ever-fixed mark

Back in July, Husband and I took a little trip to Castine, Maine while my parents watched the boys.

Coastal Castine, the picture-perfect site of the Maine Maritime Academy, manages to be both moneyed and authentic. There are few McMansions here; instead, imagine modest but expensively-landscaped and painstakingly maintained Victorian cottages.

If you live in a Victorian, you realize how much money it costs just to keep a house like this attractive. Those windows have been replaced; the wood siding has to be scraped and painted every few years; the roof has been reshingled recently; the stone wall and border take more upkeep than a huge front lawn.

There were lots of opportunities in Castine for Hopper-esque house portraits, but I quickly grew tired of perfect cottages and went looking for some imperfect ones.

I liked to think that this place is owned by a former mobster who long ago pissed off his capo and has come to hide out among the WASPs in Castine, but consequently is afraid to hire a landscaper for fear he will rat out his location. A good thing, too, because can you imagine mowing that vertical lawn?

This guy can. I was afraid that the lawnmower would tumble down on him while I was shooting this picture.

Castine is about as sleepy as these pictures make it look. It’s not really a tourist destination as much as a seasonal place. The locals don’t trouble themselves about anyone they don’t recognize as year-rounders or summer people. The women at the Castine Variety, for example, ostentatiously ignored us until they finished conversing with the known patrons. Then they would turn and not quite make eye contact, as if to say, “Here’s your window of opportunity. If you want to order, you may address me now.” The lobster rolls were pretty good, though.

We awoke to fog on our second day, the day we had planned a six-hour paddling trip. We started off optimistically, convinced it would get better. It didn’t; by early afternoon, it was like kayaking through a dream sequence. We hid out by a little island on one side of the channel while our guide monitored the radio for boat traffic. Enough boats went by without radioing their position to make her nervous about attempting the crossing. We had to paddle up to a narrower crossing, one with a sandbar that usually deterred motorized traffic, and visibility was so low she had to use her compass to set a course. But we made it back in one piece, and even with the pea-soup fog we were able to see porpoises, a seal, ospreys, a blue heron, sea urchins, and starfish.

How foggy was it? Well, this is actually a color photograph.