On nautical charts, the Maine coast appears to hang like fringe over the Atlantic Ocean, yet there is nothing flimsy about the land. Seen up close, those slivers of continent that cartographers depict as delicate seem to defy the sea, rather than absorb it. Southern Louisiana, for example, passively drinks the Gulf of Mexico like a tattered sponge, whereas the coast of Maine claws at the ocean like a giant rake.
Anyone caring to witness this can slice off almost any section of the Maine coast at random and find its vaunted, craggy persona. I picked it up at Portland Head Light, the oldest lighthouse in Maine.
To find the little notch of public land where the lighthouse has performed its duties since 1791, I took a series of back roads. Private property clings possessively to much of the Maine coast, so it’s not uncommon to follow a promising two-lane highway for 8 or 10 miles toward the tip of a peninsula, only to come upon a Dead End sign and a notice that says, in effect, “Keep Out.”
Sympathetic officers at Two Lights State Park, not far from Portland Head Light, issue little slips of paper-about the size of the fortune in a fortune cookie-to redirect those visitors who think Two Lights and Portland Head are the same thing, a reasonable assumption. Two Lights State Park covers a few acres of coastal land near a couple of defunct lighthouses surrounded by cottages. Those lights are picturesque but unapproachable.
Portland Head Light still blazes out viable warnings across the shipping lanes, and it sounds a foghorn with as much authority as when President George Washington approved completion of it in 1790. Automated now, it stands proudly as a beacon on the treacherous rocks. The former lighthouse keeper’s quarters serve as a handsome and informative museum.
From that vantage point, strangers readily understand how Northeast America meets the sea. Explorers and merchants discovered a wealth of natural harbors and exploitable timber and wildlife in Maine. Some historians guess that ancient Phoenicians were the first to see the possibilities. Others say, with more confidence, that Viking Leif Ericson made the trip circa 1000 A.D. And certainly the legendary Capt. John Smith came calling, starting around 1614.
Modern explorers sample the Maine coast in a variety of ways. U.S. Hwy. 1 and Interstates 95, 295 and 495 (the Maine Turnpike) allow motorists to seek out picturesque havens on day trips from Portland.
Of course, the quintessential Maine experience cannot be found along the major highways, except in a stylized way. I learned this when U.S. 1 led me 17 miles from downtown Portland to downtown Freeport, where scores of outlet stores line the main street–most of them affecting a faux New England/Federal architecture.
The anchor for all this discount retailing is L.L. Bean, the outfitter almost as famous as Maine. Its huge mail-order complex covers at least a full block not far from downtown; its enormous retail store dominates the Freeport shopping district. A woods-and-water mecca, L.L. Bean deals in everything from parkas to trout flies, hiking boots to silk skivvies.
Crowds glut the Freeport sidewalks and parking lots constantly. The other day, one woman left her car and shouldered her way toward the L.L. Bean emporium, where she encountered a large congregation near the entrance–shoppers waiting for a tour bus. She stood with them for awhile before asking somebody, “Is this the proper line to get into L.L. Bean?”
No, she was told, the store–open 24 hours a day, every day of the year–never gets that busy. Still, her misapprehension wasn’t too absurd, considering the swarms of shoppers all around her.
Freeport is OK if you like that sort of thing, but I was more intrigued by places up the road, names that cawed like seagulls and rang like ships’ bells: Orrs Island, Cooks Corner, Cundys Harbor, Parker Head . . .. No one without half a lifetime to spend could hope to experience them all.
Near the Kennebec River estuary, the village of Bath invited closer scrutiny. A signpost at the U.S. 1 rest stop listed its attractions, and the town looked politely cordial with its requisite church steeples and old frame houses that implied all the comfort of well-worn slippers.
The enormous red-striped riverside crane marking the Bath Iron Works shipbuilding facilities failed to mar the effect, and the gigantic gray navy ships–works in progress–seemed incongruous but not all that displeasing.
This part of Maine launched shipbuilding in America nearly 400 years ago. At the Maine Maritime Museum on the river’s edge, a modern facility houses carefully selected and superbly displayed artifacts from the boom decades: brass lamps, wooden tillers, nets, figureheads, model ships and paintings of the vessels that had at one time made the Kennebec a forest of masts.
