Beach Beats: Fall on the Midcoast

Welcome to the Midcoast

The tide is going out on the Damariscotta River, and the mudflats are giving off that cold, mineral smell that means the sea is still close.

Stand here in October and the Pemaquid Peninsula feels like it is taking a long breath. The summer crowds have thinned, the maples along the back roads have turned, and the river, fed by salt water from the Gulf of Maine and by fresh water coming down from Damariscotta Lake, moves with a patience that makes you want to slow down and match it. Native people built enormous heaps of oyster shells on its banks over roughly a thousand years, settlers later clear-cut the shoreline until the oysters disappeared for more than a century, and in the 1970s a university laboratory on the river's edge helped bring them back. Today, according to the University of Maine's Darling Marine Center, more than 80 percent of the oysters grown in Maine come from this one river.

This issue follows that thread, from the shell heaps at the water's edge, past a salt pond where a famous marine biologist did her research, out to the folded rock at Pemaquid Point. Bring a jacket, a thermos, and a little time.

The Eastern Oyster

From the outside, an Eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) looks very much like a stone. Pick one up and you notice the weight first, then the deep cup, then the thick, ridged shell that cold water and strong tides seem to build. Inside is a small animal that has been filtering this river for a very long time.

Oysters have been part of the Damariscotta for thousands of years, but they nearly vanished. After settlers clear-cut the riverbanks, erosion muddied the water, and for more than a hundred years the estuary had virtually no oysters. In 1970 the University of Maine hired Professor Herb Hidu at its Darling Marine Center, a research station on the river in Walpole, to find out whether oyster farming could work here. His students helped start the farms that now dot the river, including the Pemaquid Oyster Company in 1986 and Glidden Point Oyster Farms in 1987. Seven of the nine shellfish farms on the river still have ties to the center, and one happy side effect of all that farming is that wild oysters have returned too.

A River of Shells

The trail behind Round Top Farm runs through an old apple orchard and down to the Damariscotta River, and at the water's edge the bank begins to shine. What looks like pale gravel is oyster shell, thousands upon thousands of pieces, left by Native people who gathered here over about a thousand years, between 2,200 and 1,000 years ago. Evidence from the middens suggests they harvested oysters in late winter and early spring, probably timed to the mid-May run of alewives up the river. Alongside the shells are animal bones, pottery, and stone tools, and some of that stone traveled a very long way, from the Moosehead Lake region and possibly from as far as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Labrador.

The mound beside you was once much larger. Whaleback Midden, named for its shape, stretched about 400 feet uphill from the river. In 1886 Harvard's Peabody Museum bought the rights to any prehistoric material found there, because the heap was about to be mined. By the late 1880s a company was grinding the shells into oyster shell grit, a supplement fed to chickens to strengthen their eggshells, and most of Whaleback disappeared. Only a small portion remains.

Across the river, the Glidden Midden survived because its owner refused permission to excavate. Today it is the largest shell midden in the northeastern United States, one of eleven along the river that make up the Damariscotta Shell Midden Historic District.

Reading the Rocks at Pemaquid Point

The ledges at Pemaquid Point look like a stack of dark pages that someone folded in half. Waves keep the rock scrubbed clean, so the story is easy to read. According to the Maine Geological Survey, the layers began as sediment in the Silurian period, then were heated and squeezed during the Devonian until they bent into folds, and ribbons of lighter granite pegmatite pushed up through the cracks as dikes. The lighthouse above, commissioned in 1827 and rebuilt in its current stone form in 1835, is the one that appears on Maine's state quarter. The rock beneath it is older than anything people have built here by hundreds of millions of years.

Science project: read the rocks

Bring a notebook, a pencil, and a camera, and look for three things:

• Folds: layers bent into waves, or pressed so tightly that both sides run parallel (geologists call these isoclinal folds).
• Dikes: pale bands of granite pegmatite cutting across the darker layers.
• Boudinage: layers stretched and pinched into sausage-shaped segments.

