Roque Beach State Park, a few miles south of Machias, is one of the rare sandy beaches in an otherwise rocky shoreline.
The water is too cold for swimming, for most of us, though some sports will take a dunk.
Tag: Summer
A little more heaven on earth
The day I shot these, I encountered only one other person in two hours … and that was just as I was leaving. Admittedly, I arrived around 7 as a foggy dawn lifted and then listened to a mournful foghorn in the neighboring Bailey’s Mistake cove much of the morning. How could I not be elated?
In 1988, the Maine Coastal Heritage Trust secured the property now known as Boot Head Preserve, saving it from a planned 35-lot subdivision and instead opening it to public enjoyment. It’s a gem that includes coastal hiking, a cove with a cobble beach, and an arctic peat bog.
Promise me you won’t tell anyone else.
Sidewalk scenes
Lupine island
Officially, Eastport sits on Moose Island, though I have yet to see one here.
This time of year, though, it’s covered with flowering lupine, gloriously so. You’d never imagine the kind of winter we’d had.
Not just any old daisies
My wife is quite fond of wild Ox-Eye Daisies – not the bigger and, to her view, coarser Shastas. But she’s usually saddened each year when the Black-Eyed Susans arrive about this time, announcing the end of the Ox-Eyes’ blooming. Not so in Eastport, where, to her delight, some continue through August.
You’d think they’d been planted
A matter of relative size
Eastport is smaller – much smaller – than the model for my fictional Prairie Depot was, and I thought that place was small. Yet somehow Eastport feels more vibrant and whole.
At least in summer.
For a little perspective, the entire winter population could ride a single New York City subway train.
Even untended, they’re glorious
“We usually think of a Poppy as a coarse flower; but it is the most transparent and delicate of all the flowers of the field,” Celia Thaxter enthused in her classic An Island Garden book based at the other end of the Maine coast. Noting that the “Poppy is painted glass; it never glows so brightly as when the sun shines through it. Wherever it is seen, against the light or with the light, always it is a flame, and warms the wind like a blown ruby.”
After a half-page of descriptions of the color range of its many varieties, she quotes an unnamed English master of prose, “The splendor of it is proud, almost insolently so,” and then Browning’s line of “the Poppy’s red effrontery.”
Here on Moose Island, after blazing intensely, they give way all too soon.
To me, they glow like miniature suns.
How fitting, with our sunrise now approaching 4:42 and sunset around 8:19 – and nearly 17 hours of visible light.
Spring touches along a trail at Boot Head Preserve
Signs that the Summer People are about to descend
- First boat on a trailer bouncing down the street. Usually soon followed by another.
- Lights on in a seasonal second-home.
- Double the number of cars at the IGA from what’s been normal.
- Rain rather than snow.
- More than one vehicle parked overnight at the motel. And then international flags flying from its deck.
- Out-of-state licenses plates from other than a random New Hampshire or Massachusetts or Virginia vehicle. Beginning with Iowa, Wisconsin, Tennessee, but soon followed by Oregon, California, Texas, New York, New Jersey, Ohio. Somehow, Florida doesn’t flood in initially.
- A change in the quality of daylight, from bright crisp to buttery.
- The first Mercedes in town since October. Or BMW, Audi, or Volvo.
- Green grass and dandelions.
- Somebody actually moving within one of the seasonally closed stores or galleries downtown.
Jnana's Red Barn 