Deena and I had been planning a short trip to Maine for well over a year. It was to coincide with her seventieth birthday. We had a large Airbnb house reserved and she planned to invite a number of guests, but then the house was taken off the Airbnb listings around the end of last year. This past February, we found another, much smaller accommodation on the coast and reserved that house. The plan at that point was for Deena, Molly and I to go up and spend the better part of a week on the coast. However, as the date approached, we were fairly overwhelmed with personal events and medical exams that, among other things, suggested that my bladder cancer might be recurring. So, stressed as we were and rather than scrub the trip, we enlisted Deena’s sister Debbie to help with the driving and determined to press on with our plans. This post is an account of our sojourn in Maine.

We three (plus Molly) drove up to Belfast, Maine and arrived around 2:30 p.m. last Saturday. Belfast was an area further north than I had previously been. I was looking forward to some leisure time at the shore. Our rental was where the Passagassawakeag River flows into the Penobscot Bay which empties into the Atlantic Ocean. The unusual name for the river means “a sturgeon’s place” or “a place for spearing sturgeon by torchlight” in language of the Penobscot tribe¹. The floor of the bay was partially exposed when we arrived, and it was not a pleasing sight to see, with debris scattered about. As our host was speaking to Deena and Debbie, I took Molly down the large granite stones which were the size of automobile engines that formed the embankment and we walked on the plain. I noticed something akin to damp, green rockweed here and there and it then occurred to me to check the tides on my phone. Low tide was only an hour away. However, on that day, the high tide would be at 9:00 p.m. or so, and by that time the tide would be just over eight feet higher than present at the point Molly and I were standing on. Today, it was predicted to be almost twelve feet high!

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Those who go to the sea in ships

Fishing boats are everywhere in Belfast. Seven miles due east of this coastal town is Isle au Haut, an island of lobstermen whose tiny world was named in the 1600’s by explorer Samuel de Champlain. It means “High Island” and gained the attention of people “from away” with the book The Lobster Chronicles by Linda Greenlaw. The current population on the island is 54 souls (plus or minus.) This is about one sixth of what it was two centuries ago. Greenlaw’s book is a personal account of her experiences trapping lobsters for a livelihood (a living that is barely sufficient in an of itself) and of a young woman abiding among hardy seamen many years her senior in some cases. She uses real life examples from her past to explain how rugged–and dangerous–life under those circumstances actually can be. For example, several young islanders making a simple boat trip seven miles to the mainland can find themselves in mortal peril if a sudden squall arises. But her book includes many interesting facts about these ruddy “bugs” as lobstermen call their prey. She mentions, for example, that when early Americans discovered lobsters and understood they were edible, the newly noted lobsters were consigned to feed the poorer communities as well as for use in sustaining inmates in prison. They were not thought fit to be consumed by dainty people of good breeding. Another interesting fact is that members of this phylum (Arthropoda) can actually live as long as a century. Fishing for lobsters and other marine bounty such as cod and haddock is carefully regulated by state and sometimes federal authorities to ensure that there are future harvests.

I did not have the opportunity on this occasion to hike along the coast, though I hope to be able to do it before much longer. In many respects, trudging the shoreline of Maine is an adventure best left to younger, more nimble persons. Maine has a reputation for having a rocky shoreline, and this reputation is well-deserved. There are several contributing factors to explain this, but the primary factor involves the glacier from the last ice age which occurred some 20,000 years ago.

Maine as a window to the past

Signs of the last ice age are everywhere. Take for example the granite creags scattered in the many bays and inlets along the Maine coast, or the gourd-sized, rounded rocks resembling cobblestones that populate the coastal berms along the beach as seen in the photo below.  According to information provided by Digital Maine that speaks to these artifacts (or erratics as they are known to geologists):

• The stones that now make up the beach[es] were originally deposited here by the continental glacier.
• Waves acting on the glacial deposit washed the mud and sand into deeper water, leaving behind a “clean” deposit of stones.
• Over time, as the stones have rolled up and down the beach, they have become rounded and polished. Solid bedrock anchors the ends of the each, keeping the stones in a pocket.
• The shape of the beach changes when storms rearrange to stones on the beach into berms.  The largest storms reconfigure the entire beach whereas smaller storms may only affect the lower portions.
• Each storm leaves a characteristic berm shape, with a lower sloped beach and a higher flat top.
• Even stone beaches are dynamic systems that are constantly changing.”

