A late spring fishkill in upper Middle Bay filled to brimming the nostrils of nearby residents and kept most of the rest of us away from those waters. But a mix of clean-ups — heroic hand-gathering, environmental company vacuuming and nature’s decaying — has cleared the shoreline and the air and now a few hours floating on these protected and life-rich waters seems a perfect local summer exploration. So July’s offering in this column about local public lands does involve a short crossing of water before we meet the land to be visited.

Still, conjuring such a crossing seems a good summer enterprise, and for me it’s an excuse to load my kayak on top of the car and set out for and then from the public launch for hand-powered boats at Simpson’s Point. From there it’s a modest and usually tranquil crossing of a half-mile of water to get to Crow Island, a 3-acre stamp of land amid the waters and mudflats of the bay’s northern reach.

Crow, though surrounded by Brunswick shoreline, is held by the Harpswell Heritage Land Trust, and it is also a site on the water-based Maine Island Trail. But mostly, it sits immersed or mud surrounded on its own, visited by ducks and patrolled by a resident osprey.

Like all islands, its charm lies partly in its remoteness, even if that is mostly illusion. Going ashore on an island calls up the nine-year-old in us. My ninth was the first summer I was allowed to row solo in the family skiff to nearby Ram Island (some miles farther along the Midcoast). Once there, I circled the island on foot, prospected in its rocks for washed-up treasure and peered into the mystery of its little, lichen-bearded forest. It really was a world apart.

That feeling returns on this visit to Crow Island, and it is bolstered by the little island’s history and a rumor that attaches to that history. For many years Crow Island was part of Civil War hero and Maine legend Joshua Chamberlain’s estate. Neither Chamberlain nor his heirs ever lived on the island, but its location made it both a hunting preserve and place of peaceful contemplation.

Within that peaceful setting, the seed of story took root, and it concerned Chamberlain’s also legendary horse, Charlemagne: Charlemagne came to Chamberlain as a captured, injured Confederate horse in 1863, and a bond developed between horse and rider. Somehow Charlemagne survived Chamberlain’s tendency to throw himself (themselves) into the fray and the various woundings that ensued. Charlemagne lived on to be Chamberlain’s horse at Appomattox and the surrender. These words are attributed to Chamberlain: “…my excited horse, [was] stirred by the vastness, the tumult, the splendor of the scene. He had been thrice shot down under me; he had seen the great surrender.”

Then, Charlemagne became a family horse in Maine; now he is rumored to be at rest on Crow Island. The story goes that Chamberlain wanted a tranquil place for his war-tossed horse, and so when Charlemagne’s life ended, Chamberlain had him transported to Crow Island and buried there for a peaceful eternity. That this story is rumor and so a little otherworldly seems just right for an island.

You could, if you put a mucky mind to it, walk to Crow Island. Its surrounding mudflats open entirely at low tide, especially when the moonstruck tides swing more than ten feet. But, unless you are a clammer versed in crossing mud and not getting stuck, high tide’s floating approach seems best. Landing on Crow is best done from the south, where two ledgy arms reach out and form a tiny harbor. Even there, any landing before a rising mid-tide asks a little mud-stepping before you reach grass or rock’s terra firma.

Mere Point’s public boat launch it the other nearby put-in (just over one water-mile to the south), and it can accommodate both hand-powered and small motor boats, which, when the tide is up, are the other way onto Crow Island.

The MITA campsite, which was admirably free of litter and char when I visited (no open fires allowed), is hard by the landing area. It is a raised shelf of open earth fringed by forest and looking out on the waters and islands that lead to the sea. What little inland there is on this 3-acre island is threaded with partial paths (and, warning — small scatters of that three-leafed trouble, poison ivy). Circum-strolling the perimeter is possible, but it descends sometimes to mud or grass. The best of the isle is, I think, its south facing MITA site. There, facing into summer’s prevailing southwest breeze and out toward where the sea speaks, you can watch and listen to the lightly stirred water, and slip perhaps into island-time. Which any islander will tell you is a time zone unknown on the mainland.

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 in the spring of 2018. Your

Land is a monthly column about local public lands.