Hidden Maine

Ram Island Light

This is Ram Island Lighthouse, at the entrance to Portland Harbor. It has stood solid for over 100 years, greeting ships and waves from storms. This is high tide, concealing a reef at the entrance to the harbor. Portland Head Light is 2,000 feet away on the left.

Lobster Boat at Anchor

It’s late in the afternoon. It’s low tide. There is a mist in the air, and a strong sea breeze is blowing. The sun is low in the sky. It’s warm. It’s a beautiful day on the Maine coast at Crescent Beach, Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

Close to Portland Head Light

Hurricane Erin was 200, 300, 400 miles out to sea. The hurricane was far enough out that the sun still shone, and close enough that it riled the ocean along the coast of Maine, making for interesting seas. The waves were four feet high — not big enough to make the 6 o’clock news, but big enough to make the seashore interesting. This was near high tide. At low tide, if one were to go out on the rocks and look northeast, 800 feet up the coast is Portland Head Light. Those of us who live here know how fortunate we are to be so close to the sea.

A Wild Sea

On land, there was a gentle sea breeze, steady from the southwest. On the sea, with a moderate surf, it looked wild. A sailboat with a dark hull and a single sail, towing a dinghy, was headed south. I could see, as it sailed into the waves, the rock and roll, the surf flying. Having had a boat for many years, I knew exactly what it felt like. There, in the surf, was a wild ride and salt spray. It would be a good sail, heading down the coast toward Kennebunkport, while I sat on solid land, 78° in the shade. The sailboat was a thousand feet south of Portland Head Light.

A Good Wave Day

This was a good wave day at Crescent Beach in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. It was late in the afternoon. There was a lobster boat situated in the foreground on a sun-dappled sea, riding the waves. What few people would know, and probably only some jewelers could tell you, is that directly above this lobster boat in this picture, the shore of the beach is composed of 80% pure red garnet sand.

I’ve looked at the sand under the microscope. The garnet is red and orange. The gem garnet material is tiny and very clear. My background in geology informs me that there is a reason a 40-foot by 15-foot section of this beach is pure red sand. Garnet sand can be found in many places. I’ve never seen a concentration so intense. It’s beautiful. More than likely, it was sorted out by a melting glacier 25,000 years ago. To see the red sand, you would go to Crescent Beach State Park in Cape Elizabeth, park your car, and go to your far right.

I don’t know what port it came from. It was headed south at 1:34 in the afternoon down the coast. Let’s presume there are a thousand cabins at $1,000 apiece. It’s more in both cases. The simple math says it’s at least a million-dollar cruise. What’s interesting is that this ship, bigger than two football fields, can sail by silently a couple of thousand feet away. If I were reading and didn’t look up, I would never know it had sailed by.

This was a Sunday morning at 10:14. There was sparkly light on the water and a haze in the air. The temperature was 76° in the shade. There was a sea breeze out of the south. The sailboat had a light colored hull. It was catching the wind, wing and wing, and was headed toward Portland Harbor. In five minutes, it would be hanging a left just after Portland Head Light. Yes, that’s port. This was a beautiful, gentle sea on a summer morning in Maine.

Sunset Cruise

It was almost seven. The air temperature was 82°, and the humidity was low. It was a comfortable summer evening. The boat had a black hull. Its bottom was anti-fouling red. A single mast and a fore sail and aft, gaff-rigged sail were open. There was a slight breeze, not enough to move the boat at its apparent speed, so it was under power. Later, I saw a two-masted schooner, also moving too fast for the breeze. It looked like there were 30 on board. We have a collection of sailboats for hire out of Portland Harbor. This must have been part of the sunset cruise 800 feet south of Portland Head Light, 250 feet offshore.

Daylilies

There is a great similarity between flowers and gems. Flowers come in a range of colors. They are exquisite in their delicacy and form. As a product of nature, their DNA is contained within a seed or, in the case of a daylily, somewhere down in the root structure. Plant an orange daylily, and you always get an orange flower. My daylilies begin blooming on the 4th of July and last until the end of July. The daylily flower lasts just one day. I couldn’t believe it was so brief, so I put a twist tie on a dozen flowers. I found that a daylily does last for just one day.

