The End of the World as We Drive It: Notes on the lack of Public Transportation in Rural and Coastal Maine

Maine’s Blue Hill peninsula, where I grew up, is a public transportation desert. When I was a kid, people from away were called “straphangers” – which was shorthand for bus riders who stood and hung onto straps when the seats were full. It was not considered a term of endearment.

At the very end of the peninsula is Deer Isle, which is really several islands, connected by low causeways that periodically flood during storm tides. Deer Isle’s only road connection to the mainland is a suspension-cable bridge built in 1939. I’ve been crossing (and sailing under) this bridge my whole life. It was built with an 85-foot clearance that accommodates the windjammer schooners and most larger sailboats.

It's the funkiest bridge in Maine. On foggy days you can’t see from one side to the other. The bridge seems to rise into gray nothingness. It’s barely two lanes wide, and unless you’re in a truck on a clear day, you can’t see over the sides. Driving over it can be a white-knuckle experience for the uninitiated. In a strong wind I have felt it vibrate like a guitar string.

It was on just such a recent foggy day that I drove a rental car over the bridge for a reunion of four families with whom I spent the formative summers of my childhood. We are all in our 60s and 70s now. Our parents, who brought us to this place as toddlers, are all gone. So are the cabins that surrounded the big red house, at the end of the public road on the eastern fringe of Deer Isle, twelve miles from the bridge. It’s always felt something like the end of the world, because it’s not on the way to anywhere but the sea.

Planning any such gathering in such a place involves a lot of logistics. I rented a car for the weekend and took two of my friends to the airport in Bangor afterwards. Since I almost never have a car, I thought it was the least I could do. I’m usually the one in need of a ride.

You can’t reliably get there from here when it comes to public transportation on the Blue Hill peninsula. But a few scattered flowers have bloomed in the desert. A weekly Downeast Transportation bus does a loop around Deer Isle every Friday, year-round, connecting to Ellsworth. Another bus runs between Ellsworth and Blue Hill every weekday.

But it remains impossible to take a bus from one end of the Maine Coast to the other. The coastal bus route from Portland through Rockland veers up the west side of the Penobscot River before ending in Bangor. A separate bus service runs from Bangor along the Downeast coast. There’s a black hole centered on the area between Searsport and Ellsworth. Though the two towns are only 30 road miles apart, no public bus connects them. Deer Isle is a long drive from an area already starved for public transportation.

It’s almost easier for me to get there from Bangor by taking the Concord Coach bus to Rockland and sailing across Penobscot Bay around Stonington, on Deer Isle’s southern end. Easier, but not faster, than renting a car.

In his 1977 book, Island Chronicles: Accounts of Days Past in Deer Isle and Stonington, the late Clifford H. Gross tells that in the years before the bridge, people and commerce came to Stonington by boat from Rockland. And why not? The two towns are only 20 miles apart across the bay. Even my slow little sailboat can do it in a few hours. What if we had passenger ferry service between Rockland and Stonington, a back door to Deer Isle for people who don’t want to drive?

This could potentially work in tandem with the car ferries that serve Vinalhaven and North Haven from Rockland and the passenger ferry that runs between Stonington and Isle au Haut. Such a service could be extended all the way up to Acadia, where it would connect with the Swans Island ferry from Bass Harbor, and the Island Explorer buses that roam Mount Desert Island in the summer. Maine could promote non-driving vacations along the coast. Much of the infrastructure is already there. Along-the-coast passenger ferry service would reduce traffic congestion, alleviate the need for more parking in coastal towns, and attract a certain type of modern, environmentally conscious tourist.

And it wouldn’t hurt to establish real alternatives to the automobile even in a place like Deer Isle, where convenient public transportation may seem like a bridge too far. It’s not. It’s the future.