Sunrise over Mount Desert Narrows
28 May 2017 (posted 1 June 2017)
I: Sunrise
Through my closed eyes I can tell that it's getting lighter out. I have no idea what time it is. Am I really going to do this? I don't have to do this. But this will be the only morning without clouds. I should do this. I reach over to the nightstand and grab my phone. Four fucking twenty in the a.m. Right.
It's gonna be cold out there. Can't stand in just a t-shirt. Can't find my shorts in the dark. Coulda sworn I packed my shorts. Right. I pull on yesterday's jeans, find my camera, and open the patio door.
It's me, a handful of chirping birds, and the occasional car down on Route 3.
My hands are getting cold. How long does a sunrise take? What time is sunrise anyway?
Am I facing east, or east-ish? This matters. Check the phone.
The sky is changing a little.
Now there's a firey bit along the edge of the bottom cloud.
It's getting longer.
Ta-da! Sunrise!
Lens flare!
I'm sending some of these up to Facebook in real time. Maybe someone else is awake right now.
Me, I'm going back to bed.
Four hours later Jack wakes me up. I still can't find my shorts. This means I can get a pair of moose boxers in town. I don't know for sure that there are moose boxers. It's a safe bet there are. It's a safe bet I'll even have a choice.
The view from the patio is blue and green at this much more civilized hour.
From here we can see Bar Island.
Inexplicably, there are remnants of barrels in a clearing in the small patch of woods behind the restaurant.
From the hill we can see Bar Island Park and the sandbar that connects the town with Bar Island. At high tide, the bar is under water. The tide is coming in.
This evening, we are going to walk out to Bar Island, take the trail in the woods, and watch the sunset from the sand bar. I have a tide table; we'll be there as the tide will start to come in.
II: Zen
When I planned this trip, I counted backwards from Tom's Finger Lakes bike trip dates. That put us smack dab in the middle of Memorial Day weekend. I had no idea that all of Massachusetts and a fair chunk of Florida would be attempting to drive into Acadia National Park on Sunday.
We wait in a line of cars for a good five minutes before it's our turn to show our park pass.
Cars are parked along the entire right-hand lane for a quarter mile on either side of Sand Beach. So much for showing that to Jack. We drive on, slowly following a line of cars up the snaking Park Loop Road, coming to a halt every few minutes as another driver slowly gets into or out of a parking spot on the road, or to wait for groups of car-unaware pedestrians.
I picture myself attempting to ride my bike here tomorrow. I'll either be stuck behind a line of cars with no room to maneuver, or I'll be the one causing a line of cars behind me. At the top of Cadillac Mountain, I'll be forced to the side of the road, where nothing but a line of granite boulders would separate me from a plummet to the cold, cold sea. I'd best find a route away from the park.
We get lucky at Thunder Hole; there is one parking space open. Jack waits on a rock while I wait in the bathroom line.
The tide is still coming in. It has a long way to go before it reaches the spot where the waves will hit the back of the crevice and boom against the walls.
"Can you take a few pictures of me getting zen?" I ask Jack. One or two would do. (He did a good job: I never knew that he was taking pictures, and he never once got my face. I hate my face.)
I vaguely remember my first time Maine rock-hopping. Now it all comes naturally. Avoid the dark stuff and the wet stuff.
I find a rock away from the crowd and park myself there.
I take pictures. I take lots of pictures.
Jack plops down next to me. For a while he has his head in my lap, his hat pulled over his eyes. Then he sits up and watches the tide with me. The thing about Maine tides is that they cover a lot of distance in a short time. Jack has never seen a Maine tide.
I watch a rock slowly go under water, and later a mat of debris move towards the shore.
This is what I came here for: to sit on a slab of rock between pines and the sea, to stare without focus into the middle distance, to clear my mind and think about nothing at all. Peace.
The mat hits the rocks. We rouse ourselves. (Jack says I managed to sit still for all of 25 minutes.) I make my way to the other side of the crevice, to the twinned pine that pops up on my desktop slideshow at work. The sky is cloudy in those pictures.
The debris mat has broken up. Part of it is still off the shore (it's between the lower branch and the rock in the photo below). Some of it has reached the rocks below where I'm standing. A lable-less bleach bottle, maybe once a lobster float, bobs among the floating twigs and seaweed.
The tide has made progress into the hole, but it will still be hours before we'd hear anything.
We decide to go. I have more to show him.
