Frank Burroughs, winner of the 2009 John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing for his work *Confluence: Merrymeeting Bay,* spoke about it and his newest book, *The View From Here, Reflections on the Deep North and the Wild East* at the Curtis Memorial Library on Tuesday, March 11, 2025. The Burroughs Medal has been awarded to luminaries such as John McPhee and Rachel Carson. It was said that, among her many accolades, the Burroughs Medal was the one Rachel Carson coveted. It was a privilege to hear Frank read and tell stories. .

"Guzzle." Why Books Are So Much Better Than The Internet.

Benet Pols March 14, 2025

guzzle (guz’l), n I. n. 4. A drain or ditch; sometimes, a small stream. Also called a guzzen. Halliwell. [Prov. Eng.]

Or why books are so much better than the internet.

It showed up a few times in Franklin Burroughs’s John Burroughs Medal winner, Confluence: Merrymeeting Bay. For instance, “In May when the wild rice and bullrushes are just stubble on the mudflats, (carp) become active, feeding up into guzzles as the tide rises, fanning out as it covers the flats.”

The context reveals that a guzzle is something that maintains some amount of water even when the tide is out, but how it is distinguished from a runnel, stream, or rivulet was hard to tell. The lessor of the four? Or perhaps somewhere in the middle. Certainly not larger than a stream or a creek. But what exactly, I could not tell. More important what are the origins of the word?

Later I gathered it may be bigger than a runnel, a word I had heard before. I had read about eels inhabiting tiny runnels “of water not deep enough to cover their backs.”

The dictionary that comes baked into my Mac wasn’t much help. Although it’s never great on etymology it does have a pretty good thesaurus. Good enough that you can usually back out distinctions in meaning from the collections of synonyms and antonyms

The on line dictionaries were terrible. Able only to give just the shortest of shrifts to the possibility of guzzling or gobbling food, “gourmandizing.” But really the on line sources just wanted to tell me about booze. A fine topic in the right context but pretty tedious once ads for shot glasses and what-not started rolling in to crowd out what you really want to know.

The internet is hell (he wrote on the internet).

But then the unabridged Century Dictionary, 1914 edition, in 10 volumes with companion volumes on proper names and geographic names, graces a full shelf and half in my home. It is old and looks impressive. You can find it listed for sale for two-hundred dollars or so. One-fifty seems like the low end of what current owners hope for. My practice, if selling, would be to aim even lower. But at three feet of shelving and weighing in at eighty-four pounds it is difficult to see the margin. After shipping and the hassle of packaging are considered, the effort and cost of getting it to a buyer make the curb seem like a likely option once the personal representatives of my estate arrive on the scene.

But now, I have another good reason to just let it sit there until the next time the internet fails me:

guzzle (guz’l), n I. n. 4. A drain or ditch; sometimes, a small stream. Also called a guzzen. Halliwell. [Prov. Eng.]

Postscripts

I. As it turns out Frank Burroughs was equally curious about the word guzzle and had traced a similar path to find its meaning, though he consulted the thirteen volume Oxford English Dictionary, along with the four volume Dictionary of American Regional English.

Had I had the patience to read all the way to the end of Confluence before embarking on this search I would have learned Frank had done the research for me. In an essay near the end of Confluence Frank writes about what he calls OGL, or Old Growth Language. A glossary of sorts tracking the origins and use of regional language around Merrymeeting Bay. OGL, he writes is “something deeply rooted in a location that hasn’t been drastically disturbed for a long time; something less frequently met in the present than in the past, and that may not be met with at all in the future.”

It is difficult not to draw parallels between the loss of habitat at Merrymeeting Bay and the loss of language.

II. Frank Burroughs has a new book out: The View From Here; Reflections on the Deep North and the Wild East. This new collection includes brief essays originally published in Down East magazine's "Room With a View" column and a selection of previously uncollected essays. Ranging from coastal South Carolina to Northern Quebec, and from his childhood to the present, these essays meet at the intersection of human history, natural history, and biography.

