![]() For those looking up from the signs in hopes of a distant reality, it’s as if the panorama has been moved indoors and enclosed by encircling white walls. So that’s how far we might see on a clear day. I mingle with those shuffling towards the summit path and soon find myself in a fenced circle where long, low signs illustrate and label outlines of distant islands and mountains as far off as Mt. You won’t be able to see anything, but some signs up there will tell you what you would be seeing if it was a clear day.” His passengers drift in either direction. The guide waves his right arm straight ahead into the haze-“We passed the gift shop on the way in and it’s off in that direction, but”-his arm jerks a little further to the right-“you should just follow the sidewalk around the lot in this direction.” Then he waves his left arm off to the other side-“The path that leads to the trail around the summit is over there. It draws to a stop, and a tour guide disembarks, followed by a couple dozen passengers. With no idea where to go, I have achieved not orientation but dis-orientation.Īll at once, beyond my car, in a kind of Harry Potter-like moment, a trolley car emerges out of the fog. I see nothing beyond the walk, no further into the lot than the trunk of my car. I maneuver cautiously into an empty space, get out, and step up onto a paved walkway. The caravan I follow eventually slows to a crawl, and we creep into a hazy oval parking lot. A curtain of thick white vapor rises impenetrably alongside and overhead and yet still thickens. Off the cliff-edge side of the road, beyond the trees and shrubs immediately marking the shoulder, there is no vista, no view, no horizon. Huffing figures on bicycles suddenly appear and disappear along the edge of the pavement. I can see only the taillights and rear bumper of the van in front of me, occasionally discern the headlights of the car behind. The vehicles ahead make slow progress up the curving two-way road. What’s beyond the edges of the road, what the occasional turnouts are designed to overlook-these are mysteries. I move through an opaque haze, aware only of the pavement. Soon the trees beyond the shoulder become indistinct and, as I steadily climb, they disappear altogether. It’s over three miles to the summit, at 1530 feet the highest point not only in the park but also on the Atlantic coastline. ![]() Within a tenth of a mile it hangs above the road like a banner stretched between bordering trees. When I start up the access road, near sea level, the fog is thin and transparent, but it soon thickens. Visibility is reasonably good on the shoreline, though circumscribed I think that, however limited my vistas may be up there, at least I’ll see the summit itself. I’m not certain whether I’ve seen Cadillac at all. Throughout the day, it shifts altitude and thickness, sometimes wispy and translucent, sometimes heavy and dense, but always it envelops the peaks. ![]() ![]() But each time I look, all summits are shrouded in fog. Hiking the headlands above the shore, I gaze inland from time to time in hopes of a clear view, expecting to see it tower above the nearer, lower mountains. I’m unable to see the mountain from afar today. My best chance for that may well be the peak on which the nineteenth-century artist Sanford Gifford painted the vista I’m most familiar with, the view from Cadillac Mountain. I’ve only begun my three weeks as an artist-in-residence at Acadia National Park, and I want to orient myself to the terrain. I drive up Cadillac Mountain on the spur of the moment, after a morning at sea level wandering around Great Head and Sand Beach to get a feel for the Maine coastline.
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