The Time Traveler's Almanac

The last days of summer have always been a sweet season on the Maine coast. There’s still warmth in the sun, the crickets’ song is mellow and the vacationers are mostly gone. Nowhere is that time more golden than on Mount Airey Island.

Late one afternoon in September of 1954, Julia Garde Macauley drove north through the white shingled coastal towns. In the wake of a terrible loss, she felt abandoned by the gods and had made this journey to confront them.

Then, as she crossed Wenlock Sound Bridge which connects the island with the world, she had a vision. In a fast montage, a man, his face familiar yet changed, stood on crutches in a cottage doorway, plunged into an excited crowd of kids, spoke defiantly on the stairs of a plane.

The images flickered like a TV with a bad picture and Julia thought she saw her husband. When it was over, she realized who it had been. And understood even better the questions she had come to ask.

The village of Penoquot Landing on Mount Airey was all carefully preserved clapboard and widow’s walks. Now, after the season, few yachts were still in evidence. Fishing boats and lobster trawlers had full use of the wharves.

Baxter’s Grande Hotel on Front Street was in hibernation until next summer. In Baxter’s parlors and pavilions over the decades, the legends of this resort and Julia’s own family had been woven.

Driving through the gathering dusk, she could almost hear drawling voices discussing her recent loss in same way they did everything having to do with Mount Airey and the rest of the world.

“Great public commotion about that fly-boy she married.”

“The day their wedding was announced, marked the end of High Society.”

“In a single engine plane in bad weather. As if he never got over the war.”

“Or knew he didn’t belong where he was.”

Robert Macauley, thirty-four years old, had been the junior senator from New York for a little more than a year and a half.

Beyond the village, Julia turned onto the road her grandfather and Rockefeller had planned and had built. “Olympia Drive, where spectacular views of the mighty Atlantic and piney mainland compete for our attention with the palaces of the great,” rhapsodized a writer of the prior century. “Like a necklace of diamonds bestowed upon this island.”

The mansions were largely shut until next year. Some hadn’t been opened at all that summer. The Sears estate had just been sold to the Carmelites as a home for retired nuns. Where the road swept between the mountain and the sea, Julia turned onto a long driveway and stopped at the locked gates. Atop a rise stood Joyous Garde, all Doric columns and marble terraces. Built at the dawn of America’s century, its hundred rooms overlooked the ocean, “One of the crown jewels of Olympia Drive.”

Joyous Garde had been closed and was, in any case, not planned for convenience or comfort. Julia was expected. She beeped and waited.

Welcoming lights were on in Old Cottage just inside the gates. Itself a substantial affair, the Cottage was on a human scale. Henry and Martha Eder were the permanent caretakers of the estate and lived here year round. Henry emerged with a ring of keys and nodded to Julia.

Just then, she caught flickering images, of this driveway and what looked at first like a hostile, milling mob.

A familiar voice intoned. “Beyond these wrought iron gates and granite pillars, the most famous private entryway in the United States, and possibly the world, the Macauley family and friends gather in moments of trial and tragedy.”

Julia recognized the speaker as Walter Cronkite and realized that what she saw was the press waiting for a story.

Then the gates clanged open. The grainy vision was gone. As Julia rolled through, she glanced up at Mt. Airey. It rose behind Joyous Garde covered with dark pines and bright foliage.

Martha Eder came out to greet her and Julia found herself lulled by the old woman’s Down East voice. Julia had brought very little luggage. When it was stowed inside, she stood on the front porch of Old Cottage and felt she had come home. The place was wooden-shingled and hung with vines and honeysuckle. Her great-grandfather, George Lowell Stoneham, had built it seventy-five years before. It remained as a guest house and gate house and as an example of a fleeting New England simplicity.

2.

George Lowell Stoneham was always referred to as one of the discoverers of Mt. Airey. The Island, of course, had been found many times. By seals and gulls and migratory birds, by native hunters, by Hudson and Champlain and Scotch-Irish fishermen. But not until after the Civil War was it found by just the right people: wealthy and respectable Bostonians.

Gentlemen, such as the painter Brooks Carr looking for proper subjects, or the Harvard naturalist George Lowell Stoneham trying to loose memories of Antietem, came up the coast by steamer, stayed in the little hotels built for salesmen and schooner captains. They roamed north until they hit Mt. Airey.