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May 6, 2015: 6-11:30am, forgot to note temperature, probably in the low 60s when we started, might have been 70ºF by the end of the walk. 1 Red Squirrel, 2 Herring Gulls, 1 Purple Sandpiper, flock of 10 Guillemots, 1 Cormorant being harassed by a Herring Gull, 5 birds flew by overhead that might have been Canada Geese.

Walkers:

Kelley Sanborn, Director of Special Services, Mount Desert Island Regional School System

Lilea Simis, owner, Town Hill Market

Kelley and I met at the Great Head parking lot at 6am on a bright, sunny morning. (Lilea had to get her kids off to school and planned to join us later.) It was about 45 minutes after sunrise, and the day still felt all new and shiny. We struck out along the path, talking about the long winter and how beautiful the day had turned out. Certain people may have started singing, “Oh what a beautiful morning” because we’ve known each other for twenty years and it no longer matters if certain people can carry a tune or not.

Even though we’ve moved into new geologic territory, hiking over Cadillac Mountain granite now, the shoreline continued the pattern I’d seen all along of headlands and coves. Along this mile or so between Sand Beach and Otter Cliffs, the headlands tended to be weathered and rounded, while the coves were filled with enormous round cobbles.

Kelley has had some trouble with her knee, which has to be intensely frustrating for such an active woman (her snowshoes got me through the winter!), so when I went scrambling down the rocks to check out tide pools, she mostly followed along the trail at the top of the cliff. (That’s why she’s so far away in the photo up top.)

There were a few spots where it was possible to get down to sea level, but the stones were covered with a slippery algae I don’t remember seeing before. It was dark green, and Kelley called it “Elvis velvet,” because it looked like the background of one of those paintings of Elvis on black velvet:

I haven’t identified it yet. It was lovely, but inconvenient. You can see it glowing bright green in some of the photos:

I did eventually find a safe spot to climb down. In one of the pools near the top of the descent (not a tide pool, too high up, probably runoff) I found a dozen or so things that looked like caterpillars. I assume they are some kind of terrestrial larvae that were washed into the pool by the last rain storm. At least one was still alive, I couldn’t tell about the others.

Looking over the edge of a cliff, Kelley spotted this cutie, which I think is a Purple Sandpiper, hunting for breakfast.

The discovery of the day was a long, narrow tide pool full of tiny anemones.

They were about the size of a quarter, and almost translucent.

Ever since Schooner Head I’ve been finding wildly striped Dog Whelks. I had no idea their shells could be so varied.

The lowest tide pools had forests of seaweeds:

Then there was this amazing cobble beach. I’m not sure you can actually call it a cobble beach, it was more of a boulder beach. Those stones are all big enough for both my feet to stand on, and the cliff face must have been forty feet high.

Of course I had to go exploring in this forest of sea stacks!

The size of the boulders made it difficult to walk – your foot only connects with a small part of the curve, so every step is wobbly.

By the time I crossed the cove it was 8:30am, and suddenly we were at Thunder Hole.

The observation platform and walkways at Thunder Hole are being rebuilt, and the Park Service really really really doesn’t want you walking around down there.

Lilea found us just before Thunder Hole, so we all sat on a broad rock ledge in the spring sunshine, eating apples and granola bars, catching our breath. While the three of us are taking that break, I’m going to tell you about a part of the walk that happened a few days earlier, but belongs here at Thunder Hole.

May 3, 2015:  64ºF at 4:30, but by 5:30 had dropped to 52ºF, and the wind got much stronger.

George Neptune, Museum Educator, Abbe Museum, Bar Harbor, Maine, and member of the Passamaquoddy tribe.

You may remember George from the very first Coast Walk on New Years Day. We had planned long ago to meet here at Thunder Hole for the story of Koluscap and the Whale, and he did tell me that story, but we went on to have a long, fascinating talk, touching on Passamaquoddy spiritual beliefs, the struggle to get Maine schools to stop using “Indians” as mascots, and his dreams for the future. He even brought out his drum and sang the most beautiful song.

And my iPhone recording vanished. It was working, I checked it as we talked to make sure, but somewhere between pressing the stop button at the end of our talk, and opening the program to view the video, it vanished. And I cannot get it back. So I’ve tried to recreate as much of the conversation as I can, although it’s all in my own words now, not George’s, and I know I’ve forgotten so many important details, I could just cry.

So.

The story of Koluscap and the whale is part of a much longer story about the epic fight between Pukcinsqehs, a witch, and Koluscap, a kind of demi-god and cultural hero of the Wabanaki tribes. We’ll hear the full story when we reach Somes Sound, where some of it takes place. It is an important episode as it describes the first treaty ever made in the Dawnland, and establishes the importance of the pipe as a symbol of friendship. (Slight digression here, apparently smoking a pipe together is comparable to the European concept of breaking bread together.)

At this point in the story, Pukcinsqehs (sounds like pook-sin-squash) has kidnapped Koluscap’s relatives, Grandmother Woodchuck and his younger brother Pine Marten. He chased her a long distance, but she stole his canoe and set out across the sea with her captives. Koluscap couldn’t follow so he sang the whales’ song and Putep (sounds like “boo-dep”) came to him. He asked her to carry him across the water, but she was worried about running aground and asked him to promise that she would be safe. Koluscap promised, and asked her to promise to keep him safe on the journey, which she did. So he climbed on her back and they set out after Pukcinsqehs.

