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Leg 29, March 27, 2010, from Murch's Brook to Stepping Stone Brook

A week into spring and there remain ample reminders that this is Maine and we shouldn't rely too heavily on the calendar.

All sorts of interesting areas coinciding with the dead low tide of today's walk presented themselves. Tidal pools in particular seemed to have assembled their components to showcase their considerable beauty for the several hours available till the tide comes back in and rearranges things.

It seems there's a brook at nearly every turn, each brimming with the residuals of last week's big rain and continuing snow melt and each stuggling to still put in a respectable appearance when it's meandering finally leads to the receiving waters of Seal Cove or Mill Creek.

The sound of this one beckoned so beseechingly that I clambered over all manner of debris to get to it. As you can see it was worth it.

A couple of inland 'motions' and the debris from nearby quarrying were evident along the way. This one, found wanting I guess and abandoned, is right at the water's edge.

As I rounded the peninsula and headed down Mill Creek the extreme shallows gave off an entirely different color, shades of green and, with the sun head on at about due south, a luminous intensity. The same distinction attached to the wading waters on the other side of the Mill Creek Bridge.

Eight or ten firths can be found along Vinalhaven's coast. These narrow penetrations, some fairly modest like Mill Creek, others more imposing like Long Cove or Crockett Cove contrast with broader estuaries like Carver's Pond and the Basin.

Throughout this walk I've been surprised, astonished really, not simply by the beauty of my surroundings but by the humbling realization that I have been here for over sixty years and never taken the time to see it before. It seems ridiculous now to think, for example, of how often I've driven over the Mill Creek bridge and wondered what the rest of the Creek was like.

Stepping Stone Brook is probably always busy discharging, as it does, overflow from the two mile long watershed that includes Round Pond and, farther south, Folly and Otter Ponds.

Next adventure: Stepping Stone Brook to Holt Point.

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Leg 28 from the Bluff at Smith Point to Murch's smelt brook, March 10, 2010

A slice of Vinalhaven Diabase, so described by Olcutt Gates' comprehensive Geology Map, protrudes from the shore at low tide just a few feet from the distinctively different geology of the Seal Cove Formation which begins around the next bend. The map tells me each was deposited around 400 million years ago. It's the kind of information that I just can't do anything with, can't imagine or process, like the particulars of the universe.

I'm out of Perry's Creek and was in no hurry to be thus. Although I've lived her nearly all my life I've really only seen and appreciated it twice, during this walk and during a canoe excursion a few years ago. It's a sanctuary of absorbing beauty and one we will have to enjoy in perpetuity thanks to the generosity of several thoughtful benefactors and to the perserverance of the Vinalhaven Land Trust.

Two substantial brooks empty into Seal Cove from the west. Gully Brook carries rainwater and snow melt from the area around Fox Rocks. I've seen it roaring in the past, often washing out the A. W. Smith Road, but today, with snow melt in decline, it was fairly modest, very unlike Murch's Brook where this walk ends.

Oakes and Cedars seem determined to forego the more secure higher ground for the very edge of the shore, determined to cling there to a foothold. This one is so near the water it had dipped in to retrieve a little seaweed.

At the head of Seal Cove, just before I followed Murch's Brook up to the road I turned to look at the Cove's eastern shore, the next leg, just beyond this tide pool and this unusual arrangements of boulders.

Murch's Brook, emptying the big wetland between Seal Cove and Long Cove was not wanting for material and, in contrast to Gully Brook, was putting on its best face.

The next leg will not be till the end of the month since I am off now to ambulate around another island for a while - England!

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Leg 27, March 6, from Perry's Creek smelt brook to the Bluff at Smith Point.







The low wetland that feeds the Creek and becomes the smelt brook here is several acres of striking beauty and, although appearing dormant now in early March, will be a very busy place shortly. The marsh descends here, to the east, from its very modest high point near the North Haven Road but from there also sends some traffic in the other direction, west to Crockett's Cove.

