The writer E. B. White, who spent nearly half a century on a saltwater farm on the Maine coast, once observed that if you didn't learn anything else driving into the Pine Tree State along U.S. 1, you'd certainly learn how to spell the word "moccasin."
Maine's main drag, U.S. Route 1, or just Route 1, as the natives call it, is the major artery for the state's torrent of summer tourists, the road to Vacationland, the state's official nickname.
From near the old sardine cannery town of Eastport, the first place in the nation to see the sunrise, to southernmost Kittery, where Maine gets mixed up with the rest of the country, Route 1 winds drunkenly along 300 miles of crenulated coastline. It runs literally down the main street of many of Maine's oldest coastal towns and villages, passing everything that is Maine, sacred and profane.
Along its two-lane blacktop course is strung a carnival collection of fast-food outlets, fly-by-night franchises, discount clothing stores, "KOZY KABINS," lobster pounds, flea markets and a thousand and one pitchmen hawking everything from old lobster pots to live bait to lawn ornaments or "genuine" antiques and oil paintings of Madonna or Mount Rushmore on black velvet. You'll also have a hundred and one opportunities to buy "ALL THE FRIED CLAMS U CAN EAT."
Even if Route 1 looms like an obstacle course of all that is tacky, it also meanders across mile upon winding mile of fields rolling down to the tidal rivers and mud flats and the weathered, whitewashed clapboard homes of the true Yankees. Arching the wide and tidal Sheepscot River in the old seaport town of Wiscasset, it passes the rotting wrecks of the old sloops Hester and Luther Little, reminders of Maine's centuries-old link to the sea.
And so the trip Down East (an old sailing term: ships sailed east before the wind from Boston to Maine) is worth the side show. This is the road to an older Maine, the Maine of summers past preserved especially on the state's dozens of offshore islands, a world only a short ferry ride or a century removed from the bump and grind of the coast road, summers sprung to life out of the paintings of the Wyeths, Winslow Homer or Fairfield Porter.
The old coast road reminds you that Maine always has suffered an identity crisis when it comes to being the nation's Vacationland (the slogan adorns Maine license plates). Having officially proclaimed itself the land of the vacation, Maine also must reconcile the sentiments of most of its residents who have decidedly less enthusiastic views of vacationers.
The tiny villages that dot the peninsulas leading down to the sea are proof enough of how different rural Maine remains. Escape the crowded coast road and you'll find an older and simpler Maine in these real working fishing towns built around a busy waterfront, with a general store, a Grange Hall and the spire of a 250-year-old Congregational Church pointing heavenward surrounded by an ancient burial ground of slate and granite markers dating from Colonial times. There's plenty of real Maine in these towns, at the Saturday night baked-bean suppers in the Odd Fellows Hall or the Sunday morning blueberry-pancake breakfasts at the Knights of Pythias lodge.
It is along the side roads that summer visitors will encounter the Yankee. (Tourism has become such an industry in Maine that the locals' pickup trucks sport bumper stickers proclaiming "native.") The Maine Yankee is a laconic soul, bemused, taciturn and not easily impressed. There may be fewer natives about, but they may still be found. They are legendarily men and women of few words, whose essence is contained in the time-honored yarns, told to illustrate the temperament of the country folk.
Tourists and newcomers may affect the dress of the Yankee -- even preposterously sporting oilskins (the sartorial equivalent of the lobster trap coffee table), overalls with red suspenders, black-and-red checked woolen shirts or even black rubber high-water boots. You can dress up like this -- as if you were going to a costume party -- and many do. But it is harder to mimic the speech of the native. A dry, slow, flat drawl that betrays little or no emotion, it seems almost designed for putting on visitors from the Big City and is perfect for the delivery of the ancient punch line of that venerable lost-tourist story: "You can't get there from here." In Maine that's pronounced "You caaaan't git theeeyah frum heeeyah." (Say it very slowly.)
Good Yankee talkers may be heard just off Route 1, about two-thirds of the way down the coast on Mount Desert Island, home of Acadia National Park and the former turn-of-the-century blue blood resort of Bar Harbor. This is the quintessential Vacationland where the real Maine and the made-for-export Maine collide.
In its heyday, Bar Harbor was a rich man's playground. Today, the barkers in Day-Glo sun visors along West Street will just about absolutely, positively guarantee that you'll see a whale. Their offices boast Technicolor videos of the leviathan breeching right out there in Frenchman Bay off the Porcupine Islands.
