Show Notes

Robin Hood: I cannot find the version of the legend of Robin Hood that I read on my grandfather’s shelves when I was young. The book was old, maybe over a hundred years. The glue in the binding had long since crumbled. I remember that the one that I read was written in verse. But you know how memory is. All of this information is suspect. Anyway, if you’re interested in this older version of the story, it made its way into the popular novelization of the story written by Howard Pyle called The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood which was published in 1883 and can be found here in both print and audio.

Park History: I highly recommend The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, which includes the story of Acadia as well as many other iconic parks.

Tourism and Rolf Potts: My thoughts on travel, tourism, and tourists has been greatly influenced by a small but remarkable book by Rolf Potts called Vagabonding. If you are a traveler, you’ve got to read this book. If you aren’t, this book will make you one.

Public Piano: Here’s some pics.

Introduction

Off the coast of Maine is an island. (Wait. Hold on. That’s not news to anybody. There are, like, 5,000 islands off the coast of Maine.) But this island is truly spectacular. The only fjord on America’s east coast nearly cuts the island down the middle. Huge granite domes, scoured by glaciers look out over the sea. Their summits command views of all of downeast Maine. If you stand on their summits at dawn, you may be the first person in the United States to see the sun. Named Pemetic by its indigenous inhabitants. Today the island is mostly known by name given it by the French explorer, Samuel de Champlain, in 1604. He called it L’Ile de Monts Desert after its treeless (or deserted) peaks. Anglicized, it became Mount Desert Island or to locals just MDI. Now connected to the mainland by a bridge, and home to Acadia National Park, Mount Desert Island is visited by more than 4,000,000 people each year. 

Today, I’d like to talk about how l love that island–fiercely … intimately … like the way I love my closest friends. But … places, like people, are complicated. I can’t talk about MDI without talking about tourism and national parks, about how we treat and mistreat the places we love and the places we live in … and about how those places treat us. But … y’know … that’s how we roll on I Heart This. We go behind the sunsets and the vistas and the ocean breezes to find the wonders that people often miss. So today’s show comes to you like everyone’s favorite team of ninja turtles … in four parts. 

Let’s go! 

Park 

Robin Hood

In one of the old, pre-Costner stories of Robin Hood, the reason that Robin of Lockley becomes an outlaw has nothing to do with a murderous land grab by the Sheriff of Nottingham or unfair tax policies. In this story, A young Robin was passing through Sherwood Forest on his way to some festival, hoping to win an archery prize and maybe catch the eye of the fetching Maid Marion. But on the way he encounters some guys in the woods who doubt that he can shoot like he says he can. They dare him to fire an arrow at a faraway deer. Robin, being the world’s most storied archer, hits it, of course. And this is his first crime. 

Not because it was a crime to shoot deer, but because it was a crime to shoot deer in Sherwood Forest … because Sherwood Forest was a park.

In feudal England, a park was something very different than something like Acadia is today. Parks were the exclusive playgrounds of the titled lords, lands set aside for the sport (mostly hunting) of wealthy men. In Sherwood’s case, for the king himself. 

Robin Hood stories are almost all a commentary on social injustices, and this one was no different. All over Europe, powerful people had claimed all of the last wild and untrammeled places for themselves. The common people were trespassers. In that story of Robin Hood, the men in the forest who dared him to shoot a deer, turned out to be wardens–basically the king’s own private park rangers. The punishment for his crime was death. So the fact that when Robin escaped the wardens, he took refuge in the very Sherwood forest where he had trespassed, it was a symbol of everything that Robin Hood stood for. He had made his home in the very land that the rich had denied to everyone else. 

