Muscongus Metamorphoses
Island shapeshift.
―
On the east side of the island, the girls circled on the schist play a game they call Silent Football. All but one. A curly-haired camper in a giant sweatshirt lingers out of sight. With her long stick-legs poking from the hem and a mop of honey-colored hair, she looks less like a child than a cria, a young alpaca. At dinner, while we spooned out sticky skeins of over-boiled spaghetti, she whispered something to a counselor and then vanished back to her tent.
The tide drops, and I recall another gathering of girls on this same stone, a little older than this group. Their silhouettes bent in a half-circle against the dark, voices carrying the ritual debrief helmed by the Leader of the Day. To soften the agenda, she decreed each girl claim a “spirit animal.”
“Lemur.” “Gazelle.” “Penguin.”
My co-guide, soft-spoken and bearded, was christened Panda. Sensing his unease, they quickly revised him into Owl. When they reached me, they chose Arctic fox. Perhaps they recognized some intuition of winter in me.
Now, a few weeks later, Muscongus Bay’s horizon again glows pastel. The sky is awash in the candy-colored gradients of Lisa Frank Trapper Keepers, which were still in vogue when I was their age: tie-dyed seas, hot-pink leopards, dolphins leaping from galaxies of glitter. Those binders were Ovidian portals reimagined for the late ’80s—open one and you tumbled into another cosmos. So too here, on an island briefly inhabited only by women and girls, the veil of ordinary time lifts. Without phones, female adolescence reverts to its ancient rites: hair braided into ropes, songs composed, dances rehearsed for the end-of-camp recital. Watching them, I feel as though I am leafing through an illuminated manuscript of my own eighth-grade summer, each page preserving a transformation caught mid-gesture.
The Game Master appoints N., the group’s 22-year-old trip leader, to start the fwap—a pat on the thigh that sends the invisible football spinning left or right. N. is Australian, hair freshly shorn, grin wide, eyes softened with a koala’s solemn playfulness. They tell me how their parents were more concerned with them coming to the U.S. for the summer than going to Africa. They describe a cautionary metamorphosis as temporary as an ESTA visa: “I grew out my hair before coming here,” they recount. “Wore hot-pink Juicy Couture on the plane. Customs didn’t blink. The first thing I did when I got to the camp was cut it all off again.”
The Koala does not know the rules. Neither do I, but I join anyway, alongside my counterpart, M.—a kayak guide-in-training on the edge of her first semester as a high school teacher. She has already memorized all ten girls’ names while I still fumble. She radiates an effortless empathy, connecting with the ease of mythic figures who could charm beasts and gods alike. In my Lisa Frank menagerie, she is the Unicorn—surefooted, luminous, prancing through neon stars. She knows all the rules.
The Game Master intones: “Above all, players must be silent. No student may speak, smile, or show teeth. Permission to speak must be granted by the Game Master. To ask a question, you must raise one hand, cover your mouth with the other, and say, ‘Mr. Game Master, Sir?’”
The fwapping begins. The Unicorn flows effortlessly. The Koala giggles and breaks the spell.
“Mr. Game Master, Sir?” cries one girl through lip-lidded teeth. “The Koala laughed.”
The circle convulses in pantomimed glee. Votes condemn the Koala to further laughter. Democracy and its parody entwine. We play until the sky deepens into purples and electric blues, a neon-coral afterglow burning behind silhouettes of pine. The air shimmers not with rainbow dolphins but with mosquitoes rising in clouds, as if the night itself were sloughing one skin for another.
At last, the Game Master calls it. Teeth flash, sighs escape. The night is promised now to whispered confidences between nylon walls that do not muffle sound. An hour later, around nine-thirty, the three counselors patrol with beams of light and a comforting crunch of dry leaves. I circumnavigate the site, then return to my tent pitched on a northwest outcropping of grey schist marbled white—the sort of surreal geology Lisa Frank herself might have dreamed.
I crawl into my sleeping bag with my book about rivers. While I read of the Valley of the Eagles bifurcating the Mutehekau Shipu in northeastern Quebec, outside, the bay hums with islands. Macfarlane writes, “Spring becomes stream becomes river, and all three seek the sea.” The sea just outside my tent keeps seeking itself. It’s fallen almost ten feet, exposing inshore lobsters scuttling ever closer to the surface. Soft-bodied from a recent molt, they creep from their cast-off shells, tender and luminous until the armor hardens again.
Ovid would know this hour as Macfarlane knows his rivers: when forms seem to slip, and the mind is stirred to speak of new shapes. Myth seeps into real moments, and the ordinary is already in the act of becoming otherwise. I tell myself all is well. The Cria is safe. And yet, as sleep pulls me under, I wonder if hidden in that tent is no longer a shy girl in a sweatshirt, but some liminal creature of the night, eyes startled and luminous in the dark.