As they got closer to the other shore, the clams on the bottom began to sing to Whale that she was getting too close and would run aground. Koluscap did not understand the clams’ song, and Whale told him what they were saying and asked if it were true. Koluscap lied and said they were still a long way from shore, so Whale continued swimming. Soon the clams sang to Whale again, warning her that she was too close and would be beached very soon. Again she asked Koluscap and again he told her to keep swimming. Soon poor Whale did run aground, and Koluscap jumped off her back onto the beach. Whale was very upset that he had lied to her, and reproached him for breaking the agreement. Koluscap said, “I promised you would be safe,” and placing the butt end of his spear against her forehead, he pushed her off the beach and into deep water. Then Koluscap gave Whale his pipe to celebrate their treaty and their friendship, and she swam off, with the pipe smoke rising above her.

George chose to tell this story at Thunder Hole because the Passamaquoddy name for this spot is based on the words for ‘blowing water into the air,’ which are also the basis for the whale’s name, Putep. He also pointed out a naturally-formed face in the rock, which fits in with the very end of Koluscap’s saga, in which he left to go to a place behind the sun, where he is making weapons for a battle at the end of the world, but before he left, he set images of himself in the rocks throughout the Dawnland.

Somehow we moved from the face in the rock to the idea of the cleft in the rock as an opening to the underworld. I had to stop George and ask what the underworld is. I don’t like to assume I understand a concept just because I know what the word means. My idea of “underworld” is basically Greco-Roman, but for George, the underworld is not hell, or death, or anything particularly negative. See the seven sides on his drum? One for each direction: east, west, north, south, above, middle (here on earth) and below. Above and below are both spiritual (and this is where I really miss my recording of our conversation!), with above being more ethereal and below more closely tied to earthly things.  Things that happen in both places get played out here in the middle, on earth. More to the point, a place like Thunder Hole, a deep cleft in the earth at the edge of the ocean, is a possible point of communication between the realms. As George described it, joining the elements is powerful, and a ceremony here would most likely involve fire, to include all of them. We also discussed his concept of time, which is not linear, but more like a spiral, with distant ancestors still considered family, and part of the current “we.” I’m reluctant to try to paraphrase all this, as I’m in danger of getting it badly wrong. I was raised in the Jewish tradition when I was little, and the Protestant tradition when I was older, and I think in the end religion comes down to stories and belief. Stories are very powerful, and it’s important to get them right.

We talked about the situation in Skowhegan, where George was planning to go the next day for a school board hearing about changing the school mascot, currently the Skowhegan Indians. Skowhegan is apparently the last town in Maine to use that name for their sports team. I admitted my ignorance, and said that for me, personally, if a group of people found the use of their name or image offensive, that would be enough for me to stop using it, but I didn’t quite understand why it was offensive in this case. I grew up in Massachusetts, and there were teams named for the Minutemen, or the Patriots, who used the image of a person as their logo. How was this different, I asked? George pointed out that those were specific groups, well identified in historic or military terms, while “Indians” lumps together entire nations of people who have widely differing customs and histories and beliefs into one dismissive and off-handed term.

Yeah, I can get that.

 

[As of May 10, the school committee had voted to keep the name.]

In my favorite part of our conversation, George told me about his dreams for the future. He’d like to have a gallery with working studios filled with Wabanaki artists and artisans. Bar Harbor would become an art destination like Santa Fe, where authentic work is appreciated and native symbols are woven into murals and decoration throughout the town (but not misused.) He mentioned the Wabanaki double curve as an example, and once again I had to stop him and admit ignorance: “What’s a double curve?” In answer, George showed me the tattoo on his neck:

By this time the wind had picked up and the temperature had dropped almost ten degrees. My fingers were turning numb, so we headed back to our cars.

It rarely fails – in the course of every single coast walk I learn something that boggles my mind. I generally think I’m pretty smart and well-educated and widely read. I know the whole point of this walk is to learn stuff and become a better artist, but four months in and the biggest lesson I’m learning is the depth of my own ignorance. There is a gaseous form of granite, mice dig tunnels in deep snow, we live on a prehistoric volcano, deer get hurt and I can’t help them, the colonization of the Americas is still happening and I’m part of it, I can climb a steep rock face with my bare hands, and some sea anemones reproduce by splitting in half. What kind of art can I possibly make that would adequately communicate the intricate life of a barnacle let alone the pain the Passamaquoddy feel at having the name of a nation without the actual rights of self governance? I have to hold myself open and accept all the data, even the painful and uncomfortable stuff that I don’t know how to address, in the belief that somehow, when it all gets shaken up together, something big, and powerful, and beautiful will come back out.

…

Back to the sunny day with friends. (And if that gives you mental whiplash, yes, me too.)

I tottered across one more cobble beach, but decided that three hours of scrambling was all my legs could handle, so I climbed back up to the path and we strolled out to Otter Cliffs.

So why is it called “Otter Cliffs?” I’ve come across two stories. One is that they were named for the Sea Mink (Neovison macrodon), which was hunted to extinction by 1870, before it was even cataloged by naturalists. The species was described through skeletons, a taxidermied specimen, and anecdotal evidence. The mink was a coastal dweller, ranged from Casco Bay north to Newfoundland, and was the largest of all the minks. It apparently lived on seabirds, seabird eggs, marine invertebrates, and insects.

The other possibility is that Otter Creek was named for river otters found there, that the town of Otter Creek was named for the stream, and that Otter Cove and Otter Point were named by extension. I’ve found several references that call Otter Point the Otter-Creek Point (see below). In that case, the animal in question is probably Lontra canadensis, the North American River Otter:

River otters can be found in both freshwater and coastal marine areas. They are found throughout the entire US, except where pollution or habitat loss have driven them away. River otters apparently eat fish, turtles, crayfish, and frogs. I’ve never seen one, but the Acadia National Park website lists them as a common species here. Maybe someday!

