East coast of America, beautiful in the Maine

IN Maine, on the western shores of the Atlantic, daffodils were blooming with the same enthusiasm as on our eastern shores a month ago.

The poet Wordsworth would have greatly enjoyed them, as did I.

There was not, as yet, much else in the way of colour in the Maine landscape; the birch trees still are bare, the oaks and maples of cool temperate East Coast America have not yet put on their leaves. This contrasts with the trees at home, where the beeches along our stream are burgeoning and wild flowers are everywhere, even if only pavement ‘weeds’ or the foliage of the diverse, specialised plants that clothe stone walls as summer approaches.

But the views on the Maine coast are lovely, nonetheless, a sort of stark, misty beauty. My old friend and host, an American writer, describes it as “more like Scotland than Ireland at this time of year”. And he’s right. Although Camden, Maine, is only 44.2 degrees north, against 51.6 degrees north in west Cork, we have the warming Gulf Stream while Camden’s offshore waters are severely influenced by the cold Labrador current — severely, if you are a sea bather, felicitously if you are a fisherman, because it delivers nutrient-rich waters making Maine the third most important commercial fishery in the US, famed for its lobster, Atlantic herring, Alewives and Blueback herring that spawn in the rivers and return to the sea.

The upstate woods, as Robert Frost, the New England poet put it, are “lovely, dark and deep,” but pine forests tend to be boring, and one drives through tens, even hundreds, of miles of conifer corridors in America’s northeastern states. None of Wordworth’s “hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines/ Of sportive wood run wild” “or “pastoral farms,/ Green to the very door”. However, in autumn, the deciduous woodlands of New England are world famous for their brilliant colours.

Meanwhile, looking toward the sea, one finds that The Gulf of Maine, like Roaring Water Bay in west Cork, is relieved by islands of all forms and sizes, lending the seascapes interest and relief. At the end of summer, many of these islands, which are often forested, are ablaze with colour. It is, when one thinks of it, extraordinary the leaves of trees should, in their death throes, present such pyrrhic beauty. We know it is simply a chemical process, unlikely to have been provided by the Great Creator for our human delight but, on the other hand, we have the Eden interpretation. To fly over New England in the fall must be one of life’s most wonderful experiences.

A few days ago, en route from Cork to Boston, I was reminded of how awesome is the canvas of the earth when one sees it laid out below. First, Britain, then Greenland, then Canada, the Gulf of St Lawrence and the northeastern United States. Oceans and deserts are dull from the air, but farmland, mountains and ice-scapes are fascinating when the skies are clear.

The bare granite mountains and vast tracts of uninhabitable landscape remind one of how tiny we are on the face of this earth. Yet, in changing the climate, we become dangerously larger than those landscapes, ourselves.

After the white wastes of Greenland and the icebound sea, we reached northern Canada, granite-grey mountains with glaciers in the valleys between and, an hour later, I found the first straight line, a road travelling into the infinite distance, a white trajectory on the canvas of white and grey and, then, as we moved farther south, the blue meanders of a thawed river.

Then, the north coast of the Gulf of St Lawrence, islands of white sat in the vivid sea which became deeper blue and cobalt before we reached the southern edge, almost ice-free, and a strip of what appeared to be beach but wasn’t — simply a coastal shelf — fringing the shore. Then, snowbound roads and the first herring-bone patterns of snow-mantled villages built on spurs off the highways.

Earlier, flying from Cork to Heathrow, I saw the land below surreally patterned with huge fields of oil-seed rape, rectangles or squares of vivid, cadmium yellow between the greens of grass or browns of tillage. In the sunlight, it was easy to be enthralled.