To be a sea kayaker is to apprentice yourself to catastrophe. A cosplayer of shipwrecks. We rehearse rescues with the precision of battle reenactors, parsing choreography as if survival depended on it—which, of course, it might. We debate endlessly: should the swimmer seize the toggle or the deckline? Should the towline be clipped gate-up or gate-down? Should a capsized boat be emptied before it is righted, or heaved dripping across the rescuer’s skirt? Even our vocabulary is contested. Is the person in the water a swimmer (neutral), a victim (tinged with pity), a casualty (too severe)? The older the paddler, the harsher the term.
To paddle the ocean is to be drawn into the mythology of disaster. On rivers, dangers are obvious—holes that gulp and gargle, strainers lying in wait, rocks greedy for a snag. But at sea, danger is diffuse, infinite, invisible: storms that consume whole fleets, creatures terrifyingly antithetical to Lisa Frank fantasy—white sharks, tidal bores, flesh-eating bacteria. Sea paddlers scull the threshold of myth itself.
And so, like actors in Greek tragedy, we rehearse our dramas in the amphitheaters of bays and coves before a bemused audience of gulls. We cast our friends as victims and point them toward the foaming rocks: “Capsize there, please!” We rescue, tow, re-rescue. We debrief over whisky, parsing seconds saved, gestures corrected, the chorus of our mistakes echoing back. We tell ourselves we hope these skills are never needed. But deep down, in the ego’s secret Trapper Keeper, we long for the test—that the wild will rise, and we will answer it. With flying Lisa Frank colors.
Later that night: a whisper at my tent.
“It’s me,” says the Unicorn. “The Cria’s sick.”
I follow her into the dark. The moon is a mere crescent, offering no help. Stars blaze above the white pines, their branches pointing skyward like fingers toward the Milky Way. Four tents glow faintly. Three are sealed tight; one yawns open. Around it huddle the counselors like anxious sentries: the Koala, the Game Master, and another, tall and shifting on one leg, a Heron in her blue-grey fleece.
The Cria shivers at the center. Gone is her oversized sweatshirt; she wears only swimsuit bottoms and a thin ribbed tank. Her skin burns, fluorescent with fever. Words rise unbidden—appendicitis, hospital—as fear tie-dyes the counselors’ faces. For all their competence, they are barely older than the campers themselves. The Unicorn is not yet thirty. I, deep into my thirties, am suddenly the elder here.
As we scramble for contact with the mainland, I already know what the oracles have decided.
We launch close to midnight. Dead low tide. The Cria hunches in the bow of a tandem, the Heron at the stern. The Koala fidgets in their single. I raft everyone together and clip on my towline, belted tight at my waist. Above, the Pleiades cluster faintly—or perhaps I only constellate the stars so, needing their sisterly symbolism to steady my forward stroke. On shore, the Unicorn and the Game Master stand hapless, their headlamps the last twin beacons of land. Then they are gone, swallowed by the island’s shadow.
Darkness closes in. I am floating in its midst, small and alone. Do the girls tethered to my boat feel my fear humming through the line like an umbilical cord? For a moment, we drift in tidal nothingness. I remind myself: you are trained. You know what to do.
I paddle. The darkness persists. My headlamp reveals only a few feet of water at a time. Another stroke, long and quiet. Then another. At last, an outline of earth returns. The weight of three laden boats drags me back, but I fold it into cadence. The sky explodes. Stars mirror on the black sea like disco lights on a roller rink. My yellow blades flash gold in the beam of my lamp: wings. In that instant, the Arctic fox dissolves. I become Pegasus. The girls I tow are my chariot.
We glide past tide-born rocks. Crowned like naiads in rockweed, they urge us on. As we near the marina, the talisman appears. We all see her at once, weaving deftly among the sunken traps.
“Oh! Look! A lobster!” cries the Heron.
She scuttles across the sand, separated from us by only a few watery inches of crystalline fulcrum. Her V-notched tail flicks and flashes her onward. Female, armored, ancient—immortal in theory, doomed only by the labor of endless molting. She embodies what Ovid could not see: that metamorphosis is not linear, one body fixed into another. Like girls’ adolescence, it is a continual process of becoming and unbecoming. Tidal, protean, infinite.
And just like that, we have come through the portal. The sea equalizes time, gathering all in its molting myth.
By dawn, the Cria’s appendix is declared safe. She rests on antibiotics and fluids, her fever breaking. I collapse for a few hours in the backseat of my car, then wake to lobstermen hauling traps—men already hours deep in their labor, backs bent, ropes and buoys slick with brine. When I paddle back to the island, the bay has reverted. The rocks that rose like naiads in the night have sunk beneath the tide. What remains is only the memory, filed in the Lisa Frank binder of the mind, its pages still shimmering with otherworldly glitter.
The Unicorn has shrugged off her rainbow mane to become my friend and coworker again. M. sits crosslegged on the rocks before the stove, rubbing her eyes while boiling water for oatmeal and coffee.
“Hey,” she greets me.
