Captain Keiff on Cliff Island Maine
Like an heirloom quilt the fog covered Casco Bay, heavy and sated with reminiscent smells. Salt, fish and iodine sat steady in the air. Sound seemed to be tethered to its source. No echoes lingering. The normal sea sounds were there, but finite. Like a decision made with no room for question, every noise ended in a dull thud the instant it happened.
Perhaps this is the reason fog seems so mysterious. It takes the normal environment and attacks the senses in an unfamiliar way. For a young boy on a newly built dory, alone on an adventure, fog is the bone in a mystery soup.
I couldn’t see much past the end of the boat, and the top of the little mast was barely visible. But I knew where I was. The white and green lobster buoys bumping the hull as I slowly drifted pass told me that I was no more than 50 yards from the shore of Cliff Island. I knew those buoys well, I painted many of them for Walter over the winter to help pay for the lumber of the dory I was now sailing.
I couldn’t see Cliff Island but I knew the 60 year round residents were all huddled up in their homes, sitting by kitchen woodstoves playing cribbage or talking about going to the mainland to see the new movie, Bad News Bears.
Cliff Island is one of the smallest year round islands in Maine. Though no one will admit it, the fear of Captain Kieff will keep it that way. While I may have been bursting with childhood imagination, I believe I saw the swinging lantern traversing the shoreline as I got within rock throwing distance of the craggy waterline.
Captain Keiff was not your typical pirate. More of a murderous hermit, Captain Keiff was a salvager of no moral character. On foggy and stormy nights the greedy old man would tie a lantern around the neck of his horse and ride the trail along the coast of this little island. Sailors seeking safe harbor would mistake the light as guidance and wreck on the rocks. Captain Keiff paddled his skiff quickly to the wreck and steal anything worth taking. Survivors would be captured and murdered in cold blood.
Captain Keiff buried the bodies in a grassy meadow known as Keiff’s Garden. To this very day Keiff’s Garden sits tended on this rocky little Island in Casco Bay Maine. Also buried on the island is much of the treasure the old captain horded.
Visitors may find gold and silver on the island. A better treasure is found in the mystique of this small village. Foggy days on the coast with glimpses of a lantern swinging from the neck a slope backed horse is the mother lode.
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