Authors: Geoffrey Wolff
The Edge of Maine (7 page)
“I'm afraid it is,” Proctor said.
“Well, do they have to leave so early in the morning?”
This was not the same lady who, having come to photograph the local lobster fleet, hanging off their moorings and facing southwest on a flooding tide, remarked to Proctor:
“This harbor is so tidy! Such pride the boaters show, lining up their vessels so they all point in the same direction.”
Proctor laughs about these events. And when blow boaters get in trouble in his waters, well, he figures, he's been in trouble too. He tells of hauling a yar ketch aground on a ledge, dismasted, with its rudder busted, through the breakers to safety, but not before the sailboat's skipper, hooking up the towline, said he'd like to save his anchor, hooked on the leeward side of the rocks. It was a valuable anchor, evidently, had been in the family for dogs' years.
“Cut it loose when I give her the gun,” Proctor responded. “Either you're coming or your stern is.”
Following our unhappy dinner hour at McGlathery, late the next morning, in dense fog, we motored to Stonington with half a mind to find the harbormaster there and tell him the evil that had been done to us. We picked up a mooring at Billings Marine and saw at once a Hinckley sailboat, the
Salty Mistress,
hanging from a mooring and rafted alongside a Coast Guard cutter. The Hinckley was in bad shape, with a jagged hole amidships. An investigation seemed to be under way, so we thought to leave our complaints to another occasion and get ashore in our dinghy, buy some ice and groceries and a newspaper, and maybe eat lunch. Stonington is a busy waterfront, with many wharves and piers and docks, one of them owned by the town. We headed for it in our little ten-foot fiberglass bathtub, laden with the four of us, none petite-sized. Soon we were buzzed and nearly swamped by some teenagers in an outboard skiff, within easy view of the Coast Guard. Approaching shore we saw signs on the piers, variations of
KEEP AWAY
and
NO DINGHY TIEUP
!
*
Stonington has long had a reputation as a kind of Wild East frontier town. There's still an active granite quarry on Crotch Island, mere yards across Deer Island Thorofare from the town. When quarrying was in its heyday years ago, paydays for the workersâmany of them Italianâwere rowdy days indeed. Collisions between fishermen and rock-cutters were epic, buckets of blood serving as impromptu boxing rings and more than a few whores as spectators.
A couple of days later we read in the Bangor newspaper that near Stonington three lobstermen had been injured, one of them seriously, when their thirty-five-foot powerboat plowed its bow mid-ship into a fifty-one-foot Hinckley. The owner and helmsman of the lobster boat had been injured, treated, and released from Blue Hill Hospital; his son, as the newspaper reported, “received severe facial injuries that will require plastic surgery.” During the following few days, many people we encountered on Maine's waterfront had the inside scoop on what had happened in the fog three miles from Stonington. Both vessels had working radar, so they could be presumed to have seen each other before they hit. Depending on the viewpoint of the teller, lobsterman or yachtsman, we heard a story of blithe incompetence or of stubbornness exacerbated by rage. The captain of the lobster boat was said to have a violent temper, and because it was agreed that the collision occurred at higher speed than the conditions licensed, it was said by some that he had rammed and stove in the sailboat. Another version held that the sailboat captain, “from away,” didn't know how to use his radar or steer his boat, and wandered into the path of the working lobster boat.
A few years later, while rooting around in some old
Bangor Daily News
clips from the winter of 2000, I came across another story about the captain of that lobster boat. A year earlier, in January and with high seas running, two miles south of Stonington, that captain had been among a posse who rescued a clammer stranded in freezing weather on a nearby island. The weather was so awful that the rescuers, pelted by freezing spray, couldn't look straight ahead to search for the unlucky clammer. Yet they kept at it till they found him. He was grateful: “It helps to have locals willing to go out there.”
And the following account showed up in a Connecticut yacht club's winter newsletter, relating the outcome of the correspondent's summer cruise around waters adjacent to Stonington. He had put his sailboat hard aground on a ledge, and the lobster-boat
Nigh Duck
happened upon him and pulled him off. In the confusion of this success,
Nigh Duck
took off to resume fishing before the cruiser “could properly thank him for his good deed.” Having returned to Connecticut, the rescued fellow sent a letter of thanks, together with a check made out to cash to “The Captain of the
Nigh Duck,
” care of the postmaster of Stonington. A letter came back from that captain, Bill Baker: “If it makes you feel better, I pulled three boats off that ledge and a fourth not far from where you grounded. I enjoy ârescuing' people. I didn't expect to get paid, but it will come in handy this winter.”
