Return to Mount Desert Island

Cadillac Mountain Descent

21 June 2016

I was sixteen years old. For two weeks in the summer of 1982 I was free from everything that made me hate myself. For two weeks, I was on a peanut-shaped island off the west coast of Mount Desert Island, Maine, with a dozen other high school students, learning about ecology. On our first night there, the northern lights lit up the entire sky. 

I'm fifty years old now, and I'm in Bar Harbor again. I'm here for science once more, again with a dozen others, this time to spend four days at the Jackson Laboratory learning about the nexus of neuroscience and laboratory mice.

We slept on the top floor of a wooden house, the girls in one room, the boys in another. The walls and ceiling were unfinished wood. There were skylights, and wooden trunks at the feet of our beds. Mine was near the middle of the row.

There are three Woodland Cottages. I'm in #3 with a graduate student named Shannon. I arrive first, in the afternoon, the day before class begins. I fiddle with the lock and shove open the door to a musty smell of a cabin that hasn't been opened since winter. Shannon arrives, dragging her suitcase up the steep gravel road, as I unpack my car.

I change into my biking gear, fill a single water bottle, down an energy bar, put air into Miss Piggy's tires, and push off for Acadia National Park. The wind, blowing at 16 mph and gusting to 25, is in my face. It's 4:30 p.m.

Turning onto Park Loop Road, I see Mount Cadillac looming between the trees. I'm already anaerobic. I slow down and shift down. I'm nervous.

The one-way road rolls, mostly upwards. I pull in at every turn-out for pictures.

Russ calls the crowds "Tourista americana." He is driving the van with Rufus, the basset-beagle, on his lap. Rufus has his head out of the window. Russ calls to the crowds, "I'm a biologist and this is a sea lion!"  We all think that's great, because we're not Tourista americana.

As I climb higher, the wind gets stronger. I shift down and down, not to climb the hill, but to push against the wind.

I wonder if every picture I take will be blurry. My hands are shaking. I take a few by accident as I put the camera back in my pocket.

Pedal, push, stop, snap. At this rate, I'll never get to the mountain.

But this is Maine. I'm in Maine. I'm back in Maine! Bar Harbor, Maine! Acadia! On my bike!

My ecstasy is broken by a fastboy zipping past me without even saying hello.

I see the rocks again and the euphoria returns.

The wind is so strong that I can smell the shore from up here.

Shags.

Cormorants.

Two more riders appear behind me. The tall man catches up with ease and greats me. The small woman catches up, on a Cannondale painted solid the old Miss Piggy green, and we spend the next few miles getting to know each other, bike-wise anyway. She's taking a training course at Jax too. Not the one I'm in, but maybe we'll see each other. He's going to spend those days on his bike. They're from Boston.

They ask me if I'm going up the mountain. "That's the plan," I tell them. They're only doing the loop.

We pass a grand carriage house on our right, and then the woman falls back while the man disappears ahead. He eventually slows down for her, I pass him, and I see her turn off.

To my left are

Les Boubilles. The boobies!

the Bubbles, two rounded, bare-rock mountains across Jordan Pond.

I'm gaining on a lone cyclist. As I pull up, I notice his frame.

"Lugs!" I greet him.

He smiles. His name is Fred. He's riding a 10-year-old Serotta. He's a local. He's climbed Mount Washington. "I bow to you," I tell him when he says that. He's been up Cadillac Mountain "dozens of times."

The turn is ahead. I shift into my granny gear, even though I don't need to yet. He's warned me that the wind is going to be a problem. "It's out of the south, but it's whipping around up here."

It isn't at the moment, and I ask if there's a bike club on the island. There is, sort of, one that has group rides a few times each month. He asks about mine, and when I tell him that we have about a hundred a month in the summer, I realize how strong the Princeton Freewheelers bike club is.

We're protected from the wind by trees, and then by tall rocks as the road curves left.

"Okay. We're done with the easy part," he says.

"Steeper?"

"The wind."

We're slammed by gusts that whistle through my bladed spokes. I move to the center of the road in fear that I'm going to be tossed over the side of the mountain or slammed into the granite slabs lining the cliff off the edge of the road. At every turn, I'm thinking that it has to stop now, that it has to be in our favor now, that one more gust is going to make me walk my bike. Fred is out of sight behind me.

The road gets steeper. I'm almost out of water. My right calf starts to cramp. I stop and dig for a salt tablet in my bag. Fred appears around the bend and asks me if I'm okay as he passes.  I assure him that I am, but he circles back and waits for me to stuff my bag back into my pocket. I apologize. "I hardly ever get cramps. My nutrition has been off. I've been traveling."

"I get them all the time," he says. We ride to the summit together.

I can barely keep Miss Piggy upright as I take a picture of the lugged Serotta.

I'm going to get some more water at the gift shop (of course there's one at the summit. Tourista americana.) and take pictures on the way back down the mountain. Eyeing my bladed spokes (he has them too), Fred warns me to be very careful on the descent. "Ride with one foot clipped out," he advises. I say goodbye, thank him, and circle back to fill my bottle in the bathroom, stopping for summit pictures first.

I'm shaking as I begin the three miles to the bottom of the mountain. I ride with my hands on the brakes, feathering them, my butt so far forward in the saddle that I'm almost standing, my left leg clipped out and resting on or against the pedal. I ride toward the middle of the road.

I stop often, aiming my camera but not seeing what I'm doing as the sun glares and the wind gusts.

This doesn't feel real.

This is the most frightening thing I've done in sixteen years of road riding.

Okay. The tall rocks again. I can clip in.

Turning off the mountain road feels like returning to terra firma. I'm under trees in the big ring. I ask a pair of hikers if this is Park Loop Road, because I'm still shaking, maybe cold, maybe adrenaline, and I don't trust myself. They tell me I'm heading in the right direction. I must be, because it's all downhill.

I see the sign for Route 3, and I'm back in front of Jax.

Another half mile and I'll be home.

Shannon  is napping. I shower, using up the hot water halfway through.

We showered on a schedule, military style, three minutes. 

We drive into town to go food shopping, then return to the cabin, where we talk for more than an hour about the scientist life. She turns in before I do. I upload the day's pictures. Not one is blurry.

I climb into bed, the bottom bunk.

There was a sign above the doorway to the stairs leaving the girls' bedroom. "Duck!" In two weeks, I hit my head once, running from myself after receiving a letter from home, my peace crashing down around me.

I should stretch my back before I go to sleep. I sit up and graze my head on the top bunk. Duck!

I stand up, stretch, and settle back in, listening to the wind. My mind is racing.

I want to sleep. 

I collected water with a plankton net at night. I looked into a microscope, drew diatoms, identified them. Coscinodiscus and shards of pennates.

I turn my head to look towards the windows, knowing that clouds are rolling in.

I forgot to check for the northern lights.