My family and I spent Monday and Tuesday of last week at one of our favorite places on earth. Well, it is at least one of MY favorite places on earth, and Lorna and the kids seem to enjoy it a lot too. The place is one I wish you would visit for a long weekend or vacation this summer, if you can. It is the Rockland harbor breakwater, in Rockland, Maine. If you at all enjoy the outdoors and the rugged Atlantic coast, you won’t be disappointed.
To me, the Rockland breakwater is simply beautiful! A truly monumental marvel of nineteenth century granite construction, it is a needle-straight, level, road-width wall stretching nearly a mile out across that town’s great harbor. The breakwater ends with a wonderful lighthouse I have been visiting since early childhood.
Emily and I spent much of Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning fishing for mackerel off the side of this great stone structure. She caught her very first fish there on Monday. I caught my only fish of the year there Tuesday morning. We both had a wonderful time, and two very unlucky mackerel now lay, filleted, on a shelf in our Vermont freezer.
Sometime after noon on Tuesday, Lorna and the kids decided to head back to town and up to Camden, to do some souvenir shopping. I was glad they had time to go, before we headed back to Vermont. I was equally glad I would have a few hours alone, to walk the giant blocks of stone out to the end, to visit my lighthouse. The slow walk in the sunshine was just wonderful. I took my time, stopping occasionally to watch a lobsterman pull a trap up into his boat, or a sea bird swoop down and scoop up another unlucky mackerel.
Soon I had stepped the length of the narrow walkway surrounding the lighthouse, and was sitting alone on the rocky tip of the breakwater. I cannot truly express how peaceful, beautiful, and awe-inspiring that experience was, and always has been for me. The sight of huge white sails against deep blue skies, the scent of the salty breeze, the warm sun on your skin, and the sound of gulls calling in the distance cannot be accurately portrayed in words, at least not by me. You just must experience it for yourself, alone, at the end of my breakwater. I sat there, and thought, and wept a bit, and thanked God for the wonderful day, and the many great memories of family times at this gorgeous breakwater.
I’m sure we all have some childhood-memory place that is so special we feel called to return to it from time to time. That place, for me, will always be my breakwater. Our family went there for a day or more, nearly every summer of my childhood. On those trips Dad would faithfully retell his own cherished memories of childhood visits with his aunt and uncle at their Rockland home, and walking to the breakwater with them to catch some fish for supper. I recalled these things while on the long walk back over the stones to the shore, and to my family. I pondered the thought that all the lures and jigs and bobbers and fishing lines my children and I, and my Dad and his uncle ever snagged on the submerged stones of that breakwater are certainly still right there. They are every bit as permanently hooked on the Rockland breakwater as am I.
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