Rising. Elizabeth Rush

      After lunch, Laura and I split from the group for an afternoon kayak. We launch from her house, which sits just across the Sprague River on a small mound of land overlooking the marsh. Laura’s ancestors were some of the first Europeans to settle permanently along the Gulf of Maine, but she grew up on the other side of the continental United States.

      “When my parents got married, they drove west until they hit water,” she tells me as we dig our paddles in deep and pass the breakers where the Sprague pours out into the gulf. “Too much family back here.”

      I pause and watch a line of terns riding the air currents that rise from the waist-high waves as they curl and break. In the sheltered dunes between the beach and the marsh, a handful of piping plovers are beginning to fledge. Where the cordgrass gives way to woods, pitch pines twist along the edge of a slice of gray granite that looks like a whale’s back.

      The scene reminds me of the opening lines of one of my favorite children’s books, Robert McCloskey’s Time of Wonder. He writes, “Out on the islands that poke their rocky shores above the waters of Penobscot Bay, you can watch the time of the world go by, from minute to minute, hour to hour, from day to day, season to season.” As a child I used to camp with my family a hundred miles north of here, on the quiet side of Mount Desert Island. Returning to this rocky coast makes me feel a little as if my life is on repeat, as if what has happened is happening again. Though when I think about the preliminary findings procured on the marsh that morning, I realize that my familiarity and comfort are illusory; the Maine of today is not the Maine of my youth.

      Together Laura and I cruise along the offshore spine of Sewall Beach, the largest undeveloped spit of sand in the state. Like the Sewall Woods in nearby Bath, this place is named for her family. You can’t throw a stone around here without hitting something tied to the Sewall legacy. It is a history that Laura finally started to embrace about fifteen years ago. After decades away, working on environmental projects around the world, she returned to Maine, and has begun to act as a kind of liaison between this marsh and the surrounding community, carrying news of the environmental changes taking place in the Sprague to the folks those changes will most immediately affect.

      “The people who live out here, from Phippsburg all the way to Small Point, they are starting to pay attention,” she says. “In part because the road out the peninsula is already flooding during storms. They even formed an advisory board on the ‘New Environment’ and asked me to be a member. I’m not sure what the committee will be able to achieve, but at least they’re asking the right questions about mitigation, marsh migration, the impact on local fisheries, insurance, infrastructure, all that stuff.” Laura is easily one of the most well-informed and deeply committed citizens I have encountered since I started writing about sea level rise. She filters every bit of information she receives, every lived experience, through the lens of climate change awareness, and in so doing gives the seemingly cataclysmic a different sheen.

      Together we travel between two distinct but continuous realms—the land-bound marsh and the open ocean. Out here the surface of the water is pure glass, spotted occasionally by the passing of a cloud. Every time I pull my paddle from the sea a tiny wave travels outward and dissolves. Something happens as I nose my little boat closer and closer to the blue-on-blue horizon, where water and sky become indistinguishable. I begin to feel as though I am paddling straight into the heart of a Rothko painting, or a landscape where all traces of memory have been wiped away. The sun strikes the bay, filling my vision like a bell, and the morning’s worry momentarily disappears.

      It takes us about half an hour to reach the Heron Islands, a set of four granite outcroppings approximately a mile from the shore. Laura has never been out this far before in her kayak. As we approach the islands she tells me that the Herons aren’t known, despite their name, for wading birds. Twenty feet to my right, the snout of a horse-head seal slowly rises out of the water. He stares up at me and I stare right back, watching the little wakes that radiate out from where his breath hits the sea.

      This day is anything but ordinary, I think. Dulse-colored plumes of rockweed rumble beneath our bows as we slide between the largest of the islands, through a slender channel no wider than a school bus. I look down into yet another little universe at the edge of things: the seaweed below waves brilliant maroon, and a couple of rock crabs scuttle sideways. For a long time, Laura and I say nothing at all. Wordlessly, we head back toward the shore. About halfway there she dips her hand into the water and out come the words, “I’ve never felt it so warm before.”

      And with that the spell is broken. My hand follows hers, breaking apart the clouds that slide across the surface of the sea. I think of my childhood summering along the Maine coast. The gulf was usually so cold I couldn’t bear to stay submerged for more than a second. Now, as I look down at my fingers comfortably wriggling below, I realize that this too has changed.

      These days all it takes is a little unusual warmth to make me feel nauseated. I call this new form of climate anxiety endsickness. Like motion sickness or sea sickness, endsickness is its own kind of vertigo—a physical response to living in a world that is moving in unusual ways, toward what I imagine as a kind of event horizon. A burble of bile rises from my stomach and a string of observations I have been hearing in these parts adulterates the joy of our afternoon adventure. Because the Gulf of Maine is warmer than ever before, the bottom-dwelling cod, pollack, and winter flounder are pulling away from shore. Because the Gulf of Maine is warmer than ever before, the shrimp fishery has been closed for years. Because the Gulf of Maine is warmer than ever before, phytoplankton are disappearing, green crab populations are exploding, and sea squirts are smothering the seafloor. Because the Gulf of Maine is warmer than ever before, the lobster are moving into deeper, cooler waters, keeping the lobstermen and women away from home for longer. Because the Gulf of Maine is warmer than ever before, everyone and everything that lives here is changing radically.