A gem is also a product of nature. Our tourmaline, found in Maine’s western mountains, has its own DNA of sorts. It has a chemical formula comprised of various elements in Precise proportions to one another. These elements, under the right conditions of time, heat, and pressure, will create a crystal that forms with precision identical to the next crystal.

While the daylily flower lasts only a day, the crystal comes from a galactic eternity. Our Maine tourmaline is over 200 million years old, and you might say it lasts forever. In terms of human time, a lifetime or ten lifetimes, a piece of jewelry seems like forever.

Both the flower and the gem are products of nature. The orange daylilies, showing over a thousand flowers lining my driveway, last for the month of July. A tourmaline or another fine gem lasts a lifetime and beyond.

Beach to Beacon
Over 6,000 ran in the race.
We were surprised by how many people
6,000 actually are.

My son ran in the Beach to Beacon Race this year in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. He, along with 6,000 others, ran the 10K race. His family gathered at the last mile to cheer him on. His son kept beat with a drum. You can also hear cow bells in the background.

The race was started by Joan Benoit Samuelson, the gold winner of the 1984 Olympics women’s marathon. The participants in the race this year were an impressive cross-section of America. It was an inspirational and grand day in Maine.

Portland Harbor

This is seaweed. We have a billion tons of it growing along our 3,500-mile coastline in Maine. The pods on the ends of the branches have air in them, which allows the seaweed to float. This picture was taken in Portland Harbor, standing on the South Portland side, looking north across the bay. The waves are from boat traffic. Portland is a busy harbor.

Near Portland Head Light

This is 800 feet south of Portland Head Light, at noon. It’s 73° in the shade on Heart Rock Terrace. Twelve heart-shaped rocks are holding the tablecloth down. There’s a nice breeze coming up from the south, casting oak leaf shadows on the 1950s era pedestal table. This is looking out across the freshwater marsh to the open sea.

Summer in Maine is fleeting. We look forward to summer all year, and then, in the blink of an eye, it’s gone and fall is thinking about the arrival of winter. Find time this summer to go slow enough to actually feel the moment you are in.

Cruise Ship, Portland, Maine

You have come to Portland by a big ship departing New York to visit Maine and Canada’s various ports. At each port, there are restaurants to visit, shops to explore, and history to absorb. Your day ashore begins with a bus ride to take you somewhere, accompanied by a spokesperson to guide and entertain you. 2,000 on board the boat. Portland, Maine, is a great city. I went with a backpack and camera one summer day, pretending to be a visitor to my city. Truthfully, I found it fascinating, and as I explored, I came to realize that one could not see it all in a day. Five days would be perfect.

This is a cruise ship departing Portland on July 1st

Grocery Store Wild Bird Park

This is my grocery store parking lot, which is adjacent to a saltwater tidal marsh. The parking lot slopes slightly toward the marsh. This picture and video were taken 45 feet away from where I was parked. I like parking at the low end of the lot because there is almost always something interesting going on so close to the shore.

On this day, a white heron slowly waded through the shallows. The heron was patient, often looking for little fish. In this 56-second video, the heron catches no fish, and we get to watch his measured path. Above the heron, there are ducks swimming about. Some days, it’s gulls and geese in the marsh. This is a rising tide with an air temperature of 78°.

Location: Hannaford Grocery Store, Millcreek, South Portland.

White Sloop. White hull. Four white sails. Ten people on board. Blue water. Blue sky. The red, white, and blue American flags. Breeze out of the southwest.

Fort Williams, Ship’s Cove, looking up the coast to Cushing Island, green can buoy tossing in the waves. This is the entrance to Portland Harbor. If you look closely, you can see someone sitting on the cliff at about the same level as the can buoy. Eider ducks float in the foreground. There is no sound; this video was filmed while sitting in the truck.

