The Never-Before- Imagined Adventure of the Windmills

The plains of La Mancha are an excellent canvas for the restless minds of dreamers. Sunbaked and relentlessly windy, La Mancha means "the stain." Its shadows lie treacherously long, windmills looming. Quixote charges forth on his steed. Dali's mechanized human cabinets drift by. The starker the land, the more plentiful the monsters. I have never been to Spain, and my upcoming layover in Madrid will certainly not count.  These Maine islands I have come to inhabit could not differ more from the plains of Southern Spain. And yet... there is a way in which the clouds and fog of the most bland days fall across the craggy landscape, uniting surfaces, smoothing edges, leaving everything barren. On these days, nothing much happens and just about anything can and will appear out of the nothingness. 

We have just three windmills on this island. It may not seem like much, but nobody has anything like them, at least not yet. They are the first and only structure of any kind here that is visible from the mainland, rising above the ranks of the spruce trees. Two turbines spin, one waits, then they all turn together. Once in a while, all three are kept still. They below to Fox Island Winds, LLC, an offshoot of the Fox Island Energy Cooperative. They are controlled from afar by General Electric, and experimented upon by "energy experts" from Germany. Their construction is perfect and their motions, reassuring. Off on an edge of the island, they are somehow in the midst of it all, tips of their blades and then the whole set coming into surprise view from innumerable vantage points. Slicing through idyllic sun and blankets of precipitation, they whir the days away, our insidious and oracular monuments to human ingenuity, sleek modernity, and spending power. 

As I write from the attic apartment of the old yellow schoolhouse out here on the island, the wind is audible, stirring up the tips of the nearby spruces and sending the waves in the bay into a frenzy. This apartment is accessible via a nearly-hidden and all- too- narrow door at the end of the second floor landing, and up just one more flight of dusty stairs. Half of my apartment is its usual cheerily cluttered self, while the other half of the space is occupied by stacks of boxes for our impending move. 

You can't see the windmills from here. You've got to drive out to the north end of the island, along our own little ribbon of highway, zipping past swamp and tidal basin, past the barely-glimpsed beaver pond, past double-wide trailers on concrete blocks, past colonial homesteads with wood stoves blazing true, and vinyl-sided homes with shiny red pickup trucks, past rambling fields, tiny bridges and sloping dirt roads. 

At any time of year, at any time of day, even among the shrinking year-round population of just 1200, someone is awake somewhere, and someone is out driving around. 

It's dusk and we're driving away from our sunset spot. Spread out in the road before us, a dozen fawns. No does and no bucks, this is a rural street gang of underaged deer. They assume their awestruck tableau and we assume ours. It is a number of moments, not minutes but moments that stretch thin and sling back and coagulate. The moment they appeared, the moment we beheld them. Our desperate hush, the enormity of their eyes... They have already turned tail and bounded off. 

In October of 1836, a steamship out of New Brunswick en route to Portland catches fire and capsizes right out in the bay. The ship is transporting a circus, known as Burgess’ Collection of Serpents and Birds, a title that fails to take note of the camels, hyena, hippos, zebra, tiger, lions, and elephant that traveled with the show and were carried aboard that day. Of the 90-odd passengers and 20 crew members, some 30 people drowned, as well as each and every one of the animals, all within two miles of the tidal creek outside my window. The casualties can be attributed, in part, to the removal of several life boats from the vessel to make room for the circus cages at the start of the voyage. 


Some say that the elephant made it to Brimstone Island, a hilly place where the small beach rocks are obsidian black and deathly smooth.  They say that townspeople rowed out to the black rock beach with feed for the elephant. Nearly every source notes that Mogul, for that was the elephant's name, was found floating off Brimstone not too long after the fire.


A crimson mushroom against the greenblackgrey of the woods. A pearly pink pearly purple, wholly-spent corpse of a whale against the shore. A decapitated blowup doll, stuffed into a paper bag and stashed along an otherwise pristine trail. An engraved heart, with initials, on a tree in an island in a sort of lake within another island, where there is no other graffiti, anywhere. A middle-aged tourist, overwhelmed by the urge to push her kayak into the tidal rapids, and the rescue effort that followed. A raft of ducklings going over the edge of the same rapids, saved by a passerby at the last second. 