Frank read just recently at Curtis Memorial Library from one essay about work he had had as a young man in forestry in Northern Quebec.

III. A Room With a View in Down East is currently written by my sister, Mary Pols. I should have gotten a photo of the two of them together.

IV. Down East Books had had plans to re-release Confluence in August 2025 but those plans have evidently been put on the back burner, which is a shame. It is a book that everyone who loves the natural world, language, and language about the natural world should explore.

V. You can read more of my thoughts on Confluence, The John Burroughs Award, nature writing, Rachel Carson, Merrymeeting Bay and the Androscoggin River here.

Photographing Phototropism: embracing the optimism of a single yellow birch.

Benet Pols February 3, 2024

Tithing for conservation, a tangible response to climate change.

They lie down next to each other in a companionable sort of way, like two lichened old gravestones in an ancient peninsular cemetery, “Tamarack, April 20, 2018, her relict, Hemlock, December 18, 2023.”

One has lain there for five years or more, her branches more or less gone, her trunk moss-covered and softened in places. She shapes herself to the undulations of the earth beneath her. The remnants of her root ball long indistinguishable bits of duff. Her friend, more recently fallen, bears the scar where her tap root was cleaved, her root ball still smells of freshly splintered wood and raw earth. The fungi have not yet begun their work in earnest.

Nearby, their manmade companions, an old boathouse and a small tilted fish house have survived another tide. The wrack line pushed up into the shrubbery is littered with artifacts of older times scrapped by the storm from the very bottom of Middle Bay. Lots of old glass and rusted cans of a great age accompanied a Clynk bag’s load of more recently abandoned containers: twisted tea, white claw, and the ubiquitous woke Bud Lights.

The eradication of iconic structures like the Five Islands Cook House or the Fish Houses at Willard Beach stir contradictions. Destruction porn caught on phones accompanied with impromptu narration is compelling. The ruinous power of water captivates. On the other hand we brood on the acceleration of a once slow moving cataclysm. Even hide-bound ideologues wonder what is next? Their subdivision? Their livelihood? Their insurance policies?

The postcard tidy man made structures at the shore line contrast with the messiness of the woods. Blow down stays down. Dead trees stripped of bark stand as long as they can endure against woodpeckers and other boring critters. There is no cleaning and raking of the forest floors. The only cutting is minor to clear trails and eliminate widow makers.

This is how I first joined the Harpswell Heritage Land Trust. In 2020, I spent inordinate time in land trusts traveling to Blue Hill or Castine solely to check out some new trail in the woods. I picked up the habit of sending along ten dollars as a sort of gate fee. After a storm several years ago brought down some trees, I walked Skolfield Shores Preserve and wondered at the costs of trail maintenance. I sent my $10 with a note suggesting they use it on a can of gas for their crew’s chainsaws. They called my bluff and made me a member.

Why do conservationists, and other land managers, leave the standing deadwood and the blowdown?

It provides habitat for all manner of living creatures. As the insects, moss, lichen and fungi move in it provides food for others. The standing wood serves as look out spots for crows and birds of prey to scout from; others hide out, store food, and find shelter. Along with the moss, lichen, and fungi, microorganisms return vital nutrients to the soil. Blow down becomes nurse logs for their progeny and other plant species looking to exploit the new gap in the canopy.

Succession doesn’t just take place on HBO

Phototropism is thought to provide plants with an effective means for increasing foraging potential, maximizing photosynthetic opportunities. Positive phototropism is the bending of stems and leaves toward the light, particularly toward specific wavelengths. Negative phototropism is the movement of other plant organs, like roots, away from light and presumably toward water and soil nutrients. In short, phototropism s a survival mechanism.

Foraging in this case is an excellent word and not my own. I like it because it gives sentience to the yellow birch, like a dryad.

Three winter storms in six weeks trashed the coastline and left river front communities and businesses reeling. Just this past summer we watched the same dreadful weather borne watery power leave communities in Vermont, and to a lesser extent, Western Maine, bereft and devastated, dependent on bottled water as they pled for federal money to put roads back in place, buildings back on foundations, and to restore public water.

