On Maine's coast, a bit of peace

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

PROUT'S NECK, Maine - I will not carry it home with me this time. It cannot be carried or stored or deposited for some later date. Not any more. I wish it could. These days all I take is the memory.

And so I write down the color of the sky - pink, this morning, with swaths of blue - and the roaring, glubbing, flapping sounds of the sea. I memorize the shape of gulls, study them in flight, listen to their squeals and squawks, notice how they return to the ground soundlessly, like paper planes.

I find rose petals on the ground and squeeze them in my hands and inhale their odor so that it becomes part of me. I walk barefoot in the sand so that its texture becomes memory, lick my lips and taste salt, sit on a rock and breathe deeply and watch ducks float, and lobster pots bob, and the sun rise.

I am part of this. I taste and touch and see and hear and am grateful and humbled and happy. I am at peace.

But these feelings - of joy, of discovery, of oneness with life - will vanish, like shadows at sunset, as soon as I leave here. They will dissolve before I get to the Maine Turnpike, long before I am home. They don't stay with me anymore. I can't hold on to them. I turn on the radio and there is news of another stabbing or shooting, women and children being molested, people dying in Yugoslavia, people being massacred in South Africa.

I watch TV and hear tragedies recounted between quips and smiles, and read newspapers full of meannesses, and the peace that I felt, knew, was part of, seems an aberration.

It wears on you, the world we have created. It separates, isolates, and divides us from one another.

But not up here. On the coast of Maine it's a different world. Safe and gentle and kind to strangers.

I walk the cliffs at dusk, cut through woods I've never been in before, see people I don't know - men, groups of boys, women walking dogs, children - and they smile or wave or say hello. I walk the beach at sunrise and wave to a man standing in the ocean fishing and when I walk back we say hello and the next morning I see him again and I stop and we talk until the sun is overhead.

Imagine, stopping on the street to talk to a stranger. Imagine, sitting on a park bench or on the T and making a connection with someone you don't know. What are you, nuts? people would say. What are you, asking for trouble? What is wrong with you?

What is wrong with us that we stop to make these connections? Why are we so isolated and so afraid? We walk through life as if we're carrying a full jug of water on our head, water that has to last us a lifetime, so we don't nod, or bend or, God forbid, dance. We have to be careful, solemn, on guard. Don't go here. Don't go there. Watch your back. Don't talk to this one. Don't trust that one.

I walk down streets at home and most of the strangers I pass look straight ahead or study the ground. They don't look at me. We are all afraid to look at each other. Why?

Here I talk to the fisherman. He lives on a river in New Hampshire. He has four children. He works for the telephone company, hunts, likes to sail and play tennis. He's been fishing since 3:30 a.m.. He loves the beach, the water, the ocean. He thinks at the beach. He watches the gulls and shows me the seals in the distance.

We meet. We talk. We share. And we each go on with our separate lives a little richer for the encounter.

This would not happen at home. And that's a pity because if we all knew each other a little better, we wouldn't be strangers, we'd be friends. And if we were friends, we wouldn't be afraid of each other, we'd protect each other.

In Maine I don't have enough eyes or ears to absorb the world. Everywhere I turn, there is beauty.

At home, there is so much tragedy that I want to close my eyes and make the world go away.