We rode two segments of the Eastern Trail near Biddeford, one of the few bike trails we will see until we are in Massachusetts. It's a "stone dust" trail similar to ones we rode last summer in Wisconsin, but a few patches on the first 6-mile segment were soft and sandy, a recipe for disaster on a heavily-laden bike, so we rode slowly and cautiously. The second 2-mile section, near Old Orchard Beach, was a terrific path across a salt marsh that kept us far from the traffic of Highway 1.
On the
way to Portland we checked out two beaches, Kennebunkport and Old Orchard
Beach, and decided that either was a potential future destination. The beach at OOB, as it's called locally, is
skinny in the photo because we caught it at high tide. A beach goer pointed to someone swimming well
off shore, and told us that people would be standing on a dry beach in that
spot in a few hours. There's an Amtrak
station just two blocks from the beach -- probably the closest Amtrak gets to a
beach anywhere in the country -- so we may even return sometime if we ever take
a trip around the country by train, without the tandem.
Closer to
Portland we started seeing lighthouses, two up close and a third on a ledge out
in the harbor. We also took a 3-mile
detour out to Prout's Neck, a peninsula jutting into the sea that Winslow Homer
made his home for the last twenty-five years of his life. Take a look at these rugged rocks just below
his studio, then compare them to his painting reproduced below.
We spent
three nights in Portland, giving us two sightseeing days. Most of the first day was spent at the Portland
Museum of Art. Their collection has a
strong Maine flavor, starting with this "sculpture" called
"Mussel Dress," done in 2001 by Brian White. Maine artist N. C. Wyeth painted "Dark
Harbor Fishermen" in tempera in 1943, while Winslow Homer did "Weatherbeaten"
in 1894. The museum's commentary about
the latter is worth passing along: "With the American West declared closed
by historian Frederick Jackson Turner the previous year, Homer's "Weatherbeaten"
is an existential manifesto about the challenges of nature in the modern
world. The wilderness, long a Westerly
ideal in the collective memory of the United States, is relocated to a timeless
place where the waves of the Atlantic strike the Eastern shore." In a much lighter mood from 1874 is Homer's wood engraving, "Low
Tide." Can you imagine wearing such clothes to the beach today!
Going
back earlier still is Fitz Henry Lane's view of Castine Harbor, done in
1852. We will spend two nights in
Castine soon, shortly before we reach Bar Harbor. We will not get to Vinalhaven Island, but we
have already been to places that look similar to it as depicted in Connie
Hayes's 2002 painting, "It Still Has Good Bones, Vinalhaven."
The
museum has a decent collection of 19th century European art. A piece that intrigued us was this unnamed
oil done about 1897 by Frits Thaulow. We
had never heard of this Norwegian, but he was friends with Claude Monet and
Auguste Rodin and was brother-in-law to Paul Gaugin!
The
museum had two special exhibitions going when we were there. The first was a look at Mildred Burrage, born
in Portland in 1890. She was taken at
the age of 19 by her art teacher to that hotbed of Impressionism, Giverny
France, and introduced to Claude Monet and Gertrude Stein, among others. We saw dozens of beautiful Impressionist
works by her, and share with you one of them, "Le Jardin," to show
just how good she was.
The other
special exhibit was of an artist we needed no introduction to, Frederick
Church. One of the highlights of our
trip through the Hudson Valley two years ago was our bike ride up to his
stunning hilltop home, Olana. Church made several trips to Bar
Harbor, Maine, including one in 1854 when he painted it at sunset. In 1876 he did this forest sketch in graphite
and gouache on paper while tramping near Mt. Katahdin, and ended up that trip
by buying a summer home on Lake Millinocket that faced out to the mountain. The museum in fact owns his very last
painting, "Mt. Katahdin from Millinocket Camp," which he gave to his
wife as a birthday present in 1895.
After all
this artistic exploration of Maine, it was time to do some on our bike. We were staying in a comfy basement apartment
we found through airbnb.com, and only had to ride a few
blocks to reach a bike trail around Back Bay, where we got views of downtown
Portland and of a snowy egret. That
trail hooked up to another that ran along the eastern waterfront next to a trolley
museum that takes folks on 2-mile trips out and back.
We then
boarded a Casco Bay Cruise Line boat for a twenty-minute ride to Peaks
Island. Peaks is a mile wide and a mile
and a half long, mostly populated by folks who commute to Portand on that
boat. It is also popular with walkers
and cyclists wanting a taste of the sea coast, and it took little time to find
a bench overlooking the rocky shore where we could enjoy the lunches we bought
at Trader Joes in town and watch the other cyclists ride by.
