By Joseph Monninger
Photos by Cig Harvey
From our February 2025 issue
A bald eagle visits me every day. I have learned to recognize his voice as he approaches, a querulous complaint against the crows that usually accompany him like a desperate ring of courtiers vying for his attention. To people who will listen, I have mentioned that to be an eagle is to be harassed from sunup to sundown. If the crows leave him alone for a moment, their place is taken by herring gulls cursing his existence. No one likes an eagle except other eagles, it seems, and the eagle shrinks down when the birds dive at him, this bandit among the large pines. Half amused, half ashamed of his bulk and thieving nature, he settles on the topmost rim of branches, a Billy Budd foretopman, his eyes scanning the cold waters of the Pennamaquan River as it merges with Cobscook Bay.
I count on his visits and keep two sets of binoculars nearby, wanting to have a pair within reach wherever I happen to be on my two acres of land in Pembroke, a small community that once took its living from the sea. I am aware that the eagle has become something of a project for me. My son, when he calls from his home in New Hampshire, asks if I have seen the eagle that day, and I know that he is asking out of kindness, out of an acknowledgement of my age and the emptiness of my daily calendar, and yet I can’t help playing my part and relating to him the itinerary of the eagle’s visit. Yes, I tell him, the eagle came early this morning, stayed for nearly 15 minutes, and yes, it was on that perch on The Eagle Tree, the name I have for the bird’s favorite pine. Last year, a storm took down the tallest pine overlooking the water, and I worried that the eagle would find another place to rest while the crows and gulls hectored him. But the eagle has taken to the new tree, and so it is a safe, light topic that my son and I can explore without any of the weightier subjects that circle around us. We both know that this beautiful land overlooking this vibrant estuary is the place I am making my last stand. I live here with stage-four lung cancer, each motion, however minimal, underlined by a dry cough, my fist to my lips, my heart and head and breath paused for a moment while I wonder if and how I will continue.
So the eagle is useful and welcome. It is understood now that I am becoming mist, the ghost of my youthful life, an old man who swims in the sea and rivers to bathe, a rough birch cane in my left hand to steady myself and sometimes to help me stand. I have chosen to live this way, to live near the sea without running water, to surround myself with simple beauty. My days have been emptied of all fanfare and complication. I play chess on the computer, read great gulps of books, nap, and study the weather both in the sky and in my chest. I watch the Red Sox replay in the early morning, at first light, and find I have not given up rooting for our beloved nine. I was an Orioles fan as a boy, but 40 years in New England has changed my loyalty. The players, however, are becoming mist as well. My childhood hero, Brooks Robinson, died this past year, but I see him in the young Sox players, see myself, honestly, standing at the plate, the smell and taste of dirt and chalk and a dense wool uniform heated by the sun. Those memories are here too.
In the evenings, I like a cocktail. I drink it on the porch overlooking the water, and if there is a wind from the northeast, I find it hard to warm myself. On damp days, I build a fire in a Jøtul 118 woodstove, a boxy cast-iron stove with an inscription in Norwegian that might serve as some sort of motto for men my age: I bank my fire/ set for the evening/ when the day is done/ God grant my fire never die out. Then, more reading, or maybe a movie, and dreamless sleep. I leave the door open but the screen latched, to catch the air, and some hours later, I wake to the sounds of gulls again, their shadows passing across the floor of my small cottage like ash following wind. This far east, the sun rolls quickly from the water, and the day begins again, filled with waiting, filled with the small occupations of someone using time not as a measure, but as a companion.
The middles of days are hardest to fill. The world is at work during those hours, while I am released of that burden.
I keep a seal count, encouraged whenever I spot one of their dark heads, typically a harbor seal, peering at me from the water, and note it down as if by doing so I will arrive at some understanding of the health of the seal population. Lately, local fishermen have observed sharks in the bay, more numerous than usual, they say, and one seaweed collector claims he saw a white shark take a seal 50 feet off his shoreline. I tend to believe such things because it makes life here more flavorful and dramatic, and I cannot quite dismiss their talk when I am chest deep in the water myself. A man may look a great deal like a seal, I imagine, and I have no strength to resist even the mildest attack.
The middles of days are hardest to fill. The world is at work during those hours, while I am released of that burden. I give myself jobs to do, ones that I can accomplish in the small bursts of energy that sometimes arrive. I perform these tasks to have something to report if anyone asks what I have been doing. Stacking wood, I say, aware that any Mainer understands that as an ongoing necessity and will let the conversation end without more questions. It is useful work, we all know, and something we will be grateful for when the weather cools. I stack wood as if the individual pieces must be ordered and properly fit together, as if what I am putting together isn’t meant to come apart when the season changes. I look too long at some segments of wood, mesmerized at seeing the tree in the part, the age in the grain. I will see these pieces again some night after the geese start moving, after the orange flame of the woodstove converts them to the heat of cast-iron figures formed in relief on the side of my stove.
