Mid-Coast Maine, Moose Meadow Pond, and the Wellfleet Oysterman

Moose Meadow Pond, ©2025 T. Agnew

Portland, ME

During my recent visit to Mid-Coast, Maine, I thought about Henry David Thoreau as I gazed out over Moose Meadow Pond.

A forlorn goose idled in the middle of the pond, threw her head back and called to her vanished mate.

I watched her all week in the same spot on the lawn, standing still as a painting, leering out over the pond. When she took to the water, she swam to the center and idled, plaintively calling to the sky.

Then one day I saw her across the pond perched on Eagle Rock (named after an eagle snatched a gosling and pecked it apart). A mallard duck had joined her, and they sat preening each other’s feathers. Animals comfort each other, even if they’ve never met.

Geese are sentient, extremely loyal, emotional creatures who connect us to nature and mate for life. Every year, they make a 1,400-mile southern migration with strategic aerodynamics that leave pilots dumbfounded. When they lose a mate, they mourn like children, tucking their heads, floating in circles or standing still in the same spot.

On my first few days here, I thought of my father, who is still mourning the death of his wife (I wrote about this here). Like the lone goose, he spends his days sitting at the kitchen table, looking into the trees, trying to understand loss.

Around 1849, after Thoreau’s famous two-year stay at the cabin on Walden Pond, the writer moved back to Concord, MA, to live with his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his family.

Thoreau built a cabin at Walden Pond, and lived a life of self-reliance and introspection through observation of nature and society (he was known to study bullfrogs all day). His book, Walden, became the diary of his time there.

Contrary to how book publishers sold his pond story — that he was a recluse living in the woods, far from city life — Thoreau’s cabin was a forty-minute stroll to Concord, and less than half a mile from the Fitchburg Railroad. He often had visitors — Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, to name a few.

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Maine in July is divine and my writer’s paradise every year. It’s the first time I’ve been here in the summer, in the past favoring fall or early spring. Yet, summer here is mild. One morning this week it was forty-eight degrees when I woke, and on other days the temperature never went above 80 on the hottest days.

Lost in serenity on the far end of the pond, ©2025 T. Agnew

The blue sky, constant puffs of air filled with lupine, mayflowers, and phlox, and the serene nature that surrounds the pond remind me of my childhood in upstate New York. Idylic, sensory-rich, remarkable.

Along the acres of my friend’s property along Moose Meadow Pond, Great Blue Herons soar over the glass surface, their sleek forms replicated in a blurred, watercolor copy, as though a brush slipped on the canvas.

Beavers traverse from shoreline to shoreline, their bulky heads slicing the water like knotted tree limbs.

Like Thoreau, who often strolled to neighbor’s houses after a day spent observing and writing for the day, we visit new friends and a long-time friend who is ill. My visits here involve myriad porches.

We sit across from each other on a stifling closed porch. A translucent, blue-feathered hummingbird outside the window prances from beak hole to beak hole. My friend wheezes and grunts and he speaks when he has a surge of energy. Besides that, the silence is thick save for the vibrato of the bird’s rapid wings.

When we say goodbye, I’m certain I’ll never see him again, and I squeeze his hand a little more intensely. He was never a hugger, so our handshake suffices, and his look says farewell.

Mainers embrace a community spirit and look after each other with the loyalty of geese. On the pond, the neighbors on the other end are in constant awareness of what neighbors might need.

The texts are hilarious:

Do you hear that beeping in the woods?

Yeah, but I don’t see anything on this end. You?

Nope. Must be a car off the road.

Just geese squawking here. Damn pests.

When my friend’s husband ran his truck off the dam and into the canopy cliffside just weeks ago, the neighbors were there. One, a local contractor, pulled him out of the gulley with a crane, no judgements or explanation needed.

New England folks invite you to dinner spontaneously and without pause. When we dropped mason jars of homemade relish at neighbors, they insisted we come to dinner that night.

The view from the porch off the Kennebec River, ©2025 T. Agnew

On the Kennebec River dotted with lobster traps, we sat on their open porch, facing the riverside. Mammoth quartz boulders lined the river’s edge, and the tide was out, exposing the lower cliff side.

Again, hummingbirds vanished in a blink and reappeared at the feeder, dipping into the sugar water with strawed beaks. As the sun sets, we hear the buzz of insects and cicadas, and then nothing but silence and the wisps of a gentle wind.

We discuss the history of Maine, and Thoreau comes up. John Young Newcomb, my friend’s grandfather, was the subject of a chapter titled The Wellfleet Oysterman of Thoreau’s book, Cape Cod.

Thoreau, in his inherent wonderings, stayed with Newcomb for a time. In his late 80s in 1849, Thoreau describes him as “grizzly-looking,” leery of strangers, but later hospitable enough to invite his visitors inside after some hesitation.

An oysterman by trade, Thoreau observed Newcomb’s memories of long-ago oyster beds, the once‑rich industry, and his superstitions about their vanishing.

I found irony in Thoreau’s notes that Newcomb’s breakfast table included eels, green beans, and applesauce — a tribute to my friend’s own culinary excellence. Her kitchen, like her grandfather’s, always has freshly picked blueberries, homemade zucchini relish, and other delicacies, but no eels.

The Aurora Borialis in Maine, ©2025 T. Agnew

Thoreau wrote of Newcomb’s self-deprecating humor, calling himself a “poor good‑for‑nothing crittur,” yet Newcomb’s other memories varied from the Battle of Bunker Hill to George Washington’s pass through Boston.

Thoreau saw Newcomb as a living metaphor of Cape Cod’s past, a historical memory conjoined with environmental and cultural change. The oysterman’s quiet solitude, his rickety speech, and his recollections guided Thoreau in weaving together themes of human experience, aging, and vanishing coastal existence.

Maine’s coastline along Cobscook Bay and the mid-coast region experiences significant tidal fluctuations, sometimes reaching more than twenty feet. These intense tides, manipulated by the moon’s gravitational pull, affect the ocean’s water levels and influence wind patterns.

Back on the pond, sitting on the porch overlooking the water one evening, a sudden icy wind shifted through the far pond side, nearly lifting us up off our chairs. The salt air filled my lungs as though the ocean replaced the pond.

This was a tide change, triggered by the pull of the moon and sudden turning of currents screaming against the quartz shorelines.

Years ago, I witnessed the Aurora Borealis on Moose Meadow Pond, and now I experienced the tide change. I’ve known my friends for twenty years, and this sudden knowledge — even to her — of deep connections with Henry David Thoreau is perhaps the most wonderful gift of all.

This year, this visit is again bittersweet after decades of friendship. On this visit, I say goodbye to some, hello to others. This year, I witness cognitive decline, slower movements, a fading of moments, a fading of past.

This year, Henry David Thoreau and the Wellfleet Oysterman lept from his books into my heart.