On days when I need a change of scenery, I usually head out to Biddeford Pool, where I take a leisurely walk along the firmer section of the shoreline, looking for interesting bits of wave-worn debris or simply gazing out across the interminable vastness of it all. These days, now that the access stairs have once again been removed along Fortunes Rocks beach, the Biddeford Pool end is much more accessible, as there is nothing to climb. Its smoothly curving cove has a beauty all its own, from the point at the junction of Ocean Avenue and Bay Street to the low outcropping at sea level that is exposed at low tide.
On a recent day in October, a large flock of gulls frolicked at the rocky edge of the beach along the point, dipping and diving into the surf, their pristine whiteness accentuated by a more somber background of rocks and lichen-covered boulders that flank the decline from the winding coast road to the sea. Nearer to me, a smaller flock of skittish piping plovers walked daintily to and fro along the sand, pecking at treats that only they could see before noticing my presence and moving en masse farther away from me. At one point, when I’d finally reached the limit of my allowable nearness to these delicate little birds, up they swooped in a white and buff blur, vanishing quickly into the dune grass, the color of which this time of year is the perfect foil for anyone trying to invade their space.
Even now, the salty smell of air takes me back 50 years to the many happy afternoons I spent at Fortunes Rocks as a child. I spent the sultry July Sundays basking in the sand, wading into the waves, or sitting out on the rocky promontory pondering infinity and never growing tired of the way the tides interacted with the shoreline, gently or roughly, as its mood on any particular day dictated.
Neither of my parents drove, so we depended upon the generosity of relatives, specifically my father’s brother and his wife, whose long-standing love affair with Fortunes Rocks was as passionate as ours was. My aunt, a wonderful cook, always packed baskets and coolers with her home-baked treats, sandwiches, hot dogs wrapped in aluminum foil, cucumber sticks and plenty of soft drinks in glass bottles. For some reason, perhaps having to do with nostalgia more than anything, drinking soda, or tonic, as we called it, in cans or plastic bottles just isn’t the same. For in that strange and magical way that so many things have of deepening the wonder and the mystery of childhood, pulling one of those small bottles of root beer or orangeade ”“ frosty and dripping from the cooler of half-melted ice ”“ made a day spent on the hot sand complete.
For weeks afterward, as summer turned to fall and then to winter, my uncle’s big, beige and brown, Chrysler four-door sedan with a back seat wide and deep enough to hold us all, except my father who sat in front, smelled of those beach days, of the salt, the sand, of the tangy scent of the shells and pretty stones we gathered to bring home, and of the foods we transported there. Long after summer had ended and snow had once again blanketed Biddeford, the inside of that car sang of summer, of blue-green water, of sand between our fingers and toes, of sunburns and seaweed and of childhood joy.
Walking along those beaches brings it all back. The surf whispering along the sand, leaving its memories written in foam that fade with the pull of the moon and the wind’s caprices, the gulls reeling overhead or preening on kelp-draped rocks, the sun turning the sea to sapphires, are all no less mesmerizing now than they were when summer, and the innumerable wishes it granted, was all mine.
— Rachel Lovejoy, a freelance writer living in Lyman, who enjoys exploring the woods of southern Maine, can be reached via email at rachell1950@yahoo.com.
Comments are not available on this story.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
