The Sound of Solstice

Unexpected winter music in Midcoast Maine

This past week, I trepidatiously logged back onto Hinge (one of the Big Three dating apps) and I matched with someone had attended the summer solstice at Stonehenge. A celebration of that moment when the sun aligns with the ancient monument—the moment for which Stonehenge was intentionally erected—summer solstice draws a crowd of thousands every June. And because Stonehenge itself has garnered a loyal audience of pagans, druids, and Glastonbury 1970 veterans, I imagined a parade of rituals worthy of The Wicker Man; mandolin circles, onsite winemaking, orgies in a field of buttercups, and just for good measure, burning a Yule log from last winter. I assumed that my new “match” had ambitious plans for the dark months ahead, so I asked her, “What’s next?” expecting to hear something like, “I’m going to the Andes and trying Ayahuasca for the first time,” or “I have an aunt in Bulgaria with a big boat.”

But when I asked her what would come after this summer solstice trip, she simply replied, “Winter solstice!”

If the summer solstice is a celebration of daylight’s abundance in mid-June, the winter solstice is its emo cousin—a more funereal acknowledgment of the shortest day of the year, which happens in late December in the northern hempisphere. December 21st is when the next winter solstice will occur in New England, and I like to think of the preceding weeks of December as a buildup to this ethereal event. The days are getting darker (an observation that runs through my head in a Frodo Baggins voice) and there’s the sensation that we’re tiptoeing toward an abyss. And once we arrive at the shortest day of the year, everything just stops. There’s a release—our minds and maybe even our bodies knowing that from here, things are going to become the slightest a little bit brighter, day by day. It might sound like gallows positivity, given that we’ve got a solid three months of midafternoon sundowns and frozen ground to look forward to. But by December 21st, when the winter solstice goes down in New England, we will have hit rock bottom, and you know what they say about rock bottom.

Last year, around this time, I decided to begin the upward journey back into the light a little early. A friend had encouraged me to visit Blue Hill—a little peninsula town up in Midcoast Maine, two-and-a-half hours northeast of Portland—and given my interest in contrarian travel to off-season destinations, I didn’t need much convincing. The Maine Coast is basically forgotten by the wider public once the fall foliage has peaked, and what this ensures for those who do travel to the coast during winter is a more natural and intimate representation of Midcoast Maine Living. The pubs and diners that are still open for business are community landmarks, as are the trails and beaches that are still drawing well-bundled visitors. And if you’ve never admired a Maine harbor painted with moonlight, through the window of a waterfront bar, as your second pint arrives, you really don’t know what you’re missing. But there was another reason why I spent a cold, soggy weekend in Blue Hill. I drove up there from Boston because there was a concert happening in town; maybe the most curious concert I had ever heard of.

You see, Blue Hill is home to one of the largest sheet music lending libraries in the U.S. It’s called Bagaduce Music, it took root in the founders’ garage in 1983 before leveling up to a beautiful barn-like building near the center of town, and as of today, the Bagaduce Music archives contain over 1 million pieces of donated sheet music. In other words, Bagaduce is where long-forgotten melodies can survive generational turnover. But simply storing this sheet music isn’t necessarily enough to keep it alive.

Not long ago, with their donor base growing older and the future looking hazier, the Bagaduce Music board started thinking about how they could bring some of this forgotten music out of the library and into the surrounding Midcoast communities. And with that goal in mind, they recruited a new Executive Director named Bennett Konesni, who had studied and organized performances of old “work songs” like farmer’s hollers, sea shanties, and lumber camp ballads. Upon joining Bagaduce, Konesni began orchestrating similar concerts in venues such as forests, churches, harborside pubs, and at one point, on a big row boat near Babson Island, where the attendees sang and rowed—a series sometimes referred to as “Unlikely Music in Unlikely Places.” On the weekend when I was set to arrive in Blue Hill, there was an especially unique Bagaduce Music concert on the schedule. A “Stack and Sing,” in which people would gather at the local wood bank (which is basically the firewood equivalent of a food bank), stack log rounds, and sing old lumber ballads together.