In one
spot along the shore there was an over abundance of rock broken by winter
storms and frost, now transformed into a collection of natural building blocks
for kids, or more likely kids at heart, to construct whimsical sculptures. On the way back to town on the boat we passed
another sculpture of sorts, a fort that sounded like a good idea to the army at
one time, only to be built and soon after abandoned. But it certainly was interesting to observe
our great grandparents' tax dollars at work, or more precisely at rest.
We had a
stopover in Brunswick ME, planning to see the Bowdoin College art museum, but
after our trip was planned they announced a closing in early July to do some
minor construction. We settled for a
slow ride around the attractive campus and a stop to photograph the home of
Joshua Chamberlain. Having watched the
PBS documentary on the Civil War some years back and then read Michael Shaara's
novel, "Killer Angels" at the time we visited Gettysburg two years ago,
we just had to see this remarkable
fellow's home. After his pivotal role at
Gettysburg, Chamberlain rose to become a Union general, then was elected
Governor of Maine for a few terms, then became President of Bowdoin, where he had been a professor of modern languages before the war.
We
planned a short, 20-mile day next to spend time visiting the Maine Maritime
Museum, and it was well worth it. It is
built on the site of three shipyards that constructed enormous wooden ships at
the very end of the era of wooden ships, from 1890 to about 1920. They were slow but efficient carriers of bulk
goods, mainly coal, and some lasted long enough to have been torpedoed by
German submarines in both World
Wars! A guide gave us an overview and
showed us a sculpture that represents the bow of the Wyoming, the largest wooden vessel ever built in America at 3,730
tons, launched right here. By
comparison, the Holland-America Volendam
cruise ship that took us to New Zealand in 2008 is 63,000 tons. But the Wyoming
was no small boat, and required over 50 miles
of cotton caulking and over 100 miles
of oakum (tar-soaked hemp rope) to make her watertight! The painting is of a smaller schooner, the
five-masted Martha P. Small that was
launched here in 1901 and ended her days in 1923 in Uraguay. The Wyoming
was a six-masted schooner launched in 1909, and it unfortunately got caught in
a nor'easter and sank with all 14 hands lost in 1924.
The
museum had a lot of exhibits and displays about small wooden boats as
well. The one that most interested us
was an actual retired lobster boat built about 1930. It started life with an engine taken from a
Ford automobile, later replaced with one from a Chevy. The lobsterman lifts the buoy marking his
trap across the rollers on the port side and winds the rope once around that
bell-shaped item near the wheel. Hit the
motor and it spuns, winching up the lobster trap. Most lobster boats we have observed seem to
favor plastic-coated wire traps these days, but you do see some of the
traditional wooden ones on display all along the coast, looking just like the
one here. The opening is wide enough for
some crabs and small lobsters to get back out while keeping in the ones that
end up in on the dinner table.
Speaking
of which, our next overnight was in Wiscasset where we were informed it was
necessary to stop at Red's Eats if we wanted the best lobster roll in
Maine. We did wait twenty minutes to
order (a very short wait in the summer months, we're told) and another twenty
to pick them up, but they were quite good!
More than one lobster's worth of lobster meat, they claim, and so it
appeared -- and with no cracking of shells or slathering of hands to deal
with. On our way back to our beautiful
B&B, the Snow Squall Inn, we
passed a trio of lobster boats at rest in the harbor, surrounded by the
confetti colors of lobster buoys that one sees all along the coast of Maine and
up its tidal rivers.
We had a
two-night stay in Wiscasset so we could spend our "rest day" biking sans panniers down the hilly Boothbay
peninsula to Boothbay Harbor. Excellent
plan made better by suggestions from multiple sources to visit the Mid-Coast
Botanical Garden. They had interesting
vertical flower boxes, colorful irises and "nodding onions," and even
some rocks well-suited to nodding off.
In a pine forest they had an area where kids were encouraged to
construct "fairy houses" out of natural materials from the woods, and
several were quite cute.
From the gardens it was a nice ride along the coast into Boothbay Harbor, a place that looks like you would expect a small town to look like -- in the 1950s. For the first time this summer we stopped for ice cream cones. It's that sort of town.
Now
bicycles are a lot slower than cars, and you see and hear a lot on a bike that
you miss when trapped by all that glass and steel and noise. But it's easy to miss things even on a bike
when you just hammer out the miles. 70
to 100 mile days were common when Jeff crossed the US twice in his twenties and
when Louise did it in her forties, and you can miss almost as much winding
through a town by bike at 15 mph as you do by whizzing through in a car at
50. Since our first post-retirement trip
on the tandem 5 years ago, we've rarely gone over 50 miles in a day, not
because we're now old farts, (which we are, like it or not), but because we've
wanted to see more by biking less.
This year
we decided to ramp it down even more with three one-week stays at very
different places on the Maine coast. We
described the beach walks and salt marshes of Ogunquit last time, and this time
it was our Week on a Tidal Bay off the Rockbound Coast of Maine. It was better than we expected!
