Great Wass Island, 6/86

I went with Matt Walter to explore a section of coast peninsulas from Millbridge to Machias. The first campsite was at McLellan Park, a deserted Washington County amenity. It is located within the borders of Millbridge where the Narraguagus joins the ocean.

The absence of any other campers allowed us to pick the best site. Two little trails lead to the shore through a charmed understory carpet of sphagna and ericads shaded by birch and black spruce in wind and sea spume stunted scatterling clumps lining a pink granite slope of descending rounded slabs.

At night, to the south, we were treated to the spinning arc of Petit Manan Island lighthouse answered by the strobing spin of Nash Island lighthouse off to the east. Free from encroachments of urban light glare, the night sky wore an abundant array of stars.

The first day was given to a thirty-mile drive to Machias picking spots to visit on the way back. We passed a plaque marking the site of a Revolutionary War Naval engagement, just offshore, and a lot of trailer homes.

People here are often seduced from the self-reliance of their ancestors by blandishments of commerce offering low budget financing with easy monthly payments. And this is a place with abundant lumber where prior age's inhabitants mastered basic carpentry with ease. The trailers are drab, squat and shoddy. They are hard to repair and have a much shorter useful life than the frame homes that have stood a few centuries of weather extremes.

A few lost souls even abandoned old, beautiful homes to live in new shabby trailers parked on the lawn. Many of the older trailers wear rows of tires on the roofs to secure them from leakage.

We ended up at Beals Island by midday after exploring the Bucks Harbor side of Machias Bay. Beals is an island village consisting of itself and the larger Great Wass Island linked by a short causeway. We checked it out casually and found it to be delightful.

Beals is unique linguistic anomaly due to its long isolation from the adjacent mainland. A bridge linked it to Jonesport in the 1960's. It's a version of Maine English that is difficult for other Mainers to follow, let alone flatlanders from Boston. One of these islanders sold us a few lobsters at the Jonesport co-op while telling us about Great Wass.

It once belonged to a lobster gear seller named 'Okie'. When the tax burden for owning it exceeded his resources, he decided to donate it to the Nature Conservancy with a proviso allowing deer hunting.

Our informant drew some trail lines on our DeLorme guide. What a find! He also indicated the location of a cabin used by Okie's son Gordy and lobstermen in need of a safe storm moorage on the islands east side and told us it was okay to stay in the shack if we were considerate. We brought the lobsters back to camp at McLellan for a campfire supper.

The next dawning day was given to more detailed exploration. We drove the length of Ray's Point where locals of the most modest means still live on waterfront land that would be unaffordable in places closer to the convenience of tourists. Ripley Neck was our next stop. It's an old vacation home hamlet from the late 19^th century featuring Victorian homes and a community well with exceptional water.

It's most charming feature is at the and of a dirt road that descends the necks east shoulder through a black spruce forest at the mid point. The road ends at a secluded stretch of cobble beach shore facing Pleasant Bay. A river made spit connects a small dory shaped islet to the shore that aligns a northward tip into the sea bound flow of the Pleasant. It's a perfect small tombolo and is favored by cormorants, gulls, ravens and roving ospreys.

Addison is the gateway hamlet to Cape Split, a two pronged point that carries South Addison on its eastern prong. This consists of a cluster of small old fisher cottages housing a mix of locals and artsy summer folks.

The Wass archipelago lies to the southeast. It includes Great Wass, Roque, Head Harbor and Steels Harbor Islands. Odd little island shacks can be found on all of them in varying states of repair. Shack etiquette throughout the region allows use of the structures if a nail or rope secures the doors. If they are padlocked, leave them alone.

Roque Island is owned by the Gardiner family and has a substantial family compound as well as an amazing beach. Its shape resembles a capitol H with the beach facing the Atlantic along the south midsection. The family allows day use of the beach and is active in state land conservation. It's reputed to be one of the finest pocket beaches in Maine.

We followed the road south from Beals and found the small Nature Conservancy parking lot for Little Cape trail. The trail winds through two and a half miles of the island's bog and ledge interior before arriving at Cape Cove on the uninhabited east side. Boardwalks and puncheons keep hikers dry through the wetter sections which support dense ericad thickets of sheep laurel and labrador tea.

The trail ends at a rare jack pine copse along the shore. Sure enough, the shack lay concealed by a thick spruce screen a few yards from the shore. It has bunk beds and other essentials for living through storms and cold winters.