Parks as a Gift

America could have easily gone the same way. Yellowstone and Yosemite and Acadia … especially Acadia … could have easily become Sherwood Forests. Mount Desert Island’s story went something like this. In the late nineteenth century, America had a new aristocracy, with some of the most massive accumulations of wealth and power the world has ever seen. And the members of this new wealthy class … the Carnegies, the Rockerfellers, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, and the Astors saw the paintings of Thomas Cole and Frederick Church who had captured the dramatic landscape in vivid colors on enormous canvases. First the aristocrats bought the paintings. Then they bought the landscapes themselves. Mount Desert Island because an enclave of exclusive (quote-unquote) “cottages.” where these families escaped their equally exclusive neighborhoods in New York. Bar Harbor, the biggest village on MDI, hosted a lane of seaside mansions that became known as millionaire’s row. The barons and baronesses were capitalist instead of feudal, but the rules of the game had changed little. The rich and the powerful controlled the fate of the wild and beautiful places. They allowed or denied access at their whim. Wilderness belonged to Richie Rich and his cronies yet again. Robin Hood beware. 

But this is where the story takes a distinctly American turn. 

Those of you who’ve listened to my love letter to America might remember that, in my angsty quest for a kind of patriotism that I could believe in, I set my banner down by our national parks. It was one of the first things about our country that I felt unambiguously proud of. You see, at the same time that the robber-barons were buying up Mount Desert Island, other people were proposing a brand new idea. One that, so far as I know, was unique in the world. Maybe, they suggest, maybe we can have big, beautiful wilderness parks. Maybe we could set aside big swaths of land. Places to play in and pray in and appreciate for their sublime beauty. And what if they weren’t just for the rich. What if … in a country struggling to become a democracy … what if these parks could be for the people? What if they could be for everyone. 

It is an idea just as radical, and more uniquely American, than representative government–that in a world built out of “no trespassing” signs some land belongs to us all. 

The story of almost every national park you visit is the same … Somehow despite the seemingly insurmountable hunger of the marketplace, a small group of people … people who deeply love a place … call on the conscience of their countryfolk. They point to the place they love and say, “This land, this beautiful and precious place, unique in all the world should not be sold to the highest bidder. Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Sequoia, and Glacier. In every single case, the struggle was real. There were those who wanted those lands to end up in private hands. In every single case, there was a time when it seemed that they would. Every national park into which you set foot is a hard-won gift against the odds. 

Acadia National Park’s story offers an interesting twist … this park was protected, loved, and gifted to America by some of the very people who had snatched it up in the first place. 

Park as Endowment

Just south of the village of Bar Harbor, before you get to the Jackson Laboratory … by the way, that’s the same Jackson Laboratory that Pinky and the Brain escape from … anyway … just before that is a little pull off. Now it has a brown national park sign for Compass Harbor. But when I lived there it was little more than a gravel parking lot that could accommodate a half-dozen cars. If you get out of your car and follow the wide, flat trail through the woods, you’ll eventually get to a fork. Go left and you’ll eventually find yourself on a rocky jetty looking out over the Porcupine Islands. 

But if you take the right … onto the path less travelled … and wend your way through some ancient and twisted cedar trees, you’ll find yourself climbing some wide granite steps up onto a tiled platform. Trees grow up through loosened bricks. Moss and ferns are everywhere. This is the foundation of what was once a great house. And once someone points it out to you, you can’t help but imagine the chandeliers and fireplaces and what what must have once been a many windowed sun room on the south side. 

This is the remains of the mansion of George B. Dorr. 

George was extraordinarily wealthy. His parents each came from one of the richest families in Boston. George traveled the world, went to Harvard, and knew the most influential people of his day. He was fifteen when he first visited Mount Desert Island, just three years after the end of the Civil War. It was love at first sight and the love of George’s life. 

You might think that the work of founding or protecting a national park would be interesting work. But in the case of Acadia National Park, you’d be wrong. George spent decades of his life in meetings: bank meetings, real estate closings, meetings with landowners to try and convince them to donate or sell important parcels, and meetings with the community organizations that began administering the lands that eventually would become Acadia National Park. When the Maine legislature threatened to revoke the organizational status of one of those community organizations. Dorr caught a train to Augusta to lobby against the move. And when he realized that the only lasting protection for the places that he loved would be federal protection, he went to Washington for still more meetings. Such is the work of so much good in the world, isn’t it?

George never married. He served as the superintendent of Acadia National Park until he died in 1944. By then, his fortune was gone, much of it spent on one big gift to the people of the world. 