Then, too, there are the grassy fields with a single, house-sized rock located inconveniently in the open. It was the sheer pressure of the weight of the ice which towered as high as a mile and one half above the ground that created the fertile soil that Maine is blessed with today:

As the ice retreated about 12,000 years ago, it left behind a classic deglaciated landscape, with rounded gravelly hills, wide, U-shaped valleys, numerous lakes and bogs, thin soils of clay, silt, and sand, and [as mentioned] an abundance of stones and boulders.”

The sheer weight of the ice depressed the surface of the land by several hundred feet over time.

Maine during the last ice age.

During the Pleistocene Period in Maine which ended 11,700 years ago, there were mammals that resembled those today but they were fundamentally different as well. For example, Castoroides or beavers back then were the size of bears today, and weighed up to 300 pounds. They were plentiful along the receding margins of the glacier when bogs and wetlands formed as recently as 11,500 to 12,050 years ago. There were Homo sapien immigrants also:

Maine’s first human arrivals wandered a boggy land of sedges and grasses punctuated by scattered stands of birch, willow, alder, and spruce. Wooly mammoths roamed the grassy plains, herds of mastodons browsed on the emerging coniferous forest, and giant beaver built homes in the vast bogs and wetlands.“

And the caribou were plentiful as well, to the good fortune of the original residents of Maine.

The mean temperature one might find on top of the glacier which covered the entire state and which was known as the Laurentide Ice Sheet has been recently calculated to have been a mere 46 degrees Fahrenheit. The glacier, itself, enveloped the state for a full 15,000 years. There were also winds to factor in, but rather than coming from the West as they do now, the winds back then originated in the East and blew westwards, exposing the frozen terrain to moisture from the ocean.

Union-bound

Unfortunately, our time on the coast was limited for this trip as I mentioned earlier. After leaving the coast, we traveled fifteen miles as the crow flies towards the “outback” or hinder land region, where the busses do not run. Here, we spent the remainder of the week in a farmstead on an actual working farm, replete with chickens, rabbits, goats, sheep, alpacas, and barn swallows. Barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) appear on all seven continents (including Antarctica) but I had not seen any since my youth. There was an abandoned barn adjoining the house that had fallen into disrepair and it was a natural place for the swallows to build their nests (which they did.) The access roads were not paved with asphalt but rather consisted of tightly packed sand. Along each side of the roads were fiddlehead ferns, a delicacy sautéed in local restaurants and served as an appetizer.

At the edge of the farm was a small lake called Round Pond, which runs into Seven Tree Pond. Seven Tree Pond flows into White Oak Pond which empties into the St George River whose mouth is roughly the Marshall Point Lighthouse on the western shore of the Atlantic Ocean. The river was once home to the Wawenock tribe who cultivated pumpkins, maize and beans. The Wawenock numbered about 10,000 strong when whites first settled in Maine. By the time of the American Revolution, only 1,000 Wawenock remained, the rest having perished in a series of deadly epidemics. The St George River meanders much like the Mississippi does, taking forty miles or more to cover the shorter distance to the coast.

During the last few days of the trip, I read and took Molly for walks as Deena and Debbie visited a cousin in a nearby town or ran errands to the nearest store. The trip was a restful respite and our brief vacation, like the St George River, found a different path of its own as it moved forward from humble origins to a destiny much greater and certainly much larger than itself, that of the North Atlantic Ocean. As far as Maine goes, it is a very popular destination among vacationers from New England and elsewhere. Maine, incidentally, is the only state in the Union that has one syllable in its name. Known for lobsters, blueberries and coon cats, Maine barely has barely as many year-round residents as Dallas, TX and much fewer people than the city of Houston, TX. Add those census numbers to the area of the state (Maine is the largest state in New England in terms of square miles) and you begin to appreciate its appeal, whether because of it’s rocky shores or its thick deciduous forests with an ever present number of conifers.

Footnotes

¹Fannie Hardy Eckstrom, Indian Place-Names of the Penobscot Valley and the Maine Coast; Univ of Maine Press; Orono, Maine 1974 (original 1941