I arrived here on Mount Desert Island, Maine too late yesterday to go on a proper hike, so before I checked into my cozy B&B, I did what everyone does when they visit Acadia National Park. I drove to the top of Cadillac Mountain.

Yesterday afternoon was foggy, so these photos don’t do Cadillac justice. Not only does the summit (normally) afford stunning views of the surrounding ocean, the stones atop Cadillac are crusted with green, yellow, and blue lichens: the stones there both look and feel alive. Although the sight of fog wafting on craggy peaks and swaddling around clustered islands was gorgeous in its own right, the light wasn’t good for pictures: the fog was breathtaking in person but not particularly photogenic.

Although I love Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire as much as the next armchair environmentalist, and although I agree in theory that people should get out of their cars and walk more, I have mixed feelings about roads that lead to mountain tops. On the one hand, I felt a bit guilty about driving to the top of Cadillac. I’m able-bodied, and the hike to the summit is long (7 miles round trip) but moderate. I plan sometime this weekend to enjoy Cadillac “properly,” meaning on foot. At the same time, though, it felt wrong to be cranky and antisocial atop Cadillac: families with young children and elderly grandparents deserve to see the tiptop of Acadia as much as able-bodied folks do. Somehow I sensed that the stones atop Cadillac enjoyed the company, that although they might not like the road that’s been slapped on their back, they enjoy the travellers who use that road. I bet it’s lonely to be a mountain stone: sometimes it’s nice to have regular folks drop by.

In their work on Christian pilgrimage, anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner use the word communitas to talk about the experience pilgrims share when they arrive at their communal destination. Although each seeker might have taken a separate path, the footsteps leading to a spiritual goal being entirely one’s own, when seekers meet up at Lourdes or Canterbury or Lough Derg, they find themselves in a community of believers. After traveling separate paths, these seekers are united by a shared belief that this particular place is the sight of special spiritual power. The Turners’ concept of communitas was so personally compelling that I used it as a central motif in my Ph.D. dissertation. We each have to walk our paths alone…but at the end as well as along the way, we share our walks with other people.

I’m not going to pretend that everyone who drove (or walked) up Cadillac Mountain yesterday saw themselves as completing a sort of pilgrimage: heaven forbid I should force a religious experience on any hapless soul, my own included. But rather than chiding and deriding those who, like me, drove gas-guzzling vehicles to the top of the mountain rather than walking, biking, or shuttling there, I’d like to think that the meandering band of folks who wandered the summit of Cadillac Mountain yesterday got something more than a few pictures out of the experience. Looking at the landscape from above is typically a humbling experience: from atop a mountain, one’s mundane life seems distant and remote, the usual worries shrunken to their properly piddling size. Having had that shared experience atop Cadillac, I’d like to think we’ll all carry a lingering piece of that back home.

    As I type these words in the library of the inn where I’m staying, it is pouring rain outside: a bad omen for vacationing photo-bloggers?