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JANUARY: ACADIA NATIONAL PARK
My alarm went off at four A.M.
I hit my watch and took a few seconds to remember where I was and why I was there.
I was in Maine for New Year’s Day. It was dark, 30 degrees outside.
The first light of another year in America was about eleven miles and three hours away—7:09 A.M., atop Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park, the highest mountain in Maine and on the whole North Atlantic seaboard.
* * *
WHEN PEOPLE HEARD about my chance to spend a year in the national parks, they inevitably had two reactions. First, they asked if I needed someone to help carry my luggage. Second, they made a suggestion.
You have to go to … Glacier, Crater Lake, Zion. Whichever park was their favorite.
I explained there were a lot of places I wasn’t going to make it to in one year. When the National Park Service was created by an act of Congress in 1916, there were fourteen national parks and twenty-one national monuments. By the time I headed to the parks, the park service was on its way to passing four hundred sites, which fell into more than twenty different designations. National seashores, national monuments, national lakeshores, national battlefields, and on and on. The park near where I live in Florida has a one-of-a-kind designation—Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve.
They all are pieces of our National Park System, managed by the National Park Service. But when we talk about national parks, most people think of the places with the grandest designations, with “National Park” as their surname. There were fifty-eight at the time. A fifty-ninth was in the works. Pinnacles National Monument, south of San Francisco, was on its way to becoming Pinnacles National Park.
When people said I had to go to a specific park, I explained that my goal wasn’t to see the most beautiful parks or to visit as many as possible. My goal was to go to twelve parks—one a month, each symbolizing a different issue facing the national parks in the next hundred years.
This, of course, was in some ways impossible. It’s hard enough to see a hundred minutes into the future, let alone a hundred years. In 1916, kids were building miniature wooden forts with a new toy that Frank Lloyd Wright’s son had created: Lincoln Logs. And actual homes were taking advantage of the latest technological advance: a toggle switch to turn on lights.
In 1916, who could have imagined some of the changes and challenges that the first hundred years would bring to the park service? Kids carrying around telephones in their pockets? Traffic jams on the floor of Yosemite Valley and on its rock walls?
And for all the talk about people loving their parks to death, the National Park Service heads to its next century facing a much bigger threat. People not loving their parks to death. Apathy. Or, if you prefer the word I heard used over and over, starting with NPS director Jonathan Jarvis: relevancy.
“We exist only upon the wishes of the people,” he said when I met with him in Washington, D.C. “Remaining important to society is critical to our future.”
In the last hundred years, America has changed, becoming less rural, more diverse, and—for better and worse—more attached to technology. America will continue to change. And in another hundred years, will Americans still care passionately about the national parks?
To start the year-long search for answers, I decided to start in one symbolic spot: Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park.
When a new year dawns in America, this is where it begins—with first light hitting the 1,530-foot summit on Mount Desert Island in Maine.
Maybe. In America, we seem to debate everything, even the site of our first sunrise. In 1999, the town of Lubec protested after the U.S. Naval Observatory declared that the summit of Cadillac would be the first place to see the sun rise on January 1, 2000. Lubec, located in Maine’s Washington County (billed as “Sunrise County”), argued that while its Porcupine Mountain is only 210 feet, being sixty miles east of Cadillac gave it a thirty-second edge.
The U.S. Naval Observatory redid the calculations and—saying that the refraction of light in the atmosphere can cause fluctuations in how quickly light arrives at a spot—conveniently declared it a tie. Siasconset, Massachusetts, also claimed to be first. And if you want to get technical, St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands beats all the New England sites. And it is trumped by Guam (“Where America’s Day Begins”). And there’s a small island managed by the U.S. Air Force …
Suffice it to say: While it was tempting to begin the year in St. Croix, first light atop Cadillac seemed fitting.
The park was created in 1916, just weeks before the park service, when President Woodrow Wilson established it as Sieur de Monts National Monument. It was the first national park east of the Mississippi River. It became Lafayette National Park in 1919 and Acadia National Park in 1929. And as both the park and the park service headed toward their centennials, Acadia seemed like a 47,000-acre microcosm of the future.
In many ways, it is a model park, a place that with the help of partners such as Friends of Acadia is better off today than it was several decades ago. But it has dilemmas about technology and infrastructure, cell phone towers and parking lots. It is intertwined with towns, creating a mix of cordiality and conflict. It has something the park service is trying to preserve here and in other places: stunningly dark night skies. It straddles geographic zones, making it a place to watch the effects of climate change. And in the last century, the summit has become such a popular destination that one of the park’s biggest dilemmas is how to handle the traffic and crowds.
