The Spectacles

Just shy of eight, the corn moon lifts over the Sheepscot. Somewhere upstream sleep the descendants of pines cut for the spars of the USS Constitution, the country’s oldest surviving warship. Downstream, the nearly extinct native Atlantic salmon inch home against the current. Between them, us—two kayakers bookmarked for the night on the edge of the estuary, our REI Penates—stove, sleeping bags, thermoses—set up on an islet known as the Spectacles.

J. and I pass the dromedary of rosé and watch the pale apricot sphere climb beyond the river’s mouth as the tide slides toward its night low. Nine feet of water pull off the ledges like a cloth whisked from an altar. Low water bares the rocky bar that joins the two small islets, the feature that gave this place its name. It’s classic glacial work: granite shoulders rounded by ice, boulder till suturing the halves, cobble glued by crushed shell. Spruces hold the higher ground, wind-flagged by years of nor’easters. Down near the wash, bayberry and sheep laurel dome the edges, and a belt of eelgrass lets go and combs the beach in long green hair.

Our kayaks lie bow-to-bow above the high-tide line. The tent faces east at the northern end; a spruce limb serves as a rack for PFDs, spray skirts, and tow belts. Someone has carved TWO FEATHERS into a dead branch and cinched on a pair of cormorant plumes. Off the eastern shore a sloop anchors for the night. Its mast light and watery reflection shine like two ancient coins suspended in a museum case.

Back on the mainland, long-throated geese arrow south; a rim of crimson edges the maple outside the Boothbay library—living messengers of fall. Breckenridge saw its first dusting yesterday. My hours in this northern latitude stretch toward their end. The click of seasons drives a compulsion to distill the last months into a cohesive narrative. For a skier and paddler, the temptation to arc feels as natural as the geese.

Unable to relax into the moonrise, I break the silence with someone else’s wisdom: “You know, J., kayaking in Maine is special because it gives you intimacy with islands.”

A friend offered this insight earlier this summer. I pass forward as if it were my own.

“Intimacy?” J.’s headlamp confronts me like a cyclops.

“Yep. Spending the night on an uninhabited island isn’t like normal camping. They’re all different, the MITA islands. Their energy, what they give you…it’s a form of intimacy.”

On the rocks below, our border collie noses the periwinkles working the weed lines and the barnacles flexing in the last of the ebb. She returns muddy-pawed and full of tidal-river smells: iodine and sweet rot. She, too, is restless. Comma-splicing at our feet, she scans for seals, who write their script where the moon lays its verse across the watery velum. A gray, blunt-muzzled and big as a buoy, surfaces like a macron, a sight like a long flat sound over the vowel of a small wave. Our collie whines and a loon answers from the black cove. Its one-to-three-note wail—the tremolo—resounds like a dactyl across the scroll of liquid glass.

“So what’s intimacy look like on the Spectacles?” J. grins.

I leave the bait.

“Never mind,” I groan. “Forget I mentioned it.”

I step off our perch, circle to the tent, and shrug into the puffy—the first time since May. I linger with the dark. The thought I dropped finds me again: intimacy. On the Spectacles, it unsettles the eye—apparition or perception, mirror or twin? My own twin answers from an exposed peak at 10,000 feet, calling across corn-flat miles: you’re not ready to surrender the sea! Can it already be time to turn west for winter and take up my other life? The weather in Maine remains kind; its myriad islands aren’t finished with me yet. I want to stay here. On the Atlantic’s margin, where the tide writes a path and unwrites it, twice a day.

In Book 3 of Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas recounts his long apprenticeship by islands—the Odyssey-esque counterpoint to the mini-Iliad of Book 2. Epics within epics, retold by the losing side: Aeneas is a Trojan, Rome’s mythic ancestor; Homer’s heroes are mostly Greek.

