Sunday was our day to hike the Acadia National Park, and after a delicious breakfast at a downtown spot called Jeannie's Breakfast (cinnamon-raisin French toast for me, multigrain pancakes for J., with a side of grilled kielbasa – why don't more breakfast restaurants serve it? It's not like Bar Harbor is a hotbed of Polish cuisine), we headed into the park.
Acadia, most of which is situated on Mount Desert Island just off the coast of Maine (Bar Harbor itself is also on the island), was the first National Park east of the Mississippi, established by Woodrow Wilson in 1916 as Lafayette National Park. It was renamed to Acadia in 1929, when a wealthy donor bequeathed additional land to the park on the condition that it be renamed to something that sounded less French. Freedom Fries are decidedly not a recent idea. Today, Acadia preserves over 29,000 acres of land crisscrossed by some 120 miles of hiking trails.
Faced with such a dazzling array of hiking options, we inquired at the visitors' center for recommendations. A friendly young ranger whose first name, according to her name tag, was McKenzie – Nova Scotia seemed really close all of a sudden – offered a few options and sold us a detailed trail map. The centerpiece of Acadia, if one can be chosen, is Cadillac Mountain, a 1,530-foot summit that is the highest point on the East Coast of the US. According to McKenzie, the vast majority of park visitors drive to the top. Sad, but not surprising – we were already seeing these people in the visitors' center parking lot. Large families in RVs or rented Kias that have never seen a mile of trail and give our country its semi-deserved reputation for obesity. Hiking up, by contrast, would have provided the solitude we were seeking, but a 1500-foot climb that would then have to be descended seemed a little daunting even for us, and with only one day in the park, we decided to favor breadth over depth (or height, as the case may be) and settled on other options.
The Ocean Trail, in the southeastern end of the park, took us along the shoreline out to the tip of Otter Point. The trail was flat but progress very slow because literally at every turn, a view of the ocean more beautiful than before opened up and our hands reached almost automatically for our cameras. We passed Thunder Hole, among others – the namesake of the beer we had the previous night. It is a narrow crevasse between two walls of sheer cliff with some large loose rocks on the bottom. When the surf is sufficiently strong, as it was that day (though just barely) the incoming waves roll the rocks around the bottom and smash them into each other, creating a sound that really does sound like distant thunder.
Backtracking slightly from Otter Point, we turned off onto Gorham Mountain Trail to begin climbing its namesake. Gorham's elevation is “only” 525 feet – peanuts to anyone who has done any serious hiking in the Southwest, as we have. Or so we thought. The ascent was actually quite strenuous – steep, with sizable rocks to scramble over every few feet. Though the weather was perfect – sunny and dry, improbably it would prove to remain that way for the rest of the trip – the sun was beginning to warm up quite a bit, and we were sweaty and tired by the time we reached the granite plateau just beneath the summit. The highest “point” itself – more of a saddle than a peak – was a short walk away and offered breathtaking views of the Atlantic to the east and the majestic, pine-covered Cadillac to the northwest. A few hikers were at the top, transfixed by the forbidding beauty of the Maine coastline, but relative to the parking lots and nature trails of the bottom, the isolation was exactly what we were hoping for. After more landscape photography, a protein bar and lots of water, we exchanged picture-taking favors with a young couple from Delaware. A t-shirt I was wearing triggered a short conversation. He turned out to be a PhD student in computer science at the University of Delaware. He seemed very nice and approachable, and his girlfriend was very attractive. I wish I had asked their names. The descent along the northern ridge of the mountain, though also rugged, was short, and by early afternoon we were back at sea level.
