My Favorite Place

By G. E. Shuman

As I write today I’m sitting on the ‘ocean’ side of my favorite place in the world. After picking up two of our grandkids in New Hampshire over the weekend, our family arrived this afternoon at the coast of Maine, and, for me, the peace and protection of the massive granite breakwater of Rockland harbor.

I know I’ve written about my love for this nearly mile-long stretch of sea-soaked granite before, and I guess I am simply doing that again. This place is just so special to me. It calls me back to visit nearly every summer, since the summers of my youth. Some of the reasons for this are very clear in my mind, and some not so clear. This place is certainly one with countless great memories for me, of camping and fishing trips with my family… and of chats with my Dad, among other things. Memories are certainly made more vivid by the senses, and oceans have a way of overflowing those senses. Sights, sounds, and scents combine easily in places like this. Salty air, softly beating waves, fog horns, and lonely seagulls calling through the mist cannot help but be remembered, here especially, somehow.
I mentioned earlier, almost absentmindedly, that I feel protection here. The harbor is certainly made safe from storms by this wide line of massive granite blocks stretching across most of its width, but am I? Truly, this is a favorite place of my childhood; of happy times unmarred by any harsh situations of life. It is a place not only of my, but even of my father’s childhood. Of sunny summer days when he and his aunt Marion would walk from home in downtown Rockland, and spend hours out here fishing for their supper. And then there were those later years, when our family would camp in the area. We would picnic here among the bouys and gulls, lobster boats and seaweed-covered stones, we kids casting for mackerel, and dropping lines between the breakwater rocks in search of rock bass and starfish.
This breakwater is a place that does not change, and that may be its ultimate protection, from the storms of life and of time, for me. The massive stones on which I sit and write have not shifted an inch since those old days of my youth. I know that every snagged hook, every wayward bobber I ever lost between these rocks is almost certainly still here. To me, every word spoken, and thought and laugh ever experienced in this place, is also still held here, somehow, just in a different time.
This very week I have another chance to share this lifelong memory-place with my children, and grandchildren. Hours pass like moments here for me, as I hope they will for them. Perhaps, someday, they too will be called to return to this place of bobbing bouys, of sun and salty mists, of slipping tides, white sails and soft sea sounds.
For me, to long for the sea is to long for the past. To sit by the sea is to search white-capped waves for signs of yesterday. As a child I could never have imagined being here, now, as now I remember being here then. I am so blessed. Everyone should have such a favorite place.