The Season that Would Not Die

It’s not supposed to end like this. There’s supposed to be an obvious sense of finality, an audible gasp, an identifiable last-second blaze of glory followed by an inevitable and rapid fade to black.

But this year is different. Like an out-of-tune motor that continues to sputter and spit after the ignition is turned off, Mount Desert Island’s tourist season can’t seem to find a way to die.

Years ago it ended, like clockwork, on Labor Day weekend. As a cub reporter my job was to head up to the Trenton Bridge on Monday afternoon and snap a photo of the last Country Squire Station wagon or shopworn Winnebego Brave camper heading off island with a wooden lobster trap or two strapped to the roof. By Tuesday morning graffiti-covered plywood was on the front of junk shop windows that the day before had been overlfowing with fake Irish linens and decorative brass offerings “direct from the subcontinent,” all in a perpetual state of 50 percent off.

Each autumn, Bar Harbor city fathers resumed the debate about whether or not to shut off half the street lights for the winter. For a time they actually did.

Over several decades, and through earnest efforts to lengthen the season, it eventually stayed busy until Columbus Day. Granted, the tone and timber changes after kids go back to school. The size of the crowd diminishes yet the daily gross remains high. Business-wise, September is now better than July. October is better than June.

Later, the advent of the MDI Marathon pushed the end-of-season event horizon a week farther still. Motels and cottage colonies outside of town now only close when the town shuts off the seasonal water line to keep the pipes from freezing.

In October, two, and sometimes three cruise ships a day disgorge their domesticated herds, keeping downtown shops teeming with customers. The revitalization of the Criterion Theatre, and events run by the Chamber of Commerce, such as the Annual Pajama Sale and Bed Races, and Midnight Madness Sale, attract even more people downtown through the holidays.

That’s not to say a longer tourist season is bad. The businesses it helps support year-round benefit all. But it changes the unwritten social contract.

This year, the expected plunge in visitation did not arrive on time. The week after the week after Columbus Day, so many people wanted to visit the summit of Cadillac Mountain at the same time rangers had to shut the road down for a time. With Halloween on the horizon the tourism season here has become a modern day adaptation of the 1958 horror film classic “The Thing that Couldn’t Die.” In the movie, the 400-year old head of an evil sorcerer, discovered in an ancient box awakens, and takes over the body of a vulnerable handyman. In a way, anyone who lives in a bustling tourist town in Maine in summer knows exactly how that feels.

“Where are all these people coming from?” is now a common lament among residents grown weary of the traffic, the crowds, the unspoken disappointment of being asked to wait longer for the town to be returned to its rightful owners.

Faced with more than 3.3 million annual visitors, what’s a town of 4,600 people supposed to do? Like a third-world insurgency we retreat in the face of overwhelming superior firepower. We self-segregate. We frequent less popular carriage paths, hike the more remote trails, spend time in Acadia during off-peak hours – shortly after dawn and in the early evening. In all honesty those are some of the most beautiful times of day, when the light waxes and wanes sublime and a blissful quiet pervades the landscape. Any desire to visit Sand Beach, Thunder Hole, or Cadillac Mountain in the middle of the day is suppressed, filed away under the heading of irrational fantasy.

When out of naked necessity, or desperation, a trip into downtown is required, we get in and out as quickly as possible – infiltrating behind lines of cars with out-of-state plates and racks bristling with bicycles and kayaks. Like furtive members of the resistance, we exchange knowing glances, while enduring the sentence of interminably long lines at the grocery store.

There is no question that a robust tourist season is fine from an employment and economy perspective. But it holds real social conflict for many. You see part of the bargain for our surrendering the town, and the most popular places in Acadia National Park at the height of summer, is that we are supposed get our town back, our park back, our sense of scale and community back, in the fall. Having those glorious weeks between leaf fall and snowfall, is our time. It’s our reward for dealing with the traffic, the noise, the congestion and prioritization of economic advantage above all else, for more than half the year.

Now, the old patterns, the ones we knew for decades, the ones we learned to adapt to, economically, spiritually, socially, are changing. Like an inexorable rise in sea level and temperature due to global warming, the new pattern requires adjustment, as denial or resistance, ultimately is futile.

It’s not that we blame the tourists. It’s not so much that we begrudge their presence as mourn what we’ve lost. Tourists come here for the same reasons we love it – the spectacular beauty, the history, the sense of place, the desire to escape the incessant drone of highway traffic, and the nightly orange glare of a civilization that has turned its back on nature.

There is hope. Acadia will be closing its motor roads soon. It, like its neighbors, needs time to breathe.