Park as a Legacy

I tell this story, in part, to show how hard it was to wrest this land for the people–even when the person who was doing the wresting had all the wealth, power, and connections one could hope for. But it also reminds me just how easy it would have been for this place to have turned out very differently. The story of MDI could easily have been the story of a place that remained in the hands of the heirs to America’s early industrial empires. 

But it didn’t. You and I can go stand on the summit of Pemetic and look over the narrow valley and Jordan Pond below. We can wander the forests and bike the carriage trails. But only because people have worked hard, sometimes for their whole lives to make it so. 

And it’s not just the wealthy men like George Dorr and John Rockerfeller who leveraged their power. Parks are not just land set aside. A national park is an ongoing project of generations. They require continual advocacy. Trails don’t just happen because people walk in the woods–at least not good ones … at least not the kind that can withstand thousands of boots. Trailbuilding is a craft that demands skill and patience, and Acadia are among the most skillfully built and lovingly maintained trails in the world. Acadia is the park that I love because of rangers who have paid attention to the needs of the land and its visitors, because they close the trails where the peregrine falcons nest, and direct traffic on the crowded park loop road. And because they have done the thankless work of picking up the trash left by careless guests. Acadia happens because volunteers donate their time, because friends of the park donate their money, and because year-after-year our government, which can’t seem to agree on anything, renews its pledge to reinvest in this place. If we are lucky, people will be testing their fear of heights on the Beehive Trail when all of us are long forgotten. 

Park as Commons

Acadia and her sister parks give me hope that things can be shared … despite the so-called “tragedy of the commons.” She is living proof that just because something IS shared, doesn’t mean that it can’t be well cared for. 

If you go to Acadia, you’ll see. The trails are works of art. The peaks are clean. There are places that even the most disabled among us can find a spot to watch the sun rise from a mountaintop and there are places where the natural ruggedness of a mountaintop has been so well preserved that only the most rugged hikers will go. 

If you do go to Acadia, think of those people who have kept, and cared for, and loved that place. And give thanks.   

Destination

You are ON MDI

The village of Bar Harbor is probably one of the most touristy places in the world. Resting on MDI’s northeast shoulder, it is the launch pad that most everyone uses to enter Acadia National Park. Tourism isn’t just the basis of its economy. It kind of IS the economy. In the summer, people pack the sidewalks, elbow-to-elbow. The streets are lined with restaurants and ice cream parlors and shops full of tchotchkes. During the high season, there is no escape from the crush of visitors. 

Earlier this summer, I was in a shop on Main Street. The entire wall was covered with sweatshirts emblazoned with Mount Desert Island like it was a corporate logo. And there, on the left, was a hand-written sign, taped to the wall. It said, “You are ON Mount Desert Island” with a hand-drawn map and an arrow pointing, “You are here.” I can only imagine the clerk behind her little counter waiting on a a queue of clueless passengers belched out of some cruise ship in the harbor for a three hour excursion. How many times did she need to endure the question, “Where is Mount Desert Island?” before she put up that sign. I could almost read the exasperation in her handwriting and hear her asking under her breath. “Why are you even here?”

The Trouble with Tourists

Tourists!  They crowd our favorite places, seem oblivious to the impact they are having. They buy up cheap and meaningless momentos. So often they act as if they’re entitled to have a good time because they paid X amount of $.  

People tell me that tourists are good for the economy, as if enduring their presence was a necessary hardship … like doing sit-ups or eating Brussel sprouts. But do we really need to endure such painful stupidity as that T-shirts with the sheep saying “Baah Haabaah.” (sigh)  I go back every year, and it just … does not … die. 

I am not an economist, but I have a hard time believing that the production of thousands of identical lobster keychains is good for any of us–even if it does mean that a few college sophomores on summer break get a steady paycheck or the local restaurateurs can add some of their profits to the municipal tax base. 

Look! As you can probably tell, I get as frustrated with tourists as anyone, and although I sincerely mean everything I’ve just said about them, I love the tourists of Mount Desert Island, so I’d like to spend act two of this episode making the case that they are worthy of our deep appreciation. 

