Each summer, when I was a boy, we would drive the long, winding series of state roads to Maine to visit my mother’s parents. Auburn residents, they had a small, uninsulated cottage on Martin’s Point in Friendship. And until my father and my grandmother got on each other’s nerves (usually around day four), the tiny beach out front seemed a version of heaven to me. It had a million rocks for me to throw, including scads of flat “skippers,” and it had tidal pools that put any aquarium to shame.

I learned to be selective, however, about where I played, avoiding the pipes that ran out onto the rocks from various seaside houses. And once a day at low tide, I was sent out onto the seaweed-slippery point to “dump” the food garbage. Others, I saw, did the same. I learned to think of high tide as hungry.

Much of this came back to me recently, when I spent an hour at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art going picture to picture through “As Maine Goes,” a mounted collection of 54 photographs taken by John McKee in the 1960s. McKee, then a Bowdoin College Romance language professor, had set out to document the trashing of the Maine seacoast by a potent mix of development, tourism and a lax belief that the sea or somebody else would clean up all messes. McKee’s photos helped stimulate a growing environmental awareness then; and I found that they still do, even as some of the despoiling has shifted shape and content.

Seeing what’s before you

A confounding thing about what’s before us is its recurrence. Every day — yesterday, today, tomorrow — there it all is … or goes. Its always-there-ness often robs it of impact. Unless it and we are stopped, stilled, framed; then, when we pause to look, we pay attention. Then we may see.

For me, that being held before an image is central to the wonder of photography, why I prefer it to pictures in motion. And that wonder was born anew when I went to see the McKee collection. In McKee’s story-vision of the Maine coastline in the mid-1960s (only a few years removed from my own memories of the Midcoast), there were the familiar pointy firs, the rocks running into the water, the expanse of the sea framed by land’s final trees. Ah, Maine … as it should be.

And there also, because that’s what McKee wanted us to pause and consider, was the strewn trash, the piped sewage, the abandoned sand-saddled cars. Who were these people who strewed their crap around? I wondered; who were we? Have we learned, changed?

On the surface, the answer is often yes. The surface litter has lessened; the pipes are mostly gone, replaced by regulated septic systems or holding tanks; cars get hauled to vast junkyards instead of left in the dunes at Popham.

It is also true that we are now many more along the shore, and, in many ways, our effects have become harder to photograph, less visible. Here’s example: My mother, Maine girl that she was, loved shellfish of all description. She was slight, and so I was always amazed by how many lobsters and clams she could eat at our Point’s beach picnics. My father didn’t love seafood, but he did love my mother, and so he had learned to dig clams, trundling down at low tide out in front of the cottage with his clam fork and seaweed filled carrier. There, having found sign of a bed of clams, he would set to work, and it wasn’t long before he had “a mess” of clams, repurposing his trout-fishing language for this slow quarry.

My point with this little love story is that, despite the trashing of the coast described earlier, the sea was still healthy enough to be bedded with lots of healthy clams in lots of places. Surfaces were littered; subsurfaces, even with all that piping, still had much of their integrity.

The trade we seem to have made over the intervening years is a flipping of problems. Surface litter? Often contained or absent. Water woes? Burgeoning and complex as we ship more and more of our chemical spawn, including plastics, into the ground and into the sea.

I compare that childhood pocket beach front in Friendship with the clam flats of Harpswell Cove, closed now by a toxic chemical brew for well over a decade. And I note that our Maquoit Bay now has closure point of 1 inch on a storm’s rain gauge because of toxic runoff. What does that mean? Simply that anytime a rainfall exceeds an inch, the Bay’s mudflats close to shellfishing until the storm runoff gets diluted, washed away.

It seems that we need another awakening similar to the one John McKee helped us see in the 1960s. This one needs to focus on what runs off from our lives into the sea.

“As Maine Goes” plays off the political slogan “As Maine Goes So Goes the Nation.” Perhaps. The McKee exhibit will be up until Nov. 9. Go see how Maine went and imagine how it might go.

Sandy Stott is a Brunswick resident, chairperson of the town’s Conservation Commission and the town’s Steering Committee for Mere Brook, 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.