Cruise ships flee after the end of October, having little interest in dropping anchor when the mountains and shores of MDI become a dull study in grays and browns.

We’ll all exhale as we embrace the time of year when you can cross the street by sound, rather than by sight.

Still, as much as we can’t wait to see that last metaphorical Winnebego heading across the Trenton Bridge, we know there’s still a long winter ahead. And come spring, with souls tempered by cold and dark, and quiet, we’ll welcome the next vanguard of new faces with open arms.

First and Last

 “What the hell is that, anyway?” one man says to his companion as he squints at shadows through the underbrush. “Beats the heck out of me,” the other replies. “Just shoot it so we can get a close look and we’ll figure it out later.”

Sadly, that scene has been repeated frequently of late as more and more sightings of rare or endangered creatures around the world are being confirmed by bullets, instead of binoculars. Our history is all too rife with deliberate extinctions at the hand of man.

I’m not talking about legitimate hunting, where the taker respects the animal and plans to eat his or her kill. It’s the others, like the dentist who killed Cecil the Lion in Kenya, or Donald Trump’s sons posing holding the tail they just cut off an elephant they shot.

A while back, in Israel, several soldiers reported killing a rare leopard. There had been only five left. The one they shot, an old female, was critical to the species’ survival. Of course, according to the three heavily armed men, the creature attacked entirely without provocation, and, even though they undoubtedly hated to do it, they blasted it with an assault rifle.

In California, efforts to bring the condor back from the brink of extinction have faltered, partially due to some of the birds being shot out of the sky.

Some years ago, in Northern Maine, a man shot a creature that was either a very, very large coyote or a wolf. Wolves disappeared from the Maine woods long ago, hunted and persecuted until their species’ only hope for survival lay in a retreat into the stark wilds of the Canadian North.

If that animal turns out to be a wolf, it, too, suffered the same fate as its ancestors, caught in the adrenalin-soaked crosshairs of someone blinded by the prospect of killing some perceived ancient enemy.

Even the state’s first Registered Maine Guide, Cornelia “Flyrod” Crosby, had the dubious distinction of driving a species to extinction. She reportedly shot the last native caribou in the state.

Granted those were different times, when bragging about landing 200 trout in a single day was a badge of honor. You’d like to think that nowadays, we know better.

After well-publicized sightings in Blue Hill, Warren, and sites Down East, the existence of eastern cougars, or mountain lions, is pretty well-accepted by those who enjoy the outdoors in Maine, although fish and game officials remain scientifically skeptical. I guess we’ll have to wait until someone shoots one.

Considering our apparent fondness for stuffing and mounting all manner of animals, not even mythical creatures are safe. Bigfoot immediately comes to mind.

I know there are plenty of tobacco-chewing, monster-truck-driving “Bubba” types out there just “waitin’ to git me a crack at one a dem gaud-awful hairy fellahs.”

I can hear that alligator trapper guy from the TV show, “Swamp People” “Chooot it,  Chooot it,” he yells.

Lake Champlain’s reported sea “monster” Champ remains unidentified despite years of searching. Luckily, the legislatures of both New York and Vermont have passed laws making it illegal to harm or kill it. You can laugh, but one abortive plan to prove the existence of a deep-diving beast in Loch Ness years ago actually involved dropping surplus depth charges into the peaty deep.

Now, before the letters start pouring in, let me state that the fact that many of our rare and endangered creatures are being shot should not be used as an excuse to dump on hunters. Hunters actually provide more information and confirmed sightings of rare creatures, due to the amount of time they spend in the woods and their general knowledge of and respect for nature. Just because some moron picks a gun as his weapon of choice does not make him or her a hunter. The same individual is probably just as irresponsible behind the wheel of a car.

Still, it is a pretty sad commentary on human nature that rare creatures are being killed needlessly. And, it is an even sadder commentary that we have so little faith in human nature that we have to pass laws to protect animals we can’t even prove exist.

Maybe it would help if people took more time to look for and study a creature once its existence is suspected.

Although coyotes are plentiful and can be hunted with impunity today, they were once rare in these parts. I can remember the first time a sighting was confirmed on Mount Desert Island. The late Dr. Dale Rex Coman, a naturalist and outdoorsman of great skill, followed the coyote’s tracks in the snow for miles and confirmed the beast’s existence by scat and hair samples. No gun in sight. History was made in that respect without bloodshed.

Maybe it would help if officials could be a little less skeptical the next time someone reports seeing a rare animal. Maybe a more detailed search could be launched, using video, still and game cameras instead of guns.

We need to move beyond the point where we feel the only way to make history is by being the first person to kill something — or the last.

