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.