“After [passing through the Gorge], the road turns up along the Peak of Otter; runs high along the ridgy east wall of Otter Cove, with charming views of the cove and its settlement of farms; and finally stops at a little house. A fee is paid at the farmhouse at the end of the road; and leaving the carriage, the holiday rambler walks along a pleasant path, through a short stretch of evergreen woodland, and emerges on the vast cliffs, at whose foot, [nearly] a hundred feet below, the sea roars and whitens ceaselessly. The trend of the shoreline is visible as far as the yellow Newport Sand [Sand Beach] and the high promontory of Great Head. Otter-Creek Point is over a mile long, between the sea and Otter Cove, and rises to a height of 188 feet, covered with woods, and fronted on either side by noble cliffs. … A mile inland rises the Peak of Otter, a wild foot-hill of Newport [Champlain] Mountain. This region received its name from the otters that once abounded here, but have long since passed away. … Beyond Otter’s Nest, the summer-residence of Lieut. Aulick Palmer, of Washington, a road runs on to the end of Otter-Creek Point. Unless it is nominated in the bond, the buckboard drivers oftentimes decline to drive out over this noble road. On the western side of the point is a notable cavern, near which the natives have dug a deep pit, in the search for Capt. Kidd’s buried treasures. …Otter Cove makes in for half a mile, between high wooded shores; and has on one side a quarry of … red granite. In ancient times the head of the cove was occupied with beaver-dams.” [“The Journey to Otter Point,” M.F. Sweetser, 1888, reprinted in Discovering Old Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, Ruth Ann Hill, 1993.]

Notice that in the 1887 map, “Peak of Otter” refers to what we now call Gorham Mountain, while on the 1911 map it is the lump of land on Otter Point. Maps from 1890 and 1893 agree with the 1887 map, but there are two 1911 maps that move “Peak of Otter” to the point and call the larger mountain “Gorham.” Mountains moving: I don’t really know what to make of that.

Looking back from Otter Cliffs into what I now know is called Newport Cove, named for the mountain behind the Beehive at left, which is now Champlain, but was once Newport. Newport Mountain and Cove were named for Christopher Newport, an English sea captain who was commander of the expedition that settled Jamestown (in the course of which he almost executed Captain John Smith, which would have been a tragedy for Disney) and who inadvertently colonized Bermuda. The Beehive and Kebo seem to be the only mountains in this area that were not renamed in the last century: they show up with their contemporary names on an 1875 map, the oldest one I have that labels the mountains.

I got curious and looked into the name changes very briefly. It looks like most of them were changed in 1918 when George Dorr, in his role as Monument Custodian for the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations, made a formal proposal to the National Park Service. Others changes were proposed in 1919 when the Sieur de Monts National Monument became Lafayette National Park, although they didn’t gain approval until 1929. Dorr’s reasoning seems to have been that the old names were boring, and he wanted names with historical associations, which seems a bit high-handed to me. There’s a good, short, article in the Woodlawn Museum’s newsletter that summarizes some of the controversies around the name changes. My favorite quote: “Privately, Ellsworth District Court Judge John A. Peters advanced the popular misconception that if Green Mountain could be renamed Cadillac then logically Dorr “ought to call another one ‘Buick’ and certainly a peak near Seal Harbor ought to be called ‘Ford.’”

My brain feels utterly stuffed at the moment, but when it clears I’ll do some more research and give you a ‘bonus post’ on the mountain names.

More next week as we head around Otter Point into Otter Cove and up to Otter Creek.

May 3, 2015: 5:30-6:30pm, about 53ºF, sunny and very windy. Cold in the shadows – my fingers got numb! Low tide at 5:30. Not much wildlife: 3 or 4 Herring Gulls.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines ‘sand’ as, “a loose granular material that results from the disintegration of rocks, [and] consists of particles smaller than gravel but coarser than silt.” The first thing every kid learns on the 6th grade field trip to Sand Beach is that there’s not a lot of ‘sand’ there. Maybe half the stuff on Sand Beach that looks like sand is actually finely crushed shells. If you look at it closely, even without a microscope, you can see bits of mussel shells and clam shells and sea urchin spines. Now, mussel and clam shells are not flat, they are curved, right? So each of those teeny fragments is slightly cupped. This gives swimming at Sand Beach its most irritating quality – other than the brazen gulls who will literally swoop from behind and snatch a sandwich right out of your hand – once you get wet, the concave bits of sand suction on to you like they’ve been glued on, and you have to scrape and rinse and scrape and rinse to get the stuff off.

There’s a distinct difference between the rocks at the eastern and western ends of the beach. The area we’ve been traveling through since leaving town has been shatter zone, with a mixture of different stones and periods, and Great Head itself had a lot of areas where the older rock was isolated in chunks within the newer granite. Like this:

At the other end of the beach, the western end, the older rock is replaced by ledges of Cadillac Mountain granite that run all the way to Otter Cliffs. According to my map (Bedrock Geology of Mount Desert Island, Gilman & Chapman, 1988) we’ll see a fringe of shatter zone at the tip of Otter Cliffs.

Great Head and Sand Beach were donated to Acadia National Park in 1949 by the Satterlee family, who acquired the property in 1910. Marie Yarborough, the curator of the Park’s archives, was very kind and dug out some old photos of the estate for us. Thank you, Marie! I’m going to go look through some of their holdings next week, and look forward to seeing what kind of treasures they have.

“Nearly a century ago, the grounds behind Sand Beach were part of a grand 110-acre estate called “Great Head,” owned by Louisa Morgan Satterlee, the daughter of financier J. P. Morgan, who was one of the owners of the ill-fated Titanic. The estate, which was managed in season by a staff of ten household servants and five gardeners, was a wedding gift from Mrs. Satterlee’s father.

In 1921, Mrs. Satterlee hired the renowned garden designer Beatrix Farrand to transform the landscape. The magnificent grounds, which included beds for annuals and perennials, and even a bridge, in a forested setting, remained in bloom until part of it was destroyed by the Great Fire of 1947 … .

