A cool, foggy, lazy kind of day on the coast of Maine.
While raindrops pitter patter against the window, steam billows from mugs of tea, knitting needles click and clack through the construction of a cozy wool sweater for the coming fall.
Song: The Way I Am by Ingrid Michaelson
Usually grey, fitting in your palm- sometimes, but unlikely, pink granite. A thin, bright white line, unbroken, wrapped around the stone- a lucky stone.
Hours may be spent searching the stone beaches and rocky shoreline for lucky stones.
Jars in the family shore cabin are filled with small lucky stones. Other jars are full of small sand dollars, sea glass, bits of driftwood, and sea urchins. The heat shield behind the wood-burning stove is covered with found stones from the coastline, many lucky.
It’s become a shared event, showing visitors the stones, helping them to find their own. Ending each visit, each summer, with a bit more luck going forward.
My favorite part of living by the water isn’t just being on the water, but looking back at land.
It’s like looking out the window of an airplane and watching headlights of cars on the interstate below you, or endless desert with two roads expanding infinitely in opposite directions.
Looking back from the water is peaceful, sometimes sad, always humbling. Here I am on this body of water, the sea, a lake, a river, and it could swallow me up whole, but it hasn’t and I am lucky to be given this view.
Fishing off the coast of Downeast Maine reminds me of this each summer season.
The Atlantic Ocean from Schoodic Point, 2012
Photo | Anna Brundage
Storm forming over the Atlantic, Schoodic Point
Photo | Anna Brundage
Looking to Mount Desert Island from Schoodic Point, 2012
Photo | Anna Brundage
All consumed with what’s on the boat deck- urchins, sea cucumbers, starfish, crabs- brought up in the lobster traps, tossed on the deck for my sister and I to examine, we forgot to look at the horizon. Unless someone is feeling light headed from the swells and looking at the horizon for stability, we rarely raised our eyes.
Rounding the Schoodic Point, the small arm of Acadia National Park separate from Mount Desert Island, I will always remember the rollers crashing on the rock face and the tourists in brightly colored T-shirts waving to our boat. To see the rocks I’ve climbed in nearly a hundred times from the vantage point of the fishermen was chilling.
The rock face is different each summer, having weathered the Nor’easters each winter and the occasional fall hurricane. New trees had grown, old blown down, sometimes fog hung over the parking lot and tourists huddled near their cars. On sunny days though, tourists would test their luck by the waters edge, not understand the undertow of the waves, not respecting the power of the breakers rolling in from the open North Atlantic.
Each summer there would be a new story from the year before, telling of a tourist who wandered to close to the water on a low incoming tide, slipped on the slick rock, and was caught in a breaker. Sometimes they survived, most didn’t. Still, each year tourists push to the edge for the perfect photo op.
I was 15 the last time I saw Schoodic from the outside looking in. Since my grandfather like lobster fisherman has retired, we still explore the coast but haven’t ventured to the Schoodic Point by water- now I still sit on the rocks, a comfortable distance from the breakers, and wave to the fishermen.
The Acadia air is clearer; I’m convinced. The sun is one hundred times stronger, the skies bluer, and the clouds fluffier.
I love the sunny days but there will always be a place in my heart for the fog filled days.
The mornings when it is thick and blankets the harbor, the afternoons when it rolls in from the cooler Atlantic, cradling the boats at their moorings and the pines on the hills.
Rock beach in the fog, Maine, 2013
Photo | Sarah Brundage
Even in the middle of July it can feel like early October. Rather than shorts and T-shirts, I’m happily wearing jeans and wrapped in sweaters and scarves. Days hover around 65 degrees, a fire in the woods stove to warm the house before dinner is common.
The chime of the bell buoy is answered by the wail of the foghorn, and the best thing to do is walk along the calm shore searching for sea glass or curl up with a new book and tea.
It isn’t for the money, admiration of onlookers, or comfortable routine of working 5 a.m. to just past noon. It’s for the love of the ocean, the feeling of being at home on the sea, the tradition of honest hard work in a dying industry.
The price per pound of lobster is at the mercy of the market. Summer tourist influences the price to some degree, so does the demand for lobster around the country, and the current success of fishing in other states. Maine has some of the strictest regulations on fishing lobster in the United States, helping to preserve the lobster population year after year.
Currently the price per pound of lobster is dropping. The lobsters in the Acadia region of Maine are few and far between, unusual, even this early in the season. The strongest leg of the season for this region has been fall to early winter.
The overhead cost for lobster fishermen is growing, as the income is slowly but surly falling. New laws directly affect the success of the lobster fishermen, laws dictating how many traps they are allowed, the type of line used, and now even the amount of line on each trap. Each law means replacing gear purchased only a few years before after a previous law had been instated or updated.
