In the Right Place: The Usual Blues

Here’s an October view of that timbered mound known as Blue Hill across the Bay named after it. As many of you know, this is one of the local scenes that we monitor in all seasons for our record.

If that mound were 60 feet higher than it’s 940 feet, it would have been named Blue Mountain in 1788, when it and the Town there were named Blue Hill. At that time, mountains needed to be at least 1000 feet high for cartographic recognition. (The mountain-sizing criteria have been loosened.) In some sunlight, especially with a haze, the Hill can take on a blue cast.

(Image taken in Blue Hill, Maine, on October 18, 2024.)

In the Right Place: Buoy, Oh Buoy

Our autumns are marked by the disappearance of leaves and sailboats and the appearance of Vulcan. Not Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and forges, but the moorings vessel Vulcan owned by Brooklin Marine, LLC. Here you see Vulcan on Tuesday morning removing mooring buoys/balls in Great Cove that were used in the summer and early fall by WoodenBoat School's fleet and visiting boats:

You may have noticed that Vulcan is not exactly your graceful, slick-profiled Luders or Herreshoff racing boat. She’s not a racer; she’s built for slow, tough jobs and apparently does them well. I’m told that she has a drum winch that is rated for hoisting 10,000 pounds. Mooring anchors/bases need to be heavy to be secure.

The basic parts of a mooring setup start with an anchor or anchor-block weighing up to thousands of pounds, depending on the boat and water conditions. Where the sea bottom is soft and the boat is not huge, a mushroom anchor usually will do the job, but many boat owners prefer more permanent anchors in the form of a block of granite or concrete with a galvanized (rust-proof) eyebolt on top for the chain.

Galvanized chains run from the anchors to the mooring buoys. Unless the boat is large, a nylon rope-like pennant usually is attached to the buoy to be hooked up to the boat via shackles and swivels. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 22, 2024.)

In the Right Place: Personalities

It’s time for a few “portraits” of fishing vessels in Naskeag Harbor. These were taken of the boats at rest at the end of the day, as the sun was going down, when the growing shadows seem to reveal differing human-like personalities in the vessels.

FV Dear Abbie:

FV Judith Ann

FV Meghan Dee

FV Tarrfish

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 18 and 20, 2024.)

In the Right Place: Exceptional

The Brooklin Cemetery contains many interesting sights, two of which are exceptional in the fall and have fascinating backgrounds.

First, the centerpiece of the Cemetery is the above Camperdown elm, one of the few Camperdowns in this country. Each Camperdown is a grafted cultivar that can be traced to a unique tree that reportedly still exists. As it loses leaves in the fall, its highly-articulated underlying architecture becomes more apparent.

The original tree was created in 1837 in Scotland by David Taylor, the head forester for the Earl of Camperdown. Taylor grafted an unusual-looking and apparent elm tree to a Wych elm to create the twisting new species. Each successor tree has to be started with a cutting that can be traced back to the original.

The second exceptional sight in the Brooklin Cemetery is the majestic oak tree below, now turning gold. Although oaks are not rare, this tree is a one-of-kind.

It was planted in 1977 as a spindly sapling by the renowned author E.B. (“call me Andy”) White to protect the new grave of his beloved wife, Katharine. She was a senior editor at The New Yorker and a trail-blazer for women executives and writers, among other accomplishments.  In 1985, Andy was buried beside Katharine under the fast-growing oak:

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 20, 2024.)

In the Right Place: Strangers

We’re getting an influx of strange tourists lately. These October visitors tend to be painfully thin and don’t talk much; but, they do smile a lot. My chance meeting with one of them went like this:

Me: Welcome, where do you come from?

A: From the world below.

Me: You’re Australian?

A: [Smile]

(Image taken in Blue Hill, Maine, on October 18, 2024; bike stand removed.)  

In the Right Place: Copse Killer

Multitudes of Asian Bittersweet fruits are emerging from their yellow husks and forming beautiful red galaxies. This is good for birds and disastrous for trees and bushes.

The birds act as angels of death when they eat the fruits and excrete millions of their seeds that will propagate the plant over large areas. The non-native plant (Celastrus orbiculatus) extends sinuous vines that are python-like, squeezing to death the trees and bushes that are their hosts. It’s all about competing for sun and soil nutrients.