“Hey.”
The Argonauts once felled pines to cut their first ships, and with those hulls carved the Greeks’ first great sea story, the Argonautica. To paddle the ocean is to do the same: to hew experience from the deep and carry it back to land as story. The river, like the mountain, has its rhythm—an immediate, urgent narrative pulled by gravity. But the ocean, with its vastness and tides, resists such straight lines. It is the realm of crossings, of epics, of prehistoric species in which the females—protected by laws they did not write—can, in theory, live forever. Ever since humanity began inscribing stories, seafaring has repeated itself, molting like a lobster’s shell. Sailors relive them until, exhausted, they sink back into myth.
Wildlife Tour
A four-hour experience.
―
A four-hour experience:
Pemaquid Point
Where two worlds once met—
stone hearths, shell heaps, storming tides.
Still, the light endures.
Seals
Pod beached on the ledge;
one swims up like he owns us—
the ambassador.
Great Whites
Eyes scan the water;
“Not common around here,” then—
Sharktivity pings.
Porpoises
Pinniped breath nears,
circling bright-eyed kayakers—
click-magic captured.
Birds of Prey
Osprey! And eagle!
We point out nests like they’re ours.
The birds just ignore.
Cormorant
Deep-diving swimmer—
Darwin gave up airborne bones
for fishing prowess.
Puffins
Will we see puffins?
Nope. Maybe a guillemot.
Definitely gulls.
Terns
Tiny sky scissors—
one lifetime’s flight slowly cuts
a path to the moon.
Lion’s Mane
Flame without a heart;
invertebrate from away,
ghost beneath my boat.
Whales
Minke, humpback, right—
hunted where tourists now glide,
they still sing offshore.
Accidental Birder
They said it would happen.
―
It’s said that all paddlers become accidental birders. The ocean makes one by necessity. You move through the places where birds feed, nest, and migrate. When you spend seven days a week on the water, you learn the grammar of silhouettes quickly: the quick dagger of a tern, the buoyant bounce of an eider, the prehistoric patience of a great blue heron stalking eelgrass flats. The bay becomes a kind of page, the birds the marginalia. Eventually, you stop identifying species and start cataloging behaviors—circle, hover, plunge, wait—as if memorizing an unwritten manual everyone else already knows.
When I first came to Maine, I knew birds the way I knew constellations—vaguely, romantically, without understanding. They were background: white flashes in the cove, silhouettes above the fog line. But guiding recalibrates the senses. You start by reading wind and tide, and then—almost without noticing—you begin reading wings.
Like anyone new to the Midcoast, I began with Atlantic puffins—clown-faced emissaries of the North Atlantic, beloved for their improbable flight and perpetually startled gaze. Their colony on Eastern Egg Rock is the southernmost in the world, resurrected through decades of careful conservation.
But devotion shifts. And by July, mine had shifted to the terns.
Terns are built like exclamation marks and behave like they invented airspace. Slender, fork-tailed, bright as chipped porcelain, they fling themselves across the sky with a kind of weaponized precision. Their cry—kee-arr!—has all the charm of an alarm system and none of the restraint. They navigate the world as if the rest of us are simply in their way, which, to be fair, we are. In their lifetimes, they log enough miles to reach the moon and back. The Arctic tern is the world’s longest migrator. For a seasonal human who was itinerant long before she was a guide, the temptation to anthropomorphize is obvious—though the terns, to their credit, would never approve.
Still, the everyday residents held me too: the black guillemot with lipstick-red feet nesting deep in granite seams; the double-crested cormorant drying its waterlogged feathers—the only seabird that never fully repels water; the osprey’s unhurried hunt and that electric cry slicing fog. The nest I point out on every harbor tour—balanced high on a mast—has rendered the boat unsailable for the season, protected by law and by the birds’ sheer obstinacy.
And at low tide in the inner harbor, the snowy egret performs the opposite act: absolute stillness, vibrating at a frequency just beyond human impatience. Her black legs end in yellow “golden slippers,” an evolutionary lure she uses to stir prey from the mud. She moves with the precision of something attuned entirely to tide, not spectacle.
Then there are the gulls—loud, declarative, impossible to ignore—ricocheting off pilings and rooftops. Herring and laughing gulls quarrel over bait scraps with the operatic confidence of creatures convinced the entire coast is their personal franchise.
Some birds reveal themselves slowly; some only at low tide; some not at all. And then, sometimes, a single egret standing in a minus-nine-foot harbor becomes the entire evening—white, patient, unimpressed—stepping through the lavender sunset as if nothing else exists, least of all us.
Lord of the Flies-ing
The rooster of Crow Island.
―
The periwinkle van bumps up the gravel drive, fifteen minutes behind schedule and looking as if it’s been retired from at least two earlier centuries. With its fading block letters and boxy frame, it belongs to the taxonomy of vehicles that once ferried public-school kids to zoos and municipal pools—the era of discmans, Goosebumps books, and forced proximity. Ten middle-schoolers spill out: nine boys and one girl whose posture suggests that her attendance is compulsory. Their teachers follow—three adults with the slack-jawed fatigue of June.