Outside, scattered old buildings preserve the atmosphere of the Percy & Small Shipyard and its predecessors and successors, industrial giants turning out the frigates, schooners, clippers and sloops that plied the world’s trade routes.
About 11 miles northeast, Wiscasset still revels in its glory years as another 19th Century seaport, this one on the Sheepscot River, a hilly community of fine houses, serious antique shops and a setting that locals insist makes Wiscasset “the prettiest village in Maine.”
I could hear that sort of pride in the voice of Jane Tucker, who conducts informal tours of Castle Tucker, the most conspicuous and impressive of all the big houses in Wiscasset.
The residence, said to resemble a Scottish castle, sits atop a seven-acre clearing once known as Windmill Hill, overlooking Wiscasset Harbor. A local judge built it in 1807, and subsequent owners changed the house radically. Capt. Richard H. Tucker, Jane’s grandfather, commissioned the most impressive improvement of all, a glass portico rising three stories high to reflect the sunrise and catch the view.
“There was a time when this area was filled with ships,” Jane Tucker told me. “Many of them were my grandfather’s. The family traded all over the world.” Her hand swept toward etchings of schooners and clippers under full sail.
A few steps away from Castle Tucker, shady High Street slopes toward the Wiscasset commercial district. Fine Georgian and clapboard homes give way to merchandising for the travelers who pass through.
At Le Garage, a charming yellow-sided restaurant on the waterfront, patrons filtered toward the front porch and lunched on grand lobster salads or the house specialty, creamed finan haddie.
Two gray, wrecked ships dominated their view of the Sheepscot River. The schooners Hesper and Luther Little hauled coal and lumber from Atlantic ports to the West Indies and points south early in this century. They have sat immobile and decaying since the Depression.
Patterns of trade have changed, of course, leaving the wooden boats to antiquarians and reducing the bustle of many Maine seaports to a couple of wrecks outside a restaurant picture window.
Lobster boats do still work the shallows, their colorful buoys marking traps all along the coast. Each lobster company has its own uniquely painted set of buoys, which function like cattle brands to differentiate between owners. This year, according to several sources, conservation measures have begun to pay off with record catches as females in their prime are thrown back so they can reproduce.
Even the lowliest restaurants and the most nationally homogeneous franchises dare not fail to offer lobster in one form or another. McDonald’s, for instance, features a lobster loaf sandwich on its local menus. And the hungry never lack for lobster shacks, where they select their entree, wait for it to emerge from the boiling pot and then go at it with picks and nutcrackers at rough picnic benches.
Besides that, lobster carryout booths appear almost wherever traps are hauled ashore, a fairly reliable indication of freshness. I found one such booth at the docks just past Georgetown on the first peninsula east of Bath and in the vicinity of Reid State Park.
The little red shanty with its hand-lettered “lobsters” sign, as well as the area that surrounded it, gave off a lazy essence of endless summer. Children fished from a tiny pier. A distant island with a cottage on it spoke of long, relaxing weeks of doing nothing. Customers from other cottages lined up at the lobster-shack window, where clouds of steam released the fragrance of heated sea. Meanwhile, surf crashed, two lovers kissed on the pebbled beach and anglers tinkered with their boats.
The drive to that spot meant a twisting 7-mile journey through woods and the feeling, about halfway, that the road was somehow circling around and would deposit me back on U.S. 1 before I reached the water. Coastal Maine might be compared to the lobster. Getting at the meat requires some effort but, more often than not, the payoff’s sweet.
Even bustling Boothbay Harbor, which has yet to meet a corny idea it doesn’t like, requires a turn off U.S. 1 at an obscure sign and an 11-mile drive south on state highway 27. After all that, the reward is a Downeast ‘Toontown of souvenir and T-shirt shops, excursion ferries, factory outlets and views of a distant shore obscured by tethered pleasure craft and banks of motels.
A greeter at one of the dockside restaurants saw me looking around, trying to find a way to take a picture without a Sno-Cone in it.
“Have you been to Ocean Point?” she asked. “Take 96 where the road forks off and follow it the opposite way you turned to get here. It’s really beautiful out there.”
