A Maine Adventure In Three Acts
Act one: A Brief History & Cinnamon Rolls
Act two: A Lobster Tale
Act Three: A Fertile and Beautiful Place

In this rural corner of the country, cash is still the Maine way (pun intended) to pay, and we find ourselves counting quarters to cover the entry to Quoddy Head State Park, the nation’s most eastern point. Exact change is recommended as there is only a self-pay-box. The park is wrapped in fog an average of fifty-nine days a year, but today we can see across the channel to the cliffs of a Canadian island and the Bay of Fundy beyond. Maine’s coldest summer temperatures are recorded here and that, combined with the fog and typography of 90-150 foot cliffs, helps to create coastal peat bogs. The scale and beauty here rival that of the pink granite cliffs of Acadia National Park to the south. 

Quoddy Head is Passamaquoddy (People of the Dawn) for “fertile and beautiful place.” The lighthouse, which was built in 1808, is still in operation today. Painted with red and white stripes to make it more visible in fog and snow the light itself shines 15-18 miles out to sea and was originally fueled by sperm whale oil. 

We stroll down the coastal trail to Green Point, keeping an eye out for various birds and the whales that frequent the area in the summer. On another day, we do see a couple of seals and a pod of dolphins or porpoise just off the beach. After tide pool exploring and a snack, the boys begrudgingly follow us to the peat bog. I tell Erin she should bring a coat to the peat bog. It is an arctic peat bog after all. The land on either side of the trail is covered in a lush layer of dark green moss. It looks like an enchanted land and I tell Luke that this is certainly the habitat of hobbits, elves, and dwarfs. When we read about dwarf trees while walking the boardwalk in the peat bog I say, “See? I told you there were dwarfs here.”

 He groans, rolls his eyes and wanders off to look at a carnivorous plant. 

Just off the parking lot on the Inland Trail, we find an elf village set among the trees. It is amazing to see what folks have built here, and Noah is fascinated and begins to build a house of his own. We will come back to this spot two more times to create more homes. 

Lubec, the easternmost town in the country, is a quaint hardscrabble town that seems shuttered at the moment. The only open restaurant is The Fisherman’s Wharf restaurant, which is perched above an operating wharf. The view encompasses the harbor, Popes Folly Island, and Canada just across the Lubec Narrows. If the border were open, we could take the bridge across for even more exploring. After dinner, we wander down to the wharf where a few men are standing around the back of a dented and rusted pick-up talking while they wait to unload the clams they have dug today. They tell us that with three men it takes about four hours to harvest the four large containers that fill the back of the truck. 

Reversing Falls is a 191-arc preserve that allows for views of the largest set of tidal falls on the Maine Coast. The water lulls us into a state of relaxation as we sit on a rock outcropping watching it rush by at nearly fourteen miles an hour. Late in the afternoon, we venture to Hersey Point Preserve–the description sounds promising but the trail is overgrown and dotted with fire ant hills. One section of the beach has Luke and me sinking up to our ankles in mud. We do find a Lion Jellyfish that has washed up onto the beach. It is almost two feet across and feels like jelly. 

The Cutler Coast is our destination the following day. My mind has become clouded with the thought of a secluded beach accessed only by a wooden ladder. This drives me to push the family on an epic six-mile slog. We never make it to the ladder beach, but we do see a beach that we cannot reach. It seems to too many people just like us have tried to scramble down the ravine thus causing it to greatly erode. We do reach a beach that is nothing to write home about, and that is saying something for this area of Maine. We conclude that hiking is not our favorite thing to do, and we would have been much happier just turning around after the first mile where we stopped to have lunch on an outcropping a hundred feet above the water that supplied us with a dramatic view of the coast. 

Bog Brook Cove Preserve–Moose Cove on the other hand provides more exploring than hiking, it is also far less busy than the Cutler Coast. With a beautiful cobblestone covered beach, rocks to climb on, and tide pools to explore we are in our element. We meet a biology student from Northeastern University who is studying the effect of the invasive Green Crabs on the Welk. The crabs have been on the southern Maine shores for a hundred years but more recently have begun to move north. 

“I’m impressed at how easily you move over the slippery seaweed and rocks,” I tell him. 

“Oh you’re fine until you’re not,” he says. “Somedays I look like a newborn giraffe.”

The tides our last two days here are nearly three feet below sea level. This gives us two gobsmacked days of exploring the seafloor. We find hundreds of Sea Urchins, the Blood Sea Star, Purple Star, and the Common Star. We find Limpets, Sea vases, a Sea cumber, strange multi-legged worms, and a small minnow type of fish that is incredibly fast and seems to use its front flippers as legs to dig into the mud and disappear. At one point a Lion Jellyfish swims by. We discover Colonial Tunicates, an invasive species but still an amazing and beautiful life form. They look as if someone has spilled orange, purple, and red paint all over the rocks. I reached out to the Gulf of Maine Research Institute for help with the Colonial Tunicates identification and one respondent told me that they are more closely related to vertebrates than they are to the invertebrates that you will find in the same tide pools. 

We spend hours exploring the ocean floor–until the tide chases us back to dry land. How blessed we are to have had this experience. If it were not for the pandemic we would have never come to this magnificent corner of the world.