Recognition of an irreplaceable gift - Acadia

Of the three primary founders of Acadia National Park, only two, George Dorr and Charles Eliot, have Mount Desert Island geographical features named for them. Dorr Mountain is located beside Cadillac near Bar Harbor. Eliot Mountain overlooks Northeast Harbor from the east.
The contributions of a third major benefactor, the man who helped fund many of the park’s land acquisitions and created the Carriage Road system, John D. Rockefeller Jr., never have been equally recognized.
Hiking trail benefactor Waldron Bates has an enormous plaque affixed to a boulder on the trail on Gorham Mountain. Rockefeller’s only monument is a comparatively small marker in an obscure spot along a path near Otter Cliffs. Defaced years ago by vandals, it still awaits repair.
In an age when folks are all about splashing their names on everything from airplanes to sports arenas, the Rockefeller family continues to go about its philanthropic work quietly. They have never asked for, nor expected, anything in the park to be named for John D. or the family. All the more reason now to consider doing so, perhaps in time to be unveiled as part of next year’s Acadia centennial celebration.
It would not even be necessary to rename a peak to recognize Rockefeller in the same manner as Acadia’s other founders. At the south end of the main ridge on Penobscot Mountain, where a trail recently was reopened, the path dips and rises to a modest independent summit. That summit overlooks the lands around Little Long Pond – the 1,000 acres recently gifted to the Land and Garden Preserve by David Rockefeller Sr. The National Park Service has time to apply to the U.S. Geological Survey to name that peak after Rockefeller. It would be the only mountain in the country so named.
Honoring Rockefeller in this way would appropriately recognize his contributions to the creation and preservation of one of the most beautiful places on the planet. 
More than likely there is nothing named for John D. Rockefeller Jr., in Acadia because that is the way he preferred it. The entire family is famous for its humility and he, no doubt, was no different. However, especially in 2016 on the occasion of the 100th Anniversary of the creation of Acadia National Park, his efforts deserve acknowledgment as imposing and enduring as the granite that underlies the hills he loved so much, and wanted to protect and share with others.

Finding the best path

Last week, proponents of a plan to create a new national park in the Katahdin region delivered a petition containing the names of more than 13,000 supporters to members of Maine's congressional delegation. Of the 13,580 signatures on the petition, only 2,750 were from residents of Maine. Even if all the Maine signers are voters, which is unlikely, they represent only .3 percent of the state's electorate.

Philanthropist Roxanne Quimby – whose desire to leave a conservation legacy in Maine, including on Mount Desert Island, is admirable – controls nearly 70,000 acres in the area desired by park proponents. But there are also landowners who control tens of thousands of acres of land in that area who oppose the creation of a national park.

Lucas St. Clair, Quimby's son, who manages some 120,000 acres she owns in Maine, has been praised by sportsmen for re-opening portions of her land for hunting, ATV and snowmobile use. But a national park designation could bring much of that to a halt. And federal control minimizes local input into management decisions that affect surrounding communities.

There has been some discussion about having Quimby's lands east of Baxter State Park designated a national monument as a preliminary move. While creating a new national park requires an act of Congress, a monument can be created by executive action by the president.

Before the president or Congress act, however, one question needs to be answered first. Are those lands east of Baxter State Park so unique, their scenic attributes so exemplary, their resources so threatened that only federal ownership would provide the proper protection? Does creating a national park justify the eventual usurpation of private property owned by unwilling sellers and does it warrant the wholesale displacement of the multiple-use culture that has protected and cherished that land for generations?

Certainly the lofty heights of the Katahdin massif and surrounding lands in Baxter State Park are extraordinary. But they already are protected and wisely administered here in Maine.

That park's founder, Gov. Percival Baxter, once wrote “No one feels more strongly against the federal government invading the state than I do ... whatever parks we have in Maine in my opinion should be state rather than national parks.”

Selling the idea of a national park is easy because there's no need to explain what that means to people. But the merits of protecting Quimby’s lands in ways that respect Maine traditions should not be unexplored due to the relative difficulty of explaining it. The challenge then is to find the wisdom and foresight to create a Maine-based entity to protect the culture, as well as the land in northern Maine.

Federal protection of Acadia on the coast, instituted in an era before the state was in a position to act, has been a tremendous success. But as Percival Baxter knew full well, that doesn't mean it is the best path to follow for the Katahdin region.

Hike your own hike

For those who make pilgrimages to the wilds carrying the essentials of survival on their backs, there is only rule – hike your own hike.

Even though as in life, you may for a time, spend part of that journey in the close company of others, ultimately, when you shoulder a pack and seek the solace of wilderness, you walk alone.

