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May 11, 2015: 10am-noon, low tide at 11. 57ºF, overcast, chilly, some wind. 1 Wild Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo), several Herring Gulls, 3 bicyclists, 1 Eider, 2 black duck-like birds far off in the distance (probably Black Scoters), 2 Laughing Gulls (Leucophaeus atricilla), 1 Downy Woodpecker.

Walker: Cynthia Lawry

Throughout her childhood, Cynthia spent summers in Otter Creek with her great-grandparents, Chester and Myrtle Walls. She lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts now, and we met at the Fabbri Memorial on a damp, cold, grey day in May to talk about the family fish house and her memories of growing up here. Looking out across the cove, Cynthia pointed to the existing fish house.

Cynthia: That fish shack was not there [on the opposite side of the cove] when I was growing up. We had the fish shack over here [on the east side of the cove], and then the National Park came in, there’s a lot of crazy stuff, and that was torn down, and then all of a sudden the Smiths built that.

Jenn (me): And roughly when was this, the ’70s?

C: Yeah. I think this [the Walls fish house] was torn down early ’70s. And then that appeared.  …My great-grandfather, Chester, had a forty foot lobster boat in here, and he would haul it right there, in front of that big rock, and do his repairs. One of my earliest memories is him taking me out and handing me a boat hook, and us being off the Point, and him saying “Fend us off the rocks!” And I was, you know, this big [holding her hand at about waist height] I was very tiny, I couldn’t even really lift the boat hook, and thinking, “We’re going to die if I don’t do this.” He was a really wonderful man, he was deaf by the time he was 14, I guess he worked in a lot of engine rooms, and they’re very loud, and he was really deaf. You had to really scream to get him to hear you, but very kind. I think his deafness kind of separated him a little bit from the world. I grew up listening to he and his half-brother [Harold]; Chester’s mother died at some point, his father’s name was Willis, and Willis married another woman and had Harold. So Harold was a lot younger. They both shared the shack that was down here, and they had two slips. Let’s go wander over there!

C: So this is the old road that goes down in [ed.note: not marked but called the Fish House Road or Fishermens Lane]… there’s a crabapple tree that my grandfather planted that’s still there.

J: So how long did you live here?

C: I had a grandmother who lived in Newton, and it was felt when I was about 6 that it would be best if I lived there. I spent every summer here, and I learned how to lobster from my great-grandfather, and set trawl. These are where the boat slips were. This one, where the memorial piling is, for my Uncle Harold, that was his boat slip.

There’s a poem on the other side of it that he wrote. He was self-educated. I think he might’ve gone through the eighth grade, but he read and wrote beautifully. I do have some of his letters, I’ll have to dig them out because they are really spectacular.

J: I’d love to see them. [looking at the other side of the piling, where the poem is set into the wood.] Oh cool!

 

C: His son, Bobby, did this.

J: Now is that Bob Walls who manages Mrs. Pyne’s place?

C: I think so, I haven’t seen him in years.

J: Probably seven years since I saw him last. And his brother’s Don?  [If you guys are reading this, hi Bob, hi Donnie, it’s been way too long!]

C: I grew up with them. My great-grandfather lived at what’s now 169 Otter Creek Drive, and they lived across the road and a little bit towards town. My aunt lived in the next house over, my grandmother lived in a house towards Otter Creek.

J: So they’re your cousins?

C: Yes.  …And then Harold’s boat slip was here. They would moor their big boats out in the middle, because at low tide there’s a very small channel to get through. … Harold wrote a poem about ‘picking the slip’ because it was our job to come down here and pick the rocks out of the slip so they could get up in there. As you can see it hasn’t been done for a while. We used to drive an old truck and back a boat in. I don’t know why they settled this area, it seems insane to me because of how inaccessible it is to the water. It’s not an easy place to fish. To get in and out of.

J: It looks like it’s wide open, but it sounds like its actually really hard to get in and out.

C: I used to be able to take a motorboat in and out of here without killing the propeller, but my father couldn’t. We would go out and set trawls, tub trawls, for halibut, and he’d set off the Sand Beach; from the Soaker in to the Sand Beach is a really good place, or it used to be, and he had my great-grandfather’s chart that he had all marked up and his old gimbal compass, and I don’t know what my visual reference points were, but I could get a boat up, whereas my father ruined more than one propeller.

J: So did he grow up here?

C: No, my father is a Lawry, and his family was from, well, he actually grew up in Newton, his father was from Farmington, and he was in World War I, but that’s a Farmington story, that’s not an island story. This is the rock that I spent my childhood on [just past the piling in the photo above, it is surrounded by water at high tide. You can see it in the older photo just above as well.]

J: No kidding! I can see why, it’s awesome.

C: It’s got great tide pools on it. When I would be let loose here a lot of times I’d sit on this rock.

J: I’m a sucker for tide pools, you’ve probably noticed that.

C: And at high tide you have to swim to get off this rock. It has happened. If you were a little kid and you had to pee, you came up on the rock. Out of sight. This used to be a little more thriving. There was a guy named Shirley Bracy, and he was a clammer and he was a character. He would always come down and they would jaw as they were fixing nets or whatever they were doing, working on the boat. The fish house was right there, and it had two large wooden barrels of lobster bait, and I’m pretty sure that stuff had been in there since the 1700s.

J: That smell, huh?

C: We would go out and we would catch halibut off the Point, over there, and bring it back and just kind of throw it in the barrel, stir it up a little bit, you know,

J: Kind of like a sourdough starter, you just keep adding to it.

C: It was absolutely horrible.

J: How did they keep animals out of it?

C: It all locked up and shut up … and the barrels both had heavy lids on them, wooden lids. It was a stinky mess!