This is a freshwater marsh at noon in June. There are cattails in the foreground, a stream below the cattails, and marsh ferns out beyond. It’s 125 feet to the cliffs and the ocean. This view is looking southeast. To the left, 800 feet up the coast, is Portland Head Light. Out beyond the lighthouse are the islands of Casco Bay. On this day, the air temperature was 73°. It was perfect.

Sunday, June 1st. This is the ocean entrance to Stand Up Cave. Crystal Cove is to the right. Six kids entered the cave. I was up on the cliff filming. I watched the kids go in and not come out for a long time. I was puzzled, and I later asked what they had been doing. They were trying to excavate the quartz crystals deep in the cave. The vein of quartz allowed the ocean to dig the cave into the cliffs. The search along the cliffs was part of a pirate party. If you go out to where the ocean enters Crystal Cove, and look to your left, you can see Portland Head Light a half a mile up the coast.

This was Sunday, June 1st at 1:34. Air temperature 65°. Sea breeze out of the south. My son preparing for a pirate party. Six kids. Full sun. Blue sky. Cruise ship heading for Boston.

Maine’s Most
Southern Mountain

This is Mount Agamenticus in York, Maine. At 692 feet, it’s a big deal hill. Five miles from the coast, it’s the tallest hill/mountain on the coast between Maine and Texas. Mount Agamenticus has a thousand-acre park with hiking trails you can visit.

Our family took a boat ride out from Kittery Point. The day had scattered sunshine, a slight breeze out of the north west. We ended up three miles offshore. The air temperature was in the low 60s, with small waves. We could see the Isle of Shoals and the New Hampshire coast stretching to the south. I was surprised by the nice dock layout they had at Kittery Point.

Kittery Point

Kittery Point is the southern tip of Maine, across the Piscataqua River from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Last weekend, we took a family boat ride out to the open sea from Kittery Point. This is the restored US Coast Guard Life Saving Station and the lighthouse at Whaleback. I often think of my Coast in Cape Elizabeth and Portland as the center of the world, when, in reality, there are many beautiful places along our coast in Maine.

Fog Again

This was another week of fog. I’m a fog lover because fog eliminates so many distracting details, allowing us to focus on just a few things. First, the love seat was purchased in an antique store in Cornish, Maine. Second, the end table was one of three stacking tables in my grandfather’s garden room on Bradley Street in Portland, Maine, in 1954. The third element is the oval stone I picked up on Ram Island, which I paddled out to in a yellow kayak. The stone is granite and was beautifully symmetrical. I had to have it.

These three elements sit atop a stone wall I built 20 years ago. You can’t see the wall. It’s actually 15 feet high above the lower yard. If you sit on the loveseat on a clear day, you have a view of open ocean to the south, which, if you followed in a straight line, you would arrive in Brazil.

In the foreground is wet grass, then the grey strip is driveway, then the lawn, then fog. The distance from Maine to Brazil is 4,250 miles. Sunny days in Maine are awesome. Foggy days are mysterious.

On the coast, for the last week, we have been shrouded in fog. First, you see a railing and stairs. You can hear birds. Then, the camera looks off in the distance and sees more spring trees in the fog. You’ll hear a crow. What you can’t see is the ocean, which is just 250 feet away. I could hear bell buoys and a foghorn, and waves. The camera seemed to only catch sounds nearby. Maine is beautiful on sunny days and mysterious in the fog.

This is my shore. This is my ocean, 200 feet out in front of my house. Rock cliffs, seaweed, blue water, two tides a day. Someone has got to keep an eye on the sea to be sure it’s behaving.

Here is a sailboat sailing near Portland Head Light. It’s a black-hulled, single-mast sailboat. The sails are pure white. The ocean and sky are powder blue. The boat is 38′ long. There is an American flag at the stern. The man steering the boat owns it. He’s 6′ tall and has his life together. He dots the I’s and crosses the T’s, not only on his boat, but in all the details of life. Ah, that life should appear to be simple.

