And we're back. After a seven year vacation drought, Mike and I took off for two weeks on the coast of Maine. We stayed at a lovely old inn (Rock Gardens Inn near Bath) and had a wonderful time in almost perfect weather. I had never been to the East Coast before and was wondering if it would be really different from Puget Sound. It was, and it wasn't. The tide, the smell of seaweed and salt water, the boats, the sun on the water....all very familiar. The Atlantic Ocean was much closer to us there than the Pacific is to my home on the protected Salish Sea, but the highly irregular coastline and many islands made it seem similarly intimate and safe. On a summer's day you could easily forget the proximity of the open ocean, although I'm sure it makes it's presence known in other seasons. The rockiness of the shorelines is very much like Puget Sound, and both are sculpted in granite, but the weathering and texture of the rocks in Maine is like petrified wood, glittering with mica. Everywhere there are tiny mirrors. There are also more and much longer perfect sand beaches, with none of the gravel we know so well. Then there are the lighthouses...just as charming as their pictures and way more numerous than I ever realized. Once you see the unforgiving coast you can understand why there is a lighthouse on every point and outcropping. Any random view had at least five, it seemed.
The lighthouses, the general profile of the land, the sail boats....everywhere I looked I saw echoes of the images I have been shown since childhood. Greeting cards, illustrations in my reading books, any stereotype of "the shore" I ever saw drew from these eastern scapes. Finally seeing them in real life reminded me of how far away I felt as a child growing up in the West. We had islands and beaches, but they weren't quite the same and never appeared in ads or the generalized media. The beauty of the Northwest is a constant presence, but it still felt like there might be something wrong with us....we were outside the cultural vocabulary. What an example of the power of image and perception! I have a fresh appreciation for the complaints of ethnic minorities about never seeing themselves on TV.
Now I have personal experiences and memories of the East Coast instead of images, and that feels good. My horizons are broadened.