Salt Air

{Little Cranberry Island, Maine}

We left the Scamp on the farm and sped up through New England to our final destination: Little Cranberry Island, Maine. P's extended family still owns the marvelous, ramshackle cedar shingle house his great-great grandfather built there in 1904, and save for wifi and a washing machine, not much has changed. Not much changes on the island, period. Little Cranberry is one of the last year-round fishing community islands in Maine, and it's the hardscrabble island existence that makes it as romantic as it is rough.

P's childhood friends from the island are lobstermen now with their own boats, their own families. They keep Dominique chickens so that when the channel freezes over in January and the island is cut off from the rest of the world, there are still eggs for breakfast. It is a hard place to live. But in the summer the island is vibrant, virile; the fishermen's co-op is humming, the little lanes are abuzz with barefoot children racing ten-speeds, and the backyard vegetable gardens are overgrown jungles of squash and tomatoes. August on the island is, quite simply, magical.








I wandered the island with the dogs, picked armloads of queen anne's lace, devoured my father-in-law's anadama bread straight out of the oven, and finally did some reading. P. and I woke to the gulls calling the lobster boats out into the morning fog, out into the cold, black Atlantic. We went to bed with full, hot bellies after enormous meals of chowder and haddock around the spirited dinner table. It was the end of the Scamp adventure, the closing parenthesis on our Great American Road Trip. We were surrounded by family, and we were very, very grateful and very, very happy.

Next chapter: India.