A striking resemblance

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While on vacation in Maine, my family and I invented a game: “North Shore or coastal Maine”?

We spent four days in Bar Harbor, Maine, a town snuggled in next to Acadia National Park. The town center is down the road of clusters of motels and colonial-era inns, advertising “Acadia in our backyard.” There must be at least three on every block, each commanding its own space with impressive columns or idyllic masonry fit for a postcard. About a fifteen-minute drive down the road rests the center of Bar Harbor: a cluster of streets packed tight with restaurants boasting the best locally caught lobster in the state, lobster ice cream, and redundantly branded apparel. 
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Amongst the blocks of tourist stores advertising lobster stuffed animals was a cheekily-named coffee shop: Choco-Latté. ​Walking into the spacious café, I took in the sea of flannel, overalls, L.L. bean jackets, Chelsea boots, and beanies. This side-street café and its customers held a striking resemblance to the local coffee shops on the North Shore of Lake Superior. The first round of the game was complete.

In Duluth, I can always depend on the cozy fashion and plaid with the changing seasons. Folks are always appropriately dressed in layers for either a steep hike up to Ely’s Peak or a rest day dedicated to a fireplace and binge-worthy Netflix show. Or it looks like their closet is sourced from the Gilmore Girls catalog: turtleneck sweaters, patterned thrift finds, and coats for any weather or event. 

I always feel safe in a small-business coffee shop –with the familiar hissing of frothers hitting the smooth surface of chilled milk and the intertwined smells of coffee beans, tea bags, and spices for tea lattes. But this shop away from home was a nostalgic haven: a place to pause and breathe in the cinnamon and cardamom.

The second round of the game commenced once we drove the scaling roads of Acadia. Every “must-see” road stop —from Jordan Pond and Thunder Hole— featured rocky cliffs bordering evergreen and oak trees. From far in the distance, my parents mistook one proud tree in the landscape for Split Rock Lighthouse. The water’s edge at Jordan Pond was an unmistakable reflection of the Lake Superior shore in the backyard of the lodge my family visits every winter.

Lake Superior and the ocean are so vast that one cannot see the other side from their shores. So it was not unusual to see only rolling waves beyond the blue Acadia horizon. Undisturbed clear water reached the opposite shoreline blurry in the low fog. Small boulders of various shapes and sizes littered the ground and crept into the pond from either side. The reflection of a diagonal line of pine trees offered the only ripples in the water’s otherwise quiet surface. Or, on a different cliffside view with more jagged overlapping boulders thrusting up from the ocean’s depths, the waves thrashed from the upcoming hurricane. Observing the rocking rhythm of the stormy tide reminded me of the thunderous, icy waves in a Minnesotan snowstorm.

I gained a new perspective on the same landscape with each visit. The spraying vapor of salt water and fantastical seafoam green water was unfamiliar, but the feeling of icy water lapping over my sand-soaked feet is one I know all too well from July beach days at Brighton Beach. It does not feel as though I am away from home, but the 1,362 miles of separation begs to differ. Is it odd to unwind, to reset in a town away from home that feels like home? Perhaps not because here, I fit in. In town, I do not feel like an outsider; I blend in with my worn black jeans, thrifted green long-sleeve shirt with embroidered fall leaves, and chunky hiking shoes. 

With the glistening spruce trees and rocky cliffs in the rearview mirror my family yearningly professed, “If only Maine were closer, we would travel here more often!”. I wonder whether they feel the same as I do: at home away from home. Although it is laden with lobster restaurants and advertised tourist attractions, there are nooks we hope to revisit one day. Like the Travelin’ Lobster: a family-owned, small-business restaurant in the traditional counter-to-go style, with classically scrumptious lobster rolls and blueberry pop, ale, and pie. The Choco-Latté Café goes without saying. Our accommodation, The Coach Stop Inn, established itself as a hospitality comfort star on the map after the first few savory bites at breakfast.

Time will tell if we ever return to this small harbor town. There are still many restaurants to try, blueberries and lobster to consume (in various forms and recipes), and hiking trails to explore in Acadia. Perhaps we will just play a few more rounds of the game, “North Shore or Coastal Maine”?, to discover more similarities between the East Coast and the Midwest.

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