C: When I was a kid we would clam over here towards the road [the muddy area by the causeway] , and since I was under a certain age, I could dig a peck of clams a day without a license.

J: Wow, that’s a lot of clams, isn’t it?

C: Yep. And I liked fried clams, but my father really like steamed clams, so I would dig and he would eat. But it was fun, it didn’t seem like work.

J: Did he ever fry them up for you?

C: Once in a while someone would fry them for me but for the most part no, they were always steamed. … I heard that back in the day the mackerel would run in here, and they would sort of net a part of it off and row out … . Once when I was a kid and I think we were out fishing for pollock, and it was really foggy, a lot of times it’s really foggy in Otter Creek and you just go round and in Bar Harbor it’s clear as a bell. It was magical to come down here in the morning and have the fog. Once we got blown off, and I remember my father saying to me, ‘Well, the next stop is Europe.’ If we don’t figure this out, where we are, we’re going to Europe. It was foggy and windy and I thought for sure we were going to Europe. But we saw a lobster buoy and knew we were headed in the right direction. I wonder sometimes, how much was he pulling my leg and how frightened really was he?

 

C: …In addition to fishing for flatfish, groundfish, [Chester and Myrtle] farmed, and he had two acres of raspberries, I grew up picking raspberries, we would sell them to Testa’s, they would make raspberry pie. I remember going in and delivering the rasbperries when I was a really little kid, and the whole kitchen was stainless steel.

My great grandparents were first cousins, because the wife of Willis was a Davis, and my great grandmother was Myrtle May Davis. Myrtle and Chester Wallace. They had three daughters, they had my grandmother, Ida, and they had Aunt Madeline, and Aunt Clara. Ida is an old family name that goes back in the cemetery way, way back. Anyhow, Ida was a very popular name, and I think it was popular just in that time.

J: Kind of like Jennifer now.

…

J: I don’t know if you saw the most recent [post] at Sand Beach, and there was the picture of a little girl, Virginia Higgins – one of my friends was like, ‘oh my god, that’s my great aunt!’ So she’s looking up the family history; Virginia Higgins … was a nurse in the Navy, I think. So she’s looking to find out more about what happened to Virginia and how she ended up in the movie.

C: My grandmother used to tell me about the movie. … My grandmother … grew up in town, on Ledgelawn [Avenue in Bar Harbor], other side of the family, [and she] played the piano at the theater for the silent movies, and when I would say ‘We’re going to the Sand Beach,’ when I was a teenager, she would tell me not to go swimming in the water because they used to make movies there and somebody dove off a cliff and was swept out to sea. I don’t know if that’s true, if that really happened.

J: There was a cameraman who got washed off; he didn’t dive in, he got hit from behind by a wave. I’m not sure if that was on Schooner Head or on Sand Beach.

C: That could’ve been the basis for that little cautionary tale.

J: There was definitely a death on one of the movies. Not on the Queen of the Sea, it was on a different one.

 

C: I have boxes of stuff from this side of the family and the in-town side of the family. They were prolific postcard writers. They would write a postcard from Otter Creek to Bar Harbor. Some of them are really nice old Maine postcards, and some of them are stupid, goofy stuff, just sort of humor from the era. And I really want to scan those and catalog them, because my background is, I worked at Cornell University in the archives. I was in the Rare Books and Manuscripts. I have newspapers from when my grandmother graduated from high school, [and] I have really cool stuff like they gave them these little fake torches, and just little artifacts. I’ve got a treasure trove of stuff like that … my great-grandparents, Chester and Myrtle, never threw anything out. They have receipts, they had a stand on the side of the road where they sold green beans and things, they have this all listed, the summer people they sold things to, they kept them in these little notebooks. When I was a kid I would go out and weigh beans and sell them to the summer people. That’s part of how they earned their living, because you couldn’t just do it lobstering.

J: Even today there are … few people who have just one job. [A lot of] people do this for a living and then they do that in the summer and that in the winter.

C: It pieces together. And here … then in the winter there was nothing. Everything closed. Now most everything closes, but there’s more stuff.

J: Well, winter’s when we see each other. Summer, everyone’s too busy to hang out. Winter is … plays and basketball and potlucks.

C: We would have picnics on the beach and sand in food. I just remember sand in cucumbers. And clamming, that was a really good place to clam. And I know Shirley Bracy used to clam. He died maybe ten years ago. When I was a kid I thought he was ancient. But he wasn’t.

J: When you’re a kid, forty years old looks ancient.

C: True. He would come over to Chester’s house at night. Chester had a big garden out back, and he would sit in his rocking chair with his .22, looking for deer. Harold would come over, and usually somebody else, there was a guy named Uncle Pete, and he was bald. I don’t think he’s any relation. He lived in Otter Creek. He had a daughter named Marcie who babysat me … . I just remember they were very nice to me. And they would come over and they would just talk over the day, about what fish they caught and things like that, just kind of hang out, and my great-grandfather would be looking for deer to shoot in the garden. He never did, but it was very impressive.

J: Was he hopeful that there would be a deer, or was he just trying to keep them away from his garden?

C: He was trying to keep them away from his garden. He had a fish shack at the house, too. He kept his tools and stuff. And on the door to that were two bear paws. Back in the day he shot two bear.

His family, they settled the island, there were three brothers, I believe [the father was] Andrew Wall, and he died in Lincoln County in 1792, but his three sons came here and settled Otter Creek. Why they picked this place I don’t know, it was a fun place to grow up. We used to get let loose on the road to pick blueberries, I think because my parents wanted to get rid of us for a couple of hours. But it was fun.

J: We used to run wild, too. I was out in the woods all day. We’d come home when we got hungry.

C: There’s a brook that goes down and comes in over there. It goes up behind my great-grandfather’s house. We would go and catch frogs and let them loose in the house. And we would catch fireflies and let them loose in my mother’s bedroom at night.