“The drive,” the kids report immediately, “was like twice as long because the AC didn’t work.”
I remember those rides well: the recycled air, the awkward geometry of growing limbs in a too-small space, a single cassette tape of 70s rock on loop, the sense that discomfort was part of the curriculum. It is faintly hopeful to discover that some rough edges have survived into the age of AirTags.
The group’s leader—a cheerful history teacher—appears with a box of donuts, an unspoken apology for what he is about to unleash.
The Maine air greets the Boston students with an assertiveness they don’t yet have language for. Salt, kelp, lobster tanks, a nearby shellfish farm—all of it collides with their metropolitan assumptions. They ask for a bathroom and are directed to a port-a-potty that, miraculously, smells better than the waterfront around them. Above the kayak shop, a warehouse hums with pumps and filters, tending to thousands of growing clams. Gulls wheel overhead; lobster traps stack like a vernacular archive.
Three days and two nights of kayak-camping lie ahead. My boss and his wife spent the previous evening packing meals into labeled sacks; the group gear—tents, pads, boats, wetsuits, PFDs—is lined up with ceremonial order on the beach. This is their end-of-the-year rite: the urban field trip rewritten for the tidal zone.
After introductions, the lone girl makes a beeline for me. She wears a petunia-colored rain jacket and an expression wavering between indignation and dread.
“I’m Em,” she says. “As you may have noticed, I’m the only girl here. My two friends bailed. I don’t know any of these boys, and I’ve never kayaked or camped before. I don’t want to be here.”
I open my mouth to reassure her but the machinery of group travel intervenes. The luggage erupts from the van: wheeled suitcases, expedition-sized backpacks, a vintage L.L. Bean sleeping bag packed at the insistence of a nostalgic father. My boss gestures toward the red twenty-liter drybags. “Everything you brought needs to fit in these.”
A pause—brief arithmetic—then compliance. Even the boy with the heirloom sleeping bag relents and accepts a lightweight loaner. It turns out air travel has prepared them well: the distinction between essentials and indulgences.
Then comes the real crisis: the history teacher announces that phones must be surrendered.
The freeze is immediate. These are less objects than organs—the central nervous system of their social lives. Still, one by one, they hand them over. All except Em. She stands by the kayak trailer, clutching hers.
“Okay, Em,” I say gently. “Time to hand it over.”
She places it in my palm, fingers lingering a beat too long.
“Great,” she groans. “We’re Lord-of-the-Flies-ing it.”
Once on the water, my boss calls out, “Muscongus means ‘fishing place’ in Abenaki.” The word’s sonorous weight holds their attention for a moment before paddling takes over again. Tandem kayaks wobble and drift like siblings learning to share space.
But the name stays in the air along with the layered reality of the place: two rivers feeding the estuary; lobsters molting beneath us; terns circling overhead; seals surfacing with whiskered appraisal.
“Will we see dolphins?” the kids ask.
“Maybe porpoises,” he says. “They’re like little dolphins. But you need to be lucky.”
He continues with the short history—Algonquian travel routes, George Weymouth’s 1605 landing, the colonists who felled forests and introduced sheep. The kids lean back, half listening, wholly elsewhere: absorbed by tide, texture, the mechanical strangeness of the boats.
Em paddles with D., a quiet boy in a T-shirt featuring cats in astronaut helmets. Their strokes fall in unison.
Crow Island is two acres of low pines and sea-scoured bedrock. Its improbable sovereign greets us at the landing: a lone rooster with museum-quality iridescence and the unimpressed air of a teenager newly aware that all rules have dissolved. He studies us with the patient appraisal of a local judging newcomers.
“What’s he doing here?” the kids ask.
“I have no idea,” my boss replies.
The kids pitch camp. The work of guy lines and rain flies is halting, earnest. Only D. operates independently; his one-person tent rises with unshowy competence. Em, Dr. S. (the English teacher), and I claim the girls’ corner of the site. D.’s tent is an adjacent outlier.
As dinner prep begins, two fishermen idle up in a skiff asking whether we’ve seen a rooster. Someone dropped it off “as a joke,” they say, not expecting it to last the night. The students exchange glances. “We haven’t seen anything like that,” they assure them, with diplomatic gravity.
Riccardo—christened shortly thereafter—has already melted into the underbrush. He resurfaces at dinnertime to slurp skeins of spaghetti that have escaped our pots and landed on the schist. The kids proclaim him a “leave-no-trace master.”
The next morning, Riccardo’s 4:30 reveille sends us paddling to Louds Island. Wind and tide push stubbornly against us. My boss tows two stragglers; I tow another. A sunken working boat sits half-submerged just offshore, an object lesson in maritime humility.