Next is Otter Creek and the causeway. I guess not too many people know about the little overlook on the northern shore. There's only one other person there.
Down on the causeway, we're one of a handful of cars. I crunch down the rocks to the inland side first.
Even on this side, the tide is coming in fast. I take a picture of a half-submerged stone.
I focus away for two more shots.
And when I look down again, two minutes later, this is what I see.
Jack says "Bloop!" and the stone is under water in less than a minute.
We cross the road to the sandy side and walk down the beach.
As a kid I would have taken the still-paired mussel shells. Today I play with them and leave them on the beach.
This just begs to be overwritten with pseudo-spiritual gobbledygook, some shit about finding your own path, or cleansing your soul, or maybe a coffee enema.
We try to get into the lot at Jordan Pond. It's full. The overflow lot is full. We drive on, towards the top of Cadillac Mountain. There's a traffic jam at the base of the road as a pickup truck attempts to back out of a turnout, blocking both lanes and a pair of cyclists coming down the mountain. The lead cyclist shakes his head.
There's a parking spot or two open at the Blue Hill Overlook. I head towards the place where the rocks slant down. Jack takes pictures from the top:
More zen time.
To see the summit, we have to get stuck in traffic again, loop around the full lot, and park a few hundred yards down the road.
There's Bar Harbor.
We walk the paved path that circles the summit.
The little indentation at the top center of this picture is Otter Creek:
I climb off the path for a minute to capture the world at an angle:
At the summit, I zoom in on Otter Creek:
It's well past 2:00 p.m. We're hungry. We go into the summit gift shop. I tell Jack that he's been a good moose and gets a souvenir. I choose a pair of moose socks. He approves.
When I was here 35 years ago, there was the Harbor Bar: vanilla ice cream between two cookies, the entire thing coated in chocolate and frozen. At the time, I thought I was too fat to eat one. Today I don't care.
It's certainly not the best thing I've ever eaten. But it's sort of lunch. And it's 35 years overdue.
One more picture before we get to the car and drive into town.
It's late enough now that we might as well find a parking spot somewhere near the entrance to Bar Island Park. The village is so packed that it takes us a good five minutes before we find something in a neighborhood away from all of the commotion. From there we walk towards Main Street and find lunch at the first beer garden we see.
Then we go to the Abbe Museum, which is a small space dedicated to the region's Wabakani Nations, the People of the First Light.
We are endeared to their Creator, Glooskap, when we read about how the animals came to be the sizes they are:
"In the beginning the first man, Glooscap, formed all things, said the Elders. All the animals
then were the same gigantic size. The lively flea jumped forty miles. This was too far for the best interests
of all concerned. So, Glooscap rubbed him down until he became very little. The moose, on the other
hand, was not so stupid -- he would neither do harm nor be unduly exuberant, so he was rubbed larger.
The squirrel ran up a tree so fiercely that he tore it down. He was rubbed smaller. Thus Glooscap rubbed
everything larger or smaller according to the nature which it displayed.
(Adapted from a story told by Lewis Mitchell, Passamaquoddy, ca. 1910)
We wander in and out of the shops. Bar Harbor has the largest variety and concentration of moose paraphernalia either of us has ever encountered (and we've been to Montreal). Real, live moose, on the other hand, were chased off Mount Desert Island long ago.
III: Sunset
My trusty tide table, folded into quarters and tattered by now, tells us that low tide will be at 7:22 p.m. Sunset is at 8:06. The guide signs on Bar Island suggest an hour and a half on the trail and warn that the charge is $150 for a water taxi to rescue the hapless hiker who emerges from the woods to find the path back to Bar Harbor under water.
We start walking on the sand at 5:30. We take our time.
I venture out to the water's edge.
We start up the path.
On our right is a field of lupines. Only a few have begun to bloom.
We get to the top a lot sooner than I expected we would.
We can see our hotel through the trees.
The red sails unfurl. It's a tourist boat.
It's about 7:15 now. A low layer of clouds has moved in to the west. Perfect. Back on the sand, we set ourselves down on a log by a tree and watch our shadows get longer.
I'm trying to figure out if the moored boats will change direction with the incoming tide. They don't; they're facing into the wind.
And here comes the ship.
I like this rock by my feet.
The sun is getting close to the edge of the hills. We get up and walk around some more.
Okay, boat. You're just showing off now.
And now we have sunset.
By the way, I did find the perfect pair of moose boxer shorts.
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