Lobster Goddess

This photo was taken near Portland Head Light, at the entrance to Portland Harbor. Looking south, you can see, several miles away, Two Lights. You can easily see one lighthouse on its peninsula and a second lighthouse to the right in portions of the video as just a dot of white within the tree line beneath the sky.

The reason they built two lighthouses on this peninsula was so mariners would not be confused with the single light of Portland Head Light. In the summertime, you can visit the Lobster Shack at Two Lights. They have outdoor seating, picnic tables, gulls, and expansive views of the open ocean.

Lobster Goddess

Monhegan Boat Harbor

Our still picture shows three people on the tram walkway or railway from the boat cove at Monhegan, crossing over to Manana Island to its lighthouse. When you visit Monhegan, you can rent a row boat or Kayak at Fish Beach and paddle over to explore this adjacent island. Yes, the photo is not sharp, and the video is focused on plants growing at the island inn. You get the gist of this morning’s adventure. Spend a few days on Monhegan, and you shift into low gear. We should all do that kind of slowing several times a year.

Lobster Goddess

Monhegan Invitation

Here is what I know: If you have not been to Monhegan Island, Maine, yet, once you see this video, you will want to make your reservations. Last summer, I spent three days on Monhegan. The still photo shows Manana Island which helps to create the harbor. Manana rises dramatically out of the ocean. The harbor alone is entertainment enough for days.

The video was taken from the porch of the Island Inn. The two white chairs on the sloping lawn were where I sat for much of my time on the island. Warm days, full sun, rising and falling tides, and boats coming and going — there’s a lot to see from the porch or the chairs on the lawn.

Lobster Goddess

Last summer, I spent three days on Monhegan Island. I recommend the island for an earthly reset. It’s a nice way to clear the cobwebs of mainland life out of the way. I skipped the island during the COVID years. I returned in August of 2024, and I sat in the white Adirondack chairs on the front lawn of the Island Inn. I read a book and had breakfast and supper at the Inn. I totally played the part of an old guy just reading, sitting, and watching. The opening photo shows the shadow of the claw of the lobster goddess across the harbor on the Island of Manana. If you’ve not yet been to Monhegan, it only takes an hour for the mailboat from Port Clyde to get you out to the island.

Powered By Kite

This was a recent Sunday. What I thought I saw wasn’t what was really happening. The day was hazy sun. The air temperature was 40°. The landside had a foot of fresh snow. The seaside parking lot was full of cars. I’d been sitting quietly, writing for a half hour when I looked up, I saw a dude on a surfboard, a thousand feet off shore, holding a butterfly kite.

I went back to writing. When I looked up again, I saw him shooting across the water. I got my camera out to film. My impression was that he was kite-surfing. I was impressed by his speed. I watched for a long time, believing he was using a kite for motion, not realizing he was also foiling.

I’ve tried surfing. The physics of foiling is more complicated than surfing. Add winter air, water temperatures, a foot of February snow on the land, and being barefoot on a board; it’s complicated. Adding the 10 – 15 pounds of a 10-foot long butterfly wing sail hand-held for half an hour, you would need to be someone superhuman to manage it all!

When I reviewed the film later, I could see that it was a foil board with a kite. Wow!

Sometimes, there are moments of clarity that are so perfect and so pure that they stop me dead in my tracks. There were several this morning. This was my favorite. The sky was seamless grey, with a sun burning thorough on high. There was a fine breeze out of the southeast. I watched several boats pass through a sun-dappled sea. I videotaped them. Then, this trawler appeared, heading out to sea. There was a sense of vastness to the ocean and the mission of the captain and his boat to go out somewhere into the solid grey to set the nets and catch 2,000 fish and return to port. There was something so beautiful in this 56-second capture that I just had to share.

The land is covered in snow, pure white. The cliffs, as they meet the sea, are black. The ocean that fills the spaces in between is silver-grey with sparkly light. This is a place you can visit in your car. It’s Shore Road in Cape Elizabeth, 20 minutes from Portland.