“It’s our Old Faithful,” park planner John Kelly says.
Compared to other iconic national parks, Acadia is a compact park. Yellowstone is 3,472 square miles and attracts about 3.4 million visitors a year. Acadia is 73 square miles and attracts about 2.4 million visitors a year. Many of them, including President Obama and his family in 2010, go to the summit of Cadillac. On a typical late summer day, the road and parking lot are packed with cars and tour buses.
There was another reason to start the year atop Cadillac. Long before any of this—before today’s cruise ships and tour buses, before yesterday’s cog railway and hotels, before anyone was arguing about the location of America’s first sunrise, before there even was an America—this was a place where the original locals gathered.
Ancestors of several modern-day tribes, collectively known as Wabanaki (“People of the Dawnland”) came to the top of this mountain.
They came to greet the sun.
So with all of this in mind, I circled New Year’s Day on my calendar, contacted several people in Maine, and asked if they knew of anyone who started each year by watching sunrise atop Cadillac. More than one gave the same answer.
“Lili Pew,” they said.
They said Lili, a former board chair of the Friends of Acadia, was very active in the park. And by active, they didn’t just mean raising funds. She was in the park nearly every day. Biking, hiking, cross-country skiing.
They gave me her contact information. They wished me luck trying to keep up with her.
* * *
STATE ROAD 3, heading toward Bar Harbor, was quiet. I passed motels and cottages, signs for putt-putt golf and glider rides, lobster pounds, antiques shops, handcrafted wood cupolas, and homemade hard ice cream. All closed.
I could picture this two-lane road bustling with activity in July. But with January around the corner, it felt like I had dropped into a Stephen King novel. And not the first few chapters when everything is almost normal. The end, after some sinister force has taken a quaint corner of New England and wiped out all but a few humans.
It had been an unseasonably warm start to the Maine winter. The lakes and ponds weren’t covered with ice yet. But the fall leaves were long gone, and they seemingly had taken with them most of the other colors. Even though it was not much past noon, the sun was low and muted.
It was both bleak and beautiful.
It was six weeks before the New Year. I was headed to Maine to meet Lili and plan for the first sunrise. At this moment, though, I was trying to make it to a campground before the rapidly approaching sunset.
I inadvertently ended up on the Park Loop Road. This twenty-seven-mile, mostly one-way road is one of the iconic stretches of pavement in the national parks. At certain times of the year, cars are lined up bumper-to-bumper. On this day, I drove the loop without seeing a single vehicle in front of me or in my rearview mirror.
By the time I made it around the loop and to the Blackwoods Campground, it was nearly dark. The booth at the entrance was empty. A sign said to find an available site and self-register in the brown box on the porch.
There are more than three hundred sites in the campground. A few months earlier, every single one of them would have been full, the campground buzzing with more than a thousand people. Now one section was open. And when I drove into Loop A, the light dimming even more under the trees, I didn’t see another person.
There was a tent set up in one site, a motorcycle in another. But as best as I could tell, that was it.
I picked out a site, decided it wasn’t right, picked out another, changed my mind again, and then finally realized how silly this was. I took one that seemed nice and flat, not too far from the one lone open bathroom. I pulled my tent out, and as I started to set it up, it began to rain. A cold rain.
I’m sure if someone had been there and had been watching me, they would have been shaking their head. I eventually got the tent set up, crawled inside, and looked up.
The rain fly was inside out.
This was hardly backcountry camping. I had a rental car twenty feet away, a bathroom nearby. And the temperature, while chilly, was above freezing. Still, this felt foreign and unnerving. I felt like a camping virgin.
I had decided that when I traveled during the year I would camp as much as possible. This was partly to stretch money as far as possible, partly because you have a different experience in a park if you sleep on its ground.
Or at least that’s what I told myself. The truth was that I hadn’t done much camping since I was a kid. I still was outside nearly every day. Running, biking, paddleboarding. But after I moved away from home at age eighteen, I had stopped camping. Not on purpose. It just happened. I tried to think of when I had camped since I was a child. I came up with four times. Each involved friends or family. On this trip, and most of the ones that would follow, I was alone.
I sat in my tent and listened to the rain.