The Mecca of all long-distance hikes in the United States is the storied Appalachian Trail that stretches 2,185 miles from Springer Mountain in Georgia to the lofty summit of Katahdin in Maine.

Granted the peaks of the Appalachian Range are mere hills compared to the Rockies. It is their advanced age, however, not youth and inexperience, that dictates their diminished situation. Atop these ancient mountains that pushed skyward 400 million years before the Himalayas began their geologic rise, the trail climbs the highest peaks and passes through some of the most scenic and wild areas on the East Coast.

While some of it features highly engineered switchbacks for ease of walking, other stretches are chaotic jumbles of ankle-biting rocks. There are heights to scale, streams to ford, bears to fend off, and extremes of heat and cold to endure, all while carrying 40 pounds on your back. The rewards are more sublime -- views out 100 miles, the embrace of unmanicured nature, and the satisfaction at being able to look up as the alpenglow fades in the western sky to marvel at how far you’ve come.

Those who accept its physical challenge come to understand the route wasn’t laid out to be easy on the feet. It was chosen to be nourishment and inspiration to the soul.

I was reminded of that last weekend when I spent three days hiking in Maine's 100-Mile Wilderness near Rainbow Lake. It was two years ago, while trying to route-find a new way into that stretch from the Golden Road to the north, on old logging roads, that I snagged a root in a skidder rut with my foot and dislocated my hip. Fortunately, it went back in when I landed on it. It hurt like hell and the two-mile hike back to the truck was agony. Having good friends who took turns hefting my full pack, filled with everything for a four-day trip, was a Godsend.

Sitting in the Emergency Room in Millinocket the doctor noticed no broken bones on my x-ray. "Boy, you do have a lot of arthritis in that hip," he said. It was news to me as I had never had any pain.

Over the next two months, however, things went downhill. The verdict nearly a year later -- I needed a new hip.

So last fall, I had the surgery with the winter to recover. Over the past summer I built up my day hiking endurance. That set up my determination to get back into Rainbow Lake, to finally reach my original destination.

An estimated 2,500 people set out to hike the AT end-to-end each year. Slightly more than 10 percent succeed. The woods near the first road crossing north of Springer are often littered with cast off gear, the detritus of poor planning, unreasonable expectations, and the premature evaporation of what at first seemed to be a boundless supply of perseverance.

Some stop due to injury; others when the tangential tug of gravity from lives and loves back home can no longer be ignored.

Some run out of time. Some run out of money. Some run out of heart.

For others, vagabond dreams surrender to a new daily monotony and the reality of being at times cold, wet, bug bit, hungry, sore and tired – and often all of the above.

Others depart unable to accept the notion of themselves as sole confidante, needing more entertainment than is offered by the metronome of their own pulse.

Not all are comfortable with powerful rhythm, itself life’s primordial soundtrack. Its detection in the womb corroborates a new spark of existence – its departure at the end of life’s journey irrefutable evidence of entropy's inescapable silence. With acknowledgement comes acceptance that the number of our heartbeats is finite, some say fixed – as fleeting in the cosmic sense, as ancient mountains, as time itself.

Since it opened in the 1930s, slightly more than 10,000 people have managed to complete the Appalachian Trail. Few among them know that a Mainer is among those they are indebted to for showing the way.

Myron Avery was born in Lubec in 1899, graduated from Bowdoin and later became a successful lawyer. A friend of Appalachian Mountain Club founder Benton MacKaye, who first proposed the AT in a 1921 article, While MacKaye had a dream, Avery helped pioneer and build the actual route.

The original plan called for the trail’s northern terminus to be Mount Washington in New Hampshire. Avery persevered in his insistence it end atop Katahdin.

When the sign demarking Katahdin as the northern terminus of the AT reached the summit, Avery is reported to have made a very brief speech. “Nail it up,” he reportedly said.

Thanks to Avery, hikers have an additional 250 rugged miles to cover through the most remote wilderness found anywhere, including Mahoosuc Notch, considered to be the AT’s toughest mile, and the renown 100-mile Wilderness, the longest section that doesn’t intersect a paved road on the entire route.

Author Bill Bryson, in his classic “A Walk in the Woods,” tips his hat to Avery. “In under seven years, using volunteer labor, he built a 2,000 mile trail through mountain wilderness,” Bryson writes. “Armies have done less.”

Sadly, despite being thin and fit from a life devoted to life in the out of doors, Myron Avery died at the young age of 53, of a heart attack.

Last weekend dawned cold with muddled clouds overhead. It's always a good sign, while bumping into Nahmakanta and Rainbow over the Jo Mary Road,  when there are actual rainbows overhead. It spit snow as we hit the trail on the old logging road that cuts into the Murphy Ponds and follows the old AT path along the north side of the Rainbow Deadwaters.