We found
our seaside house through Craigslist by searching Maine vacation homes for the
keyword "canoe." Besides coming with a 17' aluminum canoe and being
on salt water, this one was also at just the right distance from the first and
third places we had identified for week-long stays, and looked nice in the
photos. It was "in person" as
well.
And
owners Betsy and Chris went the extra mile -- actually 14 miles -- by offering
to pick up groceries for us when they realized the challenge we faced spending
a week in a place where the nearest supermarket was 14 miles away and even a
small general store was 11 hilly miles distant.
So we arrived with a gallon of milk, a variety of vegetables, a dozen
eggs and much more we had asked for filling up the fridge! We don't know how much it weighed, but at $65
for all the things on the shopping list we emailed them, it felt to us like a
ton that we did not have to haul there on the tandem.
Let's
take you on a tour, starting with the day lilies by the front door. There's lots of room to cook, a big second
floor bedroom, a large living room where Jeff spent pleasant hours doing two jigsaw
puzzles from their collection, and a porch with screened walls and a view out
to our unnamed bay where Louise chuckled her way through a Richard Russo novel
she found on a bookshelf. Where is this
little paradise, you ask? On the map to
the right we're where the "N" in "Meduncook River" is,
across from the upper end of indelicately-named Crotch Island.
Approaching
by canoe past the countless lobster buoys, our place is partially hidden in the
trees above Louise's paddle. Up on the
dock you get a better view. Walk past
the boathouse where the paddles and life jackets get stowed and you can see
that there are a few steps to climb,
but then remember that, up on that bluff, we are sure to get a cool breeze on
that treehouse-like screened porch.
Let's go
back to the dock for a look at the effect of tides on a place like this. Southern Maine averages 9' between low and
high tide, more near new moon and full moon, and the average goes up as you
proceed toward Canada, as we have.
Here's the dock at low and high tides!
Having lost the joy of walking in mud that our grandkids still have, we
learned that there is a window 2 hours either side of low tide when one neither
departs nor lands at that dock.
We canoed
5 of our 6 days there, and loved every moment of it. The tide table and wind dictated our
itineraries. Our first day, high tide
was at 4 pm so we launched at 2:30 to take the incoming tide upstream to a
bridge 2 miles to the north. Although
that meant returning before the tide fully turned, we had a north wind and wind
trumped tide in pushing our shallow-drafted boat around. There were relatively few houses, and the
woods looked as we imagine they have looked for centuries past. At the end of Crotch Island we watched an
osprey take off and land in a tree far above us.
The rest
of the week had south winds and low tides midday, so we headed south each day
to let the tides assist us going and coming, and have tail winds at the end of
each trip. On one day the wind was wispy
early on, and only picked up later on, just in time to join the tide in pushing
us home. Pretty nice!
As we
headed south two hours before low tide, the rocks were already exposing their
underwater mantle of seaweed. As we
admired a distant island that floated on the horizon like a lengthy ship,
Louise suddenly jumped -- look to the left!!!
It was a fox walking along the seashore with a substantial meal he had
just caught!
On our
first jaunt toward the open ocean we stopped at a rock that sits just off the
southern tip of Gay Island. What a
wonder-world! It was only the size of
two or three house lots, but had lots to see, starting with the beach which
looked like sand where we landed, but is actually ground up sea shells, some
areas less ground up than others.
At the
high point, maybe ten feet above the high water line, someone had built a
driftwood tripod. Once we found a path
past the slippery seaweed above our "beach" we admired the rocks and
studied the shells dropped by birds who were done feasting on the former
inhabitants of those shells.
There
were numerous tide pools to examine, places where sea water splashes up twice a
day at high tide, leaving depressions ranging in size from small bowls to large
bathtubs to nurture a variety of flora and fauna in sun-warmed sea water.
Because
it was a calm day, we were able to venture to the edge of the open ocean. There was some chop and some swell, but never
enough to worry us. Although there are a
number of small islands out there, it's just possible that you could draw a
line from our little rock straight to Antarctica at just
the right angle to make the imaginary journey without ever touching land along
the way. At least we'd like to think it
was possible, as all that open ocean made us feel like we were at the edge of our continent.
Twice we
paddled to Friendship Harbor, the second time by going from our place near the
top of Crotch Island three miles against the wind down Lobster Gut to the
bottom of Friendship Long Island, then up the west side of Friendship Long
Island with a tail wind. Along the way
we passed some quaint lobster shacks, and in fact Friendship Harbor is as close
to a one-industry town as it gets -- and that industry of course is lobstering.
Wherever we looked, there were lobster boats, lobster buoys, lobster traps, even a lobsterman getting ready to head out.
At last
it was time to park our own boat and remount the tandem, in search of some
lobster dinners down the coast. We hope
to write next from somewhere near Bar Harbor.
