Finding ourselves in the sea

Beach combing is my emblem for summer. In July, we mess around in boats, pick blueberries, fish for mackerel, lounge bookishly in the hammock by the grandfather elm – and truck along the pebbled shore picking up things.

Days ebb and flow with the tides and daylight, not the clock or the jobs which tick down the rest of the year. It’s not a perfectly antique life: the harbor master may be seen wearing an electronic pager and even the tentacles of FedEx reach down the peninsula two days a week. “Here too in Arcadia” is found FedEx. I overheard one sailor pleading to her husband, as he headed for the grocery store: “Oh, please don’t buy a newspaper.” We too seek blissful ignorance. To construct the illusion of 19th-century living, the external world must be kept at bay.

But this is the place for collecting news of our interior world. A section of the shore is a repository for the tides of the bay at the mouth of the mighty Penobscot River, and our harbor the site of several ship sinkings during military skirmishes waged in the 17th and 18th centuries, when world powers vied for access to Maine’s forested interior.

In our first summers here, we had a romantic notion that the worn china and sanded blue glass which we gleaned on our shore walks had washed out of a British frigate decaying on the harbor bottom. We felt cheated when we learned that it was only the old town dump sunken a hundred yards out. Our porcelain chips were trash, not treasure. But collecting has not slowed. The children love these humble vestiges of former times. A shard of china painted with blue filigree remains exotic. “Treasure” is defined by provenance and the current collector and is not an intrinsic value.

Summer’s inter-tidal zone collects and gathers us as much as we collect and gather what the tides deposit. My hammock reading yielded this thought: “A child comes to the edge of deep water with a mind prepared for wonder” writes E.O. Wilson. “He is like a primitive adult of long ago, an acquisitive early Homo [sapien] arriving at the shore of Lake Malawi, say, or the Mozambique Channel.”

And so each summer we begin a new collection to add to the old, examine the effects of winter storms on our Maine Malawi, note the new moorings and new boats and new boaters. We reconnect with summer people, and the year-round residents who have been hidden indoors like us. But it is really ourselves with whom we reconnect: picking up where we left off and noticing the significant ways in which we are changed, and the significant ways in which we are not.

Jars of beach china line our mantel; the new album of summer photos helps to chronicle our combing. Against the consistent background of the cove the foreground shows us holding hands with children who walk in taller and taller shoes. The lad who balked when setting foot in the canoe last summer, goes on a long paddle around the pond to see the loons; his sister now fishes solo on the dock when the word goes out: “The mackerel are running.”

From year to year the changes seem immense, but the snapshots also remind me of the imperceptibleness of summer’s nonlinear growth, without a scheduled goal or level of achievement to prod or measure. Wilson notes, “Adults … undervalue the mental growth that occurs during daydreaming and aimless wandering.”

All too soon, September will flood in like a high tide. As we drop our young beach combers off at the schoolhouse door, the moment contains complex overlappings of what they were, are and will be. Languor and aimlessness give way, with melancholy, to organization and structure. But I always hope the kids will retain what they have found by the sea – the daydreams that were the vessels of this summer’s collecting – to guide their walk toward June and the next season of beach combing, of aimless, important wandering. As e.e. cummings wrote,

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)

it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.

Todd R. Nelson is principal of the Adams School in Castine.