Trifter

I know a spot along the coast of Maine, east of Boothbay Harbor, called Ocean Point, once visited by the novelist Thomas Wolfe. It also served as the collecting location for marine zoologist N.J. Berrill who writes about it in his book The Living Tide. For me, Ocean Point was and is a mystical place where bell buoys clang in the distance and where, on foggy days, foghorns can be heard from as far away as Seguin Island (at the head of Casco Bay) with the delightful sound of wee-hump. On clear days, Monhegan and Manana Islands (ten miles off shore) can be seen as well as clipper ships and lobster boats. Always there is the distinct smell of seaweed and salt spray that momentarily frightens away ever-present Herring Gulls.

   As a boy I would accompany N.J. Berrill to tide pools where we would collect specimens including brittle starfish, sea urchins, sponges and tiny green crabs trying to scuttle away. Back at his laboratory across Linekin Bay, he would show me the teeming life, viewed from a microscope, in a drop of sea water. He encouraged me to become a marine biologist which I almost did, but chose, instead, the study of literature including the novels of Thomas Wolfe. I remember the evenings at my aunt’s cottage and a crackling driftwood fire in a huge beach-stone fireplace. After a seafood dinner, my mother would serve fresh-baked blueberry pie for dessert, and my father would light his pipe and start reading a book between bights of pie. I looked forward to going to bed so I could listen to the surf and see the moon and stars.

   After breakfast and chores, I enjoyed sitting on the front porch in a rocker and listening to white-throated sparrows and Swainson’s thrushes from the surrounding spruce forest. Somehow I associated Ocean Point with Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond. It was a ferny, misty place for contemplation and, yes, even writing. Sixty some years later, I sit in far away Denver, Colorado, but I can still sense the presence of Ocean Point deep within my inner being.