There's no moral to be drawn here. I've got advice, though: If you're sailing through Merchant Row in the neighborhood of Stonington, keep a weather eye open for ledges and angry faces.
We sat long at table that day, and when we went on deck about three o'clock it was raining. And the wind was beginning to blow pretty hard. We made sail at once in the direction of Boothbay, but in the course of a couple of hours the wind rose to a gale. The sea grew very rough, and almost every minute a wave would break over our vessel and, sweeping along the deck, deluge the cockpit with waterâ¦. The air was so thick with mist that we could see nothing but the raging waves around us, and could not tell where we were going, though the sloop was plunging along at a fearful rate, her bows almost continually under water and her mast opening wide cracks at every tug of the sails. There was considerable danger of the mast's going overboard. In that case we should have been completely at the mercy of the waves, on a coast every inch of which was rock-bound, so that, if our vessel struck, she would be pounded to pieces in ten minutes.
We drove madly along, the grim old Pilot at the helm, and the anxious Skipper, arrayed in oil-skin to shed the wet, clinging to the mast and keeping a sharp lookout ahead. Suddenly the mist rose and rolled away before a sweeping blast, and then we saw Seguin lighthouse, and knew where we were. It was a superb and terrible sightâthese wild reefs with the waves foaming and flashing over them, directly in our course. It was growing late, and the gale was on the increase. The sea was white with foam on the surface, but the great waves, as they came leaping and roaring at us, had a black and angry look not pleasant to behold.
âR
OBERT
C
ARTER
, describing a day cruising the Maine coast, 1858
Gulls nest on the cliffs on the west side and on the northern ridge [of Seguin Island]. From this grassy knoll the poet, the painter, and the philosopher can perhaps take a sane and objective view of what otherwise seems a mad planet.
âThe Cruising Guide to the New England Coast
C
ontext is everything. Sixteen years after our family misadventure and rescue in the waters surrounding Ragged Island, I had an opportunity to think long and hard about another famous Maine island, Seguin, a corruption of the aboriginal word
sutquin,
meaning “place where the sea vomits.” At the mouth of the Sheepscot and Kennebec Rivers, seven miles southwest of the entrance to Boothbay Harbor, Seguin Island has America's second oldest lighthouse, commissioned in 1795.
My son Justin and I were approaching Seguin five years ago. This was our first landfall following an overnight passage from Provincetown, again aboard
Blackwing
and again wrapped in fog. This time we were sailing with Loran, radar, and two GPS units; we had rendezvoused with sea buoys along the wayâhitting them right on the noseâand at dawn (such as it was) we were giddy with self-satisfaction. Cocksure that we knew where we wereâbecause we
were
there when we thought we were
there,
at Mile Ledge red bell at forty-three degrees, forty-one and five-tenths minutes north by sixty-nine degrees, forty-five and three-tenths minutes west, less than a mile south of Seguinâwe paid no more attention to our electronics, relying on our utterly reliable compass. A few minutes later we heard the moan of Seguin's foghorn and imagined that we could make out, above the rocky shore just over there to port, the stone foundation of the light. We set a course for Boothbay Harbor, following in the wake of the wet and frightened Robert Carter who had sailed these waters back in 1858. Something wasn't right. The tide was flooding into the rivers, but we reckoned ourselves to be well to the east of Seguin Ledge. We weren't. First we heard surf breaking and then we saw the ledge dead ahead. Just in time I cranked the wheel and fell off the wind to deep water. After I gave the helm to Justin, I studied NOAA chart 13293. I had to squint to read it, but written in purple on the chart, right between Seguin Island and Seguin Ledge, and just at an outcropping called Ellingwood Rock, was the declaration
LOCAL MAGNETIC DISTURBANCE (SEE NOTE).