I had to see this. I had to take part in this. During my days as an AMC hut caretaker, I had stacked so many log rounds in subzero temperatures that on multiple occasions, I flung my axe into the nearby woods out of frustration, only to spend the next 10-15 minutes digging it out of a snowbank. Stacking log rounds in winter conditions with new acquaintances and joining together in song sounded like a potential opportunity to fall in love with winter wood stacking again. (I had actually enjoyed the meditative quality of wood stacking for the first few weeks of the job.) The Stack and Sing was scheduled for a Sunday morning, which meant that I had a full day to myself in Blue Hill; a solid window for poking around the local landscape in its hibernating form. All roads would lead to the community wood bank, but they would be meandering roads.

I decided to begin the process of getting to know Blue Hill from a God’s Eye vantage point—the summit of the town mountain, Blue Hill Mountain. This 934-foot tall peak is so integrated to Blue Hill that one of the more popular trails to the top begins in the parking lot of the town post office, and it’s literally called “The Post Office Trail.” It’s always nice to see a municipality embracing landscape features like this, and as I made my way uphill through an initial tunnel of mixed hardwoods, the forecasted rain was still M.I.A. Blue Hill was aglow with pale sunlight at 8:30am, and when I popped out of the woods midway up the mountain and turned right onto Mountain Road, I was treated to an expansive view of the mountain’s summit cone and the sloped meadows beneath it. The landscape up here brought to mind the Pentland Hills of Edinburgh; a great mass of angular grasslands, with specklings of forest here and there. I swung a left onto an unnamed trail that entered the meadows and continued up the mountain on stone stairs that eventually re-entered the trees. By the time I made it to the stony overlook, which offers a panoramic vista of the town and the harbor below, I felt as though Blue Hill had just slapped me in the face. I was stunned. Breathless. In awe.

But I wanted to get all of that out of the way, before digging deeper and exploring the less superlative dimensions of Blue Hill. After cranking out a couple hours of writing work from my laptop at the local food co-op (which, by the way, does one hell of a good savory breakfast plate), I spent half an hour driving south to one of the islands connected to Blue Hill’s peninsula via bridges. Little Deer Island—which is indeed the smaller of two isles named for the local fauna—is home to the Lisa Tolman Wotton Nature Preserve; 42 acres of steep wooded hills and ravines, a white cedar swamp, and of course, bushels of well-hyrdrated green moss. As with many Maine preserves, the land here once belonged to local family who eventually donated it to a land trust, so that others could enjoy the scenery for generations to come. In Maine, access to the outdoors hinges mightily on individual generosity, as we covered back in August. And as I set off into the preserve, with the dense spruce forest practically swallowing me as I entered from a field by the parking lot, I wondered if the majestic quality of Coastal Maine has a way of humbling some land owners, who might otherwise have chosen to exclude the wider public from their undeveloped territory. Obviously there are plenty of gorgeous, privately-owned landscapes throughout the U.S. that remain closed off to the masses, but even in those cases, I wonder how much time the land owners spend on the land itself. Or in the nearby towns, if such towns exist. Imagine owning an entire forest with its own cedar swamp, guarding it with barbed wire and CCTV cameras, and then puttering into the village to get a newspaper and a glazed doughnut, as many Mainers do. At the very least, it would probably be really awkward.

Maine is a peculiar place; a state where could own an entire mountain and keep it to yourself, but where a lot of people choose to share these treasures. As I started my drive back to Blue Hill, racing a 4pm winter sunset, I made a quick detour to one final trail—the short and promisingly named Lookout Rock Trail, which led to the exposed slabs of a massive rock overlooking Deadman Cove. Gazing out over the boreal tree tops at the great expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, with steely rain clouds gathering and snuffing out the faintest tinge of pink on the horizon, I rolled my eyes. Okay, Maine. I get it. You’re hot. Still, most of us are overwhelmed by a great beauty at some points in our lives, and if you’re going to fall like an old oak, it might as well be for Maine. I would have lingered on the top of Lookout Rock, but the sun had vanished, I still had to eat dinner, and most crucially, I had to rest my vocal cords and biceps for Sunday.