A long ledge that drops four feet to the strand ledge of rose hued granite marks the trail end. The inland side wears lichens and sphagnum. The shoreward side displays the banding segments that define the Atlantic boreal littoral.

Tide ranges up here run to twenty feet making fairly wide zones for habitat. The beach also blends from sand to gravel to cobble along all bands to make a concentration of littoral niches for nearly every form of tide life common to this biome.

From the black algae spray zone one descends through barnacle worlds, wrack and periwinkle thickets, the dip and hump region of clam flat and tide pool to the immersed homes of blue mussels and kelp.

Matt decided to head back early while I opted to stay and hitch back later. Of course, I had a primeval ball. A seal visited at dawn's high tide when waves press to the ledge at the trails end. It frolicked like a happy sea pooch in search of shellfish. Eiders hovered warily over wave tips at the edge of visibility.

I made a foraged sea stew on my last day, a Saturday. Gordy and his wife came by for the weekend. I hiked out by the road to Addison 'til a clam digger gave me a ride and an invitation to his girlfriend's house in Harrington. She worked for a fish drying business. We sat up sipping whiskey 'til dawn and I made for the long hitch home after a short nap.

The Break up on The North Coast.

Late March: The journey in mud season met the crack of spring with its onrush of sun shattered ice floes hastening to their Atlantic end. Great Heath looked like a mercury lake. Blueberry fields were getting their commencement burnover. Overhead canada goose vees pointed north to the line of ice retreat.

We went to the colony's edge with the whole westerly widening continent to our backs. Cobscook Bay provided a park campsite months before its actual opening. Lubec has been abandoned by the present after its sardine industry collapsed. Houses cost less than thirty thousand dollars with acreage. The land is Scot-coast beautiful.

We reached ‘Penobscot Meadows’, Belfast, late on a Friday night. The Innkeepers conducted us to room #5, a small cozy room with bath facing the meadow draped east. Beyond the pensive, wine dark night, a breakfast of insipid ugliness burst surreal upon a warm spring morning. There we were, marooned amidst a nuked muffin breakfast with well-dressed gaggle of Awful White People. The Innkeepers were nice enough. Applied politeness and a skittish nature are occupational acquisitions of a life so encumbered. Nerves tend to fray from the cycles of stranger parades. The nuked muffins were okay, the coffee was real and butter came in little porcelain pat-a-cups.

Entertainment came from two horrid couples and a faded ingenue. One couple had a two year old girl who they tormented with vigorous stinginess and arbitrary denial, ‘No More MUFFINS!’. The other couple, Polyester Quebecois, bristled at any wistful attributions of humanity to Soviets and viewed the world with scared jaundiced rabbit eyes. Ingenue boasted of lobbying for Audubon while still making time to loathe her teenage daughters. Blech! After a quick pay up and pack we were rolling east. We made a choice to travel aimlessly along the coast and let discoveries determine which fork of the road we’d take.

Just beyond the Belfast-Searsport line is a small state park, (Moose Point), that touches Belfast Bay. It’s an oversized rest area that provided a welcoming spot to digest impressions and touch the Sea. It’s a low grassy slope rolling down to the shore. A west edge line of white pines is joined by clumps of benches and grills. The park was ‘closed’.
The next stop was Fort Knox, guarding the Penobscot approach ways. The shoulders of this old river soul impress. The fort, for all it attempts is squat and bleak blocked granite in a neo Vauban style. It has far more charm than the hulking manufactory belching pulp steam on the Searsport side of the river. The Fort remnants, along the coasts, are military industrial fossils of bygone doctrine.

A Saturday drill rehearsal of a Twentieth Maine reenactment was beginning. We walked through the catacombs and over parapets soaking up the sunlight and broad river and bay view. A stop at Ellsworth to buy some picnic food preceded the last leg up the Down East Coast. The route along 182 gave me a chance to touch the distant shore of the previous falls walk along Hog Bay. We even visited Egypt.

The original plan was to cover prior ground only on the return trip but we had to visit The Great Heath and its cabin. I found my campsite from the previous year and picked up some trash. The poncho I left found a home. The Pineo Ridge road net was at its earliest edge of mud season. There were imposing ruts. Nancy managed to plod through bringing us at last near the ridge crest facing the Heath.