Yeah! I know this’ll be an uphill climb. We’ll see how it goes. 

Tourists are Us

First of all, I feel obliged to say this because … I AM a tourist. I did live on MDI for a while, but I don’t live there now. And unless you’ve decided not to leave your hometown for past few decades, you’ve been one too. Every once in a while, I hear some hip twenty-something who’s too cool for Lonely Planet guides and plans to backpack across Africa on a shoestring argue that, “There is a difference between being a tourist and being a traveler.” Yes, me from the past, I’m looking at you here. Don’t try to pretend to be cool when you and I both know that you carried a wooden yoga block in that aforementioned backpack. (sigh). 

Anyway, what I’ll say to that “traveler” is this: The word tourist comes from the Middle French word “tour” which is also the same root for such classic English words as “turn” and is distantly related to other turn-y word from other languages like “tornado.” The root word actually meant something like “spin something around” as if on a lathe. So, tourists are literally people “running around in circles.” (Not so smug, me from the past, I’m not done yet.) Think about your own “travels.” Did you leave home only to return? Your circuit might take longer or wend its way through more miles. But I would argue that the difference between you and the T-shirt buying cruise ship passengers is only one of degrees. To say otherwise, smacks of a certain kind of chauvinism. What do any of us do but turn our little circles? We leave home; we come back again. Each day we round the axis of the Earth. Together, we all circumambulate the sun. We start as dust and to dust we shall return. 

But, to my would-be travelers I would also say, there’s nothing wrong with being a tourist. Why do we tour in the first place? I think that in our heart of hearts even the most cartoonish camera-toting, fanny-pack wearing among us are leaving home for the same reasons that people sail around the world or pilot their dugout through darkest Peru. All of us want to be blown over by the beauty of the world. We want to taste adventure. We want to claim for ourselves something beyond the routines that inevitably harden around us as we stay in one place. 

Why we Tour

Most every one of the tourists who ended up in that T-shirt shop asking where MDI was, started with a dream–not of shopping–but of finding something of themselves that they couldn’t find with the same old people and places … whether they could articulate it to themselves or not. 

In fact, in tourists I find much to admire … even envy. They walk down the street gawking at the sights, it’s true, but would that I could look at my own town the same way … everything fresh … everything strange and new. When we are tourists, we can recapture a little bit of that childlike wonder … a kind of instant, if temporary, youthfulness. And if you watch them carefully. If you watch their faces when they are coming face-to-face with a place that you’ve grown accustomed to … that you have stopped seeing with that crisp clarity of novelty … tourists can wake you up to its majesty and power again … without saying a word. 

The Rhythm of the Seasons

I lived in Bar Harbor for six years, and in that time tourists came and went like the tides. The tides in the Gulf of Maine are some of the most dramatic in the world, and that was also true for the tides of visitors. They swell in July and August so that you can hardly move in along Cottage Street. Then they ebb away until, in January, most of the town is boarded up. I could ride my bike down the icy double yellow lines in the late evening without passing a single car. 

I loved the rhythm of it … like the whole town took in one giant breath each year. I loved how, in the winter, I had the whole island to myself. One February day I climbed Sargent Mountain with my roommates to see a wayward snowy owl that had wandered out of its arctic home. I remember how it stood like a sentinel, its feathers buffeted by the snowy gale. From there we could see so many of the island’s other peaks … Cadillac, Pemetic, Penobscot, the Bubbles … everything encased in crystal … and other than my buddies and that owl … there was not a soul in sight. To get down we slid the whole way down the iced over trail on our backs. 

In the summer, there was a different kind of beauty. Sure there was magic of deer fauns in the Great Meadow and biking down the Ledgelawn entrance to the park on that day when the cottonwoods had released their fluffy seeds into the air … and the air was so still … and the cotton seemed to levitate in the air as if I’d somehow passed over into the land of the fey. But … there were also the people. People from everywhere. I would overtake them on the trail, and after a tentative hello, they would tell me about what it was like to study microbiology at Tufts or be a homeschooling mom of six in Oregon or a Swede traveling the world with her teenage daughter after her husband had died. 

