The storms—all three of them— drifted along what was at first a novel route, then a frighteningly familiar one. An unusual wave in the jet stream helped spin them up and toss them off like meteorological cannon fire. One by one they passed over Quebec and moved off the coast. Their slow drift, coupled with the air plunging toward their cores, generated winds more long-lasting and powerful than any seen along the Maine coast for decades: southeasterlies of up to 70 miles an hour, with a few gusts to 90.

           The damage was among the worst ever suffered on the Maine coast. Immediately afterwards, some people swore they’d rebuild the wharves and docks and seafood packing houses they’d lost. But it’s becoming clear that this winter’s trio of tempests may have forever changed fishing communities here.

            When the first storm arrived on December 18th, Mainers everywhere felt its power. Ferocious winds left hundreds of thousands of households without electricity. Heavy rains pushed inland as far as Farmington (near Sugarloaf Mountain), where massive flooding shut down the entire city.

All that water swiftly ran for the sea. I

Early one clear autumn morning I go down to a dock just off a narrow river on the mid-coast of Maine. Two slim wooden boats are tied here—rowing dories shaped like slips of moon, each awaiting a handful of rowers and a coxswain. There’s a thick cover of dew. It’s cool enough for sweatshirts but not too cold to row. The rowers chat as we take our positions, but this is not a social hour. We ready our twelve-foot oars and await the coxswain’s orders, eager to slide onto the calm, winding river.

            I’m new to this rowing group, and somewhat new to this village. Before this year I’d never really rowed. The waters of my former long-time home, the gale-plagued North Carolina Outer Banks, would have been too choppy and dangerous for such narrow, tipsy crafts.

            I am a climate migrant, among the first in the U.S. Jeff and I left the Outer Banks in 2018 after three decades of watching sea level rise and tropical storms turn the thin, once-scantly settled barrier islands into a heavy-equipment operators’ playground. It’s hard enough to hold a sandy reef together in normal times, given that the ocean constantly pushes it west. Now sand-scrapers and backhoes often work around the clock to try to block the ocean’s advance—and to save the lavish houses that line the once-open shores.

            It’s all futile, of course, and what’s coming is going to make it even more so. Things are getting worse by the year on the world’s sea coasts.

On a cool autumn day in 2018, Jeff and I drove through the gate of the apple orchard in Virginia that we had owned for 23 years (but would not for much longer) and made our way down the grassy hill, through the trees we’d planted, to the simple cabin we’d built. A little numb, I fingered the key to the cabin door before inserting it into the lock. It’s okay, I thought. It’s time to leave all this behind. I felt solid in our decision to sell and ready to carry it out.

But when I opened the door and stepped inside, I was overcome by a feeling not of sorrow, but of being home. The room I stood in, and the small loft upstairs, were entirely ours—our things, our tracked-in dirt, our unique smell. My body relaxed in a way it had not in many months. Before me were the windows we’d worked so hard to put in, and the coat hooks Jeff had whittled from apple twigs he’d found. My grandmother’s kitchen table, where we’d eaten many a candlelit meal, looking up to the mountains. My parents’ folding chairs. A sense of deep belonging entered me. I stood still for several minutes, reveling in the feeling. And then I set about taking it all apart.

Ten years. A decade. A tenth of my life, if I should live to 100, more if not. It seems like a very long time since we lost Reid, our only child, in a car accident—and it also seems like yesterday. The arrival of mid-March always catapults us back to those early days. How could it not?

When a child dies, the void in the parents’ life yawns like a cosmic black hole that threatens to pull you in and obliterate you. Moving away from that force, putting distance between myself and the event horizon (science’s term for the point of no return) was unquestionably the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It was so tempting just to let it take me. And who would blame me? But over time I managed to break free. I consider this the greatest of my life’s achievements (though I know at any careless moment, I could drift back toward its deadly rim.

Older

Beautiful inside and out

Invisible

I gave a little start when those words flashed onto the screen during a presentation by the poet Elizabeth Bradfield. Liz was in the process of describing six-word stories, modeled on Hemingway’s heartbreaking For sale: Baby shoes. Never used. The photograph showed a wall from the 6 Words Minneapolis project, in which city residents were asked to briefly describe themselves. This entry spoke directly to an experience I’d been having of late but hadn’t quite been able to name.

Consider: I smile at a young couple who are walking with their baby out of the grocery store as I enter. Their eyes flit briefly over my face and body without expression.

Waiting in a loose group of people for service at a food truck—there doesn’t seem to be a line—the fellow taking orders looks straight at me and then asks the guy in back of me what he’d like.