First, a disclaimer: our Town Common, though satisfyingly treed and amply berried, has no resident bears, though some of us may hope for the odd transient, who has a mind to summer at the coast. Still, the nuts and berries found there bring on the mindset of a bear, and so, today I am his or her stand-in; this is my bear’s notebook.  

These paw-scribed pages are rife with record of what we bears care most about: food. Or the promise of it. Enough food leads to fat, and fat is winter’s warm sleep enabled. So this spring walk looks forward to: food. There is, of course, the time-honored, all-season grubbing for insects. That’s reliable in the way grain seems to be an everyday part of a homosapien’s diet.  

But today, I’m not interested in tearing up logs or clawing into burrows; instead, I have purple sweetness in and on my mind. The wide spacing of this pitch-pine forest leaves plenty of light for the brush beneath the pines, and that light spurs the brush below. And each year, that light concentrates in blueberries that begin to ripen in early July, and then come on for that month’s remainder.  

But each year brings also variation – last year’s primo patch is often sparse, and creeping undergrowth can crowd out the low bush blueberries, or spreading tree-crowns can shade out the high bush ones. There’s no regular burning over the brush of the Commons, and so each summer any berry-intent being needs to scope out the best patches.  

When is that best done? Now.  

How so, you may want to know. Later, when the berries are first green, they blend with the leaves, and, from any distance they are hard for a squinty-eyed bear or human to see. Then, even as they go purple and blue, often the best clusters are beneath leaves that have grown dense with summer. But now, amid the pollinating whirr of my friends, the bees, the patches thick with little, white flowers are easy to spot. There, given the annual bee-brought miracle, will be the clustered gatherings of berries.  

And so — amble here, amble there — in these woods, my head swinging first to this side, then to that, I make a bear’s map of these white bursts amid the new green. I’ll be back to each bush in 4 or 6 weeks.  

As your human poet Robert Frost once wrote, “You come too.” Though, when it comes to berries, I might put it a little differently: You come second. 

Public Access to our Intertidal Commons 

Earlier this spring a stir of controversy issued from and around a town plan to bolster water-access and safety with improved parking at Simpson’s Point. The project, approved by Town Council and funded by a mix of monies, drew a lot of interest, in part because it involved something rare — access to the sea we have in common. 

Brunswick, with its 60-plus miles of coastline  has only a handful — eight by count on the town’s Rivers and Coastal Waters Commission’s helpful Guide — of places where a citizen can readily get to the ocean. Neighboring Harpswell, richer in coastal miles by many, has more, though they too are relatively few. That limited access is enough of a problem, but, in Maine, it is given even greater exclusionary muscle by an ownership interpretation now being challenged.  

Current law, last tested in 1989, has it that whoever owns coastal property carries that ownership to the median low-tide line. Meaning that if you are walking or landing in the intertidal zone in front of someone’s property, you are trespassing. No matter that much of the time part or all of this “land” is underwater, and so, part of the common sea. When it shows its face, you shouldn’t be showing your face on it. 

Really? In the great majority of coastal states, the intertidal zone is seen as public, with the high tide line seen as the beginning of private land. 

I realize that our country is founded (and perhaps foundering now?) on the sanctity of private ownership, but to be healthy and just in any measure, that idea of ownership must be balanced by a commitment to what we have in common. I (and many others) would argue that this balance has tipped too far in favor of what a single owner can do with his or her “property.” Maine’s current opinion assigning ownership of the intertidal zone in front of shoreline property is an appalling example of this overreach. 

Sandy Stott is a Brunswick resident, chair of the town’s Conservation Commission, and a member of Brunswick Topsham Land Trust’s Board of Directors. He writes for a variety of publications. He may be reached at fsandystott@gmail.com.