One spring day nearly twenty years ago, I found myself in front of a class of bored eighth grade students, scrambling for whatever key I could turn to ignite their imaginations. I had walked into their school that morning with the assumption that I could easily run this class—that I could quickly engage these kids and get them thinking about their home landscapes: the places nearby that they considered special, and how those places affected their lives. Ha!

            Early that morning I had slung a backpack full of papers and books into my car for the hour-drive from our home on Roanoke Island, over two bridges and three islands, past fields of rolling dunes and glimpses of blue-green surf, to the Cape Hatteras School, grades K through 12. I was teaching in the school that week through a visiting writers’ program sponsored by the state of North Carolina.

Normally I loved this kind of assignment.  It gave me a chance to connect with young people—to spark a little creativity even in students to whom the idea of creative thought seemed utterly foreign. But for the previous few years I’d been teaching workshops with college students and adults. I was (I realized belatedly) badly out of practice working with students this young.

The assignment I’d given them had always worked well in the past: Write a few paragraphs about your favorite place in the world. Maybe it’s somewhere you can comfortably be alone. Or maybe it’s where you hang out with friends. What’s special about that particular place? How does it make you feel? I stood in front of the class trying to hide my deer-in-the-headlights surprise that my request was falling so flat.

I changed tacks and asked the students how many of them planned to leave Hatteras Island after high school. Twelve hands shot into the air. “I don’t know where I’m going,” one boy volunteered, “but it’s outta here!”

Alaska: The word itself is beautiful, the idea of it too vast and faceted to be easily held. Alaska: largest of states, and in some ways the most varied, from shadowy rain forest to the most frigid, light-filled tundra. In my mid-20s, at a time when nothing was certain for me—indeed, when my I-can-do-anything bravado was crumbling—I had a dream about Alaska: a sky-blue sparkling landscape, a place of many colors, more beautiful than any I’d seen. Of tall, snowy peaks; of slanted sunlight and the clearest lakes; of vast meadows of wildflowers.

         I awoke dazzled.

         There was no question beyond when I would go. The timing was tricky, because I had what was considered a good job at a newspaper in Oregon, a position I’d worked hard to win. The pay was generous, the schedule relentless. To my dismay, I neither liked nor excelled at the work. So I kept my head down and saved money. When I had what I thought was enough, I quit the job, drove to Seattle, and caught a ferry north. I left my car with friends, figuring I’d improvise when I reached the end of the ferry line.

         “Improvising” turned out to be hitch-hiking. On the ferry from Vancouver Island, I met a feisty German woman with laughing blue eyes who went by the nickname Mausie, and we decided to travel together. Standing on the road shoulder alongside her, I felt much safer. Mausie had no such fears. She’d explored much of the world with her thumb.

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

I love the light of deep December here in Maine. It’s unlike anywhere I’ve ever lived—more slanted, more silvery. A reminder that I’m farther north than I ever thought I’d be.

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.