J: We caught frogs and fireflies but we didn’t put them in the house!

C: We just thought that was really cool. … In WWII they had blackout curtains, which were still [in my grandparents’ house] when I was a kid, because of the submarines. And I guess during WWI there were submarines that did come into Bar Harbor. …The Bar Harbor Club would host tennis tournaments between the British and American soldiers during WWI, and [my grandmother] would go and play for the dances. … My grandmother was born on Ledgelawn; she was the daughter of Benjamin and Priscilla Perry, and they originally came from Addison, Harrington, I think. She was born and grew up with her older sister Catherine, who married into the Hamor clan. Which is how I’m related to the Hamor clan.

J: Sounds like you’re related to just about everybody here.

C: Walls, Davis, Young, McFarland, Hamor.

J: All the basics.

 

C: There are so many stories to tell about this place. It’s very special. It used to be very good clamming, whether it is now or not I have no clue. At mid-tide we would row or take a little motorboat under the bridge and scream and yell. And you always have to honk when you go under the bridge on the road. I have a brother who teaches gun safety to the Massachusetts state police, and we were down here a couple of years ago to scatter my older brother’s ashes off of Egg Rock, and he turned his police sirens on going under the bridge!

…

C: One of the things that shocks me now, when I was a kid, the Tarn didn’t have any of that stuff growing in it, and we were told that it was bottomless. I honestly think that my great-grandparents really though it was bottomless. Which to me, now that you know that it’s six feet deep at its deepest point, or something like that, is amusing. But the reflection of the mountain off the Tarn used to scare the bejeezus out of me. These were big mountains to me. Then I lived in the Rocky Mountains for fifteen years, and when I come here, it’s like, yeah these are mountains, but…

J: yeah, they’re sort of domesticated mountains. It’s a very domesticated wilderness.

[We crossed over the causeway and walked along the edge of the mudflats.]

C: I have eaten periwinkles before. There was a guy who lived across the street from my great-grandparents, and he liked pickled periwinkles. So they would come down and collect periwinkles and his wife would pickle them.

J: I’ve had pickled whelks, I haven’t had the periwinkles. They call them wrinkles, the pickled whelks.

C: Really! I had never heard of that before. I thought it was the grossest thing on the planet.

J: Oh, love them. But then I like kind of weird, chewy things. I’ll eat just about anything once.

C: My mother growing up here ate so much lobster she would never eat it for the rest of her life. And mussels. People now eat mussels, it’s a delicacy, but at the time we wouldn’t have thought of eating a mussel. And pollock, pollock was bait fish. Now it’s good eating. It’s a sustainable kind of critter.

J: Yeah, it’s funny, as we fish out the older species, we’re turning to new ones.

…

C: We never came over [to this side] as kids. To go swimming. We’d bring a boat in here every once in a while. It was considered safe for us to row a boat up under there. One year we were pulling a boat and we were going to take it out to Seal Harbor, and that was when Rockefeller was vice-president, and he was in residence, and I was to drive the boat over  and my father was going to meet me there with a truck and a trailer to pull it, and the Secret Service had the whole harbor blocked off.

J: Plan B. What did you do?

C: I was just a ten-year-old kid, I just turned around and came back.

…

C: When I was a kid there were only three boats, maybe four boats, in the Creek. There were my uncle Harold, and my great-grandfather, and I don’t know who else had, I think there were sort of really part-timers that had some boats in there, but they were the only ones that had the fish house over here, the fish shack. I have a color postcard from the forties and it shows their lobster boats. And a lot of other boats because that was before my time.

 

C: My great-grandfather used to fillet out a halibut. It was amazing to watch. I wish I had paid more attention, because he could just pull the whole bone right out. It was crazy.

J: That would be a useful skill.

C: We caught a lot of dogfish when we were setting trawl. That was mostly what you caught. And we would sometimes bring them home. They were very good eating.

J: Those are a kind of shark, aren’t they?

C: Yeah, they’re a five to six foot long shark. They’re not very big. I remember him cleaning them and having me touch the spine, you touch the base of the spine or the head and the other end of the tail wiggles. Freaky things to children.

The border of solid land between the mudflats and the hill narrowed quickly and pretty soon we had to choose between scrambling over algae-covered boulders, squishing through the mud, or climbing back up the hill to the road. You know what those damp, grey spring days are like – after talking for two hours we were thoroughly chilled. It was also noon, and all that talk about fried clams earlier had gotten us hungry for them, so we headed straight for the Thirsty Whale to warm up over a big basket of clams. Cynthia later emailed me photos from her collection, which you’ve seen scattered throughout this post and the last one. Thanks so much for making the trip, Cynthia!

 

 

 

 

Prologue: I’m afraid we’re dodging back and forth in time on the blog now – I walked the Otter Creek shore in May, interviewed the Park’s Cultural Resource Manager in early July, and am writing this post at the end of July. I’m heading into territory that is less familiar to me, so there’s more and more history that’s completely new to me. I’ve been struggling with the amount of information I’ve received, trying to decide what’s relevant to this project and how to present it coherently. It’s like trying to write a term paper for every walk!  In a long-term project like this, there’s always the danger that ‘real life’ will interfere and the project will fade away under pressure. I’m determined not to give up, but I’ll admit that it has been hard to concentrate, and harder still to give writing the top priority.

If When I make it all the way around the island, it will be a triumph of sheer stubbornness over inconvenience and distraction.