The rain finally arrived at dawn, and while it was gentle enough to set my windshield wipers to three-second intervals as I drove over to the wood bank, it was relentless enough to guarantee that my jeans would be soaked after a few hours of stacking log rounds. I parked by a couple of Subarus, squelched over to the wood bank HQ past several long corridors of stacked wood, and I was greeted with two sights that were respectively intimidating and endearing—a mountain of wet log rounds waiting to be neatly stacked, and a group of people in colorful raincoats and work gloves, sipping coffee, making small talk, and passing around a Tupperware container of chocolate chip cookies. I immediately recognized Bennett Konesni, who was taller than I had expected, dressed in a teal jacket, greeting new arrivals, and pacing around the huge wood pile with the aura of a white water rafting guide or a rock climbing instructor; a seasoned professional who was about to show us the way through some serious shit.

We took our positions under Bennett’s instruction, forming a fire line from the mound of log rounds into the open space of the lumber yard. The inital ground level stacking would be done by those of us who didn’t have to worry about excessive bending quite as much, and the taller folk would gather closer to the log round pile, given its height and heft. All that remained was the song. “I thought we’d begin with a selection from the Bagaduce library that’s called, “The Maine Woods Songster,”” Bennett said. “These are songs that were collected from lumber camps in the north woods, over a hundred years ago. You just holler and call back every line. Everyone ready for wood?” A robust YES! rang through the wood bank, the log rounds began moving, and Bennett cried out.

”A is Axes, this we all know.”

And the rest of us threw it back at him.

A is for Axes, this we all know.

”B is for Boys who can use a maul so.”

B is for Boys who can use a maul so.

”C is for Choppin’, which now we begin.”

C is for Choppin’, which now we begin.

”D is for Danger we all stand in.”

D is for Danger we all stand in.

And so it went. We stacked wood and sang wood songs for 30-minute intervals, with rain pattering on our coats, vaporized breath hanging in the air, and something older than ourselves coming out of our mouths. Even with daylight retreating and nudging us indoors, we were out here, in the last days of the year, doing something that would not only make it possible for people in Blue Hill to keep their homes warm during the winter, but which would leave me feeling strangely aglow, despite the grim conditions. Maybe it was the camaraderie, maybe it was the incantation of those old lumber yard songs, or perhaps it was the realization that the Stack and Sing tapped into something beyond the plaid-clad dream of Maine Living. Being outdoors together, in the darkest days of the winter, performing a task with purpose and belting out a song to keep the fire burning, is something that can happen anywhere. You could gather your friends, go to a local park when the fall crowds have gone home, pick up trash, and sing the entirety of Lou Reed’s Transformer together. (“Just a perfect day…drink Sangria in the park…and then later, when it gets dark, we go home.”) Or you could simply gather at a historic landmark with the scenic power of Stongehenge—let’s say, the hilltop ruins of Bancroft Castle in Groton, Massachusetts, which was one of the filming locations for Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women. You could simply be there, resisting the desolation and isolation of winter. Singing. Savoring the sound of the winter solstice.

(For an audible taste of the Stack and Sing, listen to the end of this week’s voiceover!)

Blue Hill Mountain
Hike distance: 4 miles loop
Elevation gain: 909 feet
CLICK HERE for a trail map

Lisa Tolman Wotton Nature Preserve
Hike distance: 2-ish miles loop
Elevation gain: 100-ish feet
CLICK HERE for a trail map

Lookout Rock Trail
Hike distance: 0.6 mile out-and-back
Elevation gain: 127 feet
CLICK HERE for a trail map