On Jordan Pond

Post by Grubb.

Scale changes when you enter a new dimension. When the Acadia Visitor Center shuttle bus dropped us off at foot of the Jordan Pond trail I realized my proportional world was in for a readjustment. First there was the mob clotting the throughway by the hot dog stand that led to the trail. Nature trails usually don’t look like the entrance to a New York subway at rush hour. It was evident that I was not going to be channeling Henry David Thoreau. Forget the birdsong; any birds present were being eaten.

After I knifed through the crowd to join Ella on the trail it was like I was in the land of the Brobdingnads. In Acadia what is called a pond dwarfs the size of a large New Mexican lake. Who knows how big the trout were out there in the deep. I flashed on Beowulf. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see chipmunks the size of dogs come bounding out of the forest.

It was a three mile hike around this “pond”. Ella and I chose to go clockwise since we were in a counterclockwise world and we wanted to go against the flow. You go with the flow and it always seems like someone is hunting you down. In this dimension where we appeared undersized, that was not a good thing. The first mile was on a planked walkway.

Since we were going the opposite direction of everyone else for whom our first mile was their last mile it meant, given the turn back rate after going half way, that we had the trail almost to ourselves. I say almost since there was the guy we ran across stumbling over the shoreline rocks while trying not to spill his to-go cup of coffee, and the occasional couples yanking their dogs back from jumping into the black muck beneath the raised plank walk. But for the most part there we were in the bosom of nature where the maples were turning red against the dark green groves of spruce and faint yellow glimmer of tall birch about to become gold. Fall is on its way up here in this woodsy bayside country. For a parallel universe it shows promise.