There is, of course, no one most beautiful place on earth. The judgment is entirely subjective. But for me, Mount Desert Island is that place.
I write these words on a late August day. What I call the summer symphony is in full swing as the incoming tide pounds steadily against the rocky coast, the bell buoy in the harbor clangs, and the ocean breeze swishes softly through the trees.
The sky is a light, cloudless blue. The temperature will reach the seventies this afternoon and dip to fifty tonight. The trees and plants, nourished by a wet spring and summer, are deep green. The cold ocean changes from gray to green to foaming white as it nears then crashes against the granite blocks on the shore. The air is clean and pungent with the odor of Maine: salty ocean mixed with spruce and fir trees. The forests, the mountains, and the ocean meet in a rugged beauty that pleases the senses and refreshes the spirit.
Long before the white man, the Indians of the Penobscot tribe summered on the island they called Pemetic, or “Sloping Land.” In 1524 the explorer Verrazano called the region Acadia, apparently after a place in ancient Greece. The name Mount Desert came from the great French explorer Samuel de Champlain, who landed there in 1604. Viewed from the sea the granite outcroppings on the tops of several of the island’s mountains could be confused for patches of desert sand. Thus the name “the Island of the Mountain Deserts.” As I look out my window I try to imagine a French sailing vessel captained by Champlain, gliding slowly toward the island, just as it did almost 410 years ago.
Champlain could not have missed the island, as it is by far the largest along the Maine coast. Indeed it is the third largest off the coast of the continental United States, being exceeded in land area only by Long Island and Martha’s Vineyard.
Like other places in Maine and eastern Canada, Mount Desert Island was the scene of conflict between the French and British. Although many of its landmarks bear French names, reflecting their early presence, it, like most of the rest of Maine, was eventually controlled and settled by the British. As one historian noted, the French brought Jesuits to the New World, while the British brought guns, so the outcome was inevitable. The island’s early growth centered on shipbuilding and fishing. Around the middle of the nineteenth century its cool, clear weather and beautiful scenery began to attract summer visitors.
Soon the island was “discovered,” and the rich and famous of their day came and built large mansions, which, no matter how pretentious, were always described as “cottages.” They created a lively (if class-conscious) social scene. One commentator described the period between 1880 and World War I as “the golden days,” which were ended by “the servant problem and the income tax.” Although perhaps not golden, the island continued as a preserve for the wealthy. Two things changed that: the great fire of 1947 and the creation of Acadia National Park. From May to October 1947 there was no rain. Forests across the state were the driest in centuries, and many areas suffered from extensive fires. One of them was Mount Desert Island. About a third of the structures in Bar Harbor, the island’s largest town, were destroyed, as were large portions of the island’s forests. Many of the most elegant mansions were never rebuilt. To be sure, there remain many large, attractive, and expensive homes on the island, but the gaudy, golden age was over, never to return.
Charles W. Eliot set in motion the events that led to the creation of a national park on Mount Desert Island. Then president of Harvard, Eliot, a summer resident of the island, took two steps in 1901 that were to prove decisive. He and a group of like-minded people obtained a state charter for a “public reservation” society to acquire land in the area for public use, and he recruited George Dorr to run the society. A lifelong bachelor whose consuming passion was conservation, Dorr inherited a fortune and spent it and his life acquiring land on Mount Desert Island for public use. Tireless, persistent, considered by many egocentric, Dorr gave of his own land and bought more with his funds and those donated by others.
In 1913 he had to confront and defeat a bill introduced in the state legislature to annul the Public Reservation charter. The experience unsettled him and convinced him that the only way to preserve the area that had been acquired was to create a national park: the state might undo what he did, but it could not undo an act of the federal government. After three years of effort by Dorr and others, President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation on July 8, 1916, creating the Sieur de Monts National Monument area. Soon thereafter it was converted into a national park, eventually to be known as Acadia. It was the first national park to be created east of the Mississippi River, and the only one created entirely by private donations of land to the government.