Our second hike of the day was going to be another climb – to the top of Sargent Mountain, at 1,373 feet the second highest in Acadia. The first hike took more out of us than we anticipated, however, and by the time we were at Sargent's trailhead on the shores of Jordan Pond, an inland fresh-water lake close to the geographic center of the park, J. did not look confident. We ended up hiking the circumference of Jordan Pond instead. I was disappointed initially – the views from Gorham were so spectacular that I was craving more of them – but the hike ended up being very enjoyable, and less than a mile into it I was glad we did it. Jordan Pond is a classic mountain lake – calm, cold and crystal-clear, surrounded by pine-covered mountains, waiting, quietly, for the sufficiently determined traveler to discover it. It reminded me of a lake we hiked to in Colorado's Rocky Mountains many years ago. The trail, while not as deserted as we might have wished – we saw three or four groups of hikers along the way – was still uncrowded enough to afford plenty of opportunities to stop along the way and contemplate the gently rippling waters without a human in sight.
As it happens, J. had actually been to Acadia as a child, and remembered it surprisingly well. Of all things, she remembered eating popovers (whatever those are – the best J. was able to offer was “puffy, doughy, eggy things”) in an outdoor restaurant right inside the park. A visitors' center and restaurant was not far away, and J. recognized it as the same one she had been to many years ago. It being tea time, we stopped in to experience the mysterious popover in its natural habitat.
My feelings about restaurants and lodges inside national parks are mixed. In Wilson's time, when even outdoor tourism was a far more genteel affair and outside of major cities accommodations were few and far between, they made sense. Today, however, with true wilderness being increasingly scarce and at the same time increasingly easy to reach, the uncompromising part of me wants to do away with them and send their customers, many of whom, it seems, only care about the lodges and restaurants anyway, outside the park. In the event, however, a table placed directly in a meadow and a glass of fresh cold iced tea was a welcome sight. The popovers turned out to be, well... puffy, doughy, eggy things. Balls of faintly sweet dough four or five inches in diameter, they are completely hollow inside and must be served and eaten while hot before they collapse, souffle-style. Served, appropriately, with blueberry jam, they were a delicious respite from the protein bars and trail mix we were grazing on all day, and a lovely finale to what was by then almost ten miles of hiking.
Tasty though it is, the popover a meal does not make, and it was time to start thinking about dinner. We had originally planned to camp in Acadia, but faced with an 8:00 a.m. ferry the following morning and the requirement to show up at least an hour before departure, we thought it would be wise not to have to break down camp in a hurry. So it was back to the Anchorage for a desperately needed shower, and back out in search of food.
Initially, the idea of dismembering a whole lobster and eating it one tasty morsel at a time, interspersed with long periods of manual labor to extract the next one didn't appeal to me, but by this time I was ready to attack the sucker. J., who subscribes to Andrew Todhunter's dictum that you can never have too much lobster, was ready for more. One hears much about overfishing these days. On the evidence we saw in Maine, lobster is plentiful, and I couldn't help but wonder whether we were fiddling while Rome burned and whether in a few years, a decade at the most, the Maine lobster would go the way of Russian sturgeon. On the other hand, a few days later in New Brunswick, we would find out that back in the day there was so much lobster in the Fundy area that you didn't even have to set traps – you simply went out and collected them from the ocean floor at low tide. You certainly cannot do so today, but perhaps the lobster is still a more common creature than some if its ocean-dwelling brethren.
We headed out of town into the Maine hinterlands, away from the tourist traps. On the way into Bar Harbor the previous day, we passed several establishments that called themselves Lobster Pounds, and it was those we were now seeking. We settled on one in Trenton, ME, about ten miles west of Bar Harbor, attracted by the abundant picnic tables outside and columns of steam billowing from the kitchen. A clapboard shack by the roadside, with only a decrepit auto repair shop next door, it proved to be a goldmine of all things lobster. Chaos ruled in the small front room, crowded by a mixture of locals and tourists trying to place their orders and dominated by a giant tank full of live lobsters. The poor fellows were so crowded that they could barely move, but for most of them the discomfort didn't last long. Every few moments, one was plucked from the tank, thrown for a split second into the mechanical scale suspended just above, then sent into the kitchen to become someone's dinner. You ordered from a whiteboard on the wall – either just lobster by the pound, or as a dinner which came with an ear of corn, some coleslaw and a small basket of steamed mussels. We opted for 1.5-lb. lobster dinners which, a bit disappointingly, were not any less expensive than at the touristy restaurants, and, not realizing that mussels were included, some steamed clams that by contrast were dirt-cheap and ended up being even better than the ones in town.
