Suzy Says

I am the envy of all. I’m spending the whole weekend with Candi and Brian! See you later!

Love/Hate for Friday, June 14
The Ocean

As long as I can remember, I have loved the ocean. As a child, we left land-locked New York State each summer for the joys of Mt. Desert Island, Maine, a place much more appealing than its name. We learned to swim and sail in the cold blue Atlantic – I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know how. My father worked at a lab where we could take out one of the lab’s rowboats if we had passed the test of swimming from the dock to the Point, which of course we had.

When the tide was low, we could walk out to Bar Island, being careful we had enough time to walk back to town before the tide was high and cut off all access until the next low tide. We often swam at Seal Harbor, where we could swim out to the floats, and Sand Beach, where we had to walk out and swim back. One of my favorite childhood memories is of coming out of the water at Seal Harbor, lips blue with cold, and going to lie down on my father’s sun-warmed back, snuggling my cold, wet face into his neck. Yet he never complained. Dad, unlike my mother, who was a lifeguard in high school and college, rarely went in the water. He lay on the beach and read the New York Times instead.

This rocky little island is the first place to see the sun rise on the Eastern seaboard, and it is a breathtaking sight to see. Well worth getting up for, and if you don’t feel like hiking more than 1,000 feet up a pink granite mountain that early, you can drive to the summit. You’ll even get a little card certifying that you saw the sun rise at the first place to see it that day in the entire country.

And it’s a wonderful feeling of freedom to skim across the waves on a sailboat. We were brought up on Arthur Ransome’s wonderful Swallows and Amazons series, in which a family of children learn to sail on the Norfolk Broads. These books inspired us to learn to sail ourselves. In fact, one of the pleasures in store for me on my trip to England this fall is sailing the very same waters as in the stories.

But now I live on the opposite coast, on the Pacific Ocean. I think they look different, and not just because the sun rises over one and sets over the other. No matter which ocean it is, I love to sit and watch the waves coming in. It’s soothing and makes you feel part of the whole cycle of life, connected to our seafaring past, the ebb and flow of life itself.