Just some new photos of the cabin, property, etc: Enjoy

I am concerned about the amount of plastic (whether bottles, ties for lobster outfits, or even plasticized bait bags) that end up on the beach. I am MORE concerned about the number of plastic summer chairs that end up in the island dump. You cannot repair a plastic summer chair. You can repair a wooden chair. I urge all islanders to STOP buying plastic chairs. Best, EM Burke

Obituary: L. Morrill Burke, February 12, 2013, and what he did at Singing Sands, Long Island, ME

Some pictures of what my father built at Singing Sands Beach and also his property behind the beach.

This is the earliest known photograph of the cabin my father built at Singing Sands Beach, Shark Cove, Long Island, ME. The white door to the leftish of the image still remains. The cabin has been extensively changed over the years. The original "army" barracks windows my father put into the window openings years ago rotted and new windows have been installed. The area to the left of the white door was significantly expanded around 1986, and the wood cook stove I grew up with has been removed and replaced with a gas stove.

The beach, as it has always been, if without the flocks of the Piping Plover. I suspect that when the small red fox hit the island, they made it impossible for the Piping Plover to successfully breed in the dunes; the foxes, who often dig dens in the dunes, would have raided the ground nests.

Why a week 3/4rds off the grid is a great vacation

July and August at our summer cabin have been consistently rented for over 20 years. Due to climate change, we are now offering our place in June, which has had the best weather over all the months in the past three years. Clear blue skies; temperate weather; and freedom from boaters and visiting "tourists." Quiet and loveliness as you may have only imagined.



Our place is not for the soft-handed, nor the too-pampered. This is a place for those people who really want to feel life between their teeth. A week in this place will restore your soul. No, it is not a grand Nantucket house, with fancy shops nearby. It is not Martha's Vineyard. It is not even the fancy Maine "Blue Hill" community. It is far more special and unique. It is 11 private acres, with the largest white sand private beach in Maine, which we, the Burkes share with our community, and yet still retain a sense of privacy. But, there are no automatic hot showers. There are sun-showers. Or, you can heat up water for a private bath on the front porch, at night, under the stars, or, as far as we're concerned, right during the middle of the day. Strip down, get naked, pour hot water over yourself, and soak up the sun.

And for those who have ever wondered what it is really like to live closer to "off the grid", here is your chance, without losing a bit of sleep over things. Waking up in one of the most special places on the East Coast, and knowing one will be spending a good day, even if it is foggy and rainy.



My general experience is that during vacations, I can't really rest if I'm doing absolutely nothing, just having my needs catered to. What I really want is to be re-awakened, enlivened. Time when I can finally find out about the world I am otherwise missing, because I'm so busy working.  Sure, we want a rest, but we want a rest from those hours doing things just for money, which most of us have to do.

It is not just watching the sun rise, listening to the ocean, or taking a private dip (clothed or naked). It is not just sitting on a porch all day. Rather, it is rediscovering what it means to be alive. Not just exercising in a gym, our eyes glued to some tv screen.

Kayaking in a quiet harbor and seeing the wildlife, learning about it. It is having access to a decent home library, or washing  dishes while watching terns fishing for their supper--watching, learning, wondering. A week feeling very close to those daily tasks we have to do, one way or another. A week feeling again the meaningfulness of those daily tasks. 


And still, something to do every day, whether it is boiling water to rinse your dishes, or washing your dishes in the ocean, scrubbing the pots with sand.

Or walking... actually walking, rather than getting in a car, to buy groceries. Or walking to the library. Or just walking.... to beaches to collect sea glass, taking your Maine guide to wildlife to identify plants and seaweeds. Where exercise is related to daily necessary activities.

This is our credo: Life is better when it is connected to what is necessary. It will restore your soul. It will remind you why living can be both work and fun.

Long Island, Maine: Fall & Winter

Fall on an island in Maine is probably one of the most magical experiences in America there could be. Warm during the day; temperate to cool, but not cold at night.

The colors range from still summer green to the fall colors of Maine most seen in the Maple trees, as the coolness breaks down the chlorphyll cells, allowing the yellows, oranges and reds to blazen forth.

It is a time when wood stoves still have a romance, rather than a dire necessity. When candles at night, at least in the country-side and on the islands of Maine, won't ever drown out the night's stars.

The deer snort in the woods. The ravens still call out. The sea pounds a bit more loudly at night, and then quiets out at dawn, when the fishermen head out, and still you can hear their boats putting up and down the bay--not drowned out by the noise of freeways.

Then winter: The snow falls here, as everywhere else, but it is more quiet. More peaceful. The night sky is an historic magic of clarity and stars. Walks down "main" streets are poetically old-world quiet, while the island remains technologically up-to-date.

