Village Burying Ground, Bar Harbor

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A month from now, Main St. in Bar Harbor is going to be a busy place, sidewalks thick with shoppers and walkers with their coffee and ice cream cones. People will gather at the well-trimmed Village Green. The park at the end of Main, Agamont Park, named for a storied 19th-century hotel on the site that burned down long ago, will be alive with the pleasant sounds of people on vacation, taking in the view of the harbor. Boats will ply the harbor. Lobsters will die en masse to make their appearance on the menus of Bar Harbor restaurants.

One place in town that will not be busy come high season, just as it wasn’t busy a month ago when I visited — and was the only living person there — is the Village Burying Ground, which is a minute’s walk from Main St., tucked away on a small slice of land between two churches, Bar Harbor Congregational and St. Saviour’s Episcopal.

“Established before 1790, this cemetery holds in many unmarked and unknown graves the remains of those courageous men and women pioneers on the frontier of Downeast Maine,” says a sign on site, put there by the Bar Harbor Village Improvement Association.

“Sea captains, fishermen, shipwrights and hotelmen, selectmen and legislators, their wives and children, and the occasional sailer [sic] dying far from home also rest here.”

One of those sea captains, Israel Higgins (d. 1823).

Capt. Higgins, son of Eden (later called Bar Harbor) founder Israel Higgins, was lost at sea. “Israel was considered a master mariner and served as an Eden selectman in 1802, 1803, and 1809,” notes the blog Adventures in Cemetery Hopping. “He was in command of the schooner Julia Ann (his son Seth was also aboard), thought to be the first ship built in Bar Harbor in 1809. Israel and Seth died at sea on March 29, 1823 about 25 miles south of Sandy Hook, N.J., which is about 600 miles south of Bar Harbor.”

His son Stephen seems to have escaped his father and brother’s fate. At least, no mention of perishing at sea.

Capt. James Hamor (d. 1873).

Lived to be 89. In those older days, an old sea dog who liked to hang out in the technically illegal bars in Bangor and tell harrowing and probably exaggerated stories about his seafaring youth? One of those old sea dogs who didn’t discuss the old days much? Did he regard steamships as unworthy of real seamen, or take positive joy in hearing about progress in seafaring?

Stones two by two. Maybe not coupled in life, but they are now.

Many stones are on their way to disintegration, as usual with a cemetery that goes back this far.

Dark rectangular slate, as seen in a lot of New England, though no others in this cemetery that I noticed, except for a handful of lighter-colored rectangles.

A memorial to Union soldiers from Eden, erected in 1897, ordered from a catalog. Attributed to Cook & Watkins of Boston, memorial makers.

The village paid for most of it, though the public at large donated. Their efforts were probably pushed along by the idea that we’d better get around to this now, what with all the graybeard vets.

Bar Harbor, Maine

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I might be wrong, but I don’t think this is canonical Popeye.

It is Maine Popeye. He’s a sailorman, after all, and has probably cracked open a few lobsters in his time. Or so we can imagine, free of ridiculous ideas about canon. Applying canon to Popeye only goes to show how silly the notion of pop culture canon is, but that’s a subject for another time. During the afternoon of April 16, I spent a few hours chilling in Bar Harbor, Maine, where I encountered the lobster eatin’ Popeye over a closed restaurant. Chilling had a literal component, too, since it was overcast and in the low- to mid-40s F.

Consider the lobster. Bar Harbor certainly does.

The standing lobster touts for an ice cream and coffee shop. It was open, unlike about two-thirds of the businesses on Main St. Ice cream wasn’t going to hit the spot that day, but the shop’s hot chocolate did.

Even Bar Harbor fire hydrants have that snappy lobster color, almost.

Near the water, a display of lobster trap buoys.

This structure is actually a few miles out of town, but I had to stop to look at the buoys.

As a resort town, Bar Harbor is only partly open in April. In some places on Main Street, workmen were getting stores ready for the summer.

At Cool as a Moose gift shop, note the leftover cardboard in the window. I’d have bought post cards there, just for the name, but it wasn’t open.

Streetviews.

