Maine's Coastal Reach

 

When I was a kid in upstate New York, my parents regularly took us to Maine to visit Mom's parents.  We spent every Thanksgiving in Maine, plus at least one annual summertime trip.  

I loved my grandparents, especially my grandmother's scratch-made biscuits and sumptuous peanut butter cookies.  However, my childhood self found Maine to be dull and boring overall.  Nothing but quaint buildings, bucolic scenery, and chilly salt water.

Sounds okay to you, though; right?  Indeed, now that I'm older, I realize how superficially my childhood self perceived Maine's rugged charms.

My mother grew up in New England.  Partly in Massachusetts, but mostly in coastal Maine.  Sedgwick, to be exact, on Maine's rural Blue Hill Peninsula.  And yes, just north of its eponymously-named town, there is a solitary hill whose thick forest of spruces and pines actually imparts hints of blue in just the right, misty light.

Living on a peninsula, obviously, means that one's community is surrounded by water on three sides.  Which, by extension, means that water plays a significant role in one's way of life.  Sedgwick's economy may have historically relied on family farms, blueberry barrens, and a couple of sawmills, but back then, as today, the people there live lives regulated by the salt water, its tides, its weather, and a geography literally sculpted by the sea.

Mom's parents eventually settled in my grandfather's mother's house, situated on an old country road, high above the shore of Eggemoggin Reach, between Sedgwick's tiny village and a tall suspension bridge linking the peninsula with Deer Isle.

You've probably never heard of Eggemoggin Reach.  Shucks, you've probably never heard of a reach at all, at least relative to a body of water.  So, here you go:  In English nautical terminology, a "reach" is a saltwater channel between the mainland and a relatively contiguous collection of outer islands, with ready access to the ocean from either end.  

A "reach" generally runs longitudinally, so sailing vessels can navigate under winds coming along their side.  As far as I've been able to determine, after scouring several charts of Maine's coast, the state only has two major reaches, Eggemoggin and Moosabec.  And for Eggemoggin, Deer Isle serves as the buffer from the open ocean, creating the channel for Eggemoggin Reach's ten-mile stretch.

In our post-modern society, with a mature aviation industry, and space exploration now dominated by private enterprise, a ten-mile protected salt water passage may sound irrelevant.  But that didn't used to be the case.  Long before Europeans discovered Maine - and waged part of America's Revolutionary War along the peninsula's western shore - Native Americans had already named this body of water.  Their choice, "Eggemoggin", roughly translates into "a narrowed waterway with fish".  From their apt name, they likely recognized how its geography provides valuable benefits, both for people living along it, and traversing upon it.  If you've ever experienced severe weather that comes directly off of an ocean, you can appreciate how Deer Isle's presence shelters the reach and mainland from the worst winds, tides, waves, and precipitation that can wreak havoc on coastlines.

Today, maybe even because it's something of an anachronism, Eggemoggin Reach claims considerable prestige as a premier channel for sailing enthusiasts.  Every August, for example, the world's largest wooden boat sailing race takes place there, the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta.  And one of the world's foremost publishers dedicated to wooden boatbuilding, appropriately named "The Wooden Boat", is based on the shores of the reach, in Brooklin, just east of Sedgwick.

Neither Deer Isle nor the Blue Hill Peninsula have ever been heavily populated.  And Maine has plenty of islands that have no physical link to the mainland.  So perhaps even more than the elite boating it hosts, the most unexpected aspect of Eggemoggin Reach can be found in its dramatic suspension superstructure, the Deer Isle - Sedgwick Bridge.

In the 1930s, when Maine planners decided to build a link from Deer Isle to the mainland, they could have engineered a causeway.  Or a shallow, "normal" bridge.  But several considerations led to a suspension structure as their eventual option.  These considerations did include the reach's pedigree as a sailing channel for tall-masted ships, but practically, engineers also factored for powerful tidal currents relative to the depth of the reach's channel, which limited the number and spacing of support pilings.  There were also issues of sourcing materials and labor, both of which were in sparse supply in the area.  

