The Cloud Ship (continued)

I wrote earlier about the beginning of the Covid lockdowns of 2020 when I saw the whole of the natural world in my backyard.

I watched a cloud of goldfinches feeding in an orange tree. And then I saw, or perceived is a better word, for a few seconds, what they were a part of.

James Lovelock and Lynn Margolis called it a living organism – a complex, self-regulating system which acts to ensure its own survival.

I didn’t think Gaia. I didn’t even think Nature. I thought BIG. And, Working. That was the important part. It, whatever it was, was going about what it does, as the human world ground to a halt. All over the world, the animals that are around us walked or swam or flew into our lives–remember the goats in the village in Wales? They made themselves comfortable expanding into the corners of the world because our cars had stopped, mainly, but also our ferry boats and airplanes and buses and ourselves. Not only were animals alive and working, but so were the trees and plants, the microbes under the soil …the whole of the living world. The philosopher Martin Heidegger said it beautifully. It was “worlding.”

I saw it because the screen of human activity between me and the world had been–presto! – removed.

Or maybe I saw it just because. A friend told me she felt part of a “very big world” just as she was pinning a newly washed sock to a clothesline.

I thought: what is it?

How does it work?

And then, what is our place in it? And, more urgently. Where do I belong?

This urgency has pressed me, moved me for the last five years.

In 2021, we bought a small house beside a big estuary in the far north of Maine.

In the early 2000’s, a good friend moved to a town in a peninsula in Maine closer to Montreal than New York. Two years later he called to say he and his wife had rented a place on the water for a week’s vacation but had found a house to buy in the meantime. They couldn’t afford both the rental and the down payment. Were we interested? We were.

It was a little studio that the landlord and his father had built on a big piece of granite overlooking a deepwater cove. There were fir trees. There were osprey. Most of all there were tiny islands that we could see from our small front deck. There was only one way to visit them– by boat– and so we drove over to Captain Bill’s rental place next to an old granite quarry and tried to impersonate people who knew everything about kayaks. I will not forget standing near the water holding a spray skirt as if it were a tutu while one of the captain’s guides watched me try to figure out how to put it on.

The first island was a postage stamp, owned by a land trust. As we drew close to it on the green waves, I saw a beach made of pink broken shells. All my life, I’ve had a desire to land on an uninhabited island, and here it was.

We rented that studio the next year and another place the year after that. Soon twenty years had gone by and a few weeks in summer in Maine were part of our lives.

We didn’t travel in 2020. In 2021, our usual cottage was not available –a disaster in a place where people agree to the fiction that the place you rent belongs to you– and so we rented a series of cottages in different parts of the area, moving into a hotel between rentals, dragging our suitcases and kayaks.

At the same time, we discovered that our Maine peninsula had been discovered by people escaping the cities during the pandemic and real estate had doubled. Reluctantly, we asked around for a real estate agent and began the process of looking at houses we couldn’t afford.

The combination of moving from cottage to cottage and looking at real estate caused us to enter a mind trap. As we packed and unpacked, we imagined the perfect cottage where we could live forever and never move. We brought this desire with us to every house showing, causing us to imagine that this house–this overpriced, tiny cabin with nice timbers cheek by jowl to its neighbors that lacked a foundation–was IT, the place where we would never heft a suitcase ever again. It’s only because someone else got their first that we didn’t buy something we would have regretted for the rest of our lives.

One of the places we rented during that summer was a little farther away from the towns where our friends lived. It was on a wide, wild estuary that wound its way off Penobscot Bay.

At that rental cottage, we sat on the screened porch and watched the Bagaduce Estuary. There were two loons in the cove in front of the house that dove like Olympic divers without parting the water and rose showing their white breasts.

On the Bagaduce, I watched the birds on the shore and the currents of the river and walked on the road every morning. I often met people walking their dogs who greeted me with waves and smiles. There was something about the place that I wanted.

