When we first moved to Maine, I was taken with the view from our deck. Out back, the woods sloped down to a river which, in turn, offered a daily pageant of boats. Starting each spring, a rainbow of kayaks and canoes would glide by, performing a little ballet. The choreography of their passage ”“ short stroke, brief glide, bold slice of color ”“ was one of the reliable beauties of the place.

Or so we thought.

After a couple of years, we noticed fewer boats passing by, even on the best of days. We wondered whether the local boat shop had closed, or whether, perhaps, a recent dredging of the river had halted boating. We theorized all manner of reasons why the boats might recede from our view, but came up empty-handed. For no apparent reason, it seemed, the daily procession had vanished.

Meanwhile, I was starting to find the view from our deck a bit sloppy. While woods aren’t generally subject to the same critique as a teenager’s bedroom, the term, alas, applied. Our path to the river had melded into its surroundings, leaving us to improvise our way down to the water. What was once a path had become an article of faith, a matter of guesswork. Ferns had grown tall, leaves piled high, and the dense undergrowth had outgrown its rightful place. Looking down toward the river, we could see layers of forest almost without end.

Then it dawned on me: The boat shop hadn’t closed, nor was the river off-limits for boating. Nature had simply run its course, growing unattended, and taking with it our view. It was entirely possible that the kayaks and canoes were still coasting by each day, masked by our wall of greenery. That was my working theory, at least.   

Armed with pruning shears and handsaw, we ventured into the woods. If there was hope for reclaiming our view, some serious maintenance was in order. We hacked away at the underbrush, tamed the ferns, and trimmed branches that had turned gangly.  We uncovered a path that had lost all definition and freshened its contours.

But the question remained whether so much cleaning could actually bring back the boats.

The joke, it turns out, was on us. We had focused so totally on those boats that we failed to notice the gradual cluttering of our view ”“ a literal case of not seeing the forest for the trees. Truth is, the boats had never left; it just took a different vision, and some pruning, to make them reappear.

— Joan Silverman is a writer is Kennebunk. This article originally ran, in slightly different form, in The Maine Sunday Telegram.