Otter Creek is a small town, true. I couldn’t find any official population figures, but there can’t be more than a couple of hundred people living there. Driving along Route 3 you see clusters of houses, a general store, a restaurant, an inn, a playground –  you can tell it’s a community. Driving along the Park Loop Road, though, this is the view from the Otter Cove causeway, looking north toward Route 3:

So where’s the town? Until I started going through property maps for the Coast Walk, I hadn’t even realized Otter Creek is right there. The town landing, such as it is, is just past the end of that dark hill of spruce to the left. Grover Ave, one of the most populated roads in the town, is only a few hundred feet from the cove, off to the left somewhere back there. I started thinking of it as the Invisible Town, and found it bewildering that a population center on a Maine island had no waterfront. None. No wharf, no abandoned cannery, no saltwater farms, no old boatbuilding sheds, not even a visible boat ramp. (I went looking for the public boat launch and couldn’t find it. I think you have to walk down to it from the road, which would seriously limit its usefulness.) If you’re at all familiar with coastal Maine towns, this is kind of shocking. Impossible, even. Otter Creek is an old town by American standards – European settlements here date to the 1600s, a time when most transportation was over water because the land was impassable. Granted, Otter Creek doesn’t seem to ever have had a lot of waterfront development; this is the town around 1850, with only a few buildings visible at the shore:

There didn’t seem to be much information on the town at the local historical society; the village of Otter Creek is officially split between the towns of  Bar Harbor and Mount Desert, so it seems to fall into the cracks.  (It could also be that I haven’t adequately explored the historical societies.) Eventually someone pointed me toward The Waterfront of Otter Creek: A Community History, by Dr. Douglas Deur (2012) [https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/Reference/Profile/2192442], a 244-page ethnographic report commissioned by the National Park Service. It’s absolutely fascinating, packed with stories and photos, and I highly recommend it, especially as I just don’t have space to get into a lot of the town’s history here, like why it is so oddly divided and the effect that has had on its social and geographical development. The whole thing is online and downloadable, just click on the title.

One of the first things I learned is that although the cove looks wide open, there are shallows and ledges across most of the opening, making a bit of a maze to get a boat through:

Second, the cove is exposed to the prevailing storm winds, so boats, docks, piers, and other wooden structures were regularly destroyed by storm surges. A number of bridges pre-dated the existing (stone and earth) causeway; all were washed out during storms.

Third, the shore is very steep, making access difficult. Many fishermen had fish shacks along the shore of the outer cove, which gave them a place to beach their boats, store bait, mend traps, and so forth, without hauling gear up and down the steep hill to town. (More about the fish houses later.) All of which explains why the town stayed small and the shore minimally developed. It sounds like a tough place to make a living from the sea.

As to what happened to the town’s waterfront, it appears to have fallen to a conjunction of two early-20th-century phenomena: The Great Depression and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Rockefeller had a vision for Acadia National Park and as we saw over at the Fabbri Memorial, it was a vision of wilderness. As the farmers and fishermen of Otter Creek felt the increasing pinch of the Depression, he slowly bought up the waterfront land of Otter Creek, removing the structures and allowing the shore to naturalize. [He also imagined an enormous salt water swimming pool in the inner cove, but nothing seems to have been done on that project.] According to Dr. Deur’s research, there were oral agreements with the fishermen that allowed them to continue using the fish houses in the outer cove, but once Rockefeller deeded the land over to the park, there was no record of those agreements. Since the fish houses were rough, messy, utilitarian structures, and the park’s mandate was to preserve the natural appearance of the landscape, this led to years of conflict between the fishermen and the park. The commissioning of Dr. Deur’s report appeared to me to be the Park’s response to flare-ups of that conflict in the 1990s, so I went to see Rebecca Cole-Will, Cultural Resources Program Manager for Acadia National Park to see what the park’s current thinking is on cultural vs. natural resources.

Jennifer (me): I’ve been curious about the Park and how you guys manage all the different resources. Kate Petrie recommended I talk to you ages ago, and I’ve gotten to Otter Creek, and thought this would be a really good time. As I said in my email I gather that Otter Creek has a been a bit of a controversial…

Becky: Well it has some management issues that are … not unusual … where history and traditional connections have kind of cross cut with traditional management of natural resource issues in the park, yes. I don’t know if you read Doug Deur’s report on Otter Creek?

J: Yes. Did you feel like that was a useful report for the Park?

B: Oh, absolutely! It was sort of documented recognition of traditional associations of the place that we weren’t aware of. That this was a place that has long, long connections …  There are many of those places in the park; we oftentimes don’t get the opportunity to talk to the right people to give us that sort of context for the history of place. So it was, you know, as an anthropologist myself, it was sort of a ‘duh’ moment: well of course this place has really strong ties, and it’s unusual because of the history of the way the Park was created and encircled Otter Creek … I think the report [gave] us the opportunity to really understand how decisions about park management in the past hadn’t necessarily incorporated that local voice, and so gave us the chance to think about ways to re-set that relationship, to go out and actively engage with community. Which is … what parks should do anyway, but sometimes its easy to get busy with the day-to-day stuff and not do as much of that public communication outreach.

J:  Well, what I originally wanted to talk to you about, even before I found out all about Otter Creek, was, I wondered how you choose, how you define resources and how you choose how to make them accessible and how to interpret them. One other place that I noticed was the Fabbri Memorial, where, you know, I can understand what was going on back in the 30s, I mean, military complex, why not erase it and naturalize the landscape? Which makes perfect sense except now, 70 years later or whatever, we’re all curious about what was there, now that it’s all gone and nobody knows about it. So how do you choose what’s important?

