7/20/98.. Swelter.

This'll run the tourists down the coast of Maine. We've finally had a severe case of the hots. Humid and stifling last week. Sharp and sizzling over the weekend. Now showers and sweats to season. Crimson clover and Queen Anne's lace. Vetch and chicory.

Old Sol comes up red and steamy, and the mist begins to thin. Heavy dew soaks your sneakers, as you scuttle round doing chores before the heat bites. I got another load of weathered plank for the next mural, from Eric's mill one morning, and he was jockeying his pulp loader alongside some big sticks of pine when I hauled in at 5:30 AM. Too early to run tedder and bail hay, but he was busy in the cool. These are long days for farmers, and sawyers. Max said his horses were beat by noon.

Mr. Mann spent the week at a friend's cottage on an island off Port Clyde, and I felt obliged to examine the living conditions. Out of season, the quickest way to Port Clyde is down Rt. 1, but the aggravation factor of endless summering Winnebagos sends me round about. You can dodge the high road, and enjoy the bucos, by zigging and zagging cross lots.

Cross lots from here to there runs through Torbert's dooryard, and I stopped for fresh goatmilk yogurt and raspberries, and offered Jim a getaway excursion. He jumped into the pickup before second thinking had a chance. Lucky thing I had him for navigator, as I'd have missed the crucial turns in Jefferson and Warren. Jim has commuted this way to teach Spanish in Rockland, and knows all the dialectics.

Below Thomaston, along the St. George, the air began to cool, and smell like my childhood. In Port Clyde the air was heartwrenchingly nostalgic. We found a place on the municipal pier to park, and I sketched the Harley belonging to a big woman in black halter and white pedalpushers, black Doc Martins. She pointed out that the bike Elvis was riding on my T-shirt was the same Heritage as hers. We picked up four chicken lobsters for $24, and a rack of Carabasset, while we waited for Mr. Mann.

That salty dog puttered up in a fine-lined well-dory (a modified Swampscott, I judge), and took us out around the island for a tour. It was nicely cool and rolly on the south side, and the lobster gear so thick you could walk on the buoys. Marshall Point light beamed steady, even at high noon, with only the smoky southwester hazing the horizon.

Then our skipper ran us up on the inside beach and yarned the dorette out the haulout. A beer keg for float. We were ready to party. But not before we were vetted by the island guardians, elderly rusticators who keep an eye out, and know all. All islands are incestuous. We waved and made the noises, and set off along the woods road.

The cloistered fug of island spruce and fern brake. Trailing "Spanish" moss, and mired ruts. Old high clearance junkers are used on these summer islands, to lurch and grind loads of groceries in, garbage out, footsore both. Then abandoned, romantically. With all the rain, the island road was mostly muck, except for stretches of naked granite, sparkling in the dapples. We tiptoed around the sinkholes.

"It's easy to find the place. Just take every left turn," Mr. Mann said, taking a right fork. He told us there is reputed to be a hidden meadow in the middle of the island. I'm wondering if we should be dropping bread crumbs.

Amanita muscaria is doing a circle dance under the trees, and the salt-tanged magic of place is working on us. The occasional mosquito, too. When we finally break out onto the south side we are ready for beer and lobster, and the salt breeze.

Because I'm conjuring with lobster images this month, I want to have a photo-op with Homard, and I pose the bugs artfully for Digital Olympus. I've been thinking about a Lobster Buddha (Homardisattva?), ascending to Nirvana on a steaming bed of rockweed, but with the critters actually in hand I wonder if Lobster Yoga isn't more apt.

Hope Bunker taught me how to hypnotize a lobster when I was in short pants, and I actually hustled some bucks at the Rockland Lobster Festival, as a teen, doing tricks with lively unpegged lobsters, while I sold soda on the pier. It was called pop, then. I put one of these critters in the position (a headstand), and do digital studies. Can't you see a big one on the lawn?

The trouble with intimate photography is that the subjects begin to take on personalities. This may even happen with human models. In this case, when we dished out the bugs, I recognized the boys and girls I'd just gotten to know. I'd never had that experience at the table before. Even so, I managed to shuck their juicy guts, and gobble with glee.

While Jim and the Mann strolled around the backside, I hunkered down in the bayberry and did a painting of the lighthouse. You could spend all Summer doing rock studies on Hupper Island, or the twists of stunted spruce. I settled for a quick take through the bayberries. Building up my inventory of cliches. Lobster boats throttling and pirouetting through the scene. The Monhegan ferry hurrying past.

