Beach Fires (In Bar Harbor)

The Backstory

Every boat that goes north has a date circled somewhere in the back of its head. Nobody writes it down. You just know it. Around the second week of September a feeling starts working on you, and the smart ones listen.

We did not listen.

We had come up on the June wind like everybody else. ICW to Oriental, across the Pamlico, outside at Hatteras for the long run to Sandy Hook. East River, Hell Gate at slack, up the Sound, through the Canal, across to Mount Desert in time for the good part of summer. I want to say something about Bar Harbor here, because it earned it. That harbor takes care of a boat the way a good porch takes care of a man back home. No ceremony about it. It just holds you, and nobody asks what you do for a living.

Then September came and the fleet went. It happens faster than you would believe. One week there are masts in every direction and somebody playing on the dock, and the next it is empty pennants, cold water, and the fuel dock shuttered for the season. Everyone we knew was three hundred miles south already, telling somebody about the gulf breeze.

We stayed. I have admitted elsewhere that there was a woman to blame, and I am not going to improve on that explanation now. The window was open, we let it shut, and the weather had nothing to do with it.

Here is the joke nobody up there was in on. Where I come from, Down East means Carteret County. Harkers Island, Davis, Sea Level, Cedar Island. The far side of Core Sound where the road quits and the water takes over. I have already written a whole song about it. Then I sail twelve hundred miles of coast and tie up in a place that calls itself Downeast too, and means everything past Penobscot Bay.

Same two words. And both of them came by the name the same way, watermen named them both, for the same reason, and neither one ever checked with the other. I left one Down East and spent a cold autumn in the other, and the only differences that mattered were the temperature of the water and how early the dark came.

So this one is for the sailors. The ones who cut it too fine, who let the window close because leaving meant leaving something behind. Every cruiser I know has one season they got wrong on purpose. That was ours. I would not give it back.

- Echo Thatch, October 2024, Bar Harbor, Maine