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 17, 2024.)

In the Right Place: 3rd Foliage Report

Down East’s fall foliage is now at its peak autumnal color, according to the final foliage report of the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation & Forestry:

Down East: Zone 2

The report notes that some trees have not turned yet, but provide good contrast to those that have. You might want to do some exploring along the coast before it all blows away, as is happening to some maples:

Mother Nature’s warm brush strokes this year are nice, but not nearly as numerous and thick as in some past mid-October peaks. The color now is best in the blueberry field areas where the berry leaves are turning crimson:

Some individual trees are standouts:

Just a touch of fall color to water views always is an annual treat in coastal towns:

(Images taken in Blue Hill, Brooklin, and N. Sedgwick, Maine, on October 16, 17, and 18, 2024.)

In the Right Place: Full

Last night’s full moon will be the year’s largest. Here you see it rising above Mount Desert Island as night arrived:

At that time, it had to be viewed totally through earth’s dirty atmosphere, which distorts and warmly gilds the orb from our perspective. Once the moon rises above our atmosphere, its appearance returns to cool, silvery cragginess:

This moon reportedly was 220,055 miles from our planet, the closest a full moon will get this year; the average moon proximity to us is about 240,000 miles. Thus, this moon was a supermoon, which usually is defined as a full moon that is within 90 percent of the average lunar distance away from the Earth.

This October full moon is known as the Hunter’s Moon, which is what many northeastern Native Americans reportedly considered it to be: It rises as the days are getting colder and game must be gotten and stored before it gets very difficult to hunt. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 17, 2024.)

In the Right Place: Practice, Practice, Practice

You have to approach this clearing in the woods silently, moving from behind one tree to another. It’s a special place where young ghosts practice the dances that they’ll do on Halloween night. If they catch a glimpse of you, they disappear. POOF!

On the other hand, there’s one ghost in the area who doesn’t care who sees him taking trial runs in his ghost boat, in preparation for a night sail on Halloween. The boat’s built to sail in water or anything else, including grass and we assume air. The only problem: It attracts large, hairy spiders to its sail.

(Images taken in Maine at Blue Hill [dancing at Mainescape Nursery; ghost-supporting stakes deleted] on October 11 and at Brooklin [sailing] on October 15, 2024.)

In the Right Place: Hangin’ In There

Many of our old, abandoned apple trees have lost most of their leaves, but continue to clench their fruit like misers at a fundraiser. Unlike working orchard apples, these will not be picked for the market.

The deer may get on their hind feet and eat the low-hanging fruit. But, as I understand it, most of these “wild” apples will shrivel and rot on the branch unless the tree decides to form abscission layers at the fruit stems to let gravity tear the apples away and drop.

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 14, 2024.)

In the Right Place: Herding

Here’s an October view from Amen Ridge of Mount Desert Island mountains across Blue Hill Bay. As many of you know, this is one of the scenes that we monitor in all seasons for our records.

As for this image, it’s almost 4 p.m. on Thursday, and the temperature is about 57° (F). In the foreground, the summer goldenrod and fleabane in the field recently have been mowed down. In the sky, a fair southwesterly wind is herding cumulus clouds northeastward (to the left).

“MDI,” as it often is called, is the largest island in Maine and is accessible by bridge. It’s a major tourist attraction that contains most of Acadia National Park. It also has within its coastal nooks and crannies Bar Harbor, Bass Harbor, Seal Harbor, and similar picturesque places that can get tourist-clogged in the summer. (Image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 10, 2024.) Click on the image to enlarge it.

In the Right Place: 2nd Foliage Report

We’re not yet at peak foliage, at least as measured by colorful memories of great autumns of yore. We seem to be mostly in one of those grace periods when the trees are due, but they need a few days’ forgiveness to get all the green out. When it happens, the masses of trees and bushes and blueberry fields that provide turbulent seas of color certainly are wonderous.

But the older I get, the more I seem to favor individual trees with character in the fall. I seem to be intrigued by huge wild maples that have some mightiness to them, even in periods of grace.

They can be literally awesome when they’re backlit by an intense sun or standing lonely in the midst of a green conifer party.

After writing the above, I decided to look up the origin of the term “grace period.” As you know, it usually is used to mean an amount of time after a due date when late payment may be made without penalty. It turns out that, in Middle English, “grace” meant “God’s favor or help.” (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 12 and 13, 2024.)