Lunch is behind a windbreak of rugosa roses. I ask Dr. S. what sixth-graders are reading these days.
Their list, she says, is “shockingly conservative—forty years out of date.” They’ve just finished Lord of the Flies, a novel she thinks “no longer maps onto their reality. It’s too grim, too anchored in Cold War pessimism.” Literature, she insists, should help kids imagine a better future—not just fear it.
The phoneless kids court boredom. They’ve “scrolled” the beach with their eyes and can’t take photos—what else is there? Then the old instincts reemerge. A rock-skipping contest materializes. Minutes later they discover the bilge pumps double as water guns, and the shoreline dissolves into a gleefully unregulated maritime skirmish.
By evening, they’ve settled into a functioning small society. Em rules the card table; D. retreats early to his tent. The others follow as a July drizzle begins, scattering the stragglers to their tents.
Then—just before midnight—footsteps. A bathroom mishap in the now-torrential rain. Tents unzip in a chorus. Teachers triage. Dr. S., unfazed, gives up her tent. D., wordless as ever, shifts aside to make room for the displaced tentmate.
By morning, everyone knows—and no one mocks. Hot chocolate circulates. Tents come down. Riccardo pecks at leftover oatmeal with the entitlement of a small autocrat. We bid him, and the island goodbye, and paddle toward the base in a straight, determined line.
The van absorbs all the gear, still without AC. Phones are handed back. But something in the kids has shifted; no one reaches for theirs right away. Em lingers last.
“Thank you,” she says. “I didn’t think I could do this. But it wasn’t bad. I actually loved it.”
Lord of the Flies endures on syllabi because it reassures adults that our darkest suspicions about children are correct: given enough time and weather, they’ll eat each other alive. It’s a strangely comforting myth. If kids are innately feral, then none of us are to blame for anything.
But Crow Island offered no such reading. The kids built something closer to a mildly dysfunctional start-up: inefficient, occasionally chaotic, but fundamentally cooperative. Their instincts were stubbornly practical—observe, adapt, carry on—more field-biologist than barbarian.
On the last evening, before the midnight bathroom catastrophe and its soggy reshufflings, I was scrubbing the cookware on the western rocks where the granite tilts toward the sea. Riccardo lurked nearby, riding the high of a day spent free-ranging and stealing calories. He watched each pot with the confidence of someone who has realized he cannot be fired. When it became clear I had no further offerings, he gave a theatrical shake of his feathers and strutted off, dignity intact.
Which is when the porpoises arrived.
Two of them—one small, one large—surfaced in neat tandem between a red nun and the dark spine of Hog Island. They moved with the kind of casual coordination group projects only dream of. I considered calling the kids. Then I imagined the stampede, the dropped headlamps, the inevitable questions about whether this “counted” as seeing dolphins.
I let the moment pass.
The kids would have loved them, of course. But it felt right to leave them something undiscovered—proof that the island still held a few surprises in reserve. A reason to return someday, when they’re older, or more patient, or simply bored enough to look up from whatever replaces phones by then.
Maine Guides
I go to the MDIFW.
―
Sun blanched the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife building in Augusta, just off the Kennebec River. I’d been in the state ten days but had mentally emigrated months earlier. All winter at 10,000 feet in Colorado, I’d been thinking at sea level. I checked in early—9 a.m., thirty minutes to spare. The state official looked me over, then at the swollen tote in my hand: snacks, a thermos of Earl Grey, borrowed charts, navigation tools rattling with borrowed confidence.
“You ready now?” she asked. “You were supposed to go second, but the first person canceled. You can head down if you like—just not with the thermos.”
I glanced at my new boss—mentor, witness—who’d come along for moral support. He nodded.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We descended past a barred owl arrested mid-glare and a bronze Cornelia “Fly Rod” Crosby—Maine’s first Registered Guide—forever mid-cast. My novice seamanship earned no approval from her fixed attention. Downstairs, more glass-eyed birds kept watch over two very alive assessors. The official left to gather the other candidates; the door swung shut.
“We’ll start with navigation,” said the first assessor, gesturing to a laminated chart of Penobscot Bay. She handed me a sheet outlining the legs of an imaginary passage. Her eyes flicked to the parallel ruler trembling in my hand.
“You brought your own tools,” she noted. “All right, then. Your fifteen minutes start now.”
Registered Maine Guides are licensed to lead others through the state’s wild—over ledge and lichen, across water and ice. Popular mythology still pictures the archetype as a flannel-wrapped woodsman, a bearded figure lifted from an old L.L. Bean catalog. But the first person to hold the license, Maine Guide No. 1, was not a man. It was Cornelia “Fly Rod” Crosby, a forty-three-year-old bank clerk whose authority in the outdoors was neither inherited nor romanticized.
