The Coast Where Time Stands Still

There’s nothing like summer on the Maine coast. It’s impossible to compare to anywhere else, because it is a place and a season all its own. The eastern light pouring across the ocean. The briny smell of the North Atlantic. Slippery olive seaweed. Wind-sculpted pine woods. Bare feet, ice cream cones, cliffs dropping into sandy coves. If summer tastes sweeter here, it’s because it’s concentrated into such a brief window, the months of ice and chapped hands and frozen rope spilling into a burst of perfection that feels like some nostalgic, not-entirely-real distillation of the season you might see in a Hallmark Channel movie.

I was four years old when I first camped on a sliver of the Maine coast called Hermit Island. It isn’t a true island; a sandy isthmus links it to a narrow peninsula, which itself is part of a larger peninsula. But it feels like an island, disconnected from both the mainland and the passage of time.