Willem's Yankee Notebook - August 10, 2007 - Acadia

THE RAIN IN MAINE FALLS MAINLY...

BAR HARBOR, ME ¬ The summer of 1947 was one of the driest on record in the State of Maine. Many old-time residents claimed never to have seen it drier. The usual autumn rains failed to materialize; by late fall the state was tinder-dry. On the afternoon of Friday, October 17, the Bar Harbor Fire Department, on Mount Desert Island, got a call from a Mrs. Gilbert, who reported smoke rising from a cranberry bog near her home.

It was a tough little fire, smoldering underground and resisting efforts to extinguish it; but it was hardly out of control. Then on the 21st the wind picked up to near-gale force, fanning the flames into the spruce forest downwind of the bog, and suddenly the island was faced with a wide, fast-moving crown fire headed straight for the town of Bar Harbor.

Because of the town's identity as a summer resort of the wealthy (think John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, et al), the fire became international news. But for the locals, loss of their primary homes was the burning issue (sorry), as well as the possible need for evacuation. All the roads between Bar Harbor and the mainland ran through the flames. Local fishermen came to the rescue, but many residents at the waterfront, watching the smoke behind them and viewing the gale on the sea ahead of them, opted to stay put. It turned out to be the better choice; bulldozers cleared a path on the highway through the fire, and a caravan of about 700 cars made it to the mainland.

Before the fire finally was declared extinguished in November, it had consumed over 17,000 acres, 170 homes, five grand hotels, and 67 summer estates. Acadia National Park, comprising most of the interior of the island, lost over 10,000 acres It was "the year that Maine burned."

The summer of 2008, in the unlikely event you haven't noticed, has not been one of the driest on record. As I drove over here a couple of days ago, leaving central Vermont's pluvial devastation behind, the truck radio frequently interrupted regular programming with federal alerts about flooding and highway washouts all over central Maine. My purpose in coming to Bar Harbor involved standing in front of a television camera outdoors while attempting to look happy and unruffled, so I packed plenty of extra duds and Gore-Tex rain gear. No problem; my motto is, if the (non-waterproof) camera can stand it, so can I!

The great fire of 1947 changed Mount Desert in several ways. The days of summer-long visits of the fabulously wealthy were in decline already after the war, and the destruction of the huge summer cottages pretty effectively closed them out. Where the mansions once stood, the roads into Bar Harbor now are lined with cheek-by-jowl hotels, motels, summer resorts, and chichi shops and restaurants. Traffic is bumper-to-bumper through the downtown. Our first and only attempt to dine there was thwarted by an absolute absence of parking space. The forested hills of the park, with their bare, rocky summits loomed invitingly to the south.

The park has been through three names, from Sieur des Monts National Monument in 1916, to Lafayette National Park in 1919, to Acadia National Park in 1929. Running through the forest, courtesy of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., are about fifty miles of beautifully constructed gravel carriage trails with arched granite bridges, now popular with bicyclists. The park is among the top ten nationally in popularity. Its infrastructure and regulations are clearly the work of genius, and the hordes of vacationers we've met have seemed almost universally pleasant ¬ even the ten or so Unity College freshmen we met descending Cadillac Mountain after they'd gotten up at two to hike to the top for the sunrise. It's apparently a tossup whether Cadillac or Mount Katahdin is the first spot in the United States to receive each day's sunlight.

The name Acadia came originally from Giovanni da Verrazzano, the 16th-century Italian explorer who lyrically dubbed the east coast of North America "Arkadia," after a pastoral poem about a Greek land of milk and honey. Samuel de Champlain later elided the "r," writing it as "l'Acadié," and the name slowly slid northward along the coast in succeeding centuries and maps, until it rested on the coast of Maine and the maritime provinces of Canada.

My limited experience with camera crews has led to the conclusion that they're obsessed with sunrises and sunsets, which give them dramatic video opportunities. The result is a disruption of what I consider normal dining patterns. We've left our cabin each day before five, caught a cup of coffee and a muffin at a fishermen's convenience store, and at the end of the day, dead tired, have taken pizza and beer back to our rooms. Barbaric, if you ask me; but anything for art, I suppose.

Yesterday morning we hiked up Cadillac Mountain by the North Ridge Trail, only a couple of miles over mostly open ledges. The ledges weren't open until after the great fire, and afterward were left to regenerate on their own. The original spruce and balsam have been replaced by after-fire species ¬ pitch pine, big-toothed popple, birches, and blueberries everywhere. This morning we again headed up the mountain before five, hoping to catch the sunrise and avoid the crowds. About thirty cars were ahead of ours. Everybody wants to be the first to see the sun rise. Nobody did.

I'm about to start back to Vermont ¬ 300 miles and six and a half hours ¬ and there's almost no traffic going in my direction this morning. Coming toward me it's once more bumper-to-bumper. Time to get out of here. The sky to the west, where I'm headed, is black with wet thunderclouds thousands of feet high. Here we go again!