The estuaries of the east coast of the United States were places of great natural congregation that have become places of great human congregation. Boston and Manhattan, Baltimore and Washington, Charleston and Savannah have been on the map a long time, so long that we have lost the memory of the marshes, swamps, fens and mudflats that lie beneath them, and of their vast traffic of waterfowl, fish, mammals, and lesser life that swarmed there. When you stand on the sidewalk of one of these old cities, you are surrounded by a rich and complex human history that has buried or displaced an even richer and more complex natural history.
Merrymeeting Bay is a different kind of estuary --- a landlocked estuary. That appears to have saved it. It is anything but remote --- it is midway between Portland and Augusta, is convenient to Lewiston and Waterville, and is the forgotten backyard to Bath and Brunswick. Two great river systems --- the Androscoggin and the Kennebec --- meet in it, which would seem to have made it a logical place for early settlement, a point of entry to the Maine hinterlands. But no city grew up here --- the sea was too distant. Docks and wharves were built along the waterfronts of Bowdoinham on the Cathance and Richmond upstream on the Kennebec, but not in the Bay itself. In its general configuration, it remains the broad, shallow, marshy body of water that the first Europeans saw.
You can sit in a boat in the middle of the Bay and feel a surprising aloneness. The shores are a patchwork of fields and woodlots. They imply history, but it is a muted, over grown history. From where you sit, you see no waterfront development, and not much boating. No visible evidence suggests how busy things were here a century ago. Only an effort of the imagination allows you to see logs being shepherded down to sawmills, or schooners under construction in Bowdoinham and Richmond, or headed down through the Bay to the open ocean and the beginnings of their careers. Icecutting, drift-netting, weir fishing, and taking of eels kept the Bay busy at every season, but these activities left no signs of themselves.
What you are mostly aware of instead is a remarkable proximity of the worlds of fresh and salt water. From a single vantage point, you may see a seal or a muskrat, hook a bluefish or a carp. Cormorants dive for alewives in the deep channels; bitterns stalk frogs in the marshes. Eagles, the endangered symbol of our nationhood, seem almost commonplace. When you see one, hunkering stolidly in a dead tree, utterly matter of fact and at home, it is tempting to think that here is an old balance that has always been kept, enabling the human and the natural to prosper in mutual accommodation.
But that is not the case. The eagles and other creatures that you see are not the indications of an unspoiled place, of a human history that has treated natural history with forbearance and restraint. They are, at this moment and for as long as they exist here, the indications of a human history that has begun to earn forgiveness from natural history. We do not know how complete that forgiveness will be.
Old-timers around the Bay still know the lore of a place that was far richer in game and fish. More recent memories recall a place that was much poorer, particularly in aquatic life, than what we now have. Industrial and municipal waste made Merrymeeting Bay into as viscid and lifeless a body of water as anything you would find in the center of a city. When the cleanup began, only thirty years ago, it was not clear that there was anything left to save. No one predicted how quickly the Bay would begin to cleanse and heal itself.
The lovely solitudes and distances that surround you on Merrymeeting Bay may be very temporary. Pollution had one legacy that is paradoxically benign --- it protected the Bay from development. But now the Bay is again becoming a place of great natural congregation. This time, human congregation, recreational and residential, seems likely to follow.
It is a sad and potent fact that our history as a nation has not been kind to the bird we've chosen as our symbol. It has grown so rare along the east coast and elsewhere, that few Americans have ever seen it. How we treat this local outback --- a place that is once again the nursery of eagles --- will indicate the kind of future we have coming to us.