After Troy falls, Aeneas puts to sea in search of a sanctuary: first Thrace (where he cuts down trees for new ships and Polydorus bleeds from the soil), then Delos, sacred to Apollo. The hero misreads the god’s oracle—“seek your ancient mother”—and sets a course for Crete. There, he claims ancestral heritage and the island answers with plague until, in a dream, the Penates correct his course and name Italy as his fated destination. The archipelago continues its syllabus: the Strophades, where the Harpies foul the table and Celaeno curses them to hunger; Actium, where they invent games to discipline fear; Buthrotum, where Aeneas finds Andromache, raw with grief.

For Aeneas, the sea becomes a page and omens his pen. Island by island—punctuated by waves, bound by current—he rewrites his story. It takes seven long years of wandering.

In August, I dreamed a katabasis. I visited the River Styx the way tourists visit Rome: gift shops, a ferry terminal, the buzzy public rush of famous monuments—and, most memorable, waking with the sensation of a cold hand in mine.

Morning rationalized. I led a group of six to Burnt Island Lighthouse and back, pointing out osprey nests and cormorants drying their wings.

A few days later, over Labor Day weekend, I took J.’s family kayak camping. We launched late to evade the rain. Stars lifted on the orange-blazed horizon by the time we were ready for dinner. Kneeling on a granite slab to thread a canister onto the stove line, I felt the phone hum in my back pocket. A message from Japan.

“I am sorry to write with sad news,” my cousin said through Google Translate. “My father, your uncle, has died. We cremated him last week.”

The next morning, there was no more news from Japan. I slipped from the tent before the others and boiled water for tea and oatmeal—a small, solemn meal offered to the dead. Light spilled from the east, and the tears came. For a moment sobbing caught, then passed.

We slid our keels into the flood and hopped island to island along the outer edge of the bay. We ate lunch on Black, where a yellow-and-blue lobster buoy had washed ashore, Sharpied with a blunt homily: REAP WHAT YOU SOW.

J.’s father’s partner asked if she could keep the buoy, wanting to take it home as a coastal keepsake.

“I’m afraid not,” I said, thinking of karma and Tokyo. “Technically you’re supposed to turn them in.”

“Hey, can we go to that island next?” J. asked, changing the subject.

He pointed to a dark sickle on the horizon, Wreck Island. The name is literal: a late-summer storm in the 1500s, a ship on the ledge, cries the locals heard and—by law’s perverse permission—ignored. Salvage only if no survivors. Winter smothered the cries until spring’s silence licensed the pillage. Not all place-names instruct; some indict. Locals say you can still hear the ghosts howl in the throat of a gale.

We did not take the buoy. Nor did we make for Wreck. We turned around. Part of island literacy is knowing when silence isn’t yours to enter. I felt the pull—the old heroic shape, the easy narrative of confronting the unknown and coming home with a lesson pinned to the mast—but the learning here was different: not everything wants or requires pilgrimage. Turning back is often just as good a reading.

As we pivoted, three gray seals rose around us, big and deliberate. One rolled a shoulder and showed a pale map of scars. Another clapped the surface—a sound like an oar slap. The third thrashed after a mackerel with a great splash . I thought of my dream and my cousin’s message. My mother was the youngest of three. With the passing of my uncle, the middle brother, the postwar generation of siblings was gone.

If Virgil were writing this, my kayak would capsize and I’d meet a sea god riding a seal’s back who’d speak in a voice braided from grief and command. This Maine Sea Lord would address me the way Apollo spoke to Aeneas at Delos, with the confidence only deities can muster: “Seek out your ancient mother,” remember? That oracle is so Freudian it can only invite mistakes. Nothing good comes of dogmatically chasing an absent mother. For Aeneas, that meant setting a course for Crete, and the island rewarded his misreading with a plague.

But Virgil’s not writing this essay. I am. And even though I studied Classics in graduate school, I am not an ancient Roman. I do not get gods—maybe, now and then, a little bit of kami. If I’m lucky, I get cold hands, constellated skies, no cell service for a few days, and animals that watch closely and need nothing from me. Like memories, they surface long enough to be recognized, then are left well alone. Two feathers: marginalia in the island’s manuscript. Or quills—ways of writing and reading, of leaving something to be interpreted? A carving. A poem. A cousin grieving half a world away.