Painting meditation stills the mainland noise, and I think of all the seekers who have sailed out to Monhegan, to grasp at this essence. Brine over ledges. Ocean light between black spruce. Bold shores glinting. The sparkled air full of fish stories. Wheeling gulls over Novi boats. The rattle of surges on cobblestones.

Artists manipulate stock images, trying to recreate the paradoxical balance of relaxed ecstasy that comes over us, on this coast. The magical commonplaces of Maine. I get transported on these scrubbed stones. The longing that engulfs me is unrequited. It's about the women of my childhood, who loved these places, and are gone, I tell myself. But I felt that same longing back then. Ruth Moore described this coast as, "the home you long for, even when you're there."

We never get it, of course, in our heads, or in our colors. It's the spiritual quality of the place that haunts us. If I have a holy land, it's somewhere just over this horizon.

Being busy little materialists, we try and buy a piece of it. Set a Summerperson down on a wild shore, and he wants to build a house there. I've never understood it. I'd hide the houses to have the view. But ain't that just like grubby materialists? Trying to buy their way into heaven. When all they have to do is close their eyes and listen to the surges.

So. We ambled back across Hupper in the declining day. Took snaps of the jitney barges in the harbor as Mr. Mann circled us round. Then plunged back into the humidity. A long amber sunset turning hayfields into radiant glories, and bringing out the horse flies. I was completely full of it by the time I got home.

Two days later Ross and I drove his air conditioned limo down to Owls Head to escape another scorcher. Mainers aren't above recreating at the shore when it's too hot to think. We just sneer at outastaters who do it.

Going to Hope's House is always bittersweet for me. Tom has left everything exactly as it was when I was a kid. I think it was that way when he was a boy, and his aunt Flo owned the place. The tocking of the kitchen clock takes me out of time. The smell of the back entry makes me want to weep. We make ordinary conversation, and it feels elegiac. Damnfool memory.

The main house needs a new roof. Tom is trying to make more pasture where the orchard was. Roses have buried Hope's garden. So and so died. I wander around with Olympus, and can't find the picture of my childhood. The closest I come is a shot of the backhouse (privy) behind the barn. Now superseded by indoor plumbing. Is it about meditations?

Tom takes us up to Al MacNeally's store cum restaurant for lunch, and the ladies ignore us as strangers. The accents are Southern (beyond Kittery). There are hats, T-shirts, and other trinkets for sale. The chowder, when we finally get it, is excellent, but the smalltown flavor has evaporated.

This is the same place where I had my first solo shopping adventure, having rowed across the harbor and hiked up the hill for milk and the mail. Where every one knew you, and every move you made. The last time Ross and I were here Al was in the store, and he didn't even recognize our names, although our families summered alongside each other. He couldn't remember the prices of anything either, but that's an old Maine trick.

We took a short drive around the new construction sites, which are swallowing what's left of the Head's back acreage. Huge buildings, as everywhere. Hope's House is still visually isolated, set back on its narrow slot of land, and you could almost forget the condofication, but for the traffic.

I had a childhood epiphany on the site of an abandoned farmhouse next door. Now Tom Yates lives in a grand house there. I used to come here in dreams, but the last time I slumbered here it had turned into a honkytonk, the foreshore jammed with settlement. I haven't been back, by night. Now it looks that way in daylight. The harbor is wall to wall boats.

Who am I to begrudge others their dream of the coast of Maine? Even MBNA. It does seem strange to me that we are hellbent on building million dollar cottages all over our sacred places, however. The lighthouses are still there, promising a saving light in the deepsea darkness, but they have all been automated, and the parking lots enlarged for tour busses.

Tom thinks this may be his last Summer at the Head. His wife, Ruth, who has been bedridden with MS for 30 years, really doesn't want to leave their winter home in Falmouth again. That would truly mark the end of an era. It was Tom who taught me about boats and motors, and Owls Head without him would be hollow indeed.

Places of the spirit are inside us, of course. But we confound them with rare beauty in nature, because such places open our eyes. When the bankcard magnates buy up all the scenery we are driven back on our own resources, and air conditioning. Ross and I took Rt. 17 home, with the Camry's compressor going full tilt.