Wally, an elementary school teacher, worked summers, the first several years of our marriage, at Camden Hills State Park, where he manned the booth at the entrance. Doing 16-hour shifts he had several days off every week to work around this place, pounding in fence posts, hilling potatoes, hauling manure. And plenty of hot afternoons to head down to Ducktrap with me and our first-born, where we’d settle in under the trees and cool off in the sea breeze.

By early July in the 1970s the Park was filling up every night, and so were all the motels. Many nights he sent people north, to try for a room as far away as Ellsworth. Several times he’d call me late in the evening to say he was sending a family up to our house to pitch their tent since the park was full.

He enjoyed those late nights, at the end of a day that had started for him at 7 a.m., when campers would wander down to the booth to chat. A couple of families became good friends, visiting us every summer, staying in touch in the winter. Whenever someone wanted to know where they could get to the shore he’d direct them to the Park’s shorefront across Atlantic Highway, or perhaps to Laite Beach in Camden, or Lincolnville Beach. Only rarely, if he really liked someone, had struck up a conversation and thought them worthy, would he tell them about Ducktrap.

Ducktrap was for locals, the Beach for visitors. Oddly, living a mere mile from the Midcoast’s rare sandy beach, we never once took the kids there. As one by one the next two babies arrived and Wally quit the Park to mow lawns, we ended most summer days at Ducktrap. We loved its seclusion, tucked away at the end of an almost invisible road, invisible that is to the crush of summer traffic heading north. They’d have already sailed past it and over the bridge, maybe catching a glimpse of the Trap, but too late to do anything about it.

And we loved the sense of privacy. When you come down to Ducktrap you instinctively seek out a spot of your own. It’s never so crowded that you have to set up your chair right next to another group (no beach blankets at DT – it’s too rocky). The one really busy day was the Fourth of July, when families brought down a picnic and spent the day. We’d come down late morning to grab our favorite spot under the trees; when the boys were older we’d send them down to stake our claim.

It is undeniably rocky, not really a toddler-friendly beach, except at low tide. Though this from my favorite story in Ducktrap: Chronicles of a Maine Village shows that low tide is for little kids; it originally appeared in The Christian Science Monitor:

After striking up an acquaintance with two little girls, Daria began the serious business of loading up her toy Cape Cod dory with sand dollars she found peeping from the flats and with the great empty hen-clam shells she esteems as “dishes.” We grown ups were more interested in the live clams and blue mussels below tide, which were to begin our dinner and lead up to sweet corn, potatoes, and the steak we planned to broil over the blue and yellow driftwood flames.

Ulrich Troubetzkoy and his family had taken up residence in the old brick store at the corner of Howe Point Road and Atlantic Highway. The year was 1947. A cellar hole is all that remains of the building today, that and the charming story he wrote about their summer there.

Since our kids had never visited a real beach, e.g. Lincolnville Beach, they didn’t know about sand. Really. You can ask them. So they threw rocks in the water, learned to swim in the deep channel where the Ducktrap Stream flows into the bay, and yes, collected sand dollars when the tide was way out.

Rosey Gerry grew up on the same rocky beach, he told us, because it was his parents’ favorite escape place, too. Says he hated it because it was so boring. We’d chat over our beer with Cecil and Lucille when we encountered them at DT, long before we’d gotten to know their son.

By the way, if you’ve ever been on one of Rosey’s historical tours of Lincolnville and heard him talk about Ducktrap, you know he’s, shall we say, evolved in his thinking about the place. He’ll tell you how his great-grandparents, William and Lucille Barton, had a farm right next to the Stream, south of the bridge. Read the story in Ducktrap his grandmother, Hazel Barton Dyer, told me near the end of her life.

So that’s another aspect of our own private retreat, one that I only learned about after our boys had grown up, and there was time to breathe. And learn about the history of our town, to hear the stories people had to tell, and to dig into the archive of articles and letters and diaries we were collecting.

Ducktrap’s seen a lot of drama.

Spring freshets that took out mills and the bridge.

Revolt against George Ulmer, proxy to Henry Knox, the Great Propietor who owned the county (Waldo Patent hence today’s Waldo County).

The drowning of four-year-old Sukey Ulmer, daughter of George and his wife Polly.

The landing of bootlegged whisky during Prohibition in the dark of night on DT’s stony shore.

Rosey’s great-grandfather, refusing a doctor to treat his badly-broken leg, dying in his Ducktrap farmhouse, leaving behind a wife and young Hazel

The suicide, on that same stony shore, at dawn on a freezing January day, a day in my memory, a young man I knew.

The hilarity of midnight skinny dippers.

Illicit lunchtime trysts.

A Fourth of July accident involving a homemade cannon that ended in terrible injury.