B: [laughs] That is a really complex issue, certainly, and … it goes back to the purpose of a park, … the originating mission for a particular park. All parks are charged with protecting the resources of the park unimpaired for future generations… That’s the statement that we all hew to in terms of the reason that the park service came into being; to protect these special places that were set aside for all Americans, that notion of the extreme democracy of parks. But, the irony of that is that in the creation of a lot of these places as open and belonging to the people, some people were excluded in the very nature of that creation, some indigenous peoples … for example. So the history of that goes back to the 19th century history of expansionism and the creation of the country and the notions of ‘what is America.’ Ultimately democratic, but ironically not necessarily so. … Acadia is very unique in that it was created wholly by donated lands. It’s a very unusual situation for a natural park. Most parks are big square blocks that were created as federal entities. Acadia wasn’t, Acadia was created by the work of a lot of individuals who acquired and donated land to create the park. So the mission and the purpose of Acadia really strongly hew to the vision of those 19th century conservationists. To set aside land to protect it and to preserve its pristine-ness, if you will. So in many ways Acadia’s always … been managed as a natural park, as opposed to a cultural park or a history park…. But that’s not to say that we don’t have cultural resources, and we’re recognizing those. But, a place like Otter Creek, it was acquired by Rockefeller with one thing in mind, he wanted to build his road through that area, so … the decision [was to] manage that for the natural resource value, [and] there wasn’t the recognition that this was traditional fishing territory….  So the park managed by removing the fish shacks, … to manage it for … natural resource values. Park management changes over time, and … we form our decisions based on what we know, and for managing of resources a lot of that has to do with the current state of understanding, based on documentation … like ethnographic resources, for cultural resources, for vegetation, and water quality, and so on. And we try to apply the best available science to the decision-making process, guided by law and policy…

J: …I [did an internship] with Charles Birnbaum twenty years ago when he was getting the Cultural Landscape Inventory started. Do you feel like cultural landscape is becoming more integral to the Park Service, or is that still kind of nebulous?

B: No, I don’t think it’s nebulous at all. I think that if anything it is becoming more of the notion that really all parks are cultural landscapes. They are created places that were created totally based on cultural values. That’s what a cultural landscape is.

J: The minute you set that park aside

B: The minute you set it aside, and you identify it as being something different or something special, you’ve already created a cultural context and it’s a created place; parks are managed for those created values, and also to provide for that visitor experience…, whether it’s wilderness values, or it’s opportunities for solitude, or the kind of recreational experiences we have at Acadia, but they’re all created situations and contexts. … Even in the places that are managed for wilderness … they’re places that have human value and human connection and the very concept of wilderness is very much a cultural value. There’s nothing ‘real’ about wilderness, it’s what we think it is. [There’s] the bigger level of the … interconnectedness of all of the resources and the values for which we have to manage a park. Every day you have to make decisions based on how … managing for this visitor experience [is] going to affect a resource, how is protecting this resource going to impact infrastructure, how do we interconnect and balance all of those; and every day we have to make some of those value judgements, again, guided by law and policy and what we understand for baseline documentation of the resources. So we spend a lot of time in resource management doing things like base-line inventories, monitoring air quality, water quality, monitoring for visitor impacts to resources, going out and asking visitors ‘what kind of experience did you have, what kind of an experience are you looking for?’ And then bringing all those pieces of data together … to shine a light on the decision-making process. We make decisions based on what we know, we don’t make decisions that are arbitrary or not grounded in good planning; there’s a lot of legislation and law that we bring to the planning process. Things like … the National Environmental Protection Act, which mandates that we protect the natural environment but also the human environment as well. And NEPA’s really a policy for planning. In terms of guiding good decision-making, and being able to justify what kind of decisions we make for major undertakings, and then the counterbalance to NEPA is the National Historic Preservation Act, which is another law that requires us to look at the impact of our undertakings on cultural resources or historic properties, and list properties to the National Register of Historic Places, and when we do work on them that we do it within the guidelines of rehabilitation, for example. So those are two … big pillars for planning, for understanding, and then the third one would be impacts and understandings about our visitors, because after all, we’re … providing for a high-quality visitor experience as well. … I think it always comes back to we earnestly try to make good decisions based on the information at hand, and so we have a thorough process of vetting … that does require public engagement. We need to go out and talk to people, find out what they’re thinking.

J: I’ve been working on this project since January, and it just happened to coincide that as the weather warmed up I got into the more public areas of the park. I think I hit Great Head in May, and so I started to see more and more people. I was alone for months! And I’ve seen people rock-climbing, people hiking, high-schoolers goofing off on the beach, I stumbled across a wedding, and I’ve been down there now with a COA professor doing scientific assessement of tidepools, and I was just blown away at how the heck do you manage all this; and that was just from Great Head to Otter Cliffs. How do you manage that kind of pressure, like balancing the wedding party with the rock climbers? That’s a hell of a job you’ve got!

B: Yeah, it sure is! It’s not easy. Again, … providing for the public to be able to do the things they want to in a park without necessarily either impinging on someone else’s experience or not being safe or damaging resources is a very delicate balancing act. And it’s tough. With something like those two events, they’re both regulated. Sometimes people get really frustrated with the amount of regulation that we require, but that wedding requires a special use permit, the rock-climbing, there’s a whole climbing-management plan in the Park and those climbers require a permit…, so it is tough, it’s very complicated, and I think people don’t realize that it’s like running a city when you try to run a park, and with a fairly small staff. The folks that are out there every day, the rangers and the interpreters and the visitor-use people really do a fantastic job.

J: Yeah! … [So] I reached Otter Creek and I found all these levels of history packed into this one tiny area

B: Definitely.

J: And then I came across the Fabbri archaeological report and the Otter Creek report, and by the time read the two of those my head was just spinning. It’s a lot of history!

B: There’s a lot of layers of history in this small space. We forget how small and for how long and how many layers there are. It’s a real palimpsest.

J: I just wondered, going forward, do you have plans to work with those documents, or are you ready to talk about that yet?

B: Work with them?

J: Do you have any plans based on the information?

