W.W. Norton & Co. 2009
Hardcover, 199 pages, $24.95
Solo wanderings in Acadia
If you could never set foot on Mount Desert Island, Christopher Camuto’s book would take you on a tactile, sensory exploration of “a strong place…a violent place given the jumble of boulders…,” allowing you to feel “the vigor of this coast” while reading about his bird-filled hikes at dawn, canoeing a quiet salt marsh, or watching frothy waves thrash the tidal zone.
Time and Tide in Acadia is a seeing-eye dog for those far from Maine or a vicarious re-experience for those who have paddled its waters, hiked its wooded and rocky trails; it leads us to discover the heart of Samuel de Champlain’s “l’Acadie” on some lesser-known paths and waters away from a bustling Bar Harbor.
Through years of exploring Acadia in the most “indigenous” ways (a term he uses often and aptly), Camuto crafts his internal and external experiences into descriptions that are packed with visuals and musings. His observations, even when philosophical, aren’t inaccessible or uncomfortably lofty. Sometimes, one wants him to cut to the chase, not to repeat his thoughts in subsequent sentence variations. But this may be a result of our Facebook/Twitter/e-mailing culture with our communication deficit disorder.
Nature writing can lend itself to being clichéd, sappy, or another field guide, but Time and Tide is better than this. The author makes you truly see and feel the texture of Acadia’s rocks, seaweed thrashed by rough seas, and wild creatures we intrude upon.
There is some overuse of esoteric adjectives in places, a handicap that may be the result of the author’s profession teaching creative writing at a university. One can grant him a free pass for this, since he is so good at clearly, yet metaphorically, describing the colors of the sea, the wide array of visiting birds, and the contours of these seaside mountains and the trees, rocks, and waters that clothe them.
He writes of a hike above Echo Lake, “The lay of the land is everything…the shape of land and water here have profound causes, and…what grows or lives here is wise with natural wisdom.” And of rainy days on Mount Desert, “You could do worse than sit among spruce in fog.”
Chapters have themes-summits, beginnings and endings of day, marshes, the spirit of place, cairns-each grounded in Camuto’s wanderings on foot, by kayak or canoe, or on a Maine Audubon pelagic-bird voyage. One of the finest chapters describes the power of surfacings (and necessary patience) during a whale watch.
He writes of the powerful effect a surfacing whale (or wolf or bear) has on us: “When such creatures find themselves in our presence, they finish what they are doing and disappear. In their sudden absence, we feel the cost of our cultural evolution, our distance and separateness from nature.”
The repeated theme in this book-separateness; his antidote-immersion in the landscape over many seasons, in all weather, solo. “Give in to the uncanny impression that you are at home and not at home in this landscape, that you are one with this place…and that you are foreign, an intruder…. “
So why do we like nature literature? Like travel literature, it is second best to actually being there. And maybe it’s an amplifier for having been or planning to go there. We need, some of us, these turbo boosters of good writing to dive in deeper, like a cormorant doing its daily work.
It’s a good sign when you don’t want to leave a book’s pages. I regretted having to put down Time and Tide in Acadia and leave Mount Desert in the distance, for now.
Linda Hedman Beyus, when not in Maine, lives in Connecticut and is a regular contributor to Working Waterfront.