I forgot spoons, a bowl, cooking oil, the second bottle of fuel, dry shoes and a ground cloth. We made curry the first night and ate it with purple mussel shells, sitting in our socks on the thick, gravelly sand.
We were on Jewell Island, five or so miles from the backshore of Peaks. We’d paddled four sea kayaks across Hussey Sound to Vail, and from there took the straight shot over to Jewell, bypassing the protection of Chebeague and Long. It was so sunny it didn’t feel like October. The water looked like it would chime if you touched a single piece.
We passed Hope Island with the big red barn, and I told my friends how there was a rumor that a man who visited this island infrequently, by plane, owned peacocks. Maybe, from the shore of Jewell, we’d hear them calling across the night.
The first time I lived anywhere but Maine was in 2018, and I left for college. I took an English class. When I went to my professor’s office hours, he asked my name.
“Soley,” he said, “Soley…” (columns, grates over the windows, desk like an architect’s but no computer) “…it’s a very good name.”
“I can’t take any credit for that, sir,” I would have said if I were in a book. Clearly the man had never been to Portland.
“Soley,” he repeated, “it’s like an island. Your name is like an island.”
“That’s funny,” I really did say, “because I’m from an island in Maine.”
That became the fateful line. Saying I was from Maine gave me an edge, like saying I wanted to be a writer. Both were justifications for choosing unconventionality over strict success.
I transferred to Bowdoin the following year. If you’d asked, I might have said it was for the wallpaper – the dining hall had it, with birds and flowers, and people left their coats on hooks on the way in.
But really it was because, at college in a city not-so-far-away, I’d become an island. All my sentences started with “I.”
Before my first semester at Bowdoin, I swam from Peaks to East End Beach. I ran it all back then in the green underwater, like one of our old VCRs – self-doubt, vomiting, the feeling I was stroking as hard as I could and getting nowhere, the sound of propellers in my ears – and then I was there, eelgrass stroking my shoulders. Freshman year was over and I was coming up for air.
Now, in my final semester, we were paddling home.
The plan was to take it all the way – up the Androscoggin to the row of houses down the hill from school – but we soon abandoned it. We only had three days. And besides, it was better out here in the bay, where the wind kept our words for itself and the expressions of the waves were always different, the face of someone you loved.
Courtesy of Luna Soley
That first night on Jewell was windy and cold and we crouched around the fire for a while, keeping warm from talk, but we’d been camping together too many times before to stay up until 7:30.
When we left in the morning, we were watched. A group onshore at the next campsite over stood together on the overbite of the eroding shore. Their tandem kayaks were sleeping in, stowed neatly head to toe.
“They don’t think we should go out,” I explained. If we were in Portland, they might have called the harbor master rather than wave their arms to call us back.
“We’re kayakers,” I wanted to call out indignantly, “and I’m from here, I’m from Casco Bay!”
But we only looked over our shoulders at them, into the wind. What did they see? Four kids who should have stayed in. They thought we trespassed on the wind.
We dredged four arrows in a white shell beach with our bows. A geological marker said the island was owned by Bates College. There was a stone-and-mortar house with broken windows and peeling paint – it looked like a good place for a shepherd to sleep. From an empty tent platform covered in rose hips and brittle grass, I could see Eagle Island.
My dad took me there once, the site of Arctic explorer Admiral Peary’s summer home. I remembered bones and yellow lichen.
“Get out of there,” someone shouted, “ – ticks!”
We angled our bows towards Harpswell Sound then, stopping at a seaside lobster pound, still in our spray skirts, to beg for butter.
“Sure,” the hostess said brightly, “how many pounds would you like?”
A cold drizzle started – my dad would have said someone up there was spitting on us. Under the bridge between Orr’s and Bailey islands, we argued a bit about which way to go. Maybe we’d stop at the Coastal Studies Center, where I’d come every day last year to sail and knew there was a ramp and float. There’d be fresh water there, and somewhere sheltered from the wind to cook and sleep.