B: Well at Otter Creek a big thing that we’re doing is we’ve really tried to re-engage with that community, to have meetings to try to understand; unfortunately the past is, and we can’t bring back the fish shacks, and we can’t, probably we won’t be removing the Otter Creek causeway, but are there opportunities for recognizing and providing for ongoing access into the Creek for the community, and those are some of the things we’re certainly trying to work on. Also just recognizing that that history exists; for example, last summer one of the interpretive programs at Blackwoods was about the history of Otter Creek. We’d never done that before. We could talk about this long history of the connection of this community to this place, and provide for that place-based understanding and experience for visitors that we never did in the past, so hopefully there’s that level of at least appreciating that history does exist even if it’s not necessarily visible on the landscape any more. So those are the kinds of things that we can do. There’s a new wayside that’s up at Fabbri …, maybe it hasn’t been installed yet, but it would be one of the outdoor display exhibits – if you’re at the memorial, then there’s this parking lot that looks out over the cove. … When you’re standing there you’ll be looking out towards the causeway and the Creek … and there’s information on that that talks about the history.

J: Oh cool, I’ll have to go take a look! I came through there in early May

B: So it might not have been installed yet.

J: I’ll have to go back.

B: So that’s at least one thing.

J: Yeah but that’s a big thing. It’s amazing the difference something as simple as a sign showing ‘what was’ compared to ‘waht is’ – that can be really valuable.

B: And there’s a trail that goes from Blackwoods, I don’t know if you’ve hiked the old quarry road?

J: I haven’t. I’ve heard it’s fantastic.

B: It’s a very nice trail, and that goes from Blackwoods around and eventually gets to the causeway, and it goes along the old Quarry Road, and we kept that name intentionally because … folks from Otter Creek said, ‘Let’s call it that;’ that’s what the history’s about. So that’s another opportunity. I know that some of the rangers do a hike that interprets the area. So there are things like that that we can do to recognize that there are those real deep layers of history and its all very much interplayed there.

J: As I continue hiking are there other sort of hotspots like this that I should look out for?

B: I’m trying to think where you’re going to be going next.

J: Well I’ve physically hiked as far as Hunters Beach, but in the blog I’m only up to Otter Creek. It takes a long time write these posts!

B: Yeah! … You know Stanley Brook is really kind of interesting because the road’s part of the historic motor road there, and … if you walk and look at Stanley Brook you’ll see all kinds of little features, little waterfalls and eddies and so on, and that’s a wholly reconstructed waterway there. It was probably built when Rockefeller with his engineers planned that road, they basically re-routed a lot of the stream so the road goes back and forth across it with the little bridges and so on. That’s a fundamentally altered landscape there.

J: That’s a different way to look at it. Do you know if Beatrix Farrand had anything to do with that?

B: She did, a little bit. If you go to the bridge, the carriage road bridge that crosses over Stanley Brook, that’s one of the most iconic bridges, it’s got the two side arches and then the center and the stream flows through one of them, you’ll see that you can still see remnants of her designed landscape there. There are some ash trees that are on either side of the bridge, and there’s a little bit left of that designed landscape from a long time ago there. So that’s a very cool place.

J: I’ll have to take a closer look. I’ve never actually walked through there, I’ve biked. The reason I asked about the stream is because at Dumbarton Oaks, are you familiar with it?

B: nods

J: There’s the Dumbarton Oaks Park, which is no longer really part of the managed landscape, althoughI shouldn’t say that, I was involved with this like 20 years ago so, but she had actually designed that stream, like where she had designed the waterfalls, she’d tuned them to a certain pitch, and I was wondering if she’d done something similar here.

B: Well I don’t know if she was involved with the design work for the stream or not. We don’t have a lot of records, most of it is anecdotal where supposedly she rode around with Rockefeller and said ‘Oh we should put a tree there,’ without having a lot of formal designs for her work. The person to ask would be Scott Koniecko. He’s the president of the Beatrix Farrand Society, Garland Farm.  …What designed drawings exist for her work are all at Berkeley, and [Scott’s] gone and looked at them, so when I have a question about Farrand, I usually ask Scott. He can often answer that.

J: Alright, I’ll see what he can tell me!

B: But that’s an interesting question. It’s definitely a designed landscape, that entire stream, even though the average person wouldn’t recognize that as they’re driving up Stanley Brook Road, because it’s small and winding.

J: Well I’m glad you told me, I’ll definitely detour up when I hit the beach there. And are there any other hot spots? I’m walking the whole island, so eventually I will get everywhere. On the coast that is.

B: Wow, holy cow!

J: Yeah, it’s going to take so long.

B: I think one of the most amazing places is Wonderland. Without a doubt. I don’t know a lot about the history there but I understand it was either a little zoo or some kind of entertainment – it was called Wonderland for that reason – but if you go there now you’ll see that it’s one of the most amazing natural vegetation zones; it’s a globally rare community that includes the pitch pines and the broom crowberry there together, and it’s really amazing.

J: Wow, how did I manage to miss that all these years? I mean, I’ve been around Ship Harbor …

B: Wonderland is worth a visit for the vegetation there. We had a crew that, well there was a team of dendroecologists that did some dendro work coring trees in the park just within the last month, and there are 300 year old pitch pines at Wonderland. They’re just tiny, tiny, little trees, because they’re kind of like these bonsai…  The inventory and monitoring network folks have done a wonderful briefing that talks about management decisions for protecting Wonderland based on an understanding of the globally rare nature of the vegetation there.

J: I’ve been really impressed at how much is online. I mean I found both the Otter Creek and the Fabbri archaeological, all of that I found online.

B: You know about IRMA?

J: No.

B: IRMA stands for the Integrated Resouce Management Application. If you search on that there’s a lot of digital records of all kinds of stuff related to the Park.