This wasn’t a pitter-patter of water. It sounded more like someone was hurling giant water balloons. I kept waiting to get soaked. But at some point I dozed off. And when I woke in the middle of the night, I was dry and it was quiet. When I unzipped the tent, I realized why I didn’t hear rain anymore.
It had snowed.
It was still dark, still hours before sunrise, but I couldn’t sleep. And while my new Big Agnes tent was doing its job, my old sleeping bag was not.
I grabbed it, climbed into the car, started the engine, and sat there, doubting myself, doubting my plans for the year.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY I met Lili Pew in Bar Harbor. From the moment she greeted me, I liked her. She had the traits that seemed to be standard issue for many of the year-round residents—down-to-earth, outdoors-loving, independent-minded, funny.
And she seemed as excited about my project as I was.
“How was last night?” she asked.
“Great,” I said, deciding not to mention that I had ended up sleeping in a rental car.
We went to the Thirsty Whale, one of a handful of restaurants still open. She ordered her usual, fish tacos and an Arnold Palmer. Then she told me the story of how she ended up living here.
It’s a story that begins before she was born, before the park itself was born. She grew up in Philadelphia. But her family has deep roots in Maine, houses that go back to a time I had read about, when so many families from her hometown vacationed here that it was known as “Philadelphia on the rocks.”
“I used to summer here,” she said.
When she said that, the use of “summer” as a verb jumped out. For me, summer had always been either a noun or an adjective. I had taken vacations in the summer. I had gone to summer camps. I never had summered anywhere. But the area around Acadia has a long history of people summering in it. And when Lili Pew mentioned this, I probably should have realized her roots were attached to one of the iconic American family trees. But I didn’t.
For every detail that should have confirmed this—a mention of a godmother who helped found a nature center in the park, a friendship with one of the Rockefeller descendants—there were five others that defied whatever preconceived notions I had. I’m not sure what I expected. I guess some sort of stereotype. Maybe someone who was a little soft. And long before I returned for New Year’s Day, I knew who was going to be the soft one atop Cadillac Mountain. It wasn’t someone named Pew.
But if there were any doubts, Lili called shortly before the new year and asked when I was arriving. She said she had a great opportunity, a chance to get on a boat that was going twenty-some miles off the coast. She was going to go for a dive. She added that she was going to wear a dry suit, as if this somehow made the idea—diving into water that even in the middle of summer was icy—seem like no big deal.
She was looking forward not only to what she’d see while in the water, but what she’d see on the boat ride back: the view that Samuel de Champlain saw. Sixteen years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, the French explorer saw these rocky summits and named it île des Mónts Deserts.
She wondered if I’d be there in time to join her.
“No,” I said, not sure whether to be disappointed or thankful. “I won’t get there until that night.”
I didn’t even bother to tell her about my New Year’s Day tradition. A polar plunge. In Florida. When friends in Wisconsin heard about this, they mocked the idea of anything in Florida being called a polar plunge. If you don’t have to cut a hole in some ice, one of them said, it doesn’t count.
* * *
ONE EVENING, BEFORE going back to the campground and losing cell service, I called home. Mia was busy with homework. One of her fourth-grade projects had been to chart the phases of the moon for a month.
So each night she did what, to her, made perfect sense. She went online.
“Let’s go outside and look at the real thing,” I had said one night when there was a nearly full moon.
Not only didn’t she want to do that, but she didn’t see the purpose. She had the answer. It was right there on the computer screen. Why would she go outside?
When she got on the phone this night, I told her that once I got to the campground I wouldn’t have any access to the Internet; in fact I wouldn’t even have a cell signal. To her, this sounded like a nightmare.
“It’s actually really nice,” I said.
I said good night and headed to my campsite. In a matter of a few days, I was starting to feel comfortable there—and starting to feel very fortunate to live in a time when we not only have cell phones but also have places where we lose cell phone service.
While starting a campfire, I thought about how it’s only a matter of time—likely a shorter time than any of us imagine—before there will be nowhere on earth where we won’t have phone service, Wi-Fi, or whatever else is around the corner. I don’t look forward to that day.
In theory, I always could leave my phone behind or just turn it off. And maybe I would do that for a while. But if there had been a signal here, I’m sure that eventually I would have looked at e-mails, listened to voice mails, and at least mentally headed to another place.
Instead, I did something I’ve never been good at.
I stayed right there, in that moment, with the campfire crackling and the trees rustling overhead.
