Cobscook Bay Shoreline

When I was a child, I spent my summers in Downeast Maine, in Trescott, on the Cobscook Bay. Tidal waters are powerful, flowing in and out daily with 25 foot tides, bringing nourishing Atlantic seawater far up into the Bay. Then, the shoreline was rich with mudflats loaded with clams, granite rocks thickly draped with golden brown rockweed, and deep waters undulating with yards of kelp in underwater forests - Sea Urchins, Periwinkles, Sea Stars, Muscles in abundance at the low-tide mark. The salt marsh was my playground, with Sea Lavender and Goose Tongue Greens in lush self seeded wild gardens. It was a place of verdant magic, an edible and beautiful landscape I cherished and took for granted. Now I return to find a diminished life force along the shoreline. The rockweed is stolen and slashed from the rocks, leaving barren rock where it took the seaweed thirty years to generate its long tresses. The clam flats are overturned piles of broken shells, the sea urchins dwindling in numbers because of over harvesting. The amount of plastic flotsam and trash on the inlet coves is astounding, whereas they used to be wild and pristine. Human activity had encroached on my piece of wilderness paradise. It is still a tremendously beautiful place, but my children will never experience that geography of my memory.