It was late March. Melt water fattened with rain turned the placid Pleasant into a respectable torrent. The Great Heath lay beneath the waters shimmering silvery from a rippling spring breeze. Fringed with forest blends of balsam fir, larch, aspen and red maples laden with buds laced with mist, it enchanted with its stillness as seen afar. Up close, it sang its fluvial water swelling song welling its way from distant branch brooks to swaying bay waves. It sang of vernal renewal moving to season of births and sprouting. Daylights clear vivacity was complemented by a star swarmed indigo night far from the noisome reach of urban quartz halogens or mercury vapors.

It was too early for mosquitoes, too early even for black fly simooms. The Blueberry Barrens fields were getting their early burnovers. We left with sunrise, hoping to fish tail out of the Barrens roads before thaw turned them into soup. Beyond one brief push from a ditch lay fairly stable roads. We followed the ridge east until we took a southeast turn near the hamlet of Epping to rejoin route 1.

The ‘White House’ straddles a shoulder of a crossroad between Route 1 and the way down the point capped by Roque Bluffs. The head of the inlet is just to the west. There is a small huddle of old yankee buildings to serve the road and mark the epicenter of Jonesboro. The focus sharpens beyond the dooryard of the White House revealing the teeming water drop microcosm of coastal village life. We had large toothsome piles of scratch made hot cakes crowded with fat local blueberries with quality drip coffee to wash them down. The gentle murmur flow of old Maine voices at pre-church breakfast provided a perfect aubade.

Following feeding, we made a first attempt to find Roque Bluffs. A wrong turn brought us to Kilton Point where we heard distant gull clamor at distant clammers competing for soft-shell meals at low tide. On another wrong side road as
midden testified on behalf of the clam rakes efficacy. This pause preceded a decision to return to route 1eastward. We would find Roque on the way back. The Down East Coast of Maine is laden stunning points and inlets from Ellsworth to Calais.Every one is worth a visit. Petit Manan, Great Wass Island, Roque Bluffs, Quoddy Head and Moosehorn are the main public lands along this wild rural stretch of Atlantic Coast. Our plan was to visit as many as possible.
At Machias, we made a memorable first meeting with a spring rivers roar. The Machias was bowling a tempestuous flow of ice slabs toward their dissolution in the bay. All strained through sluices in a frenzied rush of bashing, scraping and skittering end over kettle. We stared into the whirl awhile listening to the rivers boisterous expulsion of winters decaying fetters. Past the elderly abandoned railhead and the Middle Machias estuary is an archaic concrete bridge to cross the East Machias and link Route 1 with 191, an old coast road.

It’s the main coastal thoroughfare for the huge wing of granite that now carries Whiting, Cutler, Trescott and Lubec. It’s the easternmost, wildest stretch of the coast, a land of little leprechaun hills and hollows riotously festooned with boulder erratics rising from blueberry moor carpets. To give it a bit of spookliness, one soon meets a thicket of antennae belonging to a Navy Communications station on Little Machias Neck near Cutler. It’s hard to hide but, thankfully, off limits.

The region has other DOD oddities tucked into its backwaters including an Air Force Winter Survival Camp and a weird little officers club on Schoodic Point. 191 heads north to West Lubec near Bailey’s Mistake, a cove providing harborage for South Trescott. A dirt coast road continues east.

We stopped a quarter mile beyond and climbed a small granite nubble overlooking the coast. There is a sparse pebbled beach nearby and traces of a long abandoned attempt at improvement. This consisted of a graded driveway long overgrown with heath shrubs. The nubble provided a great observation point for Grand Manan Island with its steep granite cliffs just across the channel. It ran along an east-west alignment and screened the road from the shore should the road ever be busy.

The tract was a charming micro biome with a few mini marshes, alder and yellow birch groves and a seaside stand of black spruce. There is a thirty-foot slope to the strand and a score of miles of ocean to separate Grand Manan. Within the same distance offshore as the walk to the road, there is a sharp drop in depth to sixty, then ninety feet and deeper into the channel.

Following this pause was the final stretch to West Quoddy Head, the eastern edge of the US and the boundary of the Eastern and Atlantic Time zones. Within five minutes, we were parked near the candy-striped lighthouse at the head. We looked out to sea from cliffside and descended steps to the shore. A large marine granite erratic edging the channel was the eastern tip of our journey. The rest of the US was behind us.

Along the shore, brawny waves tumble cobbles noisily with the highest tides along the US Atlantic coast like an oversized maraca chorus. After gathering a few attractive stones, we went landward to explore the mossy forest. It was June warm in late March, blatant lamb weather. Lubec is a sardine ghost town. The fishery collapsed and left a sardine museum full of rusty gear as a keepsake. We weren’t able to scare up food more complex than corn chips.

