The Edge of Maine Read online

  ALSO BY GEOFFREY WOLFF

  The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O'Hara

  The Age of Consent

  A Day at the Beach: Recollections

  The Final Club

  Providence

  The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father

  Inklings

  Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby

  The Sightseer

  Bad Debts

  THE EDGE of MAINE

  THE EDGE of MAINE

  GEOFFREY WOLFF

  Published by the National Geographic Society

  1145 17th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036-4688

  Text copyright © 2005 Geoffrey Wolff

  Map copyright © 2005 National Geographic Society

  “Eaton's Boatyard,” on pp. 115-116, from Relations: New and Selected Poems by Philip Booth, copyright © 1986 by Philip Booth. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the National Geographic Society.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request

  ISBN: 978-1-4262-0907-9

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  For Ivan and Ruby

  CONTENTS

  Norumbega

  Edging Up On It

  Anchored: Ragged Island

  Chilly Welcomes

  Cruising: Seguin

  The Gallant Kennebec

  Castine (Revisiting)

  Elegies, Hairbreadth Escapes, and Repairs

  Rustication

  Cruising: Pulpit Harbor

  The View from Our Dock

  A Note to the Reader

  THE EDGE of MAINE

  NORUMBEGA

  John Milton, in Book Ten of Paradise Lost, specifies the climatic consequences of man’s disobedience to God. Global warming was bad enough, but more theatrical were those cosmic wintry blasts that felled trees and enraged the sea. Freezing winds blew from as far away as frostbit Siberia’s northeast coast and marvelous Norumbega:

  These changes in the heavens, though slow, produced

  Like change on sea and land—sidereal blast,

  Vapour, and mist, and exhalation hot,

  Corrupt and pestilent. Now from the north

  Of Norumbega, and the Samoed shore,

  Bursting their brazen dungeon, armed with ice,

  And snow, and hail, and stormy gust and flaw …

  [Winds loudly] rend the woods, and seas upturn;

  City and kingdom, Norumbega—set at the tidehead of Maine’s Penobscot River—rivaled the gold-encrusted capitals of the Inca and Aztec Empires for the fabulous wealth and ingenuity of its people. Samuel Eliot Morison writes that the place-name is Algonquin for “quiet place between two rapids,” but “quiet” is an inapt modifier to describe the astonishing settlement’s nature and achievement. It was discovered during the sixteenth century by a series of European explorers ranging Maine’s coast and rivers; they competed with one another for the extravagance of their reports. Pierre Crignon, writing in 1545, extolled Norumbega’s “docile” inhabitants, “friendly and peaceful. The land overflows with every kind of fruit; there grows there the wholesome orange and the almond, and many sorts of sweet-smelling trees.” Fourteen years later Jean Alfonce’s account of his visit, La Cosmographie, offered a more vivid picture of “Norombegue”: Here were “clever inhabitants and a mass of peltries of all kinds of beasts. The citizens dress in furs, wearing sable cloaks.” Conveniently they spoke a language “which sounds like Latin.” Moreover, unlike your commonplace dusky savages, “they are fair people and tall.”* But wait: There’s more! Morison tells of David Ingram, an English sailor stranded in the Gulf of Mexico in 1567 by the explorer and slave trader Sir Jack Hawkins; Ingram tramped from Yucatan to Down East. In 1569 he was rescued in Newfoundland and returned home to enjoy free drinks telling in many a tavern of his discoveries. This Sinbad’s description of Norumbega made so deep an impression on his audience that Richard Hakluyt published Ingram’s account in the 1589 edition of his Principal Navigations. An impressionable reader—Sir Humfry Gilbert—interviewed Ingram and as a result raised money for an expedition to visit the northwoods Shangri-la. It should have been easy to find, a village half a mile long with streets broader than London’s broadest. Norumbega’s citizens wore gold and silver hoops on their arms, and these were “garnished with pearls, diverse of them as big as one’s thumb”; the natives used these pearls as small change. The women wore plates of gold as armor and counted their gemstones by the bushel. The Norumbegans’ round (but somehow turreted) dwellings were supported by “pillars of gold, sylver and crystal” and wallpapered with fur. Elephants lived among penguins and flamingoes, and the happy inhabitants displayed rubies four inches in circumference. Gilbert assured his investors that the pub-crawling Ingram had attested to finding gold nuggets as big as his fist, scattered for the taking (Ingram evidently had forgotten to take any) in small brooks nearby.

  Gilbert crossed from England but never found the Penobscot River, let alone Norumbega. In 1604 Samuel de Champlain sailed up that river to the head of navigation. He decided that Ingram was a bullshit artist. He found himself not in what Morison titles the “New Jerusalem” of fevered legend but among a dreary hodgepodge of aboriginal huts in the neighborhood we call Bangor.