In the Right Place: Blinking

Here’s an October view of the red boathouse in Conary Cove that we monitor in all seasons. In this case, the sunlight was blinking on and off due to fast-moving cumulous clouds. (

Image taken in Blue Hill. Maine, on October 8, 2024.)

In the Right Place: Comin’ In

This is Fishing Vessel “Dear Abbie:” on Tuesday, late in the afternoon. One of the more enjoyable sights for some of us here is watching a well-sheered lobster boat coming in fast after a hard day of hauling traps. The boat usually appears from behind Harbor Island and arcs into Naskeag Harbor with bow high, spray rails spewing little sea clouds, and a wide wake.

Near sundown, as shown here, the low sun rays divide the boat into moving areas of flaring light and subtle shadows. The deeper the vessel gets into the Harbor, the more dramatic the shadows. As it slows to stop at the convenience raft and sell its catch, the boat settles down and its small bow wave often becomes luminescent.

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 8, 2024.)

In the Right Place: Good Gourd Almighty!

This image of three types of pumpkin appears with my monthly column in the current Ellsworth American.  Click on the image to enlarge it. To read the column about the zany things Americans do with pumpkins and the increasingly popular white versions of this fruit, click here: https://www.5backroad.com/montly-column

In the Right Place: Southbound Tourists

It was a mostly gray and black morning with heavy air and occasional rain, so the discordant honks were appropriate mood music. As usual, I heard them before I saw them, a gaggle of Canada geese, mostly gray and black like the morning, headed south. These are among our (and Canada’s) largest feathered summer residents.

The geese were in one of the sloppiest migrating “Vs” I’ve seen, which indicated that the current leader was a rookie. But, still, it’s always a thrill to have these big birds pass right overhead in hoarse conversation.

Research indicates that Canada geese rotate their migration flight leaders. Honks are used by the leader to set the pace and signal direction changes. The followers reportedly use honks to coordinate aerodynamically-needed position shifts and to encourage keeping pace. It apparently can be a bit like oarsman using songs and other sounds to keep the pace set by a coxswain.

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 8, 2024.)

In the Right Place: First Foliage Report

Most of our trees have not started changing into their fall attire or are only in the process of doing so. A very few, like precocious children, cannot help showing off their obvious promise. Here you see one: the locally-admired “Baptist Church Maple yesterday:

Otherwise, there are mostly scattered, warm-colored accents among the greens of the local trees. For example, a few of these colorful sprinkles competed for attention with rock-bound sunburst lichens (Xanthora lichens) at the mouth of Patten Stream yesterday:

(Images taken in N. Sedgwick and Surry, Maine, on October 8, 2024.)

In the Right Place: Opportunity

It rained yesterday, sometimes hesitantly, sometimes steadily. It was a good day for the flora and people who like to walk in a temperate rain. I was lucky to be able to grab the opportunity and see this remarkably diverse area through the enchanting prism of an October rain:

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 7, 2024.)

In the Right Place: He’s Still Here

I call him Ahab. He takes command of our neighbor’s winterized pier and obsessively stares out into Great Cove for hours. (I like to think that he’s vengefully looking for a great white minnow that bit him in the leg while he was fishing in the Cove this spring.) When he swoops over his fishing territory, he’s imposing:

The pending question about this Heron is: Will our inscrutable Great Cove Great Blue take the often-fatal risk of overwintering here, as a growing number of GBHs appear to be doing in Maine?

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 6, 2024; sex assumed.)

In the Right Place: Disentanglements

Here’s what our north field looked like on Thursday. That tan, bush-hogged look takes some getting-used-to at the end of summer. It’s like having your child return from camp with a shaved head or purple hair. You can’t stop staring at the change and wondering about the importance of appearances that you took for granted.

But it’s a good thing, really. The same wonder and stares arose in early June. That’s when the field spurted – seemingly overnight – into a lush green entanglement of grasses, sedges, ferns, and wildflower stalks:

Our small summer field creatures needed that then; this was their honeymoon destination, nursery, camp, and more. It’s now where many deer roam and browse slowly and the occasional bobcat and coyote stride quickly. (Images taken on October 3 and June 11, 2024.)