Experience Maine--the way life WILL be
--Environmentally/ecologically always ahead of its time--along with Oregon/Washington, of the first states to institute ecological statues regarding oil spill hazards.
--Politically and socially astute;
--With vast potential in the country-side, where traditional businesses have been lost, and where land  in a changing ecology will mean much more;
--Were there are mountains, streams, rivers, sea, and an increasingly temperate climate;
--Where having a BA or Ph.D and being a fisherman are not incongruous;
--Where it doesn't rain 3/4 of the time;
--Where people still care about "traditional" people-oriented architecture and fight against huge glass/steel high-rises (though we have some of those);
--Where the food is fantastic and the lawyers are still "your neighbors";
--A culturally very diverse environment reflected in its restaurants and schools;
--An ever increasing bio-awareness around transportation--more buses, and more bicycle and walking paths;
--Long-standing clubs for hiking, bicycling, kayaking, golfing, tennis, running, etc.
--Great new ventures in bio-science and strong businesses in bioscience.

Join us in making Maine, on your East Coast, the ecological fashion statement of the century!

Long Island, Maine Spiders: A Local Study

Last summer I started taking notes about and drawing the spiders I found on our property on Long Island, Casco Bay, Maine. While spiders may spread themselves on the wind, or by having their eggs attached to things that end up elsewhere, they obviously don't fly, so their mobility to other environments is by chance and haphazard.

Sometimes I ended up drawing and or studying other insects/bugs that were right there, in my way, and I just wanted to know about them. One of the most direct ways of knowing anything is to observe, takes notes, draw.

Singing Sands, Long Island, Maine

"Singing Sands Beach, Long Island, Maine". Copyright E.M Burke, JO Burke, AL Burke.

Singing Sands is a beach in Shark Cove, Long Island, Casco Bay, Maine.

South Beach (aka Big Beach, or Sandy Beach) is in Andrew's Cove, Long Island, Maine.

The Burkes own Singing Sands Beach, and the last about 1/3 (toward Singing Sands Beach) of South Beach, of Long Island, Maine. Below is a tax map of the property--Lot 419. The Burkes own to low water... ie as far as the lowest tide at the lowest average tide of the year--in short, "to the Atlantic"

In the image here provided, the easiest way to read this is to follow the yellow line that goes from the top right to the lower left...

Excluded is the "Nubble"... the bud of land, without beach, that exudes from the lower most right hand lower half of the image.

Some history of the beach

Singing Sands Beach and last third (or so) of Andrew’s Beach

By Elizabeth M. Burke, May 11, 2010

My parents bought the Long Island property in 1954. Prior to that, it was owned by the Jones Real Estate Co from 1895 until 1954. Below is a more extensive history of ownership.

My memories of the beach are inextricably bound to my memories of going to the cabin my father built at the island. I was born in 1961, not long after my father started expanding on what he first built, a lobster shack, into a two-room split level cottage (with most of the cabin built of things he hauled from the sea—and the cabin’s construction is really rather remarkable—huge beams resting on each other and hardly a nail to be seen), and so I grew up from my earliest years going every summer to the beach.

The cabin was for many years vandalized over the winter, and we’d arrive in the spring with windows busted out, furniture axed, the like. It was frightening for me to see that. During my youth my father would sometimes get up at night and take his gun with him and walk around the cabin—I presumed because he was afraid someone would try to vandalize the place while we were there.

There were big flocks of sand pipers that scurried up and down the beach at the tide’s edge for most of my youth. Those have sadly disappeared.

Because the mooring in that sandy-bottomed cove wouldn’t necessarily hold tight in a very high storm (why, I think, it has never been a working cove, as Wes Johnson has suggested), my father would wake us up in the middle of the night if one of those storms was hitting and bundle us into his small metal boat for a very rough ride back to Falmouth.

When I was ten, the summer my parents divorced, Andrew and I lived with my father at the cabin for most of the summer while my father built the current “out house.” Dad had found timbers floating in the ocean where they’d broken from a dam over a winter, and we pee-veed them up the beach to the site. It was your usual shitter for many years. We have had a composting toilet there for about eight years.

Andrew got in a leaky dory he’d outfitted with an outboard and putt over to work for Ted Rand or Stanley McVane. Leaky is a nice word for that dory. We’d get up in the morning and the only thing you could see were the gunnels.

I cooked meals that summer on an old wood cook stove. We got a gas stove a few years later, or maybe the same time we got a new gas refrigerator… I don’t recall. I even made bread in that wood cook stove. We washed our dishes on the beach by scrubbing them with beach sand and then rinsing them in the ocean. I hauled laundry to Portland, or washed it on the front porch using an old washer board using the rain water we collected in the old whiskey barrels. I also cut the lawn with a old scythe.

My mother kept the beach property after my parents got divorced and was more welcoming to visitors. Since her death in 1986, John, Andrew and I have maintained the policy she established around 1982—no fires, no alcohol, no radios, no dogs, and visitors between the hours of 9-5 only, plus we reserve the section close to the cabin for cabin users only. There have been times that beach has filled up so much, the sand was covered with people as it is in the summer at Higgins Beach, or worse, at Old Orchard. The cove has gotten twenty boats tied up together and all the adults in their boats getting drunk, while they let loose the kids and dogs—half of them running up to the Shulman’s and peering into her house.