J: Awesome!

We chatted a little more, and I took my leave, wondering a bit how to incorporate our discussion into the narrative of the Coast Walk. As you can see, I’ve left it as a bit of a side trip into theory, and we’ll pick up back on the shore in the next post, when Cynthia Lawry joins us to talk about her childhood in Otter Creek. I’ll leave you with this intriguing diagram from Deur’s report:

July 10, 2015

I went back to the Fabbri picnic area to see the new wayfinding signs. Nice!

May 20, 2015: 6:30am. 55 degrees, chilly, light breeze, sun and clouds. 9 Herring Gulls, 1 Crow, 1 Loon, 2 male Eider Ducks, 4 Black Scoters (2 male, 2 female), 3 Wild Turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo), 2 female Common Merganser (Mergus merganser), 2 Laughing Gulls (Leucophaeus atricilla), 1 Lesser Yellowlegs (Tringa flavipes) [although I’m not totally sure; it might have been a Solitary Sandpiper.]

I walked down the Fish House Road awfully early on a bright, cool morning in late May, and headed south along the shore of Otter Cove.

The terrain underfoot changed quickly from gravelly pink granite to small boulders so covered in periwinkles it was hard to know where to step, to similarly-sized boulders completely covered in rockweed. It was slow, wobbly going over the rockweed.

My side of the cove was still in shadow, and I watched the west side gradually get brighter as the sun rose higher in the sky.

The fish house across the way looked tiny against the hill. (We’ll be visiting it soon!)

I stumbled across an enormous tide pool, shallow now at dead low tide. The morning light hit it at an angle, lighting up the interior like an aquarium. Notice that there’s a sandy-looking bottom, very exotic around here.

Because it was so shallow and perfectly lit, I was able to get some great photos with minimal distortion. I think these little tube worms are Spirorbis borealis.

I tried to get a shot showing the worms feeding, but they were harder to photograph than barnacles! If you look closely, you can just make out the feathery arms of one at the top right, and another like a little star at bottom left:

The Coralline and its crustose cousin were wearing matching shades of pink:

There are three Slipper Shells piled on top of one another here:

OK, this was new. A periwinkle had rolled over, and had to pull itself upright. I always wondered how they would do that – turns out they can come a long way out of the shell, then suction on to the nearest solid surface and just pull themselves over. This one must have had half its body-length out of the shell by the time it found something to hold onto. I didn’t get a photo of that, I was too fascinated watching. But I did notice those little orangy-green clusters near the eyestalks. I spent some time hunting down diagrams of periwinkle anatomy and parasites online but couldn’t figure out what those are.

A closer look at that “sandy” bottom shows it’s actually finely crushed shells:

This is probably the native Sea Cauliflower (Leathesia marina), but it might possibly be Colpomenia peregrina, a newcomer to the area. They look like little olive-green balloons:

The day warmed up a bit as the sun rose higher over the hills, and I came to an outcrop of pink granite that blocked my way.

Climbing up, I found a decaying stairway and realized I must be below the Fabbri Memorial.

I’ve known the area for years as a picnic spot with convenient bathrooms, and never paid much attention to the memorial itself, which is the standard rock-with-a-plaque: pretty boring, even if you take the time to read the tiny text.

I felt sort of obliged to at least find a photo of Fabbri for this blog, and stumbled across several resources that made me look not only at the memorial but at the whole of Otter Cove with fresh eyes. [Specifically: The Fabulous Radio NBD, Brandon Wentworth, 1990; Archaeological Investigations at Fabbri Memorial, Diane Lee Rhodes, Denver, Colorado, National Park Service, 1985; this wikipedia entry about the radio station, Karen Zimmerman’s essay about the lookout tower, and Fabbri’s obituary in the New York Times.]

It looks so wild and untouched here, except for the causeway, but standing at the memorial, to your right the town of Otter Creek is just beyond the trees at the head of the cove, the forest across the cove screens busy Blackwoods Campground, and somewhere close by was once a submarine refueling station with a substantial steel pier. You would be standing in front of the main administration building of the “radio station” mentioned in the plaque, which was a large naval communications station that included barracks, medical offices, at least 5 radio receiving stations, two 185′ tall steel antennae, that at its peak during World War I employed about 100 men. All of that is either deliberately hidden or  has been equally deliberately wiped away. My mind did the usual bit of boggling, and I started to understand just how directly and actively the conservationist philosophy guiding the establishment of the National Parks had affected this landscape right here. It was one thing to wander around the ruins of George B. Dorr’s estate in Compass Harbor – the presence of the ruins and the access roads signal that this was once an inhabited landscape that has been allowed to naturalize. Otter Creek, Fabbri’s radio station, and the campground are invisible, as if the cove is pretending to be wilderness. Which it is, because there are trends in conservation and in historic preservation, and until recently, wilderness was more highly valued than vernacular history. For many people it still is.

Confession: I’m a landscape architect with training in historic preservation, so I appreciate a pretty view, a functional native ecosystem, and a cultural landscape. As you can tell from any entry in this blog, I thoroughly enjoy the traces of history. Whether they are left as mysterious ruins, as at Dorr’s estate, or whether they are explicitly interpreted, as in the excellent “Museum in the Streets” program that has finally reached Bar Harbor, I find they add enormously to a sense of place. I understand why the old radio station was erased – in the 30s it was so recent it wasn’t considered history yet, and the prevailing philosophy was the preservation of natural beauty. Why not remove all trace of a utilitarian military complex?

I’ve got a meeting scheduled with the Chief of Resource Management at the park next week, and am really looking forward to learning about current park management philosophy, and how on earth they find a balance – any given stretch of coastline might be a resource for fishermen, historians, rock-climbers, botanists, geologists, artists, or plain old tourists, so how do you decide what access to provide and what information to present? But let’s turn our attention back to the memorial.