I took up the walk where I left off last, at the very head of Perry's Creek and headed east along the southern shore, under outcrop whose upper few feet have succumbed more slowly to erosion than the area down at the water line. Only a few hundred feet from the first smelt brook is a second, Indian Ladder, fed from Fox Rocks to the south. Within a few hundred feet then are two substantial streams, one a steady, languid and meandering flow carrying huge quantities of detritus from the west to the tidal critters below and and the other, fed from high rocky elevations to the south, comes careening down during times of snow melt, like now, and rainfall.








The shoreline along the western half of this side of the Creek is all layered deposits. My very cursory research tells me it's Vinalhaven Rhyolite, deposited over 400 million years ago but who knows what my geology friend, the Glacial Eratic, will say. The layers are of different sized material and some of these and some entire compositions are obviously more resistant to erosion than others. The result is striking - deep recesses, caves or protrusions like this one with its very unlikely tree cap. Efforts to erode it
have been abandoned but the assault continues unabated all around and behind it.
















At this very low tide I could have walked nearly the entire length of the Creek on just mussel beds.

Next leg, 28, sometime this week from Smith Point to another smelt brook, Murch's in Seal Cove.

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Leg 26, Feb 22, 2010, the north shore of Perry's Creek from Lamson's to the smelt brook.

More memories here but not as relentless as those accompanying the last two walks. I had moments, a few, betwen recollections for idle thought.


This was the longest walk yet. I was a little optimistic in thinking I could cover the entire north shore of the Creek in as much time as I'd allotted and still be observant.







As I've already mentioned, my Dad used to do all the work at Saltonstall's, often under the direction of their devoted caretaker, Danny Pendleton of North Haven. Danny was memorably stoic and dry and wonderful company. Each fall involved towing their floats around Hopkins Point and putting them away here in a place we called the nursery, a supremely sheltered area tucked in the east
side of Orchard Cove, where several caretakers in the area put away their charges for the winter. Paths from this area lead back through the woods to the several nearby estates and throughout the winter those responsible come down here to check on things.




A little color is certainly in stark contrast to everything else at this time of year. I spotted this juniper from quite a distance.








A gift of land in 1986 on Perry's Creek from the Saltonstall and Byrd families to honor their parents, Senator Leverett and Alice Saltonstall, was a prime impetus for the formation, that year, of the Vinalhaven Land Trust. Since then, the Land Trust has acquired all the land on the north shore of Perry's Creek and now maintains an enchanting system of trails that weave throughout the area connecting one exquisite place with another.


The ever present animal tail continues along the shore. I'd promised in an earlier posting to include a photo of it in each entry but the trail, although always there, doesn't always lend itself to being photographed. It's very apparent from the ground however.








Approaching the deep recesses of Orchard Cove I heard the crows. They weren't making the usual sounds, the caws I associate with them, more like chuckling. When I rounded the bend I saw about fifty gathered on the flats near. I've never seen that many in one place. From my distant vantage I couldn't tell whether they were feeding. It wasn't apparent however; it looked more like a lodge meeting. I took a picture but the distance was too great to gain any resolution. Eventually my movement caught their attention and they flew off, first about half, then, as I came a little closer, the remaining birds. They lit in the nearby trees and for the next hour and a half, accompanied me, flying sorties from one wooded or open waterfront area to another, as I walked up the Creek.






Looking back out toward the entrance and Calderwood Neck beyond.







This smelt brook, emerging from a substantial wetland just above, was the most popular of the half dozen or so brooks we frequented as kids. Indian Ladder, a little farther south in this same Creek, was nearly as productive. Smelting was a great activity. A friend lived just above the Creek in DyerVille, a tiny enclave on the North Haven Road and it was only a ten minute walk from there through the woods to get down to the brook. Next to his house was an abandoned building we'd turned into a sort of clubhouse and we'd often fuel up there for an evening at the brook and return there again to spend the night.

The next walk, leg 27, will take me from the brook along the south shore of Perry's Creek and out to Smith Point, later this week.

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Leg 25, Merrill Poor's Brook to Lamson's at Hopkins Point, Feb 18, 2010.

This was the first walk undertaken in falling snow, not much snow but falling continually and gently. It was also begun early, before 7, without much light and didn't lend itself very well, for the first hour or so, to photography.

I drove to Saltonstall's and left my truck there thinking that was as far as I'd get, and biked back to where Merrill Poor used to live. As it happens I got all the way around Hopkins Point and had to walk back to my bike from Lamson's. Like the leg just preceding it, what I met along the way were memories, every few feet it seemed.

