I was having a lot of big feelings as I departed Ithaca, on my way to the only New England state I had never visited. The two weeks I’d spent in my hometown was the longest I had stayed in one place since this trip started. It was also the longest stretch of time I'd spent in Ithaca since moving away away in ‘98.
In week one, I caught up with old friends and toured my old stomping grounds. In week two, the pleasant nostalgia faded and I remembered all over again why I left.
I had stayed with my mom most of the time. The last time we'd been under the same roof for that long was when I was an angry, rebellious early teen. All things considered, everything had gone very well. I helped with her summer solstice party and officiated her wedding to Jeff, which was a great honor, but I was itching to get back on the road.
The rolling New England hills were a bright leafy green in the early summer light. I covered the 600 miles in two days, stopping in Hartford, Connecticut for the night in between. I crossed into Maine early Sunday afternoon and drove through Portland shortly after.
After moving to Portland, Oregon a few years ago, I learned quickly that I had to clarify which Portland I meant when speaking with people on the east coast.
Before I moved there, I had always assumed that Portland, Oregon was named after the Port of Portland along the Willamette River where cargo ships unload consumer goods from overseas and pick up local agricultural products. But no, in fact Portland, Oregon was named after Portland, Maine.
In 1845, two business partners from New England flipped a penny to determine who got to name the burgeoning west coast city. Asa Lovejoy, who was from Portland, Maine, won the toss. Had the coin landed the other way, his partner Francis Pettygrove would have named it Boston.
So surely, you say, Portland, Maine must be named after its Port of Portland - but you’d be wrong again. Maine’s Portland is named after the English Isle of Portland, once again proving that there is nothing truly original in the world anymore.
I stopped for lunch in a small town after Portland, choosing a small coffee shop/restaurant with funky art on the walls. On the blackboard were yummy sounding sandwiches and salads, and something called a Red Snapper. Assuming correctly it was not the fish, I inquired about it.
A Red Snapper is a Maine staple that is a bright red hotdog with a natural casing known for its snapping sound when you bite into it. It’s served in a top-split bun like a lobster roll.
For novelty’s sake I ordered one in addition to my regular lunch. The color was so clearly artificial it was a little off-putting, but I figured the red dye was probably the least awful thing in the hot dog and chowed down.
BANGOR
I was uncertain before arriving in Bangor how to pronounce it, and apparently I was not the only one. The problem is so prevalent that a local marketing company made a music video explaining that “it’s pronounced more like 'stores' and less like 'airplane hanger'". It’s worth a listen - it’s an absolute Banger.
Bangor, and its sister city Brewer, run along opposite sides of the wide Penobscot River and are connected by three bridges. They are, for all intents and purposes, one city. For reasons no one seems to recall, Brewer broke away from Bangor (then Orrington) in 1812, incorporating as its own township.
I had dinner my first night there at Mason’s Brewing Co. on the waterfront in Brewer. After a fantastic pizza and a couple of beers, I walked the paved path along the river as the evening light dwindled.
Strains of music wafted across the river from an outdoor stage. I stopped to listen and recognized “How Sweet It Is.” The performer was doing a remarkable rendition of the song. He sounded just like James Taylor.
I was not prepared for the fact that indeed it was James Taylor playing in Bangor. I wouldn’t have guessed it, since there are only a couple small colleges in the area, but their Waterfront Concert Series gets some very well known music and comedy acts.
I sat on a bench for a while listening to the music, and I was not alone. Several couples had also timed their visit to the river to coincide with the concert, which made a lot of sense. The acoustics were surprisingly good, it was free, and they could avoid the concert chaos. After being mercilessly devoured by mosquitos while sitting, I walked back and forth along the path all the way through his encore of “Fire and Rain”.
STEPHEN KING
Bangor, as any fan of horror will tell you, is (or was) home to The Master of Horror, Stephen King. Bangor was the model for his fictional city Derry, which is the main setting for 8 of his novels and mentioned in 24. It is so well known for this fact that I wondered if perhaps Bangor was the obvious place to visit in Maine. I decided to go anyway because I'm such a big fan of King's books - I must have read 20 or more. And, if I’m being honest, I was never not going to choose Bangor.
The first of his books I read was his take on the vampire genre - Salem’s Lot. I was 10 years old and it creeped me out so badly that I had to put it down and come back to finish it years later. As I mentioned in my GEEKY post, for fun I adapted his (as Richard Bachman) dystopian thriller The Running Man into a screenplay.
His Dark Tower series, which spans eight books and 4,250 pages, is one of my favorite works of fiction and I’ve read it twice. IT, which I’ve also read twice, is a masterpiece. I was lucky enough to get an invitation to the premiere of IT: Chapter 1 when it came out in 2017.
