Don’t Look Away

by Kate Woodworth

Not everyone believes climate change has anything to do with the ferocity of the storms that hit the Northeastern United States on January 10 and 13, 2024. I do. Not many people care about the fate of North Haven, a small island located about twelve miles from the Maine Coast. I do. North Haven is, for me, a place of pea-soup fog and sun-struck breezes, of bluefish and harbor seals, of buttercups and spruce, of friendship and of freedom. It is also the setting I had in mind when I wrote my novel, Little Great Island (Sibylline Press, May 2025).

During the January 10^th storm, the images of North Haven that appeared on the Internet felt like a chronicle of all the devastation climate change can bring to coastal regions: heavy rain, fierce winds, and record-breaking high tides. Buildings were carried out to sea, roads flooded, and trees toppled. With this storm, the big, amorphous topic of climate change hit home for me. I could not look away, but I learned quickly that others could.

Why don’t more people care about what’s happening to our planet, I asked myself? And how can I, as a fiction writer, get them to care?

In Little Great Island, my answer was to create a small community of characters who all want to save the place they love, although they cannot agree on how—a conundrum that hobbles global efforts to address climate change. No one in my novel is willing to compromise until the threat volume is loud enough that the characters come together as a community rather than fighting for their individual wants and needs. For the climax of the book, I needed catastrophe to strike something or someone that mattered to everyone…but no spoilers.

On the real island, the impending catastrophe during January storms was the fate of Brown’s Boatyard, the waterfront business critical to North Haven’s 400 year-round residents and to recreationists who own or rent summer homes on the island or who stop at the boatyard for fuel, ice, showers and laundry facilities while cruising the Maine Coast. Water covered Brown’s dock and extended across the parking lot. It had infiltrated the boatyard’s shop, where wood and fiberglass boats are built and repaired, and the island’s only gas pumps were in two feet of water. In one afternoon, climate change wiped out North Haven’s only fuel source, only hardware store, only resource for myriad necessary goods and services, and a fundamental part of the island’s economy. It had also damaged a 150-year old building as integral to the landscape of island life as the World Trade Towers were to the Manhattan skyline.

“Heartbreaking” was the general consensus once damage could be assessed. My own heart was fractured, and yet when I mentioned the damage to Maine’s working waterfront to friends – both in the Boston area and across the country – I was met with responses that ranged from obliviousness to a calloused insistence that insurance companies shouldn’t reimburse “those people” and that the government should pay for them to relocate. That suggestion disregards both the humanity of North Haven’s residents and the difficulties encountered in places like Newfoundland when rural communities were resettled in urban areas. It puts in place the comforting distinction between “us” and “them”: They suffered damage, not us. They need their lives uprooted. Not us. We don’t need to feel for their fates. We are safe. We can look away.

But can the people of this planet afford to limit our caring to “us” and either ignore “them” or dehumanize them to the extent that we suggest they be plucked up and moved like objects?  In Little Great Island, my answer is a definitive no. Everyone who cares about the fate my imaginary island needs to face adversity together and not as a collection of individuals focused only on their own wants and needs. My hope is that this message can be extrapolated to the global community.

On North Haven, there was no time for philosophical questions: another storm was on the way. While on my fictional island, the community becomes increasingly divisive before coming together, members of the North Haven community quickly showed up at Brown’s Boatyard with food, tools, skills, and hugs. Everyone shared the same commitment – to save the building from the impending storm – even though the question of whether it could or should be saved in the long term remained unanswered. More importantly, the Brown family’s loss was everyone’s loss. One family’s grief was felt by all. The distinction between us and them simply did not exist.

Whatever the psychological mechanism is that allows humans to dismiss extreme drought, raging forest fires, unprecedented storms, or record-breaking temperatures as something that’s happening to them, over there needs correction. There’s no science behind this assertion, nor is there a practical solution; it’s the purview of fiction writers. We are the ones who can be compassionate witnesses. We can keep strengthening our innate ability to look, to notice, to feel and to tell rather than turn away. We can urge our readers to practice empathy rather than judgment or knee-jerk solutions. As writers, we can’t fix the world’s problems, but we can remind our readers to be their most noble selves, not only with those closest to them, but with everyone, no matter who or where they are because, after all, Maine’s coast is Massachusetts’s coast. When a forest fire rages somewhere, the smoke is in all of our air. When Inuit communities can no longer travel by ice, all shorelines have a problem: their ice melt is our sea level rise.

On North Haven, high tide on January 13 was a few minutes before noon. Forecasts predicted a peak storm surge of 3.5 feet on top of the king tide, which is an exceptionally high tide that occurs during a new or full moon. Three hours before high tide, a post from the boatyard read, “We, along with our incredible community, have done all we can. It’s up to our ancestors.” These ancestors included the generations of Browns and other families who called North Haven home. Specifically, it included ancestors of the fifth-generation business and the late Linda Crockett, whose purple chair was placed by a window at the boatyard, where she used to wait out storms and this sense of the ancestral presence, dating back to the Red Paint People, is strong in Little Great Island as well. Community includes those who have come before and those who will come after, just as it includes all races, genders, and ages. We’re all in this together.

As the tide rose, reports of damage across the island and along the coast trickled in. Ramps torn loose from docks washed up on distant beaches. Smaller structures along the shoreline fell into the sea. In some coastal communities, the working waterfront infrastructure – the docks and businesses necessary for fisheries, ferries, boat building, repair and maintenance – were destroyed. But Brown’s Boatyard remained standing. As Foy E. Brown, a member of the fifth generation of Browns to work the boatyard put it, “It worked because the whole town turned out for us.”

Kate Woodworth is the author of Racing Into the Dark (EP Dutton) and the forthcoming Little Great Island (Sibylline Press, May 2025). Her short stories have been published in Quarterly West, Cimarron Review, Shenandoah, and others. She lives outside Boston with her husband and her Maine Coon Cat wannabe, Tully.