Many of the new laws are in relation to the migratory whale population. It is believed by some, that the whales become tangled in the lobster line, and controlling the materials lobster fishermen use to trap lobster, may directly help protect the whale population that migrates through Acadia to the Bay of Fundy.
“Born Into It” is an independent documentary, by Austin Hopkins and myself, following the lives of the lobster fishermen in the Downeast and Acadia region of Maine, and their views on their way of life, included the laws enacted to protect the whale.
You are what you eat- I’d like to disagree but there is at least some truth in, you are as healthy as what you eat.
I still surprise myself with my own eating habits and quirks. For almost 12 years I refused to eat eggs, and for nine I wouldn’t eat any form of fish or shellfish. Those hang-ups aside, I try not to be a picky eater.
Now, I barely go a day without eating eggs, and I prefer fish and chicken to
Campfire eggs and homefries in Acadia, Maine, 2012
Photo | Anna Brundage
red meats.
…
Campfire Eggs and Home fries for two
4 large eggs
1/2 small onion, chopped
1/2 green pepper, chopped
1 large potato, cubed
Montreal steak salts
olive oil
Over hot coals pour enough oil to keep food from sticking to skillet.
Using one half of skillet sauté the cubed potato, and on the remaining half of skillet sauté the onion and pepper. Sprinkle Montreal steak salts over the sautéing potato.
When the onion and pepper are soft to cut and cooked through, crack the eggs over them. Let eggs fry to desired crookedness, flipping only once, or use a utensil to break the yolk and scramble on the skillet.
Flip potato regularly, letting all sides brown. When easily cut with a fork, potato is done. Spilt between two bowls, serve hot.
She is called Mother Nature. She can love you with bright rays of sunshine, trick you with unexpected showers, and she can destroy you with blizzards, hurricanes, tornadoes and floods.
It’s been humid in Virginia. Cool mornings quickly slink away and leave behind hot, hazy, sluggish afternoons. Usually a week of sun is a blessing, but hailing from New England, I’m not accustom to the blazing sun and sticky humidity. South Africa was hot but in a different, welcoming way.
Finally, it rained here on Indian Creek. After days of endless sun and choking humidity, fat and heavy rain drops fell. Everything went grey and green, the sea hawk cried, and rain drip, dropped into the creek.
click image to view Vine post
For a short while, the sky was black, the wind picked up and the rain fell in sheets, cutting visibility. I was driving when the weather turned to the worst hour of the afternoon- scary, especially when the ‘high wind alert’ lights flashed over the bridges.
The afternoon rain made me miss Acadia in Maine. In Acadia many mornings are blanketed in fog, often burning off from the sun in the afternoon, and in the height of summer, just as many evenings are painted by fiery sunsets or billowing thunderheads and heat lightening.
My dad’s marine radio is a comfort on any day, regardless of weather. The droning voice rattling off tidal periods in area harbors and bays, listing weather for the week, and looping back hundreds of times. On foggy afternoons especially, I’ll switch on the radio and read the paper with the cup of coffee. On Indian Creek, the radio won’t currently hold its charge. Still, we live by the weather, although entirely different from how we live by the weather in Acadia.
When the rain stopped on Indian Creek, the thunderheads rolled on but the sun burned through. Low but bright in the sky, as it is at 7 p.m., the sky lit up with fiery yellows, organes, and pinks. The water was calm with the wind gone, and like glass it reflected each roll in the clouds.
click image to view Vine post
A kayaker passed by the dock during the sunset, paddling out of Indian Creek and into the arm of the bay. His paddle and boat cutting the glass like water, leaving a wave that rippled the entire way to opposing shores, uninterrupted. The day went from torrential rain to peaceful and still in a matter of hours.
The weather may change in a heartbeat anywhere in the world. It may be a passing shower or complete destruction, but it is always breathtaking.
My name is Anna Brundage, I am 22 and a coastal vagabond.
Born and raised on a farm in Connecticut, I spent my childhood puddling in streams and lakes, boating on rivers and vacationing by oceans. Most of my time has been spent in and around Down East, Maine, but my travels have taken me to the Great Lakes, the Chesapeake Bay, Cape Cod, and Cape Town, South Africa. The experiences and lessons I’ve learned, when visiting and living by the water, are recorded here.
I drink my coffee black and am crazy about documentary films, HBO mini series and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. My goals include back packing North America, photographing for National Geographic and writing a novel. I’m honest, quiet, supportive and comfortable with who I am.
Coastal Vagabond 