The everyday, garden-variety tragedy of someone dying too soon, lying in her bed that looked out over the Trap.

On the lighter side, who knows how many babies have been conceived at DT, presumably not on the stony shore.

So yesterday, when my upstairs family piled outside, carrying towels and beach chairs, heading for an afternoon at Ducktrap, I could only smile. Of course, it was the perfect retreat from reality, from our current locked-down, stay home life.

Barely an hour later they were back. Ducktrap, where social distancing had been perfected, was being invaded. Not long after they’d arrived, cars started coming down narrow Howe Point Road. Cars with out of state plates!

Shades of Wally and his long-ago prejudice, his protection of Lincolnville’s own special place!

According to my family, people started swarming everywhere, no one staying safe distances apart. It might as well have been the Bald Rock Trail parking lot on a week-end afternoon. Yes, there’d already been a few cars at DT, but all with Maine plates, and everyone acting responsibly. Now there was no getting away from these newcomers. My family gathered up the kids, the towels, etc. and came home.

Social distancing. Six weeks ago we couldn’t have said what that meant. Now, if someone stops by for eggs (available in our barn fridge through an outside door) and stays to chat for a minute, we might as well be two magnets with like poles, pushing us apart even as we want to connect. Maybe because most of my friends are old like me, hyper aware of the danger this virus is to us, we take the social distance thing, the masks, and the hand washing seriously. We wouldn’t dream of shaking hands or hugging or even coming close, even as we want to with every fiber.

So what’s this with the out of state plates? With hotels mostly closed, these out of staters are most likely part-time Mainers, meaning they have a house here. I know people are quick to say “I pay taxes here; I have a right to be here”, but taxes are only a piece of it. It’s more complicated.

I’ve always considered summer residents to be as much a part of the fabric of our town as we year-rounders. It was a good part of why I chose to write a book about Ducktrap, to acknowledge their love of the town, a love that often focuses on the things we take for granted: its beauty, peacefulness, community spirit, its sense of time apart. One woman told me Lincolnville was the one constant in her family’s life, that they’d lived many other places, but came here every summer. It truly felt like home to her.

But suddenly we’re faced with the reality of our health system. Most of us are well satisfied with the care we get here when we need it. But when we need more – cancer care perhaps, or specialized surgery, or complicated disease – we might go to Portland or Boston. All the virus news we hear is about over-whelmed hospitals, over-worked nurses and doctors. Our hospitals, which are doing fine right now with the cases they have, can’t handle an upsurge.

And careful as so many of us are being, we worry that people coming from out of state, even our summer folks whom we’re fond of, can be bringing Covid with them. Governor Mills says anyone coming into the state must self-quarantine for 14 days. That means you don't leave the house. You don’t go out for groceries, etc.

A friend, talking to an out of state client about whether the couple should return, heard the husband in the background exclaim, “I’m not doing that!” Quarantine for 14 days he meant.

I guess we’re afraid these folks coming north, perhaps understandably wanting to escape their virus-ridden cities, won’t take the situation as seriously here. After all we have only a bit over 1,000 cases, a drop in the bucket of other states’ infections. Why should they have to worry about social distancing here, especially on a beach?

Back in the day, it was Labor Day we longed for, when the lines of cars with those out of state plates snaked their way down the turnpike and out of our hair. But give us a few months of cold, of isolation, of shut down restaurants and businesses, and we couldn’t wait for Memorial Day, when the lines of cars were heading north, bringing yes, their money, but also the exhilaration of new faces, new ideas, the fun of summer in Maine.

Mainers traditional love-hate relationship with the visitors that are our life blood, especially here on the coast, is being strained by this new challenge. We’ll do best if we can look at every person, from here or not, as someone as tested as we are. Loving one another, and all that means, really is the only way we’ll get through this.

Town

Be sure to read this article about the shorefront four plus acres north of Ducktrap that is being offered to the town by Coastal Mountains Land Trust in trade for town-owned acreage on the Ducktrap River. We’ll have a chance to vote on it at Town Meeting in the spring. By the way, the white dog in the photo in the article is my dog Fritz, on an outing, several years ago, with Corelyn Senn

­­­­­­­­­Gardening from Home

Of course, most of us garden at home, but other years we rely on collecting seeds and seedlings, onion sets and seed potatoes from garden centers. Three Bug Farm, located on Hope Road/Route 235, has all kinds of seedlings for sale. Check out the garden centers for curbside service. I found seed potatoes at Green Thumb in Rockport; they only allow 5 people in the store at a time and are strict about it!

The rain and cold seems to have stopped for a couple of days, and the sun on the week-end brought the asparagus tips popping up at last. The raspberries are budded out, the garlic sprouts, which had turned yellow under the heavy leaf mulch, have turned back to green.