Alessandro Fabbri was the son of one of the ‘Morgan Men’ (partners in J.P. Morgan’s company) who were a large part of Bar Harbor’s summer colony around the turn of the 19th century.  Although he was born in New York City, he spent most of his childhood in Italy. Fabbri’s home in Bar Harbor was an Italianate villa called ‘Buonriposo’ on Eden Street. [It was demolished in 1963, and in a year or two when we Coast Walk that area we’ll visit whatever’s left of it.] Around 1912 he developed an interest in radio transmission, and with help from Ralph Tabbut of Bar Harbor built a wireless station here.  When the US declared war on Germany in April of 1917, Fabbri donated his yacht to the US Navy, and offered to donate the wireless station as well if he could be named station manager, as he didn’t want it manned by novices. The Navy refused on the grounds that civilians could not manage a military station, so Fabbri became an ensign in the Naval Reserve and after searching for a site with good potential reception for European radio signals, he leased a property known as ‘Otter’s Nest’ which was located where the memorial is now.

Otter’s Nest had been the property of the Palmer family of Washington, D.C. Purchased in 1883 by Aulick Palmer, in 1910 it became the “Country Club of Mount Desert.” Members included John D. Rockefeller, George Dorr, and Robert Abbe. The club was successful for a time, but closed by 1917. The archaeological report I mentioned includes a few intriguing bits of early history: it cites a prior survey listing a “contact period Indian settlement in the vicinity of Otter Creek Point,” and a 1688 census listing one Indian family living on the east side of the cove (p.20), mentions that Samuel Champlain may have anchored in the cove, and includes a history of the land ownership (p.21-22). (It’s a really interesting and very thorough document, 214 pages including illustrations and maps, and it is online here, if you’d like to read the whole thing.)

In addition to the Otter’s Nest property, Fabbri leased a 5-acre tract to the north, providing 12 acres total for the Otter Cliffs Radio Station, which was officially commissioned in August of 1917. The Otter’s Nest cottage became the receiving station and quarters for the radio operators. The station had outstanding reception capabilities and by 1918 it was the “pre-eminent receiving station in the US of over-seas transmissions.” (Rhodes, p.32)  This was the radio station the Germans contacted to initiate peace overtures in 1918, and the station that received the declaration of Armistice.

Other buildings were constructed – barracks, medical facilities, mess hall, etc –

and in 1918 the whole point was made a secure area by the Navy, in part due to fear of submarine attacks. An electric fence sealed off the point:

To increase the station’s capabilities, the Navy built a remote transmitter site at Seawall, linked to the Otter Cliffs station by a submarine cable. [We’ll visit the site when the Coast Walk reaches Seawall.]

Fabbri resigned in 1919 after the war’s end, and was awarded the Navy Cross in 1920. He developed pneumonia after catching cold on a duck-hunting trip in 1922, and died three days later. He was only 44.

After the war’s end, the station’s workload fell off sharply and by 1920 there were only about 60 men stationed there. In 1929, Rockefeller announced plans for what would become the Park Loop Road, but it took several years to negotiate an agreement with the Navy.  The process began in 1934. The station was dismantled and all the buildings were razed by 1935. Rockefeller had the radio compass facility moved over to National Park Service land at Schoodic. The Loop Road was built shortly after, and runs between what used to be Otter’s Nest and Barracks A. The Fabbri Memorial rock was dedicated in 1939.

The archaeology report mapped the foundations, dump sites, sewer pipes, and stone-lined wells they found, and has photos of lots of refuse including early 19th century china shards as well as electrical wire, batteries, and other debris from the radio station. The report recommended the park develop interpretive displays – “We have many areas in the NPS system that illustrate and commemorate the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, but very few representative examples of World War I activities, especially communication technology. Acadia’s Fabbri area is a unique and eloquent tribute to the technology and military defenses of the period, and the to dedicated men who served here.” Still a cool idea, if you ask me.

After all that research on the radio station, I think I’ll hold off on the Otter Creek history until next post. All of that came later, anyway. After I noticed the stairs leading up the bluffs, I turned back to the pools on top of the ledges. I’ve been looking at them even more carefully since finding the salamander eggs, and today I noticed little black swimmy things (top) that looked like slimy commas when I caught them (bottom.) After some research, I think these are mosquito pupae. Oh joy. There was an adult stalking me, too:

Then there were these odd little things:

They were so small I couldn’t see any detail on them, and too far down to use my iPhone macro lens on. They looked like tiny seeds, but they were swimming. (That black stuff is dead leaves at the bottom of the pool.) I hunted around among ephemeral pool references, and I think they must be something like a clam shrimp or a seed shrimp:

 And I have no idea what this is! It was a little narrower than my thumb, and seemed to have a lot of crushed crab shells in it. Seagulls eat crabs, but seagull poo is a lot wetter than this:

Eventually I reached a point where I could go no further along the ledge, and couldn’t climb down. I didn’t much want to climb up the bluff, so I retraced my steps.

Picking my way back through the rockweed, I almost missed this:

Can you see it? How about now:

 

We’ve got a Common Sea Star (Asterias rubens) and a Sea Cucumber (Cucumaria frondosa). The Sea Cucumber is particularly cool; they are deep water animals and I never expected to find one in a tide pool!

Aren’t the colors amazing?

This particular wildlife took advantage of me being precariously balanced and holding an expensive camera over a tide pool to bite me on the wrist:

My first black fly (Simulium sp.) bite of the season. Probably not the last!

 

Next week: cod, granite, lobster, and a National Park: the history of Otter Creek and why you can’t see the town from the water.