At the moment it seemed that there was a common explanation as to why what happened in Vermont wouldn’t happened here in our part of Maine. You see it was the hilly and mountainous communities drained by narrow gorges and narrow valleys. Picturesque and quaint, these gorges caused all the damage by magnifying the force of the heavy rains. Vermont which used to be immune to major flooding, tornadoes and other perils that afflict the middle parts of the country was different than most of Maine. Vermont had been a lot like Maine—able to endure cold weather and snow because even at their worst winter storms they generally leave structures intact, roofs on and basements dry.

If Vermont was special Maine was even more special.

Until, that is, our winter wonderlands changed. Atmospheric rivers dumped biblical rains. And we recalled that while Maine has fewer gorges and canyons than Vermont, we have tides, and tidal surges.

Where we should have had a blizzard, a snow day, and fresh powder on the piste and in the woods, we had a deluge. What should have been snowpack to replenish aquifers in spring instead scoured the shores of vegetation and livelihoods. We watched the water rising, sand bags being deployed, and our post card scenes disappearing before our eyes.

Like wandering around outdoors, making photographs is a reflective pastime. I find a consonance with natural objects and creatures when I see them through the lens, even rocks in the mud or fallen tree trunks. It brings me closer—it may be just a construct, my imagination—but I feel it. I can be a part of it. The same is true when I look through the lens at a goal being scored, a competitor being chased down the back-stretch, a victory celebration, or the intensity of eyes in completion.

For an instant I understand it.

Perhaps the land trust needed a few cans of gas because the trails were impassable for some folks. There were dangerous branches or whole trunks hanging like a guillotine over trails. Some maintenance would be done so more could enjoy the restorative power of the outdoors. Concrete thinking like this leads me to spells of abstract thinking.

Reflecting on climate change, my role in it and my reaction to it, the only tangible way for me to engage in climate advocacy—without suffering the frustrations of engaging with government—is through contributing directly to land conservation. I feel it is the only real thing I can do. The rest is just noise.

There is plenty of science on carbon sequestration in forests, the importance of salt marshes as ocean levels rise, and the role connectivity between parcels plays in the preservation of species diversity.

But more important for me is the resilience of that yellow birch.

Ripped from the ground when its much larger coniferous neighbor fell some years ago, left clinging to the apex of a disk of earth circumscribing the fallen trunk and torn roots, the nymph found its trunk, just a sapling at the time, perpendicular to the sun. Its own root system, extirpated from all it had known, flailing in the air. But its roots pivoted ninety degrees toward the earth, while its stem lengthened cells on the side away from the sun and bent its spindly stem ninety degrees to reach the light.

Now its trunk is five inches in diameter and the tree rises twenty feet above the edge of the old root ball. It may not reach old age; its weight may surpass the capacity of what earth remains in the root ball of its host.

But for the time being it is a tree, foraging.

Last fall during senior portrait season one of the land trusts put out a call on their social media channels. They had noticed the abundance of photos shot on their properties and asked for a #hashtag, just a little hat-tip to the organization that keeps all these beautiful spots. Spots so memorable that a 17 year old can imagine themselves 40 years hence saying that’s who I was and that’s where I wanted to be.

10% of any fee for portraits—senior photos or any location portraits—will be contributed to the land trust or any public entity that manages the property where the photos are made.

Down by the River, I Shot My Camera

Benet Pols October 30, 2021

Lately, I have been spending a lot of time down by the river getting high school students set up with photos for their yearbooks. I can tell you that the old people in Brunswick (those that went to school here in the 1970s and 1960s) aren’t joking when they talk about the pestilential condition of the Androscoggin back in the day. It stunk.

Now though, it’s kind of nice down there. The color this time of year is great and the bike path, the river walk, the town landing, and Pinette’s Landing all offer picturesque backdrops with the monumental old buildings, funky industrial remnants, and a several interesting bridge scapes.

