Maternal Instincts Maine writer reflects on adopting stranded seal in her memoir

Nan Lincoln sits like a queen in her forest green office at The Bar Harbor Times. There, among the paintings, etchings and grave rubbing hanging on the wall are a host of certificates for the awards she has received for her work in journalism. Lincoln has worked for the Times for 18 years, writing and editing the arts section and penning feature obituaries of Mount Desert Island luminaries. It’s these obituaries that Lincoln is most known for – hence the tombstone rubbing, a present from her daughter.

Now with the publication of her first book, “The Summer of Cecily,” issued by Bunker Hill Publishing of Charlestown, Mass., Lincoln’s writing is being taken to a larger forum. The book goes back 28 years, when Lincoln was writing family letters, not obituaries, and when her place of work was the log home built by her former husband, boat builder Bob Lincoln. Her job description at the time? Mother. Lincoln later ran a country store, was a waitress, taught art and music on the Cranberry Isles and bartended. But the summer of 1976, with son Benjamin nearly 6 years old and Alexandra at 21/2, mothering was fervent and fierce with Lincoln, and it didn’t stop at her own doors – or even her own species. How else to explain her reaction when she and her husband found a seal pup whimpering on the rocks in the Mount Desert village of Pretty Marsh, too far from water to slither back in?

Where was its mother? What had happened? And how could anyone walk away leaving a seal stranded on the beach? But walk away the Lincolns did, at least for long enough to call a game warden. Lincoln recalls the conversation in this memoir of her time with the seal she was quick to name Cecily: “‘I know you’re not supposed to interfere with these pups, officer, uh warden,’ I said in the sort of breathless and urgent manner I might have used to report an automobile accident. . . . ‘But why would the mother leave it in such a dangerous place, I mean, why would she?'”

The warden told her to leave the pup until the next high tide to see if the mother came back. If she didn’t, the warden would bring someone over to see if the seal needed rescuing. But, the warden warned, rescuers don’t usually have much luck. Often pups that get left are sick to begin with. Even if not, baby seals are very hard to feed, needing round-the-clock care. “Seals are pretty highly evolved animals and need real fostering, not just food,” continued the warden. “But who’s got the time to take on that kind of responsibility?”

Duties flashed through Lincoln’s mind: the garden, the meals, the household, not to mention the two children to whom she had given birth. But the idea of letting this other baby starve alone on the rocks was as impossible as abandoning one of her own children. “Maybe I could?” ventured Lincoln.

That was when the warden gave her the number of Steven Katona at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. In 1976, COA was itself but a fledgling institution, though Katona had already started Allied Whale to conduct research on marine mammals. Katona, now president of the college, wrote the book’s forward because he was closely involved with that summer of Cecily. While further warning Lincoln about the difficulty of trying to foster a seal pup and the likelihood that it would not survive, Katona also instructed her on what she’d need to buy and how she should care for it, should the pup indeed be abandoned.

“The Summer of Cecily” is the story of how Lincoln cherished, nourished and ultimately set free the seal. It also is the story of the tension between the needs of wild animals and those of humans who sometimes find themselves taking care of them.

From a vantage point of nearly three decades, Lincoln laughs frequently as she merrily recounts the stories that became the book, stories about the sibling rivalry between her daughter and little Cecily, and about how she used to bring Cecily to the local swimming hole just to get it in the water, much to the amazement of other swimmers.

Then Lincoln stops telling stories for a moment and confides, “You know, I kind of resented Steve at the time. I was sure that his plans were going to fail and I’d get to be with Cecily. There was no way I could pretend that my whole endeavor was to return her to the wild.”

Katona, for his part, remembers Lincoln for her creativity and energy, a woman who was absolutely convinced that she could make the accommodations and sacrifices to raise this pup. Caring for a seal, he says today, “is a lot of work, an awful lot of work. Not many people could do what Nan did, and not many should. Today it doesn’t happen at all.” Abandoned seal pups are now cared for by trained professionals not fierce mothers.

Lincoln comes from an old MDI summer family. Like others of her generation, she was determined to make Maine her year-round home. But beyond raising her family in Maine, she came to her Maine home with no other great ambitions. “I’d done acting, I used to sing in bars and coffee houses, but I just didn’t have the personality to pursue it. In the back of my mind, I thought maybe writing, I’d always written really great letters.”

Fed up with bartending, she left a resume at The Bar Harbor Times. At about that time, former Times writer LaRue Spiker was taking a sabbatical. “Earl Brechlin was the editor then,” recalls Lincoln. “I don’t know why he pulled my resume out, but he did, and sent me to cover a meeting.”

Before long, an opening came up for an arts writer. “All those things that I had wanted to do, the art, the music, the theater, I was much better writing about. It was just perfect. I’m nosy and I’m really interested in people’s stories. The moment I sat down at my desk at the Times, I felt I was in ‘Camelot.'”

Lincoln had longed to write the story of Cecily, but she could never get going until Bunker Hill came to her and asked her if she had a book for them. She began writing in September and finished Jan. 1, while still carrying on her duties at the Times. She just couldn’t stop, she says. “As soon as I sat down and started writing – after work, in the wee hours of the morning – it was all there, banked up in some little cupboard in my brain. It was such fun to finally tell the whole process, not just a little summary of the story. I’d go to bed at 2 a.m., and then the next paragraph would come. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last winter.”

The story is written for adults but accessible to children, though they might want to skip some digressions into family and community history. Ultimately, however, the story she writes is about a maternal love that transcends species and even the basic human desire to keep close those we love. Despite her railings against the scientists who worked with her, despite her mothering desires, her maternal instincts knew that Cecily was better off swimming with seals than with humans.

Coming to that, however, took some time. After Lincoln was told it was time to let Cecily go, she monitored Cecily’s whereabouts daily, until one day the seal disappeared. “It was an unusual day, hot, the water was flat, and seals were coming up like pistons,” Lincoln says. “I was under the water and I saw all these shadows. I thought it was a shark. It was seals. Seals flitting back and forth. I realized then that this was a community and that Cecily was fine. She’s a seal. These are her people. I let her go.”

Nan Lincoln will sign books 4-6 p.m. Saturday, May 29, at Rue Cottage Books in Southwest Harbor. For more information, call 244-5542. Donna Gold can be reached at carpenter@acadia.net.