But we turned the other way instead, back out into the sound.
The waves were steeper here, with whitewash sliding down the slope. The spaces between our boats widened. The white kayak with red piping was far ahead now; my friend was there and gone again, a mirage. He rode the waves down into the trough.
“Let’s land there!” someone shouted, and it appeared as if flung from his arm. An island, centered in the sound and stove to the wind, her gunnels low slung beneath the spruce and long bowsprit of rock stretched towards us – come here.
We landed. Relief. Long slippery plain of seaweed leading up to the beach. The rocks were modest, hiding their curves beneath yards of green. We set the boats down above a berm of sand and driftwood and set off to explore.
Ragged Island, as we later learned it was called, was beautiful but not lonely. You felt the causes of raggedness there, but none of its effects.
The rocks on the open shore were Arctic white and the trees horizontal and recoiling from the wind but on the other side – where we squatted on wet clumps of seaweed the next morning to eat pancakes we’d made with the begged-for butter – they were layered like filo dough. There was a house on the far side, its windows dark but the silvered cedar clean and recently maintained. On the other, a cliff – short, yet severe – where we stood together and watched the colors pass, gray to purple to antique gold.
Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a poem about Ragged. She might not say she owned it, but she bought it with her husband in 1933.
Millay the New York City émigré, with her wanton Greenwich Village ways. Everybody knows she grew up in Camden.
I’m from an island in Maine, but it didn’t make me who I am.
The fact that our neighbors came in my mom’s back door through the kitchen to make themselves a PB&J might have, and that we did the same to them. We all knew the summer family from Tennessee would share ribs and watermelon anytime we were hungry for it, and we’d sit on their long, shaded porch between mother and aunt and their competing clouds of cigarette smoke and listen to their friendly strain of gossip when we were hungry for that.
There are catalogs, now, for Maine, that brand themselves as magazines. I could have submitted this story to one of them, but I worry they’d miss the point.
They would not write about my mother, who has been known to “accidentally” spray summer visitors who stray into her yard with a garden hose. Or my father, who jokingly refers to tourists as “terrorists.”
Their readers neither visit Maine nor choose to stay. They sleep here, for two weeks, a month out of every summer – however long it takes to establish dual citizenship between home and “the way life should be.” They come to buttress their “I.” They think Maine is a way, even the way, to be closer to who they want to be.
About her life in Maine, Louise Dickinson Rich said simply, “I know that many people – perhaps most people – couldn’t feel that, living here, they held within their grasp all the best of life. So for them it wouldn’t be the best. For us, it is.”
Maine is the myth of Maine, both object and inspiration. It’s waiting all year for summer and complaining when it comes.
For my part, I have only to tell you this: Maine is the place where my family lives, and the place where I’ve made friends. I have trouble talking about it now without starting every sentence with “we.” I can’t tell the story and be done, leaving the neat white margins of the windowsill to gather dust. I fell in love here, and still live here – longer than I ever thought I would.
When we saw the moon rise from Ragged Island it was split in two; the sky shared it with the water. “Don’t forget,” my friend said the other night as he passed me in the library, “to put that in your story.” As I read the Edna St. Vincent Millay poem again, I think it both is and isn’t like the island we saw. And still, it seems only fair to include it. My memory of Ragged is intertwined with that of my friends. It is also shared with – and altered by – a woman who wrote about it.
“Care becomes senseless there;” Millay said, “pride and promotion
Remote; you only look; you scarcely feel.
Even adventure, with its vital uses,
Is aimless ardour now; and thrift is waste.
Oh, to be there, under the silent spruces,
Where the wide, quiet evening darkens without haste
Over a sea with death acquainted, yet forever chaste.”
In the morning, we paddled into the sound until its throat constricted and parched. We dragged the boats up then, left them in the woods with mud on paddle grips, feet, and keels and walked the five miles back to campus. I followed the friend in front of me, pant legs rolled past his ankles, the purple dry bag he took everywhere swinging like a purse from his right hand.
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