Beach Fires (In Bar Harbor) Is Out

New single. One song. It’s out.

Beach Fires (In Bar Harbor) is about the week the boats leave.

If you’ve never cruised, that won’t land. If you have, you already know exactly what I mean. There’s a stretch in September when a mooring field goes from full to empty almost overnight. The dock music stops. The fuel dock closes. Everybody you spent the whole summer with is suddenly three hundred miles south, and the water where they were sitting is just water again.

We got caught on the wrong side of that. Had the window, watched it close, stayed anyway. Not for weather. For the other reason.

So we did what you do. Dragged some driftwood down to a cold rock beach, got a fire going, and held onto summer about two months past when we had any business holding onto it.

Here’s the part that still gets me. Back home, Down East means Carteret County — Harkers Island, Davis, Sea Level, the far end of Core Sound where the pavement gives up. Up there, Downeast means everything past Penobscot Bay. Two places, twelve hundred miles of coast between them, same two words, and both of them named by watermen for the same reason. Nobody planned that. I left one Down East and wintered in the other, and I’m still not sure I ever left.

This one’s for the sailors. The ones who cut it too fine. You know who you are, and you know it was worth it.

Go listen. Then go check your weather window.

— Echo