Years ago, when I was a young father, I wrote MAGIC WOOD on a single piece of cord wood each year and buried it deep within the stacks, an inducement to get my son, as a boy, to carry wood up from the basement. If he found it, as he always did, he could trade it in for a trip to the movies or a day at a local arcade, his pleasure at each year’s discovery fresh and triumphant, his glory at having a day on his own terms a victory for children living beneath the endless tyranny of their parents in every corner of the globe. He typically set it aside and kept it as a contract between us, proof that he deserved something for the work he contributed to the house’s warmth. Now, in the piles I stack, there is no magic wood except when I come across a bolt of special beauty, the drama of seed, earth, rain, sunlight, snow, decay, weakness, imbalance, and final fall, represented in the weight I swing in my weak arm when I toss it into place.
Every two months, I travel to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, in Hanover, New Hampshire, to visit my oncologist. The modernity of the hospital complex, its great wide windows and tiled floors, its welcoming bathrooms, provides contrast to the simplicity of my seaside cottage. I receive a CT scan, a blood draw, an infusion, then a half-hour consultation with Dr. Dragnev, who oversees my treatment. He asks various questions about my breathing, about the cough that consistently clogs my lungs, about my bowels, my weight, my appetite, my sleeping. He is a practical man who nods at my statements. He has explained that it is unlikely I will collapse all at once, but beyond that, he has no bankable predictions. It is a long, dull story, but I have been on a cancer-fighting regimen that on average adds 19 months to one’s life. I am at three years presently, not a record, as Dr. Dragnev reminds me, but not bad either. The day will come when my current approach will no longer work, and I will face the decision of how much more to endure, how hard to seek additional time, whether I can say to myself, and to my loved ones, that I have had enough.
After the Dartmouth visits, I return to Maine with a pocketful of hope. I have two more months at least, I tell myself, and I try to make resolutions for the upcoming days. I will stretch more, eat better, take whatever walks seem within my ability. I will keep a neater cottage, make an effort to store things where they should go. Maybe, I think, I will chart the birds I see around me, keep a careful record, but this plan, like all my plans, is undone nearly as it forms. Ambition, even applied to the smallest tasks, no longer seems to spark in me. A kayak rack I had looked forward to building now seems an attempt at order that is chiefly an illusion. I suppose I know things can fall apart no matter how carefully one plans, so to go through the process of acquiring lumber, screws, and so on, seems hollow. Simultaneously, I understand it is important to keep active, to keep pushing, despite what feels like futility. Often, I end up in a stalled middle ground, not committed to the project but unwilling to let it go. I nap instead. I tell myself tomorrow will be the day to start.
If I were a different sort of person, I might try to fill my days with social rounds, but that has never been my inclination. Even as a healthy middle-aged man, I was never comfortable with the peck and paw of social interaction. A woman I once knew in Vienna, where I taught for a time, said to me, “You don’t sit well.” It was an offhand remark, but it has haunted me more than she could have ever guessed. I don’t sit well. She was correct. And because of my relative isolation here, because of the simplicity of the way I live, I am able to indulge my preference for solitude without apology. My time is my own even when I don’t spend it particularly well.
Some days, I go out on a boat with my neighbor, Tim, who never fails to remind me of Steinbeck’s friend Doc, a biologist and specimen collector who is the unofficial mayor in the novels Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. Tim is a native of Aroostook County, born there when his parents fell under the thrall of the Nearings, the back-to-the-land couple who wrote Living the Good Life and thereby launched a generation of people striving to inhabit more meaningful lives. When Tim’s parents bought a parcel of land far up in Maine, the house they occupied had a tree growing up through the living room.
I have gone with Tim to collect eels and hermit crabs. In some ways, he is a bounty hunter. After an order arrives on his computer or phone, he strikes a price, and then he goes to look for whatever has captured the client’s interest. He sells seaweed and clams, sponges and scallops. He has sent eels to a client who hoped to keep them in a basement sump-pump drainage basin, sponges to a Korean cosmetics manufacturer, the elements of a biology-class aquarium — green crabs, sea worms, and coral — to high schools all over the United States. He has sold seawater to a firm that needed high-quality salt water and baitfish to party-boat captains in New Jersey.
I go on these trips as an observer and to keep him company. We have set lines for hagfish along the New Brunswick border and pulled lobsters from the middle of our bay. Behind the wheel of his boat, he reads the waters, pointing out shoals and islands, troubles and landmarks mixed together. I turn to him when something puzzling occurs in the water off my land. This past week, for instance, the bay’s surface has been blasted by small fish fleeing something below. They create a sound like sand being thrown with great velocity against the water. Afterward, the sea settles and sometimes a seal’s head emerges, a fish held crosswise in its mouth, while at other times a pair of cormorants, called shags up this way, paddles through the disturbance, their necks craned like question marks asking something the menhaden failed to understand.
In January or early February, the scallop fleet arrives. Our tiny harbor of simple mooring rigs fills quickly with boats from farther south on the Maine coast. Pennamaquan Bay is a good anchorage, with Leighton Neck and Hersey Neck closing together to prevent winds and seas from mauling the fleet. Despite the relative calm the headlands create, a storm took one of the boats last year. I missed the actual sinking, but I woke to see an antenna protruding from the sea’s surface like the ghost of sailing masts from an earlier century. Two lobsterboat crews towed the sunken ship to shallower water, where they pumped it dry and raised it without great difficulty. The event, naturally, became the biggest news up and down Leighton Point Neck, bigger even than the murder that occurred several years ago when one local woman shot and killed another for odd cash, drugs, and ancient animus.