Given to Acadia National Park in 1949, most of the estate’s buildings were removed shortly thereafter. Nature took its course, and the once spectacular gardens returned to woods and meadows. …

The path that now runs from the Great Head parking lot to the east end of Sand Beach was once the driveway for the Satterlee’s main house. The estate included the gardens, barns, greenhouses, servants’ quarters, guest houses, a water tower, and boathouse and tennis courts. An oddly out-of-place concrete foundation here, or stone retaining wall there, are all that remain.” (from “Great Head’s Long-Lost Eden,” Earl Brechlin, The Ellsworth American, July 26, 2012)

 

In July of 1911, a schooner called the Tay was driven onto Sand Beach by a storm and wrecked. I’ve been told that the most severe winter storms will sometimes uncover her timbers for a little while, but have never seen them myself.

“Lumber schooners like the Tay typically carried deckload piled as high as possible, leaving just enough room for the booms to swing over. It was not unusual for the helmsman to have a hard time seeing forward. Since the entire cargo was buoyant, lumber carriers could, and did, load until the decks were awash. The remains of the Tay lie under Sand Beach, far up on the shore near the stairs.” (p.122, Discovering Old Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, Hill, 1993.) The photo below is not the Tay, but a similarly loaded schooner.

I found two accounts of the disaster, one in the local paper and the other in the New York Times. There are some interesting differences in the accounts.

“In the great storm of wind and rain which was almost terrifying in the heart of town last Friday night, and has proven to have been most fearful at sea, the two-masted schooner Tay, Capt. I.W. Scott, of St. John, N.B. bound from St. John to Boston with lumber, went ashore on the Sand Beach at Great Head, … at 12:15 o’clock Friday night and was a total loss. One man was lost, J.B. Whelpley, the cook, of St. John, N.B., who is survived by a wife and three children. … The crew numbered six besides the captain.

The Tay was doing well, according to Captain Scott, and was bowling along in the face of a heavy southwest gale, when the schooner sprung a leak. At this time he was keeping her off shore and when the leak was discovered he squared away and intended to make the harbor here.

The mainsheet parted and then he lost his main boom. Capt. Scott attempted to stand off shore under head sails, but he was too far in and was swept inside the breakers. The Tay struck hard and was dismasted fore and aft at the first shock and began to go to pieces rapidly. The deck load of shingles was carried away but her cargo of plank below deck is safe on the beach.” [“Schooner Wrecked,” Bar Harbor Times, 1911, reprinted in Discovering Old Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park.]

The Satterlees built a boathouse on Sand Beach – I’m not clear if it was built from the wreckage or just named for the schooner:

And then I was poking around in the Jesup Library’s vertical file (a four-drawer filing cabinet filled with randomly amazing articles, photos, and documents) looking for photos of Great Head before the Satterlees, and I found this:

In the summer of 1917, the Fox Film Company filmed scenes from the production Queen of the Sea, starring Annette Kellerman, on Sand Beach and Great Head. “The director, John Adolphi, was enchanted by Bar Harbor’s scenic beauty – until fog, clouds, and rain, interrupting the daily work schedule, somewhat dampened his enthusiasm. … Some actors suffered severe sunburn…; barnacle-scratched players needed medical attention; and sea sickness overcame those in small boats. … Ebb and flood tides, over which even omnipotent Hollywood could not prevail, delayed shooting scenes of costumed mermaids and seals disporting on the rocks. A set called “the cavern of despair” was swept away three times by high tides before it could properly photographed. … Ernest Lorillard, the tobacco tycoon, invited the entire cast to a clambake at Sand Beach, where he himself undertook the bake, piling hundreds of clams on top of a huge mass of steaming seaweed. Herbert Saterlee [sic], appointing himself keeper of the fire, steadily hauled loads of driftwood to replenish the cookout. … Another favorite diversion was holding “rock parties” to view the film-making. These were sumptuous lunches carried by car in large hampers and spread out on the rocks along the Ocean Drive.” (“When Hollywood Came to Bar Harbor,” Gladys O’Neil, Downeast Magazine, Sept. 1981.)

I needed to know more, obviously, and Debbie Dyer over at the Bar Harbor Historical Society was out sick, so I obsessively googled the movie name, the star’s name, 1917, Bar Harbor … anything I could think of. And I found the mother lode. Just in case you were wondering whether or not everything in the universe is in fact online, I found a digital archive of silent movie stills: The Jonathan Silent Film Collection, which is part of the Chapman University Digital Commons. A search for “Queen of the Sea” gave me 101 stills from the movie, copyright-free. We just don’t have space for all of them here, but there were some real beauties of the cast goofing off between takes. I have not been able to find out whether a print of the movie still exists.

“Merilla, the queen of the sea, learns that if she saves four lives, she will be endowed with a mortal body and an immortal soul. The kindly queen saves her first lives by rescuing three drowning sailors whose ship the Sirens (the daughters of the wicked King Boreas of the Storms) have been instructed to destroy. Furious, King Boreas confines Merilla in a cave, but she is freed by Prince Hero, a human being with whom she falls in love. Determined to have his revenge, Boreas wrecks Hero’s ship and locks up the prince’s fiancée, Princess Leandra, in the Tower of Knives and Swords. Following several thrilling adventures, Merilla rescues Leandra, who, in her gratitude, releases the prince from his promise so that he may marry his beloved sea queen.”  (synopsis from AFI)

 

Annette Kellerman was quite a character – a daring stuntwoman, long distance swimmer, and movie star who pioneered the one-piece bathing suit as an alternative to bathing dresses (on the grounds that no one could actually swim in a thigh-length skirt). Intrigued? Read this article.