But you may prefer to take the Cranberry Isles mail boat, which sails pretty much regardless of the weather out of Northeast Habor for a swing through some of Maine's most beautiful offshore islands, typical of the many that dot the state's jagged 3,500-mile shoreline -- farther than the distance from Boston to San Francisco.
The round trip aboard the Sea Queen costs only $6 for an adult and $3 for a child, and while they don't absolutely, positively guarantee that you'll see a whale, you will see a bit of the real life along the Maine coast. If you happen to pass a whale out in the channel, well, Maine being Maine, the pilot will have no objection to circling the beast a couple of times so that the tourists from New Jersey or the natives coming back from a visit to the podiatrist in Ellsworth can say that they, too, had an authentic Maine coastal whale-watching experience. And, Maine being Maine, they had that experience at a sizable discount over what they'd have spent had they gotten mixed up with a lot of fast talkers in sunglasses and Day-Glo sports clothes down there among the fudge stands and discount T-shirt outlets in Bar Harbor's tawdry commercial district.
Over in Northeast Harbor, the folks at Beal & Bunker, which operates the mail boat and ferry service to the Cranberry Isles, have a pretty much no-nonsense approach to things.
The Sea Queen is about the business of bringing the mail, spare parts for a generator, boxes of groceries and the Boston Globe or Ellsworth American to those far-flung Down Easters, native and summer visitor alike, who live offshore on Sutton Island, Little Cranberry Island (which most folks call Isleford) or Great Cranberry.
From the Sea Queen, the island's craggy and spruce-studded shorelines are bordered with a natural jetty of gray rocks at high water. The summer flower-flecked meadows -- dotted with the remains of an abandoned apple orchard or the swaybacked remnants of a barn or outbuilding -- roll down to the cold Atlantic's waters. Regardless of the weather, the sky behind the lobstermen out pulling their traps off Bear Island Lighthouse trails a wake of circling sea gulls.
The great old summer houses, many dating from the 19th century, stand sea-weathered, facing Mount Desert, the lawns hedged with great overgrown tangles of rose hips and lilacs, the sweeping porches decked with battered wicker furniture, the flag of the State o'Maine flapping from a pole in the front yard.
Seen from the rolling Sea Queen, a lone cyclist on a battered bicycle winds languidly along the gray gravel lane, a pickup truck piled with lobster traps and brightly painted buoys pulls into the yard next to a distant boathouse on the shore, and the solitary clam digger bent with his short rake and black high-water boots is patiently at work on a faraway mud flat at low tide. If the wind is right, the distant horizons are etched with the white sails of sloops moving off into the Gulf of Maine. Far off, too, the surf breaks on the Ledges.
Once the mail boat clears the dock at Northeast Harbor and passes the Bear Island lighthouse, the breeze off the ocean is sharp and cold. A stack of war surplus issue blankets is kept at DTC the ready for especially cold mornings.
Although the crew of the Sea Queen good-naturedly takes along all comers, passengers who have actual business on the islands are understandably given preference. And since the crew knows all year-round residents and many of the longtime summer people on a first-name basis, this is an easy matter to determine.
Maine's offshore islands, numbering in the hundreds from tiny rock ledges to islands capable of supporting several villages and hundreds of residents, are still among the places Down East where it is possible to get away from the bump and grind of the summer-season tourist crush along the coast. They represent, too, a genuine link with Maine's past, for many of the islands were among the first places along the rocky coast to be settled.
So if Route 1 is not the real Maine, traveler, it's the road to the real Maine. Cheer up, you can get there from here.
If you go . . .
Tourist information is available by calling the Maine Publicity Bureau, (800) 533-9595, or by writing the bureau at 97 Winthrop St., Hallowell, Maine 04347.
For the Cranberry Isles mail boat and ferry schedule, write Beal & Bunker Inc., Cranberry Isles, Maine 04625, or phone (207) 244-3575 or 244-7485. Mail boat and ferry service to the Cranberry Isles from Northeast Harbor is scheduled every two hours during the summer months.
For further information about Maine's offshore islands accessible via ferry or mail boat, call the Maine Department of Transportation, Ports and Marine Transportation Division, (207) 289-2841), or write the Maine State Ferry Service, P.O. Box 645, 517A Main St., Rockland, Maine 04841; (207) 596-2202).
Universal Press Syndicate