acadianationalpark – Carrie Jones Books

When I first saw her, she stood on a granite walk that jutted out into the Atlantic Ocean, holding onto a railing that tourists lean against in better weather. They stand, listening to the calmer waves sweep into a carved-out place in the rock called Thunder Hole. The ocean was crashing over her, obscuring her from my vision.

Someone screamed.

People had stopped their cars to watch the waves the storm made, but instead they saw a woman standing on the roped-off platform, her back to them, facing the sea as it smashed itself against her. I was one of those people, the people who watches.

She survived the wave that swept over her head and waited for another to come, to engulf her and the platform. The waves were so large, they splashed over my hiking boots and I was standing above her by fifteen feet. The echoes they made as the crashed against rocks hurt some of the children’s ears. One little boy stood near me with his hands pressed against his head, crying.

“She’s going to get swept right in,” a man next to me yelled to anyone and everyone. “She’s crazy. She’s going to get swept right in an bashed against those ledges.”

People murmured their agreement.

“It’s not going to be pretty,” he added.

This was true.

“You going to get her?” He asked me, zipping up his LL Bean anorak to his neck.

“Me?”

I looked around for a park ranger, a cop, someone official. There wasn’t anyone there. Just tourists in expensive cars with their kids and dogs beside them. And of course her, the woman in the waves, standing there, defying one of the strongest forces of nature.

Just then the woman buckled as another wave crashed against her. I expected when the crest dropped to see her gone, to just view the soaked granite of the platform and a vacant place where she used to be.

And then it hit me – the guilt of the bystander, the one who watches and witnesses. The guilt overwhelmed me.

She made it through. Her back was bent as if she was ancient.

“Jesus! She made it!” someone yelled. A few people cheered.

“What a freak,” some college-aged guy standing on the other side of me said. “She must be totally psycho.”

They didn’t know her. They didn’t know why she was there, what she’d done, who she was, what she’d been through, or even what emotions she was feeling right then. They just stood there watching, judging, not helping. And just like that, I knew… I didn’t want to be one of them.

“Okay,” I grumbled aloud and started down the wet rock steps, trying to pump myself up for what I was about to do. “Okay.”

Lifting one leg over the rope with the “closed” sign shining on it, I slipped a bit, heading down, but somehow she knew and turned herself, facing me now, grabbing onto the railing with both hands, she pulled her way back up towards me before the next wave hit. Her eyes were brilliant. The gray Maine ocean was so dull in comparison.

I reached my hand out for her.

She took it, smile, and came up to where I was.

“Thank you,” she said, laughing, alive, still holding my hand as she hopped over the rope and glided from one granite step towards the land, towards the bystanders, judging, watching.

And that’s when I realized where she was…? Down there in the waves? It was a less dangerous place then where we were heading back to. You know the violence to expect from the sea, from nature. You brace yourself for it. You move with it. But people? We expect more from each other. We expect hands and help, guidance and love. But too often, what we get is inaction, judgement.

When we got back up, most of the people had left. She survived. They weren’t interested any longer. The moment for them had passed, a story to tell, even though they didn’t know her, her motivation, or her name.

Sometimes I think that woman is all of us. Sometimes when things go down in this country that are just ridiculously bad, I think about that woman, standing there, a force in herself, bending but not breaking, refusing to be swept away, silently taking it as everyone watches. And when I think about her, I’m amazed.

“Are you okay?” I asked her as she shook out her hair and started to actually wring out the sleeves of her shirt.

“I am,” she said. “I am now.”

She took four steps forward and disappeared.

Note:

This happened when I first came to the island and a long time before the accident that took a child’s life close to this area. I was working dispatch at the police department when they recovered that little girl and this story has absolutely nothing to do with that horrible event.

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Where I live, my friends are weird and tourists visit. A lot. They fly or drive and ramble through our national park hitting the TOP TEN DESTINATIONS OF ACADIA NATIONAL PARK and when we meet them at our comedy club or at a restaurant, they’ll brag about seeing the sunrise on Cadillac Mountain, about having pop-overs at Jordan Pond, about driving the Park Loop Road and seeing Thunder Hole.

Don’t get me wrong. All of that is awesome.

But what mostly happens, is that the tourists almost always say, “I love it here. I think we’ve seen everything, right?”

And I never know if I should tell them the truth, that ‘No, you haven’t seen everything. You’ve seen the tourist things at one brief moment in time. You haven’t seen winter. You haven’t seen our bed races or our cantankerous town meetings. You haven’t seen volunteers spend a day giving out water to marathon runners with no goal other than to help. You haven’t seen the volunteer firefighters get up at 2 a.m. to put out a fire or respond to a car accident and then witnessed them stand in sub zero weathers for hours to keep a road closed. You haven’t seen a talent show at the grammar school. You haven’t seen a fist fight on Main Street after bar close.”

Okay. Maybe they’ve seen that.

Where I live people tell stories of bad parking jobs, winters where there were no snow, winters where there were 500 feet of snow, about times when a girl was crushed by a boulder that she and her friend had been jumping on and somehow dislodged. The friend survived because her petticoats got caught in a tree. She dangled all night before rescue came.

People here tell stories of jumping off docks, parties in fishing shacks with cheap beer they stole from convenience stores. These stories? They are lullabies and mantras, ways that they rock themselves to solace because the past is over and the future can sometimes be scary, but story – stories – you can craft and shape and collect.

People here tell stories and create them every winter, clustering together in small groups and large, fortifying themselves with bonfires and wood stacking, community theater and random nights out at the few restaurants that stay open all year. Sometimes, I think we might actually worship those few restaurants for being there and supporting a community where the numbers dwindle every year.

And there are places and movements to remember and try to retain the stories of people who were here before this town was called Eden. Part of the Abbe Museum’s mission is to remind us that “Maine is a Wabanaki place.”

Geo Neptune at the Abbe Museum’s summer market event

And people here complain. They complain about a lack of housing, about a dock, about taxes, about politicians. They make petitions and protest and worry. And it’s all good, because it means they care enough to complain, to protest, to make a petition.

The tourists don’t get to see that. And I am sad for them. But I’m also sad for me – for all the places that I visit and don’t get to really see and experience because I won’t get to spend even a year there, because I might not venture off a well-beaten tourist path and really breathe in a place. Because I won’t get to see the beloved stories of a town or a city or a country and hear what makes a place real. And because some of those stories of the past, of other cultures before, aren’t sung out as loudly as other stories.

What makes a place real isn’t buying a t-shirt or getting a meal at TripAdvisor’s #1 ranked restaurant. What makes it real is something that moves and breathes and changes. Because what makes it real are its people and how they interact with place and with each other. I feel so lucky whenever I get to get a glimpse of that. I hope you do, too.