The Rockbound Coast, Acadia and the Geography of Beauty

Somewhere around fourteen thousand years ago, the last of the great ice sheets that had covered New England retreated northward, and what it left behind was the coast of Maine. The glacier had pushed deep into the existing river valleys, and as the ice melted and the sea rose behind it, those valleys flooded. The result is a coastline of extraordinary complexity: bays within bays, rivers opening into tidal estuaries, hundreds of islands ranging from bare ledge to forested hills a mile across, and a shoreline that, if you could unfold every inlet and cove and run it out straight, would stretch for nearly thirty-five hundred miles, more than the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida measured in a straight line.

The bedrock itself tells a long story. The pink granite of Penobscot Bay formed deep underground more than three hundred million years ago. The granites of Mount Desert Island, including Cadillac Mountain, are about four hundred twenty million years old, part of a complex of intrusions that rose and eroded and rose again over the course of hundreds of millions of years. The thin soils of the Maine coast are largely post-glacial deposits; in many places along the shore, bare rock is the immediate surface, and the forests that cover the interior rest on a layer of glacial till that in places is only a few feet thick.

The first European to document the coast with care was Samuel de Champlain, who sailed along it in sixteen oh four and named the mountains of Mount Desert Island L'Isle des Monts Deserts, the island of the bare mountains. He was seeing the summit of Cadillac Mountain, stripped of trees by exposure and thin soil, its granite domes rising nearly fifteen hundred thirty feet above the sea. Champlain's name stuck in modified form: Mount Desert, which many Mainers pronounce like dessert, with the accent on the second syllable.

The landscape that drew American artists to Maine beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the luminous painters of the Hudson River school and its circle, who set up their easels on Mount Desert Island and around Penobscot Bay, was this one: cold light, hard rock, dark water, and the particular quality of northern coastal air that makes distances look sharp and colors saturated. Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and Fitz Henry Lane found in Maine's coast something the rest of the American landscape did not offer, a grandeur that required no exaggeration. The painters were right about the place. The light here is genuinely different.