When the fire died out, I turned on my headlamp and headed to the east edge of the campground, following a short trail that led to the deserted Park Loop Road, then to some rocks on the rugged coastline and something that made me freeze.
The stars.
The trees perched along the rugged coastline were visible not because they were illuminated by anything, but because they were silhouetted by skies so dark that they had turned milky.
In 1916, when people were flipping those first toggle light switches, they would have laughed at the idea of light pollution. But in the last century, we’ve reached a point where most of us forget what it feels like to stand under a sky like this.
A National Geographic cover in 2008 featured a photo of a cluster of skyscrapers and the headline: “The end of night. Why we need darkness.” It pointed to scientific studies that show how the proliferation of man-made light has affected many forms of life, including ours.
The idea of trying to preserve night skies is a relatively new one for the park service. In the late 1990s, it established a Night Skies Team, a group of scientists in Colorado headed by Chad Moore. When I traded e-mails with Moore, below his e-signature and title—Night Skies Team Leader—was a quote from Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu: “When darkness is at its darkest, that is the beginning of all light.”
When the park service director unveiled his “Call to Action” in 2011, it included thirty-six goals for the second century. No. 26 was labeled “Starry, Starry Nights.” And while it focused on establishing “America’s first Dark Sky Cooperative on the Colorado Plateau,” one of the models of existing cooperation was here in Maine.
One afternoon in his office, John Kelly, the Acadia park planner, had pulled up a series of images on his computer, maps with splotches of color, bringing to mind weather radar. But in this case, the colors represented the amount of light on the East Coast of America.
“You can actually see the creep of light coming up the coast with the growth of population,” Kelly said. “We’re in this little pocket where it’s clear.”
The pocket was partly the result of lighting ordinances in the towns that share Mount Desert Island with the park. And while there was some initial resistance to the regulations, businesses had realized that the lighting changes not only saved money but brought in more business. The latest issue of the chamber of commerce magazine had a photo of a starry sky on its cover and information about the third annual Acadia Night Sky Festival.
Nearly 1,500 people attended events during the weekend—a cloudy, rainy weekend—that included a concert with songs about night skies.
Some scientists predict that, at the current rate of light pollution, those songs eventually will be about something that no longer exists—night skies that look like this.
I thought about that while standing on the rocks, looking at the stars above the Maine coast.
We don’t use the night skies to navigate any more. We have GPS and Siri. But nothing orients you quite like looking up and seeing countless stars.
For thousands of years, people have been doing this and trying to use words and music and art to describe what they’re feeling. If something happened to Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night tomorrow, if we couldn’t go to New York’s Museum of Modern Art and gaze at the original, there would be a worldwide outpouring of sadness and loss. And yet as we lose the inspiration for that painting, the night skies that Van Gogh saw in the 1880s, the world shrugs.
Maybe that’s because most of us have never seen truly dark skies. Or even if we have, we forget what they look like.
At home in North Florida, on a clear night with a new moon, I can look up and see stars. But not like this. Never like this.
* * *
ALTHOUGH I DID not sample the Ben & Bill’s lobster ice cream—created to prove to customers that the local business does indeed make its own ice cream—I did have several other flavors. It was Lili’s nightcap of choice.
“Does it ever get too cold for ice cream?” I asked.
“Never,” she said as if that were a silly question.
I quickly realized that it also rarely was too cold—or hot or wet or any weather condition you can think of—to keep Lili out of the park.
For a few days, she played tour guide and ambassador, driving me around the park in her Subaru, planning a hike, and taking me for a bike ride that was part sightseeing, part workout, part history lesson.
When we biked to a stretch on Sargent Mountain, Acadia’s second-highest mountain, with a spectacular view, Lili pointed to a rock next to the carriage road that looked like a chair.
“That’s my office,” she said with a laugh.
She said she comes there when she wants to just sit and think. She came there after 9/11. Like everyone else, at some point she wanted to get away from the images on the television, the loop of planes hitting towers again and again. So she came to the chair. There weren’t any planes flying overhead that day. The skies were blue and empty. There was solitude.
We got back on the bikes and, as the light began to fade, headed back to the parking lot.
She was busy as a real-estate agent, taking phone calls and trying to resolve issues, and she also had a part-time job at Home Depot. When I asked her about that weekend shift at Home Depot, she said that part of what she loved about it was the sense of completion. Everything else in her life was a long-term project. That was different. She started a task and finished it. The only other thing that gave her that sense of immediate accomplishment was an athletic workout.
