Somes Sound

Author's Comments

Most people on Mount Desert Island never quite find it. They come for Cadillac and the Park Loop and the sunrise crowd at the summit, and they drive past the turnoff for Sargent Drive without quite registering what they have missed. Somes Sound does not advertise itself. The water sits low between the mountains, sheltered and quiet, and the road that follows its eastern shore is narrow enough that you have to want to be there. I came in early October on a morning when the air had not yet decided whether it was fall. The water was completely still. The pulloffs along Sargent Drive are small and unmarked, and at the third one I stopped and did not move for almost an hour. The mountains on the western shore came down to the water in layers of evergreen and the first turning hardwoods, and every detail of them appeared again, inverted, in the surface of the sound. There was no wind. There was almost no sound at all. This is a place that asks for a wide lens and a slow morning. The reflections only hold while the air is still, which usually means before nine, and the light is best when the sun is high enough to reach down between the ridges but low enough to keep the water from going flat. A kayak would change the photograph entirely - put you down at water level, give you the mountains rising above rather than across. I have not done it yet. It is on the list. Call it a fjord or do not. What it is, really, is one of the quietest places on the Maine coast, and most people drive right past it.

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