Silvering Light

We’re past the season of the lowering, as I’ve come to call it, when the sun sits slightly deeper with each passing day in Maine, even at noon. By mid-December, rather than arcing across the sky, it merely rolls around the edges, never climbing more than a fist’s width above the horizon. The trees cast thin, stretched-out shadows that stand out starkly when there’s a cover of snow. The sun rises about 7:00 and sets just after 4:00. I try to make as much of those nine hours as I can.   

In late 2018 during our first full winter in Maine, I dreaded the shortening of the days. Not quite a year had passed since we’d left the North Carolina Outer Banks as some of America’s earliest climate migrants. We’d pulled up stakes and launched ourselves into a new life up north, hoping we wouldn’t find the cold and the long winter nights oppressive. To my great surprise, the fading light made me feel settled in and safe. We’d managed to make a major life shift much sooner than we’d planned. The reverberations from that explosive act were still with me. Nothing seemed certain. But the winter dark somehow comforted me. (The appealing novelty of the long nights would wear off as the years rolled round—six of them now.)

That first full winter I was surprised to see the strange optical effect created by the lowering sun. In the weeks around the winter solstice, its light slants and flattens. In our fields, the browns and grays of milkweed and meadowsweet fade as their stems freeze and dry to rattles. Shadows deepen, even within the grooved bark of oaks and pines. Every line seems more well-defined, as if my vision has suddenly grown sharper.

When I first noticed this, out walking one day, I thought something had gone slightly screwy with my eyes. I crossed the fields and hills near our house with a slightly off-kilter feel. Back inside, I searched the cabinets and closets for colorful fabrics to make sure my vision was still working. (It was.) The sideways sliding sun was simply casting a different light. It was more stark. With a covering of snow, the bleaching of the landscape became even more severe. The flattened, silvery tones bathed the land only from mid-December until sometime in early January, when one day I noticed the brightened browns and pale yellows of timothy grass again washing the fields.

It’s been that way each year since—until now.

Early this past summer it began to rain, and rain. At first this was most welcome. Maine had been in a serious drought for three years. There was talk that the dryer weather was a product of climate change and might be permanent. Area farmers began to wonder if they would be able to adjust to a warmer, drought-plagued New England.

Every few days it rained, all summer long—often five days out of seven. Rivers rose. Campgrounds in the north woods closed because of the high water. Black flies swarmed later and more ferociously than usual. Float trips were cancelled, the beach season mostly ruined. Lawns grew with astounding speed but couldn’t often be cut; conditions were too wet. The rains continued into autumn, which was much warmer than normal. A single inch-and-a-half of snow fell in early December, hung on the trees for a few days, received a mild freshening of new snow—and then washed away in rain. And the showers that came were much heavier than normal, with storms often dumping an inch or two of moisture.

In mid-December a major storm swirled up the East Coast, dropping up to six inches of rain here. Its winds howled and ebbed, howled and ebbed, very much like those in a hurricane. I knew the feel of that weather. Where was I living? In Maine, or still on the Outer Banks?

Christmastime arrived, and with it the lowering of light. But this year the silvering rays fell not on freeze-desiccated stems and stubble, but on green grass. On a Maine landscape that had yet to experience a solid cold snap. (I thought back to our first autumn here, when a neighbor warned me that it wouldn’t be unusual to have our first frost when green leaves still clung to trees.) Mosses grew lushly on the north sides of trees and on the rocks lining streams. And so I walked through the Christmas holidays and into the New Year not through a landscape of silver and platinum, but in one that even as a newcomer I found shockingly unfamiliar.

Shortly before Christmas, my mother’s best friend called from Pennsylvania. As we chatted, she exclaimed, “The grass is still green here! I can’t believe it.” As with our grass, hers did not grow. But neither did it die.

In ways small and large, climate change makes itself known.

            The deepest nights of the year have gone, and our part of the world arcs toward spring. It will still be a long journey for us—through what many of us hope will be (but fear will not be) the snowy months. If the cold never comes, I worry that we will have continuous weeks of mud season, when Maine is at its absolute worst. At last we’ll reach mid-May and the yearly greening. With each revolution around the sun, this Earth moves further into a new era. I do not know what to expect of it. No one really does.

            Do you have a particular spot in the natural world that’s dear to you, and that you fear will be radically altered, perhaps even destroyed, by a warming climate? If so, please get in touch. I would like to compile an atlas of natural places that are deeply important to us and that are under serious threat because of climate. This should be a specific site, one that speaks to you personally. My hope is to make this a widely collaborative project.

