This must be the place: ‘17 has turned 35, I’m surprised that we’re still livin’
The Pemaquid Point Lighthouse in Maine. Garret K. Woodward photo
Hello from the coast of Maine. About an hour northeast up along the shoreline from Portland. The small, quaint community of New Harbor. More specifically, Pemaquid Beach Village.
A place initially settled by British and French settlers in the 1600s, the local indigenous tribes who lived here for thousands of years before that.
Hearty boats and lobster traps. Aged wooden docks creaking to the coming and going of the waters of the mighty Atlantic Ocean. Salty air soothes the soul. The sounds of the waxing and waning tides crashing atop the white sand beaches makes the heart sing. Sandy toes and flip-flops. Beach towels and coolers filled with snacks, fruit, water bottles and cans of cold suds.
At 39 years old, I’ve been coming to this exact spot almost every summer since I was born. My parents started camping in Pemaquid at the nearby Sherwood Campground in 1972, newly married with the future unknown. I arrived on the scene in 1985; I was six months old when they first brought me here.
There were cabins and houses we rented throughout the decades. My folks, myself and my little sister would motor up to New Harbor every single summer from our farmhouse in Upstate New York. After high school, I would sporadically come up each July to meet my family and our friends here. Less so in recent years, with this go-round being my first chance to wander up since 2020.
For June 2024, I’m finding myself back in the northeast with my girlfriend, Sarah, to take care of a few personal family matters. Making sure my folks are doing OK and helping out where I can with what little window of time I have in being in the North Country. A short side trip to New Harbor marks Sarah’s first time in Maine. Within the first hour of crossing over the state line into “Vacationland” from New Hampshire, we were sitting in a chowder house in the Portland harbor, chowing down on a $32 lobster roll washed down with a Shipyard Export Ale.
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Finish the last of the lobster roll doused with drawn butter in gusto. Time to head up Interstate 295 North to U.S. 1 North to M.E. 129 South to M.E. 130 South to Huddle Road. The sights and the sounds have remained the same all these years later, thankfully. S-curve roads and large maple trees. Old Fort William Henry casting a watchful eye over Pemaquid Harbor. Hot sandy beaches. A stiff breeze off the Atlantic. A home away from home, in many respects.
Our family’s “best friend family,” the Corbetts, own a summer home in Pemaquid, which is where Sarah and I are currently staying on this jaunt. You can see the ocean from the front porch and smell the mesmerizing scent of it when the wind is blowing just right. At night, if you listen closely, you can hear the waves crashing down at the local public beach right down the road.
The Corbetts are from just outside of Boston, Massachusetts. We first met them almost 30 years ago, when they rented the cabin next door to ours. Both sets of parents got along just fine, still do. As did I with their son, both of us elementary school kids in those days. We became fast friends over trading baseball cards in the lawn between the cabins during the day, watching Boston Red Sox games on the NESN TV channel following dinner. Go Sox.
And yet, here we are. The months, years and decades have simply flown by without any regard for letting me catch up and catch my breath as to the people, places and things that have made up this whirlwind collage of memories I try desperately to preserve, in honest haste within the realm of the written word. I try the best I can, but the sands of time and moments mostly fall through the fingertips of chance and opportunity unfolding in real time.
Wandering around the Corbetts’ summer home, it looks the exact same as when I was a kid. Front porch with rocking chairs. Hammock on the side lawn. Blue interior walls. Tide chart held steadily by a magnet on the refrigerator. Dusty seashells and old photographs on the shelves and on the fireplace mantle. Lobster buoys and traps for decoration. Maritime-themed mementos and so forth. Framed maps of local townships and oceanic depths. Hardwood floors and a ceiling fan thwarting away the heat and humidity of life on the coast in the early days of summer.
Cruising around the main roads, back roads and side roads of this peninsula, I found myself constantly pointing out points of interest to Sarah. The old buildings that once housed a beloved pizza parlor or a long-gone café or a wharf bar where we’d go for sunset beverages, which was recently destroyed by a freak winter storm. That same wharf bar was where the Corbetts’ son, my old childhood baseball card trading chum, had his wedding reception there some years ago. I’ll never forget that day, nor that specific sunset.
But, some things are still clear and present. Shorelines where we would collect sea glass and shells as a little kid. The tiny Harbor Ice Cream on the corner of Bristol Road and Southside Road where we would go immediately thereafter. The Fairwind Marine gas station across the street and C.E. Reilly & Son grocery store across from that.
“Where do you even see a gas station not owned by a corporation and a grocery store not owned by a chain anymore?” I commented to Sarah. We sat momentarily at the stop sign awaiting to turn down Snowball Hill Road and head back to the house to get ready for the beach, onward to dinner at the River House the next peninsula over in Damariscotta.
I don’t glorify the past, nor would I want to. But, I do enjoy the occasional stroll down Memory Lane, especially when you can physically meander down it, thoughts ricocheting wildly about faces now six-feet-under or 600 miles away.
And ain’t it funny how those John Mellencamp tunes seem to only get better, get more real and relevant with age, the melodies echoing out of open windows in the truck along Snowball Hill Road: “Holdin’ on to sixteen as long as you can, change come around real soon, make us women and men, oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of livin’ is gone.”
Life is beautiful, grasp for it, y’all.
