The Maine Course

I suppose I could grow tired of lobster. It’s possible I could grow blasé over the brilliant display of fall color, the picture postcard towns with charming clapboard houses and downtowns both vibrant and historic, the gorgeous organic produce that outshines anything I’ve managed to grow in California. Maybe after a while I’d take for granted the sense of community in the small towns, the outdoor activities like free sailing and rowing for locals and the cultural opportunities that seem so plentiful. But I don’t think so.
Maine is wonderful. The people we’ve encountered are extraordinarily friendly. The air is clean, the scenery is beautiful and every town qualifies for “Tree City USA.” The coast goes on forever and real estate is affordable.
At this point the invariable response is: “but, the WINTERS!” Well, if you’re lucky enough to be retired you can always leave. Or you can stock up on winter apparel at the L.L. Bean outlet, make sure the house is well winterized and watch the ponds turn into ice rinks. Just muddle through it. Our friend Lisa, who lived in Hawaii and California much of her life, does.
We spent a weekend at her late-1800s house in Belfast, actually two houses joined together with a hip-roofed shed incorporating rough-hewn beams. It’s a buttercup yellow work in progress, a do-it-yourself project that’s turning out beautifully. She played local tour guide, driving us on scenic backroads, taking us to a rocky beach where we watched dogs Fritz and Moose frolic while we hunted sea glass and picked wild apples. And of course we went to the local lobster pound, where her friend Biff joined us for an alfresco feast on Penobscot Bay. It was a great weekend and renewal of a friendship going back nearly 35 years.
We began our Maine sojourn in a campground near Bar Harbor, where two visiting cruise ships brought over 5,000 passengers to town. Grand water-view homes give a sense of the beauty that drew the original vacationers to the area a century ago, while large inns dominate much of the waterfront view today.
But the rest of Mount Desert Island is lovely. We walked the carriage roads and the path rimming Jordan Pond in Acadia Park, enjoying a lunch of seafood chowder, popovers and a glass of local pear wine. We bought and cooked lobsters from a pound we’d visited five years ago, using our camp stove outdoors and a pot loaned by the proprietor, no deposit required.
One night we bought the $29.95 cooked dinner for two from the lobster man across the road from our campground: two lobsters, two peekytoe crabs, two ears of corn and a stick of butter – and free delivery – for the price of two St. Helena burgers. Another night it was sweet dayboat scallops right from the bay. It’s easy to be locavores in Maine.
We took the mail boat from Northeast Harbor to Cranberry Island, sharing the ride with locals like Carl Brooks, whose family has owned land on the island for 250 years. A chatty Ted Kennedy lookalike, Carl told us what it was like to live on the 39-resident island, showing us the little shed on the dock where UPS deliveries are made, along with the post office, a former fish cooler. “We never had a zip code and it drove Homeland Security crazy after 9/11,” he said. “We had to put names on the roads.”
We walked the island’s main road and followed a path through a boggy forest to a beach, where we added stray lobster floats and other flotsam to a driftwood totem. The land was donated for public use and the path built by volunteers, said Phil, a volunteer who opened the island’s history museum for us.
Heading back to the dock, we passed Carl’s Victorian house and he waved. “I should have offered you a ride to the far end of the island,’ he said, pointing to his golf cart. We hopped on, and he gave us the royal tour, including a bumpy ride up a dirt road to an exclusive club frequented by Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, where a gun-toting local once chased away a snooping journalist from the Wall Street Journal.
A little café/general store, subsidized by a wealthy summer resident, supplies basic needs for residents at remarkably fair prices, even in the summer when the population swells by tenfold. But everything else, from furniture to firewood, arrives by boat. We shared the ride back with a group of construction workers who drank beer on the stern deck, while the boat’s captain passed out dog biscuits to traveling canines up front. When we stopped at the next island, the boat picked up a young woman with two couches on the dock, the construction workers cheerfully helping to load the furniture onboard.
The rest of our stay was a visual feast of foggy lighthouses and salty harbors, crimson-flecked forests and pumpkin-head scarecrows celebrating fall’s bounty. We ate more lobster and haddock than I could ever imagine and discovered whoopie pies. We went through our first Nor’easter and saw a rare blue lobster. We kept extending our stay by “just one more day.” Finally, it was time to move on.
For photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/happytwo.mcwilliams/TripEast7Maine?authkey=Gv1sRgCN-ymcer9o-BkQE&feat=directlink.