I came to Maine armed with the basic knowledge that every summer vacationer quickly learns: that black flies inevitably bring an abrupt end to late-spring picnics in the woods; that blueberry season, though short, is very, very sweet; and that the ocean tides are even more impressive than you can imagine.

What I didn’t appreciate until this, my first winter in Maine, is that this is a landscape of magic. One bright, cold morning in late November I awoke to find the bay outside my window begauzed with three-foot tall curling wraiths of fog, looking for all the world like a sea on fire. This was my first encounter with “sea smoke”, the result of sea water shedding its rising moisture into an overlying layer of much colder, drier air.

Then last week, during one particularly cold day, I looked up during a walk on the beach to see that the entire island of Petit Manan, some seven miles offshore, had been lifted into the sky. This phenomenon, I learned, is well known in deserts and in polar regions, when a steep temperature gradient near the surface causes light to refract in peculiar ways. The result is often a mirage: the shimmering pools of “water” miles ahead on a summer blacktop highway; the “castles in the air” of folk legend.

Petit Manan island, airborne in January

An ocean on fire. Entire islands that rise into the air. Billions of tons of seawater that pour in and out of every cove, bay, and sound all up and down the entire coast — not once a year, not once a month, but twice each day.

All this leaves me wondering: who could have dreamed a world as astonishing as this?

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