Seventeen summers after graduating from Dartmouth in 1969, I met Half and Susanne Zantop when by felicitous accident my wife Karen and I discovered a simple, virtually secret Maine cottage community beside a stunning cove on a remote down-east peninsula.
At Hiram Blake Camp on Cape Rosier -- a place out of time and exquisitely hard to find -- down a looping road to nowhere except back where you came from, Susanne, Half, and their daughters spent a part of each July in a cedar-shingled cabin called Maples, with a wrap-around porch overlooking Penobscot Bay.
Summer upon summer, Karen and I shared three weeks of communal life with Half, Susanne, their daughters and other Hiram Blake families from hometowns far and wide. In this glorious nick of nature a long way off any beaten path, we came to feel at one with the world.
Half often sailed a small Laser around the bay with an easy hand.
Sometimes he would ferry Susanne to a favorite island to forage the gooseberries she would later transform into vast quantities of tart, deep-purple preserves. I once told Half that I had learned to sail pretty well as a youngster, and had skippered dinghies off and on around Mascoma Lake while at Dartmouth, but hadn't handled a tiller for many years. From that moment on, his boat was my boat.
In time, we two couples bought an old cruiser to sail up and down the Maine coast together, from Brunswick to Buck's Harbor.
With a small flotilla of day-sailing friends, we regularly would make out from Hiram Blake Camp to one or another island beach to steam up some hand-picked mussels for lunch, and saut the delicate chanterelles Half and Susanne knew how to find hiding in the woods among less desirable mushrooms.
When fog filled our cove to the treetops, or rain tattooed the roofs, or mosquitoes mastered the night air, we occasionally would repair to the Zantops' cabin to help Susanne tediously "tip and tail" her gooseberries -- relieve them of their tufts and stems before cooking -- secure in the knowledge that a tasty reward would grace our breakfast toast the next morning.
Last year, packed and ready to go on their day of departure from Hiram Blake Camp, Half and Susanne had made their customary round of good-byes.
They might have been running just a little late. Standing by the car, her summer canning complete, her perpetual knitting project one year and six inches further along, Susanne had perhaps begun to think about a conference or a paper or a course outline or a student or colleague in need of her attention.
But Half had one last lesson in Maine coast geology to teach. A Swiss army knife in his right hand, a rock in his left, and an inquisitive eight year old by his side, Half scratched the surface of beach treasures proffered, patiently distinguishing quartz from shale, copper from schist; quietly encouraging his young student to do the same.
So they were, and in our memories always will be: generous givers, masterful mentors, devoted partners, extraordinarily capable, uncommonly humane.
