The Edge of Maine Read Online Free

us had any sense of its duration. When the engine coughed (was even that reliable thumper preparing to stab me in the back?), I dumped into the tank our last jerrican of diesel, and I worried silently that we might soon run out of fuel. How could that be? Hadn’t I prepared? Done the math? I tried to do the math now in my head and it never came out the same twice. We were all seeing coronas, occasional flashes of light around us. Samuel Eliot Morison has written about the persistence of mist-shawled mystery along this coast, its sailors seeing “fantastic figures in a lifting fog, [imagining] the towers and battlements of a shimmering dream-city; and someone who knows the story will sing out, ‘Norumbega!’” The strobing phenomenon that day was sometimes a comfort—was the sun about to break through?—and more often a terror: What was that? These items we did not see: black cans or red nuns, birds, lobster pots, seals, boats, any way out of our fix. Now and then we imagined we heard a booming sound. We were listening for anything: a foghorn, a gull crying, a ship’s bell, a ship’s engine, surf breaking on rocks, something.
    I can recall my fear in its shaming detail all these decades later. Truth is, of course, that the terror was mostly unfounded. We had a VHF marine radio aboard, and trailed behind us a seaworthy rubber dinghy powered by an outboard. It was improbable, with my family scrutinizing what there was of a horizon, that we’d hit anything. That was the problem: There appeared to be nothing around to hit. And even if there were, our speed was four knots. We weren’t mountain climbers trying to get off the summit in a whiteout, but I was near frozen with anxiety and dread, and decades later, I came upon a piece of writing that suggested the elevator-falling quality of this panic, aggravated by the added dimension of altitude.
    In James Salter’s memoir Burning the Days, he tells of training as a pilot at the end of World War II. One May evening he was sent with others in his squadron on a navigation flight to Pennsylvania, from West Point to Scranton to Reading and home. They left while it was still light and soon were separated from one another. The information they had received about the direction and velocity of winds aloft had been inaccurate, and as the sun dropped and Salter flew west at an airspeed of 160 miles per hour, with “no one to see or talk to, the wind, unsuspected, was shifting us slowly, like sand.” In common with seventeen-year-old drivers and with sailors like myself, pilots at Salter’s level don’t think about what they don’t know, because they don’t know they don’t know it. Call it cockiness or call it blissful ignorance, it is dangerous. “Flying,” Salter writes, “like most things of consequence, is method. Though I did not know it then, I was behaving improperly.” He had failed to pay close enough attention to certain anomalies he might have noticed about the ground unspooling below, and he was unused to flying at night, “a different world” in the dark. “The instruments become harder to read, details disappear from the map.” Then, as night cooled the Earth, a scrim of mist obscured the lights below. Salter, attempting to navigate by the same RDF system that I was using thirty-five years later in Maine, tuned and adjusted the volume to find a clear signal from Reading, Pennsylvania. No matter what course he flew, the signal grew weaker. Now he was watching the clock, and his fuel gauges. “Something was wrong, something serious: the signal didn’t change. I was lost, not only literally but in relation to reality.” Now panic attacked:
    I turned northeast, the general direction of home. I had been scribbling illegibly on the page of memory, which way I had gone and for how long. I now had no idea where I was…. There was a terrible temptation to abandon