By the end of that summer, we were on our third rental. We’d seen a parade of dismal, expensive properties. Our realtor, Roger, had just showed us the studio with solid timbers and no foundation.

It was now September. Vincent was cooking for a party on my birthday. An elaborate fish stew. We were wondering whether we might get a cake when Vincent looked down at his phone and said, “Roger just sent me a text. He says a house has come up on the Bagaduce.”

We drove out the next morning in a grey drizzle on a road where the hardwood trees bowed over the car. I was a year older. We turned onto the road where we had rented, past a collection of propane tanks belonging to a local plumber, and made a left at a green mailbox.

There was a meadow on one side of the driveway with the dried husks of plants lying on the ground. I would discover in the coming years that they were Goldenrod and Blue Asters. On the right was another meadow and beyond it a forest of White Pine and hard woods. Birches. Apple trees. Leaves were turning in the fall light.

Near the front door, was a tree with rough dark bark. I knew its name. It was a River Birch.

We walked in off the porch into a large living room with a kitchen area at one end with a large white ugly refrigerator. The house was not a beautiful 18th century Cape or a gorgeous post and beam. It was a modest house with a solid feel built in the early 2000’s.

But we weren’t looking at the house. Even in the grey rain, we were looking at the outside. Outside was the Bagaduce. Its currents were visible and shifting on its surface even in the rain. Two masses of land with pine trees that looked like the masts of ships stood out across the water. They turned out to be islands.

If I could have picked one word to describe what we saw, it would have been alive.

We had fallen in love with each other very quickly forty-one years before this moment and we fell in love with the place on the Bagaduce just as fast. Vincent turned to Roger and said, “I’d like to buy this place.”

* * *

The first year we lived there, the neighbors arrived one by one on our porch and pounded on the door. I am an introvert. I don’t welcome uninvited guests. The first time two people arrived on the porch during the morning hours, I almost didn’t open the door. I had no experience of what these people were up to.

All summer; they held parties. Any excuse would do. And, when we walked down the road, chances were someone was either walking, too, or sitting on a screened in porch from which they beckoned to us. One of our neighbors, the man who negotiated the Covid vaccine trials between the manufacturers and Massachusetts General Hospital, met us on the road shortly after we had finally taken possession of the house and gave us everyone’s email address.

The road was certainly a neighborhood, but it was something more. I realized that I didn’t know what it was.

When the people on our road weren’t collecting each other together, the local institutions were. The local library held a book sale, an art sale and reception, book readings and their famous dessert auction. The bakery and pizza place down the road held barn dances and concerts. At the many August yard sales, you could not leave the sale without talking to the sellers.

There were three farms near us that we discovered one by one. On Cape Rosier, a 20-minute drive, Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch at Four Season Farm had been growing organic, no-till vegetables for sixty years. People crammed into their tiny parking area on Saturdays to get in the door. Across our stretch of the water, in Castine, two young farmers were offering meats from other farms and a CSA for their unimaginably fresh eggs. Nearest to us, a woman who’d just retired from teaching English in the United Arab Emirates was growing “what I want,” “eating it” and selling “what was left.”

I found myself overcoming shyness because the people living in our community didn’t engage in small talk. They spoke of the weather because they were farmers or sailors or builders; they wanted to hear the story of how we’d found this place and tell the story of how they found it. In the air was human vitality, a buzz of activity, concentrated in the short summer season but also focused on how to make this thing, create a togetherness, build on other people’s efforts, greet each other, remember each other’s names, make jokes, invite others in.

We attended parties, sat with our new neighbors, talked at yard sales, went to the dessert auction to benefit the library ---and discovered the house was haunted by its previous owners, both of whom had died there.

It was a gentle haunting. They were just, uh, there. I had never bought a house where I knew so much about the owners; the only other house I had bought was the one in California and the guy who sold it to us was just a name and a pleasant face when he handed us the key.

But these two people, Joe and Dori, had been well known on this road.

People on the road remembered them, missed them. The dogs on the road searched our pockets for the treats Joe used to give them.

