Seventh

Maine's challenging Trails

Helping The Needy

North East Harbor's Fleet

North East Harbor's Entrance

North Hero Island on Lake Champlain, VT

The Resplendent Catskills

Grand Isle, VT

Middle Bass Island, OH

Atlantic Boat Company, Brooklin, ME

Heading Home


This was Carrie Rose’s seventh year of summer cruising. Over these years, we have been thrown a few curves and have had to adjust the schedule. Sometimes it is weather, sometimes mechanical failure; sometimes it is as simple as boredom or a place not being what it was represented to be.

This year it was Charlotte’s father being hospitalized, twice as it turned out. It was not a surprise. Despite Charlotte’s efforts to prevent it, it seemed inevitable. When we heard the news, she flew back to Chicago to manage his care.

He needed a tune up: fluids, food, antibiotics, and twenty four hour care. Three weeks later, he was discharged in better condition, and Charlotte flew back to Maine. Still, we decided that while Charlotte’s sister was minding the store we should get Carrie Rose tucked away for the winter.

Due to my disinterest in crawling around the engine room any more this year, decommissioning (a fancy sounding word that allows for higher hourly rates) was left to the Atlantic Boat Company. They are slow to bill, so around Christmas the shocking invoice should arrive in an email attachment.

We took a farewell cruise to Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island (MDI) for a final emptying of the head. This harbor is a dream destination for many cruisers. Part working: lobstermen and women, ferries and mail boats, a Christian affiliated aid ship for medical, dental and spiritual relief to remote islands. Part recreational: tour boats, fishing charters, repair and storage facilities, fuel and other stores and services.

It is a striking place nestled within the low granite foothills of MDI’s Acadia National Park mountains. One classic boat after another pack the harbor’s docks and moorings, and add to this the transient fleet of robust sail and powerboats that come and go all day. Of course, along with the boats comes a unique mix of crews. Some professional, some single handers, but most couples like us. The fact that we all made it here provides instant bona fidies. I have to continually remind myself that Charlotte and I belong to this informal and unspoken of club.

The other reason for coming to Northeast Harbor was to hike the Acadia National Park’s trails. My goal before the end of the summer was to top Cadillac Mountain, the highest peak on the island at 1530 feet. It is the highest point seen from sea for most of the eastern and western American coast. I enlisted Charlotte in this attempt. We took the free island bus to the North Ridge stop and started up the trail of the same name for the 2.2 mile trek to the summit.

One thing I have learned about Maine is to be skeptical of trail difficulty ratings. Easy should be moderate, moderate difficult, and difficult impossible by us flatlanders. We began hopeful, especially since numerous families were dragging their mumbling preschoolers along with them. This was to prove a near fatal (a bit of hyperbole) mistake. The trails I have walked in Maine consist mainly of exposed rocks and tree roots intermixed with steep angled slabs of grey and green granite, many with the scars of ancient glaciers still evident.

To our favor, it was a cool sunny day with a stiff breeze. Charlotte made it 7/8ths of the way up before bailing. I decided to huff it to the top with the last eighth as challenging as the lower seven/eighth had been. She tucked herself into a spot out of the wind and waited (or so I thought) for me to return.

Cadillac Mountain’s summit consists of sweeping views and a parking lot. I negotiated the throng of tourist to the summit, rotated 360 degrees, and quickly headed back down not to keep Charlotte waiting. My inclination is not to trudge down mountain trails. I hop and skip, and try to keep my momentum going but in my state of exhaustion, I thought it better to take my time. So, I carefully placed one foot in front of the other, slow and steady.

It took longer then I thought to retrace my steps. I expected to see my now rested partner around every corner. The search was proving fruitless when suddenly I heard a familiar voice call out from above. Charlotte was up at one of the road’s scenic lookouts.

One peculiarity of the North Ridge Nature trail is that the summit road often runs directly above it. This is not the trail to hike if solitude is an objective. I scrambled up and stood there panting while Charlotte bluntly stated that she was not walking down, and that I had better ask someone for a ride. I looked to my left and saw a woman jump out of a smallish SUV with her camera, leaving her husband behind the wheel.

Our eyes met and without hesitation, I asked if he could give us a lift to the trailhead. With his wife now back, I repeated my request and after a quick evaluation it was determined that we were not likely serial murderers, and the back seat began to be cleared out. His wife was exuberant; it seems not long ago a stranger had rescued her from the final three miles of a hike in their home state of Kentucky. It was pay back time.

We exchanged niceties and then the question of where we are from lead to how we got to the island, and the next thing we knew he decided to take us back to Northeast Harbor to see some boats, ours included.

To travel, especially on a small boat, is to welcome experiences not always expected or planned. They can enlighten or dishearten, but usually they are thought provoking. I am not a big believer in a karmic universe, but that day on a steep mountain trail it played to our advantage.

The next day’s hike was the “easy” Jordan Pond Trail. It leaves from the Acadia National Park’s restaurant that is famous for popovers, and heads for three miles around the pond. We decided to walk counter clockwise and for the first half, until we reached the headwaters at the far end, it was a flat gravel trail, easy. Once we crossed over the unique wooden bridge that fords the pond’s feeding stream the nature of the trail changed.

Now granite slabs appeared, as did a jumble of rectangular rocks that had broken free from the steep rock face of the mountain above us. The trail became wet and required wide circles around mud ponds. Then we found ourselves on a boardwalk made up of two split tree trunks. Some were rotting, some were new; some were stable, some were not. Each step became an adventure; and this went on for most of the second half of the trail.

It was a beautiful walk nonetheless, with mountains bordering each side of the crystal clear pond. To celebrate our accomplishment we stopped at the local lobster shack on the way back to the harbor, and had home made Maine blueberry pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. It was a fitting way to replace the calories burned in the last two days.

But I am not sure why I am telling you this. I have no reason to think that you have an interest in the mundane facts of our trip. Maybe, despite the adventures that Carrie Rose has afforded us, it is precisely the mundane facts, the everyday occurrences that make our explorations unique. With that in mind, we decided to take advantage of our eastern position to visit friends on the way home.

In Maine, we stopped by the log cabin of a friend I went to Chiropractic school with. He proceeded to adjust my hiking weary feet, and his wife regaled us with the joys and challenges of horse husbandry.

In Vermont a fellow Nordic Tug couple who showed us much hospitality in the three months we spent on Lake Champlain, instilled in us the joys of living in their adopted state.

Then we headed south to the New York Catskill Mountains to visit Charlotte’s childhood friend and her husband. These New Yorkers showed us how the beauty of their summer home in a resplendent forested valley helps to soften the complexities of NYC living.

And finally, we travelled west to Ohio to visit another Nordic Tug couple that spends their summer living to the fullest on a tiny island in the middle of Lake Erie. The octogenarian captain and his admiral inspired us to never let the vagaries of age prevent us from living life on the water.

If inspiration was needed on how to live a fulfilled life, this was the group to emulate. We came away with a profound sense of gratitude that they have continued to reach out to us over the decades. So, even though our seventh cruise was truncated, it allowed for an alternative journey. After all, it is a fragile world with no guarantees; so we will take all the “mundaneness” we can get.


Chicago, IL