Dispatch VI

Rockland to Bar Harbor

After our Stephen King/Waterville experience, Rockland looked like Florence to us. The town was filled with galleries and charming little mom and pop stores that ran along the Main Street. And one very large lobster near the harbor. 

(Photo by Chip Walter)

It was too late for breakfast by the time we made our way there, but we found the Rockland Cafe for lunch, a place that reminded me of the original Primanti’s in Pittsburgh, or Ritter’s Diner. Three middle aged women waitresses right out of central casting ran the place singing out with broad Maine accents.  “I was watching a nice movie at home,” said one, rolling her mascaraed eyes, “and then my kid called me in!” Their sandwich board proclaimed they had Maine’s best seafood "chowdah," and it was excellent. Big chunks of haddock and scallops, shrimp and lobster in a hearty red sauce.

We asked Tammy, our waitress, how the town was doing, COVID being the elephant in everyone’s room. She said the big problem was staff. She and the other waitresses were handling that end of things just fine, but they had lost two line cooks and getting food in the hands of customers was a big deal throughout the town -- part of the "big resignation." We would hear more of this in Bar Harbor and farther into Canada. COVID had simply changed people. Some had had time to rethink the work they once did and had decided they didn’t want to do it anymore. Some found side-hustles that had turned into real income. Some decided they needed to stay with their children rather than work and pay for childcare. Others decided they’d ride out they government subsidies as long as possible. Whatever, the virus had changed daily dynamics,  and international economics, probably indefinitely.

Fortified by our lunch and Tammy’s insights, we wound our way upwards following Highway 1’s dictates; hugging Maine’s rocky coast and colorful trees. One charming harbor town after another passed us by: Camden, Kennebec, Lincolnville, Belfast with restaurants and businesses sporting marine-oriented names like Captain Tinkham’s Emporium or the Whale’s Tale or the Finback Alehouse. It was all about the sea. And seeing the sea against the state’s fall foliage lowered your heart beat, and put a grin on your face.

One reason Maine is so calming is because not many people live there. All 39,000 square miles of Maine are home to only 1.3 million souls. The proof is written on Mainers’ license plates. Their numbers and letters are truncated compared to license plates you’d see in New York, Pennsylvania or Massachusetts — 499 XM, for example, or P  99  h, or one we saw that simply read BABE. 

That may explain why there was no shortage of people in Bar Harbor when we arrived. By dinner the sidewalks were thick with tourists taking in the last and best week of fall foliage. New Englanders were getting their fill of dramatic coastlines, colorful forests and plenty of lobster. Our daughter Molly says Bar Harbor looks like Disneyland, the set of a perfect northeast harbor town.

Shelves of books have been written about Bar Harbor so I won’t try to improve on that. Cyn and I toured the town the couple days we were there, attempting to avoid the tourists we pretended we weren’t. Later we ran over to nearby Ellsworth to get our all-important special Canadian COVID test so we could make our way to our neighbor up north. Everywhere I kept hearing the term “Downeaster.” I knew it was the given name of the train that brought us to Portland from Boston, and I kept seeing it on signs everywhere — bars, restaurants, clothing shops and galleries. Why “downeaster” when we were going up north, climbing the uppermost neck of the United States?

The term comes from the late 1700’s when schooners hauled goods in a northeasterly direction (like us), but would often sail what was called a strong “downwind” at their backs. Since the same wind was also moving them east, sailors conflated “down” and “east” into “downeast” or “downeaster,” which was later attached to an entire geographical region as well as the people who lived there, as in “you’re a downeast-ah.” Downeasters are also known as “Mainers,” a special breed, like Yinzers in Pittsburgh or Montana cowboys and girls, I suspect. They are the opposite of people like me and Cyn who are "from away." According to my rigorous research, they have deep generational roots; are tough, proud and committed to the rugged beauty of the state. They also have a knack for taking apart the English language in interesting ways. They use r’s where there aren’t any and don’t use r’s where they “ah” supposed to as in Bah-hah-bah and roast-ah and lobst-ah. And don’t forget idiomatic inventions like “wicked smaht” and “ah-yuh.”

The state that Mainers live in produces 90 percent of the nation’s lobsters and 99 percent of its blueberries. It boasts 5100 rivers and streams, 6000 ponds and lakes, 2000 coastal islands, and if you walked all 3500 miles of its shoreline you would have walked farther than the west coast of California. This made my mind wonder about the origin of the word “Maine” itself, a strange name for a plot of land when you think on it. New Hamsphire, New York, even Pennsylvania (Penn’s Woods) or Massachusetts (Native American) seemed obvious enough. But Maine? I won’t inflict that information on you here, but feel free to jump down that rabbit hole on your own by paying a visit to the Maine State Library (https://www.maine.gov/msl/maine/meorigin.htm). They’ve got the whole story.