Tourists are Beautiful

I’m not trying to make excuses for bad behavior. Tourists can be assholes. And that assholery gets amplified because there are so many of them … and because they don’t know the rules and customs and etiquette of the places they’re visiting … and because, for many of them, the unfamiliarity of new places inflames their anxieties. And as with all people everywhere, some don’t accept the idea that there might be legitimate ways of doing things other than their own. Tourists can be selfish and entitled. They can be shallow. But I haven’t lived a life free of entitlement and selfishness either. 

There is an obvious irony about griping over tourists. We act as if we want them to go away so that we can enjoy the very same beauty that they came here to bask in. But there is another, less obvious irony too. It’s not just landscapes that we travel for. We also travel the world to encounter other people … to immerse ourselves in their cultures and look back on our own with new eyes. And here in the special places … they come to us … in all their beauty. I’ve stood on the crowded summit of the Beehive in July and seen an old couple absolutely aglow with breathless delight and the young couple silently intertwine their fingers, looking at each other instead of the mountains, and the eight year old girl practically levitating with pride after finishing the vertiginous trail where she came face-to-face with her fear of heights and pushed through to victory anyway. You can find ugliness wherever you find people… but it doesn’t cancel out the beauty. We humans contain multitudes. 

(Long pause) 

Piano in the Gazebo

This summer in the gazebo on the Bar Harbor town green, someone had left a brightly painted, out-of-tune piano. The town green is kind of like the Grand Central station of Bar Harbor. On one end of the green, people spill out of ice cream parlors. On the other, they spill out of the Island Explorer buses that run their circuits through the campgrounds and the park. The gazebo sits right in the middle of everything. 

I ended up sitting in the gazebo one rainy afternoon, waiting for some companions. I watched toddler bang out noise on the keys with their tiny hands. I watched a teenager tentatively stumble through “Fur Elyse.” I watched one young woman play Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” so brilliantly that you could hardly tell the piano was out of tune. Passers-by barely looked up from their phones. When I approached her afterwards and told her how beautifully she’d played, she shrugged and shuffled away. A silver-haired woman with bright lipstick play a rollicking chopsticks duet with a girl of no more than ten. 

All of those fingers falling across the keys. It was as beautiful as the waves crashing against the rocks on Great Head. 

Pilgrimage

Lots of Ways to Travel

People travel to Mount Desert Island for all kinds of reasons. Some want to drive in comfort along the park look road and take in a few sights. Some collect national parks and carry around a little blue book that looks like an oversized passport to get a stamp from each one. Some want to connect with nature. Some want an experience where they can bond with their kids. Some go because their parents force them to. Some want to test themselves by cycling or paddling or climbing the hard thing. 

There are plenty of journeys that begin with people just wanting to rest, to unwind, to feel pampered. Go to any travel agency and you’ll see this kind of travel packaged up with a bow on it. A kind of extravagant version of a day at the spa or a Netflix and chill night where the purpose is to reward yourself with decadence for all the hard work you do in your real life. I’ve got nothing against this kind of travel, but it’s never held much appeal for me. 

Journey Stories

But there is another kind of reason to travel … one that is harder … maybe impossible … to package. 

Literature is full of journeys undertaken primarily for this other reason. They run the gamut from Peter Mathiessen’s The Snow Leopard to Elisabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. From Frodo Baggin’s desperate quest to destroy the One Ring to Cheryl Strayed’s attempt to walk right through grief to Jack Kerouac’s amphetamine-fueled diatribe about life on the road. The Hero’s Journey, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Travels with Charley, Into the Wild. 

Every story is different … and also, somehow, they are all the same. Whether the traveler knows it or not, they have gone out looking for themselves. We have a name for the journeys that we take for this other reason. We call them pilgrimage. 

The metaphor is as on the nose as can be. Life is the journey. It is the process that changes us, not the arrival. Like most big, true things … we’ve heard it before. We call it a cliche … at least we do until another poet comes along and tells the story fresh again. Maybe it’s a cliche that we ought not dismiss. 