The best thing about Main St. before high season is that parking is available and free. Municipal signs say that parking fees kick in on May 15 every year. By then, which is to say the day after tomorrow, I’ll bet parking isn’t much available any more either.

The harbor. Not very busy.

More detail.

Passersby have decided this is the place for stickers.

No Buc-ee’s that I noticed, but give it time.

Acadia National Park: The Woods

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The Park Loop Road in Acadia NP is a fine drive (1) if there aren’t many other cars and (2) you take it easy around those curves. In that, it’s no different than a lot of rural roads. But there’s also the bonus of passing through thick Maine woods. There are brief views of the ocean from the road, but mostly you’re tooling through evergreens.

Through patches of deciduous trees as well.

Acadia National Park, April 16, 2026

Periodically, the road crosses under handsome bridges.

This made me wonder: bridges for what? Soon I learned that the park not only has a hard-surface road snaking through, but also a network of carriage trails. A lot of them. The bridges are for them.

“Forty-five miles of rustic carriage roads, the gift of philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. and family, weave around the mountains and valleys of Acadia National Park,” says the NPS. “Rockefeller, a skilled horseman, wanted to travel on motor-free byways via horse and carriage into the heart of Mount Desert Island. His construction efforts from 1913 to 1940 resulted in roads with sweeping vistas and close-up views of the landscape.”

It was barely the season for the paved road, and I suspect few visitors were on the carriage roads either. I noticed that the entrance to the Wildwood Stables, a facility that supports carriage riding, and which can be glimpsed from the road, was still closed. A carriage ride through Arcadia NP might be an grand experience, but maybe not in April.

The woods alongside the road.

Driving is one thing, but I also wanted to walk. I found my way to Jordan Pond for that purpose.

Jordan Pond is a remnant of the latest Ice Age. According to Wiki, it counts as a tarn. Even better, an oligotrophic tarn, a term that makes my day. Even better to know that I visited one, or rather another one, though it simply means a body of water without much in the way of aquatic plants.

Near the pond, I found patches of snow.

“Oligotrophic lakes are most common in cold, sparsely developed regions that are underlain by crystalline igneous, granitic bedrock,” the entry says. “Due to their low algal production, these lakes consequently have very clear waters, with high drinking-water quality.”

I had my own drinking water as I walked the trails near the pond.

An easy trail. At one point, it crossed a creek feeding into the pond.

There were too many interesting tree roots to ignore them.

“Roots are typically at least half of a plant’s biomass, but you wouldn’t know it given how little scientific research has been devoted to these critical tendrils,” says the Smithsonian magazine. “Only recently have scientists given plant roots their day in the sun — in fields like collections research, climate science and microbiology.”

Or, in the case of the hardy trees of coastal Maine, their day in the fog.

Acadia National Park: The Coast

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We live on the crust of the Earth, and what do crusts do? Crumble. Especially when moving water has anything to do with it, as it does along the coast of Maine. Famously so.

I arrived at the crumbly coastline of Acadia National Park on the morning of April 16. The date is important for only one reason: Park Loop Road, the main scenic drive through the park, opens for the season every year on April 15.

Acadia NP occupies about half of Mount Desert Island and some other nearby peninsula acreage and small islands. The morning of the 16th broke damp and foggy and chilly. From my lodging in the sizable town of Ellsworth, Maine, which is on the mainland near Mount Desert Island, I made my way to the island, then Bar Harbor, then the entrance to Park Loop Road, stopping only for a wonderful breakfast sandwich at one of the few places along the way that was open, Farmstand Coffee House.

The visitors center at the park entrance wasn’t open either. The NPS missed making a sale of post cards to me. By the time I got to the park, the weather was better: slightly less damp and slightly less foggy and slightly less chilly.

Such is Maine in spring. I didn’t mind. In fact, the damp chill meant few other people had come that day. Chilly but no ice underfoot. I like to think that it all melted by April 15. Or maybe on April 15.

I sent a few pictures to Tom in Austin taken while I visiting Acadia NP.

He answered: “Wow. Fabulous. Choosing to visit that national park before May is a bold decision. Looks like you got good weather, though.”

Bold? Maybe. To boldly go where many vacationers have gone before. And will again, real soon.

