The Storms Will Not Undo Us

A storm hit the Maine coast this past Wednesday (Jan 10, 2024) and another is here now. That first storm decimated a lot of things on the coastline on our island. Dunes are gone. Seawalls made of rocks and boulders are gone. Pieces of road, some docks, and our beloved Shore Path have holes. Some fishing outbuildings are gone. It’s all a blow for the working waterfront and property owners and businesses. A shipwrecked schooner, the Tay, from 1911 has been unearthed and its bones are on Sand Beach in Acadia National Park. People are posing with it. A man died in that wreck in another storm so long ago.

Front page of the Lewiston Saturday Journal after the storm that wrecked the Tay and several other yachts and schooners in the area, including many in Northeast Harbor.

Photo by Kristin McKee. Bar Harbor’s Shore Path

Photo by Jeremy Dougherty. Bar Harbor’s Shore Path.

Businesses by where the cruise ships tender.

The Bar Harbor Inn’s pier . Photo: Jeremy Dougherty

There’s a bit of disbelief as photos roll in of destruction caused by wind and storm surge and tide. I’m only using some of the ones I have permission to here. There’s more on Bar Harbor Story, my newspaper.

Today, there’s a post on social media with nostalgic memories of storms past where snow was so high there had to be tunnels to Bar Harbor businesses. But that nostalgia is mixed with disbelief, too. There’s no snow on the island. There wasn’t snow on Christmas.

People keep asking: Where is the snow?

But they’re also asking: What comes next?

Steve Boucher photo.

The beach in Mount Desert. The sea wall is gone there and in other places along the island’s coast. Photo: Steve Boucher

What comes next are choices: To build, to rebuild, to build differently, to not build at all.

What comes next are also choices about kindness and generosity: To support each other or not, to help move boulders and sand or not, to think just about the photo opportunities or how someone’s story ended with a shipwreck, to think about what we can do to help those on the working waterfront to get through this or not.

I think the choices are going to be good ones. Here’s a story about a similar community in Florida that I wrote a bit ago after it suffered through a major hurricane.

My community is full of people who diss each other on social media and then hug each other on the street, who vilify people with opposing views about property rights or cruise ships or how to deal with making more homes in a small area and then celebrate each others birthdays or mourn at their funerals. It’s a community that comes together in hard times, that forgives each other, that fights again and forgives again.

The important thing is that it’s a community that loves. And that it will choose again: to love.