Journey to Maine - Part Two
In Acadia
Coniferous trees adorn
The rocks of eons
En route to Acadia National Park on the eastern coast of Maine, the vision is assaulted by garishly-fronted tourist shops advertising all kinds of trinkets, baubles, pictures, postcards, pendants, pins, and other crap. And lobsters. Depictions of lobsters are everywhere, and restaurants and snack shops abound where you can purchase lobsters cooked in all sorts of different ways. In Maine, marijuana is legal; I wouldn't be surprised if the cannabis shops offered lobster-flavored edibles. You've got to shove all this out of your consciousness to get at the real Maine, the gorgeous land that has enthralled the indigenous peoples who originally lived here and all visitors since.
Acadia National Park encapsulates some of the sublime landscape for which Maine is justly renowned. Unfortunately, when we arrive, my son and I realize that we are not the only ones aware of its existence. We think that the park might perhaps be slightly less crowded on a Friday than on a weekend, but on the sunny Friday we choose in late June, the visitor center where we initially stop is inundated with a deluge of sightseers. From the parking lot a series of steps lead up to the main building, and these steps are packed with streaming lines of tourists. The tight press of humanity is disconcerting for my son's dog, a partially-trained Belgian Malinois, so they remain below while I mount the steps and have a look around. It turns out that the available information is not more useful than that on the map already in our possession, and besides, the swarms of people make it difficult to get the attention of any park personnel, so we hastily exit the mob scene and commence a circuit of the park loop road.
We briefly stop a few places along the way to take photos of the scattered small islands in Frenchman Bay, but then we pull over and park on the side of the road when we find a trailhead leading upward over glacier-smoothed granite sprinkled with bright green pines to the summit of Cadillac Mountain, the tallest mountain on the U.S. east coast. (That is, on the coast itself. There are taller mountains farther inland.) The entire hike would have been about four and a half miles up and back, but alas, we are unable to go all the way. We have forgotten to carry water with us, and my son's dog, who is jet black, begins panting heavily, obviously overheated. We are content to clamber over ice-sculpted rock formations until we get about halfway to the top, and then we turn back. Some kind fellow hikers offer water to the dog on the way down, for which we are grateful.
Our next planned adventure is to continue to Sand Beach so my son and his dog can cool off in the ocean. However, we find out from a brochure that dogs are not allowed on the beach, so we reverse course, taking a side road back through the overly-pristine touristic town of Bar Harbor. Just outside town we find an unmarked beach where son and dog get in a good swim. We then have to make our escape through the cloying grasp of the garishly-fronted tourist shops to the relative serenity of the normal tree-lined roads and highways.
Ride the full gamut
From hot to cold and then back
Extreme yet siblings
I have found through my brief contact with it that the weather in Maine swings wildly from one extreme to the other. I first thought it might be similar to the weather in Seattle, but I think that in Maine the differences in intensities are even more pronounced. I know not whether this is a recent or historic phenomenon as I have not researched it. I suppose that the winters have always been harsh here, but that summers are also getting increasingly hotter.
When I arrived, Maine was trapped within a heat dome that was oppressing most of the eastern United States. The air was stiflingly hot; since the house we were staying in didn't have air conditioning, we had to run fans. It was still hot, although not so scorching, on the day we hiked up the mountain in Acadia National Park. However, the day after that, it began to rain and the temperature dropped to the extent that even inside the house I remained clad in sweatshirt and parka. As I mentioned above, I don't know if these wild swings are typical; I am only reporting what I have experienced. One thing I do know is that last winter water pipes froze, leaving the upstairs sink and shower in our rented house inoperable. The landlord came by and tore the shower apart. He succeeded in stopping a leak in the piping, but a plumber will show up in a few weeks to accomplish a full repair.
Contemplating weather extremes caused me to reminisce about situations I have experienced in remote parts of the world. I'm fully aware that many people have visited, or even live in, hotter or colder climes, but these are examples that occur to me from my own past. The first time I traveled through Afghanistan back in the 1970s, for instance, it was early fall – winter hadn't even set in yet – and in answer to my pleading query the management informed me that it was too early to start up the heater in my hotel room in Kabul; as a result, I shivered without remedy. I also spent one winter sleeping on the floor in a rented apartment in Kathmandu, Nepal. Though I had a girlfriend sleeping next to me, the body heat and all the bedding and clothing we had was not enough to keep us comfortably warm during the cold, cold nights. And long afterwards, there was the time my Greek wife and our children and I moved into the house we'd just bought in a village east of Thessaloniki. It was a cold winter – outside the house, a barrel of water had frozen solid – and the heating system was not yet operational. We suffered through the cold for three long days and nights before the system was complete and we felt the relief of warmth.
As for the opposite, I can think of numerous instances of extreme heat. When I was an adolescent, on a summer vacation to Sun Lake in eastern Washington my brother and I decided to play a round of golf in the middle of the day. I don't know what the temperature was, but the sun shone down upon us with relentless heat, and we were both too stubborn to quit until we'd finished the entire course. As a result, I got heat stroke. On one of my trips to India, I ended up in Goa in early summer, and it was so hot and humid that when I rested my forearms on a plastic tablecloth in a restaurant for no more than a few minutes, when I pulled them off, the parts of the arm that had touched the table were covered in heat rash. Other places I've grappled with the heat have been Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Bangladesh.
As the world warms, temperatures become more and more extreme. Maine, like Washington State, has had more than its share of wildfires in recent years; in fact, on our drive back from Acadia National Park, we saw signs for emergency evacuation routes. To a certain extent, weather variations are stimulating – until they become dangerous. Let's hope, for the sake of our progeny, we are able to endure and even prevent future excessive fluctuations.