            I envision this as a way to honor the special places that may soon become unrecognizable to us (or that we’ve already lost). My hope is to collect these stories and post them online. Please send me a brief (less than 500 or so words) description of your beloved place and a photo if at all possible. You can find me at jdeblieu@gmail.com. Many thanks, Jan

A Climate Migrant's New Life

            Early one clear autumn morning I go down to a dock just off a narrow river on the mid-coast of Maine. Two slim wooden boats are tied here—rowing dories shaped like slips of moon, each awaiting a handful of rowers and a coxswain. There’s a thick cover of dew. It’s cool enough for sweatshirts but not too cold to row. The rowers chat as we take our positions, but this is not a social hour. We ready our twelve-foot oars and await the coxswain’s orders, eager to slide onto the calm, winding river.

            I’m new to this rowing group, and somewhat new to this village. Before this year I’d never really rowed. The waters of my former long-time home, the gale-plagued North Carolina Outer Banks, would have been too choppy and dangerous for such narrow, tipsy crafts.

            I am a climate migrant, among the first in the U.S. Jeff and I left the Outer Banks in 2018 after three decades of watching sea level rise and tropical storms turn the thin, once-scantly settled barrier islands into a heavy-equipment operators’ playground. It’s hard enough to hold a sandy reef together in normal times, given that the ocean constantly pushes it west. Now sand-scrapers and backhoes often work around the clock to try to block the ocean’s advance—and to save the lavish houses that line the once-open shores.

            It’s all futile, of course, and what’s coming is going to make it even more so. Things are getting worse by the year on the world’s sea coasts. In 2016, when the outermost edge of Hurricane Matthew knocked down hundreds of trees on Roanoke Island, our home, we began looking seriously for a safer place to live. The center of that storm, and the most powerful winds, had stayed 100 miles to the south of us.

            Many people will face a similarly wrenching decision as climate change continues to take hold. Wildfires, droughts, astounding heat waves, strengthened tornados and hurricanes: There are plenty of reasons to consider leaving the most severely affected regions. Nor are the parts of the country considered “safe” without their own climate problems, including here. The Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest warming water bodies in the world. Invasive, north-moving insects like the hemlock wooly adelgid and the emerald ash borer threaten entire forests.

            Americans are a famously unsettled people. We pushed relentlessly across a continent and even now move long distances for jobs, for family, for sunnier climes. But there is a qualitative difference between electing to try life in a different locale and abandoning your beloved home to find one in a safer place. A climate move can upend perfectly comfortable lives—and it implies that there is no going back.

            For me our move from the Outer Banks carried the heartbreak of leaving a landscape I deeply loved. Waking each morning there, listening to the salty breezes sing through the tops of the loblolly pines in our yard, I felt more complete than I had anywhere on Earth. Walking the miles-long beaches opened me and renewed me. I didn’t think anything would ever drive me away.

            The chore of emptying our Outer Banks home of three decades, where we had assumed we’d grow old—where we had become the people we are—was painful beyond words. We walked away from the friends who knew us best, aware that our easy, day-to-day relationships would never be the same. Once north we faced the task of learning a different regional culture. On meeting you Southerners will ask all manner of questions about your life. New Englanders are kind but more quiet and cautious. Establishing friendships here takes longer. In our case the process was made even more difficult by the pandemic. Still, we were exceedingly lucky. We landed in a place that suits us well.

            That’s not to say our lives are the same. Even after nearly six years I still don’t have the easy I-belong-here confidence that I enjoyed on the Outer Banks. There I knew what each wind shift meant, how it would shape the ocean waves and the very feel of the day. I knew when to step in to help a friend with an ailing relative and when such an offer would seem intrusive. That kind of deep local knowledge isn’t something I can quickly rebuild.

            The crescendo of our move was followed not by climate bedlam on the Outer Banks, but by a continuation of normal life. Although a major hurricane swept over Ocracoke Island in 2019, although erosion and sunny day flooding frequently cause problems now, nothing much else has changed. A part of my heart catches when I think of the years I could have enjoyed there. Even so, I wouldn’t change our decision to come north.

            How soon should people in danger zones leave, if they choose to? At some point the scales will tip, and there will be clear winners and losers in the relocation lottery. Housing prices will plummet or soar; storms or fires or floods will destroy communities. While I feel safer in Maine, this world is not particularly safe, anywhere. Yet I feel a peace and sense of solidness here that wasn’t possible anymore on the Outer Banks. During hurricane season I keep loose track of the storms that are spinning along the Atlantic seaboard. But instead of a rising pulse, I feel only a deep sadness when one threatens the islands I still love.

            My new home isn’t a climate paradise. Not at all. At times the weather here resembles an ill-tempered, dangerous animal. Last year a microburst tossed the roof from a neighbor’s barn into our field. Winters are growing increasingly wretched as the reliable New England cold gives way to cycles of intense freezing, followed by immediate thaws. Mud season in spring is interminably bleak.

            But for now, as autumn slides toward winter, all is well. And so I row, reveling in the clear, slanted light and the moist coolness. The smooth rhythm of the oars is like the graceful passing of days when I no longer worry about which tropical storm will next put our home in its sights. We row, passing shadowy hemlocks that dip their branches toward the water and marshes filled with wild rice—a vibrant green last month but now brown and limp. We pull back in unison and release our oars with a single sharp click. Rounding a curve, we gasp as a sturgeon leaps from the water, flexing its sleek, silvery body (while we still manage to keep stroke). As we pull and push and glide, I celebrate my new home on high, rocky ground, that—however changed by climate—will still be intact a century hence.

