Maine: Where The World Is Young

by Charles McGuigan, originally published September 2013

Leaving Richmond, particularly when you’re traveling north, reminds me of being aboard a multi-staged rocket that rises almost imperceptibly at first on a telescoping column of fire to achieve thrust that will break the ties of gravity. By the time we hit Fredericksburg our engines seemed to fail us and we were stuck for almost two hours outside the beltway. From then on the going was slow and we would yell out the name of each state as we left it in our wake.  When we hit New Jersey the pace quickened for a bit and then fell to a standstill, but we fortunately made a layover at my aunt and uncle’s house in Haddonfield, ate dinner and slept soundly.

Next morning the Jersey Turnpike was stop and go until we reached Fort Lee near the George Washington Bridge. We headed up the Hudson and crossed the Tappan Zee then headed west through Connecticut. The travel was swift and it seemed our second stage had dropped away. We stopped at a diner for a late lunch in Danbury and by the time we got back on the highway traffic had slowed to a crawl. It was the same thing in Hartford. 

The final stage broke away as we crossed the bridge from Portsmouth, New Hampshire to Kittery, Maine. We were now beyond the tug and weight of the mid-Atlantic and even New England, for Maine seems a country unto itself. 

We threaded our way over to Route 1 and slowly inched up the coast at leisure speed, stopping for dinner at a roadside clam shack where we ate a gallon of local steamers on picnic benches, and then on to Brunswick and out to a small archipelago linked by narrow bridges—Sebascodegan Island, Orrs Island and our destination that night, some fifteen miles out in Casco Bay and the North Atlantic, Bailey Island.  When I pulled the car into the parking lot at Cook’s Island View Motel, the kids were sleeping. I walked Catherine into the room and carried Charles to his bed and they never really woke up. I locked the door behind me and walked along Harpswell Road about a mile up to Mackerel Cove where fifty lobster boats were moored at buoys in deep water. Their prows all faced in the same direction like a shoal of mullet. 

I sat on a bench at the end of a wharf where lobsters are sold in the daytime and watched the moon, directly overhead now, and remembered a summer twenty years ago when I slept in a car facing that very harbor and woke with the first hint of sunlight and the barking of a very black dog. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply of the thick salt and iodine air and that ever-present hint of decay. It was past midnight as I made my way back to the motel, the world silent and the night air cool.

We spent two days on these islands called the Harpswells and early that first morning drove into Brunswick, a town dominated by a Naval Air Station and Bowdoin University, a picturesque liberal arts college where Joshua Chamberlain, the man who held Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg, served as president more than a hundred years ago. This had once been a mill town and those old factories that rise out of the steep bluffs of schist and granite along a tidal river are now fashionable condominiums.  On Main Street we stopped at Frosty’s, home of the finest donuts anywhere, and Maine folks are serious about their donuts. There was a sign next to our booth that read: “To a New Englander a good donut is just as important as a good bagel is to a New Yorker.” It’s a family operation opened back in the 1950s that serves up blueberry coffee, the perfect medium for dunking. 

Our objective that morning was a bike trail that runs parallel to the river, part of an off-road system of bike trails that will one day link the Florida Keys to the Canadian border.  

Here’s the thing: I had bought Charles a new bike for his birthday in late June. On the two previous bikes I had given him he had tried to learn to ride, but his fear of falling had always gotten the better of him and he would throw in the towel. “I know you’re going to learn to ride before we go to Maine in August,” I had told him just after summer began and every day Charles and I would pedal down to Holton Elementary School and ride bikes together and though the progress was slow at first my son one day mastered it all. So we rode that trail—about four miles each way—and Charles never fell and his confidence rose like sap in the spring. 

Later we climbed cliffs along Land’s End at the tip of Bailey Island looking out to the farthest islets in this chain, nothing more than rocks really, that are home to countless seabirds, among them orange-billed puffins. We walked Bailey Island, from one end to the other, exploring the Giant’s Stairs and rocky ledges and deep pine and spruce forests where silvery lichens, hair-like, coated entire trees transforming them into silvery holiday trees that looked like they were cast of aluminum. These trees were dead but the lichens were eating every bit of the nutrients that remained. 

The following day we made our way north to a small village called Spruce Head. Many years before I had stumbled upon it and a place called The Lobster Lane Book Store owned by an old woman named Vivian York. She sold used books for a dollar or two and I had found a first edition of “A Moveable Feast” there along with many other books, but I hadn’t seen the place in twenty years.

We found the shop, now operated by Vivian’s daughter, and the moment we entered my daughter was in paradise. There are thousands and thousands of books crammed into every small recess. Each wall in this meandering clapboard cottage is lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases; books are even tucked away up in the rafters. We left with about forty books which cost less than fifty dollars.

The next morning we left early and headed straight for our final destination on the Schoodic Peninsula. This is where the real Maine begins: This is Downeast.  I’d found a cottage on-line for less than $600 a week. It was deep in the Maine woods a few miles from a remote fishing village called Corea and was hard to find up a long, pitted gravel road.

We quickly settled in to this carefully appointed home that wore a sheathing of sun-bleached cedar shingles. And before daybreak the next morning I walked up the road and found a massive patch of wild blueberries—they’re very small, not much larger than buckshot, but sweet and thick flavored—and picked over a hundred and shoved them in the cargo pockets of my shorts. Back at the house I mixed a simple pancake batter and made blueberry waffles for breakfast. 