A couple of weeks ago, we sent an email with a picture of a grey sky with icicles. The temperatures warmed and the ice melted. This last week, we had another snowstorm, and longer carrot-shaped icicles formed. The morning I took this picture, the temperature was 18 degrees. The wind has been drifting snow. Spring is less than a month away.

A Silver Sea

Last we had a foot of snow overnight. The sky was hazy grey. The land was all white, and the ocean sparkled silver. It took ten minutes to shovel a path out to the driveway. The air temperature was 27° with a slight breeze. This photo was taken within sight of Portland Head Light at 10 in the morning.

I stepped out onto the porch one morning last week at 8 o’clock. The sun was rising through a grey sky. The ocean surface was ripple calm. It snowed overnight. There were fox tracks in the snow next to the house. The air temperature was 29°. Icicles were two feet long and dripping. It was another beautiful day in Maine.

SparHawk Mint Green Teal
Tourmaline Mining

Many wonder…when I was a kid, I wondered just how, when, and why gems were found. In the picture above, we capture a moment when a tourmaline crystal is lifted off of the sieve tray. This tourmaline, if clear enough when cut, will probably yield a two-carat gem.

This sieve tray held a couple of handfuls of pocket material. It was washed and washed until clear. Then, gems were picked out. The light green behind is the low point in the mine filled with water. The water is important to use to wash the silt and clay from the crystals. This was late August, 25 miles north of Portland.

In June 1968, I did a coastal run along the shore from Higgins Beach in Scarborough to Portland Head Light. I was 19 years old, and I believed I was indestructible. That run taught me I was almost indestructible.

That morning, I ran from our farm in Gorham 20 miles to Higgins Beach. I helped my family clean cottages for two hours, then crossed the river to run the Cape Shore. A portion of the run was sandy beaches and mostly rock cliffs. I did a side trip across the breakwater to Richmond’s Island. I never fell. Nineteen-year-olds have wings on their feet. I ran and scaled rock cliffs. I never stopped to rest.

I remember climbing down a particular cliff into a circular cove in Cape Elizabeth. When my feet touched the bottom of the cliff, I picked up a quartz crystal. It was the largest, best quartz crystal I had ever found. This crystal stopped me for a few minutes. As I continued to look around, I put the crustal in my pocket. I still have the crystal today. What I didn’t know that day was that twenty years later, I would live in that neighborhood and know this cove called Crystal Cove.

I continued along the cliffs but had to backtrack because the tide was rising. I went up on the road and passed in front of my future home. Twenty minutes later, I arrived at Portland Head Light. At that point, I had run 28 miles. From Portland Head Light, I walked back to Higgins Beach. I had reached my limit. I limped for two weeks.

This picture and video were taken at Crystal Cove, Cape Elizabeth, looking southeast at nine in the morning. Crystal Cove is filled with quartz crystals, tiny to huge. There is a crystal cave beneath the stone beach that has appeared only twice in 30 years. It’s 8 feet long and is filled with hundreds of large crystals. We have excavated doubly terminated quartz crystals, and one time, we found 13 pounds of crystals. Crystal Cove is a magical place.

The Many Moods of the Sea

The ocean comes with many moods. In spite of being eternal, there are days with sun, and there are days with grey skies, dark rocks, blue-green waves, and the sound of surf. We go to the shore regardless of the skies for solace, to sort through all the things we’ve been thinking about. Maine’s ocean is an awesome place for contemplation and reflection.

Where Do Gulls Go?

Andy and I were discussing birds this morning and migrations. We know geese fly south. Maine puffins fly out to sea; no one is sure where. Andy asked me where seagulls go in the winter. I told him they stay right here in Maine.

This video was taken at my grocery store’s parking lot, showing gulls swimming in open water and standing on ice flows. Yes, a grocery store with a parking lot that looks out onto salt water and tidal marshes. How awesome is that?