Dorr was helped immeasurably by John D. Rockefeller Jr., who had come to the island at the turn of the century. He liked it and built a hundred-room “cottage” here. He also built fifty-seven miles of roads (now called carriage paths because when built they were intended to be used only by horse-drawn carriages, not motorized vehicles), which traverse large portions of the island, providing scenic hiking, biking, and horseback-riding opportunities. Rockefeller also provided much needed funding for further acquisition by Dorr. Today his son David and several members of his family maintain summer homes on the island and continue their family’s impressive legacy of philanthropy and conservation.
Acadia is one of the most-visited national parks in the country, even though it is one of the smallest. Millions of people come each year, rich and poor alike, to enjoy the island’s beauty. I became involved with the park when, as a U.S. senator, I wrote and obtained enactment of legislation establishing for the first time a permanent boundary for the park, resolving other contentious issues, and ending nearly a quarter century of conflict between the park and the surrounding towns. It took me six years and required many trips to the island, where I had dozens of meetings with local and national park officials. I negotiated many land swaps between the park and the towns and encouraged some private landowners to donate, then or at a future date, some of their property to the park. That experience instilled in me a love for the island and its people that has grown over the years.
That feeling has been enhanced by many humorous events. One of my favorite stories is about a visit to the Jordan Pond House. It is a restaurant that has existed for decades within the park. It is a lovely setting, the restaurant on a ridge above a long lawn that slopes down to the heavily forested shores of the small, picturesque body of water known as Jordan Pond. The original structure burned down in the late 1970s. When I entered the Senate I helped obtain funding to complete the rebuilding, and it has since been one of my favorite stops on the island.
One warm August day early in my Senate tenure, I agreed to meet two close friends there. One of them, Don Peters, a builder and contractor from Portland, arrived just as I did. We waited for a long time for our mutual friend, Marshall Stern. Frustrated, we decided to call Marshall to see if he was in fact coming. We walked to a spot near the restaurant’s men’s room where we knew a pay telephone was located. A man was standing at the phone, on which he had propped up a card with several phone numbers written on it. He was having trouble getting the pay phone to work. As he pumped in quarters without response he started banging the side of the phone box with his open hand and cursing. To his wife standing next to him he unleashed a torrent of criticism in which he made clear that he, from Boston, didn’t care much for the “yokels” in Maine who didn’t even know how to properly maintain a pay telephone. Gradually the line grew, and the small crowd watched and listened in embarrassed silence. Suddenly the man standing behind me tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, aren’t you Senator Mitchell?” I acknowledged that I was, and he extended his hand toward me, saying, “I’m Bob. I’d like to shake your hand.” We did, then he asked, “Are you working or are you on vacation?” I told him I was there on vacation and had just stopped to have lunch with a couple of friends. Then, since it seemed like the polite thing to do, I asked him the same question.
“Oh,” he said, “I’m working.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a telephone repairman.”
It took me a moment to digest that, then he added:
“When that fella from Boston runs out of quarters I’m gonna fix that phone.”
He then leaned forward and said to me, in a low and conspiratorial tone, “Senator, if I was you I’d go downstairs and use the phone there. I know it’s working ’cause I just fixed it.”
We went downstairs and called Marshall. He eventually arrived and we spent a pleasant hour laughing over the telephone story.
The wily and resourceful Mainer who outsmarts the big-city slicker is a staple of Maine humor. Another story I like to tell makes that point. Two smart young men graduated from Harvard during the Great Depression. Unable to find work, they took an old printer and rebuilt it so that it produced counterfeit twenty-dollar bills. This enabled them to live comfortably, and one of them bought a small summer cottage in Maine. One summer day the machine malfunctioned and produced a batch of eighteen-dollar bills. One said, “We’ll never be able to pass these, so I’ll destroy them.”
“No,” said the other, “I’m going to Maine next week. I’ll get them past the old guy at the country store near my cottage.” When he got to the country store he asked the old man if he’d had a good winter.
“No problems,” the old man answered. He then told the old man he needed a favor.
“No problem,” the old man answered.
“Can you change this eighteen-dollar bill?”
“No problem,” the old man answered again, “you want two nines or three sixes?”
Out my window the Cranberry Islands, and other islands beyond them, stretch like stepping-stones to the east, across the cold gray waters of the North Atlantic Ocean. Over the horizon lies Europe and beyond that the Middle East. For a half century I traveled to those and other distant lands where I met, talked, and worked with people of many languages, religions, races, and colors.
