Tag Archives: Windows to the wild

A visit to Wood Island with Windows to the Wild

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During August of 2021, I kayaked out to Kittery’s Wood Island Lifesaving Station with with Windows to the Wild host Willem Lange and producers Steve Giordani and Phil Vaughn, where we spent a lovely day with Sam Reid, president of the non-profit Wood Island Lifesaving Station (WILSA), which is restoring the once-dilapidated Life Saving Station to a living museum.

The resulting show, titled Wood Island Life Saving Station, had its debut broadcast on New Hampshire Public Television on February 2, 2022, and is now available online at the NH PBS Youtube channel (Episode 1, Season 17), (and also will broadcast many times on NH PBS, WGBH, and other public television stations).

Wood Island, located just off the coast of Kittery, Maine in the Piscataqua River, is a tiny scrap of an island with a fascinating history. I’m working on a post about bootlegging in the Piscataqua River, but with one thing or another, my writing time has been limited. I’ll be posing more frequently come spring.

See the full 2022 for Windows to the Wild schedule here.

Return visit to Orris Falls with Windows to the Wild

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Click on the image to see the preview.

Click on the image to see the preview.

Early in January, 2017, I enjoyed a chilly morning to Orris Falls Conservation Area with Windows to the Wild host Willem Lange and producers Steve Giordani and Phil Vaughn. The resulting show, titled “The Maniacal Traveler” is scheduled for broadcast on New Hampshire Public Television on February 15, 2017 at 7:30, with repeat broadcasts on Sunday, 2/19. See the full schedule here. (Eventually NHPTV will archive the show here).

The show is based upon my earlier post, Travels on the White Rose Road to Orris Falls, a post that highlights the hiking within South Berwick’s Orris Falls Conservation Area, owned by the Great Works Regional Land Trust. Nineteenth-century writer Sarah Orne Jewett wrote a lovely piece about an afternoon ride on what she called the White Rose Road, including a visit to the lonely farmhouse of Daniel Littlefield.

We could feel a keen sense of Littlefield’s isolation on the January morning of the filming. Although I was verging on hypothermia by the session’s end (due to misplaced optimism about the temperatures), it was great fun to spend the morning with Willem (80+ years old) and producers Steve and Phil.  Crafting a 26-minute show, it turns out, isn’t so different from crafting a blog post, except that the on-site process takes longer (and probably the editing as well). It’s all about stitching words and images together to tell a story.

I recently wrote another post, Searching for the lost village of Punkintown, about another wonderful patch of land in Eliot that Great Works helped to conserve in the 1990s. For more on hikes in the Seacoast region of Maine and New Hampshire, see the tab, “Hiking: 4k and more,” at the top of the page.