Born in 1854 and orphaned early by tuberculosis, Crosby was advised to “walk out the sickness.” She began doing so literally, following the Sandy River until she stepped past the perimeter of her life. She learned from local woodsmen and from Wabanaki knowledge keepers—people for whom these waterways were not recreational spaces but ancestral corridors. They taught her what moved, when, and why: trout behavior, seasonal winds, how a river reveals itself to those who watch long enough.
Crosby did not marry, had no children, and took up outdoor life relatively late. In 1886, a friend placed a bamboo rod in her hands—a five-ounce instrument of precision. The line sang. A storm on the river, she wrote, “set her on her course.” She returned to town with shoes full of silt and an unnamed shift in orientation. That night she wrote for the first time under the alias “Fly Rod”—plainspoken essays that treated the outdoors as a place of work, not bravado. She was skeptical of mystique. “I would rather fish any day than go to heaven,” she wrote. Not a metaphor. A preference.
By the time Maine formalized guide licensure in 1897, Crosby had spent a decade establishing that a woman in the woods was not an aberration. She earned License No. 1.
She sits in a broader, seldom-named lineage of women who became outdoor leaders not through institutional pathways but through repetition, observation, and necessity. Georgie White Clark, for example, didn’t run her first Grand Canyon trip until she was in her thirties, after losing her daughter in a car accident. Her explanation for becoming the first woman to row the full canyon was characteristically flat: “I didn’t mean to start anything. I just wanted to go down the river.” Mina Benson Hubbard—who completed the first accurate mapping of Labrador after her husband died attempting the same expedition—said simply: “I went because I had to go.” None framed their work as trailblazing. They framed it as common sense.
To become a guide is not mastery but resignation: this is the life that makes sense when nothing else does. The ones worth emulating rarely arrive early, or through straight lines. Crosby walked out her illness. Georgie White Clark rowed her way through grief. Mina Hubbard mapped Labrador because she could not allow the story to end with someone else’s failure. None of them framed guiding as a calling; it was simply the thing that remained when every other explanation fell away. That is the quiet commonality: not destiny, but inevitability. You follow the water, or the trail, or the chart, because you can’t imagine doing anything else. The work is orientation—first of yourself, then of the people who trust you to lead them.
After navigation came the rest of the oral exam: flora, fauna, boating regulations, first aid, and a mock emergency—a stroke on an island near Bar Harbor requiring a MAYDAY call. Ninety minutes later, I climbed upstairs for the written test. One hundred questions, pencil on paper. I turned it in and sat between Fly Rod and the owl, watching my boss pace outside. I looked at her bronze gaze, not his outline, and waited.
Soon the official called me forward. She opened a Tupperware of patches—embroidered ocean blue, iconic.
28 hr (1,873.3 mi) via I-80 E
Poems composed on the drive from Colorado to New York.
―
Poems composed on the drive from Colorado to New York:
Mile 1
My life in a box
at seventy miles an hour—
winter home recedes.
Mile 74
Road signs like old friends,
markers of seasonal life—
one journey, two homes.
Mile 562
Flatness, everywhere.
Time itself has leveled out—
must be Nebraska.
Mile 1487
Another podcast.
“Ohio,” GPS laughs—
nine hours to go.
Mile 1776
Road steams with insects;
even headlights feel soggy—
“welcome back, East Coast.”
In The Land Before Time
I paddle from Haines to Juneau.
―
The avalanche-swept Chilkats rose above me, and the silver-grey saltwater of Lynn Canal stretched out below—a long exhale from summit to sea. I could feel the transition in my ribs as clearly as the dry bags clattering in the hatches of my loaner NDK Explorer.
It had taken two flights, a five-hour ferry, and months of saving and circling REI clearance racks to reach Haines, Alaska. First came the Southeast Alaska Sea Kayak Symposium; then a five-day expedition along the northernmost corridor of the Inside Passage. I understood immediately why it’s named that—inside. Protected waterways, yes, but also a corridor that pries open whatever you’ve managed to keep sealed. Miles through wilderness, and miles into your stowaway self.
In Southeast Alaska, rain doesn’t fall—it inhabits. It rises from the ground, settles into your bones, and claims you with quiet authority. Forty degrees here is not forty degrees in Colorado. I doubled baselayers, added a vest, swapped gloves. I accepted dampness as the price of admission into a domain ruled by whales and grizzlies.
On the morning of May 6, the journey stopped being weather forecasts intersecting lines on a chart. We left our luggage onshore and paddled off—just me, my seventy-six-year-old paddling partner, the Wolf, and our two unfussy, unflappable guides. The Wolf is compact and deliberate, the kind of paddler who wastes no motion. He rolls without drama, comes up blinking and expressionless, and settles back into a steady cadence that seems older than he is. Age shows mostly in the way he pauses before lifting his hull onto his truck. Once he’s in the boat, it’s gone. Sea kayaking suits him: a discipline where economy outperforms strength and longevity is earned stroke by stroke.
