BAR HARBOR, Maine –Little New England, ever tight and clubby, has found room for only one national park. That, of course, would be Acadia. Reservations advised. Plaid trousers optional. Keep right, except to pass.
Visitors lacking invitations to most sections of the famously rock-bound Maine Coast do have permission to explore one part of it–probably the very best part of it–in Acadia National Park. And so they come in droves, more than 3 million a year.
Almost every other place where the state meets the sea, private property and No Trespassing signs stand between the public and the choicest scenery.
Even a cursory glance at the map shows that the Maine shore claws erratically at the Atlantic, while numerous islands pock the briny deep.
Deborah Wade, chief naturalist at Acadia National Park, figures the Maine coastline covers thousands of miles–a majority of it off-limits.
“Acadia National Park provides 25 percent of the public access to the coast in Maine,” Wade noted recently.
The first European settlers were French, following in the wake of explorer Samuel de Champlain. They coexisted peacefully with the native Abenaki tribe. In 1760, the English settled in, following their victory in the French and Indian War.
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Around the turn of the century, the region largely belonged to the American upper crust, people with names like Vanderbilt, Astor, Morgan, Carnegie and Rockefeller.
In the classic pattern of gentrification, artists had blazed a trail for the tycoons. Painters from the Hudson River School, including Frederic Church and Thomas Cole, arrived in the 1840s. They lived cheaply and painted furiously, getting the whole exquisite scene down on canvas. They were joined by “rusticators,” the backpackers of their day, who returned to the cities with tales of untamed and beautiful countryside, thrilling seascapes and precious tranquility.
Lured by the artists’ depictions and the rusticators’ tales, tourists clattered in and hoteliers built resorts. After that onslaught came the fabulously rich and their 100-room cottages. The rash of development could have closed the gates to the rest of us permanently if the privileged hadn’t decided to share.
“The prime message of this park is that it is an example of what people can accomplish by working together for the common goal of conservation,” Wade said.
“This park was (made up) entirely of donated land until the 1930s or so. The park was started by a small group of individuals who, beginning in 1901, worked together to try to preserve parts of this beautiful area. And they did so with the idea in mind that they would be preserving it for public access for future generations. It was a rather altruistic thing to do.”
As long ago as the Gay ’90s, public-access vacation spots in coastal Maine already were fast disappearing into private hands. Then the vacationers who had summered in the Acadia region during the Civil War era returned in their dotage and found to their dismay that the idyllic spots they remembered so well were filling up with summer resorts.
A lot of the credit for holding the line and creating a park goes to conservationist/philanthropist George B. Dorr, who, in 1901, organized a group of equally concerned swells into the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations. In a dozen years, the trustees acquired 6,000 acres that they dedicated to general use. John D. Rockefeller Jr. chipped in with a 50-mile circuit of horse and carriage roads on Mt. Desert, complete with 16 handsome limestone bridges.
Resident park-huggers continued the program, setting aside a patchwork of public lands. Spending their own money, they enhanced the hiking trails. Some benefactors added stone steps and iron ladders in the more formidable spots, or dedicated paths to deceased loved ones who had considered the parklands their special place.
In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson put the park under federal protection, dubbing it Sieur de Monts National Monument. The name was a nod to the original French governor of the region. Three years later, Congress made it Lafayette National Park, the first national park east of the Mississippi. The new name honored Marquis de Lafayette, the Revolutionary War hero.
In 1929, the park name was changed again, and “Acadia” probably will stick. Without honoring any single individual, it hints that the region was a French stronghold for well over a century and a significant part of Acadia, the name the French gave their holdings in the New World.
The remaining mansions on the edges of Acadia National Park still resemble the posh homesteads where families sat around the fire and traced their genealogy. With so many branches and offshoots and a lineage that predates the ice age, why should the family tree of a national park–especially a New England national park– be any less complicated?
The official park boundaries that encompass most of a large island, a substantial peninsula, an impressive fiord and some smaller islands were not established permanently until 1986. Of course, the property lines could change again if some individual deeds more land in the future. People around here do cherish Acadia.
