Musing -- on the editor's mind

La Conner is 320 miles north of Harpswell, Maine. That is why the mixed hardwood-conifer forests there were so familiar to me. The 10 years I lived in Minnesota and when in Michigan during the 1980s, I walked in woods where the evergreens were Eastern white pine, northern white cedar and red juniper. While white pines could be towering, hardwoods dominated the forest: sugar maples, red and white oaks and beech.

On the train going north from Boston, I thought: The hardwoods of the northeast. How much farther north is La Conner than Boston or Portland, Maine? (I hadn’t yet calculated latitude differences.) Approaching Exeter, New Hampshire, it was all hardwoods all the time, very beautiful and very different from the Pacific Northwest.

Getting out in Portland, I was far enough north that conifers were standard, holding their own with hardwoods. By Harpswell, conifers start to dominate the mixed woods system: Eastern white pine, northern white cedar and spruce, distinctly different from the darker, larger, dominating Douglas-fir, hemlocks and spruces in our neck is the woods.

La Conner is by far the farthest north I have lived. When in Pioneer Park or walking Valentine Road or in Mesman’s woods, there is always a sense of weight and darkness from the Douglas-fir, spruce, western hemlock and western red cedar which dominate over alders, birches, cherry and maples.

Part of the east coast sensibility, which I have not seen in my limited time and with my limited view of the Salish Sea, is boats moored in harbors and bays. One rows out. That was the scene flying over Boston harbor and in every bay and cove in Maine.

Family tells me that the town of Harpswell is some 128 square miles in area and has 216 miles of shoreline, more than any town in the country. Its population is almost 5,000, scattered up and down peninsulas and across islands. The farms are small. In my time there I never came across the population or commercial center. I don’t know where the post office is.

We did visit a lighthouse. Photographs included very white winter scenes.

Not for us mountains of snow and icicles hanging down the roof line to the ground from waves crashing against the shore before the lighthouse.

And, they do fish, bringing up both crabs and lobsters.

My sister and brother-in-law have found an east coast paradise, if not the center of the universe.