The Stephen King house, where he lived with his family for decades, is in the Whitney Park Historic District in central Bangor. It has a foreboding wrought iron fence with bats and spiders on it. Inside on the yard is a massive tree trunk that has been carved into an ornate sculpture of a bookcase with human feet, ravens, an owl, cats, and his corgi Molly.
He and his wife Tabitha have retired to a home in the Florida Keys, but in 2019 he got the house re-zoned for non-profit and announced plans to turn it into a private archive for his work and a writer’s retreat that can accommodate up to 5 people at a time. Sadly, I couldn’t find any mention of it opening since, and the house was closed and dark when I stopped by.
Although there was an official Stephen King tour that would have taken me around to local landmarks that appeared in or inspired places in his novels, I opted to visit just a few spots on my own.
Later that week I visited the Paul Bunyan statue that came to life in IT. Bangor claims to be the birthplace of Paul Bunyan. But then again, so does Bemidji MN, Hayward WI, Tomahawk WI, Akeley MN, Brainerd MN, Halifax Nova Scotia, Manistique MI, Oscoda MI and more for all I know.
I also explored the Mount Hope Cemetery where he used to take frequent walks and which holds the gravestones that provided many of his characters’ names.
They filmed parts of Pet Sematary there (intentionally spelled that way to mimic a child’s misspelling of the word).
ACADIA NATIONAL PARK
Acadia National Park is one of the few national parks along the coast that is not in Florida or California. Despite being located in a rather remote location, it was the 7th most visited national park in 2023 with nearly 4 million visitors. The majority of it is contained on Mount Desert Island, part of the craggy Maine coastline.
Staying in Bangor provided easy access to the park - just over an hour away. I decided to take advantage of the 4th of July to visit the park on Thursday. I was concerned that the park would be overrun on the holiday so I got there early.
The morning was cloudy and surprisingly brisk for July. My friend had recommended the Beehive Loop Trail, which is one of the most popular hikes in the park. I found the trailhead on the large map in the visitors center and drove there, parking along the road just outside Sandy Beach lot, which was already full.
The Beehive Loop is only a mile and a half and a 508-foot elevation gain, which sounds like a modest hike. 508 feet is only 58% of a New River Gorge Bridge after all. What the numbers don’t tell you however, is that the climb goes straight up the side of a cliff using natural rock shelves and metal rungs that were pounded into the side of the mountain.
Since there were only a few places where two people could pass each other, the climb moved at the speed of the slowest climber. As I creeped higher, the view became more expansive and the path more precarious. At many points I was perched on ledges only 2 or 3 feet wide with a sheer drop on my right going down hundreds of feet.
The trail was an incredible experience and it didn't actually freak me out. In fact, the National Park Service's laissez-faire attitude toward life and limb was refreshing after growing up in a country so obsessed with protecting stupid people from themselves that warning labels have become the height of comic absurdity.
I did find myself morbidly thinking about how easy it would be to fall off the cliff and wondering how many people must die at national parks each year. Apparently I’m not the only weirdo.
The National Park Service has a dedicated page complete with an interactive dashboard to track the numbers, causes, and demographics of all the deaths that occur in each of the national parks. Acadia, as it turns out, only had 13 deaths between 2014-2019, and only one of them was from falling. God Bless the Internet.
I stopped at the top of the climb on a large plateau of rock and munched on a protein bar while looking out at the rugged coast and ocean. It was hard to tell where the steel sea ended and the overcast sky began.
The remainder of the loop descended gradually down the back side of the mountain, skirting a picturesque pond known as the The Bowl. Bees flitted between bright blooms of purple pickerel on the tranquil water.
When I completed the loop and returned to the starting point, I looked back up at the cliff I had just scaled and thanked my past self for showing up early. The trail was getting crowded.
After the supposedly short hike, I was spent. But I stopped at Otter Point to climb around on the angular rocks along the coast. The sun was beginning to peek out occasionally.
I discovered a small pool of rainwater (it was too high up to be a tidal pool) that had gathered in a depression in the rock. The most vivid green plants grew beneath the surface, absolutely striking in contrast to the granite cliffs.
On my way back to Bangor I stopped for lunch, ice cream, and a game of pirate themed mini-golf. The sun had finally come out and it was a perfect summer afternoon.
That evening was the fireworks display in Bangor. I joined hundreds of people on a grassy slope near the amphitheater where James Taylor had played just four days earlier. I hadn’t watched fireworks in many years. My former partner and I had a nervous dog that was totally freaked out by loud noises, so we always stayed home comforting her every Independence Day.
I enjoyed the fireworks display despite the rampaging kids wired on sugar. The evening air was so still that the smoke didn’t clear, so by the time the show crescendoed in its big finale, we couldn't see much.
The following morning I packed and departed. I had decided to take the long way around to New Hampshire, looping through Canada and stopping in Montreal for the long weekend. I hadn’t been there since my brother’s bachelor party 11 years before.
Yes, and…
Matt
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