a few gusts to 90.

           The damage was among the worst ever suffered on the Maine coast. Immediately afterwards, some people swore they’d rebuild the wharves and docks and seafood packing houses they’d lost. But it’s becoming clear that this winter’s trio of tempests may have forever changed fishing communities here.

            When the first storm arrived on December 18th, Mainers everywhere felt its power. Ferocious winds left hundreds of thousands of households without electricity. Heavy rains pushed inland as far as Farmington (near Sugarloaf Mountain), where massive flooding shut down the entire city.

All that water swiftly ran for the sea. In the town of Hallowell, on the Kennebec River, waterfront businesses were left with two feet of tide in their basements. In downtown Brunswick, the Androscoggin River rose with such force that highway officials feared it would swamp the bridge crossing it. Flood water poured over the dam there and roiled its way downstream, roaring so loudly I could barely hear the words of a woman standing next to me. The dam stands about 18 feet. On that day, the overburdened river lapped nearly halfway up its height.

The second storm blew in three-and-a-half weeks later, its power centered over the coast. The third system followed three days later, in the same track. December 18th, January 10th, and January 13th:  “To get one of these storms would have been more than enough,” Maine state climatologist Sean Birkel said in an online presentation. Three in a row, in less than a month, was beyond belief. It didn’t help that the fiercest portion of the January 13th storm  arrived with an astronomically high tide—up to 14.7 feet, a state record.

            Every sea town or headland with any eastern exposure suffered significant damage. The beaches of Wells. The waterfronts in Portland. Harpswell, Phippsburg , Bristol, Port Clyde, Rockland, Rockport, Camden, Stonington, and on up the coast. Massive ocean waves even topped Pemaquid Point, with its famous lighthouse set high on a rocky point. The front wall of the brick building that holds the sea bell there was beaten to pieces by surf.

Maine’s fishing communities were home to countless docks and wharves that jutted into ocean coves, many with seafood packing houses atop them. Waves conjured by the two January storms damaged or destroyed many of them. The direction of the winds didn’t help. “Normally we have northeasters,” said Ben Martens, executive director of the nonprofit Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association. “We’ve built our infrastructure to handle northeasters, and we got waves coming from a direction that was completely unexpected. And then three days later, it happened again—but worse. Nobody was prepared for the scale of it.”

Lobster traps, neatly stacked on docks for the winter, were rolled and thrown by waves. Those that could be recovered were filled with leaves and seaweed. “The tides were two feet higher than the NOAA forecast,” Martens said. “In the middle of the (January 13th) storm, guys were wading through tide to unplug cords from electrical boxes that they had thought were okay”—high enough to be safe from flooding.

Estimates are that between 50 and 60 percent of the state’s working waterfronts were damaged or completely destroyed.

            From my years of living on Hurricane Alley on the North Carolina Outer Banks, I know what the residents of those battered communities must now face. Photographs and videos of flooding never completely capture the damage: the filth, the smell, the mold, the scale of the ruin.

How can these communities possibly recover from such a blow in the three short months before peak season begins?

When I asked Martens that question, he became somber.  “Honestly, we’re making it up as we go along,” he said. The state’s fishing fleet doesn’t have the knowledge or response team to swing right into rebuilding the damaged structures, in part because of the permits needed. “What’s legal? What’s not legal? What are the steps we need to go through?”

The question now, he said, is whether many of the wooden wharves and fish houses so iconic along the Maine coast will be built back at all.

  There are so many factors that comprise the landscapes we love. For me one of those is the mess of boats and docks along the coast, as well as the people who work the waters. Fishing towns have grit and vibrance; they’re a stellar example of communities that exist in spite of, not because of modern culture. They’re also among the places most threatened by climate change.

The islands of the North Carolina Outer Banks, my home for three decades, don’t have nearly Maine’s tidal amplitude: 8-plus feet on the coast near the New Hampshire state line, building to 18 feet at Eastport, near the Canadian border. The ocean rising and falling 18 feet, twice a day: It’s a sight to behold, and not easy to work around.

Nor do the fish packing houses in Wanchese and Avon and Hatteras Village have wharves that extend into open waters like they do in Maine. Unloading and packing seafood on the Outer Banks is done on the more sheltered coastal sounds. In the aftermath of tropical storms and damaging northeasters, there’s plenty of money lost and nasty mucking out to do. Comparatively speaking, though, the logistics of putting things back in order are much simpler.

            Wharves in Maine typically reach far out into ocean coves and are set high enough to be out of the reach of tides. On the dropping-and-swelling ocean here, it’s tricky to unload crates and boxes of lobsters and the bait fish menhaden (called pogies here). Mechanical lifts are often used to bring filled crates up to the level of wharves.

            Think about the difficulty and expense of replacing all that, especially in these times: A lobsterman I spoke with said that last summer, six months before the storms, a family member had made some inquiries about replacing a single, simple wharf. He was told that because of labor shortages, the marine construction company was taking orders three years out.

Working waterfronts in Maine were already under tremendous pressure because of gentrification. During the pandemic, sales of second homes in Maine skyrocketed. The Island Institute, the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association, and other nonprofit groups are nervously tracking the disappearance of commercial mooring fields and landing sites.

As I read the accounts of damage and the struggles to work out how to get a few facilities operable for peak lobster season, I think about how much the lives of fishermen and women differ from mine. Fishing is an identity, not just a job. In an online video, a retired lobsterman from Camden describes how he considers the ocean to be the same as his home. “People don’t understand the connection to us of that flat, broad expanse of water. . . . To us it’s just like this town, where we have this street, and that house . . . It’s the extension of our lives. We have a vision and image and perception of all that’s going on underwater.”

Each time a boat goes out, there’s no guarantee it will return, though they almost always do. There’s generally no hourly wage, so earnings can fluctuate wildly. There’s only the community and the culture you belong to, and the joy of being on the water.

That culture includes the infrastructure that waits on shore. It’s been deeply upsetting to residents in these communities to lose wharves and packing houses with long family histories—many of them built by relatives and friends now gone.

  There’s talk of the state and federal governments providing financial assistance, though it’s not clear how much or when it might arrive. It’s difficult to imagine that it will be sufficient to rebuild all that was lost. For now, says Sam Belknap of the Island Institute, the affected families aren’t counting on financial help. They don’t have time. Their focus is on doing everything they can to get back on the water for the season. That includes repairing structures that received minor damage and working out arrangements to share space with those whose docks and wharves and packing houses were spared.

“Fishermen are fixers,” Martens said. “They move move move. I’m always awed by the resilience of these guys and their families and communities.” Even so, he acknowledged, everyone’s feeling pretty beat up. “I think we just experienced a watershed moment in Maine.”

The three storms made it clear, Belknap says, that “climate change isn’t a ‘then’ problem. It’s a ‘now’ problem.”

Whichever wharves and docks and fish houses are replaced, recommendations are that they be built back higher—two or even four feet higher—than the original structures. Raising them, of course, carries additional expense. And should they again be made of wood, or of aluminum—or steel?

Martens noted that Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funds can be made available to communities but not to individuals. So some towns may opt to build central docks and seafood packing facilities that can be shared. “I think it’s going to be a community by community decision,” he said.

Time will tell how many of the old iconic structures will be rebuilt. Suppose, Martens mused, you had a small dock behind your house where you could store some lobster traps and sometimes tie up your boat. It was old, maybe built by your grandfather. Those kinds of docks were everywhere. They were part of the coast’s well-worn but vibrant feel.

Many, if not most, are gone.