Cape Jellison's Gifts
Following Maine’s coastal route up from Portland brings you in a few hours to Searsport, first settled in the 1670s. Its shipbuilding reputation led it to once being proposed as the capital of Massachusetts (Maine did not become a state until 1820). It still hosts a fine harbor but is small enough that there’s no need for a traffic light along its main street. Leaving town, a slight right turn leads into Stockton Springs, itself a once thriving port, and soon a hard right takes you onto Cape Jellison Road, inviting you to experience the history and allure of its peninsula loop.
Fort Point Light, in operation to help ships navigate the Penobscot River since 1835, occupies the tip of the cape. Its Fresnel lens still guides ships, a testament to the cape’s importance and endurance. Its Bell Tower, once needed in dense fog, is now as quiet as the hills and waters surrounding it, a glorious silence punctuated wonderfully by the occasional lobster boat, barking seal or rain storm. The earthen remains of pre-Revolutionary War Fort Pownall sit beside the lighthouse. Built in 1758, British Governor Thomas Pownall promised it would “take possession of the very finest bay in North America.”
We were first drawn to Cape Jellison by the gracious invitation of two very dear friends. Over the years we and our young children spent many a summer vacation there with them and their children. The cape strengthened the invaluable bonds of a half-century friendship and implanted this small peninsula in our hearts.
Our mid-summer sojourns here transport us into a deliciously different world. Approaching it on our first visit a gas station attendant apologized for the “heat wave.” It was 70 degrees. The First Gulf War never made it to page one of the local paper, which was reserved for news of the lobster catch. Yet Cape Jellison is not a wilderness backwater. WiFi and cable TV are here now, but why live in virtual worlds when the real one is so intriguing? If you want “action,” you can go to the casino in Bangor or join crowds in Acadia National Park, but neither matches the uninterrupted beauty of these 1,600 acres jutting into the Penobscot River.
Lupines and wildflowers line many roads, pine trees scent any woodland walk, fog rolls in as cool nights wring moisture from the air, and the morning sun sweeps it away, lighting the hills as they descend gently to the river. Engaging your imagination, you can see a wooden rowboat whose eighteenth century sailors just made landfall at the point below the fort, as if emerging from the mist to reveal a past which has thankfully never really left here.
When the children were young, our days filled with scavenger hunts, stops at antique shops, Frisbee football, croquet and visits to cemeteries whose gravestones cried in aguish with the words “Lost at Sea.” Cookouts and S’mores on the beach welcomed cooler air and the setting sun.
On Cape Jellison a “beach” might be a 200 yard long slip of narrow land covered with gull-split shells, pebbles, glacial rocks and tide pools. The children braved the icy water and spent a night camped on a small island created when high tide rolled in over the sandbar separating it from us panicked parents on the mainland.
Gathering sea glass, metaphorically labeled “Mermaid’s Tears,” occupied hours of bent-over searching. These pieces of broken bottles tossed from ships onto the waves were tumbled smooth before washing ashore. Their soft browns, whites, greens and scarcer reds and blues fill bowls and lamp bases that sit in our homes, keeping the cape alive in us.
The children have grown up as we have grown old, but these joys remain in memory as vivid as when we lived them. We have new joys now – reading in an Adirondack chair gazing at the river, watching fledglings leave their nest tucked into porch eaves, a Shakespeare play on the stone-block interior of nearby Civil War era Fort Knox, hunts for finds at used book shops and a meal at Young’s Lobster Pound shared with these friends whose wisdom in coming here so enriched our lives.
Just off Cape Jellison is Bucksport, which greeted us this year with a large sign. An arrow pointed toward Bar Harbor, and the sign read “Beaten Path.” But another sign and arrow pointed into town and its shops and glistening small harbor. It was not a subtle hint about where to spend our time.
As I sat silently on the porch on our last day here this year, wildflowers swayed gently in the breeze and the glistening river beckoned. Such moments in which we permit ourselves to do nothing else are another Cape Jellison gift. As the writer Edward deBono once put it:
“There is no hurry –
Like the empty space in a Chinese painting,
The time in which nothing
Seems to be happening
Also has its purpose.”
Generations have moved on and through this landscape, as we have, but it remains to greet those in search - and in need - of its charms.
Photo Credit: Cape Jellison, Carol Donsky Newell