The newspaper, ‘Quoddy Tides’, (easternmost paper in the US), listed ridiculously low prices for homes and land along with charming gossip columns by elderly ladies about the neighbors dahlias or who visited who. Following a swing through Lubec, we visited Cobscook State Forest. It was technically closed but the gate padlock was left open. We let ourselves in and drove around the forest roads through groups of campsites.



The food search continued at Dennysville. It ended at the Dennys River where a combination store/diner fed us the best scallops and clams I’ve ever had. They were fried to perfection and coated with a thin tempura like batter. All you can eat cost around seven dollars. There were also a number of homemade cream pies. This place, by itself, justifies the eleven-hour drive from Boston.

After this food wallow, we returned to Cobscook and picked a campsite on a thumb of land next to the mouth of Burnt Cove. A small, tree clad islet sat in an inlet before us to the east. Beyond lay Whiting Bay. A wide broad picnic meadow lay to the northeast. Moosehorn guards the west. Canada goose vees and eider lines crossed the sky following opening waters northward. The soil was semi-frozen, plastic and studded with frost heaves. Sleep was serene.

Whiting Bay at dawn was a sheet of glass in the mid point of its cycle of between surging and receding. The morning eider chorus used indefinite temperament to voice an intricate staccato melody in a lower register.

We found Roque Bluffs on the way home after another transcendent breakfast at the White House. It’s a remnant summer colony from the turn of the twentieth century. There is even an octagon house that had weathered brick red paint trimmed with dark forest green.

Roque Bluffs State Park overlooks Roque Island on the eastern side of Englishman Bay. It’s a cobble beach sliver of crushed granite micro pebbles enroute to sand with a wide tide range near 24 feet. At the crest of the bluffs separated by the road, is a freshwater pond inhabited by trout below with a flotilla of great black backed gulls. The ecotone mix puts fresh waterfowl and shorebirds in close proximity. It’s a perfect spot for a picnic lunch.

We began the long return to Boston stopping at Schoodic Point at midday. We climbed around the Points’ broad slabs of cubist granite sheets divided here and there by tar black basalt filling ancient fissures deep pocked by wind and waves. Beyond Schoodics’ tip, low flying eider lines skimmed the rising wave tops. The oceans’ tumbling tumult blasts the rock, punctuating its’ pulse with roaring crashes to leave a lingering glimmer of mist. One last visit brought us to spring snowmelt waters sliding over sphagnum jeweled rocks beneath the beeches girding Maiden Cliffs, north of Camden. The sturdy beeches hug the steep slopes and were at earliest burst of the season’s chartreuse bright bud tips. All that remained was the long tedious haul along Route One to the highway.

Downeast Sojourn Part 4: Going Home.

Late Sunday--sunset.

Ha Ha Ha! Boy did I fuck up! I'm just past the Stueben-Millbridge line. I completely forgot how far East I am. A look at the map reminds me I'm only forty miles from New Brunswick! I'm at least six hours drive from Portland! Oh well. Dum de dum dum.

When I get back, I'll have to calculate the total distance I walked. It could've been sixty miles.

So far.

Roosts

9/30 Westfield Hotel, Portland (fleabag).

10/1 Crocker House, Hancock Point.

10/2 Schoodic Bog.

10/3 Barrens I, Cherryfield.

10/4,5 Barrens II, Cherryfield.

10/6 Route 1 pond overlook, Steuben.

So now I'm back to everyday life wearing clothing and using abstractions like time instead of watching the sun. I'm back on paved and numbered roads.

It's a days hitch to Portland. At least, now, I'm at a jump off consisting of a five or ten yard walk to the highway at dawn. Hopefully, someone with business in Portland will get me there in one ride. Whatever. I'll be back tomorrow. Still on map 25. Over and out.

Monday: Yay. I'm at the bus stop, waiting on a 4:00 southbound. As far as I'm concerned, I'm ahead at this point, Steuben to Portland in about six hours, give or take a few minutes.

Ms Sparrow, of Lubec enroute to Bangor, led the charitable with a stated fondness for folkies and other coffee house strummers. Jim Lynch, Hood Sails rep enroute to Thomaston, pointed out his favorite features of Penobscot Bay. Donny Houchin, Cherokee folk singer with war wounds from Khe San, got me to Damariscotta.

The leg from Damariscotta to Wiscassett was covered by a huge comical ironworker headed to Augusta for a vote on a weak contract with Bath Iron Works. "If it's a tie vote and it's up to me, we ain't workin' tomorrow".

