Nature Beckons
Is Isle au Haut the most beautiful spot on Earth? Hop a mail boat and see for yourself
I follow Linda Greenlaw, swordfish boat captain turned lobster fisherman turned writer, up a steep incline on a narrow wooded trail. She is taking me to one of her favorite spots on the island she calls home. With each step, a low rumble grows ever louder, like an approaching locomotive. The trees fall away, and the Cliff Trail opens onto a bluff looking down to jagged fingers of rock poking into the Atlantic. Agitated by storms of the previous day, waves crash against the rocky shore. Foam careens into rocks and flies in the air; some spouts burst upward like geysers, others bend into long arcs before breaking up into droplets that plunge back into the sea. "It's almost like staring at fire," Greenlaw says. "Every wave looks just a little different."
The seascape makes me think back five years earlier, to the first time I hiked the southern trails of Isle au Haut. On a perfect summer day, after gazing out over the surrounding islands from Duck Harbor mountain and walking intimate rocky beaches, each framed by gray boulders, black jagged rock, and green spruce trees, I was overcome with the feeling that I had found the most beautiful place on Earth. On this return visit, I wondered if I would feel the same magic.
Isle au Haut is one of the most remote outposts of Acadia National Park. About 10 square miles in size, it lies at the end of an archipelago of islands in Maine's Penobscot Bay. French explorer Samuel Champlain named it high island in 1604, for its peak overlooking the bay. Mainers mangled the French, so today's pronunciation is eye-la-ho. Roughly half the island is incorporated into Acadia; it is also home to a few hundred summer people and about 45 year-rounders, including a dozen or so lobster fishermen. Even at summer's height, the island is free of the crowds that jam the heart of Acadia on Mount Desert Island. Unless you have your own kayak or boat, the only way there is a 45-minute mail boat ride from Stonington.
Wild over ewe. The $32 round trip through the islands between Stonington and Isle au Haut is a fantastic cruise. As the mail boat pulls away from the dock, Russ Island is in view--now spruce covered but once the scene of open meadows where farmers raised sheep. Russ is sheepless these days, but wild rams and ewes can still be spotted on York Island, off Isle au Haut's eastern shore. As the mail boat turns into Deer Isle Thoroughfare, passengers get a close look at the granite quarry on Crotch Island, named for the fiordlike inlet that splits the island in two. Though large-scale granite mining ended in the 1960s, the lust for granite countertops has revived old quarries. Lobster is the lifeblood of the area. The ocean is thick with colored buoys, and in summer, the morning mail boat passes dozens of lobster fishermen pulling traps from the ocean floor.
On the day I visit, a steady drizzle falls from the sky. It is often rainy in May on Penobscot Bay, but from July to September, clouds yield to sun. The ranger station is a short walk from the town landing, and I hurry over. Wayne Barter, the senior ranger on the island, has a white mustache and a soft coastal Maine accent (r's disappear from the end of words, then reappear where they don't belong). Barter has a taste for dramatic understatement. I ask if his family has been on Isle au Haut a long time. "Oh, a couple generations," he says. "They came in 1792." Maine humorists call that a poke line. You aren't supposed to laugh but can't resist a smile.
Ducky view. Barter suggests walking down the Duck Harbor Trail, which begins behind the ranger station, then exploring coastal trails at the island's southern end. Western Head and Cliff trails are two of his favorites. "It's a tossup between those trails and [hiking up] Duck Harbor Mountain," he says. "It's only 300 feet high, but you get a great view."
The 3.8-mile Duck Harbor Trail is the best way to get from the town landing to the coastal trails. In the summer, one of the morning mail boats goes directly to Duck Harbor. But you'd miss the wild blueberries on the trail's edge, along with a great example of a Maine fog forest. Because of the moisture in Isle au Haut's air, moss spreads like kudzu and lichens crawl up the spruce trees. Where winds push over a shallow-rooted spruce, its lichen-covered spine looks like a whale skeleton. On summer mornings when a fog still hangs in the air, the forest seems wrapped in a ghostly aura.
Eben's Head Trail, which starts near the end of Duck Harbor Trail, takes you through coves and rocky beaches. Dozens of them ring the island, and each is subtly different. On some beaches, small rocks crunch under each step; on others you pick your way along jagged cliffs. Some coves are sheltered and quiet. Others present fierce cliffs and battering spray. There's one quintessential Maine scene after another.
As I walked the trail, I got the same feeling as five years before--as if I were the first to have disturbed the stones on these sublime shores. An illusion, I believe, that many visitors savor.
A day tripper could spend the rest of the afternoon climbing Duck Harbor Mountain and walking Cliff Trail, then catch the 5:45 p.m. boat back. Because I have the luxury of staying overnight, I get a ride with Barter to the Inn at Isle au Haut. (Forced to choose between a $25-for-three-nights campsite and a $300-a-night lodge serving three elegant meals, I opted for the latter.)
The next morning, Greenlaw picks me up at the inn and takes me around the island in her old Range Rover. Before she returned to Isle au Haut to lobster, Greenlaw was a swordfishing captain who commanded the sister boat to the Andrea Gail, which went down in the Perfect Storm. These days she does more writing than lobstering--her latest work is Recipes From a Very Small Island, an Isle au Haut cookbook. And like a good fisherman, she loves telling stories. As we tour, she points out a mastless sailboat where her handyman raised four of his five children, and a house with a boulder sticking up through its kitchen floor--the rock was too big to move and the builder wanted the house in a very particular spot.
We then enter the park, and I walk with Greenlaw past Deep Cove, where harlequin ducks squeak in the backwash of waves, to Cliff Trail, where the surf is breaking in spectacular patterns. I ask her what drew her back. "There are places I get a real sense of the past," she says. "I can imagine Indians exploring this place, living here."
I nod. Maine has many picturesque coastal villages. Yet that beauty has led to inevitable changes. Fishing becomes secondary to tourism; canneries yield to boutiques. Not on Isle au Haut. Much of the island is still wild, seemingly untouched by modernity.
There are those who love the big sky of the American West, but to me it is this place--with its perfect little rocky beaches that you can take in at one glance--that is the most beautiful place on Earth.
LOCAL FAVE
"The Bagaduce Lunch in Brooksville, a '40s-era takeout joint the size of a no-frills mobile home, is located on the edge of the Bagaduce Falls and serves up what might be the best bellies-and-all fried clams, onion rings, and fried haddock in Maine."
HEIDI JULAVITS, a novelist who splits her time between Manhattan and Brooksville, Maine
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Augusta
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This story appears in the July 4, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.