That first day was a reminder of what the body remembers when asked gently: the slip of the blade in cold water; the way engagement from the feet spares the shoulder later. Rain held as we moved past ululating scoters, sea lions rising like pylons from the dark, and pocket beaches arranged as if for a postcard. We pitched our tents on Shikoshi Island, devoured burritos, and collapsed by nine under a sky that never fully darkened.
While the guides scrubbed microscopic hints of food from pans down the beach—bear country etiquette—I climbed onto a rock, bear spray at my hip. Far enough to feel alone; close enough to still be found. The stillness was immense. Unexpectedly, a thought surfaced: I wish my mom could see this. The tears followed with no fanfare. Grief can feel dormant for years, then rise cold and quick as tidewater. The landscape was large enough to hold it; I let it.
The Chilkats are younger than the Rockies where I grew up and now winter. Lower, yes, but geologically restless—glaciers still softening their flanks, moraines drawing straight lines down to the sea. No roads, no lifts, just tectonics and time.
“That’s the Davidson Glacier,” the local guide said, pointing to a blue-brown cradle of ice high above. “In Muir’s time, it calved right into the water.”
As the sun slid behind peaks, a strange memory visited: an old VCR tape, an animated ridge line. The Land Before Time. I hadn’t thought of it in decades, but in that moment the echo was unmistakable—mother loss, the ache of separation, the long pursuit of a new valley. The film had carved something into me, a glacial striation I didn’t know I carried.
The next morning, a black triangle flitted at the surface. “Orcas,” our lead announced, already scanning. “Moving north. Do you see?” I did not. “There. Sometimes I swear people think I’m full of shit.”
Wind came up. Then died. Then returned. When my fingers throbbed with cold or when peeing through four layers felt like a complicated moral exercise, I whispered my private mantra: You chose this. You gave your time and money to be here.
But as the days wore on and the landscape wore me into it—like rivulets braiding down a mountainside—I wondered if I chose anything at all. Or if choice is only a polite name for current and countercurrent, a slack tide flipping direction without warning.
When the wind eased just enough for the guides to greenlight our crossing, I imagined every failure point: capsizing in the cold, soaking my tent and sleeping bag, blowing my angle and drifting toward the sea-lion rocks. You chose this, I repeated. But the water had its own ideas. We reached mainland, exhausted and relieved. The Wolf collapsed on the beach, still sealed into his PFD like a child who’d fallen asleep in a snowsuit.
We would need to make up at around twenty-five nautical miles the next day. While we ate tortellini, the lead looked out toward the channel and said, almost offhandedly, “I see sun on the horizon.” I took that into my tent like a borrowed talisman.
This summer I’ll guide not in Alaska but in Maine. Still, that trip handed me a horizon wide enough to hear the quiet part of myself say: This is why. Not because an inner adventurer needs indulging, but because something in me recognizes the utility of maps, bearings, crossings. Watching the guides hang tarps, call out bear-fence placements, decipher wind with a glance, I wondered which kind of guide I’ll become. Whether I’ll be good. Whether I’ll enjoy it.
When I was young, I wanted to be an “explorer.” The adults laughed, partly because I was a girl and it was the 90s, partly because modern life insists there’s nothing left to explore. But the explorers I loved—Frodo, Littlefoot—weren’t charting territory. They were leaving the familiar because home had changed shape beneath them.
The realization surfaced gently, like the mother humpback and calf we encountered on our third day. The mother exhaled first—tall, resonant. The calf followed, a smaller punctuation. They moved alongside us, unconcerned. A quorum of gulls marked the bait ball beneath. They knew we were there. They simply didn’t adjust themselves around our presence.
Maybe I am not seeking the thrill of new terrain but the permission to feel something primordial that has always been at the waterline—grief, wonder, memory—held long enough to come up for air.
The primordial is not ancient or remote; it’s as ordinary as dropping the skeg and turning downwind. In my boat, I am Littlefoot—small, unsure, moving through immensity anyway. Or like the fire our local guide attempted on our last night in Berner’s Bay—rain-soaked wood, no kindling, no chance. She kept at it. Then, the Wolf remembered the cracked cutting board in his hatch. We fed it to the flame. Finally, a spark held.
Many times the earth beneath me has shifted—divorce, death, breakups, pandemic. Sharp-tooths abound. But the “Great Valley” is not a destination; it’s a clearing, a pause, a space where grief exhales without demanding resolution.
Back in Juneau, our re-entry to time coincided with Mother’s Day. A holiday I’ve long treated like a bruise—best ignored. Brunches, flowers, the forced sentimentality of it all. But that day, moving through gift shops and trailheads dotted with mothers and daughters, I didn’t brace against anything. I just moved among them. I chose to be here, and found I could.
Maybe that’s what the Inside Passage teaches best. Not grandeur or grit, but access—to the remote places outside us, and the more remote ones within. Five days in the Alaskan backcountry loosened something that had been calcified in me for years. The grief didn’t vanish. It simply found room.
Southeast
Poems composed in Haines.
―
Poems composed in Haines.
