I had visions of a small boat pitching violently on a wind-lashed sea. My imagination saw me peering hard into the snarling teeth of a November gale for a light through the fog, some sign of land.

Instead, I am aboard a ferry bound for an island in Casco Bay. The sky is overcast, but the temperature unseasonably warm for early November – in the 60s – the air dry, the sea calm.

Of course, if the storm of my vivid imagination had accompanied our bay crossing, I would be cowering in a corner with the complexion of a Martian. A Hemingway protagonist I’m not.

Call this story: “A Somewhat Older Outdoorsman and the Sea.”

I am sworn to secrecy about our specific destination by our host Dave, who fears an onslaught of tourists should his pristine island be discovered. Perhaps his fears are warranted.

The map of Maine’s Casco Bay conjures up a mental picture of some great beast dragging claws across it from northeast to southwest. But it was glaciers, not claws, which left these scars, this diagonal alignment of fingers of mainland, islands, and inlets.

More than 200 islands stud Casco Bay alone, large ones connected by bridges or ferry service to the mainland, smaller islands more isolated from civilization, and uninhabited, tiny rocks.

Once called the Calendar Islands – a name derived from the long-held but mistaken belief that the bay contained 365 islands – today most are in private ownership. A small but hardy population resides out here year-round, from lobstermen to professionals commuting by ferry from Portland, committed to life in a place with a different set of rules.

But many island homes spend the winter in shutters – which is our task this weekend.

The ferry drops us off and we walk a mile to the cabin that’s been in Dave’s family for far longer than he has. We’ll spend a couple days here, enjoying November, then close it up until Dave returns in May.

An unusually high tide crashes against shoreline rocks maybe 20 feet below the cabin’s front porch, making me wonder what this place must be like in a storm.

The cabin offers a reflection from what seems now like another epoch: kerosene lamps the only light source, a kerosene stove and iron sink in the cramped kitchen, the outhouse at the end of a path out back. We carry buckets to a spring for water.

By late afternoon, as November dusk creeps up on us, the tide retreats 15 or 20 feet, what Dave calls a “big drain.” We hike over the freshly exposed rim of rock along the shore.

On its perimeter, it becomes easy to see the island – like probably all the others in the bay – for what it is, a huge rock covered with conifer trees. Its foundation crumbles at these edges, pounded by the sea’s patient fist. Blocks of detached stone lie in the mounds, seaweed draped over them.

On these frayed edges of the island, the topsoil gradually loses its tenuous foothold. Stunted spruce trees – which I imagine spent their early years farther “inland” – topple like toy soldiers into the ocean.

Stones, mussel and periwinkle shells, and seaweed carpet the ground of a cove littered also with manufactured debris: a pair of buoys, a sneaker, a wad of tin foil.

Somewhere in the rocks, the waves find a pocket into which they can rythmically trap air, registering a pop like a muffled gunshot into the warm breeze.

Darkness falls early, and we spend the evening in quaint old tradition: socializing by kerosene lamplight.

With the morning comes a return to the weather I had envisioned. A harsh, wet wind scrapes across the sea into our faces; whitecaps lift off the incoming tide.

The sky and bay wear the same color, or lack thereof: a steel-wool hue, the flatness overhead only slightly brighter than the flatness beyond the front porch. They mimic one another, too, the sky’s overcast showing its ribs, the bay constantly rollng toward the mainland.

It feels pleasantly like November.

We finish shuttering the cabin and walk to the ferry landing, pulling collars and hoods up against the chill, joining the seasonal migration from the island’s isolation back to the 20th century.

Michael Lanza is a syndicated columnist.