“Turner Buckminster had lived in Phippsburg, Maine, for fifteen minutes shy of six hours. He had dipped his hand in its waves and licked the salt from his fingers. He had smelled the sharp resin of the pines. He had heard the low rhythm of the bells on the buoys that balanced on the ridges of the sea. He had seen the fine clapboard parsonage beside the church where he was to live, and the small house set a ways beyond it that puzzled him some. Turner Buckminster had lived in Phippsburg, Maine, for almost six whole hours.

He didn’t know how much longer he could stand it.

Maybe somewhere out West there really were Territories that he could light out to, where being a minister’s son wouldn’t matter a…well, worth a darn. He hoped so, because here, being a minister’s son mattered a whole lot, and pretending that it didn’t matter to him was starting to peck at his soul.”

The book’s opening passage highlights several things about Turner and Phippsburg. The sensory language describes the town and its setting. The “culture clash” between the urbanite Turner, who has just come from Boston, and the rural town is apparent when Turner doesn’t realize that the “small house” is an outhouse. The phrase “peck at his soul” implies that Turner’s role as a minister’s son is one that is hostile to himself.

“The day might come, she thought, when she would take her grandfather’s dory and row to the mouth of the New Meadows. She’d take it out past West Point, past Hermit, past Bald Head, and drift until she was alone with the whales in the open water. Then she’d come back in close and follow the coast, maybe row all the way to Portland, maybe even to Boston.

And then she’d row home. She would always come back to Malaga Island, just as sure as the tide always came back.”

This passage demonstrates Lizzie’s integration of her sense of identity with Malaga Island and the area she grew up in. Her use of landmarks such as West Point, Hermit, and Bald Head attest to her familiarity with the land and water nearby. The mention of whales foreshadows Turner’s experiences with the pod of whales in Chapters 5 and 12.

“Turner suddenly felt sick with sadness, as sick as when he had been standing on the rock ledges waiting for the sea to come crashing in on him. Mrs. Cobb was so alone, sitting in a dark room as hot as Beelzebub and waiting for Death’s dart to come so that she could say the one thing people would remember her for—knowing all the while that there would be no one there to hear it.”

Turner begins to feel sympathetic toward Mrs. Cobb, who is without family or much community contact to help her feel connected to the outside world. The word “Beelzebub” is a synonym for the Christian concept of the devil. Turner’s use of the term to reference the house’s heat is a stand-in for the concept of hell. The metaphor has hostile connotations and demonstrates Turner’s familiarity with Christian concepts because of his father’s vocation.