  Ah, Bangor! Storied hometown of lumberjacks, fur traders, sailors, muggers, tavern keepers, confidence men, and whores: In this very place chewing gum was invented in 1842. Myth has a stranglehold on the little city: Hank and Jan Taft’s A Cruising Guide to the Maine Coast attests that there’s a “birth certificate on file at the Chamber of Commerce” to assure the gullible that Paul Bunyan was born in Bangor on February 12, 1834; the city erected a statue of Bunyan thirty-one feet tall, his exact height in real life, on lower Main Street. Thousands of sailing ships delivered freight to Bangor every year during the boom of the 1860s, and millions of board feet of white pines felled nearby drifted down the Penobscot during river-jamming spring drives.

  The marvels of Bangor have exerted a powerful pull. In 1977, a Bavarian brewery worker, en route by charter flight from Hamburg to San Francisco, disembarked at Bangor during a refueling stop. Erwin Kreuz had been aloft all night, and had consumed much of the fruit of his labors; he later confided that he was a seventeen-beer-a-day man. He spoke no English but for three days he toured Bangor in search of the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge that he found, fording the Penobscot River, made a poor impression on him, but otherwise he liked the town just fine. Like San Francisco, it had water nearby, and hills, and a hotel—Bangor House—where he slept. His navigational error was discovered after a taxicab driver demurred angrily at Kreuz’s command that he be driven to “downtown San Francisco,” and a taver
n waitress who had served the bewildered tourist put him together with a German-speaking Czechoslovakian immigrant. The situation was publicized, and the San Francisco Examiner treated the German to a visit to the genuine City by the Bay. Despite attending a rodeo at the Cow Palace and being given an honorary Chinese name by residents of Chinatown, Kreuz confided to San Francisco’s mayor George Moscone that he preferred Maine’s version of a port city.

  The adventurer received marriage proposals from grateful Down Easters and was made an honorary member of the Penobscot Indian tribe. Now he’s welcome to visit the “quiet place between two rapids” whenever he pleases. Upon arriving home at the Frankfurt airport, the returning explorer boasted to an international press contingent: “If Kennedy can claim, ‘I am a Berliner,’ then I am a Bangor.”

  EDGING UP ON IT

  “We may reason to our heart’s content, the fog won’t lift.”

  —SAMUEL BECKETT

  I’d first come to the edge of Maine at fourteen from the sky, riding a DC-3 into Bangor a few minutes after a midsummer sunset and then by Pontiac station wagon to Castine. I was visiting a girl I scarcely knew; we’d met during a glee club concert at my school. She was fifteen, an only child, and her dad, driving along the Penobscot River, was asking questions—where did I expect to go to college and did I sail?—and his wife was trying to draw my attention to points of historical and topographical interest out there in the night. In the back seat the girl and I were already holding hands and I wasn’t looking out any car windows. After Bucksport the parents clammed up the final half hour as their headlights bounced off streaks of fog swirling at the shoulders of country roads. The station wagon poked hesitantly down a finger of land bounded by the Penobscot and Bagaduce Rivers, to its tip on Perkins Point. The drive must have tired them, because after feeding us hot chocolate in their big country kitchen, they sent us off to bed. My room was upstairs at one end of a long hall with creaky pine floors; their daughter’s was at the other end; mommy and daddy slept between, with their door open. The next morning, anxious that I might be called on to show what I’d meant when I’d answered that I “liked” to sail—without mentioning that I had been in a sailboat once in my life, and hadn’t been happy to be there—I woke soon after dawn, and before me I saw for the first time one of coastal Maine’s representative prospects. The house was set on a bluff above Wadsworth Cove and my bedroom windows were aimed to look across a few miles of Penobscot Bay to Islesboro. The curtains hung still and heavy at my open windows, and for a moment I believed it was drizzling rain from my ceiling. Outside was milky, thick. Whatever sailors did, I reckoned, was not going to be done this morning. I gathered my damp sheets around my damp flannel pajamas and fell back asleep. The fog was as lazy as I; it stayed put the whole week. I had much opportunity to study this fog. Its physical properties—droplets responding sluggishly to gravity and stirred gently by an occasional breeze—were dynamic, but the affective atmosphere of the matter—gloom, dampness, a shutoff of the world—was static and unrelenting. A couple of days before I was scheduled to leave, my hosts didn’t even try to disguise their anxiety: DC-3s weren’t flying into or taking off from Bangor. I manfully volunteered to hang around till the murk burned off, but these considerate folks wouldn’t hear of monopolizing more of my summer and sent me home by bus. My soi-disant girlfriend seemed stoic about my leave-taking. Rumbling along Route 1 during that long, long journey to New York—past many a roadside enterprise selling garden gnomes or lobster traps, and crossing the occasional bridge with the rumor of water below—I realized that I’d have to wait to “see” that part of Down East beyond the low tide line. Maine was in no hurry to show its stuff to me. Meantime I began Dickens’s Bleak House, which my hosts had given me as a souvenir:

  Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping … fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck.

  Thirty years later, asked “Do you sail?,” I’d respond with a straight face: “Do I sail? Are you kidding?” In 1982, aboard our thirty-foot cutter Blackwing, clearing Race Point northwest of Cape Cod’s tip at Provincetown, on an offshore course bearing northeast 112 nautical miles for Monhegan Island, my wife asked, “Are you sure you can do this?” I gave the only possible answer.

