When You Become the Shipwreck
I thought I had a really good idea. I would head down to our National Park, check out the storm damage on Sand Beach, take a picture of the Tay, a shipwrecked schooner that met a terrible fate in a storm back in 1911. The Park Service had covered its bones and the large pins that stuck them together in a dune and in sand. The last time they’d been exposed, most people said, where in the 1970s.
A storm this week exposed them again. On Saturday, another storm swept them to sea and back again. They were up now on uneven rocks and boulders on a different part of the beach, worse for the wear with some of the pins missing.
People came to see them.
The Tay is a bit of Mount Desert Island history, a bit of history that was hidden in the sand and waiting for people to remember.
I thought that I’d help them do that, go down there with Shaun and snap some photos just in case she didn’t come back after the next high tide.
I forgot that I have no depth perception. I forgot that I have bad knees thanks to genes and the fire academy. But the rocks did not let me forget.
I fell in front of a group of young people wearing wool and Patagonia, and I managed to not hurt anything but my dignity. So, I tried to cover for my pride anyway, angled my phone and pretended that I was down there on purpose—yeah, yeah, right—I was going to take a photo. I was in this bizarre half-crouch and half-squat because that is the professional I am.
This is the photo.
Then I turned and took this one.
Look. Other people were scrambling too, unsure of where the solid places were, cautious about where to put their feet.
I wanted to make it look believable, so then I snapped this one.
And in that second, I had a sort of epiphany about myself and the Tay and people. I had no idea that the past Carrie, intrepid explorer of Maine mountains and New Hampshire woods, solo kayaker, was history, too, sort of buried under everything—all the worries about money and the world and the environment and violence and family and kids.
So, I came back, unburied because of a storm that caused so much loss along our coast. Yeah, I fell, and yeah, I was a little embarrassed. Yeah, much like the Tay, people gawped at me. Thankfully, no one tried to climb on me. But, the point is that I was and am still here.
And being here? It’s pretty cool.
Robert Breault has this quote that goes, “Often it's just a short swim from the shipwreck of your life to the island paradise of your dreams, assuming you don't drown in the metaphor.”