Leave No Trace ethics are as anti-Roman as can be. And yet, Virgil’s epic, like Homer’s endures as a work of western genius because it can be read in two opposing ways. There’s a surface narrative of conquest, but the reading I prefer goes: Try to be guests, not founders. Land and launch toward invisibility. Pitch above the wrack on durable ground; keep off the lichens. Cook on a stove, skip fires unless allowed—and then keep them small and erased. Pack out everything: food scraps, dog waste, tea leaves, and on thin-soiled islands, human waste too. Keep voices low after dark. Give wildlife room; birds and seals own the shore before we do.

Why do we paddle out to these islands? We give these islands our time, sweat, salt, love, attention. They give us a living grammar. A windline becomes an audience; a fogbank, an argument you shouldn’t force; a name like Wreck, not a dare but a boundary to be respected. Prophecy, closure, visitation, omen—it’s all the quiet feeling of being very close to the world in a vernacular only you can understand. No arc required.

We are not Trojans exiled from a demolished city, goaded by inklings of destiny. And yet, we are goaded by something. You are not yet done with the sea, sings my mountain twin to me. You come for the small, accruing knowings: which mossy flat cushions a root; that an onshore breeze will snuff the stove unless you turn its mouth a few degrees leeward and shield with a pot lid. For the field-marks that make a place become itself: the late-season tern that should have already gone, the single monarch angling south over salt, the way eelgrass stains your hands sweet-green.

The deeper flow of this narrative is still Virgil’s, translated across millennia to a humbler register for a less heroic age. For that is what good epic poetry does. It conveys the legacy of human saga, for reasons great and small, allowing it to be repurposed and contextualized, long after the empire has fallen. The ruins of Aeneas’ heirs attract millions as they decay. The trees of Thrace and Alna—felled for the ships that carry the stories—meanwhile have grown and grown.

Whether the Mediterranean or the Gulf of Maine, seafaring adventures teach human beings to read the world as a text, but caution of arriving at any fixed point of interpretation and anchoring there too long. Scylla and Charbydis remain hazards as real to 21st century sea kayakers as they were to 2nd century BCE sailors. The hydraulics of minds and river confluences will always hold the power to swallow a boat whole. Ancient epic’s register gives us a vocabulary for charting modern meaning and adapting a little better to our own internal weather. An uncle dies in Japan; a sea kayaking niece on an island in Maine mourns. A seal is not a mother, but also not not her, for the feeling this sighting conveys. Aeneas misreads Delos; Crete corrects him. At Strophades the Harpies make a lesson out of hunger: you will mistake want for destiny until you know the difference in your bones. At Actium, courage becomes ritual. In Buthrotum, grief becomes a craft Andromache lives in loss without spectacle. The archipelago teaches the threshold—sandbars that appear and vanish with the tides, doubles that are mirror and not twin, moons that look like prophecy but also simply illumine the life that is already there.

Back on the Spectacles, the September morning arrives diluted, the color of milk left in a cereal bowl. The corn moon loosens into it and disappears. Lobstermen work the channel in tight circles, haulers clacking, diesel thrum low in the chest. A gull drops a quahog on a rock and misses; on the second try it scores; the shell shatters clean and neat, a violence that is purely practical. On the sloop, two figures in sweaters step out with mugs and give us the small nod of morning boats. We answer with our spoons, lifted from the oatmeal pot.

We break camp without speaking much. Drybags slot into their hatches; our collie leaps like Palinurus to the bow, and the tow belt clicks back around my waist. The bar is already taking water; the path becomes a darker seam and then only memory. One island becomes two again—tidy, divisible.

I dip a blade. We slip past the last granite shoulder into the channel, where the river’s cold meets the bay’s salt and stitches a line you can feel with your knees. Behind us, the Spectacles regard us the way a good poet does when you read their work not by luck but by practice: not praise exactly, but recognition.

1. Virgil. The Aeneid. Translated by Scott McGill and Susannah Wright, introduction by Emily Wilson, W. W. Norton & Company, 2025.