Apparently there were several movies filmed on Sand Beach between 1917 and 1921, but I wasn’t able to find photos of any of them. The movies themselves appear to have been lost. However I did find one much more recent movie that filmed a scene here:

 

 

Notes: April 22, 2015, 7:15-9:30am, low tide at 8:15. 49ºF, sunny.

Walker: Nicole Ouellette of Breaking Even Communications and Anchorspace, Bar Harbor

Before I say anything else about today’s adventure, I have to give you a couple of warnings.

One: Anemone Cave is not easy to reach, and not easy to leave. You have to scramble down slick, algae-covered rocks and over very sharp barnacles. I got the first injury of the Coast Walk here – sliced the tips of my fingers and the palm of my hand on the barnacles, and I’ll tell you, they don’t look bad but they hurt like hell. You also have to know the tides, as you can’t get in until the tide is way down, and you don’t want to stay once the tide starts coming back up.

Two: Anemone Cave is incredibly fragile. The anemones are in the tidepools, yes, but they are also everywhere else in little pockets in the rock and when their tentacles are not extended they are very hard to see even if you know what you are looking for. Photos below will demonstrate. It is at least as slippery in the cave as it is outside, so finding a place to stand without stepping on any creatures is tricky. I was paranoid the whole time we were there about inadvertently killing one! The Park Service took the cave off all the maps years ago because visitors were causing so much damage, but the cave has been what you might call ‘at risk’ since the 1880s. [“Anemone Cave is a picturesque grotto, forty feet deep, across the cove south of Schooner Head, full of interesting sea-mosses, sea-lettuce, pale-green sponge, … starfishes, and other wonders of the shore…The exquisite sea anemones, once so abundant in its rocky pools, have well-nigh vanished at the hands of visitors; and the owners of the Head now strenuously forbid the removal of the treasures of this loveliest of aquaria.” from ‘Sightseeing at Schooner Head,’ M.F.Sweetser, 1888 (as reprinted in Discovering Old Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, Ruth Ann Hill, 1993.)] I was last there about twenty years ago, and I remember starfish and sea urchins everywhere – none now.

So, if you can’t balance on one foot for 30 seconds, don’t go. You need to be able to place your feet very carefully. If you can’t comfortably lift your foot to waist level, don’t go. You’ll have a heck of a time getting in and out, and could get badly hurt. Think of how humiliating it would be to have Search and Rescue come and haul you out on a stretcher if you break an ankle! I debated about whether to include it at all, but everybody knows where it is, and it’s all over the internet, so be smart about it. Know your limits, and if you go, tread very very lightly.

OK, enough doom and gloom. On with the show.

Nicole and I headed down to Anemone Cave at 7am on a relatively warm, sunny morning (warm enough to shed our winter coats and hike in fleece tops). There had been a big storm the day before, the surf was still pounding, and we had to wait for the tide to recede a little farther before we could get into the cave safely.  So we hung out on the rocks, watching the waves, enjoying the sun, and chatting. Now, I know Nicole as a specialist in online technology – websites, blogs, social media – but when I told her about this project, I discovered her undergrad degree is in geology. I’ll tell you, when I started walking I was hoping to learn a lot, but I had no idea how much I would learn about my own friends!

J: So how did you end up going from geology major to computer goddess?

N: Oh my god. Well, I’ve always wanted to be a writer. That’s what I really wanted to be. But I got my geology degree because I thought it would be practical, and I wanted to do some sciency stuff, but then I learned that I would have to move to a big city and be an environmental consultant. That’s essentially what I could do with my degree. Or I’d have to go get a masters degree. And I was so burnt out after my bachelor’s degree I was like, well OK, if I’m going to incur some more debt here I’d better be certain, so I took a bunch of jobs, and what I realized was that I could be a writer and it would be a really competitive market, and make no money, or I could just learn a little bit of code, and I could charge $75 an hour, and I could get to write, like, half the time. So that’s kind of what I do now. I do a lot of writing, but I had to be sort of practical about it, nobody was going to be like, oh, Nicole, here’s this trust fund, go live in this house for a year while you write your first novel. I had to figure how to make some money. And then I ended up really liking it. I like that it involves learning new things, working with people. I think I’d get lonely if I was just writing all the time.

J: What kind of writing?

N: I don’t know, you know when you’re a kid and people ask what you want to be? That was my thing. I wanted to write things that people would read. I wanted to travel, and I didn’t have anything super definite. I did buy this book on travel writing, and I thought, I could get paid to travel, that would be awesome. But like I said, once blogging and all that started, writers are pretty cheap, so. But like I said, you add a little bit of code skill to it, and suddenly it pays a little more. I’ve always been pragmatic.

J: No, it makes sense. I finance photography by renting my house in the summers.

N: There you go. You just get creative.

J: It’s funny, I met a whole bunch of artists over the last couple of weeks, and we’re all asking each other, so, what kind of work do you do, what’s your focus, what’s your theory? And then: what do you do to pay the mortgage? Because very few people actually make a living at this, everybody’s got some kind of other income, or a spouse.

N: Hey, do you carry a map?

J: I do, actually. But the nice thing about this whole walk thing is that I can’t get lost as long as I keep the ocean on my left and keep going straight; eventually I will get somewhere.