I have chosen to live this way, to live near the sea without running water, to surround myself with simple beauty. My days have been emptied of all fanfare and complication.
From my deck, I can sometimes watch the scallop boats work at first light. This close to land, the crews rely on divers, local men in dry suits who comb the bottom of the seabed for scallops. Farther out, the draggers plow the bottom with their coarse nets, destroying habitat essential for urchins and other species. Tim thinks the solution might be underwater drones, small mechanical pickers that could be piloted by local teens paired up with old lobstermen. It’s a forward-thinking idea, but he does not have much faith it will be pursued. Old fishermen are slow to change, and the money for a good scallop haul is the financial blood of the small fleet.
The ships are gone by late February. The freeze used to come all the way down to the scallop boats’ moorings, ice sliding like a blue-green sleeve over the arm of the bay, but in recent winters, the water has remained free and flowing. Snowfall is limited. I remain in the cottage and watch the weather, checking the radio to see if the weather report conforms to my observations. Night comes quickly, and I always buy lamp oil when I visit any hardware store during that season, filling the reservoirs through a small funnel that hangs on the wall of my shed. With the woodstove going, with the lamps burning, I am aware of the quality of light I have chosen for this primitive living. From the sea, I am sure, my home appears as a soft haze, the white smoke from the stove rising from the chimney, then, like a small bird, deciding by the first current of wind which way it must inevitably travel.
This past week, Steve Brown came to brush-hog my two acres. We do it largely to keep down the colonizing aspens and to give a sense of orderliness to life. Steve has the most perfect Maine accent one can imagine, and I always make an attempt to engage him simply to hear the dialect. He is a conscientious man on a tractor, one who knows the idiosyncrasies of granite shelves and half-submerged boulders. In truth, he knows the topography of nearly all the land in this part of the world, having mowed it or lumbered it beside his father. I don’t need to remind him of the burial plot in the center of the property, one with a cracked headstone that marks the resting place of Harriet Carr, dead sometime just before the Civil War. No one is quite certain where Harriet Carr came from — some say she died aboard a ship and was buried on the first convenient hillside — but Steve knows where she ended. Goldenrod marks her place, left tall from Steve’s thresher blade. Birds land on the flowers’ heads, hang carefully as the plant decides to accept their weight, then skillfully launch themselves into the air like children sliding from a swing on the upward arc, their bodies temporarily suspended, neither falling nor rising.
Geese arrive in the days after Steve finishes, looking, I suppose, for new green grass. They avoid the meadow at its wildest, not trusting how the dogbane and desiccated lupine shafts form hide-outs for potential predators. I wake in the morning to the murmuring of the geese as they graze. They sound contented, like country burghers too ample in the belly and fussy about their footwear. Remembering a lesson I learned in San Marco plaza, in Venice, from an old guide many years before, I throw an oven mitt in the air to make the geese think a hawk is stooping at them. It worked miraculously with pigeons but not, it seems, with geese. Sometimes, they shy away from the mitt, but mostly they continue to feed, fouling the ground with an army of caterpillars formed of their waste. They make apologies by flying past my cottage at sunset, framed by the moon or a fleet of clouds as light begins to fall into the ocean.
On the very best mornings, when I feel strong and hungry, I drive to Karen’s diner, located on the main drag in Calais, a stone’s throw from New Brunswick. Every old man likes a breakfast diner, and I am no exception. I order the same thing every time, never sure I will have another chance to eat at Karen’s. Scrambled eggs, link sausages, home fries with onions, homemade Texas toast, an orange juice, and plenty of coffee. I don’t put my phone on the table, or read, because the break- fast, eaten among my fellow Mainers, is delight enough. The same waitress serves me on each occasion, her efficiency and skill a pleasure that I remember even as she makes it familiar once again. I know she will return with two coffee pots, one in each hand, orange lipped for decaf, black for high-test. And when it is time to pay, the bill will be plucked from a blue pad and turned upside down on my table while she says, “No hurry, make your meal.”
Then, home. Down the Charlotte Road, past the Moosehorn wildlife sanctuary. If the weather is good enough, I will park near the Seeley Flowage and take a swim. The water is filled with cattails late in the season, but bathers keep a sandy section clear. I strip out of my clothes, down to the bathing suit I wear underneath my shorts, and I wade out, the pleasure of water encouraging me to go deeper, to let my feet swing up so that my body might become weightless. When I am well launched, I roll onto my back and float, water stopping my ears, my white, formless belly an island of flesh in a dark, quiet sea.
Joseph Monninger passed away on January 1, 2025, at age 71, a few weeks after this issue went to press. Monninger authored more than two dozen novels and other books, including a 2023 memoir, Goodbye to Clocks Ticking: How We Live While Dying. He taught writing at Plymouth State University for 32 years. After his cancer diagnosis, in 2021, he settled year-round in Pembroke.