One of the kids asked me about the building on the right here—-what it used to be? You can’t see it easily from the road as come into Topsham off the Green Bridge. It’s set back a little behind some smaller buildings on Main St., just past the Great Bowdoin Mill (a/k/a Seadogs). While it does a pretty good impersonation of an old mill building recently renovated into something trendy, it’s actually new, built within the last ten or fifteen years. So it didn’t used to be anything. There was something called the “Granny Hole” and a much shorter old truss bridge that used to connect the Great Bowdoin Mill to the chunk of land behind where the old Topsham Fire House used to be at the foot of Green Street..

But it did make me wonder a bit what was downstream on the Topsham side. I have a sister used to own a house on Green St—-first right turn coming into Topsham, goes up and connects to Elm Street—her land went down through some swampy boggy land and to the river’s edge. So I wondered if there’s a place on the Topsham side where you can get down to the river. Turns out there is.

It’s one of those deals between the town, the Brunswick Topsham Land Trust, and a private landowner. It’s a short little trail, less than a third of a mile long that makes a crescent just below, on the river side, of the aptly named Riverview Cemetery. It’s called the Smart Property, though, based on signage, the landowners seem to have a different name now. You can get there from Town Landing Road, which is more or less someone’s driveway, off of Green Street. You’ll want to leave your car elsewhere, maybe on Elm Street. Or, you can come in from the other end of the trail which is at the back end of a parking lot at the River Landing Residences on Elm Street.

Roof line up on Green Street as seen from the short trail along the river front. The trail itself is easy walking, wide. Dry recently, but no doubt can be wet. It has just one short wooden bridge to cross. However the descent down from both sides is fairly steep and would be challenge for someone with mobility issues,

Looking back at Brunswick, the Green Bridge, and the Yellow Mill from a different angle can be interesting. I was surprised when even Da Eye Rize cast a nice rosy reflection of the setting sun.

There was plenty of bird action too though I didn’t catch any significant photos: an eagle took off right above me when I first entered the trail—-camera was still in the bag—but the eagle had the remnants of a fish which it discarded in the river before flying away. Evidently being considerate of the neighbors. Herons, terns, lots of ducks and small birds in the woods that I don't know about.

This patch of water used to be filled with a gruesome foam that in the colder months solidified to a chemical meringue. When the current or tide changed it’d calve, like an iceberg, and show an inside striped with different layers in the most putrid shades imaginable. Not so bad now though.

You can find information about the Smart Property here from the Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust, or from Maine By Foot. And here is some information about the Granny Hole Bridge.

Lannscape Photo. Pennelville Brunswick, Maine.jpg

We Walked Because We Had To

Benet Pols August 29, 2020

Ireland. In the 1970s. Unaccountably that is where these photos took me.

Perplexing because the barn, seen by me a thousand times, and the tree photographed dozens of times, could not be less like the Ireland that it took me too. The rock strewn hills of the Partry Mountains, treeless but for some wind-stunted abstractions, its deep green grass perpetually shorn by flocks of sheep wandering in a steady drizzle or maybe a fog lifted from the grim glacial lake nearby waiting for some quirk of the atmosphere to lift it just high enough up the steep sided valley to condense and drizzle its way back to the boulder strewn earth. The sheep, fractiously companionable, wandered freely. The only sign of humans a spray painted marking in red or blue on their soggy mud-bedraggled fleeces.

How did I get here?

Not the tree. It is a grand thing standing there proudly for all to see. Not the barn. Little thatched whitewashed stone things were dropped here and there around the Irish hills, nothing so imposing as this. Not the nearly cloudless sky.

The shadows then.

But once a day the sun showed itself slanting away from the west called up at the same time every day by some trick of Atlantic gusts pushed through a not too distant fjord, sometimes making a prism of a still lingering rain shower. Forty-five minutes or maybe an hour before the ski darkened and then rain, steady again, resumed its grey work.

