Day One: The Journey in the Destination

From the tip of the peninsula where I grew up, at sunset, one can look east and live in the light of the day for some thirty seconds more as the last gold brushes up the slopes of a rise there. From this photo, the land continues left out to a point some thirty yards from my parents' perpendicular running peninsula. There's an old, time-undone dike there, evidence of what at the time must have been an immense effort to control the flow of water into the upstream marshy field. In so doing they were able, I'm told, to graze sheep there, though now, dike over-run and flowed their cloven hooves would no doubt puncture through the muddy salt marsh and into the strange crevices below just as ours did, when as kids my brothers and I would venture out into this mucky golden expanse. My older brother Philip and I, along with our wives Marsha and Ida, have just purchased this fourteen acre spit of land, a many year dream of ours come to pass in a fit of determination and financial creativity. It is here that we will build our tree houses, dwellings that we hope will inspire those who inhabit them with the creative spirit in which they were conceived.
It was a dream of ours for some years, but it really began long before that as a dream of my parents. They moved up here, (then, and perhaps to others even now, the middle of nowhere) after some years on a sailboat, a reaction to two years in Greenwhich village, New York where my father attended Columbia University in 1968 and 1969. This morning I've just read Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited describing his subjects, after sex, lying and smoking in a New York Hotel, as "not ready to sleep, for in that city there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy." Some in the counter-cultural movement of the time were seeing through the facade of the urban and drugged version of peace and love, and looking to scratch through to a richer patina, one based on the timeless values of the land, of sustainability and integrity. The so called "back to the land movement," was loosely based around the philosophies of Scott and Helen Nearing in their book, Living the Good Life, published a decade earlier and gaining traction in the upheaval of the day. My parents, along with my oldest brother Ernie, were one of several families in the early seventies to choose an island, Georgetown, on the mid coast of Maine, as the base for this new experiment in wholesome living. They plowed the land, lived in tents, planted fruit trees, ground their own flour, drank warm goat's milk from the neighbors, fed us babies mushed avocados and wheat germ. Even I as a child, not brought into their world until 1980, remember taking the one step up to the throne of our off white and fading plastic, composting toilet--or, finding our small bathroom occupied by one of my parents or my three brothers, dashing out to the still usable outhouse they built back in 73,' with the styrofoam seat my dad had fashioned and painted, a non heat-(cold)conducting material for those chilly Maine mornings.
This thrity-five acre penninsula surrounded by the Back River, branching off the Kennebec as it does and emptying back into Hockomock Bay after a six mile detour between Georgetown and Arrowsic islands, was a magical world of Tarzan and indians and cowboys for us as children. More to come on these memories as this story of our tree house adventures unfold, but for now it's enough to instill that as we found ourselves in our thirties and ready to adultedly form our own adventures, it seemed a shame, on the one hand not to build upon the decades of groundwork laid here by my parents, yet on the other, it felt a small betrayal of their pioneering spirit not to go out on our own, to pry open some entirely new lid and splay out its contents. This fourteen acre spit of land--new, yet, at least at lower tides, connected to the peninsula of our youth seemed the perfect harmony of these competing hands. It's fresh, it's our own, yet it's connected literally and figuratively to what has come before, to my parents' spirit of adventure. We've named this land "Sequin," after the Indian name for a lovely light-housed island off the coast nearby, and today I'm beginning the building of the Tree Houses at Sequin.