Reflections is written by Island Fellows, recent college grads who do community service work on Maine islands and in coastal communities through the Island Institute, publisher of The Working Waterfront.
Scar tissue, I’ve been told, takes time and conscious effort to heal.
I learned this lesson gradually after I tore my achilles last December during a pick-up basketball scrimmage against the North Haven girls team. I had surgery to repair it later that month, with the daylight waning and the deep rest of winter beckoning.
I was reminded that healing is a collective effort, intimately tied to our surroundings.
It meant months of massaging the rigid scar tissue that had formed around my tendon—a gradual regaining of strength buoyed by the support of others, from family who looked out for me in my immediate recovery, to the community on-island which lent supportive shoulders when I needed to navigate my apartment’s stairs during a slick, damp Maine winter.
Seeing my formidable recovery boot, people in passing disclosed their previous injuries—broken bones that left lingering arthritis and ache whenever a storm approaches. Repeatedly, I was reminded that healing is a collective effort, intimately tied to our surroundings.
My physical therapists explained that our body’s instinct is to form scar tissue around the site of an injury. The body calls in reinforcements in a moment of crisis, and the scar tissue knits together a stiff, unnatural pattern that offers temporary support.
But when scar tissue is not realigned in the flow of recovery, the surrounding muscle groups weaken, natural movement patterns are inhibited, and the site becomes increasingly prone to re-injury.
In other words, when scar tissue remains, what suffers most is your body’s resilience—its ability to return with renewed strength and capacity.
Resilience is a term I hear in my work for the town office of North Haven, supporting various community-climate projects.
Often, I come back to questions of how the concept of resilience plays out in practice, and whose obligation it is to prove resilient in the face of increasing climate-related pressures.
I’m thinking not only about immediate rebuilding after events like the January storms, but also how communities cultivate collective endurance for longer-term issues like the risk of saltwater intrusion, aging infrastructure in low-lying areas, and supporting livelihoods affected by climate.
Over the span of the initial data and information gathering phase of the Thorofare Waterfront Project—intended to preserve and adapt North Haven’s response to a changing climate—my role largely has been to listen and organize insights through meetings, workshops, and a community survey.
As I’ve listened, patterns have emerged, along with concerns, memories, and questions for the future of the island:
The tide never used to come up this far when I was growing up. The season for southeasterly storms is getting longer. The water is warmer, and new species are turning up in Penobscot Bay. Are there solutions to sea level rise? What options do we have, and how could we make them happen? We need long-term solutions, and to address the flooding happening today. Raise what we can. Adapt. Preserve. Fortify. Flow.
These sorts of reflections have been stitched together with actions of collective grit and reciprocal care on-island, in response to shared challenges and losses. Resilience cannot exist in isolation. It is an exercise in interdependence.
Without addressing the scar tissue—the impulse to become more rigid, to retreat from one another, to stay static in the face of a rapidly changing climate—we become increasingly prone to re-injury.
Though North Haven has completed the first phase of the Thorofare Waterfront Project in collaboration with GEI Consultants, in many ways the work has just begun.
The issues are not straightforward; there is not a predetermined, one-size-fits-all solution. As we transition to the design-oriented stage of this process, all I know with certainty is the best answers will come through the voices of those rooted in and committed to this place, guided by the relationships and daily efforts that make this island a living, breathing place of memory and potential.
Claire Oxford works with North Haven to shore up its working waterfront in the face of storm surge and sea level rise. She graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies.