Prisoner at Home

Late one winter afternoon, I walk crunchily down a road on a forested point of land that thrusts into Merrymeeting Bay. My snowshoes make more noise than I’d like; I certainly won’t be sneaking up on wildlife today. On either side of me is water, glimmering through the trees. Tides and currents have broken the ice that covers the bay into jagged bits. These catch light from the lowering sun, throwing up rays of rose and purple on one side of the point, yellow and gold on the other. I stand and watch the shimmering colors for as long as I dare. The Northern Lights, I think, the terrestrial version. The sky deepens to purple and I hurry on, ahead of the looming dark. Cool air sings through my lungs, fresh and sweet.

During any other winter I might have missed this show, tethered to my desk as I finished the day’s last tasks. But I can dispense with all those later this evening—may as well, in fact. There’s not much else to do.

I’m a fairly frequent traveler and normally might not be at home for more than a couple of months in a row. Of everything that’s changed for me during the pandemic, this is one of the most profound: my presence here, here, rather than, say, visiting beloved family or returning for a spell to my former home on the North Carolina Outer Banks. Jetting off to France to continue my exploration of the village from which my family takes its name. We live in Maine now, in the fullest sense of that word. There is no escaping to somewhere else. How long until it’s again safe to travel? Are we really only halfway through the pandemic?

I try not to dwell on all I’m missing out in the world, though sometimes a restlessness rises in me like a trapped bird. It’s the height of spoiled indulgence to be distressed by having to stay home when so many people are suffering such hardship, I know. So I tamp down my wanderlust and reach out again to those I miss, hoping I’m not bothering them, rationing my phone calls and Zoom sessions like a medicine that’s in short supply.

And I walk, forcing myself outside, trying to exercise my way out of emptiness and frustration. I live in one of the most comfortable possible places to spend a pandemic: lots of countryside to hike; fresh food available from neighboring farms; and, thankfully, a mild winter making it possible to walk or ski with friends. To sit around outdoor fires, staying carefully on the other side of the flames from our companions.

With no road trips, no new scenery to take in, I try to watch closely all that goes on around me. I can manage this most days for approximately fifteen seconds. With fewer distractions and errands pressing in on me each day, I should be able to focus my mind more keenly—right? Probably not, it turns out, and possibly the opposite. The constancy of days at home seems to be immersing me in a mental fog. I keep reminding myself that I’m also unhappy when commitments take me away from home for longer than I’d like. 

I try to take note of all there is to see here: the lengthening daylight (coming more quickly now), the snow buntings and other birds I’d be unlikely to spot down South, the trees and shrubs I only glanced at, back when they had leaves and would have been easier to identify. I walk more, which occasionally yields sights like the ice-bound Northern Lights. On days I’m especially antsy, I venture outside to chop away Japanese honeysuckle, a pretty but predatory shrub that, if allowed, will take over every inch of of our land. 

Still it’s not enough.

There have been times in my life when, after reading about people being held prisoner for long periods (Nelson Mandela comes to mind), I’ve wondered if I could stay sane under such conditions. I like to think I’d be mentally strong enough to invent strategies to hold on: constant meditation, say, or devising a clever code to communicate with other prisoners. They couldn’t keep me in chains, not my truest self! Yet here I am, in the most watered-down version of imprisonment imaginable, and I can’t even muster the energy to straighten up my desk. All I want is to be is somewhere besides home.

In the introduction to his book Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World, Scott Russell Sanders writes, “My nation’s history does not encourage me, or anyone, to belong somewhere with a full heart.” When I first read those words, my heart fully belonged to the Outer Banks, and might still if those thin strands weren’t being drowned by rising waters and unbridled development. I tell myself that I’ve dedicated myself entirely to this new home. But is that true? If so, what can I see in it—what can I absorb—that would be difficult for me to notice in normal times? 

Like it or not, this pandemic is another opportunity for each of us to move more mindfully through the world. Why not treat it as that, since we’re going to have to get through it one way or another? What can I learn in the process? There are more lessons than I could ever list (including this one: The very idea that I might gain insight from all this irritates the heck out of me, Why might that be?).

I’ve come to allow myself an occasional pandemic melt down, and why not? At such moments I go off by myself to silently scream and flail my arms. I’ve done a version of this for years, actually. It’s quite therapeutic, a part of my spiritual practice that quickly restores my equilibrium. And I can rest easy knowing that, unlike normal times, should anyone catch me in one of my raging sessions now, the person would likely give a sympathetic nod.

The days pass. Light is slowly returning. I hold on to that with all my strength. God knows, we pray it’s a light that comes from more than the season-rounding slant of the sun.