In coastal Maine, it is not unusual to see extremely aggressive tree-pruning efforts–like this one in Brooksville. Why are people lopping off the tops of pretty trees like a bad ’50s haircut? Because the trees are interfering with the view, so they get radical trim jobs that reduces them to virtual stumps while allowing people to get a good look at the water and the boats. This poor tree had the misfortune of growing right in front of the porch of our cabin.
You might ask, as I did, why people don’t just remove the trees, stumps and all? The answer to that logical question is: sometimes they do, they catch them early enough. But trees grow like weeds around coastal Maine, and by the time a tree is big enough to chop back its root system might be so extensive that removing it could lead to erosion–and in an area where coastal property is precious, no one wants that.
As a result, there are a lot of trees in the Down East region that are nicknamed “Stumpy.”
We’re staying in a rustic former lodge that looks out over Cape Rosier, with Castine, Maine in the far distance, across the bay. It is a log cabin-style dwelling, with lots of wood everywhere you look, and it has a great porch.
What makes a great porch? A sturdy, untorn screen, for starters, because at twilight the mosquitoes can be ferocious. You also want to have a pretty scene to see, and some comfortable rockers where you can plop down and enjoy the view while getting in a few lulling rocks. Good lighting is nice, if you want to read, and a quiet setting where you can enjoy the occasional calls of wild birds is a welcome feature, too.
This porch has all of that, but has an additional feature that moves it into the exceptional category: a plastic-covered table, shown below, where you can eat messy boiled lobster and readily clean up afterward. It’s a distinctive Maine touch.
The border between Weir Cove and the passing road is a strip of green that is dotted with colorful flowers. There is no doubt that the plants are wild, and probably considered by strict horticulturalists to be weeds–such as the delicate Queen Anne’s Lace, or the tall, spindly yellow dandelions–but the combination of greens, whites, yellows, and purples is pleasing to the eye and to the nose, and it is almost as if a savvy gardener had designed it for the rest of us to enjoy.
In much of coastal Maine, areas are allowed to just grow wild. In most cases, that seems to work out well. Mother Nature does a pretty good job.
Our rental cottage in the Weir Cove area of Cape Rosier in coastal Maine is a pretty place. It is set back in the woods, across the road from the area that leads down to the water. When you wake up in the morning and shuffle outside, you are greeted with the scene above: towering pine trees, a slight breeze ruffling the leaves at the top of the spruce trees, and a fresh, piney tang to the cool air as you take a slug of your first cup of coffee.
The driveway to the cottage ends at the single public road that runs along the perimeter of the Weir Cove area. (I am not counting “private roads,” which are kind of like glorified common driveways.) If you turn left onto the road, you walk through the woods, getting an occasional glimpse of the water to the right and seeing a solid phalanx of trees to the left–until you reach the pretty little meadow shown above, with its large granite boulder in the distance. On this walk to the left, you can vary the temperature as you see fit by seeking sunlight or shade. The shade is dense and dark under all of the trees and immediately cooling; the sunlight on a clear summer day is dazzling to the eye and gloriously warming to the neck and shoulders. When you are walking Russell’s dog Betty, she thoughtfully makes sure that you are exposed to both.
The turn to the right at the end of the driveway takes you along the road to the little horseshoe-shaped beach where people launch kayaks and wade into the cold water up to their knees. Like most beaches in this part of Maine, it’s a stony beach, with rock sizes varying from gravel at the water’s edge to pebbles and then to larger rocks as you move farther from the water, with good-sized boulders bordering the roadway. Yesterday was a perfect day for sailing, and multiple boats were out on the water, including this small craft that quickly passed from one side of the cove to the other as we walked along.
A big rainstorm rolled through last night–a real “gullywasher,” my grandmother, who hailed from Uhrichsville, Ohio, might have said–and it left the Cape Rosier area feeling clean and washed this morning as the sun rose over the inland hills. Yesterday was unseasonably warm for this part of Maine, with the temperature touching the 80s, and it was downright humid by coastal standards. That means the coast was experiencing about 1/100th of the humidity you get in the Midwest on a high summer day, so the cool, crisp feeling this morning was welcome and energizing.
I walked barefoot down the winding asphalt road to the little cove, letting the rough surface of the road stimulate the nerves on the soles of my feet. Half of the cove was in sunshine, half was still in shadow. A large flock of seagulls was camped out on the mudflats that were exposed because the tide was out. Occasionally one of the birds would launch itself into the air, circle the cove, then land again. It was as quiet as a church, and even the gulls were maintaining a respectful silence on a beautiful late July Sunday morning.