I thanked her, and when I arrived in Ocean Point, I silently thanked her even more. Quiet summer lodgings faced a gentle cove with spruce-topped islands a few hundred yards offshore. A few people sunned on the rocks like seals, and the sharp-edged slabs of granite formed a kaleidoscope of black shadows as if carved out by the largest chisel in the universe.
Tracking further crinkles in the shoreline, some back roads out of Thomaston hug the St. George River (known locally simply as “Georges”) and eventually lead to the Olson House.
The thrill of seeing this salt cottage of dark clapboard probably would be in direct proportion to one’s fondness for the works of painter Andrew Wyeth. He lived in nearby Cushing and still summers in the area. The Olson house, portraits of his friends the Olsons and depictions of the surrounding meadows appear in several Wyeth paintings.
The most famous, “Christina’s World,” rendered in 1948 and now hanging in the Museum of Modern Art, depicts Christina Olson reclining on the grass, wearing a dusty-rose dress and looking toward the distant house, which, considering its distance and her frail condition, looks unattainable.
Those who regard Wyeth as a great artist (and many do) flock to the site, just as worshipers of Claude Monet pay their respects at portions of the Normandy countryside.
Like most old structures along the coast, the Olson residence bears a long history of changing owners and altered states, dating back to the late 18th Century.
Alvaro and Christina Olson, brother and sister, inherited the property and lived there until their closely spaced deaths in the late ’60s. Wyeth came and went as if he were part of the family.
“I just couldn’t stay away from there,” the artist has said. “I did other pictures while I knew , but I’d always seem to gravitate back to the house . . . It was Maine.”
Joseph E. Levine, avid Wyeth collector and movie producer, bought the house from the Olson estate in the early ’70s and briefly turned it into a museum, the rooms hung with Levine’s Wyeth originals. “A neighbor lady sued Levine because of the crowds, so he closed the museum,” said Joan Provost, a Cushing resident and volunteer guide at the Olson House.
“People were actually camping around it! Then John Scully of Apple Computers bought it and bought the neighbor’s house as well. He gave it to the Farnsworth Museum in 1991.”
The Farnsworth, a Rockland institution, reopened the house to the public in 1993, and the crowds have returned. They tour the sparsely furnished whitewashed rooms, each one decorated with a print or prints of the Wyeth paintings inspired by those spaces.
A few Wyeth fans carry their worship to near-outlandish extremes, Provost disclosed. Some ignore no-trespassing notices and traipse down to the little family cemetery by the Georges River, trying to find Wyeth’s exact point of view when he created “Christina’s World.” Lacking Wyeth’s artistic license, the interlopers soon find out they cannot get that far away from the house without swimming to the middle of Maple Juice Cove.
“Some people come here and pose for pictures dressed like Christina,” Provost said, still amazed. “I’ve thought about buying some pink dresses in small, medium and large and renting them out–for a huge sum of money.”
The visitors’ enthusiasm might be forgiven, considering that Maine residents shield so much of their world from the public. And that may explain why Acadia National Park enjoys such an enormous following. Acadia liberally permits access to the shoreline–and the most rewarding part of the shoreline, at that.
In Cushing, I had reached the end of comfortable day-trip distance from Portland. Acadia and Mt. Desert (pronounced De-ZERT) were still ahead.
One rainy morning, I began driving that way (again, north and east on U.S. 1), taking a detour to Port Clyde. From the dock there, the passenger ferry Elizabeth Ann took me and about 30 others across 11 miles of choppy sea to Monhegan Island for a few hours of immersion into an alluring little territory of well-studied and beloved seaside enchantment.
White harbor seals posting themselves on two large rocks guarded the entrance to the island like affable doormen. Beyond, the gray houses and hotels of Monhegan Island rose out of the granite and the mist.
Inside the yellow, gabled Island Inn, a schedule and maps tacked up near some tables covered with unfinished jigsaw puzzles revealed that 21 of the artists who summer there throw open their studios to visitors on a regular basis. Not every artist on Monhegan Island participates, however. I was told that Jamie Wyeth, son of Andrew, paints at the family’s island cottage, but he offers no gallery hours. Wyeth’s work sells nicely without walk-in trade.
Lobstermen and their families settled on Monhegan, too, and although the islanders forbid cars, their pickup trucks rumble over the unpaved main roads, hauling traps and those colorful buoys to boats scattered over the coves.