When she was younger, she said, she trained in the park and could tell you the exact distance between Point A and Point B, but she couldn’t tell you much about what was in between. After a divorce, she moved here as a year-round resident. That’s when she truly began to appreciate the park.
She quickly grew to love winter here. The crowds were gone. And to her the park didn’t feel cold and empty. It felt pristine and inviting.
“You get to see the park at its rawest, its purest,” she said. “When I made the decision to live here, I tried to look at everything as if I were visiting for the first time.”
Before I saw Acadia for the first time, truth be told, I was more excited about some of the places I would make it to after first sunrise. This was just the somewhat gimmicky opening scene. After just a few days in the park, I changed my mind.
When you look at America’s national parks, Acadia doesn’t have the most acres, oldest trees, deepest canyons. What it does have is something that can’t be quantified with numbers, something more subtle but equally profound—like the trails and paths and roads themselves, all carefully designed to blend into the landscape.
As Lili drove me through the park one day, she pointed out not only the meticulous details—the protective stones alongside the road often referred to as “Rockefeller’s teeth”—but also the big-picture design of George Dorr and John D. Rockefeller Jr.
They didn’t just acquire land and then donate it to the American people. Rockefeller, reluctant at first to be a part of Dorr’s plans, eventually became the driving force, overseeing the construction of the carriage roads and stone bridges. The materials, the sight lines, the experience they would create.
“Start incorporating this into your mind-set,” Lili said as we dipped into a valley and then gently climbed around the ocean side of the next mountain. “He wanted everything to be a passageway from one part of the landscape to the next, with slow rolling curves rising up to a vista. All of these passages were considered to be episodes of a journey. He uses that phrase many times. It’s an ‘episodic journey of discovery.’”
I scribbled that phrase down and underlined it.
It was both an apt description of what it still felt like to explore and a summary of what I hoped would begin with first light of the New Year.
One big episodic journey of discovery, starting with the four A.M. alarm.
* * *
I WOKE UP and stumbled out of the spare bedroom. Lili and Carol were already up and starting to get ready.
Carol Bult, a close friend of Lili’s, had graciously offered to let me stay in her house in Seal Harbor for the New Year’s Day trip. And as much as I had enjoyed camping a few weeks earlier, after the cold, rain, and snow I was more than happy to take her up on that offer.
Carol is a geneticist and computational biologist at the Jackson Laboratory, a research institution that was established on Mount Desert Island in 1929. Her job involves improving the use of the genome to tailor cancer therapy options to individuals. She also volunteers for search and rescue in the park. In other words, I was in the company of two smart, tough locals.
The three of us were going to start the year by biking to the summit of Cadillac Mountain.
When I had first contacted Lili, she had said that maybe we’d cross-country ski or snowshoe to the top. But with no snow on the hills of Maine, we were going to ride mountain bikes, with metal-studded tires for the ice on the roads.
We left the house at five, riding about a quarter mile on Carol’s street before dropping down onto one of the carriage roads.
The beams of light from our headlamps danced along the path. When I glanced up, I caught glimpses of what was visible between the trees—so many stars that it almost felt fake, like someone got a little carried away with Photoshop.
Our tires crunched on the crushed stone. Climbing quickly washed away the initial chill. Lili and Carol pointed out some of the landmarks we passed. Jordan Pond, Day Mountain, Bubble Pond. In the dark, it wasn’t so much what I was able to see, though. It was the exhilarating feel of the place, the reminders of what it was like to be a kid moving through woods at night. And then we got on a paved road and started climbing toward the turnoff for the road leading to the summit of Cadillac Mountain.
As we reached the gates—the 3.8-mile road closes to vehicles each winter—the black sky was starting to turn gray.
In the distance, we could see a string of headlamps. We weren’t going to be alone. But it also wasn’t going to be like January 1, 2000, when local resident Martha Stewart announced plans to start that year atop Cadillac.
Stewart did a trial hike and decided it was too difficult to reach the summit in time for sunrise. She announced that she was canceling the original plans and would instead drive to the beach, hike to a ledge overlooking Frenchman Bay, then have a big breakfast at her home in Seal Harbor. The Associated Press reported that the guests, dressed in fuzzy bathrobes, would find their names written on egg-shaped rocks borrowed from the park to serve as placards. They would eat fruit from candied grapefruit shells, drink from giant café au lait mugs, and wipe their fingers on fine Irish linen.
