It is mid-April as I write this, flipping pages through this enchanting book, arranged to take us on an ecological, environmental, perceptive creature-journey of a year, from January 1 to December 31, a path touching the rise and receding of seasons and the living forces that harbor planet earth as home.
I must watch, I note, for April’s full moon on the 20th, the Pink Moon, named for the wild ground phlox, one of the season’s earliest blooms. Naming things, though, varies, and so April’s full moon is also called the Seed Moon, Egg Moon, Fish Moon.
As in all the 12 months Catherine Schmitt so elegantly writes about, we are tossed the birthdays of notables who have contributed to our current knowledge about the ground — or waterways — we find ourselves on, such as the entry for April 3: John Burroughs, naturalist, writer, “was born on this day in 1837. In Signs and Seasons, Burroughs wrote that on the beach we emerge into a larger and more primitive out-of-doors.” As she will throughout A Coastal Companion, Schmitt lends us a bit of the birthday person’s philosophic thinking: “There before us [Burroughs writes, from a beach], is aboriginal space, as we stand at the open door of the continent, meeting of earth and sky”¦”
April 21 we discover is the birthday of John Muir, the conservationist best known for his writing on the American West. Who knew that on one of his trips, for the Sierra Club he founded, he took a detour to Maine, describing Moosehead Lake as “a charming sheet of pure water 40 miles long full of picturesque islands”¦”
Glimpses of the minor and major profundities of April’s past and present leave readers of A Coastal Companion with inklings of treasured earth moments in the days of each month, ever year. For instance, it seems that in late April particles no bigger than grains of sand “will shoot through the sky at over 100,000 miles an hour, disintegrating into light as they enter earth’s atmosphere.” It is the dusty trail of the comet Thatcher, the Lyriad meteor shower from the constellation Lyra. It is the oldest meteor shower recorded by humans “observed 2,687 years ago by a Chinese man who wrote of stars falling like rain”¦”
Schmitt never ceases to amaze with her abundance of side references that enhance, indeed affirm, our connection to an ancient earth, forever new in the lingering concepts continually chanced upon and expanded by a science-loving 21st century. Life itself in its manifest forms, bred in ocean, at the edge of the sea, inland, springs eternal to our wonder in spring with the nesting of birds, “baby eels like tiny glass willow leaves”¦ghostlike through the viscous sea””¦birds arriving “from over the open sea for their brief courtship with the land and each other.”
Each month begins with a poem by a contemporary Maine poet, and black-and-white illustrations by two Maine artists, Kimberleigh Martul-March and Margaret Campbell. On nearly every page the flora and fauna of our coast swim, fly, hop across the page — so real is the rendering of the haughty great blue heron, departing geese, a tide pool, the swaying eelgrass.
I venture towards May, towards June, the birthdays and writings, thoughtnesses left by Jacques Yves Cousteau (June 11); Rachel Carson (May 27); Henry David Thoreau (July 12). May’s full moon is the Flower Moon, the Corn-Planting Moon, or Milk Moon. What plants, what birds, what slumbering-away-the-winter months fill the lengthening days, the star-filled nights! In September we are encouraged to “pay attention, as so much that is here will soon leave”¦”
The natural cycles of our bays, rivers, marshes, coastal forests, illuminated by artists, writers, scientists thus bringing their originality and particular relevance to humans sharing their elemental domain are encapsulated in this book meant to be at hand, an inspiring reference of wonder for any day of the year. On any day reach for it — note the presence of the Cold Moon, or Long Night Moon of December; the subtle or sublime sound of the sea in the heat of July; the spawning of sea urchins in mid-summer; the Luna moths clinging to your screen door in August; “the waning light of day [that brings] hormonal changes in plant cells”¦senescence, botany’s poetic term for death” — in trees and shrubs in October.
Science — the awakening to the integral charm of each day with its infinite life forms — is rarely captured in such captivating allure, the book a life force in itself leading to further reading of books, authors cited. A Coastal Companion — beautifully compiled with its artwork and words — a rare treasure indeed.
Hannah Merker reviews books in Bristol, Maine.