I found the note: “Differences of as much as eight degrees from the normal variation have been observed in an area around Ellingwood Rock for approximately one nautical mile in all directions.” You might ask, what's eight degrees between sailors and ledges? A lot. Enough to haul you up on Tom Rock or The Sisters or Black Rocks or White Ledge or Jackknife Ledge. Relying on a compass in this case is about as reliable as a hunch. I consulted my electronics again, and left them blinking and buzzing warnings at us until we were moored at Boothbay Harbor.
In the interest of commercial shipping crossing the Atlantic and sailing the coast to and from Portland, a light was called for to mitigate the Seguin neighborhood's shipwrecking perils. Local merchants petitioned for this light, and it was ordered by President George Washington at a cost of $6,300. It was even more impressive then than now, rising 186 feet, the highest light in Maine. The first keeper, a Frenchman who served against the lobster-backs in the Revolution, was paid two hundred dollars a yearâa good deal more than Abbie Burgess's dad got much later for keeping Matinicus Light, but a good deal less than Seguin's keeper felt he deserved. He had a point. In his first year at the light storms broke up his two boats and a canoe; the larger of his boats was valued at three hundred dollars. A short time later, history records, John Polereczky died “penniless and boatless” on Seguin. The damp, mildewed, and maundering wooden structureâbeset by fog and storm-driven sprayâbegan to rot and collapse as soon as it was erected. In 1842 it was replaced by a stone structure, now painted white with a black lens-house and attached dwelling. In 1857 Seguin light received Maine's only First Order Fresnel lens, the most powerful light on the coast. Fresnel's lenses, designed in 1822 by Augustin Fresnel and manufactured in Paris, are optical masterpieces of ingenuity, graded in order of their size, cost, and complexity from First Order (called “hyper radiants”) to Sixth. Seguin's lens, weighing three tons and standing twice the height of a keeper, valued at eight million dollars, was saved by the intervention of a local lobsterman from being dismantled by the Coast Guard in the 1980s. Tended and financially supported privately by Friends of Seguin Island in Bath, one of the many salvation and restoration projects along this coast, the light is lit by a couple of thousand-watt bulbsâonly ten times the power of a household bulbâand focuses its rays to an intensity of four million candle-power, casting its beam eighteen miles. (In earlier days it managed a similar range using lamps lit by sperm oil, lard, and kerosene.) It does this by a dauntingly complex arrangement of more than a thousand crystal prisms and bull's-eye lenses mounted in a brass frame. In the infancy of Maine's lighthouses they all cast a single white beam, creating a dazzling and bewildering string of light along the coast. To distinguish between these lights, colored lenses were tried, radically reducing their range. The solution was the creation of flash patterns, a periodicity peculiar to each light and published in the Coast Guard's
Light List
under the rubric “light characteristics.” Each light has its flash-and-eclipse interval, a repetition pattern controlled by a clockwork mechanismâdriving huge counterweights and needing to be wound several times per dayâcomprising shutters mounted on low-friction rails circling the Fresnel lens. Seguin's characteristic used to be one second lit followed by one second eclipsed. Today, owing to its blue-ribbon place of honor in the lighthouse pantheon, it beams white and steady; its fog signal sounds two brays every twenty seconds.
With as much as 2,374 hours of fogginess (27 percent of a year's total hours), Seguin needed a potent fog signal. The original bell couldn't be heard above pounding surf, so it was replaced by a steam-driven whistle, which was replaced by a diaphone horn so powerful that its concussive blast, heard fourteen miles distant in Bath, extinguished kerosene lamps and knocked seagulls out of the air.
The more prominent the light, the grislier the ghost story. Seguin's could have inspired fellow Mainer Stephen King to dream up
The Shining
. It seems that during the nineteenth century the keeper's wife had a piano on the island, and on that piano she played a single song over and over. (All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy?) The keeper destroyed the piano with an ax, then killed the pianist, and then himself. Some say that the tune drifts to the mainland on quiet nights.
The music I remember is in a deeper octave, the grave lowing of the Seguin horn through the fog. And welcomed in my memory I can see on a clear night from the entrance to Boothbay Harbor six lights, a necklace of steadfastness, flashing in code their warnings and welcomes, announcing unambiguously the mariner's situation.