And so, as it must to all men unwilling to climb one more shaky ladder to clean oak leaves out of a downspout, we moved from 43 degrees 56 minutes N. all the way to 44 degrees 015 N. to the local retirement massif five plus miles (Naut.) or so up the estuary. Quite a change from the beehive of activity at Clarks Cove to gracious geriatric living, where you go into supper (dinner) at 5:45 or else and the biggest prospect for excitement is a bus trip with contemporaries to Pemaquid Point.
But there is a bright side: Until She Who Must be Obeyed lifts the ignition keys, we can make it down to Clarks Cove six days and check it out on the seventh on the way to and from the island kirk. And after SWMBO’s key lifting, there’s always the possibility of (the gods help us) a jet-ski, because Climate Disruption has kept ice off the river for the last nine years. The drawback is that the upper river hasn’t been dredged since 1905 – when the tide’s down, there’s a quarter-mile of mudflat between the riverbank and the eel rut which passes for a channel. We’re working on that part.
Meanwhile, the horizon has broadened. From six in the morning, we get to set on a brick terrace and observe the upper river – this is the part nearly shut off by a long ledge, so that the flushing rate is only about 15 percent – it takes a week and thirteen of fourteen flooding tides to change the water completely, and the runoff from the lake lowers the salinity, which seems to be great stuff for all the oysters (the tidal interchange up there is right on 22 million metric tons). In Clarks Cove, more than a mile below the long ledge, the flushing rate is just one day, the interchange is 44 million tonnes, the salinity is higher, beloved by the mussels, the temperature is lower, and all matters most generally oceanic.
And below that the firth, as the Scots name it, close to the open sea but not of it, birthing ground of near three-quarters of fish the world over. For this lower part of the estuary, there is only one place to go, turning the clock back by 70-odd years the while, and that is a fish house near a tiny Cape on a fairly bold shore in Christmas Cove, at the estuary mouth in view of Ram Island and Seguin.
The fish house was a perfect reflection of a life’s work and a stern living as well as reflection of Heraclitus’s 6th century (B.C.E.) remarks that everything flows and nothing stays and that you can’t step twice into the same river: Gear of all kinds – a gill net for alewives and other bait; a pair of clam hoes (one with a tine missing) and homemade hods, a dip net for smelting; a half-empty tub of pepper for keeping the mice out of the twine; a multi-purpose potbellied stove to melt tar for the trap-heads, water-soften oak for trap bows cut in the woods, and reduce the water in split-pea wine, a specialty of the owner; a trident spear for eels; heading-twine cores secured by rubber bands in 3-2-1 triangles for small tools and the odd dowel, an ice saw, cedar buoys overhead – in short, everything needed as life-support systems and everything not needed immediately covered with cobwebs but handy by, with an old beautifully tight peapod on a haul-off outside to take him wherever he was of a mind to go.
Oceanographers tells us that in 150,000 years we can walk from here to Provincetown and then wander eastward on Georges Bank to pull stumps left over from last time. While we’re waiting, whether or not the 401K goes pouf, if we will take care of the estuary, the estuary will take care of us. Never mind the dollars – just look at its menu – when lobsters brought 15 cents a pound, that would buy a pound of the best ground beef. And in the mid-thirties, the estuary gave us a bonus of more blues and stripers than you have seen in many decades. “Everything flows and nothing stays,” as Heraclitus observed, so prepare for balancing surprises.
– Ed Myers
Damariscotta