Sketch one of each and note which way the layers tilt. Stay well back from the waterline and off wet, dark rock, because swells at the point can reach higher than they look.

A Pool Between Tides

A few miles north of the point, the Rachel Carson Salt Pond Preserve fills and empties twice a day. At high tide it is simply a rocky shore. As the water drops, a quarter-acre pool is left behind, and in it is a small, crowded world.

The Nature Conservancy began protecting the site in 1966, when Helen Williams and her sisters donated the first 40 acres, and dedicated it to Rachel Carson in 1970. Carson gathered material from this tidal pool for her book The Edge of the Sea. The preserve now covers 78 acres, and across the road, trails lead through woods and old fields to a small pond that was dammed long ago to harvest ice.

Activity: the twenty-minute count

Sit by the pool with a small notebook and list every living thing you can find, from barnacles and periwinkles to rockweed. Wet your hands before you touch anything, look more than you lift, and put every creature back where it was.

The Fish Ladder at Damariscotta Mills

On the northwest side of Great Salt Bay, at Damariscotta Mills, water from Damariscotta Lake drops toward the sea past a fish ladder that has been in place since 1807. Each May and June, alewives (a kind of river herring) climb it from the ocean to spawn in the lake, rising 42 feet along the way. By October the run is long over. The ladder remains, and so does the quiet.

That makes this a good season for stillness. At Salt Bay Farm and Nature Center, 110 Belvedere Road, Damariscotta, 115 acres of former farmland slope toward the river, and a mowed path circles a restored marsh. Hooded Mergansers nest here, many other birds stop on migration, and Ospreys and Bald Eagles are common over the river. Great Salt Bay itself is shallower, warmer, and less salty than the rest of the estuary, and it holds large beds of eelgrass.

The Edge of the Sea

Rachel Carson is best known for Silent Spring (1962), the book that changed how the world thought about pesticides. Before that, she was a marine biologist who wrote about the shore with a scientist's eye and a great deal of patience. The Edge of the Sea (1955) is her guide to the Atlantic coast's rocky, sandy, and coral shores, and part of its research was done at the salt pond in New Harbor.

Carson began visiting Maine just after World War II and built a cottage in Southport, near Boothbay Harbor, in 1953. In 1956 she helped start the Maine chapter of The Nature Conservancy, the organization that now protects the pond. Read a chapter at the water's edge, near low tide, and the pages and the pool start to describe each other.

Oysters, Cheese, and Apples

The farms, docks, and markets of the Damariscotta area sit close together, so a picnic can be built in a single morning, from the river to the table.

Where to eat: the river picnic area at the end of the trail behind Round Top Farm, a table at Glidden Point, or the picnic area at Pemaquid Point Lighthouse Park.

Where to shop

Hot Spiced Cider for the Thermos

Some afternoons by the water call for something warm that is not too sweet. Fresh cider from a local orchard or farm stand does most of the work.

Steps

1. Combine everything in a saucepan and heat gently for about 10 minutes, until steaming. Do not let it boil.
2. Strain into a thermos.
3. Pour a cup at the water's edge and let your hands warm first.

Photo Challenge

Autumn light on the Midcoast stays low and warm for much of the day, which is a gift for texture. Aim for the golden hour, just after sunrise or before sunset, when the sun comes in from the side and every ridge and fold throws a shadow.

Collect three frames:

1. Layers: the folded rock at Pemaquid Point, or the pale bands of shell along the Whaleback bank. Shoot low and close.
2. Reflection: the salt pond at low tide, when the surface is still and the sky sits in the water.
3. Stillness: the marsh at Salt Bay Farm or the fish ladder at Damariscotta Mills, with nobody in the frame.

Keep your feet on dry, stable ground, never on wet rock for a better angle. Share your frames on Instagram and tag @wheresmysandybeach.