The wait was long. I sipped my soda, the only choice of beverage available, and enviously watched the two middle-aged couples at the next table who brought two bottles of white wine and an ice bucket, apparently in no violation of law or policy. Why didn't I think of that? After a few minutes, I walked over to the large kitchen windows to watch the proceedings. Several giant vats, each about the size of a commercial washing machine, were bubbling with seawater. Everything went into one of the vats, including the corn, cooked while still in its husk. The lids were tied to strings that ran through pulleys above each vat. The cooks would put whatever it is that needed to be cooked into a large net, yank the string to open the vat, blasting themselves with a cloud of salty steam, throw the net in and shut the lid. About a dozen windup timers were lined up on a ledge above. Whenever a lobster went in, one of timers would be switched on. When ready, the cook would pull the string to open the vat again and, in another blast of steam, pull out the dripping net.
I was starting to get mesmerized by the uneven rhythm of the grueling work when it occurred to me that the entire place was family, or at least locally, staffed. The girl cooking most of the lobsters couldn't have been more than seventeen. In flared jeans and a fitted black t-shirt decorated with bits of chintz, her skin not yet ruined by the heat and the salt, she looked like she belonged at a suburban mall. Any wonder family businesses around the nation are dying out, retiring owners unable to pass the reins to the unwilling young generation? After slinging lobsters and bushels of corn every summer of her teenage years, I wouldn't blame her for a second for wanting to get as far away from the business as possible and not look back. How much longer before immigrant labor has to be brought in to do the same work? And is that labor going to be willing and able to trudge to the northern reaches of Maine for a few months every summer? And even if it does, who is going to manage them? Are we seeing the last generation of the American family business, all but invisible but a vital element of our culture?
When our lobsters finally showed up, they were plopped directly on plastic trays, the drawn butter in a plastic cup, the shellfish in paper baskets. Both the mussels and the clams, of which there was an alarming amount, were phenomenal. It's really impossible to describe the flavor of a good bivalve, especially one as fresh and flavorful as this. A bit sweet, faintly rubbery at the stem that attaches them to their shells and almost creamy elsewhere, they smelled and tasted ever so slightly of the sea and had an almost wine-like effect on the palate. And the lobster... suffice it to say that in an instant I understood all the hype surrounding the ancient crustacean. To be sure, the primitively idyllic setting, the sunlight reflecting off the lobster's glistening, deep orange carapace, the clean, piney northern air and complete disregard for elegance and table manners conspired to embellish the perfection, but even taken on its own terms, the lobster was special. No easier to describe than the mussels, it was so rich that it bordered on overwhelming, but never went over the line. Every bite, perfectly balanced in texture between firm and tender, would linger with a delicious aftertaste long after you swallowed the last of it. The closest equivalent in terms of sheer sensory intensity that I could think of, besides sex, was top-quality sushi.
Sated and happy, we drove back to Bar Harbor. The night was still relatively young and, in one of her occasional eating-everything-in-sight moments, J. wanted dessert. We headed downtown and picked another place at random, this one featuring a large balcony overlooking the waterfront. J. had some blueberry pie, excellent by her estimation, while I, deprived of an adult beverage with my dinner, opted for some liquid dessert – Cadillac Mountain Stout from the aforementioned Bar Harbor Brewing Company. It proved to be another winner – dark, intense, complex, with just a hint of coffee and a more pronounced chocolate flavor. A perfect ending to a perfect day, marred only by a drunk yelling obscenities on the sidewalk below.
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