After 15 minutes or so, the tide had fallen enough that we could get down into the cave. This is the waves foaming into the entrance:

 

And this is looking out from inside:

These two are Nicole’s photos; I was so bedazzled by the tidepools I completely forgot to take photos of the cave itself! The shot below gives you a good idea of the size of the cave and the tidepools. That’s me balancing on the edge of a rock there:

At first the tide pools seemed to be, not exactly empty – they were fabulous – but empty of anemones. I mean, you can’t call this empty:

The bright pink is a kind of seaweed that grows as a crust on the rock using calcium carbonate in its structure (we’ve talked about it in earlier posts.) I haven’t figured out what the feathery red seaweed is yet, but you can see barnacles, jingle shells, sponges, and horse mussels (close-ups coming right up). The horse mussels were a surprise. I had no idea what they were at first, and I realized I’d never seen one alive before. By the time I find them on the shore the thready-things have been worn off:

This is Coralline (Corallina officinalis), probably my favorite seaweed because it just seems so improbable. We’ve talked about it before, so sorry if I’m repeating myself. There’s a Tortoiseshell Limpet (Testudinalia testudinalis) at the left of the clump. I’m giving you all the Latin names in case you want to look them up. You’ll get better search results with the official name than with the common name.

See those tiny, translucent, clam-shaped shells in the background? They seemed to be stuck to the rock the way that a limpet would be, and I could not figure out what they were. Here’s a better view:

They looked a lot like the jingle shells I’ve seen washed up on the beach down south (Anomia simplex) so I did some research and found that jingle shells do live here in the Gulf of Maine. But why have I never found one here in nearly twenty years of beachcombing? Anybody? And just between you and me, “jingle shells” is a term I learned at the shell museum on Sannibel Island (which is an amazing place) – I first knew these as “Grandfather’s Toenails” which is a terribly descriptive name and never ever used by people who want to sell shells. Here’s what the bottom looks like – it’s flatter than the top shell:

And this is a breadcrumb sponge (Halichondria panicea). Between the hot pink coralline and the lime green sponges, the tidepools look like a Lilly Pulitzer fabric.

Finally we found a tidepool that was full of anemones! Here’s the two-minute summary of sea anemone basics: “Sea anemones … [are] invertebrates related to corals and jellyfish. Their bodies consist of a soft, cylindrical stalk topped by an oral disc surrounded with venomous tentacles. At their base, they sport a single adhesive foot, called a basal disc, which they use to attach to underwater surfaces like rocks or shells. Anemones can have anywhere from a dozen to a few hundred tentacles. …  Anemones, like all cnidarians, such as jellies and coral, have only one opening, so food enters and waste exits from the same place. … Anemones are carnivorous, feeding on tiny plankton or fish. Their stinging tentacles are triggered by the slightest touch, firing a harpoon-like filament called a nematocyst into their prey. Once injected with the paralyzing neurotoxin, the prey is guided into the mouth by the tentacles. … Many species of fish, sea stars, snails and even sea turtles have been known to opportunistically feed on anemones.”

These are Dahlia Anemone (Urticina felina), also known as the northern red anemone. They are pretty small – the biggest ones might be three inches across. Fun fact: U. felina reproduces asexually by longitudinal fission (splitting in two). I’d like to see that! It also does the more traditional thing where males and females release sperm and egg into the water.

And this is what they look like closed (those lumps are about the size of a quarter):

They aren’t much bigger than the periwinkles, are they?

This one is a Silver-spotted Anemone (Aulactinia stella). Fun fact: A. stella can brood offspring from other individuals of the same species.

According to a 2007 National Park Service report, “A census of … 3 species [of anemones], Tealia urticina felina, Bunodactis stella, and Metridium senile in the Anemone Cave was conducted on 23 August 2007 using methods that would be directly comparable to earlier censuses. All three species of anemones have declined from 1999 to 2007: Tealia felina declined by 71, Bunodactis stella declined by 63, and Metridium senile declined by 33. Reasons for this decline could include trampling by tourists, lower salinity levels in the pools during low tides, or runoff from the parking lot above Anemone Cave.” [Note that Tealia urticina felina is now called Urticina felina and that Bunodactis stella is now called Aulactinia stella because science is a moving target.] I didn’t see any Metridium on this visit, but maybe there are some tucked away in a corner. I was really hoping to see some after reading this description: “This makes the anemone look like a turtleneck collar topped off with a wig.”

 

Eventually we tore ourselves away from the cave and continued southwards a ways. We talked about a lot of things, including geology, but sadly the surf drowned out our voices on most of my recordings. At one point we were looking at a dike like this one:

and she said:

N: Back in the day, this was gaseous [pointing to the white seam], and it would come up and then it cooled out here.

J: So wait, the rock was originally a gas?

N: Yeah, it’s a gas at I don’t know, 600 or 800º celsius, and it came up and filled in these cracks, and we see the lovely gabbro [pointing to the grey stone] and dike [pointing to the white stone].

J: Cool. I didn’t know rocks could be gases.

N: Yeah.

J: OK, mind blown.

N: At a certain temperature everything’s a gas.

(I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the gaseous form of granite.)

According to my geology book (The Geology of Acadia National Park, Carleton A. Chapman, 1970), “You are now in the ancient zone of fragmentation (the shatter-zone.) The ledges along the shore are composed of breccia. Note how the diorite and Bar Harbor Series were thoroughly shattered, impregnated with granitic material, and restored to a consolidated and coherent rock. More recently this mass of breccia was somewhat cracked and jointed by disturbances far less intensive than those which formed the old zone of fragmentation. Note how the ledges tend to be more severely cracked in certain places than in others. This selective fracturing prepared the way for the formation of Anemone Cave. The rock material that originally occupied the space within the cave was more intensely cracked than that now seen forming the cave roof. Frost action and the work of waves were largely responsible for the gradual excavation of this large opening. Notice how extensive, nearly horizontal fractures in the roof have controlled the falling of large slabs and the formation of the broad, flat cave roof.”

We scrambled along the rocks a little farther, and then headed back to the parking lot. I leave you with this last exchange:

J: No anemones up here. I am still so pysched [to have seen them].

