By Charles Kniffen, Lubec

I am a combat-wounded Vietnam veteran with PTSD. Sears Island was my place of refuge and peace. I was a caregiver for a dear old friend, a Navy veteran and life-long long-hauler as he faded into the deepening folds of Alzheimer’s. He was a very active 69-year-old, which kept me busy because some of his behaviors had become risky. This, as any caregiver knows, goes on 24/7.

But some days his mom, at an equally active 88, came to visit and I took advantage to go for a paddle in my kayak around Sears Island. And I stopped at the southern tip to take a walkabout and enjoy, from the innermost reaches of my traumatized heart to the crown of my troubled head, the wonders that an open, uncluttered, non-commercialized island can yield.

Leave the island be. Don’t pinch pennies and lose a treasure. There are suitable  alternatives to the windmill issue right next door. People along the crowded midcoast need at least one place that is open, quiet and surrounded by the glorious waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Leave the island be.

Please, Governor.

Charles Kniffen is a combat-wounded veteran of the Vietnam war and the author of two non-fiction books about war and its aftermath, Fifty Years in a Foxhole and Rude Awakenings, Making peace with the beast machine. He’s worked as a truck driver, a milkman, a herdsman on a New England dairy farm, mental health worker, a Licensed Social Worker, and a Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor. He’s been an all-season solo kayaker for two decades, plying the North Atlantic from Spring Point to the Bay of Fundy. He and his wife, Rhonda Welcome are the co-owners of Turtle Dance Totems in Lubec, Maine.