A small business consultant who enjoyed classical music got me to Bath. A silent fellow got me to Falmouth and a coupla' cokehead hot shits brought me to the Congress St. exit ramp.

Jim Lynch makes a good living from little boats; yachts and such always need sails. He's built a few of his own and was building a house. He told me a lot about emerging entertainment needs as more people who don't need to be near a city move to Bar Harbor and environs. They want to return to land less stifled by encroaching mechanism choke. He mentioned an auditorium and an imaginative jazz club in Bangor.

I was invited to visit several homes, Charlie Hutchins place in Cherryfield, Jim's at Bluefields and Donny's place in Damariscotta.

Donny needs a hand. He wants to die cause his back is a wreck thanks to a combat stint in Vietnam with the Marine Corps. His mother was one of the remnant Cherokees missed by Jackson's agents during the death march called the Trail of Tears. They lived in their cove cabin home over the years to watch their ancestors grave land drown beneath rising waters from Howard Baker's pork tub Tellico Dam. She died cursing the Euroids and I say, "Good for her!"

He wanted to die. Three discs removed and now they want to take out another. With inspired stinginess, the service only allows him partial disability status even though he can't lift more than twenty pounds. Before the war, he could make a forty-yard dash in 4.7 seconds. He even tried out for the Redskins.

He's played guitar for 21 years but now he can't stand to sing or play. His life's flame is at a low glow. I tried to encourage him to fight the Beast. Why make it easier for them by dying? I urged him to sue the Corps for full disability.

What the fuck! I know useless slobs who have chiseled five to six figure insurance fraud incomes over far more dubious mishaps. I told him about Harvard's Native American Law Project and about the encouraging number of humane Vietnam Era veterans now entering Congress.

I offered to introduce him to Gordon and Rounder in order to provide more reasons. I suggested he look up the history of the Five Civilized Nations. His response brought the house down. "I tried but it's so sad while the history of the invaders is so bright and upbeat, I couldn't stand to read anymore".

Oh well. I told him how the five nations and the northern nations refrained from significant warfare with the Continentals while the issue was in doubt. This was one of General Washington's main fears. I told him about the Mohawk Longhouse Council and how it gave Benjamin Franklin useful ideas for framing the Constitution.

This seemed to encourage him. I can hope so anyway. He gave me a feather work as an honor token and resolved to spend the day looking for turquoise to work for its healing properties. I told him about Nyah Nyah finding more reasons to write it. It'll be a fat heap of bile and spleen to climb by the time I begin, maybe in the coming year.

The steelworker and the consultant both had stories about shipbuilding.

The steelworker complained about management's attempt to introduce a two-tier wage system, reduce health coverage and cut wages by ten percent. The first two items were the worst. Tiered wages erode a union's unity and insurance coverage is vital in a calling as hazard prone as shipbuilding.

The consultant told me most federal contracts at Bath are now met on time and at cost as a result of accounting and award procedure improvements such as commissioning several ships at once, instead of one. He thought Bath was weakest at landing commercial design and building contracts.

The average commercial contract is for three ships a year and Bath is lucky to finish 2.7. This is exacerbated by fairly primitive drafting requirements. They rarely use more than six blueprints and about a three inch keel thickness overall, (that's commercial, not federal). Pretty amazing when you consider the truckload of blueprints it takes to specify an F-16.

The consultant also cared about music and had an avid interest in my description of funding programs in Massachusetts like "New Works" and "Heritage". The components for a vivacious life are certainly there.

Maine will always be one of my favorite places. If I don't abandon America, I'll try to be a geezer in a small house on some Downeast neck near the Heath. That will cover my need for contact with the world beyond shopping malls. There, "outside" is a term endowed with meaning. Even the cities are a break from stupid Boston and drab New York. People are kinder, more distinct and tend to be more in tune with the essentials.

I'd also rather wander here than merely visit another country. It's as foreign as I need a place to be without the nuisance of a passport. It's as close as New England gets to frontier with a visible, if low profile, Native American population.

And, of the outdoors... everyone should try just once to forget Time and live by sun cycles. Walk naked in thick bog underbrush for a while and you'll understand why animals are 'graceful'. One needs grace to move easily through thickets without getting scratched and cut. Clothes were on of our earliest abstractions to numb our touch of the actual world. Knowledge of woodcraft sharpens perception, especially senses of sound and smell, which become guides instead of mere entertainers.