N: Yeah, and all that pink cora, corda, …

J: Coralline. Coral, line – it literally means ‘like coral.’ Like ‘serpentine’ means ‘like serpents?’ Coralline, like coral.

[Nicole starts humming ‘Sweet Caroline.’]

J: Exactly. And now I’m going to have that stuck in my head, thanks.

N: Trying to help myself remember.

J: That oughta do it.

N: Now I have to think of other lyrics for it.

J: I don’t know any of the original lyrics except for ‘sweet Caroline.’ Hard to write a parody when you only remember two words.

Has anyone else ever tried to write a song about a marine alga based on a Neil Diamond tune? I think not. Thanks, Nicole!

 

Next episode: Nicole and I scale cliffs and try to rescue a damsel in distress.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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April 20: 34 degrees, sunny, 49º by the time I finished. Not warm, but pleasant.
Suddenly I’m surrounded by wildlife: 2 Downy Woodpeckers (Picoides pubescens), 1 Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus), a white-tailed deer, a raccoon, 4 male Common Eider and 3 or 4 females (Somateria mollissima), a flock of 12 Black Guillemots (Cepphus grylle), then a second flock of about 15 (flying, so hard to tell), 2 Black-backed Gulls (Larus marinus), several song sparrows (Melospiza melodia), 1 crow, 1 cormorant, 1 loon.

This past week I’ve trekked from the northern side of Schooner Head to the northern edge of Great Head, and it was fascinating and exhausting, and there was so much to share I had to break up the journey into three posts before it turned into a book. I mean, I hope it will be a book, eventually, but right now it has to be short enough to load! So this is the first post.

As soon as I walked onto Schooner Head, I had left the park and was on private property. I had permission from most of the landowners, but as you can see in the map, not from all. If anyone is reading this who did welcome me, Thank You So Much! The terrain at the shore was steep clefts in the rock, covered in slippery moss-like green algae, and for much of this portion I tucked my camera into my backpack and clung to the stone with both hands while inching along the ledges. It doesn’t look all that high, but it felt like I was climbing Everest. Unfortunately, that meant I didn’t get a lot of photos here.

 

The rocks I was scrambling over were very cool, and I wish I knew more about them. I do know that the middle one is called a dike, and that dark seam is diorite that came up in liquid form through a crack in the older stone, which I think is part of the Bar Harbor Formation:

I didn’t spot a lot of wildlife down there, but I did find an unfamiliar snail, which after research I think is a Northern Lacuna (Lacuna vincta.)

Over the course of the day I spotted a surprising number of birds, given how empty the ocean has felt most days so far. Clockwise from top left; eider duck, loon, black backed gulls, a flock of guillemots, and a downy woodpecker:

Eventually there was (as usual) a wall of rock straight into the ocean, so I backtracked and scrambled up to the top of the cliff. It stayed high and steep, and I wasn’t able to get back down to the shore within the property I had permission to visit. This is looking down into one of the rock clefts from the cliff top.

Up on top of the cliff, a pileated woodpecker took one look at me and fled. (You’ll see this is a bit of a theme this week.)

When I reached the property edge, I headed back to the road and visited the next place for which I had permission, on the south side of the Head. There are a few items of interest in the middle section which I didn’t get to scout out, but I can share old photos of them with you. There were cannons placed here during the Civil War Spanish-American War [see note at end of post] and although they are long gone now I’ve heard the foundations are still there.

Schooner Head used to be a tourist destination because of the Spouting Horn, a phenomenon somewhat like Thunder Hole: “Schooner Head is a bold headland on the coast, with high rocky cliffs, breasting the surf. In one of these is a long, tunnel-like opening, from whose inner end a cleft opens away into the top of the Head. During rough water the waves rush madly into this passage and dash out at the top, throwing showers of white spray many feet into the air. This is the famous Spouting Horn, which, on the pleasant days usually chosen for this excursion, forbears to spout. Venturesome persons have climbed up through the Horn, at low tide, but it is a perilous and uncomfortable journey.” [excerpted from ‘Sightseeing at Schooner Head,’ M.F.Sweetser, 1888 (as reprinted in Discovering Old Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, Ruth Ann Hill, 1993.)]

“There are various wild legends connected with the white stain on the seaward face of the Head, which bears a singular resemblance to the lower sails of a schooner. One of these tells of a pirate-schooner, one of Capt. Kidd’s, running in to make a harbor and land treasure at Otter Cove, and disabled off this shore by a broadside from a British corvette, after which she was dashed to pieces on the Head. Hence the mariners along the coast, a century or more ago, often fancied they saw, off this point, the ghost of a schooner, with a shadowy helmsman, flitting past in the white moonlight. There is also a tradition that one of His Majesty’s cruisers ran in here, during the War of 1812, and opened up brisk fire upon the cliff, under the impression that its white face, dimly descried through the fog, was the mainsail of a flying Yankee schooner.” [another bit from ‘Sightseeing at Schooner Head’]

There’s also a small cemetery, and according to Cemeteries of Cranberry Isles and the Towns of Mount Desert Island (Thomas F. Vining, 2000. Updates are posted on this page of the MDI Historical Society’s website) it is occupied by Albys, Bauers, Clarks, Lynams, and Vaughans. I couldn’t see it very well even with a telephoto lens:

The south side of the Head continued the predominantly Red Oak forest we’ve been walking through since High Seas, although I found some White Oak leaves, and there were several stands of Paper Birch and (possibly) Yellow Birch.

After the rugged climbing I’d done on the north side, I was relieved to see the south side was much easier walking:

It was comparatively flat with only small patches of slippery algae, and honeycombed with the best tidepools! (Please remember this is private property and don’t make the kind people who gave me permission to show this to you regret their generosity.) Why were they the best? Because they were gardens of seaweed. Seriously, I have never seen so many species flourishing so thickly.