A couple of thousand other people went ahead with their plans to start the year wearing fleece and Gore-Tex, standing on the rocks atop Cadillac Mountain. And with the road clear of snow, the park service opened it to vehicles, leading to a scene that’s normal for the middle of summer but a rarity on January 1.
This year, though, the gate was closed. No vehicles. Just a few dozen people walking and, as best I could tell, three people biking.
The road had patches of ice. But the studded tires worked, gripping the surface and making a sound that reminded me of being a kid, with baseball cards in my spokes.
“Happy New Year!” Lili shouted as we passed people.
“Happy New Year!” they shouted back.
When we reached about the two-mile mark, Lili said we were coming up on the waterfalls, which during the winter sometimes become icefalls.
“We’ll see which it is on the way down,” she said.
Maybe. Visibility was quickly fading. Wisps of clouds had turned to dense fog. The stars were gone. The only lights visible were the dim headlamps farther up the mountain.
We rounded a couple of bends, continuing to climb.
A family was headed down. It still was about an hour before sunrise, but apparently they were giving up on watching from the summit.
“Last stretch,” Lili yelled out. “Quarter mile to the top.”
We pushed up the final few hundred yards, reaching the top about 6:15 A.M., more than forty-five minutes before sunrise.
We took off our backpacks. The women ducked behind the closed Cadillac Summit Center to change into dry base layers. I pulled out the shirt I had packed, took a deep breath, then started shedding layers—Gore-Tex shell, fleece, wicking base—until I was standing there, shirtless, sweaty, and suddenly aware of the wind.
I had heard stories about the wind, about how even in the summer, when the sun rises before four A.M., the wind can make things downright chilly. But it wasn’t even so much the temperature. It was the sound.
I had ridden out hurricanes in Florida and heard the wind howl. I had been in canyons where the wind whistled. This wind sounded unlike anything I had ever heard.
It crackled, ripped, and snapped.
It still wasn’t clear what the sunrise was going to look like, but it obviously was going to have a memorable soundtrack.
There were about forty people at the top, many huddled next to large rocks, hoping to block the wind gusts coming from the west. On a clear morning, you could see chains of islands dotting miles and miles of the Atlantic Ocean. On this day, as it gradually got lighter, you could barely see the rocks fifty feet in front of you.
The vegetation, coated in a layer of rime ice and swaying in the wind, reminded me of corals underwater in the Florida Keys. Only in this case, not only weren’t there any fish swimming past, there weren’t any bright colors. It felt as if we were standing in the middle of a black-and-white photo.
I wandered around, trying to capture this scene with my camera, tucking my gloves in a pocket so I could adjust the settings. And before I knew it, my teeth were chattering.
“Are you okay?” both Lili and Carol asked.
“I’m fine,” I said.
My teeth kept chattering. I tried to tighten my jaw and make it stop. This only muffled the chattering.
“Here,” Lili said after a while. “Get in this.”
She handed me a bivy sack. They poured some tea from a thermos and we huddled behind a rock. I kept telling myself it wasn’t really that cold. I had spent many a day growing up in Wisconsin playing for hours in single-digit temperatures. My chattering teeth kept telling me that after twenty-some years in the Sunshine State, I was a Floridian.
Between the tea and the bivy sack and body warmth, I eventually stopped shaking.
We couldn’t actually see the sun, but everything was getting lighter, the increases coming in fits and spurts, as if every so often someone turned a dimmer switch.
The black-and-white landscape turned pinkish.
Pink fog, pink vegetation, already pink granite turning even pinker.
I thought of the Nick Drake song, “Pink Moon,” and how it was used in a Volkswagen ad. Some friends in a Cabrio driving along moonlit roads pull up to a house party, look at each other, then back up and return to the road and the pink, pink, pink moon.
Down the mountain, at Martha Stewart’s place, perhaps people were wearing fuzzy bathrobes, drinking giant mugs of café au lait and sitting in front of egg-shaped rocks in an old estate. I wouldn’t have traded places. At this moment, there was no place I’d rather have been than sitting in a polyethylene bag, sipping tea, leaning against one of the rocks on this old mountain.
At 7:09 A.M., with still no sign of the actual sun, Carol counted down the seconds, as you would at the previous midnight.
“Ten, nine, eight, seven…”
“Happy New Year!” we yelled loud enough to hear the sound of our voices over the snapping of the wind.
To our left, three twentysomething guys cracked open beers. And when the sun did appear ever so briefly—or at least the distinct glow of something beyond the fog—people pointed and cheered.