I didn’t drive particularly fast along Park Loop Road. Little traffic for one thing, too much of a risk of a car-on-tree encounter for another thing, so curvy is it. Gnarly, you could say. The drive, whose construction John D. Rockefeller Jr. facilitated, winds but does not climb much as it follows the curves of the shore. The scenic stops are close to each other, since in national park terms, Acadia is a touch on the small side. Despite that it hardly lacks variety.

Beginning with the rocky shores you’d expect. The fog that day was a nice Maine touch. The foggy shores of Maine. There’s a song title for an AI song writing program: “The Foggy Shores of Maine.” Sad song about a solider dreaming of home on these shores? It worked for “Galveston.”

Boulders and sizable slabs, on their way to being pebbles and sand.

A feature that wears its name well: Thunder Hole.

A loud place, Thunder Hole, the waves bashing the rocks in crash-splashes, followed by the whistling, sucking whoosh as water pulls away from the rocks, followed by another bash against the rocks, all before you can count to three.

You can get closer to Thunder Hole behind the (relative) safety of rails, but that won’t keep you from a good drenching. Not that day, anyway. I kept my distance, and let the sound come to me in its noisy fury.

The park has a sand beach, called on the maps, Sand Beach.

I take that as an indication that most of the shore in these parts is topsy-turvy with boulders. I believe it.

Lilacia Park ’26

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Finally a warm Saturday. Finally a warm day of any position on the calendar. They’ve been spotty lately. Warned that the day would be warm, we went to Lilacia Park in Lombard early in the afternoon, something we do every few years in mid-May, for nearly 20 years now.

Most of the tulips were gone, but true to the park name, lilacs are in bloom in profusion. Not just colorful to see, but put your nose close for a fragrant moment.

Lilaicia Park is a crown jewel of suburban parks, and yet not overcrowded on a pleasant Saturday during peak lilac bloom. Just busy.

One of these years, some fool influencer or two might make Lilacia an It Spot, and the crowds will show up in ridiculous numbers. Or considering its location in the thick of the suburbs – the sort of place where influencers might grow up, but never consider interesting enough to point their cameras – that isn’t very likely? I couldn’t say.

The view from over the water feature.

The water feature.

Over 700 lilacs and 35,000 tulips annually, according to the Lombard Park District. Plus some other flowers, for that extra variety.

In groups.

And singly.

Good to make it back. We met Kevin there this time around, at our suggestion, who came from the fairly close other western suburb of Downers Grove. He’d never heard of the park, and so I was glad to introduce him to it.

Belfast, Maine

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You can’t call it an obituary exactly, but not many people get a writeup like Eric R. Overlock, who died at 17 in Belfast, Maine, in 1999. The entire thing is worth a read, as are the two other entries on a Substack by one Matthew Hurley.

Eric Overlock was the toughest kid in Belfast, Maine. He was also the coolest. We grew up skateboarding. He was talented and sponsored in the ’90s when that was a big deal. His nickname was Big Poppa, like The Notorious BIG. He could fight, smoked cigarettes, and was dropping acid at 15…

I learned a lot from Eric, but it was from him I first learned that anyone, and eventually everyone, can and does die.

When I arrived in Belfast on April 15, a sign directed me to a public parking lot off Main Street. Next to the parking lot is the Eric J. Overlock Memorial Skatepark, marked by Eric’s plaque.

No one else was around, so I spent a leisurely few minutes documenting the skatepark at that moment in time. Like the Cadillac Ranch, I figure it changes according to the whims of Belfast graffitists.

Whatever the paint job, a world as strange to me as parallel bars or luge or the flying trapeze. How again does anyone learn it without serious bone breaks?

The skatepark and parking lot are on a long slope to the Passagassawakeag River. According to the Piscataquis Observer, “The Voice of Rural Maine,” it’s pronounced puh-SAG-uh-suh-WAH-keg. Which is just fun to say, once you get the gist. Wonder whether there’s a clipped version locally.

Main Street retail wasn’t quite closed for the winter, but mostly so for the chilly shoulder season. I expect the Moody Dog is gearing up for the summer season even now.

Main Street was very much worth a look anyway.

A handsome edifice at Main and High Streets. Maine seems to have, or had, a way with bricks.