It has been a long way home. But no matter how far from Maine I went, I was at all times rooted in the place of my birth, my upbringing, my family, and my values. Fate and hope carried my mother and my father’s parents many thousands of miles, from Lebanon and Ireland to Maine. Here my parents lived lives that were very hard, but meaningful. They had neither wealth nor status, but they achieved their goal and their efforts were validated by their children. Because of them I have been fortunate beyond measure, for I have lived the American Dream.
In Northern Ireland I chaired three separate but related negotiations over a five-year period. In the Middle East I completed two tours of duty over three years. In one the result was a peace agreement. In the other conflict continues.
Both were long, difficult, and draining, physically and emotionally. The separation from my family, especially after Andrew and Claire were born, was especially hard. A parent’s love for his or her children cannot be understood until it is experienced. But, ultimately, both were rewarding because I was able to serve my country, in and from which I have received more than my share of benefits.
It is pure coincidence that my mother was born in Lebanon and my father’s parents were born in Ireland. But traveling to and working in Ireland and the Middle East enabled me to learn about my parents’ heritage: to walk the land of my ancestors; to meet the people among whom they lived; to learn of their hopes, fears, aspirations. It helped me fill an inner void that I didn’t know existed before I travelled to Ireland and Lebanon. All this I came to regard as an extra benefit from serving my country.
On the hundreds of long flights to and from Ireland and the Middle East, I tried to imagine my mother’s early life: what was it like for a young girl growing up in the hills of southern Lebanon? What was her parents’ life like, Arabic-speaking Christians living in a Muslim-majority land? I asked the same questions while daydreaming about my father, who never knew his parents and went from a Catholic orphanage in the center of Boston to the cold forests of northern Maine where, as a boy, he worked among men. I wondered about his parents: much has been written about the Irish immigrants who succeeded in the new land, little about the many who failed. Their lives often were as hard and barren as the huge rock formations of the west coast of Ireland. Had that been the fate of my grandparents and their parents?
On a recent flight across the Atlantic, I saw the sun rising in Dublin as the plane touched down. I was drowsy but my mind was awake with thoughts, dreams, fantasies, about those whose blood is now mine. I thought of stories of Ireland and Lebanon that always make me smile when they come to mind.
I was at a reception in my honor at a resort hotel just below the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland. A bridge between them had been destroyed during the Troubles. It had been rebuilt and was now to be called the Peace Bridge and named after me. The large and friendly crowd of well-wishers peppered me with questions about my father and his family. Most reacted with surprise and disbelief when I answered that I really didn’t know much about his family history; to them, history is a living part of the present. A couple of them suggested that I retain them, both in the business that specializes in genealogy, mostly for wealthy Irish-Americans. With a twinkle in his eye and a sly smile on his face, the host of the event, a local official said, “Senator, if you pay them enough they’ll connect you to Brian Boru” (an ancient warrior-king well-known in Irish history). We all laughed. In other words, it’s all hokum!
On the other hand, maybe it’s not. The other story is about my mother. When we were growing up she often said to her children, softly and with nostalgia, “You should see Lebanon. It’s so beautiful. The air is pure, the water is clear, the mountains, the forests, even the flowers smell better. Oh Lebanon, my Lebanon.” After arriving in the United States at the age of eighteen, she returned to Lebanon only once, late in her life, after my father died. My sister Barbara accompanied her as they returned to the village of Bkassine, where they attended a reception and dinner with relatives and friends in the house in which my mother had grown up. Late in the evening my mother was asked to say something. According to Barbara, my mother stood, paused, looked out at the large, happy crowd, and, with great emotion and a broad smile, said, “You should see America. It’s so beautiful. The air is pure, the water is clean, the mountains, the forests, even the flowers smell better. Oh America, my America.”
She had little formal education; she couldn’t read or write English and spoke it with a heavy accent; she worked her entire adult life on the night shift in a textile mill; but she was generous and loving, strong and wise, and she understood clearly the meaning of America.
To me, no one has ever said it better.
Oh America, my America.