|
A Good Walk Unspoiled: Exploring Biological Communities In Maine
Waiting for the sun, we danced about in the cold predawn dimness atop the stone coping lining the top of Cadillac Mountain. When the sun finally rose, it was spectacular. Rose, then red, then orange highlighted the endless islands and coves of Downeast Maine, set Frenchman's Bay on fire, and illuminated the sleeping village of Bar Harbor below us. With this sunrise our adventure on Mount Desert Island ended. We boarded our two College vans and began the eleven-and-a-half-hour ride to Chestertown.
We had arrived two weeks earlier--eleven students, two recent graduates acting as teaching assistants, and myself. Our goals were to learn some biology, see as much as possible of Acadia National Park, and have some fun doing it. I am happy to say that we succeeded on all counts. I had designed the course, Community Ecology of Coastal Maine, in my imagination well before I took a position with the biology department at Washington College. My wife, Vikki, and I had spent the summer of 1996 doing research at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory and getting to know the park on the weekends. By the end of that summer, I had decided that if the power to do so was ever put in my hands, I was going to share this wonderful island and its bounty of biological communities with students.
The students knew from the start that we would be doing quite a bit of hiking during the course, and I had warned them repeatedly of two things over the past two months; buy your boots early and break them in, and bring warm clothes! Mid-afternoon of our first day found us at the top of Cadillac Mountain, huddled behind a rock out of the wind to protect ourselves from the 24°F wind chill. To their credit, everyone was dressed warmly, most more comfortably than I was, and there were only two blisters among the lot. On our way back down the mountain, we saw a van from Gettysburg College in the parking lot and, not far from it, a gaggle of students being lectured to by a professorial-looking fellow. We hiked by in fine spirits, hoisting our packs and weathering our aches with small secret smiles on our faces. We had gotten here the hard way.
By design, each of our forays into the park led us to a distinct community (a community is a biological term for all of the species interacting in a given area). As a result, each day was unique in some way. We hiked through darkened hemlock forests so thick that the sky was lost overhead, and through sunny glades of waist-high grass and birch trees with bark that shone white. We visited a magnificent old-growth spruce forest where the canopy was a hundred feet overhead and the ground was clear of undergrowth, but carpeted in inches of soft pine needles and lush green moss. The hush of this place reminded me of nothing so much as the massive grandeur of a cathedral.
To reach our goals, we scrambled up millennia-old rockslides, traversed ever-steepening switchback trails, navigated boulder-strewn stream beds and narrow water-carved ravines. The tops of most of the mountains in Acadia National Park are bald granite slopes dotted with low, cling bushes and twisted dwarf pines carved like nightmare topiaries by the extreme winds. It was these bare peaks which led Samuel De Champlain, a French captain, to name the island "L'Isle des Monte Déserts," the island of deserted mountains. The open nature of these peaks results in spectacular 360° panoramic views of other glacier-carved peaks and lakes as well as the ocean and numerous small islands surrounding Mount Desert Island.
On a cool, rainy day we visited the boreal bog. The weather worked in our favor, as it kept the mosquitoes down. If you have never seen a native Maine mosquito, let's just say they are rumored to be capable of flying off with small children. To access the bog we had to cross through a stretch of dead black spruce forest, where the trees were so close-set that the branches tugged at our ponchos and packs as we moved. More than one of us voiced the opinion that we expected the flying monkeys of the Wicked Witch of the West to descend upon us at any moment. Once onto the bog proper, we were no longer standing on solid ground. A boreal bog is not a place of mud; rather, it is a tangle of interwoven moss hummocks literally floating over shallow water. When we bounced up and down, the ground moved with us and we could see the ground ripple outward, like water from the site of a dropped pebble. There was no exhilarating climb to reach this place, nor were there spectacular views, but this may have been the most unique community we visited, and as such it touched each of us.
In addition to the plethora of terrestrial communities we visited, we also had the opportunity to visit a number of shoreline marine communities, including the rocky intertidal zone and tide pools, both rare on the East Coast of the U.S. The curiosity, enthusiasm and wonder that characterized the students during this trip were never more evident than during our visit to the tidal riffle at Ship Harbor. At this site the tide ebbed from and flooded into a shallow embayment through a narrow channel. The tide never fully exposed the rocks over which it flowed, which resulted in a rich and diverse marine community. Under every rock was an array of marine invertebrates more diverse than many of the aquariums I have visited--starfish, sea cucumbers, brittle stars, sea anemones, marine annelids, sea urchins, mussels, snails and others. The students were enchanted, the happy babble of their voices carrying the excitement of a day at Disney World, and all this over the wonders of biology!
As the sun rose behind us and the feeling returned to my fingertips and nose, I privately assessed the course. The lecture and exams had gone well, our evening discussions of the days' events had been productive, all the reports summarizing the data collected during our hikes had been finished . . . all that flashed though my mind in an instant. What played over and over in my head were the moments of wonder and joy we had shared; the places we had been, the paths we had hiked, the sights we had seen. Perhaps the only thing better than experiencing a thing of beauty is being able to share it with someone else who appreciates it.
When he is not hiking through biological communities, Martin Connaughton enjoys taking students in his marine and estuarine biology class out on the Chester River.
|
