Category Archives: Ogunquit

We arrive to lilacs in full bloom, filling our room and the yard with their Spring perfume. Some years we’re off – arriving just before or soon after their show is complete. This time we hit it just right.

Throughout the long weekend they would accompany us with their cheerful lavender blooms, sprinkling the air with that quintessential New England fragrance.

It’s good to arrive on Thursday – a trick we learned after waiting in long lines of Friday traffic on 495 for our first few years. Today the town is slowly awakening after a long, torturous Winter, and a rather rainy early Spring. None of that is in evidence now – window boxes are brimming with pansies and all the other pots have been planted with flowering annuals.

A row of mandevilla, and their accompanying trellises, lines the street in front of me, which I watch from a tree-shaded patio, sipping coffee and writing this out. It is a customary soft-entry into Ogunquit – a sweet decompression period that gently erases all cares or concerns of work and life in upstate New York.

I can feel my shoulders relaxing as the town walks by, and the dappled sunlight and ocean breeze work their healing magic, lulling me into a familiar comfort, an ease of life reserved for this beautiful place by the sea. In some strange way, I feel more at home here than I do in my own backyard. Another Memorial Day weekend in Ogunquit has begun.

It sends its scent forward first, and before it even comes into view the ocean has heralded its presence. It sends its sounds next – the vaguely thunderous pattern of waves, the cries of seagulls, the rolling wind. Only after this introductory preamble does it come into view, revealing itself with its sparkling crests glinting in the sun, the white-capped waves lapping at the beach, the vast immensity of the Atlantic occupying all that lies ahead. It is the deep blue horizon, and when you face it – really face it, head on, and take it all in – everything behind you suddenly ceases to matter.

This is our world at its simplest – at the crux of land, water, and air – and what else is there? We are small creatures to stand before such a colossal expanse, and it always gives me pause to question the humility and, alternately, the hubris it takes to face that vastness.

Most of us aren’t here for that kind of rumination, and, sometimes – well, most of the time – it is enough just to smell the salty air, to be lulled by the queasy undertow, to watch the kids splashing in the frigid surf. With the sun beating down and the warmth of the sand beneath bare feet there is no reason to think of anything else.

The title of this post is all there is to say really: a pair of men hold hands as they walk along the Marginal Way, and nobody pauses to stare, nobody raises an eyebrow, nobody even whispers after they pass. It seems like such a simple thing, such a common occurrence that most married or dating couples take for granted. But when you’re a man married to another man, there’s not much you can take for granted – not even holding hands. Men and women have been attacked and killed for less.

This is the only place in the world where Andy and I have ever held hands in public.

What does that do to a couple? What does that do to a marriage? What does that do to the human spirit?

Greg and Mike at the Ogunquit Beach Inn always have the best vintage postcards of Maine beach scenes, so a few years ago Andy and I took a set of 35 mm photos of our own while on Ogunquit Beach. (Apologies for the scanned quality, but I think it adds to their antique inspiration.)

The post is entitled ‘Vintage Ogunquit’ because it evokes another era: a more innocent, hopeful time, when the sun and wind were the only reasons for furrowed brows. Also, these photos were taken a number of years ago, so for me they’re vintage in that sense (hence the tragic goatee, and not-so-tragic 30-inch waist I once had).

Hopefully Ogunquit will weather the impending Hurricane Earl with pluck and aplomb, as it has countless other storms. (Though for once, I feel lucky to be far inland.)

Good luck to all our friends on the coast… our thoughts are with you.

Drawn by the undertow, my life is out of control,

I believe this wave will bear my weight so let it flow…

~ James, Sit Down

This marks my first time at the beach since, well, my last time on the beach, which was with Andy a few years ago when we had an unusually hot spell in May. I had not, however, been on a Maine beach in the summer since my childhood.

To be honest, after childhood I didn’t get the thrill of lying on a beach. Without a sand castle to make, or a warm ocean to explore, where is the joy in sitting around? What is the point? But like my recent embracing of the joys of lying around in a pool lounger, I was hopeful that this would prove a similar rite of passage into adulthood.

The sun is strong, and while I doused myself in SPF 50, I did not prepare for the fact that I just got a super-close buzz cut, and my scalp was all sorts of exposed to the elements. On the way to the beach, I find a lightweight pink plaid fedora in one of the tourist shops, a life-saving accoutrement that matched my towel.

Paired with sunglasses and an open Hawaiian shirt, the hat makes me feel like an old man in Miami, and I love it.

We walk quite a way to find a space not entirely overrun with people, made more difficult by the encroaching high tide. (I was amazed to see the ocean completely cover about 100 feet of sand within an hour.)

We lay our towels down and follow suit on top of them, sinking gratefully into the soft warm sand. It gives exactly where you want it to give, and supports in the spots where you don’t even realize you want it. Our feet, cold from the lapping Maine sea, dig into the heat of the beach. I open up the book I’m reading, ‘The Sea, the Sea’ by Iris Murdoch, but only read a few pages of it before I’m pulled under.

The ocean gently roars at our feet, lulling with its rhythmic, intoxicating drone ~ the steady beat of waves upon the shore, and there is no greater inducer of sleep. Soon enough, I nod off in the baking sun, protected only by a thin layer of sun-block and a flimsy whim of a hat. Overhead, the breeze is alternately warm and cool ~ whichever your body most wants before it even cries out its discomfort ~ and suddenly the spell of the sea is upon me. There is no more peaceful, comfortable, sensual place to be.

I’d forgotten the call of the sea, the way it heals and smoothes out the wrinkles of life. A certain calm exists, even in the most tumultuous waves and how they crash on the shore, the storms and wind, the sand-blown blunting of the sharpest edge. The ocean brings irrevocable peace.

I come to and open the book again, but it is all too much, too calming ~ and soon enough the book falls to the side, and I am asleep in the sun, Andy beside me, and the ocean quietly crashing before us. It is this which enchants, this which binds men to mermaids and sirens ~ and we are powerless to its tempting call.

The spell is not easily broken ~ how simple, how easy it would be to stay here, to stew happily in the sun, to give in and give up ~ Blanche Hudson on the beach while Baby Jane dances her way to oblivion ~ who was better off in the end? But we awaken, and we have dinner reservations, so we make the trek back to the hotel, in the daze and blaze of the afternoon sun ~ unrelenting, glorious, from the beginning of time.

I’ve come to the conclusion that we have to live on, or very close to, the beach. There is simply no way around it. The question is how… All I know is that a few days in that heaven has stirred a dormant passion for the sea.

Now I’m relieved to hear
That you’ve been to some far out places
It’s hard to carry on
When you feel all alone
Now I’ve swung back down again
It’s worse than it was before
If I hadn’t seen such riches
I could live with being poor…

~ James, Sit Down