The young camper above earned the nickname "rock sitter" for his habit of rising before dawn to watch birds.
Text by Suki Casanave
TEN DAYS IS NOT SO LONG, REALLY. In a lifetime, that is. But when you're a kid and it's summer and you're on a small island in Maine, time stretches on and on, spinning out like an endless reel of fishing line cast in a perfect arc. Ten days is long enough to crawl through the night woods after a porcupine, to watch an eagle disappear into the distance. Long enough to search out puffins on Eastern Egg Rock. Long enough to creep along with a magnifying glass inches from the ground and follow a trail laid out with a piece of yarn, imagining you are an ant. Long enough to sit alone by the sea and watch dusk descend from an indigo sky. Ten days is long enough to change a life.
A visiting Russian scientist demonstrates the taxedermy process on a Puffin. Hog Island is only a mile and a half long, about half a mile wide. It sits within shouting distance of the mainland in Bremen, about nine miles southeast of Damariscotta. But when campers board the Puffin III and head across the narrows in Muscongus Bay, maneuvering past the rock at the end of the mussel bar, they are making a journey to a fragile world, a granite-bound, 330-acre Audubon Society wildlife sanctuary. During the next ten days of ecology camp they will learn something about this tiny world -- and about the bigger world to which they will return. What you learn here, one camper said, is "how wonderful the world is."
A camper displays a starfish pulled from a net during a trip aboard the Puffin III. Before 1981 there was no youth camp on Hog Island. There were sessions for adults -- had been since 1936, when Millicent Todd Bingham made the island available for the first Audubon Nature Camp. Adults, many of them teachers, came to Hog Island each summer to study with experts like Roger Tory Peterson. When they left, ecology was no longer simply a word in a textbook. Lessons learned at Hog Island were carried to classrooms across the country.
When the kids, ages 10 to 14, started coming, nothing changed much. There were no canoes, no sailboats, no tennis courts. There wasn't even any swimming. "I said, `Heck, this thing isn't going to work,'" says Joe Johannsen, the camp's much-loved manager and boatman who has looked after the place for 20 years. "But I was completely wrong." There are still no canoes, sailboats, or tennis courts, but there's always a long waiting list for the 50 slots in each of the two August sessions. They come, quite simply, because of the place. Except for the camp, a cluster of weathered buildings on the northern tip of the island, the land is as wild and unchanged as if it were 100 miles to sea. On a clear night the whole star-filled sky gazes down on itself reflected in Muscongus Bay. Run an oar through the water, and a cloud of phosphoresence shimmers beneath the surface, a bright cloud suspended in the dark ocean. Light overhead, light down below, you in the middle of it all -- it's hard to tell which way is up.
A tired hiker enjoys cooling off at the end of a long, hot trek. You can get dizzy with all there is to do and to learn on Hog Island. On the last night, when the young campers write about their experience, it's hard to sum it up. They don't write about marine biology, geology, forest ecology, or conservation. They tell about moments. They tell about finding rat-tailed sea cucumbers and learning to hide in the woods in 30 seconds flat; about singing around a campfire with new friends who love nature, too. More than half a century ago, Millicent Todd Bingham wrote, "If only the island could be saved, it would do more for us than we could possibly do for it." The island was saved, and now it gives back these moments. What it adds up to, all these moments, is a way of piecing something together -- of making connections between the starfish in your palm and the ocean at your feet, between the circling osprey and the wind that carries him, between you and everything else in a fragile world.
All this in ten summer days.
Three campers explore a new world aboard the Puffin III.
For more information about Hog Island, contact:
Reprinted by permission. Original text ©1993 Suki Casanave. |
This was precisely what Millicent Todd Bingham had desired. The daughter of an Amherst astronomy professor, she had summered here since childhood, exploring its craggy borders and its spruce-scented trails. "I could never feel that I owned such a place," she once wrote. "It seemed, rather, the property of all who cherished it."
Copyright ©1995 Stephen O. Muskie