As a settlement, Belfast is old enough to have been burned by British forces during the Revolution. Afterward, revivals and declines have come and gone, as industries cycle through the decades: shipbuilding, seafood processing, railroading, shoe making, poultry, credit card processing, shipbuilding again and tourism.

The Cooper Collection of US Railroad History

The building at the five-street intersection of Main, Church and Beaver Streets.

Details. Is Belfast a hotbed of anarchism?

But you can mock a two-faction system without being an anarchist. But note, back at the skatepark.

How about nanny-statism? I don’t know that you can plausibly accuse Maine of that, but still. A crosswalk example.

In case you were wondering.

What do you know, Maine was my first ever Belfast, not counting the HMS Belfast.

The Other Portland

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More of my idiosyncratic logic: Before last month, I’d been to Portland, Oregon, but I’d never been to Portland, Maine, and that would never do. I rectified the situation early on the afternoon of April 15 as I traversed Maine near the coast, partly on US 1. It was a short visit, so I focused on the historic downtown of Portland, known as the Old Port, even though I understand it still has elements of a working port.

Still, much of the Old Port is indeed old buildings, many handsomely repurposed in our time for one sort of retail or another. Wander around only a short time, and the overall impression is bricks. Everywhere bricks. Buildings of various sizes and shapes, made of bricks.

Even buildings of various vintages, made of bricks. Most are older buildings, or course, built one brick after another by masons themselves long gone. But their expert brickwork abides.

There are newer brick buildings too. At least, I think they’re newer — some of these buildings might be a combination of older structures with newer additions. It’s a little hard to tell. But anyway, more bricks.

Portland, Maine
Portland, Maine

Streets paved with bricks.

Sidewalks paved with bricks.

That one was a little tricky to walk. But I was paying attention.

Among the bricks and other hard surfaces, other details.

It was in Portland that I began to get a sense of the strength of Maine’s regional identity. Growing up in Texas, I know expressions of regional identity when I see them, and I saw a lot in Maine.

Portland, Maine

Texas has the longhorn. Maine has the lobster.

Stockbridge, Massachusetts

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Not long ago, I wondered how accurate the lyrics of “Alice’s Restaurant Massacre” were on one specific point. I had my reasons.

You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant
Walk right in, it’s around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track

Seems like a convenient rhyme, but that’s not all. Google Maps tells me that the site of Alice’s Restaurant is about a half a mile from a railroad track. I didn’t save the scale on this map, but the distance is correct. This is mildly amazing. Who expects geographical accuracy from a song lyric?

That morning, April 14, I’d extracted myself from Midtown Manhattan via various sorts of transport, retrieving my car at long-term parking at Newark International, and planned to spend the night in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Though New England isn’t large, it is molasses when it comes to driving through its densely settled areas, and first I had to get out of New Jersey and New York, then cross Massachusetts. All that meant an all-day drive. Stockbridge, Massachusetts, former home of Alice’s Restaurant, was a stop along the way.

Near the eastern edge of New York state, I cruised north on the Taconic State Parkway.

That sounded good, I thought when I noted the name on a map. It was. Budding greenery, smooth driving, no trucks. Or that many other cars, the further north you go. Construction started about 100 years ago, at the urging of then private citizen Franklin D. Roosevelt. The parkway is in the same league as the Natchez Trace Parkway or the Blue Ridge Parkway, though only about a quarter as long as either.

Once I’d gone far enough north, I took connecting roads to the Massachusetts Turnpike. Stockbridge, which is slightly south of the turnpike, counted more-or-less as a midway point on my day’s drive. As I entered town via Massachusetts 102, I noticed a tower. A stone tower, exuding 19th-century New England sturdiness. Its clock was wrong.

The Children’s Chimes Tower, a 19th-century bell tower built on the site of the town’s original church. A 19th-century replacement for that church stands near the bell tower, looking as New England as can be.

The First Congregational Church UCC. Remarkably, it was open.

Musicians were practicing, or rather seemed to be wrapping up a practice. They paid no attention to me as I looked around.

Jonathan Edwards was the church’s second pastor. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” Jonathan Edwards? Yes.

