The View from the Porch
To describe the view from the porch I must first describe the porch, and if I’m going to do that I may as well describe the garden too, and everything else.
Time and sea air turn all wood grey in this part of the world, so the planks that make up the porch’s floor and ceiling, and the shingles on the side of the house that form its back are all the same shade. So too are those parts of the square support posts and the roof beams that peek out from behind their cracking coat of white paint. Even the wooden rocking chair that has stood outside for as long as I can remember is grey. The sagging window-frames and doors to the living room and sun porch break the monochrome trend with their worn but persistent redness, as do the two new-ish green plastic reclining chairs. Where the porch turns round the south-east corner of the house there is a hammock slung diagonally between two posts, which more often than not is occupied by talkative three-year-old Milo, the youngest son of my cousin Clarissa. A short flight of steps (grey, with grey handrails) leads down to the spiky, uneven, never-quite-green grass of the lawn.
To the left of the steps as you descend, in the spot where one would land were one to leap from the porch, is my aunt and godmother Anne’s fruit and vegetable garden. The raspberries are mostly gone now, picked and eaten by her eager and adventurous grandchildren, but their tall bushes remain to cushion the fall of the hypothetical leaper. The gooseberries, too, have been harvested and transformed into a sweet but tart fool for our dessert. The bean plants have shot up their poles during the few short weeks since we arrived, and are just beginning to bear. To the right of the steps is the flower patch. Someone with more botanical knowledge than I could surely spend even more time describing it than I have spent on the fruit and veg, but to me it is simply a glorious profusion of colour and smell, and a good place to spot hummingbirds.
South and seaward of the flower patch, away from the house and across the short expanse of lawn, is a rose bush running parallel to the porch. It stretches from the trees that mark the western end of the garden, with one small gap (of which more later), to a pair of wiry but proud spruces that stand directly opposite the middle of the porch. Just to the left of the spruces the bare bleached bones of a tree that has been dead for longer than I have been alive reach up from the shrubs. How it has managed to cling on to the thin soil and rocks just above the beach for quite so long is a mystery to all.
Through the gap in the rose bush one finds oneself at the top of a flight of rough marble stairs that run down the sloping face of an even rougher marble sea-wall. The wall is known as ‘Henrietta’s Folly’ as it was conceived and commissioned by my late grandmother in order to make the walk down to the beach easier, and protect the lawn from being undercut by the fierce erosive power of Maine’s winter storms. A relatively new addition to the sea wall, running along beside the staircase, is a wooden rack for storing my parent’s kayaks. During the peak of the highest tides the bottom step is just submerged by the waves of Frenchman’s Bay, giving the momentary impression that the stairs might continue onwards, beneath the swell, to some long-forgotten sunken marble city. The tides here are some of the biggest in the world, and by the time the waters drop the fourteen or so feet to their lowest point a large expanse of chaotically rocky beach is exposed. The beach features boulders as big as cars and patches of shale almost fine enough to be described as sand, but most of it is a thin gravel, rich with snail shells and sea glass, stuck with rocks the size of large saucepans that are usually covered in barnacles, seaweed, or some combination of the two. A decade ago the lower half of the beach was dense with starfish and the spiny purple sea-urchins that they feed on, making barefoot swimming excursions a dangerous prospect, but an urchin-picking fleet selling to the insatiable Japanese market stripped the entire bay clear of them several years ago.
The bay itself is far too restless to be constrained by a single metaphor. In the grey summer mornings it is a gently undulating pool of mercury, laden with the muted growl of distant diesels. As the wind begins to spread across the surface and tease it in to life it is gradually overlaid by patches of brushed aluminium. Then, the sky clears, the sun breaks through, the wind and waves rise and it suddenly transforms in to a dancing, glittering field of bright blue crystals, crossed by straining sails and the wakes of bouncing motorboats. When evening finally closes in the bay gradually vanishes from sight, leaving only the sound of waves washing up the beach to remind you of its presence until the next morning. The only constant attribute of the bay’s character are the brightly patterned buoys that mark the locations of the thousands of lobster traps that are scattered wherever the water is shallow enough. Their constancy is relative, though: they bob and spin with the wind and tide, and their distribution is always subtly shifting as they are raised, checked, and re-sunk by their owners.
Beyond the bay, on the horizon, lie what look like two arms of land sweeping in from left and right but just failing to meet in the middle, leaving an opening to the Atlantic ocean facing due South and towards, as family legend has it, a very distant Venezuela. The left arm actually is a peninsula, but the right is part of a huge island, most of whose area is occupied by a national park full of mountains to hike up, ponds to swim across, and country cafes with lawns to sit on while one reflects on a hard day’s hiking and swimming. The coast of both the huge island and the peninsula are strewn with smaller islands that are by and large impossible to differentiate from the mainland, but for a few that occupy the southern gap and one just to the right of it that conceals half of the town of Bar Harbour. Being the most popular tourist destination in the region it attracts much in the way of waterborne traffic, all visible from the porch, including the occasional hulking cruise ship and, three times a week, a comparatively svelte catamaran ferry. It also dispatches its own ships on a daily basis, the most recognisable being a four-masted tourist cruiser with a striking suit of crimson sails that slouches out of port every sunrise, noon and sunset and returns before ever getting up enough speed to endanger its passenger’s drinks.
Above the peaks of Acadia National Park there is nothing but clear azure. As boats leave their wakes in the bay below, so jet liners leave their contrails in the sky above, soaring from the busy metropolises of the Eastern US to Paris, Amsterdam, London, my friends, and my home.
