Susan Hand Shetterly - Notes on the Landscape of Home

Susan Hand Shetterlyis the author of Settled in the Wildand Seaweed Chronicles: A World at the Waters Edge, as well as several childrens books including Shelterwood, named an Outstanding Science Trade Book for Children by the Childrens Book Council. Her writing has been longlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Award and shortlisted for the New England Society Book Awards. Shetterly has received a nonfiction writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Alfred P. Sloan grant, and two Maine Arts Fellowships. Recently, she contributed monthly essays to Down Eastmagazine, some of which have been expanded and included in this book. She lives in Surry, Maine.

I THANK MICHAEL STEERE, my editor, for encouraging me to put together these stories that examine and celebrate aspects of what it is to make a home on the Maine coast, and working with me to make a book. I am indebted to Michelle Tesler, my agent, for her kind guidance and patience, and to Elaine McGarraugh, senior production editor at Rowman & Littlefield for her help and good eye. John Cornell gave me the gift of his photograph of the least sandpiper in flight close to shore. It carries, perfectly, the spirit of this book.

There are many people who have shared their expertise with me. Their knowledge and goodwill are at the heart of this work. I have to start with Aran Shetterly who has read many drafts, generously offering his time and talent; Maggie Budd Miller who critiqued the first essays and gave essential advice; Cynthia Thayer for her careful edits; and Kate Mrozicki for her read-through of the chapter on Wayne Newall. Brian Kevin, editor of Down Eastmagazine invited me to a wonderful two and a half years of writing short essays for the magazine, a number of which I have expanded. They are included here.

Seth Bentz, Brad Allen, Bill Townsend, Rosemarie Seton, John Meader, and Diana Winn answered my questions on scientific issues; Mark McCullough, Sarah Redmond, Sandy Walczyk, and Gayle Kraus shared their science and their stories; and Wayne Newall told me stories of his remarkable life.

Paula Mrozicki and Susan Curran kept me going through some of the tough moments of putting a book together, and Margot Lee Shetterly helped me whenever I asked. Hugh Curran sent me articles on subjects I was writing about, as did Charles Guilford.

I am especially grateful to the people of the Blue Hill Heritage Trust for the brave, skilled work they do protecting land on the Blue Hill Peninsula, for the work of the Downeast Institute to preserve fisheries and teach students about the ocean they live by, and to the people at the Downeast Salmon Federation who have worked tirelessly to bring back the health of streams and rivers on this part of the coast.

A number of the essays in this book began as Room with a View columns in Down Eastmagazine. A version of a longer article, rewritten as Learning to Speak, also first appeared in the magazine.

An early version of The Gull appeared in the Sun. The Preserve and Becoming a Flock first appeared in Yankeemagazine.

ON A CLEAR NIGHT the sky is black, and the constellations burn brightly here. No lights from a nearby town, no headlights from a stream of cars obscure Orion, the great hunter who pledged to rid the world of wild animals and was felled by the sting of a single scorpion. As I write this its the heart of winter. Orion with his belted sword moves slowly to the west during the long hours of darkness. If the air is drifting onshore, up the ledges, across the fields, and into the woods, you can stand outside in the breathtaking cold and smell the salt from the bay.

My first home was my parents apartment on Bleeker Street in New York City. Later, we moved to an old colonial in Connecticut with woods and fields and a little stream, and later still we spent a few enchanted years in Mallorca. But the truth is I grew up in a cabin on a 65-acre woodlot half a mile from a working harbor in Down East Maine, if growing up means learning something about how to live in the world. I moved there with my husband and first child. I was 29 years old. The life I had lived before, all that was tender, funny, painful and loving, frightening or deeply beautiful, was preface and preparation for the years I spent learning how to manage a life that was both practical and good for the spirit, and exploring what was left of the wild in this cutover land.

The natural world and my exposure to it grew into a solid thing. I was a part of something bigger than I was, that was subtle and complicated, and I paid attention. If you pay attention to the land where you live, as many of us already know, you enter into conversation with it, until it becomes a voice inside you and some of the boundaries between you and it dissolve. That woodlot and the village around it were teaching places for me, as home places all over the world have gifts to teach when we are alert to the pieces that fit together to make them whole, or when we note the pieces that are missing that indicate, in some ways, big or small, that theyre broken.