Last night we spent the night in one of the rustic cabins that are part of the Lookout Inn, an old hotel and lodging spot on Flye Point, near Brooklin, Maine. Flye Point is considered by many to be one of the most scenic parts of Maine. Regrettably, we weren’t able to enjoy the view to its fullest, because the fog was heavy and prevented us from seeing far out onto the water. The tide was out, the air was redolent of the well-known scent of the waterfront, and to get down to the rocks you needed to walk down a mossy wooden staircase. In short, it was a classic Maine scene.
The Lookout Inn is a pretty place that has been a Maine lodging option for decades. That’s it to the center left of the photograph below. It has extensive and beautiful grounds that were puddled and dew-soaked when we ambled around this morning, after an evening rainstorm. If you stay in one of the cabins, don’t count on getting wireless or being able to catch up on email, incidentally. That’s one of the advantages of the place, in my view.
One of the great things about Maine is that there is always an incentive to get out and take a walk, because you never know what you might see at any given point in time. A tree-lined country road may eventually open up to display a pretty seaside scene, for example. And the vistas are ever changing as the tide moves in and out, rocks are covered or exposed, the fog blankets part of the scenery or suddenly lifts to reveal a distant coastline, or you spot a seal splashing in the bay on a quest for fish. Add in a few gulps of fresh, moist coastal air and you’ve got a recipe for a delightful ramble.
It’s a lot easier to exercise when there is a meaningful incentive to get out and walk.
There was a significant development in Blue Hill, Maine, about a year ago: a new bar and cocktail lounge opened. The Brick Block now occupies a spot that once housed a little breakfast food shop, in a historic brick building down by the waterfront.
The opening of a new bar doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but in this part of coastal Maine there aren’t many of them. And, in particular, places that stay open until the wee hours are rarer than hen’s teeth. The Brick Block serves people who want to wet their whistle until 1 a.m., which is long past closing time for the handful of other adult beverage establishments in the area. According to the bartender at The Brick Block, that makes it the go-to spot for the restaurant bartenders and servers and cooks after their workday is done, and makes for a pretty raucous crowd come the midnight time frame, too.
We visited The Brick Block last night–well before the party crowd rolled in–and in our view it is a very welcome addition to the Blue Hill community. It’s a cozy, quirky spot with a friendly bartender that serves a nice menu of drinks that includes Narragansett, a classic regional beer that I last enjoyed during the summer of 1976. (It still hits the spot.) We chatted up one of the locals as we checked out some of the interesting and humorous bar decorations, like the one below.
A new bar in Blue Hill, that keeps the kind of late-night hours that city folk have come to expect! Blue Hill is now officially a town on the move.
The Maine coastline is rugged and ragged in this “Down East” part of the state. The area is pockmarked with bays and inlets, studded with islands and narrows, almost always bordered with sheer rock face.
We’re staying in a bungalow on one of the fingers of Blue Hill Bay, with a view of the bay and Blue Hill itself in the distance. One of our goals this summer is to one day take the hike up to the top of Blue Hill, but as night falls it is pleasant just to sit on the porch and enjoy the sunset, the pretty scene, and the gentle lapping of the water in the bay against the stony coastline.
I’m up in Maine for a spell and enjoyed this morning’s view of one of the bays in Blue Hill, Maine. The sun rises early on the far eastern edge of the Eastern time zone–about 4:50 a.m. this time of year–so the day is well started by 6 a.m. The morning air was blissfully cool, there was not a ripple on the mirror-like surface of the water, and this corner of the world was enveloped in an unearthly absence of sound. There was not a car engine, or a boat motor, or a human voice, or a breath of wind ruffling the leaves of the trees to be heard.
In last week’s federal appellate court ruling, the core question for the court was whether the National Marine Fisheries Service, which licenses fisheries in federal waters, acted properly in preparing a so-called “biological opinion” under the Endangered Species Act (“ESA”). The court’s ultimate decision was summarized in the second paragraph of the opinion:
“In this case, we decide whether, in a biological opinion, the Service must, or even may, when faced with uncertainty, give the “benefit of the doubt” to an endangered species by relying upon worst-case scenarios or pessimistic assumptions. We hold it may not. The ESA and the implementing regulations call for an empirical judgment about what is “likely.” The Service’s role as an expert is undermined, not furthered, when it distorts that scientific judgment by indulging in worst-case scenarios and pessimistic assumptions to benefit a favored side.”
The court found that the ESA contemplated a “scientific judgment” and did not require “‘distorting the decisionmaking process by overemphasizing highly speculative harms’ whenever the available data is wanting.” The court noted that “[b]y the Service’s admission, it relied upon worst-case modeling that is “very likely” wrong, based upon assumptions the Service concededly does not believe are accurate.” The court also observed:
“A presumption also ignores that worst-case scenarios lie on all sides. It is not hard to indulge in one here: ropeless fishing technologies, weak links, inserts, and trawls may not work; permanent fishery closures may be the only solution. The result may be great physical and human capital destroyed, and thousands of jobs lost, with all the degradation that attends such dislocations.”
