The Wrack

The thirtieth annual Laudholm Nature Crafts Festival was a record-breaker and an art-filled, volunteer-fueled celebration.

When I heard that the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge would be celebrating its 50th anniversary this summer, I thought "Cool, and I was there at the beginning."

I remember my family taking a jaunt down Route 9 from my grandparents' house in Kennebunk after a ho-hum conversation about some Rachel Carson land that had just opened up. After a short drive, we piled out of grandpa's Bonneville and walked into the woods.

The day was bright, but the sun was muted by a closed canopy most of the way. We strolled along in single file, following a path softened by pine needles, until we reached an opening where sunlight burst through to the forest floor. The effect was profound: Beaming light, a scent of pine and sea air, and an enveloping quiet that belied the presence of my brothers and me. I've no idea how long that moment lingered or how the spell was broken, but I recall that glade as a cathedral, that instant a locus. I was in awe. In Nature.

Want a wedding spot on the southern coast of Maine? The Wells Reserve at Laudholm features beach, dune, forest, and field.

On December 24, 1968, the Apollo 8 mission team shared this photo of Earth as seen from orbit around the moon.  This photograph has since been credited with igniting the second wave of modern environmentalism in the United States, as people realized that the Earth was a small and unique oasis in the vastness of the universe. While modern American environmentalism has come a long way, it has slowed from a speed run to a painstakingly slow walk over the last few decades.

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 5/24/2015.

The small bird my boys found in the backyard last weekend was olive green with an orange crown like a dirty hunter’s hat. It showed no signs of violence, but it was definitely dead. No rigor mortis, so it wasn’t a winter casualty emerged from the snow. …that’s as far as our “CSI: South Portland” investigation went before I got a shovel and buried the bird six inches under. My seven-year-old placed a cantaloupe-sized rock over the grave and we went on with our day.

It was only after going back inside that evening that I began to wonder what species of bird it had been.

President Abraham Lincoln, February 1865. He looks tired.

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 4/26/2015.

One hundred and fifty years ago this month, the Civil War staggered to a bloody and exhausted end. Our nation lay in ruins: our national psyche fractured, half our economy and infrastructure reduced to ashes, 750,000 battlefield casualties (1 in 10 white men in America of military age lay dead). Why did we fight those four long years, at such cost to country and kin?

On September 26, 2013, the Wells Reserve invited a team of ghosthunters from New Hampshire, the Seeking the Unknown Realm Society, to spend a dark and eerie night poking through the basements, barns, attics and outbuildings of the Wells Reserve.

Accompanied by [skeptical] Reserve educators Suzanne Kahn, Kate Reichert, and Caretaker Ed, the ghosthunters deployed their electromagnetic field (EMF) detectors, infrared cameras, and flickery flashlights across "old Laudholm Farm."

What they found surprised and shocked them.

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 8/17/2014.

Around the time I was twelve, I went through what my parents called “the Indiana Jones stage.” I wore an officially licensed brown fedora, carried a homemade clothesline “bullwhip,” and definitely expected to be an archaeologist when I grew up. I even talked my way into a field expedition to the Caribbean island of Grenada, though I was two years short of their minimum age requirement. Rules didn’t matter – in search of lost tribes, buried treasure, even whip-cracking adventure, I dreamt only of piercing the jungle’s dark heart. Cue the trumpets!

Worn down after many years, the farmhouse north face gets new siding and a fresh set of steps.

Enthusiastic volunteer and proud mom Eileen Willard had her boy "Flip" Baber (Johnnyrandom) help us understand why music in the Laudholm barn sounds So Darn Good…