Across the road from the church and freestanding bell tower – which doesn’t chime, except in the summer – is the town cemetery.

“One of the earliest burials was the first minister, John Sergeant, who died in 1749,” says the Stockbridge Library. “Members of the Mohican tribe who joined the church also were buried here. Twenty years later, discussions began about ways to enclose the burial area to keep out cattle, horses, and pigs. It wasn’t until 1853, however, that a new organization in town, the Laurel Hill Association, took on the responsibility to clean and protect the area.”

Route 102 turns into Main Street, with its shops, hotels, and other establishiments.

And, around the back (off Main St., that is), just a half a mile from the railroad track, is Theresa’s Stockbridge Café.

Closed for the day.

US 1 New Jersey

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Driving the entire length of US 1 is more logistics that I want to take on at the moment, or maybe ever, but I figure I get a little of the same satisfaction doing it in sections. US 1 from Trenton to Newark, which I drove the afternoon of April 10, isn’t what anyone would call a scenic road, but that I’d say it’s better than the New Jersey Turnpike, whose main scenery is tail lights of other cars.

US 1 in New Jersey is four or six lanes most of the way through, generally is a divided highway, passing large cross streets, retail agglomerations, railroad tracks paralleling for a time, car dealerships, sporadic stretches of forested or other undeveloped land, thick traffic through New Brunswick especially, more than a few Jersey lefts and an uptick in spaghetti interchanges the closer you are to Newark. Stops were for traffic lights, but not too much for simple congestion. Take that, New Jersey Turnpike.

During the drive, I chanced on a radio call-in show that asked callers for stories about crashing wedding receptions, sneaking into off-limits places or other common enough rule infractions, such as taking food into movie theaters. One man claimed to have crashed a reception with a couple of friends, none dressed for the occasion; the father of the bride took a cotton to them and made sure they were well fed and good and drunk before long. One woman claimed to take entire meals to the movies and eat them there, and never being asked to leave. Now this was local radio, a real New Jersey thing to talk about.

Jan had told him many times, “It was you to me who taught:
In Jersey, anything’s legal as long as you don’t get caught.”

“Tweeter and the Monkey Man”, a group effort but clearly a Dylan song, is a brilliant example of a pseudo-ballad. A ballad tells a story, right? A pseudo-ballad seems to tell a story, but at some point near the end of the song, you wonder just what happened. Lyrically, not all of the pieces of the puzzle are available. “Crime and other weird behavior in New Jersey” is about a specific as you can get in this case.

In October, I’d spent a few hours wandering Yale’s stately lawns and buildings and the nearby cemetery. So it only stands to reason – if I’m the one doing the reasoning – that I also visit Princeton, a short way off US 1 not far from Trenton.

Stately buildings.

Early spring on the stately lawns.

Not the best collegiate manhole cover I’ve seen – that would be at Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbonnais, Illinois – but not bad.

Speak to the organ grinder, not the monkey.

A variation on, “Never hold discussion with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room,” which is widely attributed to Winston Churchill.

Princeton is west of US 1; Grovers Mill, New Jersey is to the east, also not far. I had to go there, too. Specifically, to a small park on a small lake in the unincorporated Grovers Mill. A short park trail includes information about Grovers Mills’ claim to fame: in Orson Welles’ version of War of the Worlds, it was the first place the Martians landed.

There’s a sizable plaque, a little bit hidden away, but I found it.

The township of West Windsor, in an unusual display of municipal imagination, erected the memorial in 1988, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the broadcast. Sculptor Thomas Jay Warren did the relief.

The entire script is on line.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars. The battle which took place tonight at Grovers Mill has ended in one of the most startling defeats ever suffered by any army in modern times; seven thousand men armed with rifles and machine guns pitted against a single fighting machine of the invaders from Mars. One hundred and twenty known survivors. The rest strewn over the battle area from Grovers Mill to Plainsboro, crushed and trampled to death under the metal feet of the monster, or burned to cinders by its heat ray. The monster is now in control of the middle section of New Jersey.