What am I trying to say here? I think what I’m trying to say is that I suspect that hidden under our hopes to escape or to rest or to challenge ourselves … many of our journeys are undertaken for this very reason. Even if we spend our whole vacation lounging on the beach … there is this secret part of us that years to be transformed by our journeys. Even if we are too cool to admit it. Why else would we go to such iconic places if not to be touched by adventure or love or insight or healing? 

Like any great destination, Mount Desert Island is the sight of tens of thousands of experiments in self-discovery. People trying to break free of their small lives so that they can see themselves and the world around them with new eyes. Maybe we are all pilgrims all the time, bravely stepping out into the unknown, full of hope. 

Pilgrimage Fails

It’s a beautiful idea, but lately, to me, it’s also seemed a bit of a tragedy. I don’t know if it’s just my way of looking at it or not, but on my recent travels to Acadia, I see it in people’s faces. People who might have come filled with hopes of touching the sublime and having adventures wind up settling for circling the parking lot looking for a spot and eating overpriced lobster. 

Maybe this tragedy is its own cliche. The flip side to the journey of self-discovery. The unsettling knowledge that many of these journeys fail to enlighten us. Who doesn’t recognize the quixotic quest spoofed in movies like National Lampoon’s family vacation where Chevy Chase stands on the lip of the Grand Canyon muttering, “Very nice! Very nice! Okay kids, back in the car.” 

How does this happen? What is wrong with us? 

Romano Tours

There is a Saturday Night Live skit where Adam Sandler parodies a tour company infomercial called Romano Tours. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I highly recommend you go find it on YouTube. It starts out like any low-budget infomercial ad, but quickly segways as Adam Sandler’s character tries to manage the expectations of his prospective clients. “You’re still going to be you on vacation,” he says. “If you are sad where you are, and then you get on a plane to Italy, the you in Italy will be the same sad you from before, just in a new place.” 

It’s pretty hilarious. And also wonderfully insightful about how we long for transformation to be magical and easy and lead to only ever happiness. That we forget the demons we all carry in ourselves–our depressions and fears and limitations and loss. And I think that’s part of the familiar disappointment that many people feel when they’re traveling. 

But I think that beneath that there’s an underlying problem that makes us prone to this kind of craziness. I think that our misguided expectations of travel are a symptom of thinking about travel as something you buy.  

Place as Commodity

It’s so easy for those of us who live in today’s world to turn things around us into commodities. And the places we visit are not different. Vacation packages, cruiseline cabins, plane tickets, hotel rooms, guided tours. Restaurant meals. Everything about our travels is bought and sold until the very places we are on pilgrimage to become a product that we measure up for its monetary value. We give it ratings on a five-star scale. We write reviews. Influencers (which by the way is a synonym for manipulators) make top-10 list full of product placements. 

When you are in Bar Harbor, walking down streets lined with shops hawking swag, there is no way to forget that Mount Desert Island has been turned into just such a commodity. Maybe this is, in the end, why we are so uncomfortable with tourism. Maybe in our lucid moments we can see how easy it is to reduce something of indescribably beauty into keychains. We recognize in others our own tendency to collect photographs of our experiences instead of having them–our tendency to look at the place we are in through the screen of our phones. 

I think, that deep down, we know that if we do this to the places we most treasure, it does something … not to the place, per se … but to us. 

Tragedy of Failed Pilgrimage

There is something afoot in our world right now that is accelerating the reduction of our experiences into things that are bought and sold. It has to do with so-called “technology” and our phones and social media and the companies that have found a new kind of capitalism–one that reduces even our attention into metrics that can be monetized. 

It has to do with all of these things, and it also has to do with us and how willing we are to surrender our attention to them … how willing we are to exchange the pursuit of happiness for the illusion of buying it. 

But it is a lie! 

You might be able to buy a room with comfortable sheets and a view of the ocean, but you cannot buy a feeling of awe. You can buy a ticket to drive up to the summit of Cadillac Mountain, but you can’t buy the feeling of having your heart broken open by the colors of the sunset. You cannot buy the things that prompted us to travel in the first place–relaxation or healing or adventure or insight.   

