Stonington, Maine
I didn’t go down to the harbor first thing. I know I said I would. The lobster boats were out there in the dark at four in the morning and I was asleep, which is probably the correct call given that I’m sixty and not a commercial fisherman. By the time the window started doing its thing in the early light, I was where I was going to be: coffee in hand, time lapses running on every flat surface in the room, watching the tide come in over the little islands of green I’d been photographing since the evening before.
There’s a channel I found while putting together this episode, a guy named Mike who goes by Old Man Living Better. He’s eighty-one years old and cranking out YouTube content with more energy and clarity than most people half his age. He has a line at the beginning of his videos — if you ain’t dead, you ain’t done — which I find more reassuring than it probably sounds. I left him a couple of comments and he asked me who my audience was.
I didn’t have a clean answer. I had an answer I’d written on a whiteboard before this trip started: over fifty, travelers, second-act types, people seeking purpose and connection. Mid-lifers. That’s who I thought I was making this for. Whether that’s who’s actually watching, I genuinely don’t know.
What I Was Supposed to Do Here
I came to Stonington with the intention of telling someone else’s story. A lobster boat captain, maybe. A fisherman. The kind of person I’d been circling on this whole trip and somehow not capturing.
What I did instead was sit in the Heritage Room in my night shirt drinking four cups of coffee and watching the tide. I am completely aware of the gap between those two things. I am also more relaxed than I’ve been in years, which feels relevant. The blood pressure at that window was something close to zero. The light kept changing. The clouds would clear and I’d take the cameras off the windowsill and then look up and the whole sky would be full again and I’d put them all back out.
Some mornings are just mornings. You don’t have to make them into content.
Stonington on the Way Out
The best haddock I’ve ever eaten was at the restaurant down the street, an inch thick, from water that was visible from my window. I had clam chowder first, which I didn’t used to like and have apparently become converted to somewhere between Connecticut and Maine. The restaurant had a jug of water with a handwritten Sharpie note on it: this is for when the water gets shut off. I don’t know how often the water gets shut off in Stonington. Apparently often enough to need a system.
The Stonington Public Library is from 1897. The Opera House was originally a nine-hundred-seat venue, burned down, was rebuilt smaller. Nearly every building in the historic walking pamphlet has burned down at some point. Maine has a recurring theme.
I drove past the inn one more time on the way out. On the Harbor. Smallest town I’ve stayed in on this trip. Most time I’d spent just looking out a window without trying to accomplish anything.
Leaving Maine
I drove toward New Hampshire thinking about the gap. The stories I wanted to tell and didn’t. The fisherman on the dock I talked to but didn’t film. The coffee shop archives I found too late to do anything about.
What I’ve concluded, with the benefit of a few months of editing and distance, is that you probably need a fixer. Somebody who knows the place, knows who to call, can arrange for two hours on a lobster boat or an afternoon in a granite quarry. I can ask questions until the cows come home. I’m genuinely curious about these people and what they do. Getting from curious to on-camera in a town you’ve been in for eighteen hours is the part I haven’t solved yet.
Next time I come to Maine — and there will be a next time — I’m going to slow down more and plan for fewer states. Take a week on the peninsulas. Go out on one of those boats. Actually tell the story I keep saying I want to tell.
But this time I got the haddock. I got the view. I got four mornings of light chasing in the best place I’ve been.
That’s enough.
New Hampshire next. Fall color.
