This is climate change: A very wet summer and fall in Maine - The Boston Globe

This is climate change: A very wet summer and fall in Maine

Last July, I opened a closet to take out a dress to wear to a reading for my first novel. I found that everything in my closet, including that dress, was covered with mildew. I closed the door and said to myself, I can’t even deal with that, and put on some just-washed jeans.

My niece and her dad appeared in August for a visit. “The rain is insane, like a monsoon,” I overheard him saying on the phone to his wife back home in New York City.

According to the State of Maine Climate Change Institute, 2023 was the wettest summer on record since 1917, and the second rainiest growing season (May-September) since 1895. After two years of drought, which was scary in its own right, the rain came as a shock. These were interminable, sluicing, violent temper tantrums of rain, as if Poseidon himself had decided to pick up the Atlantic Ocean and dump it on us, attempting to drown us in his fury.

And though we all believed it would end, surely and finally, by the normally dry month of August, it kept on, day after day after day on through September, turning the notion of cozily curling up with a book into something panic-inducing.

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October finally brought us more sunshine, when many of us in Maine got our first ripe tomatoes. But it also was the warmest October ever in Maine and the ground stayed wet. And then it started raining again in November and on into December, turning my yard into a bare mud slick.

When my two sons, husband, and I went to get our Christmas tree for the holiday, we donned our customary muck boots and waded through ankle-high mud to find a tree and hoist it home.

People born and raised in Maine, as my husband, Dan, and I were, are flinty, like the shale that is our bedrock. We’re hard to influence and even slower to warm. Many of us have chains and jumper cables in the backs of our cars and trucks, work gloves on our car dashboards. We begrudgingly accept the terms of our Maine existence: harsh winters, rocky, tree-root-tangled soil, and crashing waves. And a combination of pride and knowing our landscape makes us reluctant to ask for help.

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This past summer and on into the fall, we started to get scared. The normally placid streams and their tributaries to the ocean have remained flooded, many with rushing white water. These high, fast waters are funneling endangered elvers (young North American eels), which heroically made their way up those very same streams in the first weeks of May, back out to the oceans, years before they are ready to go. Along with the elvers, freshwater fish have been dumped into the ocean along with baby pond turtles, frogs, debris, and water striders, among other things. According to the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, large amounts of pesticides and organic matter that otherwise would have stayed in the streams and been absorbed by the soil, plants, and trees at their borders are now sloshing into the Gulf.

Fields of blueberries never got pollinated last summer; most tomatoes never ripened; potatoes got acne or hollow heart; lobsters in holding tanks too close to the mouths of gushing rivers died from lack of salinity; apples got scab; hay for our beef and dairy cows molded and rotted in soggy fields (Maine farmers are now sourcing hay form New York State); monarch butterflies never arrived to lay eggs on lush patches of milkweed; the cloudy, cold, and foggy weather made it hard to grow vegetables, even in greenhouses. The same conditions created poor visibility for fishing boats, which were unable to access deeper waters for their catch.

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To add insult to injury, all summer long and up until early October, no-see-ums (Maine parlance for biting midges), which are normally a July-only plague, proliferated in the damp soil of our yards and gardens and came in through the tiny holes in our screens, attacking us as we slept. This was the first summer of my life I slept with my windows closed; being hot was better than being eaten.

In some ways, it might seem that the rain, as bad as it was, is preferable to the droughts Maine endured in previous summers. But the weird thing I learned from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute is that our ground — large slabs of shale atop a layer of thick clay — can’t absorb water pounding down so intensely. By the time the normal mid-October rains came, there was already so much water soaked into our ground that nothing more could be absorbed. Underground aquifers and wells can’t fill quickly from downpours, which is exacerbating a problem of well water availability, just as if Maine were in a drought. Maine has entered winter this year as a watery, muddy desert.

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What is happening now with the weather makes us, up here in Maine, feel as if we were shaped for a time that has passed. There are no jumper cables or chains we can throw in the backs of our trucks for what is happening with climate change and how fast it is accelerating. No ark we can build from our pine trees that’s big enough to save what Maine means to us up here. All we have at our disposal is our intrinsic flintiness, a willingness to wrestle any problem, and, at this point, our need for help, even if we hate asking for it.

Caitlin Shetterly is the author of four books, including the novel “ Pete and Alice in Maine.” She is an editor-at-large for Frenchly.us, an online French arts and culture magazine for which she writes “Le Weekend.” She has written about Maine, elvers, and birds for Orion magazine.