I think I’ve mentioned before that seaweeds stump me, and most of these are new to me, but I managed to identify a lot of them. The wide, flat leaves are a Laminaria species, the wide, frilly leaf with a bright central stem is an Alaria species, the squiggly brown ones are Dumontia, and some of the bright green is Sea Lettuce (Ulva lactuca). I don’t know what the other bright greens are. Yet. The yellowish one at bottom right is Knotted Wrack (Ascophyllum nodosum).

This bright green stuff is Enteromorpha:

The brown patches that look like lichen are a crustose seaweed, meaning it’s a plant that grows as a crust on the stone, maybe a Ralfsia,

while this reddish coloring is probably a different one, probably Hildenbrandia:

So many new species, and I’m only a couple of miles from home! I wonder if it’s because the shorelines I usually beachcomb have a gentler slope, and the ones I’m on now are rock outcrops with a steep drop-off, so I’m seeing species that prefer deeper water or less exposure to the air? Maybe if I’d been able to reach the shore along Sols Cliff I would have seen these sooner?

Now this is something cool that I just learned here – see all the paler dots on the strands of Fucus in the photo below?

Those are conceptacles, the reproductive organs of the plant. They release male and female gametes into the water, and the resulting embryos attach themselves to the rock to form new plants.

I was so busy staring into the tidepools and trying to get photos of all the different seaweeds, that I didn’t notice I had company. At some point I looked up, and a raccoon was standing about five feet away with a shocked look on her face. I kid you not, if she could have spoken, she would have said, “Get off my rock!” She took off as soon as I noticed her, and I only got a few fuzzy photos of her fuzzy bottom.

The ledges with the amazing tidepools eventually sank down into a cobble beach, and I was able to do a little beachcombing there.

A little stream empties into the cove, and a small flock of song sparrows was splashing around in it. They took off when they saw me, but several of them came back to the beach and hopped around pecking at things in the seaweed.

I had left my collecting bag in the car (doh) so I had one hand full of camera and the other hand full of stuff. It looks like a bouquet, doesn’t it?

To be continued…

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ADDENDA

April 30, 2015

While poking around in the vertical files of the Jesup Memorial Library I came across an article about the cannon (“Cannon in the Dooryard,” Frank Matter, The Islander Magazine, date unknown) that filled in a lot of the details. It was apparently placed on Schooner Head, in the front lawn of the Hale estate, in June of 1898 following the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor. Because the country expected to be attacked at any moment, the government scrounged up four old Civil War-era cannons and sent them down east. The other guns were placed on Egg Rock and Turtle Island. The bridge to the island had to be widened and strengthened to bear the weight of the cannon. It was a short war – the armistice was signed by mid-August – but the gun emplacements were not completed until October. They were, obviously, never used.  One can only imagine how irritated the Hales must have been to have construction going on through the entire summer season. According to the article, Mr. Hale refused Washington’s offer to remove the cannon, saying , “it might cause further injury to his roadway and lawn,” and the cannon remained in the Hale family’s front yard until 1943, when it was sold for scrap as part of the war effort. The Hale estate was destroyed in the Fire of 47. I’ve included the full text of the article for your amusement:

May 5, 2015

Found a couple of photos of the Hale estate before the fire:

and after:

 

November 6, 2016

The first European settlers on Schooner Head were William Lynam and Hannah Tracy. Married in Gouldsboro, they moved to MDI in 1831 and started a hundred-acre farm on Schooner Head. [As a side note, can I say how much it irritates me when history books say that male settlers came to the island and brought their wives with them? I don’t think any pioneer farm survived unless it was a joint enterprise, so can we please just start saying ‘they’ instead of ‘he?’]  There were few inns on the island until later in the 19th century, and the earliest tourists often boarded with local families, including the Lynams. Several of the early artists who visited (including Frederic Church, I think) stayed here.

Charles Tracy, a New York lawyer and one of the earliest tourists to MDI, kept a diary of his visit here in 1855. Here are his descriptions of Schooner Head and the Lynam family:

You may already know some of this, but a whole web of connections spreads out from that 1855 visit. Charles Tracy’s daughter Fanny, who traveled with him, later married J.P.Morgan. She brought him to Mount Desert Island for their honeymoon, they built a house here, and most of the senior members of his firm (the ‘Morgan Men’) started summering here and building houses. The Morgans bought Great Head for their daughter, Louisa Satterlee (see Coast Walk 8) – her children donated it to the National Park.  Alessandro Fabbri, whose WWI transatlantic radio station we talked about in Otter Creek, was the son of one of those Morgan Men. So the web goes from brown bread at the Lynam farmhouse to Gilded Age cottages along West Street to submarines in Otter Cove. Crazy, isn’t it, what one tourist started?

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WORKS CITED

Collier, Sargent and Horgan, Tom, Mount Desert The Most Beautiful Island in the World.

Helfrich and O’Neil, Lost Bar Harbor.

Hill, Ruth Ann, Discovering Old Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, 1993.

Matter, Frank, “Cannon in the Dooryard,” The Islander Magazine, date unknown.

Mazlish, Anne, ed., The Tracy Log Book 1855: A Month in Summer, Acadia Publishing Co., 1997.

Sweetser, M.F., ‘Sightseeing at Schooner Head,’ 1888 (as reprinted in Discovering Old Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, Ruth Ann Hill, 1993.)

Vining, Thomas F., Cemeteries of Cranberry Isles and the Towns of Mount Desert Island, 2000. (Updates are posted on this page of the MDI Historical Society’s website)

Vandenbergh, Lydia, Opulence to Ashes: Bar Harbor’s Gilded Century, Downeast Books, 2009.

Wilmerding, John, The Artist’s Mount Desert, Princeton University Press, 1995.

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