We’ve had to keep pretty close tabs on the beach, because non-islanders (boaters or summer renters) usually don’t bother to check to see if property is private when they set out for a picnic, and they’ll camp right up to our front porch and ask for the toilet. I had a troupe of thirteen teenage girls and their camp leader arrive on a big sail boat last summer and they were planning on camping out on our lawn. I find strangers wandering all over our property, picking my blueberries, peering through my windows at times. It’s unnerving to come out of the cabin or my yurt bare naked because I’ve come off from the beach from a swim and am showering up outside, only to be confronted by total strangers.

I suppose they confuse the state property section of Andrew’s Beach with Singing Sands. Regular visitors get the drill and generally support us, because they recognize that the beach is so lovely—for quiet family outings, swimming, meditation. We have worked hard to preserve those qualities—to protect that natural resource and the dunes, and it can be a lot of work.

Asking people to leave is never a pleasant experience, and yet it happens every summer. People will literally sit smack down in front of the Private Property sign and the rules, pop open their beers, unpack their grill, and go right about doing what they want, as if it were their own back yard. You ask them to follow the rules nicely the first time, they don’t; you ask them a second time, they ignore you or tell you to go away (or worse); you tell them to leave, they don’t. They become belligerent. I’ve had people in my face threatening me. Then we have to call the police.

Back when the Marchons sold their portion of Andrew’s Beach to the State, the State erected a sign indicating where the State beach ended and private property began. That was promptly torn down over the following winter. Our Private Property signs continue to get torn down and disposed of every winter. To me, that’s like someone going up to your house and ripping your house number off, or throwing your porch furniture into the ocean.

The name “Singing Sands” is not on any map. I think it should go on a map. (Well, I think a decent map of the island is overdue.) It is a common name given by the islanders, though some called it “Little Beach,” and called Andrew’s Beach (aka South Beach, also aka Sandy Beach) “Big Beach.” The only long-standing map demarcation is that the beach lies in Shark Cove. I’ve consulted a number of map sources. The only officially mapped name for a beach on the south side is “Andrew’s Beach”… what is now 2/3 State park and one-third (thereabouts) Burke property.

Recently, people have started calling Andrew’s Beach (aka South Beach) “Singing Sands,” and advertising it as such—on the web. The glossy high-end Travel and Leisure has gotten on the band-wagon. Andrew’s Beach (South Beach) is nice, but the sand that collects there isn’t of fine white crystals and doesn’t “sing”, as does the sand on Singing Sands Beach. Stanley MacVane says every Long Islander knows that with the tone of voice that says you were born knowing that if you were a native islander. One person has posted pictures of Singing Sands Beach (commonly, historically called) on the web almost as if it were a public beach and with some suggestions the site was created by a public entity because of the url: www.longislandmaine.us/photos/tag/singing-sands-beach. I finally tracked him down and he argued that the beach was public based on the tax maps created by the island—despite the very clear posting by the island that the tax map was not meant for determining property boundaries. He was vehement the beach was public. That will create more problems for us—more people arriving who believe the beach is public and argue with us. More calling the police. I suppose if our signs keep mysteriously disappearing in the winter, someone must want to raise the overall island financial needs and tax base. I can’t get my head around it. Maybe the solution is to close the beach to all but island residents—for their exclusive visiting use, as Dr. Rockefeller does with his property in Falmouth. Just put up a sign saying “Private Property, for walks and bathing by residents only”… so I don’t find five dogs yapping, radios blaring, and drunks trying to play Frisbee in those summer moments I finally get to enjoy my property and when I want to hear the sea against the sand and watch the flight of the least tern in the cove.


History of Ownership / Sales of the Beach Property

Singing Sands Beach and last about third of Andrew’s Beach (now commonly called South Beach), plus property behind the beaches.—or Lot 7 of the Estate of Jeremiah Cushing.

History of when Griffith bought property from estate not yet found.

May 31, 1830: David Griffin sold it to Benjamin Cushing on May 31, 1830.

April 14, 1846: Benjamin Cushing (mariner) sold the property to David Griffith, of Portland, Maine, for $200.

History from Griffith to Marston not yet found.

March 19, 1889: Mary E. Marston and 4 others each sold their 1/5 interest of the property and also the Nubble to Charles P. Ingraham, Horatio N. Jose, and John E Tewksbury.

January 9, 1895: Charles P. Ingraham, John C. Tukesbury and H. N. Jose sold to Jones Real Estate Co.

1954: Jones Real Estate Company to Elizabeth C. Burke and Lawrence M. Burke, Jr.
On the deed for the lot with the beach, reference is made to “Lot No. 7 on plan of Division of the Estate of Jeremiah Cushing” which was bounded sea-ward “by the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the division line between this land hereby conveyed and the “Nubble”.