A Pilgrim’s Progression

Fri Afternoon Shore Path, Bar Harbor

The Shore Path skirts the southern shore of Frenchman Bay. And there’s something about this place that conjures up the New World. Maybe it’s the long expansive breadth of it all. This ain’t no Smuggler’s Cove. Graced with pine-fringed, round-topped, rock-bound, completely unpopulated islands called the Porcupines (Sheep, Burnt, Long, and Bald), it doesn’t flow inland as much as cut a mighty swath into the continent itself.

From here, I can also see the opening to the open sea, protected by Egg Rock Island and its squat lighthouse. While looking to the northern side, past the Porcupines, I see nothing but shore and pines. Oh maybe one or two buildings that from this distance could pass for small trading posts. In other words I think I see the last frontier.

I know I’ve thought and written that before, but every year this discovery is so startlingly revealing. What I see right now is not that different from what Samuel de Champlain must have seen when he dropped by like a European Adam to name this place Isle de Mont Dessert.

Deserted indeed. And so, like a desert to its pilgrim, the new world waits. And every spring for the past eleven years I’ve come to find it.