The New Jersey State House

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At the appointed time, I waited in a hallway whose entrance was off the New Jersey State House complex courtyard, expecting the tour to begin there. I started wondering about that assumption after a few minutes, and no one else, official or tourist, joined me in the room. But soon a capitol employee, a woman roughly my age, said she would take me to the beginning of the tour, which was through a couple of closed doors and down a stairway. We made small talk along the way. She asked, without using the word specifically, whether I was a capitol enthusiast. I said yes.

“I’ve been inside more than 40 state capitols,” I said. “And this one is the most like a fortress.”

I think she had a wry smile, as if to say, I’ve heard that a lot. If not quite in those words.

I’d made the 11 am tour of State House on April 10. The capitol building is impressive, as capitols tend to be, and directly fronting a sizable city street, as they tend not to be.

About an hour earlier, I’d wandered into what looked like a public door on State St. in downtown Trenton.

An imposing kind of place, but for those of us used to standalone capitol domes, the New Jersey State House is an odd duck.

A security guard pushing my age told me that casual visits to the capitol were not allowed, off limits and strictly verboten. Actually, he didn’t exactly say any of that, but he made it clear I had to go to the visitor center entrance about a half a block away and register there for a tour, as my only option for seeing the interior of the State House. He was pleasant enough, but I think a little annoyed at having to explain that for the nth time. A sign explaining all that outside the entrance would be the way I’d have handled that informational task, rather than putting the onus on a bored security guard, but I’m not from New Jersey.

I went to the visitor center. The next tour was at 11, nearly an hour in the future. That allowed me time to go look for the capitol dome. I knew there was one, but it mostly wasn’t visible from State St.

I took a stroll around the capitol grounds – the complex – or better yet, the compound. Eventually, I spotted more of the golden dome. Even then, it seemed hemmed in.

I also had time to stroll the block on State St. near the capitol. Nice.

Back at the visitors center, I was escorted through the complex’s courtyard. There, I was told, was the best view of the dome. It still seemed a little distant.

Then came my short wait in the hallway. Regarding my comment about this capitol being like a fortress, the woman leading me to the group acknowledged that security was indeed tight, had been for a long time, and by law the state police (I think) were in charge of it – even the governor had to abide by its dictates.

I joined the tour group and spent the next hour or so in the State House. From what the guide (a different woman) said, and what I saw, I’d say the Wiki text about the capitol is spot on:

The State House has experienced numerous expansions and renovations to meet the growing needs of the state since its original construction. Designed by Jonathan Doane, the original structure has seen architectural inputs from other notable architects across the centuries….

The New Jersey State House is unusual among state capitol buildings in the United States, the majority of which are reminiscent of the U.S. Capitol. The building consists of two parallel structures connected by the dome-capped rotunda, resembling the letter H, with its long arm parallel to State Street. A long portico wing, added by [architect John] Notman and subsequently enlarged, extends west from the rotunda toward the Delaware River. To this portico, a number of architecturally dissimilar, unusually shaped structures have been added. These structures have been the subject of subsequent renovations to blend them with the original wing.

The practical upshot of the agglomeration that is the New Jersey State House is that it’s hard to find your way around inside. That’s my assumption, anyway, as we wandered the corridors and took stairs here and there. Guess a guide was a good idea, after all.

The best way to see the dome is stand under it.

The floor under the dome. Note that Liberty has a Phrygian cap, just as Prosperity (Ceres) has a cornucopia. Also, Liberty and Prosperity look the same. A cogent argument could be made that they are indeed twins: go or come, buy or sell, be drunk or sober, as you please.

It’s a nice design for a state seal. Less so for a state flag, which I saw flying almost nowhere. At least it isn’t a state seal on a blue bedsheet.

About 10 years ago, this design won a competition for a new flag for New Jersey.

It’s a better flag, but does it really say New Jersey? Maybe the state’s distinctive outline, instead of a star? Anyway, the legislature hasn’t acted on flag redesign as yet.

The state General Assembly.

The state Senate.

More details from the capitol, such as fine secular stained glass, with a variation on the seal.

Many eagles.

Dragons supporting the balconies. Dragons?

Our guide also pointed out some capitol Easter eggs, to use a term the creators of such eggs – artisans whose names are lost to time – would not have used.

Such as an homage to a Great War solider, there on a staircase.