Twelve years ago today I was sitting in my office away from home in Gainesville, Florida and kicking around the idea of starting my own blog. For quite some time I had been reading those of others and I thought it might be time “to chime in.” I did not know what to expect when I first started out; I figured I would take my inspiration from wherever it came and go from there. Twelve years, 529 posts, and 310,000 hits later I am still at it with no plans to stop anytime soon.
My first actual posting – “Down on the Creek: Notes from Florida” – appeared on December 1, 2008, the day before we left Gainesville to return home to Maryland. We spent part of it roaming the back roads east of town, through the hammock country over by Cross Creek, Micanopy, Island Grove, and Hawthorne. The narrow country roads pass under canopies of live oak festooned with long gray beards of Spanish moss. There was water in Cross Creek and in the River Styx (not always the case), and we observed white herons and egrets wading the sedgy marsh shallows looking for their next meal. We wandered around the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings farm where she wrote The Yearling (1929) and many of her other works and we were are lucky to have the entire place to ourselves. I was reminded why I like to come back to this special part of Florida. Perhaps Miss Rawlings said it best. “It is necessary to leave the impersonal highway, to step inside the rusty gate and close it behind. One is now inside the orange grove, out of one world and in the mysterious heart of another. And after long years of spiritual homelessness, of nostalgia, here is that mystic loveliness of childhood again. Here is home.” I know what she meant.
My new ‘blog" was barely a week old and already I was receiving inquiries regarding the significance of its title. Why was I "Looking Toward Portugal"? This is a legitimate question and there was no big secret or mystery. For the past three decades I have been gravitating to the coast of Maine. At first, it was only during our annual summer vacation, but later I returned more frequently . . . every chance I could, to be quite honest. For the past decade, since my retirement, we have spent the entire summer in Maine. Each time I returned I found myself standing on that rocky shoreline, looking out to sea and pondering this and that. If you gaze in a general easterly direction from the Maine coast, you will see nothing but the rolling swells of the Atlantic. Nova Scotia is out there somewhere, but if you continue across the Atlantic you will eventually arrive on the northern shores of Portugal somewhere near Oporto.
I have come to believe that my life today, and what I hope to accomplish in the years remaining to me, are in no small way tied to the pleasant days I have spent on the Maine coast. I am constantly reminded of Jack Kerouac’s observations when he stared out across the Atlantic from the shores of Long Island – "this last lip of American land." "Here I was at the end of America . . . no more land,” Kerouac wrote in On The Road (1957). “And now there was nowhere to go but back." He reminds us of our limitations, but he also offers a hint of what might be if we only choose to look beyond those far horizons.
It was the American artist Bo Bartlett (born 1955) who gave a name to what I have been doing all these years. Bartlett divides his time between his hometown of Columbus, Georgia and Matinicus Island lying almost 25 miles off the coast of Maine. "Still Point," his summer home and studio, are situated on Wheaton Island which forms the small village harbor on Matinicus. He refers to the seaward side of his island where he goes to mediate as "the Portugal side," and so I attribute "Looking Toward Portugal" to him. These posting have become own meditations.
In that first posting I made reference to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' tenet that everyone needs "some small place of enchantment to turn to." Although I have enjoyed my more and more infrequent sojourns in that swamp and hammock country of north central Florida, it is the coast of Maine that has become my true querencia, the place where I feel most grounded and to which I long to return. It has become my place of solitude, solace, and inspiration. Looking out to sea from "the Portugal side" of my own life, and pondering what lies beyond that meeting of water and sky, I know that my grand search will never be over. Certainly not in my lifetime. I will always return to that "last lip of American land" and ponder what I have done and contemplate what lies ahead.
