Travelogue: Mount Desert Island, Maine

These, then, are the archetypal New England villages that everyone’s trying to recreate. There are strange juxtapositions in a place where the economy is trafficking in quaint. Here the oddly taciturn natives interact with seasonal urban migrants (sunbirds?) Working fishing operations sit beside far too many antique shops. I couldn’t help but wonder how the place has changed since, say, Herman Melville’s day. Towns built for backbreaking labor become havens for leisure. Is there irony in the inauthenticity of going to someplace because it was authentic, and by doing so rendering it no longer real? Or maybe it is real, who’s to say. There seems to be a deprivation chic at work in some of this. It sort of reminds one of the Europeans that adopt cowboy fashion: do they not realize that it was all about endless work in the broiling sun, hand-to-mouth subsistence and short life spans; or is that the whole point? (No one ever wore a ten-gallon hat because they wanted to work on their tan.)

Settlement is kind of like that. Here we have a pattern (this is an assumption – no scholar of Maine history, me) designed to huddle a few houses around the place most sheltered from the oppressive winter winds and waves, and place everything close enough together to make life in the blowing wetness a little more tolerable during the long years of lumbering and lobstering. Because it turns out to be beautiful should it matter? Where do the tree and fish people live now? Are they still here, and if not, what does that say?