IT WAS JUST PAST MIDNIGHT when I slipped my canoe into the water at Duck Cove and headed due east, exactly as the instructions said, to the point of shore where he would meet me. A green light clung to each of my paddle strokes. The bay was stunningly calm, and so silent that I could hear a pair of raccoons breaking open mussels on the distant shore. Our two canoes met and neither of us spoke a word, sensing that it was better to let the night speak for us. The moonlight cast long shadows on the spruce-lined shores and the channel narrowed, bringing us eventually to the powerful tiderip through which we passed to enter Bill’s home. That evening, the tide was going our way and I rode the current, pulled deeper into a place that would change my life.
The rushing tide empties into a calm and large expanse of shallow water called Mill Pond, the heartbeat of Bill’s homestead. Pulled by Earth’s relationship to the moon, the pond fills and empties again twice a day, living a dramatic life of tides: waves of green water, mudflats, mussel beds, eagle, osprey, and heron. I’ve been coming here for ten years now and it’s this ever-changing pond, the ebb and flow of seawater, that tells me I’ve arrived.
Bill and these four miles of coastline have gently shaped one another in a relationship that has lasted forty years, in which an enduring quality of care and attention has made him and the wilds inseparable. They live together. He’s built osprey nests, gathered his water from hand-dug springs, and harvested mussels. He’s made footpaths through the woods, where after years of pulling fir saplings by hand, he now walks through glades of birch and maple. He’s transplanted the smallest of flowers and the heaviest of stones to make his place complete. He hammered rock to create a landing for his canoes, and he’s built a beautiful home by hand from wood and sun.
Bill and I have crossed miles of open water to explore a stretch of beach that might yield rope, or whalebone, or a revealing conversation about abundance and fairness. Bill’s life has quietly offered me the proof that an individual, in our country and in this age, can still create a unique and authentic life, and that the art of that life is in its wholeness with its place. In watching how Bill carries the land in his heart and mind, I have learned that the essential purpose of saving land is to create the chance that each of us, in our own way, might live in a healthy relationship with the rest of earthly life and—in so doing—to elevate what it means to be human. We need Bill’s story to remind us of other ways of living.
I dedicate these images to my colleagues at Maine Coast Heritage Trust and the Trust for Public Land who are endeavoring to keep all life healthy at Dickinson’s Reach, and to everyone who seeks a relationship with land in their own journey to lead a unique life.
PETER FORBES
Fayston, Vermont