First light was more like first glow.
Someone apologized, saying you never know what you’re going to get atop Cadillac Mountain. I told them I had seen many chamber of commerce sunrises that I couldn’t remember.
“This sunrise I will remember,” I said.
We got back on our bikes and headed down the hill. The wind had faded. The sound of the studded tires on the icy roads was now cranked up a notch.
We stopped at the overlook and got a second sunrise. This time it wasn’t just a hazy glow. A big bright-red ball came up over the summit of Cadillac. It lit up the clouds behind it and covered stretches of the landscape below in a warm light.
I thought about something Lili had told me earlier. She talked about how the light changes. In winter, the sun doesn’t just rise late and set early. Instead of passing high overhead, it stays closer to the horizon. And the result is the light that many a photographer has fallen in love with. It cuts through trees and across the mountains, highlighting details, emphasizing patterns.
“It’s like a skipping stone of light,” she said.
Lili had said that if we were lucky, we’d see some of her favorite things about the park on New Year’s Day—the waterfall on the side of the road turned to an ice sculpture full of turquoise blues and greens, the top of the mountain shimmering in a way that makes her feel close to her mother.
“There’s this wonderful poem ‘Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep,’” she said. “It talks about the diamond glint of snow on top of the mountain. I read that at my mother’s funeral. And every time I come up here and see the light skipping across the mountain, with the diamond glint on the snow, I think of my mom.”
When we got off the bikes, I looked across the road and saw the waterfall for the first time. It was an icefall. And when the sun came out for a brief moment, I saw the light skipping across the mountain.
Lili’s mother died in 1986 at age forty-nine. She was the first woman to head the National Association of State Racing Commissioners. She had breast cancer, discovered way too late. She died in a hospital in Lexington, Kentucky.
Lili had told me that much. When I got back home, I found some of the obituaries. The story in The Philadelphia Inquirer said that Joan Ferguson Pew-Hickox, known to her friends and many acquaintances simply as “Joanie,” brought to the Thoroughbred industry “a seemingly limitless energy, a quick intelligence and a great impatience, an impatience directed at its resistance to change and its fragmentation.”
I read that and smiled. It reminded me of the woman who had taken me to the summit of Cadillac.
I also found several versions of the poem Lili read at her mother’s funeral. It generally is traced to Mary Elizabeth Frye in 1932. The most common final two lines are: “Do not stand at my grave and cry. I am not there; I did not die.” But I was drawn to one that ended differently. With a sunrise.
I give you this one thought to keep—
I am with you still—I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am sunlight on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awake in the morning’s hush
I am the swift, uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not think of me as gone—
I am with you still—in each new dawn.
From the comfort of my warm Florida home, I read that and thought about Maine. The blowing wind, the diamond glints, the shining stars and the new dawn.
I thought about how my parents went to Acadia for one of their anniversaries and watched a sunrise atop Cadillac.
I thought about how Dad sometimes made statements about death that were half joking, half serious. “When I’m gone…” he’d say.
When he was gone, he told Mom, he wanted her to find someone else. When he was gone, he also wanted her to know he was still with her. He said it would be like the love letter Union soldier Sullivan Ballou had written to his wife. He would be in the wind. (“I shall always be near you … if there is a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath.”)
Ken Burns featured a reading of the letter in his Civil War series, along with a violin playing “Ashokan Farewell.”
After Dad died, I noticed that Mom had a cassette tape of that song in her car.
A couple of years later, for her sixtieth birthday, Mom decided that she wanted the rest of the family to do a rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. At one point, as we drifted along a calm stretch of the Colorado River, deep in the canyon, our guide—a small woman with ripped arms—stopped rowing and pulled out what looked like a musical instrument case.
She unlatched it and, sure enough, she had brought a violin with her.
She rested it on her shoulder and began to play. A few notes into it, I realized what she was playing.
“Ashokan Farewell.”
As the music carried through the canyon, a soft breeze blew upon our cheeks.
So many people in this world have so many beliefs, things they seem to know with absolute certainty. Sometimes I’m envious. I have so many questions and doubts that I often don’t know what I believe.
I do know that, as this year began, I already believed that it was possible to find comfort in dark skies and pink landscapes. And that if Dad was with us when a breeze blew through the canyon, he really must have been with me when a wind whipped across a mountain in Maine. And Mom? She was waiting at the next stop.
Copyright © 2016 by Mark Woods