The upshot is that the National Marine Fisheries Service will have to go back to the drawing board and develop a new “biological opinion”–one untainted by pessimistic assumptions and worst-case scenarios. The Service will also, as part of that process, consider whether the court ruling will affect related regulations. In the meantime, the Maine lobster fishing industry will avoid the worst-case scenario it was facing–at least, for now.
I’ve written before–see here, and here–about the deep concerns the people of Stonington, Maine have had about impending federal regulations that would drastically affect the lobster fishing that is a crucial pillar of the local economy. Those working in the lobster trade were convinced that regulations designed to protect the endangered North Atlantic right whale would make lobster fishing practically and economically impossible.
Those concerns have been deferred by recent actions by Congress and President Biden. As is often the case with Congress these days, the $1.7 trillion spending bill that was passed and then signed into law on December 29 included an array of additional provisions–including one that delays the implementation of the right whale regulations for six years. The bill also allocated $55 million to try to accomplish two tasks related to the regulations. First, some of the money will be spent to develop workable ropeless lobster fishing gear and techniques, since the right whale regulations will require an end to the traditional rope-and-buoy system that have been a foundation of Maine lobster fishing for decades. Second, the money will fund research to determine if the North Atlantic right whale is in fact found in the Gulf of Maine, and if so where and when.
An article in the Island Ad-Vantages, the local newspaper for Deer Isle, Maine, reports on the legislation and the reaction to it here. Basically, those in the lobster trade are relieved at the delay in the regulations–which they no doubt view as a kind of stay of execution of their industry–but, as the article’s apt headline states: “And now the work begins.” There are a lot of details to work out, as those involved in the lobster fishing industry need to create a process for making and responding to right whale sightings and figure out how to spend millions, including money to be allocated in future years, to create the ropeless fishing technology. That last task is a crucial one, because the concern underlying the delayed regulations is that the the endangered right whales become ensnared in the ropes that link the lobster traps on the ocean floor to the buoys on the surface. If workable ropeless technology can’t be developed, the reprieve won’t provide long-term relief.
It’s frustrating that our government can’t seem to function at a deliberate, thoughtful pace and address issues through single-focus legislation, and instead can only act through colossal, last-minute spending bills that become Christmas trees for all kinds of unrelated provisions. In this case, however, that process helped out–temporarily, at least–a beleaguered industry and local communities that are dependent on it.
Mother Nature threw a curve ball at our plans for an outdoorsy weekend at Moosehead Lake. The big storm soaked the area in torrential freezing rain, and the high winds knocked down many trees. When we tried to drive to a hiking area the morning after the storm had passed, we discovered we were penned in by fallen trees and downed power lines. So, we contented ourselves with exploring the downtown areas, where these photos were taken, eating meals at the excellent Dockside restaurant, and checking out the shops.
Alas, I did not see a live moose, but we’ll have to try again. I liked Moosehead Lake and would like to come again in the summer, when — hopefully— freezing rain and ice are not part of the forecast.
The big storm rolled over Moosehead Lake yesterday, pelting the area with a heavy, cold rain and blustery high winds. Overnight the temperature plummeted about 40 degrees, and a thin skin of ice has begun to coat even the open areas of the lake, leaving the few remaining ducks swimming in a shrinking area of open water.
With the thermometer at about 10 degrees, it will be a cold day today for exploring, but anything is an improvement over soaking rains when the temperature is in the 30s. We’re getting a glimpse of blue sky, too, which contrasts nicely with the lakeside building that is painted a bright, Pepto-Bismol pink.
We decided to take a perverse course in the face of the latest Storm of the Century–we flew into Bangor, Maine yesterday, and then today headed north to Moosehead Lake, a large lake in inland Maine, just as the storm started to pummel the area. The roads were treacherous as we rolled through a “wintry mix” of snow, rain, and hail, but we made it safely thanks to Russell’s deft driving skills. Greenville, a town on the southern shore of the lake, was largely deserted, so that we felt like the lone duck, above, weathering the fowl (get it?) weather on one of the few unfrozen sections of the water. That’s the lake’s steamboat in the background, adding its black, white, and gray to a monochromatic landscape.
Moosehead Lake is one of those resort areas that caters to both summer visitors and winter visitors. I’m not sure that the storm will permit it, but I am hoping that I get to do some hiking and see a moose at some point during our visit. The road signs cautioning about being wary of moose collisions suggest that there are lots of moose around, but even they might be hunkering down in this crappy weather.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(999x0:1001x2)/north-atlantic-right-whale-54cbcb04ed5c452cb71250cb389ccc91.jpg)
Webner House 