Christopher Camuto - Time and Tide in Acadia: Seasons on Mount Desert Island

ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER CAMUTO

A Fly Fishermans Blue Ridge (1990)

Another Country (1997)

Hunting from Home (2003)

Time and Tide
in Acadia

SEASONS ON MOUNT DESERT ISLAND

Christopher Camuto

THE COUNTRYMAN PRESS
WOODSTOCK, VERMONT

For my sisters

Mary, Pat, and Kathi

and the Maine of childhood

The same day we passed also near to an island about four or five leagues long, in the neighborhood of which we just escaped being lost on a little rock on a level with the water, which made an opening in our barque near the keel. From this island to the main land on the north, the distance is less than a hundred paces. It is very high, and notched in places, so that there is the appearance to one at sea, as of seven or eight mountains extending along near each other. The summit of the most of them is destitute of trees, as there are only rocks on them. The woods consist of pines, firs, and birches only. I named it Isle des Monts Dserts. The latitude is 44 30'.

SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN,

SEPTEMBER 5, 1604

Contents

The Birds of Mount Desert Rock,
October 36, 2006

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Jennifer Lyons, my patient agent, and to Amy Cherry, my equally patient editor, for their interest in this project. Bucknell University granted me leave time and travel assistance for part of this work, and the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor gave permission and logistical support for my visit to Mount Desert Rock in October of 2006. Chuck Whitney and Toby Stephenson did yeoman work organizing that trip. Thanks to the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, for providing access to Mount Deserts indigenous past, and to the Friends of Acadia, which puts so much volunteer effort into maintaining the trails of Acadia National Park. Thanks to the Maine Audubon Society, for the genius of its autumn pelagic-bird cruise, and to the naturalists of Allied Whale, who do such a fine job of educating the public about the marine life of the Gulf of Maine on whale-watch cruises out of Bar Harbor. At Bucknell University, graduate assistants Kimi Cunningham Grant and Cara Maria Cambardella helped with research, photo-editing, and proofreading. Erica Stern kept the proceedings in order from New York; from her vantage in Maine, Kathleen Brandes put her keen weather eye on the text as copy editor. Mary Jellison found me a comfortable, warbler-infested place to stay on the Quietside of Mount Desert Island and introduced me to a wonderful circle of friends. Special thanks to Andy Ciotola and Katie Hays for coming down from Damariscotta for a good walk at Ship Harbor, where this book begins. Finally, gratitude is due the National Park Service, which works every day to preserve the heart and soul of Mount Desert Island, giving us all a chance to visit what is left of lAcadie.

L and lies in water...

ELIZABETH BISHOP,
THE MAP

FIRST LIGHT

Lands End and the Minds Eye

Sunrise from Cadillac Mountain reveals a coastline carved with a crooked knife.

From that famous vantage on Mount Desert Island, the coast of Maine comes out of the dark as a complicated affair of peninsulas and coves, a jigsaw of rock and water, a play of motion and stasis. The ground you stand ongraniteis as firm as bedrock gets, but the other elementsair, water, lightmove fluidly through a landscape that seems simultaneously ancient and just born. The mainland is an afterthought, something to put an edge on.

At dawn, the familiar names of famous places dont much matterBar Harbor, Frenchman Bay, the Porcupine Islands, the Cranberry Isles. You need pay attention only to the forms of this landscape emerging from night, a natural reciprocity of land and water shaped by climate and honed by weather, attended by the casual genius of sea level expressing itself as a restless edge of tide.

On Cadillac you can feel all of Mount Desert underfoot. You seem to be riding a graceful surfacing of mountains headed, like a pod of whales, out to sea through other, smaller islands equally well wrought, unique expressions of rock foaming at their margins, leaning a little seaward or a little landward, depending on which way the tide is moving. From here, to the south and west, one island leads to another, all the way to Frenchboro and Swans Island and Isle au Haut, as this landscape toys with the idea of islands until the sea says enough and there is only water.

On clear mornings, standing on this great whaleback of granite, with this wide coastal world at your feet, you can see the roundness of the earth in your minds eye and sense keenly the orderliness of the solar system, the way the sun and the moon pull on the oceans to the advantage of life on earth. To the east beyond Schoodic and Petit Manan, you can see a day coming toward you as a blush of lightthe rosy-fingered dawn of Homeric poetry.

Dawn on Cadillac is frequently greeted by small crowdslarger ones on the solstices and equinoxesthat gather on this well-worn summit, though natives and seasoned visitors have their own, more private places from which to watch the rising sun. I dont like crowds either, but come once, at least, to Cadillac Mountain to see the sun rise Down East. Watch the ragged beauty of this well-built coastan affair of granite and spruce-fircasually reappear out of night.

On a cool morning in autumn, you will find clusters of people wrapped around cups of coffee and hot chocolate, and couples, wrapped around each other, drawn to the ordinary business of the turning eartha sleepy, makeshift tribe wanting to see the sun come up in a beautiful place. Some cheer and clap at the performance partly as a joke, I think, and partly to relieve their embarrassment at being unexpectedly moved and suddenly more innocent than they could imagine themselves being.

Watch enough dawns from enough places on Mount Desert, in every season and in all weather, and eventually you might get a glimpse of Pemetic , the Mount Desert of the Passamaquoddy, wielders of the crooked knife, who gathered food and hunted and fashioned their creation myths and stories on these shores. The Passamaquoddy are Abenakithose living at the sunrise Algonquin-speaking people who, along with the Penobscot, Maliseet, Pennacook, and Micmac, understood well the nature of this place.