A lot of these questions came to mind while Cyn and I explored Acadia National Park in general, and hiked Jordan Pond in particular. The road that rings the park is considered one of America’s most beautiful drives, and Jordan’s Pond is one of the most beautiful sectors of the drive. This particular October day we found it glass-still, surrounded by mountains, studded by brilliant green and gold.  The people of the Wabanaki Confederacy ("People of the Dawnland") which include the Algonquian nations—the Maliseet, Mi'kmaq, Passamaquoddy, Abenaki and Penobscot people lived here for 12,000 years before white men began to change the place. J.D. Rockefeller used to own land around Jordan's Pond, along with robber baron families like the Morgans, Fords, Vanderbuilts and Carnegies  but in the 1920s it was all tuned over to the federal government to become the nation's first national park east of the Mississippi. 

Even before Rockefeller purchased the property, people in the mid 1800’s had found Arcadia, calling themselves “rusticators.” We rusticated the five mile hike around the pond, past boulders that had been shoved up against the pond's far perimeter by a receding glacier, which gave Cyn’s recovering knee (accident back in March in which she cracked her knee cap open like an eggshell) a solid work out. She breezed over the rocks and emerged out of the woods stronger than ever.

Visiting Machias

If you push far enough into Maine, you’ll eventually collide with Canada, and that was where we were headed next. We hugged Maine’s rugged coast and got an eye full of maple, birch and oak rioting with color against tall stands of green pine; forests deep as anything you’d imagine in a Grimm’s fairy tale.  As darkness approached, we stopped in the town of Machias (MAH-CHEE-AHS). It wasn’t much more than a wide spot along Highway 1, but it was hard to miss the area’s love affair with blueberries. One place we passed, proclaimed it was Maine’s blueberry museum. It was closed for the season, but every building was painted deep blue, including a squat domed one, cleverly posing as a huge blueberry. 

Machias marks the eastern most plot of land in the United States. At least that’s what The Quoddy Tides, the local newspaper claimed. Turns out to be true. I checked. 

The Tides had other revelations to make. City council had six people running for office, but only three slots to fill. None were incumbents and some of them were even “from away.” Change was in the air! But which way the wind would blow was still up for discussion. The Maine Lobstering Union was suing the National Marine Fisheries Service because it closed lobster fishing in a 976 square mile area to avoid Right Whales from getting tangled in lobster lines. The union said losing the business cost them a significant chunk of the $750 million a year that Maine’s lobster business generates for the state’s economy. And COVID struck again. The Grand Theatre in nearby Ellsworth had to cancel its local production of “Nunsense,” because one of the people directly involved in the show came down with the virus. The Grand said it made the decision after “much deliberation, and a heavy heart.” 

Opinions were freely shared in Machias, which is the Mainer’s way. At one Mini-Mart a bear of man wearing high rubber boots, walked in. The woman at the cash register hailed him, “Hey Tom, what do you know?” “Me?” He said dead pan, “I don’t know nothin’.” Mainer's are famous for wit so dry sometimes you're not sure if it's wit. He bought a couple of lottery tickets, a pack of cigarettes and walked out, but I noticed the woman at the register was chuckling and wagging her head as she stashed the cash.

The next day we walked a trail along the Machias River which is the native Passamaquoddy word for “little bad falls.” The river runs right into the Atlantic Ocean and when the tide comes in, the estuary rises so fast you can watch while you’re hiking the estuary trail. That's what we were doing when we ran into Michael, a middle-age man sitting by a picnic bench, his battered bike nearby. He had the misfortune of losing his two front teeth, but smiled freely nevertheless. That he was a big Donald Trump supporter was clear by the T-shirt he wore which proclaimed. “If you don’t like Donald Trump, then you probably won’t like me. And I’m okay with that.” (Nothing gets by us.)

Michael said he was off to eat his lunch and “have a Natty” (local beer). I figured as long as we didn’t discuss politics we could remain civil so I asked him if he could tell us a little more about the trail we were walking. He launched into an excellent rundown of the battles along the river during the Revolutionary War. “They call me Michael, the historian, around here sometimes,” he grinned. 

Turns out there were a couple of battles right where we stood, but my favorite was the Battle of the Margaretta, the shortest in the war’s history. The British were sailing up the estuary in a ship called the Margaretta, planning to take control of the American fort there when Neptune Bear, a Passamaquoddy Native American chief who was working with the colonials, stood on a high rock, aimed his musket and shot the ship’s captain in the head from 200 feet away, a miracle! The whole fleet high-tailed it back down the river and ended the battle as they disappeared into the Atlantic. Anyhow, that was Michael’s story, and he was okay with that. Me too. If only all battles ended so quickly.

Before heading to the border and out of Machias, we made sure to sit down at Helen’s Restaurant and try out their famous blueberry pie. We couldn’t resist the advice they gave us when we walked in the door.

Next we cross paths with the wild beauty (and wild characters) of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. We hope you’ll join us as we …

Crack on!

Best,

C-Squared

This is a series about Cyndy and Chip’s Vagabond Adventure - our journey to explore all seven continents, all seven seas and 100+ countries by land and sea, but never by jet. COVID has forced us to begin the United States, not a bad start, but soon we'll be heading overseas. What will the world be like following a global pandemic? What people will we meet? What cultures, places, languages and music will broaden us. Are we being pulled apart or are we coming together? We’ll find out.