Pilgrimage can never be bought! Of course, commerce happens on the road to Mecca, but it is incidental to the journey. 

I think again of that sign in the T-shirt shop. “You are ON Mount Desert Island.” And isn’t that just the way … the more we try to buy our way into paradise, the less we are able to recognize it when we arrive. 

Is there a way to prevent this? Are we doomed to succumb to the hypnotic drone of commerce? Or is there a way to inoculate ourselves against it? 

I think there is, but I don’t think it’s easy. I don’t think it’s ever been easy. Awe and joy and meaning aren’t things that just happen to us. Certainly they require grace. But they also require effort. It is the work of turning our attention to what is awesome and joyous and meaningful. The most beautiful vistas will not move us if we spend our mountaintop moments posing for selfies and posting them in our feeds. The world may be burning, it is true, but it is still so gorgeous. And you are only here so long. 

Do you want to buy joy? You have the chance. But there is only one way to pay for it. Pay attention. 

And you can’t just pay for it when you arrive. The pilgrimage isn’t about the relic at the journey’s end, or about the cathedral in which it is housed. The journey doesn’t even start when you first lace up your boots on that first day on the trail. It starts long before, when you first decide that the journey is something that you want. As Rolf Potts writes, “Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility.” 

If Potts is right, then pilgrimage isn’t even about the journey, it’s just a commitment to letting the world in and being curious about when it surprises you. 

If that’s true, and I think it is, then let’s not wait to start paying attention when we finally hit the road. Then, when you finally reach a place like Acadia, you won’t be rushed. You won’t be ticking experiences off of a to-do list. You won’t be unconsciously measuring the quality of your experience against how much you paid for it. Maybe you might even be a little less afraid of having moments that are difficult or boring or lonely. They are part of the journey too. They have their own lessons to teach. 

Pay attention now. Be curious now. About this person, this place, this experience here. This is your life, no matter what you paid for it. 

Home

Souvenirs

In the summer of 2020, Maine opened its COVID-restricted borders to visitors, but only ones from New Hampshire and Vermont. And since we lived in Vermont, we immediately booked a room at our kids favorite little motel at the corner of Eden and Mount Desert street. We had to sign an affidavit, testifying that we really were from Vermont in order to get our room. 

I remember the weather was gorgeous. And I remember that everything felt surreal. Places that were always, always, always bustling with summer crowds were empty. I stood at the summit of Champlain Mountain for an hour without seeing another soul. I walked from there down Huguenot Head and past the Tarn, up the Great Stair to the summit of Dorr Mountain, through the Gorge, over Cadillac and down its other side to Bubble Pond–a hike across some of the most beautiful and most visited places on one of the most visited islands on the continent. I saw no more than a dozen people, and most of them for only a few minutes as I walked past the parking lot at the top of Cadillac mountain. But that walk was still crowded with memories–with friends I knew and now not seen in years, with adventures I only remember parts of, with the ghosts of my own children from when they were younger than they are now. 

I do not live on Mount Desert Island anymore. But there is a way in which it is still a home for me. Every time I go, I am almost bowled over by a powerful feeling of recognition. I think the closest word for it, in English anyway, is nostalgia. But that’s not quite right. This feeling is like the ocean wave that you’re not ready for and threatens to knock you on the sand. It’s like suddenly standing face-to-face with my younger self–a self with different dreams and different fears. 

In French, If you want to say that you remember, you say “Je me souviens.” It is a reflexive verb which means that it is something you must do TO yourself. The verb “souvenir” to remember comes from the roots “sous” meaning under and venir meaning “to come.” So in some ways, to remember is to come under, to bring yourself under, as if memory were an ocean … and you were plunging into its depths to see the sunken shipwrecks of your past.

That island will always be the final resting place of a great armada of my memories, even when the neuronal circuits in my brain don’t have enough voltage to recall it. 

Think of all the memories that must be there, left by all of its millions of visitors back to the very first ones some 7,000 years ago … people who just like I did, stood on its rocky peaks to watch the rising sun.