The stillness is constantly broken by the projection of our imagination against the barren seascapes and our imagination is once again inflamed, with the monsters, with the adventure, with the strange apparitions of this stark existence. 

                                                                                    copyright ADB photography

In two weeks, I leave these islands, for even more unimagined adventures, far from home. 

The Point

 In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness..."  

-Sarah Orne Jewett

In April I started a garden 

 (with lots and lots of assistance). 

       It's one island over from where I live. 
It's close enough to the shore that an unusual tidal high would sweep the whole thing away. 

We hauled enormous stones and centenarian bayberry bush roots out of this little piece of earth sticking out on the point of the cove. 

It was, really, a lot of work.

                                Now our garden looks like this:

To Make An End Is To Make A Beginning

Easter Day of 2010 sparkled with promise. I felt the corners of Life edge towards me amidst the dappled green of the lawn at my family gathering. The day was sun-drenched and airy, soft and forgiving.


Just a few hours later, the police found my sister. Now the brilliance of those last holiday moments come back to me in a crazed sort of whisper.


The day after Easter found me speeding to Massachusetts, to the house where we grew up. I arrived mid-day to rooms thick with casserole-bearing neighbors and the smell of their  funeral food, laced with grief and pity.

What I want to say has to do with losing a part of yourself that perhaps never belonged to you at all, of the little waves of horror that take hold of a life, rupturing it anew again and again in the weeks and months after suicide.

How the person you loved, who breathed into your hair and giggled on the phone and kicked into the surf beside you vanishes and you are left with remnants of her likes and dislikes, of her quirks. And it feels like failure, not to be able to receive her in your dreams, not to feel her somehow beside you. There are no messages from Nora from beyond the grave, cryptic or otherwise.

What I want to say has to do with escape and maybe even redemption.


I came to Maine, adrift, on a gloomy day, to camp with my mother for a week on a mostly uninhabited island in Penobscot Bay. And slowly I was enveloped by the ripple of the tides, the crackle of the driftwood bonfires. Sheltered by the wide dark heavens, I found an island boy from my past, walked right up to him and then just never really walked away again. 


It is exactly one year ago this week that I returned for a moment to my city life to pack up a tiny rented room in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. 


One year ago this week I started over on an island in Maine. Nora and I had come here together as children. It was our very own repository of myth and magic. Maybe the only place for me now.


The Maine State Ferry Service runs six boats a day from the Mid-Coast out to sea. Last September found me hobbling aboard the last boat of the day. I arrived with a half dozen boxes, on an ankle I sprained in my late summer NY packing frenzy. Fifteen miles separate America and these Penobscot Bay islands. From harbor to harbor, between departure and arrival, the ocean settles into herself, unfurling lazily alongside the ship's hypnotic drone and the constant churn and fizz of the displaced Atlantic.


On the other side: a new boyfriend, a new (old) dog, and our attic apartment in the town's old yellow schoolhouse.


Before I came here, I worked as an administrator at an evening English school in Chinatown. I served cocktails in the trendy part of Brooklyn. I went to secret parties on my monthly Metro Card. I arrived at crowded tables in cafes and imparted quick kisses on each cheek. I fell asleep on 5 a.m. trains, on my way home from work and barhopping.


This year, I learned how to operate a tractor. I navigated a skiff alone through thick banks of fog and then piloted a 70 foot, 102 year-old industrial ship across the bay. I can still barely drive a car. I am stronger than when I came. My hands are tougher and my nails are dirty and stubby. My hair is tangled and frayed. I've spent time around gasoline and grease, engines and compost and fertilizer and good thick black earth.


It's quiet here, mostly. Lush and still and ever-shifting. Here I found love again. Here I found a certain peace of mind.

And now I am leaving...