It took a couple hours, some cursing at the mud and rocks, but eventually I was standing at the Dam, the spectacular view of a snow accented Katahdin looming large across the unfrozen water.

As I lay in my 20-degree sleeping bag that night, contemplating whether to don another layer as the wind blew steady and the temperature dipped to 19, I was warm in the satisfaction that comes from fulfilling a mission I had begun two years before. Fate had conspired to keep me from this remote and beautiful place on the AT. But it did not win in the end.

The Appalachian Trail Conference doesn’t keep records; it discourages folks from trying to set them. That is because there is nothing about the Appalachian Trail experience that requires or compels one hiker to compare themselves to any other. Doing so misses the point.

In the end, whether on the trail or off, there is only one rule in life. Hike your own hike.

The colors of nature in Acadia National Park

Nahmakanta Camps an Oasis of comfort

Deep in Maine's 100-Mile Wilderness, on the Appalachian Trail's longest section without easy resupply, there is little evidence of civilization beyond a dusty network of nameless gravel woods roads and the odd logging operation or two.

But tucked up on the beach at the northern end of Nahmakanta Lake, surrounded by state and federal protected lands, there is an oasis of convenience and comfort. Nahmakanta Lake Wilderness Camps have been a mainstay to travelers in these parts for more than a century.

With few impurities and a high dissolved oxygen content the waters of Nahmakanta Lake are prime for cold water fish species such as trout and landlocked salmon. The name itself is Abenaki and means "plenty of fish."

Nearly every major structure at Nahmakanta Camps dates back to the late 1800s when the camps began catering to sportsmen. All nine cabins, which can sleep from 2-8 people each, are composed, at least in part, from sections of the original log sleeping structures. Owners Angel and Don Hibbs have worked tirelessly over their nearly three decades of stewardship at Nahmakanta and you won't find a better maintained, or cleaner, sporting camp anywhere in Maine.

All cabins have been updated, have screened-in porches, some have their own bathrooms, although you won't find electricity in any of them. Gas lights, stoves and refrigerators get the job done. All sinks have cool, clear spring water piped in.

There's a place to recharge electrical devices, and limited access to wifi in the main lodge, which sports the original dining room that features moose and deer mounts, old maps, and other memorabilia.

For cabins that don't have full bathrooms, the owners have constructed modern private toilet, sink and shower facilities in a building just steps away. Each cabin gets its own private suite. Compost toilets back in the cabins provide facilities for middle of the night bathroom needs.

Even better than the welcoming facilities themselves, is the unparalleled view. All cabins sit just up the shore with an unobstructed ten-mile view straight down the lake. There is no other sign of civilization to be seen.

To the west, Nesuntabunt Mountain, where hikers on the Appalachian Trail get their last full view of their destination, Katahdin to the north, looms straight out of the lake. Loons sing with regularity, eagles and great blue herons fly about, and even the occasional moose wanders past.

Guided moose safaris can also be arranged.

Each cabin has a cozy woodstove and well-stocked woodbox as well as a grill and a separate campfire ring outside.

Canoes, kayaks (no charge) and Lund aluminum fishing boats sit on the beaches out front at the ready. There's a dock and swimming float as well. Fishing guide services are available.

Along with the camps, Angel and Don have created a network of nature and hiking trails that connect directly from the camps to the Appalachian Trail, and the trails in the adjacent Debsconeag Lakes Wilderness. They have detailed maps of the area and can advise on how best to visit the area's stunning waterfalls, remote Pollywog Gorge, or where the best swimming spots are where the AT follows the rushing waters of Rainbow Stream. The number of hiking, bird watching, canoeing, kayaking, fishing and photography options is endless.

Families love visiting Nahmakanta because of the spectacular natural setting and traditional atmosphere. There's so much to do, including, if you so desire, doing nothing at all.

Cabins can be rented on a housekeeping basis or on the American Plan that includes meals in the rustic lodge. A modified American plan is available which includes evening dinner while you cooking breakfast or fix lunches on your own. When the dinner bell is rung at 5:30 p.m. you can count on tasty, wholesome meals, fresh-baked goods, and good fellowship in the main lodge. Accommodating any dietary requirement is never a problem.

While the camps are not accessible by road in winter, that doesn't mean their are empty. Don, a champion dog sledder with CanAm victories under his belt, offers half, full and two-day dog sled excursions out of their winter quarters in Millinocket sometimes using the camps as an overnight destination.

When it comes time to surround yourself with unbridled nature, and creature comforts, Nahmakanta is the place to go.