Juneau
Rainforest welcome:
skunk cabbage brightens wet trails,
fog stitches the woods.
Marine Highway
Fjord currents ferry
skiers northbound for Skagway;
I will paddle back.
Haines
Hammer museum,
people exist between scars
of avalanches.
XtraTuf
Brown boots everywhere—
locals wear them like logic,
the tall ones only.
The Maul
Bear spray at my hip—
a constant, like a cell phone
with no reception.
Distillery
Whisky tastes of sea;
Alaskans drink like weather—
deep, sudden, stormy.
Mud Season
Ski school is closed.
―
Ski school is closed.
Closing Day
Tourists clear out fast.
Now the mountains hum with mud—
just the way we like.
Cheap Dinner
Snow tires still on.
Main Street maître d calls out:
“Half off for locals!”
Scene Change
Rivers rise and run—
an idea caught in between.
The thaw rushes on.
On Finitiation
Ski school is ending.
―
By April, the sun advances her agenda. Breckenridge’s lifts keep turning, but it’s mostly for show; chairs pass overhead like empty gondolas in a diorama. A film of windblown dust settles over the remaining snowpack, dulling its reflectivity and speeding its retreat. Down in the North Gondola lot, meltwater feels out the terrain with the patience of a surveyor, committing to the lowest routes with increasing confidence. Birdsong resumes its looped soundtrack. The mountain, deprived of school holidays and long weekends, begins its yearly slide toward irrelevance.
Ski school ends the way snow does—grain by grain. The J1s disappear first. Part-timers fold themselves back into their other lives. The rituals loosen: less chatter in the locker room, fewer dad jokes at line-up, a general sense of people backing away from the season without fully turning their backs on it. Someone’s Bluetooth speaker plays rock music at a volume that implies finale. Outside, bulldozers idle next to rows of early-season mountain bikes. Our locker room building will be razed as soon as we vacate. No one is sentimental enough to stop it; no one is immune enough not to notice.
Guests often ask, “What do instructors do in the off-season?” Most of us offer the old punch line about taking the moguls inside for the summer.
The first week of May feels illicit. No uniform, no hot chocolate vouchers, no obligation to pretend enthusiasm for a blue run in flat light. There’s a short-lived pleasure in domestic tasks: laundry, neglected mail, the rediscovery of sandals. Then the silence stops being restorative and becomes simply silence. By June, many instructors have drifted into a low-wattage depression—nothing acute, just a sense that the structure that held the winter in place is no longer load-bearing.
This drift can look like anything: minimum-wage summer jobs, halfhearted travel, or an earnest attempt to “catch up on life,” which typically collapses into scrolling through photos of powder days we already lived. Writing assignments returned to my inbox, and I met them with escalating reluctance. My dog became the only creature with a clear agenda. The off-season had a way of exposing all the seams winter had hidden.
The cognitive dissonance was consistent: without skiing, I felt reduced to the version of myself I’d paused in October, someone who didn’t feel entirely accurate anymore. Two identities rubbing together with just enough friction to blister.
I eventually understood that it wasn’t skiing I missed so much as teaching—its focus, its tempo, the way it stabilizes a day. So I followed that feeling toward water.
Whitewater, at first. Students practicing wet exits in a reservoir the color of tea; then peel-outs, ferries, a few tame rapids. On the Colorado, with a line of novice paddlers bobbing behind me, some internal gear re-engaged. Whatever part of me had belonged to winter recognized the structure: a moving medium, a technical vocabulary, the need to make good decisions in flux. The boundary between seasons, previously so rigid, began to dissolve.
It turned out the off-season wasn’t “off” at all. It was a misnomer—what felt like absence was simply an unclaimed form of the same work.
Ski instructors love to talk about transition—the hardest part of a turn. It’s often called “finitiation,” the moment between the old turn and the new, where direction and pressure reassign themselves and the skier pretends the change is smooth. Most of the time, it isn’t. The body knows it’s a hinge point, a brief negotiation before committing.
The end of the ski season functions the same way. April memorizes meltwater the way December studies snowpack. Nights refreeze; days undo it. Creeks rise and recede in a single afternoon. Water returns to its previous channels, records its edits: a shifted stone, a revised edge, a small rebellion in direction.
Nothing is lost, exactly. It just becomes something else.
This summer, I’ll trade the river’s turbulence for the abstraction of the Maine coast. Longer boat, broader water, fewer immediate hazards but more consequences when they happen. I’ll steer clients around lobster buoys, toast bagels over driftwood, check the winds with the same reverence ski instructors reserve for snow forecasts. The job description doesn’t really change: read the conditions, place the craft where it needs to be, anticipate the forces that want to move you.
Snow is water; water is weather; weather is work.
So, what do ski instructors do in the off-season? We finitiate, in the truest sense of the word. Sometimes awkwardly. Sometimes with fluency. Often with a brief, dull ache of disorientation and a touch of weight gain.