As soon as I stepped on to the shore, I found myself at this stream and thought of the great smelting adventures friends and I had undertaken in the late 50's and early 60's. This, if not this one then another very nearby, was not the most productive of the smelt brooks but it was one we visited often. That may have had a lot less to do with smelt than it did with Merrill & Kay's beautiful daughters. At high tide the smelt would have found navigation a little easier than this little fish ladder presenting itself at low tide.

The area covered on this walk was not as naturally interesting as most of what I'd seen since beginning this venture, one big summer place after another in the section of town we used to call the Gold Coast. Only a few were new to me. My father and I had worked on nearly all of them and he'd had been the resident carpenter for decades at Jim Reynolds, Muriel Lewis's, Leverett Saltonstall's and others and had built a new home there between Lewis's and Saltonstall's for Muriel's daughter Eleanor Campbell and her family. A few years ago Eleanor gifted the Vinalhaven Land Trust with the Poly Cover Preserve on Calderwood Neck. As has become my practice, I've not posted the photographs of homes along the way (although I've photographed every one) concerned that some might think that an intrusion but this little cottage, certainly not typical, but shrouded as it is by all that menacing fauna, seemed a suitable subject. Clearly something is going on in there.

Durng the years I worked with my Dad on these places I came to know and grow fond of many of the summer residents. Although they were certainly understood to be wealthly, it wasn't obvious except for their island holdings. These folks were generally not pretentious nor did they seem to feel they were entitled to anything in particular other than honest service from the many residents from both islands who depended so entirely on them. Of course they depended equally on those islanders and generally each treated the other with genuine respect and thoughfulness. Now and then that allegiance was a little thin and my memory is that more often than not, not always, it was an islander, usually a caretaker, who broke the bond, perhaps presuming too much. Wonderfully outragious stories of these indescretions abound but I'll have to give them careful thought before committing any to paper. Many of these relationships, though, lasted for years, sometimes generations and the caretakers were often treated as part of the families, attending weddings and funerals and enjoying the generosity and consideration of their benefactors.

The lightly falling snow was just dusting over the deer tracks along the ever present animal trail near the shore and it was apparent that these critters had just preceded me by a half hour or so. Suddenly at this juncture where I found the perfect right angle, the tracks of a bigger deer, it's tracks were half again as large as the others, came into this path from inland and continued ahead of me. Althought the snow continued to fall there wasn't a single flake in these tracks, so fresh were they and so near at hand was this creature. I never did see him but he and I followed the same path all the way to the end of Hopkins Point and once or twice I think I heard him crashing through the underbrush ahead.

I was making repairs at Jim Reynolds in the early sixties and was under an outside deck on my back looking up through a hole left by having removed some rotted fir decking. Suddenly a face, curious about what I was doing, appeared above me. I recognized him as a regular guest of Louis Rukeyser's on Wall Street Week and told him so. He talked to me for a while and told me how much fun it was to be a regular on that show.

We we arrived at Saltonstall's one late summer for our annual meeting with the senior Senator from Massachsusetts, he presented us with a list of projects he'd like completed that winter. Wonderfully frugal, this gentle and appealing soul presented us with an old coffee can full of nails, discarded fasteners he'd collected over time. Among the projects to be undertaken was to gently 'nail' back the wallpaper in the upstairs hallway, paper that had succumbed over the years to the rigors of warm summers and cold bleak winters and the unforgiving contrast between the two.

Smith Point is defined by Perry's Creek to the west and Seal Cove to the east and southeast and rounding Hopkins Point I had a nice view of the two houses I built there, one few years ago, the other in 08. From one of these, The Bluff, the owner and the happy guests he entertains there each summer have admired the eagles nest barely visible from that vantage, on Mouse Island. I got a little closer on this walk and it is indeed an idyllic location, right in the top of a tree and perfectly accessible but just below the tops of all the sourrounding trees, giving it a little privacy.

Leg 26, this week sometime, will take me down Perry's Creek, certainly one of the most beautiful places on the island, maybe anywhere and much of which has come under the protection of the Vinalhaven Land Trust.