“That stewardship feeling is still present,” said park-naturalist Wade. “Last year, volunteers donated over 21,000 hours toward the upkeep of `their’ national park. It’s very much a communal sort of spirit. Even the one-time visitor gets to see evidence of it. Walking in Acadia today, you come upon those stone steps, those stairways, that have been built into these mountains. And you can almost envision people of 100 years ago in their long skirts and vests and straw hats strolling up these trails.”
Unlike so many of the western parks, which often serve as scenic drive-throughs for a nation of strangers, Acadia comes off as slightly more clannish. Someone asking, “This your first time here?” might give your answer more weight than people would in other places.
On the streets of Bar Harbor, packed to the piers with the familiar toys of a tourist economy, a newcomer still might feel uncomfortably awash in a sea of regulars. There was a time when Bar Harbor meant something rare and fine, like Hyannis Port or Martha’s Vineyard. That cachet may have been worn a little thin by the stampede of mountain bikers and other jock-vacationers in recent years, but a patrician air still seeps through.
In secluded coves, colorful buoys–painted in patterns as distinct as cattle brands–mark the lobster traps, yet another sign that you have stumbled upon something old and proprietary. These tourists, too, shall pass.
The clerk in the liquor store looks bored and slightly annoyed as customers sign over hundreds of dollars on their credit card slips. At the bar in Testa’s restaurant, men in faded polo shirts glower as an outsider bellows, “I’m goin’ whale-watching tomorrow, and I’m determined to see ’em. I don’t care if I have to call ’em myself: UMMM, HMMM, HMMM!”
Acadia National Park weaves in and out of solid summertime communities, most of them quiet and insular, a few, like Bar Harbor, gone commercial but with a studied air of reluctance. On a Saturday night in mid-summer, Bar Harbor feels like Bourbon Street on sun-screen. The honking voices sound a bit more nasal and the A’s a little broader, but . . .
A woman chases her little boy down Main Street, past all the restaurants, past the two Christmas-decoration shops, stepping on boat shoes and brushing by madras sleeves. Finally, she yells, “If you get lost in Bah Hahbah, I’m not going to come looking for you!”
The boy glances back scornfully and says, “So?”
Facades on Main Street and Cottage Street and Mt. Desert Street may have retained their turn-of-the-century quaintness, but it’s hard to imagine the long skirts, the vests and the straw hats negotiating this gantlet of charter-boat box offices and daiquiri stands.
The one blessing of overzealous towns near national parks is that your escape from the congestion heightens the sense of bliss. Acadia, for all its crowds, does provide respite from throngs. The trails and the carriage paths break free from automobiles. It is possible to idle, all alone, at the tip of Schoodic Peninsula or stroll around Seawall on the far southern end of Mt. Desert and revel in the ancient turmoil produced by wind and sea.
On cloudless days, the ocean turns a vivid blue. Lobster boats, sailing yachts and distant lighthouses make the sea come alive. The vista gains a pleasing texture on foggy mornings, when moisture creates tendrils of sea smoke, outlines blur softly and the pines take on a black patina. Fog adds an air of delicious mystery.
Pamphlets handed out at national park visitor centers across the country rarely manage to capture anything like the magnificence that travelers encounter in those regions. Words fail in the presence of mountainous grandeur that defy sane description.
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But I was taken with the little brochure distributed by Acadia National Park, because the writer had somehow sensed my mood. “If you have never tried–really tried–to do nothing,” it says, “Acadia is a good place to begin.” The brochure suggests finding a rocky ledge or a stony beach, then advises, “Sit down and relax and wait for things to happen.”
I did that, out at Otter Point, where the rocky ledge forms part of an embrace around a section of vast Frenchman Bay and where a distant pebble-strewn beach abruptly surrenders to deep green forest.
I waited . . . and waited. Oh, a few gulls flew by; a pine cone dropped somewhere behind me; a gray bump on the horizon surely must have been a whale. The sun warmed my face and a breeze cooled my toes. I did nothing and neither did Acadia National Park. We got along just fine.