Forty-five minutes to bounce a ball in the road—old macadam with its varied pebbles still visible like a crowd of periwinkles following one another over the mild hills and curves down the two mile shoreline of the lake. For forty-five minutes the pumice like surface of the water grew brighter green and even dared to hint at reflecting the odd blue smudges between the clouds. Forty-five minutes to watch the long shadows of the neighbor men stretching out over the road, chasing and catching their makers for just a moment at the crest in the road just to stretch out again behind them as they headed down the hill toward The Larches, the local pub.

The walking then.

Ours is a time of walking.

Theirs was a country of walking.

Cars were few, roads were narrow. Work seemed to be mainly with the sheep or in peat bog. Peat needed a cart but, like the pace of peat burning, the cart seemed fine with a donkey or an old horse to pull it. The neighborhood walked, or biked, to and fro, if it felt the need to move at all. And in the evening when the sun made its brief appearance to call them out, they strolled.

The lengthening shadows took to walks long ago in Ireland. — The lengthening shadows took me back to walks long ago in Ireland.

The same man would saunter by our little house every evening. His shadow stretching out behind him down the slope just to rush up and catch him briefly at the crest of the next hill. Our place stood at the crest of a hill so he would arrive alone to greet us and be joined by his shadow. We weren't to do more than acknowledge the greeting. There was no clear reason for it, just some tacit understanding that he was not approved of. Perhaps our dour and distant landlady had passed some wordless clues to our parents. So we’d move to the side of the road and stop bouncing the ball back and forth. He’d pass by, smile. I see him in a cap, his hands in his pockets and a jacket hanging in the loop of his arm. Shortly, just after dark we would hear the singing wending its way back along that two-mile shoreline.

But for now we would step back into the road and resume bouncing the ball.

And now in 2020 we walk too.

Relentlessly, sometimes with a grim resignation, we walked. The need to do anything but stay inside overcame inertia, indifferent weather, and habits generations in the making. At the same time came a sense of discovery, joy in simple things, the early greening of moss, the trickle of melt water in an otherwise quiet wood, paths through woods that we had not traveled since childhood, stumbling upon artworks placed in the woods to astound the infrequent passersby. It was spring after-all, or what counts for spring in Maine, so the signs of renewal were there. And we were forced outside to greet them.

The photo of the tree and the barn with its long twilight shadows was taken just two or three weeks into the 2020 lockdown. Our local schools had last welcomed students in person March 12th, my wife was working from home, my oldest had been sent home from college. Only I left the house on a regular basis to a work place radically changed where a mood of, at times, grim, dutiful, determination drove us to normalize the abnormal. On the way home I would stop at, a local market with a keen sense of its responsibilities and purpose in this new and peculiar time. I would scout for an available pound of butter, bag of sugar, or perhaps a treat.

And then we would walk.

Sometimes together, sometimes separately. It was not long before we and others stumbled to the fact that the neighborhood streets no longer met the need. The awkward glances exchanged during the pas de deux of greeting an oncoming walker called for new territory. Hesitant parallel steps from the curb to cross the street lest we cross wakes of exhaled breath not yet cleansed by the daylight and breeze, followed by both resuming the curb before some gesture or nod cemented who would cross and who would stay drove us to more far-flung spaces. A short drive and leaving the car by the side of some rural road opened new territory; even there there were others.

An old navy base in my town has a stretch of disused road and paths on the near side of the runways. I would bike out there in the evening. For six weeks I never went on the property without running into a man I know and his wife; sometimes their grown children were along. I have known this man casually since childhood; he’d been an intimidating kid, a little older, quick to take on the smoking habits of his tribe, a disruptive presence in school. Not a walker by nature, he speaks with the rasp of a man who is never far from a smoke. Bundled against the March wind cutting across the airfield his garment was a vintage snowmobile jacket emblazoned with a sled makers’ logos. No hi-tech fibers of the outsider. Nonetheless they too were driven out for ninety minutes in the weak sunlight. We greeted with a nod and a wistful smile, acknowledging another day’s meeting on the little patch of earth that we do share.

