Dropping out in Blue Hill/Deer Isle, Maine

BY ANNE MATTHEWS

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If you crave the coastal maine distractions of the Route 1 corridor—the 24/7 crowds at Freeport’s L.L. Bean store, the clam shacks of Damariscotta, the discount malls of Searsport—then follow the state’s most crowded road from urban Portland to urbane Bar Harbor, 175 miles northeast. If you prefer the Maine of 40 years ago, turn off near Bucksport and follow Route 15 south as it threads past salt meadow and blueberry flat, spruce grove and fern glade, lily pond and lupine meadow, lobster pound and pottery studio. Side roads beckon all the way, nearly every one ending in a water view.

This glacier-scarred Penobscot Bay region is known as Blue Hill/Deer Isle. Route 15 runs down its rocky spine, south to the sea, for 38 nearly franchise-free miles. Unlike more developed corners of Maine, it remains a working landscape, a jigsawed coast rich in coves and islands, low on noise and neon, decidedly fond of privacy.

And thrifty with names. Blue Hill refers to four places: a hill, a village, a town, and a peninsula. A 1939 suspension bridge over Eggemoggin Reach ties the Blue Hill mainland to Deer Isle, which is actually two islands, Little Deer Isle and larger Deer Isle, linked by causeway. You’ll find four settlements: Sunshine, Sunset, the tidy clapboard town of Deer Isle, and the fishing port of Stonington, where immaculate white houses perch on pink granite ledges above the harbor and black lobsters sullenly rattle their dockside traps in the foggy dawn. “Deer Isle is like Avalon,” John Steinbeck decided in Travels With Charley. “It must disappear when you are not there.”

That lost-world quality has drawn idealists and urbanites to Blue Hill/Deer Isle byways for more than a century, usually in high summer: July and August are perfection here. But the September-October leaf season is wonderfully bracing, and in late fall there’s still time to wring some pleasure out of the area before the arrival of 40-inch snows and February gales that break windows and flood roads. After mid-September, hours do vary; some places close at first frost, some open year-round.

So most visitors remain migratory. Vacation compounds from Cape Rosier to Brooksville have sheltered generations of city rich, irreverently called the “summer complaints” by native Mainers. Certain out-of-towners do stay, and thrive, like Helen and Scott Nearing, 20th-century gurus of countercultural simplicity. They are said to have swung a dowsing pendulum over a map of Maine to find Blue Hill, and then they wrote Living the Good Life, the book that made the area a center of America’s back-to-the-land movement, emphasizing social justice, off-the-grid solutions, and daunting quantities of raw goat’s milk.

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