Joe was a blacksmith. He had moved a little cottage to the land near the head of the driveway and built a forge. The walls were black from coal and fire.

After we’d been there a few days, I got up to pee in the night and passed through a cloud of smoke.

I didn’t deep down believe it until a friend stayed there one night by herself when we were gone. I tiptoed into a question about how the night had gone and whether she had sensed…anything…before I finished, she said, “Oh, yes, they’re still around.”

Joe and Dori built the house. They planted the river birch near the front porch. Joe helped put boats in the water in the early summer and brought up the docks in the fall. They were worlding here before us.

The spectral presence of the people who built the house was the beginning of an indication that the place we had bought and were now living in was not what we had imagined. We had imagined a place that would provide us with a vacation like the one we had every summer only longer. This place was more like the parallel worlds theorized in quantum physics. It looked the same as our summer planet, but it wasn’t the same. It was more exotic and unfamiliar. It was not what many regions and cities have become in California and elsewhere– a pretty backdrop you passed through that had things to buy. It was more demanding and, at the same time, consoling, in equal measure.

None of this was clear to me at the beginning of that first summer. I only sensed that our neighbors were gauging something about us and realized sometime midsummer that they wanted to know what our commitment was. But to what?

Sometime late in the summer, I watched a webinar–a friend was interviewing an economist from Harvard about climate change. At some point, my friend asked her how “community” might affect this complex puzzle. She started to reply, and I felt my ears prick up. Having been in this part of Maine only a few months, I understood that she–well-trained, educated, sincere– could talk about business and climate change but did not know how to answer the question. She knew just about nothing about community. It was all theory. And I realized that what I was seeing around me, what I was learning boots on the ground was community. This elusive and invisible substance was very real here in Maine and people were making it out of thin air, like magicians, right in front of our eyes. The barn dances were not only about making money for the pizza place; they were about gathering people together, especially in the winter as it turned out, when they might be miserable and depressed at home. The dessert auction was not only a fund raiser –it was also–that abstract and boring phrase that has nothing to do with this reality—building community, which meant, in this case, setting up a way for people to meet each other and enjoy each other’s company by bidding on Joy’s Guinness cake and watching kids hold their parents’ auction numbers aloft, with big grins plastered all over their faces. It meant that you started something in motion that had widespread and unplanned results; it meant that the woman whose almond tart you won the bid for would rush over when you picked it up to offer you her basket to carry it home. To return the basket, you would have to learn her name.

Community was a sport, and these people were gold medalists.

One evening, we sat with neighbors outside swatting mosquitos and talked about how long they’d been coming to this part of the world. Liann now lived in London but came back every summer. She inherited the land we were sitting on from her father. She told a story about a man on the road who asked her if he might collect walnuts from the old tree on her land, as he had when her father was alive. She said, yes of course. When she returned in the summer, she found on her porch a box of shelled walnuts. Her stepbrother mentioned that he’d had a request to tap one of his sugar maples and then found a quart of syrup on his doorstep. We exchanged these stories that evening and considered whether this might be what we’d read about when we were younger. Was it like Hyde’s gift exchange? But later in the summer, my neighbor Jerry, who grew up on the road, told me that in the fifties most of the people here were dirt poor. They survived by sharing a piece of land for cows, digging for clams, and hunting birds. They had what is called a shared Commons. When I heard Jerry’s story, my thoughts returned to the maple tree’s syrup and the walnuts. You gave back, not only to the person who owned the trees (if anyone can be said to “own” a tree), but to keep up a common savings account, that each person relied on to survive.

The word that came to me was reciprocal. Its roots are Latin meaning back and forth. If you allowed your neighbor to tap your maple tree, he gave you the maple syrup he got from it. To tap the tree and not give someone a portion of the syrup would mean an interruption of the back and forth. This interruption would have been more than a simple failure to return a favor. Like making community, the important thing was to keep things moving. If movement stopped, something very large stopped with it.