Even though the island is just a mile and a half long and half a mile wide and its 100 permanent residents keep much of it off-limits, the possibilities for exploration seem endless–17 miles of trails strung through pine forests and meadows, past ponds and an old lighthouse, descending to the rugged shore and mounting some of the highest ocean cliffs in the state.
On my voyage from Port Clyde that morning, the Elizabeth Ann had been stacked with suitcases, duffel bags and painters’ easels. Coming back, we daytrippers seemed to share a forlorn sense that we were leaving Monhegan Island too soon, that we had afflicted ourselves with the gadabout disease.”Well, it was nice to see something I never, ever saw before and probably wouldn’t have otherwise,” a woman sighed to her companions when they reached the Port Clyde pier.
At Acadia National Park, Maine’s message begins to sink in. Clearly, the state demands repose. No wonder the National Park Service pamphlet declares: “If you have never tried–really tried–doing nothing, Acadia is a good place to begin.”
A 27-mile loop of inner highway shows the car-bound what the 40,000 acre park has to offer: the shores of Mt. Desert; the bald summit of Cadillac Mountain, 1,530 feet above the sea; a rare sandy beach; the mirror-like Jordan Pond; sheer cliffs dotted with falcon nests; pine and larch and wildflowers everywhere; and, even in the bumper-to-bumper confusion of the scenic overlooks, a hint at tranquility.
In Bar Harbor, the big town (pop. 2,768) on Mt. Desert, humanity comes together, occupying nearly every inch of sidewalk space in front of cute shops and cuter restaurants, lobster-shack docks and excursion-boat piers. There are those who never want to escape urban frenzy, and in Bar Harbor they find a Shanghai in Top-Siders.
But the town also aids and abets getaways. People rent mountain bikes and kayaks, hire saddle horses, book bus tours and carriage rides. Some put on their hiking shoes and just walk.
Acadia cannot present a wealth of scenic perspectives of the sort that absolutely stand the hair on end, but travelers willing to wander through its interior, stretch out on an isolated rock or hunker down next to a tide pool and watch the life inside it teem while their own takes a rest–begin to comprehend that even stones and trees and roaring breakers will gently embrace anyone patient enough to sit and wait.
DETAILS ON MAINE
Getting there: United and Delta Airlines schedule direct flights to Portland from Chicago. United’s lowest roundtrip fare is $468; Delta’s is $482. United flies nonstop both ways. Delta stops in Cincinnati–with no change of planes on the way out and a change of planes on the return.
Getting around: The major car rental companies maintain desks at Portland International Jetport and at some of the major hotels in the larger cities and resort areas. Book as far ahead as possible for sport-utility vehicles or any other cars that might be considered out of the ordinary.
U.S. Highway 1 hugs the coast as well as it can. Interstates 95, 295 (Portland area) and 495 (Maine Turnpike) roughly parallel U.S. 1 until they reach Augusta and head for the interior. To reach most coastal scenic areas, detour south off of U.S. 1 and follow a state or county highway through a peninsula to the sea. Peninsulas generally get only one highway each, so it’s difficult to get lost.
The Maine coast reveals itself most stunningly to those who see it by boat. Ferries, mail packets, excursion ships, nature cruises and whale-watching boats seldom charge more than $30 per round trip. Whale-watchers rapidly churn out to sea for about 25 miles, and most “guarantee” that passengers will witness the spouts and dives of 60-foot finbacks, the occasional right whale and maybe a smaller minke or two. The guarantee means only that you qualify for a free ticket.
Accommodations: Book a year ahead for luxury digs or places with exceptional charm. It’s common for some popular spots to require a minimum number of nights. But it wouldn’t be too foolhardy to go without reservations because several pleasing areas are just a day-trip away from Portland or the highway motel strips, where, last month, I seldom saw a no-vacancy sign.
Accessibility: Most public buildings and modes of transportation are wheelchair-accessible, but some historic sites, bed & breakfasts and park areas are lacking.
Information: Write the Maine Office of Tourism, State House Station 59, Augusta, Maine 04333. Or call 207-287-5711 (fax 207-287-5701) or 800-533-9595.