  Priscilla and I had sailed a good deal by then, in the Caribbean and Europe and along both American coasts. We’d bought Blackwing, our second cruising boat, three summers before. Now she was nicely broken in, sturdy and reliable, rigged with a self-tending jib and driven when necessary by a diesel auxiliary. She was beamy and heavy, built to go offshore and stay awhile. This was to be her first overnight passage offshore. Typically we sailed her within a fifty-mile radius of Jamestown, Rhode Island, where we lived then: to Cuttyhunk, Block Island, Nantucket, Stonington. These were frequently open-ocean passages, subject to what seemed like an impressive inventory of perils: storms, heavy seas, rain, patches of fog from time to time. But we’d depart in the morning, allow generous time to alter our course or destination to adjust to the weather, sail until late afternoon, provide a comfortable margin of daylight to find a mooring or drop anchor, watch the kids fish, have the Mount Gay poured before dusk, congratulate ourselves on our prudence and competence.

  So we had decided soberly to let Blackwing convey us in measured stages from Jamestown to Penobscot Bay. First night at Cuttyhunk, second night at Wings Neck, riding the dawn tide east through the Cape Cod Canal followed by a nice downwind sail to Race Point. The final leg would be the new experience: sailing twenty-plus hours out of sight of land with virtually no seamarks, aiming for Monhegan, a big bold island with a lighthouse.

  Assuming a clear night to let the full moon shine down its nighttime consolation, our enterprise nevertheless presented for us challenges of stamina and navigational sagacity. Priscilla—bearing full-time duties as cook, lookout, and general counsel—would give limited service at the helm. My sons could each keep a steady course, but they were kids: Nicholas was just shy of fourteen, Justin was eleven. Holding a precise course across the Gulf of Maine was no petty imperative. The currents swirl erratically, and given poor visibility an on-the-button landfall would be a matter of blind hazard. This dilemma kept circumspect sailors far from Maine. Its chief topographical attraction—rock-strewn coasts and myriad islands—makes close-to-shore sailing a grim option. Sailing Down East once upon a time separated lambs from wolves. The advent of affordable electronic navigational instruments teased the lambs forth, and here we were, bubbling “downhill” as sailors in those waters say of our course before the wind.

  The state of electronic navigation in 1982 was transitional. Global positioning system (GPS) receivers, today almost as ubiquitous as the compass, were still a glimmer in the Pentagon’s eye. Radar was big, clumsy, ruinously expensive, and unsuited to small sailboats. Prudent mariners who had experience sailing offshore in Maine were equipping themselves with Loran. This device, using land-based signals to triangulate positions, was tricky to tune and use, and it cost a pretty penny back then, maybe two thousand dollars. We must have spent half that sum on the cases of wine now being shaken to ruin stowed in our bilge. Still, I felt good vibes, the kind I’d once felt kicking the bald rear tire of a used street-racing Norton motorcycle and telling the salesman that I had a hunch the bike (dripping oil and festooned with lightning-bolt decals) had been fastidiously cared for, so didn’t he agree I was wise to buy it? Besides, I was going to use a radio direction finder (RDF), a device that was basically a little radio turned this way and that to locate the null—or dead spot—on a radio transmitter signaling at known intervals from a known position. In our case this position was a tower atop Monhegan Island. Theoretically, one could sail along the path of this radio beam to its source. Aircraft had used RDF for many years. I had practiced in dayligh
t with an evolved version of the instrument—a silent radio shaped like a pistol and with a compass for a sight—and I was satisfied with the approximate accuracy of the outcome. Nothing was perfect, and, as experienced sailors never tired of repeating, electronics were meant to be used as backups. A far-sighted offshore mariner navigated by visual reference and DR, dead reckoning, defined by one dictionary as “predictive calculation based on inference,” defined by seafaring folk wisdom as “dead wrong.”

  After sunset I went below to catch a couple of hours of sleep, leaving Nicholas at the helm. I could feel the steady waves lift our transom and slew us a bit windward and feel him correct in the deliberate manner—nothing panicked or forced—of someone who knows what he is doing. Justin was in the cockpit with him, looking around for traffic. Their voices were low and steady, intimate. Priscilla was below, reading by the light of a kerosene lamp, as I listened to the weather radio. The Maine coastal forecast was summer-generic: wind southwest ten to twelve knots, with a chance of fog. This hard chance was forecast in a bored, matter-of-fact voice. In the twenty-first century marine forecasts are delivered by computer-generated voices,* but in 1982 the dispassionate voice we heard was enough to chill me in my bunk. I poked my head through the companionway hatch to remind the boys that if the fog came, to wake me right away. The moon was dimmed by a screen of thin clouds, but I could see it. Went below; lay down; closed my eyes. Was gone.

  Nicholas was talking. “It’s here.”

  He sounded grim. It sure was there. My sleeping bag was heavy with it. My glasses were wet. I had no right to be surprised. Just before I went below I’d wiped moisture from the compass dome and cowl, and when I’d spoken to my boys in the cockpit I’d seen my breath. That had been more than two hours ago. Now Priscilla was sleeping.