In Maine: Essays on Life's Seasons
by John N. Cole
$21.95
Hardcover, 172 pages, B&W photographs, Maine Nonfiction
ISBN: 0-9671662-4-1
ABOUT THE BOOK Collection of essays by the late John N. Cole. Cole writes with passion
about his life, the outdoors and the glorious rhythms of nature. Originally
released in the 1970s and unavailable for two decades, this revised Islandport
Press edition features new essays and photographs.
For decades, John Cole wrote with passion about his life, the outdoors
and the glorious rhythms of nature. In Maine, like all his essays
and books, draws deep from his lifelong partnership and his fascination
with the natural world from commercial fishing in the waters off Long
Island, New York to chasing stripers in Casco Bay, Maine, to quietly observing
the shifting winds that roll across the local meadow and the annual change
of seasons, a ritual he finds exhilarating. "Few realities life can muster
are capable of destroying the zest and richness of September and October
in this northeast," he writes.
Cole has gained insight and contemplated potential lessons during his journey. He
notes the changes that have come to the world and those that are coming. And he
laments the basics of nature that too often pass unnoticed today, but remain
important parts of our past and possibly our future. "Men cannot live without
knowing... knowing which way the wind blows, which way the rain falls, how the sea
surges, the land lives and the forest dies." To do so, he says, is unnatural.
In Maine, originally published in 1974 and available again for
the first time in 25 years, features essays that appeared in the Maine
Times during its formative years but remain as fresh and insightful
as ever. The revised edition also includes new essays that sparkle with
the same energy and enthusiasm as Cole's earlier work.
REVIEWS "Cole is the best outdoors writer to ever live in Maine. The man is a craftsman
and artist of the highest order."
– The Maine Sportsman
"With In Maine, John Cole celebrates the rich fabric of life in Maine, bringing
it straight to the reader in essays that will please the mind and enrich the
heart." – Mount Desert Islander
"Reading the collection is a pleasure because of the gems one finds on every
page." – Down East magazine
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The late John N. Cole, avid sport fisherman, amateur naturalist, and honored journalist, started working in Maine at the old Kennebunk Star in 1958. A decade later, he co-founded Maine Times, a unique and daring newspaper that emerged as an influential voice in Maine during the 1970s.
His three decades of heartfelt essays – which began as "John's Column" during those early days at the Times – are among the best writing on the outdoors ever produced in the state.
After In Maine was first published in 1974, Cole wrote more than a dozen books, many touching similar themes and passions, including Striper, Fishing Came First, Fish of My Years and Life List.
Cole also served as editor of the Bath-Brunswick Times Record and the former Brunswick Record and as contributing editor to New Shelter and Outdoor Life magazines. His articles appeared in Time, Reader's Digest, Sports Illustrated, Life, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly and Smithsonian, among others.
Cole received the Yankee Quill Award from the Academy of New England Journalists in 1973 and the Outdoor Life Award for Environmental Writing from President Jimmy Carter in 1979. He was inducted into the Maine Press Hall of Fame in 2000.
EXCERPT “
I am no longer sailing the same waters I did as a fisherman more than
a decade ago, but much of the same exuberance I knew off Montauk is still
part of my life. It is a welcoming of the days, an armswide greeting,
an embrace of all the hours. And the hours that are most cherished are
those that fly in on the wings of the northeast wind.
In Maine, the wind still moves as it has for eons. There are few cities to
baffle it with their fingers of concrete and glass, few factories to soil it with
smoke and sulphur, few engines to override it with noise or charge it with
monoxide. Here I can live with the free wind as I lived with it off Montauk where
all the winds clean themselves in the sea.
In Maine, I have watched the wind being born, birthing in the western sky and
then feathering the bay's silken surface with the first tentative touch of its
young pinions. I have seen the nor'westers make a sea of our meadow, rolling the
high grass in waves that break on the crest of our hill. And I have felt the same
wind fill a sail with a hard slap that sets my boat a running.
"It does the same to me. It dashes its fresh chill in my face, clears my head and
sets my thoughts a running. Of the nor'west thoughts, the one that echoes loudest
each September is the one about knowing ... knowing which way the wind blows.
What has happened is that too many men decided they no longer needed to know.
The decision came in a rush that had been building for tens of centuries when all
men lived always with the wind. They knew the same wind that brought the fat
ducks in the fall also brought its cutting edge in winter. They watched the wind
dry their saved soil to dust and blow it to the sea; they witnessed the wind-made
waves that sent their sailing ships ashore, crushing the souls within like so
much chaff. For them the wind was more cruel than kind; certainly cruelty often
came mixed with kindness."
Then, just a moment ago on the century clock, men learned how to build temples
the wind could not torment, ships the wind could not sink, fields that could not
be flayed. Because the wind was subjugated, it was also forgotten; or, if not
forgotten, shelved, set aside, ignored to the point where most men arose in their
temples and set forth on their days without knowing which way the wind blew,
without caring, without looking, without seeing.
"The ignorance of the wind might have been expected (after centuries of being
awed by it), but it is not natural. Men cannot live without knowing ... knowing
which way the wind blows, which way the rain falls, how the sea surges, the land
lives and the forests die.
Yet there are multiple millions of men who don't know; men who live in cities in
windowless walls who walk Windy Corner and notice nothing more than city grit
much more of its now than when I walked there as a child. How to tell them which
way the wind is blowing; how to get them to know the nor'west experience; how to
dash its fresh chill in their face, to set them thinking, to set their boats
running how to do that is one of the puzzles I ponder most when the northwest
wind fills my Maine days.
Part of the answer, I decide, must be here in Maine. The other afternoon I
counted seven sparrow hawks flying over the field, or perched beside it. The tiny
falcons had been brought here on the wings of the northwest wind. It is the
parent bird of the falcons, and they fly with it for all their fall migration to
the south. They will stay in the field now until the northwest wind returns; then
they will leave and a new band of hawks will be blown in. Along with them will
come the plover, the geese, the teal, the curlew and the coot. They, and their
wind, will enrich each of my autumn days until the wind locks away the bays
behind a wall of ice.
Today is an autumn day, and as I watch the falcons fly under the wings of the
northwest wind, I wish the same sight could be seen by the millions who have
forgotten why the wind blows, or how, or where.
After seeing Maine in September, they may forget no more.”