After breakfast we drove the forty miles to Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island and there climbed mountains and hiked along the rugged coastline. Catherine as lithe as a mountain goat scaled sheer walls of pink granite that rose fifty feet about the dark blue swells of the Atlantic. And Charles and I climbed up and down steep stone steps that led to tidal pools, these amazing microcosms, for within each of them, on a low tide, there is a replica of the ocean at large. They are filled with mystery and an abundance of color and life, all within the confines of a depression in a granite slab the size of a house. On our knees we would study the small life in these pools—urchins, anemones, starfish, periwinkles, grass shrimp, calico crabs, and algae and seaweed. We would do these things every day from sunup to sundown and on our way back to the cottage in Corea would stop at a lobster pound in Trenton just off the island and buy our lobsters and steamer clams so inexpensively that we ate like royalty night after night.

One late afternoon, after climbing Dorr Mountain, we drove down to Bass Harbor which is at the very tip of Mount Desert Island. Next to a perfectly dressed stonewall, behind which the fabulously-well-to-do vacation, there is a hinged dock, a municipal wharf, that rises and falls with the tide. We walked out to the end of the dock and I stripped out a squid on the deck. Just as I was baiting the twin hooks of a top-and-bottom rig, I heard someone call my name. I looked to my kids who seemed as puzzled as me. When I turned toward the parking lot there stood my brother Bruce with his wife Andrea and their kids Kirsten and Matthew. He and Matthew each carried a rod-and-reel. It turns out they were on vacation, staying in a small cabin in Bar Harbor. So we fished until dusk and hit the incoming tide just right, for with these incoming waters arrived massive schools of Atlantic mackerel and pollock. Charles kissed the first one I caught—a  pollock, slimy as an eel—for good luck and good measure. And the luck played out because among us we must have caught fifty or sixty fish, all of which we released, though we didn’t kiss another one. 

The next night my brother and his family joined us for dinner and I bought twelve lobsters for less than sixty dollars—the going price this year was under four dollars a pound, the cheapest I’ve ever seen it. We ate with relish and late into the night sat around the fire telling stories and Charles, who had moved into my lap, fell asleep before the stories ended.

The last day in Corea we decided to stay close to our home base. We found a wide sand beach, rarer than hen’s teeth in Maine, and decided to walk along the rocky coastline on the east side of the horseshoe shaped cove that nestled this beach. We were looking for stray lobster buoys—brightly colored Styrofoam floats that had washed ashore. It was about eleven in the morning when we left and I figured we’d be back in an hour or so. For the first mile we didn’t find much. There were houses built along this section of the cove and their owners had undoubtedly scoured the rocky shoreline for their own buoys. As the houses vanished, the buoys began appearing in great profusion. We found yellow ones and green ones and black ones and blue ones and many of them were two-toned. We would leave them in conspicuous stacks as we walked further up the coastline. This was rugged terrain. Sections were like forty foot dunes made up of millions of rounded rocks the size of duck eggs so when you took a step the rocks would give way in a small avalanche and unless you were fast and sure-footed you would end up in the rock slide. Other sections were made of jagged slabs of granite that made footing difficult. But we kept on, always gathering more buoys.  I thought maybe an hour had passed and told the kids we’d better start heading back. I found a couple of lines thirty or forty feet long in among the sea wrack and handed one to my daughter. The other one I began threading through the first pile of buoys. Half-an-hour later I was dragging about forty buoys behind me and Catherine had at least thirty on her line. We were both sweating and our arms and shoulders ached. Dragging these buoys up and down the rock ledges and over the jagged outcroppings was almost impossible, and then I had an idea. When we came to one of the beaches lined with the rounded rocks I told my daughter to meet me at the shoreline and I took her strand and tied it to mine then waded into the water and pulled some seventy buoys along, and the going was much easier. I covered about a mile this way like Gulliver when he captures the fleet of Lilliput’s invaders. Everything was going smoothly until we came to the sheer granite bluffs. Here the water was no longer shallow; it dropped off to about twelve feet. So I returned to the shoreline and we made two stacks of buoys that we really liked—a total of thirty in all. When we finally got back to the sand beach it was nearly four in the afternoon and in the morning we would be leaving.

Late that night I secured the lobster buoys and most of our belongings in the Jeep and after breakfast the next morning, and a final cleaning of our beloved cottage, we headed off the Peninsula and rolled south down the coast.

We spent a final night back on Bailey Island and over dinner at a restaurant just down the road from the motel I asked Charles why he liked Maine so much and he said: “Because you have the ocean and you have the mountains.” He said it almost impatiently as if I should have known this all along and he had hit on something here.

Consider this: What if our Blue Ridge Mountains were suddenly moved through the magic of plate tectonics down to Virginia Beach?  That is what Maine is like. But this too: this northern coast is primordial in a way, seemingly taking shape in stop-action geologic time right before your eyes. Spruce trees grow directly out of the granite—in any small fissure where just enough soil is trapped—and the roots break down the rock and turn it into earth. Lichens grow everywhere and through their slow digestions disintegrate the granite and turn it into soil. It is as if the world is still young, just rock and ocean, and primitive plants and fungi band together to conquer the granite and carve out niches for new life.

I looked at both my children in the rearview mirror and off to my right. We all traveled together to Maine for the first time seven years ago when Catherine was ten years old and Charles just barely five. My son will start middle school in a matter of weeks and my daughter is a senior in high school. They haven’t changed all that much, not really, not in all those years. At least I don’t think so.