The song of a mountain

I think this walking around thing is starting to become a habit.

Yesternight I drove up to Bar Harbor - actually skipping a tango practica - to spend the night.  It was a kind of 24-hour vacation.

Rather shocking, in a way, to decide to visit.  My friend Patrick Fogarty, one of the Original Group at the Orchard, had left to open a unique little gift shop, called "A Little Mad".

I had asked if he'd be OK with my smudging his store with sweetgrass to give it good luck and he kindly agreed.

So that was my motivation.

That and a chance to see the incredible beauty of Mount Desert - is there really a mountain called "Desert"? - it's pronounced like "dessert", from what I can tell - but spelled like the kind with sand.

Oh well.

The timing was especially useful since this is the start of Memorial Day weekend and hordes of well-heeled, tony people will soon descend to take it over.

Now that I think on it, they're going to descend on Portland too - though we seem to see the infestation a bit later in the Summer.

The smudging itself was a lot of fun, in a spiritually serious way. I don't allow pictures to be taken during such a moment. It's not really a formal ceremony but there is something very personal in it for me, my feeling are very close to the surface.

That done I headed to the main Abbe Museum of Native Maine Culture.

But I never quite got there.

Actually there is a branch of the museum in Bar Harbor. I visited it after breakfast. The original museum is on the grounds of the Acadia National Park, just west of the town a few miles.

It was while here I realized that the park was woven, warp and woof, with hiking trails. And since, as always, I'd packed too many clothes I changed into some loose-fit shirts, got out my new hiking poles, checked the map and started off across the country.

The first trail, Jessup, you see in the first pic. After a bit of wandering it devolves into an amazing wooden walkway of perhaps a fifth of a mile, arrowing straight across a bog. The water runs down from Kebo Mountain, to the west, dozens of small rills that are fed both by springs in the hill and by the runoff from the last night's rain.

But as I approached the walkway, crossing a service road I saw a message carved deeply into a plank.

It announced the start of the Kebo trail and an unpaved path led off and up into the hill, fading away into the bright green of the trees.

This took me right up against the face of Kebo Mountain, one of the peaks guarding the approach to Cadillac Mountain.

The day was warm though very few bugs were out. Perhaps they were still getting themselves together.

The face of the mountain stretched up to my left. If I'd started off the trail to head up that way I would have been stopped easily

Huge rocks were scatted like ice cubes in their bowl in my 'fridge. It looked like someone - or something - had rolled them around like the dice of a giant, the kind used to decide which village gets destroyed, who dies by accident today, who finds true love or treasure (if that's not the same thing).

But some of those stones were big as a Volkswagon - an example is shown, rather like a menhir at Stonhenge but much, much larger.

And as I walked, poling myself surely and comfortable across the lower face of the mountain I began to hear, slowly and clearly, a long clear musical bass note, as if some huge bass singer was clearing his throat and then humming a tune, something so low that I couldn't actually hear it.

This was a bit odd, as I've still got a lot of my hearing left, even as my brain fails to catch up to it.

I've walked up two other "mountains" - Bradbury, in Pownal, about 17 miles north of Portland, and the hill behind Butternut Farm - call it "Butternut Mountain", behind the house of my friends Chuck and Nancy Brown-Fergus.

No wonder they wound up living on a farm - their names sound like very high-quality potting soil.

Still, to my memory, they had each a different sound, more buzzy, more baritone than bass.

I marveled to think that the stones I saw had cracked off the face of Kebo, had rolled down into the fantastic piles beside the trail, that the mountain had taken thousands, perhaps a million, years to rise to the point where the boulders would fracture and fall.

And I could hear it singing, slow and clear. Not a tune but a drone, a long, slow, deep, rich and fulfilling note in my head. I sat on a stone - it wasn't singing today, not that I could hear, maybe it was feeling abused by being used as a chair, I don't know - but I leaned on a tree trunk and let it fill me, rich and strong.

I think if I can call that song up - or the memory - I can find another way to see the steps my life must take, have a new tempo for the music my steps weave.

I've said before that dancing calls up the story of the music, that we create a story when we dance.

Perhaps I hear a new thing in my head that is very old, that I've been hearing since childhood but not listening to until this very moment.

Perhaps.

Portland, Maine