To me, Maine is the coast. Maine is lobster boats and harbors and halyards clinking against masts. That’s the Maine I grew up in and the Maine I imagine, although I now live inland, 25 miles up the Penobscot River.

The Maine coast is closer to the equator than the pole. But it feels like we’re way up north on these long June days, which begin to brighten around 4 a.m. and don’t fully fade until after nine. A small sailboat is the quintessential slower traffic, slower than a bicycle, sometimes slower than walking. Still, you can go a long way on a long day.

The Native Americans who lived in Maine prior to the arrival of Europeans traveled up and down the river with the seasons, much as I do now for pure recreation. It’s a form of madness, really – to spend weeks preparing a boat to go slowly at great cost. But that’s not really accurate, is it? The wind is free. And you can have a whole lot of fun at five miles an hour.

This madness compels me to outfit my boat each spring for a trip from its winter home in Hampden to its summer mooring in Rockland. Sometimes the trip takes two days. It’s often convenient to stop at Fort Point State Park, where the Penobscot River becomes Penobscot Bay. There’s a dock, a good anchorage, and a lighthouse.

The fort was built by the British in 1759 during the French and Indian Wars. Signage at the park attests to the placement of forts at the mouths of Maine rivers for the purpose of keeping the Native Americans inland and disrupting their seasonal way of life. The rivers were their avenues, their thoroughfares. In the Automobile Age, they are almost forgotten as transportation arteries.

Future president James Garfield visited Bangor by steamboat in 1878, before returning by train to his home in Ohio. Yesterday’s boats and trains have given way to cars and buses and airplanes. But you can still travel the Maine Coast by water. Thousands of people do it ever year, on thousands of boats. Some are modest like mine; others are ostentatious and expensive, and a few are obnoxious overkill. The rising popularity of Maine as a destination for large cruise ships has several coastal towns grappling with issues of congestion and community character.

Rockland, the unofficial capital of Penobscot Bay, is blessed with a wide harbor and easy access to many of Maine’s best sailing grounds. It’s also ground zero for the ongoing argument over the character of the coast. Rockland remains a working port, with ferries, a Coast Guard station, a fishing dock, and some industry. Twenty years ago, there were few high-end sailboats and luxury yachts in the harbor. Now there are too many masts to count. The cruise ships want to come in greater numbers, and a private marina is seeking permission to expand its operation out into the area in front of the public landing.

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If you want dinner, though, you’d best get ashore before nine. That’s when all the downtown restaurants stop serving – even in June, on a Friday evening with the last glow of day still in the sky. Perhaps this is a vestige of the early-rising fisherman mentality, a sign that despite gentrification, Rockland is not yet cosmopolitan.

But the city has become friendlier to its non-driving residents and visitors. Signs along Main Street advise drivers that bicyclists may occupy a full lane of traffic. And there’s a new local bus, the Downtown Area Shuttle (DASH), that runs between Pen Bay Medical Center in Rockport to the Thomaston Wal-Mart, with stops at the ferry terminal and other convenient locations, five days a week, from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., year-round. Watch this blog for more on this new service.

On the Concord Coach bus back to Bangor, two days of sailing roll past the window in two hours. Why spend two days on a boat going somewhere you can drive in two hours? Madness, I tell you.

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