It took me a while to figure it out. Was I angry? mad? sad? Wednesday night and all day Thursday I was just out of sorts. I finally figured out my unease. As much as I knew it was coming—we all knew it was coming—witnessing Wednesday morning’s high tide had unraveled me. 

As I stood at the bottom of Bay Road just before the high tide, watching a detached pier float past while the wind buffeted my cheeks, I knew this one was different.

After Bay Road I made my way past the yacht club, where breakers roared up in a corner, soaking the lawn where the two large trees still stood vigilant, although one of them’s roots had become nakedly exposed. 

I couldn’t get down Bay View Street, my usual route, due to a broken propane line. The fire department had us reroute.

When I did get back to the waterfront, I watched the water lapping at Fresh’s front door. Next I joined my fellow gawkers at the public landing, watching picnic tables, benches, and even off-season nav aids floating around the parking lot, surging in and out with the swell, almost reaching the restrooms, where many stood under the eaves, sheltered from the storm’s driving rain. 

Some onlookers even hoisted themselves atop the dry-docked, stacked inner harbor floats. As good a spot as any, I guess. We were all transfixed by the power of the ocean, rising, rising, rising, accompanied by wind gusts that set the schooners lying broadside rocking back and forth, straining at their dock lines. One’s plastic cover was tearing off before our eyes, pieces flapping. I silently gave thanks that my boat was high and dry, inland. 

Later in the day, when the sky had cleared to a cerulean blue with not a cloud, and the wind had dropped to a breath, I took myself back to the harbor, almost as if to confirm or refute what I seen. A friend was also down there—I was glad to have company to witness the lumps of rockweed on the town boardwalk and in heaps at PG Wiley; to confirm that the aluminum pier standing on end wasn’t as it should be. 

My companion told me of the mud and rockweed-strewn parking lot at Lyman Morse, so I had to go see that. Next I walked to Steamboat Landing to see all the ramp pieces dislodged, again—third time in five months?—like children’s blocks. And peering around that corner, incredulously, to see the massive granite towers that days before had held a pier—now sunken and broken, a hazard to navigation someplace in the harbor. Further up Sherman’s Cove I saw two other piers standing on end in the mud.

I walked home, numb. All that evening I found less-than-healthy ways to distract myself. I simply could not take in the boiling mass of energy Camden Harbor had become on Wednesday’s high tide.

It’s not like I haven’t been warned. I’ve studied the high-water and storm-surge maps. And yet. My heart could not take it in.

By Thursday midday I was able to put words to what I was feeling: grief, sadness, worry. These compounded as I looked at beloved spots along the coast—JO Brown’s in North Haven, the Landings in Rockland, where I refuel my sailboat—in my news feeds. Simply put, the Maine coast got pummeled this week. And Mainers got pummeled. 

And here we are, I am, on the even of another storm. Today in town I spied a barge across the harbor, by that pier that got pulled apart—I suspect it was out there hoping to haul up the damaged pier before it got further entangled. 

Back on the south side of the harbor I spied workers on a seafront lawn, picking up rockweed, maybe hoping to construct some further protection for the next storm. At the yacht club a man picked up blocks and other debris from the highest corner of the parking lot. At one garage that had been flooded on Wednesday the doors were open, perhaps airing things out, prepping for the next dousing. At the Waterfront a closed sign hung next to the open front door, with a trailer backed up, laden with water-damaged furnishings. 

Further along sandbags stood ready by first-floor doors, and at the public landing the picnic tables and benches have been moved to the inland side of the restrooms—hopefully out of harm’s way. 

So here we are, between storms. This week we’re just days between storms.

And yet, today it’s sunny, and bright—warm, if you compare it to the way January used to be.  These are challenging and confusing times. Our sense of “normal” is being dismantled storm by storm, day by day.

And that’s my feeling strange. 

It is strange: my body, my frame-of-reference, my “norms” are all off kilter. Just like the climate. Not sure why I couldn’t have predicted how hard this was all going to be. But it is. I know that now, I can feel it. 

How about you?