We went out to the Nubble early in the afternoon on one of the first warm days of this new season (it was June 3, a Tuesday) and were a little surprised to find all the parking spaces facing the ocean taken, and lots of folks strolling about. The sun was out and the sea was calm, but there were lowering clouds that appeared to be growing in number, and the forecast was for possible showers.
By the time we left, a couple of hours later, clouds were filling the sky right down to the horizon, and raindrops were sending people scrambling back to their vehicles.
Before that happened, though, we got a chance to interview some of those people, and to discover, once again, what a varied crowd York draws, and to be reminded of how very long it's been doing so, and of how faithfully many of its visitors return to it, again and again.
And, of course, we unearthed stories.
Patricia Bly was sitting alone in the driver's seat of her car reading a paperback - what she called a "cowboy-detective" novel titled "Lawman," by Diane Palmer, she told us when we poked our nose in and asked. She was "just getting into it," Patricia said, so she couldn't give us a report on it, but she did very graciously consent to tell us about herself.
A resident of Dracut, Mass., she's been coming to York, summers, for over 60 years, she said, from the time her mother and a friend rented a big house in York Beach overlooking Short Sands and filled it with their families.
Patricia herself would marry at age 24 and come to York, summers, with her husband, renting cottages to stay in when their four children were small.
And as we spoke, Patricia reported, grand-nieces and nephews were renting their own York vacation properties.
Sadly, we neglected to ask Patricia's late husband's name, but we did learn that the Blys ran "Blys' Fried Foods" a fish-and-chips restaurant in Billerica, Mass., for 13 years, and that he died about 20 years ago.
"We had 39 years together," Patricia said, adding, "He was one day older than me."
Their four children were three boys and a girl, and when we asked what each was doing now, Patricia reported that she lives with one son, who works for the Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad Company, that another works not far away in Woburn, while another is a detective in Putnam, Conn. Her daughter, Patricia said, is a nurse's aid in a Woburn rehabilitation center in which Patricia herself works for three days a week.
Additionally, she volunteered, the Woburn son has a son whose job it is to, as she put it, "fly visitors around Alaska."
When we asked if Patricia herself had been to Alaska, she said, "Oh, yes! I went on the cruise" - on the Inland Waterway, that is - "and I loved it!"
On the day we were talking, Patricia was in town just for the day to visit Jean Kaknes, a friend who's a Stage Neck condo resident, and Patricia was killing some time while waiting for Jean to return from a doctor's appointment before the two went out to dinner together.
Our last words together had to do with where in or around York she might hold a family reunion. The family has convened before in the Lake George area, because some of the nieces and nephews are from Buffalo, Patricia reported, but now, she said, "We're thinking about this area."
Made sense to us, we agreed, as we offered our thanks and shared goodbyes.
We next approached four-and-one-half people - young folks, from our perspective - who were surveying the lighthouse and sea from above the rocks at the parking lot's edge.
They were Ed and Alana Dubaniewicz, their one-and-one-half-year-old daughter Sierra, and Alana's sister, Alissa Blais.
The "half" person was the pregnant Alana's not-yet-born baby, a boy, now five months along.
All were actually relatively local in origin they told us - they live in North Berwick now, but Ed was born and brought up in Kittery, and Alana and Alissa came originally from Rye, N.H. - but, after some chat, we discovered that each came trailing some exotica.
Ed, for example, is now a power-plant operator for PSNH, New Hampshire's largest public electricity utility, but, in six years as a Marine, he saw service in, among other places - including some on the East Coast and several in the Middle East - Haiti, Bosnia and Bahrain.
Alissa was just finishing up nine years' service in the U.S. Navy, three of which she'd spent in Japan, three in Washington, D.C., and three at Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii. The Pearl Harbor assignment had been the most recent, and, in fact, Alissa said, she'd just come from there. A Yeoman 3rd Class, she described her job as "basically, a security manager for my ship." And the ship had been the U.S.S. O'Kane, a guided-missile destroyer with a crew of about 300.
Alana works part-time as a dispatcher for the Portsmouth, N.H., Police Department, a job she's held for almost seven years, she said. She also serves as an auxiliary officer, she added, smiling, "when I'm not pregnant." On the job, she's had what she called "probably every experience a dispatcher can have" - a report pretty credible, considering that Portsmouth dispatchers handle fire as well as police calls.
More than a few changes, it seems, are ahead for these folks.
Alissa is leaving the Navy, she said, "because I've been away from family so long, and I'd like to start a family of my own" - and we joked together some about her finding the right husband to get that process started.
Ed, Alana confided in us a little secretively as, with their daughter snuggled up tight against his shoulder, he walked away from us at one point, is now a member of the Air National Guard, and in that capacity will be deployed to Afghanistan for six months in August.
That means, we noted with some alarm, that he won't be around for the birth of their baby in September - and we confessed to fighting back tears at that prospect.
Alana, laughing, asked us not to cry lest she cry, and, back among us, a cheerful Ed gave his daughter a jiggle and a squeeze while saying to her, "Somebody's got to do it, right?"
Sierra responded with a giggle and a gurgle.
See what we mean about stories?
Early in the afternoon on a June day at the Nubble, they're out there, layer upon layer...