Like most of the young men who lived there then, my grandfather worked on that bridge.  He was injured when he was up, high and obscure, on a scaffold that somebody on the ground mistakenly moved, throwing him down, and knocking four of his bottom front teeth out of his mouth.

Yeah, that was long before OSHA.

To help solve both the materials and labor problems - the carelessness which led to my grandfather's injury probably not an anomaly - the bridge ended up getting partially pre-fabricated in Staten Island.  New York City was much closer to steel mills, rail yards, and a deeply skilled workforce.  Sophisticated, engineered steel structural components were then barged up to Maine, for final assembly like a giant 3-D puzzle.  The whole process ended up setting a precedent for suspension bridge construction.

Turn-about is fair play, however, since much of the granite cladding countless towers in Manhattan during that era - including the Empire State Building - came from quarries in Deer Isle!  

It's also worth noting that every year, tens of millions of dollars worth of crustaceous cargo gets trucked over that bridge from the bustling harbor in Deer Isle's largest village, Stonington - one of the world's lobster capitals.

I say all of that as a prelude for what you're about to see.  Call it "context", if you will.  

To the casual observer, this body of water in these upcoming photos may look like any ordinary lake, or maybe a river.  And not just because these photos are of poor quality.  Hey, they were taken by non-digital cameras a couple of decades ago, and I'm a bad photographer.  But these are scenes from my grandparents' home on Eggemoggin Reach, and that is Deer Isle in the distance.  The water you see is salt water, straight from the Atlantic Ocean, and this body of water is tidal, meaning the water is constantly moving; either coming in, or going out.

Even as a kid, looking out to the reach at various times during the day, and realizing how much the tide had come in or gone out, was impressive to me.  I could check the times for high and low tides listed in the local newspaper, and sure enough, there the water's edge would be!  Day in and day out, rain or shine, the tide never stops.

Unlike tropical beaches, which tend to be mostly sand, coastal Maine tends to be mostly rocky, with stones and boulders providing reliable benchmarks for gauging the tide's progress.  There was at least one boulder the size of a cargo van down at "our" shore which sometimes sat by itself with no water nearby, and other times was completely submerged.  That amazed me, because I'd been down to that boulder, walked around it, and tried to climb it, but couldn't - it was covered all over with slippery seaweed.  That wet, salty seaweed was proof of the amount of time it spent underwater!

Legally we never had "shore rights" access to the water.  As you can see, my family's property was on the "water view" side of the road, not the "waterfront" side.  We did, however, over all the decades my family owned that house, have a series of kindly neighbors across the road who gave us permission to go down their sloping meadow - it used to be a working hayfield - to the shore.

While it looks incredibly idyllic in photos, getting to and from the shore was a chore!  The walk back up to the house always seemed even longer and harder, since the meadow's slope is deceptively steep and long.  Fortunately, our neighbors always kept a path mowed, which made things easier.  One of the owners of that property, a wealthy divorcee from Mexico City, no less, owned a golf cart which she let my brother and I drive down there and back.  And it was fun - unless the sloping path's grass was wet, which significantly decreased her golf cart's traction.

(That particular neighbor also had a pristine, 1960s-vintage Mercedes sedan in her rebuilt barn - silver paint with bright red leather interior - but she didn't let us drive that, unfortunately!)

Perhaps it won't surprise you to learn that I don't really remember going down to the shore during our Thanksgiving visits.  Instead, I remember the biting wind, and the pellets of snow, and staying indoors a lot, guzzling my grandmother's homemade chicken soup! 

Meanwhile, it's Maine's beautiful summer days that truly are epic, and that I remember most fondly and nostalgically during our Texas summers, when our Lone Star sun may beam just as brightly, but always seems to lack the wholesome radiance of Maine's brilliant skies, and the sunlight's twinkling whiteness as it dances about the water's azure surface.

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