I met a neighbor maybe three miles from our block. I asked him if he was going any place special. “No. Just going.”

Coming home from work on a backroad at a crossroad nearly two miles from town I was slowed by traffic yielding for pedestrians. Usually empty, this intersection had seven pairs of walkers making their ways.

After traversing two land trust properties and a friendly farm my wife and I headed to a town owned patch of woods that leads down to the bay. We had gone too far from home to get back in time to make supper so we called our daughter for a ride. Another time bushwhacking through the woods near the shoreline on that same old navy base we got turned around and had to use location services on the iPhone to show us where on God’s Green earth we were.

A muddy afternoon on one of the more obscure trails of neighboring Freeport’s land trust left us starring in disbelief at a mail box with a name, street number and adjacent newspaper receptacle deep I the woods on rutted, rocky, root filled track wide enough to maybe accommodate a 1979 VW Rabbit. It was wet, there was still plenty of snow deep in the woods, the paths were a quagmire, so we improvised wandering through the woods just off the trail.

Yet on each of these walks we met people. There were the hardcores and wannabes, crisp synthetic fibers, hydration systems, and hiking poles to aid the conquest of a meandering path through a copse, but there were also tank tops, faux-camo, and Mountain Dew.

There is an expectation about conserved public land. We are owed some kind of pay-off. But so many of these walks were just quiet, subtle meanderings that I question that perception of accessible public lands.

All the websites, Facebook pages, and campaign materials feature the big pay day: cliffs, waves, mountain tops with water views, kayak camping on remote islands. Make no mistake, a walk that culminates in a crescendo is a fine thing. But if that is all you want you will miss the fine details, the chance “to see the world in a grain of sand.”

skolfield-preserve-harpswell-heritage-land-trust-photo 2nd-4.jpg

And we were working, some tethered at home to the internet, some more thankful than ever just to have a place to go outside the home. A place to give some little normal structure to the grim reiteration of marking time with the statistical recitation of deaths, infections, hospitalizations, and bombastic fabrications.

We needed outdoors time that didn’t require travel. We needed an afternoon walk.

Maine By Foot, a comprehensive town-by-town list of Maine’s many publicly accessible trails provided an excellent source of new, nearby walks. Some stunning and surprising, some subtle and comfortable like that grain of sand. Land trust websites are also a great source.

Rambling through these properties on a nearly daily basis brought forth the true purpose of the land conservation.

So much if what is preserved is not accessible to the public, but that is okay. The land is there for the grain of sand, for the wildlife, for oxygen, and for carbon sequestration. And it provides a generous buffer to sustain what is accessible.

So much of what is preserved is undistinguished: no grand vistas, no water features, no adrenaline rush from the big climb. But there are the shadows, the horizontal light of afternoon.

So much of what is accessible and beautiful isn’t preserved at all, at least not formally. It exists in the view-sheds on the rural roads that are seen more fully at a walking pace that at 45 miles an hour.

Go for a walk. Find the greenest green of the moss, marvel at the bluff that hosted a ski area in your childhood, listen to the throbbing of peepers deep in woods of an old navy base, wonder at the light and shadows. Someone made the effort years ago—centuries even as is the case with the Brunswick Town Commons—to leave it alone just for this moment. Take the moment and you may find yourself carried over the ocean and the years to a roadside in Ireland forty-five years ago.

I take my camera with me on a lot of walks but I don’t always use it. Sometimes I go out for a walk with the express purpose of making some pictures.. Other times I just go without it. In this gallery are photos from the Chase Preserve and Freeport Woods, near Maquoit Bay, the Pennelville neighborhood in Brunswick, Bradley Pond in Topsham, Sewall Beach in Phippsburg, The Commons in Brunswick, Bunganuc, Wildes Road in Bowdoinham and Merrymeeting Bay, Crystal Spring Farm, Merriconeag Farm and Skolfield Preserve in Harpswell, Tumbledown Mountain in Weld, and assorted other places around the area.