McClellan Park, Milbridge, Maine: Personal Coast

I finally, actually, became scared when I pulled into the remote campsite, which I arrived at by the recommendation of the founder of Catherine Hill Winery. I stopped at the tasting room in Bar Harbor based on the “Free Wine Tasting Anytime” sign, but I left with free “if-I-didn’t-have-to-work-I-would” advice.

McClellan Park is not that remote: you can type “McClellan Park, Milbridge ME 04658” into Google Maps and it will get you there. But there’s no way to get any cell phone service at this $10-a-night campground. You’ll have to drive back to actual Milbridge, a town where the only places to loiter are a Mexican restaurant (dinner) and a diner (breakfast and lunch). I talk on my phone, eat french fries and a taco, and finish reading Slaughterhouse Five at the Mexican restaurant. I could easily be in Sardis, Mississippi. I still stick out.

I arrive back at the campground just in time: at 6:00, the caretaker drives through and collects payments in cash from anyone who’s pitched a tent for the night. He offers pickling cucumbers and tomatoes from his garden, since he grows more than he can eat. I think of how my dad would thrive running this sort of operation. He asks questions, and makes a joke about the young couple from town who camp out here every once and awhile for a “tryst.” He tells me that, if he could, he’d be at Baxter State Park right now. That’s the second pull to visit that far upstate for me: in my head, I add a second tally to the count of reasons-to-go. (The first is Mount Katahdin, the famed formation that initiates the Appalachian Trail and on which there is abundant literature.)

This campsite is run by the town of Milbridge, on coastal land that someone donated, and for which the town hasn’t come up with another use. I feel right at home. The caretaker offers me firewood—some dry birch that’s been in the shed for a while and should be dry. He also brings newspaper, and I build my first solo fire. I slice the tomato and eat it with bread and cheese. The fire burns for hours—too well almost, and I let it go to embers so that I can traipse on the coastal rocks a few hundred yards away. From there, stars are mostly everything.

The next morning, I go back to that coast and settle on a boulder that’s angled forward, so that I can sit for hours in a half-lotus with a notebook on my lap. I write a story. It’s…just a first draft of something, but it’s there. I have the coast, the islands, the water, the possibility of sharks all to myself.

On the way out of town, I eat at the diner. The waitress’s accent is amazing, like nothing I’ve ever heard. I learn her name because everyone calls her by it. Everyone talks about how school starts later that week. There are no children in the diner.

I drive to Baxter, and end up stopping at a populous campground with free coffee in the lobby, free kayaks by the water, and release forms for use of the kayaks. Driving to my campsite, there are people asking for directions to their site. At night, there is a beer pong game nearby, and a family of forty singing eighties pop songs right up until quiet hours. The next day I find out I’m not allowed to climb Katahdin if I didn’t reserve parking a couple of months ahead. There is nothing here like Milbridge.

Bar Harbor, Maine: Cheap Sleep

Road tripping is savored in slowness. There are the people you meet, the cities, and there is money. I watch how quickly the latter moves on a screen, each digit like a plastic letter on a gas station sign that I’m not in charge of. Instead of making another trip to the ATM, I checked out of the hostel-priced campsite near Acadia National Park on Maine’s rocky coast, and parked my car on a calm street lined with bed-and-breakfast signs (“Vacancy”) and wine shops. I spread my sleeping bag across the backseat and set a sheet on the armrest so that, later, I could drape it over the headrests as a tent for myself in the backseat.

It’s Saturday afternoon. People are all around in clusters.

I walk through a park built on a mound of dirt, landscaped with nice grass. Bar Harbor shares a peninsula with Acadia National Park, and tourists are everywhere, eating ice cream and going on walks along the ocean. The rocks on the shore are covered in a stringy moss that glows in the twilight, casting the deep brown of the rocks themselves in a contrasting magic, equal in force. I stand next to a rock the size of a bedroom to eat a Twix that’s more like sugar than anything else. A glacier dropped off this grand piece of earth a long time ago, presumably without any of the tedium it currently represents on the bed of tinier rocks, mossy and wet rocks. It’s huge, dry, and it blocks the view of the ocean for children walking past. But it’s been here longer than the foreign families, the bed-and-breakfasts, and two-hour parking.

In the afternoon, around 2:00, the tide recedes enough between Bar Harbor and the island nearby that a land bridge forms for about an hour. I arrived late, and walked about halfway to the island. I let the water lap around my hiking boots like puppy tongues.

Later in the evening, I get tired quickly. My muscles are ready to rest after morning hiking, but on the way back to the car I hear a familiar Irish song from a pub. People are crowded inside, and they line the sidewalk. I ask the host if there is room at the bar for one person, and of course there is—I’m the only one-person here. I am the efficiency piece to the bar-profit Tetris game, the one often missing in Bar Harbor.

I squeeze in beside a middle-aged couple, maybe retired and maybe on a yearly vacation. The band keeps doing a wonderful job. I watch a family eat hamburgers for dinner. I try not to watch everyone there, but it’s hard. I leave an hour later, when the streets are quieter, and the music is still on.

The car is hot, and I suck up some cellular data scrolling through Facebook at one point to distract myself. By midnight, sleeping sticks. I’m in a sort of fetal position with my head elevated by a shoebox of books and a pillow on top of all that. I sleep through the alarm set for sunrise. At 8:00, the sun is high inside the fog I’ve come to consider to be Maine itself. I drive out along the waterfront, past closed-up bars and shops, people in baseball caps, people in rain jackets, and a million cawing seagulls.

Portland, Maine: The Morning

I couch-surfed for the first time in a woman’s converted acupuncture studio. Around me were Chinese lanterns and bottles of aromatherapeutic oils. I did not oversleep, and for that reason, my dreams were better. I’d left Brooklyn with nightmares cast realistically. It’s a quieter state, not to have any nightmares to think through in the day time.

Portland, Maine. So comfortable to me: a massive, secluding fog and water nearby – all a respite from the cities I’ve inhabited lately. I need to find a car shop today on the way to Acadia for an oil change, to cash in my Groupon and to feel secure as I drive on this brand new coastline.

I look forward to hiking in mountains near the ocean: Acadia. I will fill a backpack; I will pitch a tent in the designated camping area, probably. I will spray myself with deet and set an alarm to check for ticks in the evening before the sun goes down.

I write in this surface way lots of specific nouns and I think of Aunt Ellen’s writing, which is beautiful often because it meditates on things. It watches closely and that makes it good because our brains can do the rest of the work. They like to.

“Fearlessness is the ultimate joy.” This, today, is the rest of the work.