March is expansive — light swells, days lengthen, buds, well…begin to bud. At the same time, winter’s accumulated claustrophobia and remnant ice and frost often restrict us to roads and hardened paths. Early spring’s elixirs, mud and water, don’t invite exploratory walking.

So, in this month, as in November, I go often to the roads of Pennellville, and, when I do, I aim also at a point where the road slopes down to and then disappears as ramp in the sea. You can, if so inclined, roll yourself right into the water.

That sort of immersion isn’t what most early spring walkers, runners, boat-toters, bicyclists and drivers are after when they reach Simpson’s Point, however. Proximity to the sea will do when the water temperature’s still in the 40s; immersion so prized by Simpson’s Point swimmers is still a few months away.

But even in this off season, I often have company at Simpson’s. Perhaps, I reflect as I reach the point in the middle of an afternoon run, it has to do with the angle and exposure of this small slice of tarmac and rock. Facing generally south, Simpson’s Point tips all day toward the sun, which treks left to right across the sky. Yes a southwest wind often hurries in wavelets across the water, carrying with it the water’s cooling, but the sun warms me even in winter, catching in the folds of my jacket or scarf and radiating little riots of heat inward.

This effect can be especially pronounced when you sit on the boulder placed on the right side of the ramp going toward the water. Put there, with a companion rock on the left side, this thigh-high boulder offers a complement block to the two metal posts that seal off the ramp to trailered boat traffic. Since 2008, it’s been only hand-carried craft at Simpson’s; trailered boats now have nearby, excellent launching from the public Mere Point Boat Launch.

Here is fine-grained advice: go to that boulder, and, facing the sea, you will find an indent on its right upside, and that indent will form a perfect seat; it is as if some sculptor were set loose for a short time with a commission to shape one subtle seat for a point-and-water watcher. The boulder tips slightly forward, as does its seat, and, on a clear day, the bay sparkles and the mud glistens. Close your eyes and the warmth and water sounds can take you anywhere.

If it is a windless late winter day, and the cast-up icebergs, gifts of earlier cold and tide, still litter the point’s rocks and ramp; you may (if you listen intently) hear a tinkling music. Every so often the notes seem to find rhythm, but most of the time it sounds as if John Cage is the composer — random tinkling intersperses with silence. It is, you realize, the slow melting of the bergs; it is the song of their return to the sea.

To your left, as you look out, a long stretch of large stones rises from the bay at low tide. At its end point, it kisses the permanent water. A little sleuthing and imagination sees this prone march of stone for what it was — the base of a once-upon a-time pier. And that pier belonged to some small shipyards, spawn via nearby example, of the major 19th century boat-building of the Pennell brothers’ shipyard for which Middle Bay and Brunswick were then famous.

Simpson’s Point, according to From-the-Falls-to-the- Bay, a pdf offered by the Pejepscot Historical Society, was “settled somewhat later with the road [to it] built in 1837.” One Simpson’s boatbuilder, Robert Given, was said to have “built his ships almost single-handedly, sometimes taking as long as three years to complete one.” Yankee to the bone, Given “would not go into debt for their construction and would stop building, and work at something else until he has money enough to complete them.”

For me, Simpson’s Point also carries the resonance of a personal past. In the early 90s, during a visit with friends who had just moved to Brunswick, I went to Simpson’s as the launch point from which I enjoyed my first of what are now hundreds of Casco Bay forays in a kayak. Then, Scrag, White and Crow Islands seemed challengingly distant; all these waters were strange to me. When I can slip on that first-time lens, and add a little history and the music of melt to it, the view from Simpson’s Point seems impossibly rich.

That, I sometimes reflect, as I listen to the slow song of ice, seems the pace and sanity of another era. But then, one gift of going to Simpson’s Point and sitting on its subtle stone seat lies in the slowing and retrieval of time.

Sandy Stott is a Brunswick resident and chair of the town’s Conservation Commission. He writes for a variety of publications and has a book, Critical Hours — Search and Rescue in the White Mountains, due out from University Press of New England on April 3rd, 2018. He may be reached at [email protected]